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...
Along came a spider - well not literally but started with that line to set the tone. Talking about death and your last wish can be very enlightening for some people. Although other blogs and websites have written about the creepiness about this new social network, we do not think this is so. With all the hype being built into social media and social networking sites. People constantly complain about the need for more serious stuff to be shared online. Well, here you have it, especially if you are one of those people who always want to talk serious stuff this might be a nice getaway for people to discuss the actual reality of life. Maybe inspiring some to go for a dream they might have had their whole life but never had the guts to just do it. Death always brings with it a shock and shakes people a little. It is also the one thing that can truly inspire. Steve Jobs now famous quote from the 2005 Stanford Commencement Address where he says that every morning he looks in the mirror and as...