Donald Trump is a man who lives by a singular philosophy: “Aaj kuchh tufani karte hain” (Let’s do something daredevil today).But sadly, his deep desire to be disruptive is completely at odds with what the world actually needs. Today, the entire planet is paying a steep price for his almost orgasmic fixation on…
Read the note →Reality is masquerading as parody:
From trade wars to military wars, anything the US president says can shift markets, and so teams of traders - as well as a host of automated computer systems - monitor his statements to perform trades within seconds.
Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) now wants to charge for such market-moving information put out on its Truth Social platform. It has launched a paid service to give Wall Street firms and institutional investors the “fastest access” to the social media site’s most influential accounts.
TMTG has not directly said the service includes the account of the president himself, but with some 13 million followers - the most on the site - it’s fair to say that his posts would be among, if not the, most influential.
Brilliant piece by Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi:
In a farcical re-enactment of the Iraq War script, we were told that the Islamic Republic would collapse like a house of cards. But unlike in 2003, there has been little attempt to persuade the wider world, or even the US Congress. The rhetorical labour that accompanied the invasion of Iraq, however flawed or dishonest, has largely been abandoned. Even senior US military officials have struggled to explain how the campaign’s objectives would be achieved swiftly or decisively. The assumption of inevitability has replaced the burden of argument.
The absence of justification is not incidental. It is a morbid symptom of an international system in crisis. The certainties of the United States’ hegemonic stewardship of the ‘international rules-based order’ have been deformed beyond recognition by the Gaza genocide, but no alternative architecture has cohered in their place. Instead there is a politics of gangster imperialism that has neither international nor domestic consent.
We don’t give a shit about anything anymore because we are bored, distracted and getting dumber by the second in the flickering shadow of the screen.
Read the note →This is not from The Onion but from the Financial Times:
Officials working with Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace” are exploring setting up a stablecoin for Gaza as part of efforts to reshape the devastated Palestinian enclave’s economy, according to five people familiar with the discussions.
The talks around introducing a stablecoin — a type of cryptocurrency whose value is pegged to a mainstream currency, such as the US dollar — are at a preliminary stage, and many details of how one could be introduced in Gaza remain to be determined.
The US Supreme Court rules that Trump’s tariffs are illegal. Trump decides to double down.
Read the note →New age shitty bribes.
Read the note →The reason could be that when you are powerful, people take note only when that power falters. The world was hardly impressed when Trump went on his tariff rampage; what struck people was when China successfully fought back. America demonstrated stunning military power in Venezuela but it was also expected; what people have noticed is Russia’s military failure in Ukraine.
People also notice who envies whom. And it is no secret that Trump envies China; and that to his chagrin the envy goes unrequited. The US president fantasises about the scope of China’s industrial power, so much that he now practices state capitalism Chinese-style. It is as if Trump has lost trust in his country’s political and economic system. As the saying goes, imitation is the highest form of flattery, and now it is Washington imitating Beijing.
Hamilton Nolan on Trump’s attack on Venezuela: For those of us interested in reality, the question becomes: Might there be some downsides of kidnapping the president of a sovereign nation, because he is not sufficiently in America’s pocket? One thing we have done is to supercharge the urgency of almost all smaller…
Read the note →An essay exploring the history, economics, and politics of tariffs, prompted by the re-imposition of sweeping new trade barriers. The request called for a detailed, nuanced, and fact-checked analysis covering the evolution of tariffs, their successes and failures, the spectrum of economic opinion, key research and…
Read the note →