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 world finally has a functional death ray. Raytheon's new "Laser Weapons System" is a solid-state, six-laser array attached to a Navy Phalanx Close-In Weapons System. The "death ray" focuses 50kW of fiery death on anything airborne. Watch it kill a UAV in video below. Check out this YouTube video which is slowly going viral. The Death Star according to a Wikipedia article is a fictional moon-sized space station and superweapon appearing in the Star Wars movies and expanded universe. It is capable of destroying a planet with a single destructive beam emitted from the large indentation on its surface. In the films, the first Death Star is featured in Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of The Sith being constructed and in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope which at that time is fully constructed, and a second Death Star is under construction in Star Wars An original post by Sociolatte