Severely allergic to BS, including my own if the case. Echo chambers not my thing. Children are humanity's greatest treasure.
Joined May 2021
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When stories like Jensen's Huang break, for every Jensen there are multiple think tanks and people trying to influence discussion the exact same way taking the exact same money. I won't mention the individuals, think tanks or universities by name but they deserve the same scrutiny
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China is expanding export controls beyond rare earths to solar manufacturing processes, AI models, drones, and other technologies.
The restrictions are designed to make Chinese factories and laboratories harder to replace. They could limit foreign access to the latest Chinese AI models and make it more difficult for companies outside China to build competitive solar equipment factories. Beijing is applying the same approach it has used with critical minerals to a wider range of technologies.
The controls are not a ban on finished goods. They target the processes and equipment that others would need to reduce their dependence on Chinese production. The goal is to keep the manufacturing advantage inside China.
NYT: China’s Message to Its Rivals: You Need What We Make—It’s not just rare earths. China is making it harder for other countries to shed their dependence on its solar, drone and drugmaking technology.
@dhpierson
nytimes.com/2026/11/02/world…
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Whether its Iran or Russia, our adversaries testing Western Civilization. We're going to have to respond in a serious way - and that means winning in Iran and winning in Ukraine.
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Mr. Vice-President,
Please allow me to present a different perspective.
The problem was not the Iran War. It was the cease fire.
If you start a war, you need to win it and finish it – otherwise don’t start it.
This war should have been over six months ago, with the Strait of Hormuz wide open and oil flowing. The second and third tiers of Iranian leadership should have been destroyed, and we should have supported the pro-western forces who could have taken leadership. We stood on the brink of a new, more peaceful Middle East - and then we blinked. We had a chance not only to deny Iran nuclear weapons, but to get rid of the world’s biggest supporter of terrorism.
Instead, we had a cease fire, which was followed by months of will we or won’t we finish the job. Every day was a different message. There still is. Is the war over? Is it about to begin? No one knows. There is confusion and inconsistency.
In June 2025, America was not involved. This was an Israel vs Iran issue.
No one forced the United States to attack Iran then, or in February of 2026. It was a decision made by President Trump. In my opinion, it was the right decision.
Once the decision was made, we should not have stopped until the regime fell. But instead, you negotiated a cease fire that didn’t last, didn’t work and left us in no man’s land, with higher prices and our troops still deployed.
Our troops could have been home, the Navy returned to its bases, a peaceful regime in place , new alliances forged, and gas prices below $3.00 a gallon.
No, Mr. Vice President. It’s not the war. It’s the so-called cease fire.
One of the things the data analysts on our side obsessed over was "composition"—whether the electorate looked close enough to 2024 for Republicans to win. And despite polls that showed a Democrat blowout, the data kept on telling us the same story: in some states turnout was merely OK, in other states it was downright amazing, and in no state was it catastrophic. There was a genuine sense of optimism on our team: our people were showing up.
So, I asked the smartest data guy I know, does that mean we're going to shock the world? "No," he told me. "We might do better than the polls suggest. But the data is telling us that a lot of Trump/Vance 2024 voters are pissed and planning to vote for the other guys. Our voters are turning out, but they may not vote for us."
Well, that looks prophetic now. Our voters did show up. In Florida, for example, the electorate was 9 points more Republican than Democrat, just a couple points worse than 2024. Undoubtedly there were places we could have done better on turnout. But the main problem is not turnout. The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026.
There will be a lot of infighting and arguing over what happened and why that is. One of the pollsters I really respect told me that our economic messaging wasn’t sharp enough down the stretch. I’m sure that’s true.
But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone.
Another pollster—one of the smartest people I know in politics, told me yesterday we’d lose the generic ballot by 13 points. I felt negative going into Tuesday, but even I was shocked by this. In his polling, he saw that a lot of Trump 2024 voters were angry and planning to vote for Democrats. He asked those voters who had abandoned us what would cause them to come back on our team. The top four answers, accounting for nearly all of the responses were:
1) End the war
2) Focus on cost of living/inflation
3) Put America First
4) Change our relationship to Israel
Our voters showed up. And the above four reasons are why many of them voted for Democrats. This is according to a pollster who nailed the results. While many spent Monday attacking Rachel Campos Duffy for calling for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict, it turns out her political advice was sound. (She’s also a great person.)
In the next few months, there's going to be a lot of gaslighting. Expect to hear any number of establishment politicians say the solution to our woes is amnesty. I'm open to the idea that we should change enforcement—by focusing more on businesses that hire illegal labor, for instance. But anyone pushing amnesty is lying to you.
The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night.
If you'd like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that's at least honest.
But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.
I remain hopeful about our country. To the people who are pissed off and want to say, “I told you so”: you’re right, you did tell us so. Take that energy into electing Republicans who share your worldview. To the people who are just pissed at the results, you should be. Let’s take that anger and get back to the work of saving our country.
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I’ve said this before, and here’s another example: just about every time someone in the China field calls for “nuance”, it means “let’s adopt the Chinese government’s framing”.
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"Putin will wage war. I don’t know when, but he will. And you, Europeans, will be surprised to discover that this war is aimed at you, too... You think that what is happening in Moscow has nothing to do with you—that it’s our problem.
Putin hates people like me, certainly. But through us—in Russia, or through the revolutionaries in Ukraine or Georgia—it is you he hates: your democracy, your society, your freedoms.
Do you think his regime is merely a threat to us? Your awakening will be brutal."
Anna Politkovskaya, in Paris, 2005.
She was assassinated in the lobby of her apartment building on October 7, 2006—Putin’s birthday.
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This seems like a great time to reshare my favourite Sir Patrick Stewart performance, ‘What has the ECHR ever done for us?’ It’s just perfect in every possible way … including the ending 😂😂😂 RIP.
🎥 The Guardian
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Chinese people seem to be having a hard time grasping the fact that in the West don’t give a fuck about others mocking our past or even present leaders. We do it all the time ourselves.
We don’t worship people here, especially not mass murderers.
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The perfect South Park clip for this Mbappé moment:
the Chinese market doesn’t just buy your product. It buys your spine.
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Chinois se connecte à un VPN pour expliquer aux Occidentaux sur Twitter qu'il ne vit pas sous une dictature
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International soccer star @KMbappe should not apologize for calling Mao Zedong a dictator. Mao was a dictator, and by orders of magnitude, he did more harm to the Chinese people than a comment from a soccer player ever could. Mao was the leader of the CCP for decades and his dictatorship and disastrous policies killed tens of millions of Chinese people in the Cultural Revolution, the Great Famine, and other atrocities. Involved in the Party from its first national meeting in 1921, Mao is the principal historical figure for a Party that continues his practices of oppression and ideological purges. For decades, the CCP has denied the Chinese people basic human rights including freedom of expression and freedom of religion. These are rights enjoyed by Mbappe and millions of people around the world and Mbappe should exercise this opportunity to tell the horrific truth about Mao’s dictatorship.
The real disgrace in this news story is the companies rushing to apologize so they can continue to do business in China. The CCP is the largest oppressor of the Chinese people and their human rights, and those businesses that work with the CCP help normalize its crushing brutality. reuters.com/business/media-t…
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This paper answers why confident idiots run the world.
Cornell University published a psychological paper that explains every terrible boss, every loud influencer, and every broken corporate hierarchy.
It’s called “Unskilled and Unaware of It.”
they tested participants across logic, grammar, and humor to measure the gap between actual performance and self-perception.
And the results are wild.
participants scoring in the bottom 12th percentile consistently believed they were operating in the 62nd percentile.
they were not lying. they were literally incapable of recognizing their own incompetence.
the paper revealed a brutal paradox:
the exact skills required to master a domain are the exact same skills required to accurately evaluate your own competence in that domain.
if you lack the skill, you inherently lack the cognitive capacity to realize you are failing.
this creates a dangerous systemic loop.
the incompetent are blessed with absolute, blinding certainty. their brain protects them from their own ignorance, allowing them to speak first, demand authority, and never second-guess their decisions.
meanwhile, the actual experts suffer the exact inverse.
top performers in the study consistently underestimated their rank. because a task was easy for them, they falsely assumed it was easy for everyone else.
they hesitate. they obsess over nuance. they assume they have nothing unique to add.
we are biologically wired to confuse confidence with competence.
the loudest person in the room gets promoted, gets funded, and gets the microphone, not because they know what they are doing, but because they are physically incapable of seeing what they don't.
the only defense mechanism is building systems that stop rewarding absolute certainty and start demanding proof of work.
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Notable use of the phrase "talent cultivation" 人才培育, a phrase at the core of PRC education policy and so highlighting how parts of Australian higher education are being socialised and integrated into the PRC system.
Australia: Australian tertiary education sinks deeper.
"Victoria–China Education Dialogue 2026: Collaborative Innovation for Future Talent Cultivation.
How can government, universities and industry work together to prepare the talent of tomorrow? At CACIE 2026, representatives from China and the Australian state of Victoria meet to explore university-industry collaboration, practical teaching, international student mobility and new models for cross-border talent cultivation.
Speakers include Dr. Stacey Farraway (La Trobe University), John Molony (Deakin University), Sunny Yang (Monash University), Dr. Jason McGovern (Swinburne University of Technology) and Leigh Howard, Commissioner to Greater China, Victorian Government.
• 29 October
• Co-organised by the China Education Association for International Exchange and Study Melbourne"
facebook.com/CACIEofficial/p…
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In 2023 I secured new powers so Confucius Institutes could be shut down.
The Labour Government scrapped those powers in their first months.
The threat is inside our universities, and Labour *chose* to let it fester and grow.
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The War Department has designated Confucius Institutes as a threat to our national security.
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Palmer Luckey warns China won’t stop at Taiwan… and believes Beijing is already building a historical narrative to justify territorial claims over Okinawa, the Philippines, and other Pacific territories. 🇺🇸🇨🇳🇹🇼🇯🇵
“This is my crazy theory, and people can disagree with me. But nobody in history has ever built a gigantic amphibious landing force, used it once, and then dismantled it—except for the United States.
If China takes Taiwan, I think they’re immediately going to hop over to Okinawa, parts of the Philippines, and maybe parts of Vietnam as well.
Xi Jinping has been talking about the Ryukyu Islands, where Okinawa is located, and historical tributary relationships with China.
They’re not bringing up ancient history just because they love wandering through national archives looking at obscure tributary states.
They’re constructing a national narrative that would allow them to convince their people to start with Taiwan—and then go after more of America’s Pacific allies.”
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中国・新疆のウイグル人収容施設を命がけで撮影し、世界に伝えた関恒氏。2020年に撮影、2021年に公開した映像は、迫害を検証する貴重な資料となった。
中国を逃れた後、米国でICEに拘束されたが、2026年1月に亡命が認められ、2月に釈放された。
迫害を告発した人を守るのは、人権を掲げる国の責任だ。彼の勇気と、収容された人々の苦しみを忘れてはならない。
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Navi Pillay, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, was UN High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2008 to 2014.
Below are emails sent to China during her tenure, giving advance info on who would speak out about China's human rights abuses.
Pillay declined to attend the award to Liu Xiaobo.
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This is not a joke.
The Russian biological war research should have us all concerned and stopping ALL flight from Russia, and all Russians from entry.
The longer this goes on the more countries we will have to stop flight from.
FYI: the Russians were working on a plague that is resistant to antibiotics
Russia's plague outbreak is getting worse, now with 5 hospitals in Irkutsk quarantined, universities canceling classes and accusations from healthcare workers that the government is attempting a media cover-up.
Nearly 200 contacts of a 28-year-old anti-plague laboratory worker who died last week are reportedly under isolation or medical observation.
Irkutsk universities are canceling classes citing a “case of pneumonic plague,” while an aluminum plant introduced mandatory masks. A local government warning advising residents not to travel to Shelekhov was published and later deleted.
Healthcare workers claim doctors are discussing plague internally while avoiding the diagnosis in official documents.
Russian health authorities continue to deny any plague outbreak, attributing the woman's death to “pneumonia of unknown origin.”
Pneumonic plague is far worse that it's Bubonic cousin as its transmitted directly between humans.
