On Thursday, Donald Trump will walk into the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, shake Xi Jinping's hand, and declare it a great meeting. There will be announcements. There will be numbers — billions of dollars in Chinese purchase commitments, a new bilateral mechanism with an important-sounding name, possibly a joint statement on Iran. Trump will post on Truth Social. Markets will rally briefly. Pundits will argue about who won. None of that will tell you what actually happened. What is actually happening in Beijing this week is something more consequential and more uncomfortable than the summit theatre will reveal: two leaders of two deeply mutually dependent superpowers, both of whom need this meeting to succeed for entirely different reasons, sitting across a table in a world that has already moved past the assumptions that defined their last nine months of negotiations. The Iran war changed the equations. The rare earth gambit changed the power balance. Taiwan is sitting in...
Now this must be the coolest AMA on planet earth. We write a lot about some of the really cool AMA's done by people and this seems to be one of the finest and coolest. If you're wondering where Chris Hadfield is while doing his AMA - when asked by one Reddit users. He said he was now off the western coast of Australia in the Indian Ocean. when asked which part of earth looks coolest from space he replied that the Australia Outback looks coolest and the Bahamas looks most beautiful. He is now aboard the Space Station ISS. If you're wondering what the ISS space station is - Wikipedia says that the International Space Station is a habitable artificial satellite in low orbit earth. There are many interesting questions answered by him - like, what does space smell like, What's the funniest thing that happened on the ISS?, what's the scariest thing he has seen in space. He answered saying watching a meteorite burn up between me and Australia. Now this is something conside...