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...
The government of Sweden has recognized a new church - Church of kopimism. This church believes that all knowledge is sacred and the right to share it is sacred. The church has as its sacred symbols CTRL+C and CTRL+V. These are the commands for copying and pasting. For the Church of Kopimism, information is holy and copying is a sacrament. This comes at a time when the US government is pushing ahead with the SOPA bill ( Stop Online Piracy Act). This new bill which is being met with a lot of opposition is still forging ahead. If it becomes law then websites that help promote torrenting and file-sharing will be banned. ISP's will be asked to make them unavailable. 2012 needed to start with some sort of controversy and here we have it. Check out the video below for more details: You can visit the church's website but all you get is a static page. They have promised to be up once the storm settles. Church of kopimism An original post by Sociolatte