“The board is set, the pieces are moving. ” – Gandalf Irony is dead. And no, this is not AI.
“The board is set, the pieces are moving. We come to it at last, the great battle of our time.” – Gandalf
Irony is dead.
And no, this is not AI.
This -from the FT- made me chuckle
Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed on a raft of measures from trade to tourism on Friday at the first meeting between the countries’ leaders in Beijing in eight years. Coming in the wake of trade battles with the US, ‘51st state’ nonsense, chatter that Trump is interested in Alberta seceding from Canada, and the new growing dispute over Denmark, this has the potential to open up a whole new can of worms between the two countries. Expect a strong response from Trump.
Geopolitical tensions escalated as President Trump deemed U.S. non-control of Greenland unacceptable, prompting Denmark and France to boost military presence there with 86% of Americans opposing force per polls.
Trump has been talking about Greenland since at least 2018. Speculation is that it was first broached to him by Ron Lauder.In a term that has seen him seem to be very concerned about his legacy, the opportunity to be the first president since Seward to expand the United States land mass to add possibly a 51st state and to make every map maker in the world need to remake their maps sounds at least as attractive to him as geopolitical and resource issues. The need to have an Arctic presence, get more access to rare earth minerals, and prevent China and Russia from exerting influence or establishing a presence there are legitimate. But none of those things seem to require ownership or control, when they can be done with treaties or agreements.
One of the reasons that Greenland looks so attractive is because it appears on the maps to be a huge landmass.
A Mercator projection map is
a cylindrical map type, invented by, known for keeping compass bearings as straight lines, making it great for navigation, but it heavily distorts area, especially near the poles, making places like Greenland look huge compared to equatorial lands like Africa. This conformal projection accurately shows shape and direction at small scales, but inflates sizes of regions farther from the equator.Gerardus Mercatorin 1569The Mercator projection dramatically exaggerates Greenland’s size, making it look similar to Africa, a common visual distortion known as the “Greenland Problem”. This happens because the projection stretches landmasses far from the equator to keep compass directions (rhumb lines) straight for navigation, but severely inflates polar regions like Greenland, which is actually about 14 times smaller than Africa. Greenland is closer in size to Texas or Alaska, but its high latitude causes it to appear massively inflated on typical Mercator world maps.
A bipartisan resolution targets Trump’s Greenland rhetoric and warns that any military action tied to the Greenland crisis would require explicit congressional authorization, signaling institutional resistance to unilateral escalation.
Iran is far from over. The Iranian government backed off from mass executions andsignaled fast trials for protesters,thereby averting another US strike ( a delay reportedly requested by Israel and other Arab states). amid airspace closures and U.S. base evacuations in Qatar. However, U.S. military assets continue to flow into the Middle East, with the Roosevelt now there and another carrier group expected in 5-10 days. Reports also indicate a massive buildup in Diego Garcia. You don’t move all those assets to a region to do nothing.
“The Arithmetic of Regime Death: Iran’s Four-Domain Compound Failure and the 90-Day Window That Will Reshape the Middle East”
Venezuelan developments included a $500 million U.S. oil deal with proceeds to a Qatari bank, while Maduro’s capture revealed a dark fleet, alongside US announcements of Cuban aid and Honduran election vows. Machado gave Trump her Nobel Peace Prize yesterday, so she may be in charge soon. This, despite the Nobel Committee saying that there are no ‘sharesies’.
Congress cleared an initial multi‑bill funding package that covers Commerce, Interior, Energy, Justice, NASA, EPA, and key trade agencies, reducing tail‑risk around immediate disruption but leaving more bills to pass. (Politico). A new funding bill needs to be passed by the end of the month, and reports say the congressional recess may be canceled to make that happen. Something to keep an eye on.
U.S. President Donald Trump has publicly threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act in Minnesota to deploy the military in response to protests tied to federal immigration enforcement, keeping domestic security and civil‑liberties risk on the radar.
The shooting was a horrible tragedy and should never have happened. That given the failure of either side to be able to take any responsibility but to simply blame the other side 100% for what happened is consistent with what seems to be going on across American society.One has to wonder, given statements by administration officials such as Stephen Miller, whether the goal here is to provoke a sharp reaction and provide justification for using the Insurrection Act to increase military force.
The president has mentioned, maybe canceling midterm elections, at least three times in the last two weeks. Personally, I’m done with not taking him both literally and seriously when he makes these kinds of comments.
See if you can spot the inconsistency - from ‘TGIF’ on
The Free Press
Voters hate both sides, and personally, I don’t blame them.
Gotta hand it to Candace; she has the innate ability to make anyone anywhere feel sane by comparison. From Nellie Bowles’ TGIF on The Free Press;
“Her latest is that
. “Why did Charlie Kirk think he was a time traveler? He said, as I showed you in earlier messages, that he was a time traveler and he had to find me. . . . And again, not anything that I would have placed so much emphasis on back when he was saying it, but it came to fruition. The other parts. . . . I’m totally occupied by this. I tell you, I read these messages and I’m going,, what is this, what is reality, actually?” She alleges that there were “agents” who had Charlie Kirk “monitored. . . since he was young.””.Charlie Kirk was a time traveler
The wealth inequality in this country continues to widen. And frankly, that’s the largest wedge being driven in this country today.Until some politicians are willing to step up and solve this problem, I think things just continue to get worse
The stock market is overvalued on quite a few metrics, and retail is increasingly part of the buying cohort as people feel FOMO if they’re not investing a lot of their money in the market.
The dollar is looking interesting here. It looks like it’s setting a base, and current conversations about Kevin Warsh being named the new Fed chair instead of Hackett will help the dollar bulls.
Consumer discretionary names usually act well after the first year of a new president’s term, it’s a group to watch as it’s been an underperformer.
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