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...
This New Year's Eve we are going to see a blue moon. It has nothing to do with the shade or hue of the moon. It is simply a colloquial term for something that is very rare. There will be two full moon's this month the first having appeared on Dec 2. It's the first time this is happening from 1871 and only the fourth from 1900. On very rare occasions the moon can actually sport a bluish tint due to atmospheric conditions caused by forest fires or volcanic eruptions. It’s even happened fairly recently. The moon was a little blue across many sections of eastern North America in September 1950, because of smoke from widespread forest fires in western Canada. Also, after the massive eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in June 1991, there were many sightings of a physically blue moon all around the world. Fortunately these calamities don’t happen that often, and that lends itself to the creation of the phrase “once in a blue moon.” The astronomical definition of a bl...