The long table in Beijing by Thanos Kalamidas

There was a revealing asymmetry in the photographs from Donald Trump’s latest meetings with Xi Jinping. Trump, the man who once treated diplomacy like a televised arm-wrestling contest, appeared oddly diminished; one arm tucked behind his back, posture stiff, smile strained in the peculiar way of a politician trying to disguise anxiety as confidence. Xi, meanwhile, looked exactly as the Chinese leader always tries to look, unmoved, patient, perfectly comfortable with history unfolding in his direction.

Body language analysis is often junk science masquerading as insight but sometimes the theater tells the truth before the communiqués do. Trump did not travel into a negotiation from a position of triumph. He arrived carrying inflation that refuses to behave, farmers angry about shrinking margins and unstable export markets and a restless political base still waiting for the return of an America that no longer exists outside campaign slogans and faded memories.

The deeper problem is not merely economic. It is psychological. Trump’s political mythology has always depended on the promise of restoration. The factories would hum again. Cheap gas would return. Manufacturing towns would revive. America would resume its uncontested place atop the global pyramid simply because Trump willed it so loudly enough. But history does not reverse itself on command. Entire electorates can spend decades voting against time and still lose.

Xi understands this better than most Western leaders. China’s long-term strategy has never depended on charisma or emotional spectacle. It is built on endurance. Beijing thinks in decades while Washington thinks in election cycles and cable-news segments. That difference now shows everywhere.

China dominates critical supply chains. It extends influence through ports, infrastructure, lending and trade agreements stretching from Africa to Latin America. Its military projects power farther from its shores each year. Even countries wary of Beijing increasingly treat China not as an ideological ally but as an unavoidable economic gravity field. They may distrust China; they simply distrust dependence on America more.

Trump once boasted that trade wars were “easy to win.” Instead, many American farmers became collateral damage in a geopolitical experiment they never asked to join. Soybean growers, cattle producers and small agricultural exporters learned a brutal lesson; global markets do not reward patriotic rhetoric. They reward stability. China diversified suppliers. Brazil benefited. Others stepped in. And many of the old relationships never fully returned.

That lingering resentment matters because farmers were not merely another voting bloc for Trump. They were central characters in his national story, the hardworking Americans supposedly abandoned by cosmopolitan elites and rescued by populist nationalism. Yet nostalgia is a poor substitute for economic planning. The “good old days” are politically useful precisely because they cannot be tested against present reality.

Meanwhile Xi projects continuity. He does not need applause lines. He does not need rallies. He only needs the appearance of steady ascent. Even China’s serious internal problems, youth unemployment, demographic decline, property-sector instability, do not erase the broader perception that Beijing is expanding its influence while Washington struggles to define its own role.

That is why the Taiwan issue suddenly feels so delicate. Trump has always approached alliances transactionally and transactional diplomacy becomes dangerous when facing authoritarian powers skilled at exploiting ambiguity. Beijing watches carefully for signs that American commitments are negotiable. Any hint that Taiwan could become part of a larger bargain sends tremors across Asia.

Perhaps Trump believes flexibility is strategic. Perhaps he thinks unpredictability keeps adversaries off balance. But there is a fine line between strategic ambiguity and visible uncertainty. Xi, unlike many American politicians, rarely mistakes patience for weakness. He understands that exhausted powers often compromise gradually; convincing themselves each concession is temporary and manageable until the balance of influence has quietly shifted.

The images from Beijing captured more than two leaders meeting across polished tables. They captured an uncomfortable truth about the current century. America still possesses immense power, wealth, innovation and military reach. But confidence has eroded into improvisation. China, despite all its vulnerabilities, increasingly behaves like a nation convinced that time itself is on its side.

And perhaps the most unsettling part for Washington is this Xi no longer needs to defeat America outright. He only needs America to keep doubting what it once was.

At The Cafe #Poem by Jan Sand

 

At small gobbletime I squatted in clocklight
To glancegrab streetwheel swifties and stumblebys.
Skyfog chunks ambled in the blue, allwhite,
While chirpers quietchopped with whistletries.
Allflat headstate uncoiled the now and lightwind called
With fragrantscent the Springheatjoy to donate
A splitoff outof recallpains and old sunshines unwalled
Where lovehate parse unhorses what to collate.
Timeoozes, squirtsalerts or puddles in the unresolvable.
Wherein, whofor, whynot and why snarl and growl.
Thoughts aroused tailchase and squabble, ideas evolvable
To spin within, where to begin the jumblejungle howl?
The nevermind is more kind, it’s still earlytimetoday,
Morestories to be told even though I’m getting old.
Patience will abide, things to be tried, I’ll find a way.
And, anyway I’ve got to move, my coffee’s getting cold.

The politics of fear in rainbow colors by Cassandra Sparks

International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia arrives with the same uneasy contradiction in the United States, rainbow logos bloom across corporate America while statehouses sharpen new restrictions aimed at LGBTQ people, especially transgender Americans. The disconnect has become one of the defining political spectacles of the Trump era and the movement that grew around it. In one corner stands the language of freedom, individuality, and patriotism. In the other stands an obsessive campaign to regulate identities, censor discussion, and turn vulnerable minorities into permanent political targets.

Donald Trump did not invent American transphobia. Those forces are older than television, older than party branding, older even than the modern culture wars themselves. But Trump understood something instinctively that many Republican strategists before him only half understood, resentment can be turned into entertainment. Under MAGA politics, outrage stopped being merely a campaign tool and became a national identity. Entire media ecosystems were built around convincing Americans that drag queens, transgender teenagers, pronouns and school librarians represented a greater threat to the republic than poverty, gun violence, unaffordable health care or climate catastrophe.

The result has been a politics of permanent panic. State legislatures compete with one another to pass increasingly theatrical laws targeting transgender people, often affecting a population so statistically small that many lawmakers likely never knowingly met a trans constituent before deciding to make them the centerpiece of civilization’s collapse. The sheer disproportion is revealing. A movement that once spoke endlessly about limited government now seems deeply interested in bathroom patrols, classroom censorship, banned books, medical surveillance and policing language itself.

There is something especially cynical about the way LGBTQ people are discussed in MAGA rhetoric. Gay and transgender Americans are rarely treated as citizens with ordinary lives. Instead, they are transformed into symbols, warnings, or punchlines. The neighbor becomes an abstraction. The teacher becomes a conspiracy. The teenager becomes a threat. This rhetorical dehumanization is not accidental. Political movements require villains, and modern right-wing populism has discovered that cultural fear mobilizes voters more efficiently than economic policy ever could.

One of the most revealing aspects of this political moment is the contradiction between conservative claims of defending children and the cruelty embedded in the policies themselves. A transgender teenager struggling with isolation is not protected by public humiliation. A gay student is not strengthened by being told their existence is inappropriate for classroom discussion. Fear has never been a moral framework. It is simply fear, dressed up as principle.

What makes the present atmosphere more disturbing is how quickly open hostility has become normalized. Comments that would once have ended political careers now circulate freely at rallies and on social media, rewarded with applause, memes, and fundraising dollars. The degradation becomes incremental. First comes the mockery. Then the suspicion. Then the legislative punishment. Finally comes the insistence that the targeted group is somehow responsible for the hostility directed against them.

International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia matters precisely because it interrupts this cycle of normalization. It insists on memory. Americans like to imagine social progress as inevitable, as though rights simply unfold naturally over time. History suggests the opposite. Rights survive only when defended repeatedly against political opportunists eager to convert prejudice into power.

The tragedy of MAGA politics is not merely that it weaponizes intolerance. It is that it shrinks the national imagination. A country capable of extraordinary pluralism is instead encouraged to fear difference as decay. The United States once marketed itself as a democratic experiment strengthened by diversity. Increasingly, parts of the American right speak as though diversity itself is a national wound.

Yet the persistence of LGBTQ Americans, particularly transgender people facing relentless political attacks, remains a form of civic resistance in itself. Visibility becomes defiance. Ordinary existence becomes political testimony. That is why authoritarian movements fixate so intensely on controlling identity: because people living openly expose the fragility of fear-based politics.

The International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia is therefore not simply a symbolic observance. It is a reminder that democracy is measured less by how loudly a country praises freedom than by how it treats those its loudest politicians encourage the public to fear.

Berserk Alert! #104 #Cartoon by Tony Zuvela

 

Tony Zuvela and his view of the world around us in a constant berserk alert!
For more Berserk Alert! HERE!
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May 17, 1792; Underwood

On May 17, 1792, twenty-four men gathered beneath a buttonwood tree on Wall Street and signed an agreement that would help invent modern capitalism. The document was brief, fewer than two hundred words. It fixed commission rates and established that the signers would trade securities primarily among themselves. In foul weather, they retreated indoors to the nearby Tontine Coffee House, where merchants shouted prices through pipe smoke and damp wool coats while slaves, sailors, speculators and errand boys crowded the streets outside. From this modest fraternity of brokers emerged the institution that became the New York Stock Exchange.

The mythology of American finance likes to imagine this beginning as quaint and democratic: honest traders under a tree, improvising the future with ink-stained fingers and practical genius. But the real story is more revealing, and far more American. The Buttonwood Agreement was not born from idealism. It was born from panic, exclusivity, and the desire of insiders to protect themselves from chaos.

That distinction matters. The agreement came only weeks after a financial disaster known as the Panic of 1792, one of the young republic’s first market crashes. Speculators had inflated the price of government securities and bank stocks using borrowed money, then watched the scheme collapse with astonishing speed. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton intervened aggressively, effectively inventing the American financial bailout. He organized liquidity support through banks and stabilized the market before the panic consumed the fragile economy.

Hamilton understood something before almost anyone else in public life: markets are never truly “free.” They require choreography, confidence, and occasionally rescue. Wall Street mythology later celebrated the rugged individualist trader, but the Exchange itself was born dependent on state power and elite coordination. The supposedly self-made architecture of American capitalism emerged with government fingerprints all over it.

The brokers under the buttonwood tree were not visionaries in the modern sense. They were middlemen attempting to impose order on a disorderly market. Prior to the agreement, auctions of securities occurred openly and somewhat chaotically. Traders undercut one another. Prices fluctuated wildly. Information travelled unevenly. The Buttonwood Agreement essentially created a club, a protected network that excluded outsiders and reduced competition among insiders.

This, too, would become a permanent feature of Wall Street. For all the romance surrounding finance, the history of exchanges is often the history of access control. Who gets information first? Who gets to trade? Who writes the rules? Who is left outside the room? The technologies change from handwritten ledgers to telegraphs to fibber-optic cables to algorithmic trading systems but the social logic remains remarkably consistent.

The location itself was symbolic long before it became iconic. Wall Street took its name from the actual wall built by Dutch settlers in seventeenth-century New Amsterdam to defend the colony. Defence, exclusion, and commerce were fused into the geography from the beginning. By 1792, New York was rapidly eclipsing Philadelphia as the nation’s commercial center. The harbour pulsed with Atlantic trade. Insurance houses flourished. Ships arrived carrying sugar, coffee, textiles and enslaved people.

One uncomfortable truth is often sanitized in nostalgic accounts of Wall Street’s origins: much of early American finance was entangled with slavery. New York merchants insured slave voyages, financed plantations and traded commodities produced by enslaved labour. Banks accepted human beings as collateral. Securities markets helped channel capital into the expanding slave economy. The future financial capital of the United States was not built in moral isolation from the country’s greatest crime; it was interwoven with it.

The Tontine Coffee House, where traders gathered during bad weather, reflected this strange convergence of refinement and ruthlessness. Opened in 1793, it became a center of mercantile gossip and securities trading. Coffee houses in the eighteenth century functioned as hybrid institutions, part newsroom, part tavern, part casino, part political salon. Men argued over shipping manifests and government debt while consuming caffeine imported through global trade networks built on colonial exploitation. Deals were made loudly and often dishonestly.

One can almost hear the noise: boots scraping wooden floors, auctioneers barking prices, rain hammering the windows while fortunes shifted over cups of bitter coffee.

The New York Stock Exchange did not immediately become powerful. For decades, American markets remained provincial compared to those in London or Amsterdam. The Exchange traded government bonds, bank stocks, and shares in infrastructure ventures like canals and turnpikes. Yet even in infancy, Wall Street displayed its defining characteristic: the conversion of abstraction into authority.

A stock certificate is, after all, a peculiar object. It represents ownership without physical possession, wealth without tangible substance. The Exchange professionalized belief itself. Traders agreed that pieces of paper had value because enough influential men collectively behaved as though they did. Modern finance would later layer derivatives atop equities atop debt instruments until entire economies rested upon systems of mutual psychological faith.

The buttonwood tree becomes almost comical in retrospect, a rustic symbol for a machine that would eventually move trillions of dollars through invisible electronic impulses measured in microseconds.

And yet there is continuity. The emotional atmosphere of Wall Street has scarcely changed since 1792. Beneath the technological sophistication lies the same combustible mixture of greed, fear, performance, tribalism, and ambition. Financial crises still resemble theatrical panics. Speculative bubbles still acquire moral language while expanding. Every generation convinces itself that old rules no longer apply. Every generation discovers gravity again.

The Exchange survived fires, depressions, wars, and technological revolutions because it adapted without surrendering its core function: concentrating power through finance. By the late nineteenth century, industrial titans like J. P. Morgan and Cornelius Vanderbilt transformed Wall Street into the command center of American industry. Railroads, steel, oil, and electricity flowed through the Exchange’s capital markets. The institution no longer merely reflected the economy; it actively shaped it.

This transformation altered American culture itself. The old republican suspicion of speculation gradually gave way to admiration for financiers. The broker became a national archetype. Wealth acquired a new glamour detached from landownership or manufacturing. Money could generate more money through systems increasingly incomprehensible to ordinary citizens.

By the twentieth century, Wall Street had evolved into both cathedral and casino. Its rituals possessed quasi-religious authority. Traders spoke in coded language. Economic indicators became sacred texts interpreted by experts on television. Yet underneath the polished surfaces remained the primal instincts visible beneath the buttonwood tree in 1792.

One reason the founding anecdote endures is because Americans prefer origin stories that feel accidental and homespun. A tree is comforting. A coffeehouse sounds civilized. The reality, that modern finance emerged through insider coordination during a speculative crisis tied to state intervention and elite self-interest, is less picturesque.

But it is more truthful. The irony is that the men who signed the Buttonwood Agreement probably could not have imagined the scale of the institution they created. They were solving immediate problems, not constructing a global financial order. History often works this way. Vast systems emerge from local improvisations. Civilization pivots on paperwork nobody initially regards as immortal.

Today, tourists walk through Wall Street photographing bronze statues and neoclassical facades, searching for the symbolic center of capitalism. The actual mechanics of finance, meanwhile, have become nearly invisible, distributed across server farms, trading algorithms, offshore entities and digital networks that no longer require a physical street at all.

The tree is gone. The weather, however, remains unpredictable.

Trekking Chat #008 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

They trek across surreal cartoon streets, armed with quirky sarcasm
and boundless humor. They map uncharted valleys, befriend bizarre creatures
and find the real adventure in their square frames.

For more Trekking Chat, HERE!
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The emperor and the supply chain by John Reid

For Donald Trump, statecraft resembles professional wrestling, entrances, taunts, oversized personalities and the constant need for a villain. Yet China presents a peculiar challenge to that instinct because China is not a rival that can be insulted into retreat. It is a civilization-state with factories, ports, engineers, batteries, shipyards and patience. So when Trump traveled alongside Elon Musk and Tim Cook, the contrast between the two businessmen revealed more about America’s confusion than about China itself.

Musk represents the modern American myth in its purest MAGA form; the heroic disruptor who believes rules are for slower people. He thrives on confrontation, speaks in provocations and treats politics like an extension of social media. But there is an irony buried beneath the mythology. In nearly every field where Musk has planted his flag China has produced a domestic equivalent that is often cheaper, faster and astonishingly efficient. Tesla faces aggressive Chinese electric vehicle companies capable of manufacturing at terrifying scale. SpaceX may dominate headlines in the West, yet China’s state-backed space ambitions move with relentless discipline. Even in artificial intelligence, where Silicon Valley once assumed permanent supremacy, Chinese firms now compete with startling speed while benefiting from enormous state coordination.

China does not imitate America anymore. It industrializes ideas more efficiently than America can commercialize them. That is the uncomfortable reality hovering over every smiling photograph from these diplomatic excursions.

Tim Cook occupies the opposite moral and managerial universe from Musk. Where Musk performs disruption, Cook practices calibration. He rarely raises his voice, avoids ideological spectacle and understands that supply chains matter more than slogans. Apple’s global success did not emerge from patriotic chest-thumping about manufacturing returning home. It emerged from a deep integration with Chinese production ecosystems built over decades. Cook understood earlier than most American executives that China was not merely a cheap labor market. It was becoming the operational center of modern industrial precision.

That difference matters because Trump views economics emotionally, almost tribally. Factories symbolize strength to him in the same way skyscrapers once symbolized success in nineteen-eighties Manhattan. He talks about tariffs with the confidence of a casino owner explaining blackjack strategy. Yet the presence of Musk and Cook beside him suggested two competing visions of American capitalism confronting Chinese power.

Musk embodies America’s appetite for dominance through innovation and spectacle. Cook embodies America’s dependence on global integration and disciplined manufacturing partnerships. One sells the fantasy of technological conquest. The other quietly manages the machinery that keeps consumer capitalism alive.

Trump likely believed the trip elevated his own image as the indispensable negotiator between American business and Chinese leadership. He has always measured diplomacy through visible proximity to wealth and celebrity. Standing beside Musk gives him the aura of futurism. Standing beside Cook grants him proximity to the world’s most profitable consumer brand. But China probably interpreted the tableau differently. Beijing sees American elites arriving not as conquerors but as petitioners seeking market access, industrial cooperation and economic stability.

This is the central tension of modern America. The country still speaks the language of supremacy while increasingly depending on systems it no longer fully controls. China builds infrastructure while Washington produces political content. Chinese companies refine manufacturing capacity while American politics descends into performance art.

In that sense, the trip was not really about Trump at all. It was about an aging superpower trying to decide whether it still wants to build things or merely brand them.

Perhaps that is why the image of Musk and Cook beside Trump felt symbolic. One man represents disruption without restraint. Another represents stability. Trump, meanwhile, represents nostalgia dressed as strategy. China understands that empires are not preserved through slogans or charisma. They survive through production, discipline, education and long-term planning. America still possesses strengths but behaves like a nation to market greatness instead of manufacturing it.

Going #Poem by Abigail George

“When we can’t think for ourselves, we can always quote.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein

I offer you cranberry bread.
I offer you this knife for the hard cheese.
I offer you this clock.
I offer you the dark.
I offer you this fruit.
I offer you this orange.
I offer you this as a blessing.
I offer you this sweetness.
I offer you this shroud.
I offer you this veil.
I offer you this truth.
I offer you this memory.
I offer you, Africa.
I offer you these gifts.
I offer you equality.
I offer you this ancient sea.
I offer you music.
I offer you this river.
I offer you this garden as meditation.
I offer you the history of this continent.
I offer you this as an alternative.
I offer this to you for our salvation.
I offer this to you because I love you.
I offer you this because today you are getting on a ship,
and sailing far away from me.
I offer you sleep, captor.
I offer you this forest that I dragged behind me
because you have the personality
of foolish paper and the medicine of the wildflower.
I offer you this frozen mist.
I am offering you this blue cat. Take it.
Please accept it gracefully.
Let it be your companion.
I offer the dissolution of the sun.
And now, now I come to peace.
Now I come to minister to you.
I bring you coffee and poetry books.
I will bring you a pen and an empty journal for your thoughts.
It was Christ who brought us this morning.
It is time. It is the hour of your departure.
I turn to embrace you, to say goodbye.

Counting votes, not cartoons by Kingsley Cobb

Every few years in the United States, Americans are treated to the same traveling circus disguised as civic duty. Television analysts stand before giant digital maps, counties turn red and blue like mood rings and somewhere in the middle of the spectacle sits the voter, increasingly aware that the system was designed less to reflect public opinion than to manipulate it. Gerrymandering, once a technical term buried in political science textbooks, has become one of the defining symbols of democratic exhaustion in America.

The absurdity is no longer subtle. Districts twist across states like spilled spaghetti, carefully engineered to dilute some votes and inflate others. Politicians are no longer choosing voters rhetorically; they are choosing them literally, with software precise enough to carve neighborhoods block by block. The result is a democracy that often feels prearranged before a single ballot is cast. Americans are told their vote matters deeply while simultaneously watching entire elections become mathematical exercises in partisan survival.

What makes this especially dangerous is not simply unfair representation. It is the psychological effect. Millions of citizens now approach elections with the numb suspicion that outcomes are already predetermined. In heavily gerrymandered districts, many voters correctly believe their ballots will change nothing. That cynicism does not remain confined to election season. It spreads outward into every institution. Trust evaporates. Political opponents stop looking like fellow citizens and start resembling hostile tribes gaming a broken machine.

The United States loves to present itself as the world’s great democratic example, yet its electoral map increasingly resembles a legal loophole competition. In functioning democracies, parties attempt to persuade more people. In modern America, parties increasingly attempt to redraw enough lines to avoid persuasion altogether. That is not democratic strategy. It is institutionalized avoidance of accountability.

The deeper irony is that both major parties condemn gerrymandering passionately whenever they are victims of it and defend it quietly whenever they benefit. This bipartisan hypocrisy has turned electoral reform into a moral pantomime. Americans are left arguing endlessly about personalities while the structure itself quietly distorts representation underneath them.

It does not have to remain this way. The principle should be embarrassingly simple: every vote should count equally, regardless of zip code or party affiliation. Independent redistricting commissions would help. Proportional representation would help even more. National standards for district drawing could restore at least a minimal sense of legitimacy. None of these ideas are radical. The truly radical idea is continuing to accept a system where politicians can effectively design their own electorates.

Democracy is not merely the right to vote. It is the belief that the vote carries genuine weight. Once citizens lose that belief, elections become ceremonial theater rather than democratic participation. America has reached the point where many people no longer argue over policies first; they argue over whether the game itself is honest.

That may be the clearest warning sign of all. A democracy can survive disagreement. It cannot survive widespread suspicion that representation itself has become fictional.

Until the country confronts that reality directly, polarization will deepen and turnout will continue shrinking beneath waves of frustration. Citizens do not become apathetic because they suddenly hate democracy. They become apathetic because democracy stops recognizing them. Gerrymandering did not create division, but it sharpened all of them

Absurdity Woke 26#009 #cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

Our top story; common sense has left the frame, the inmates are running the asylum
and the asylum is now identifying as a luxury resort. This is Absurdity Woke.

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Carpond #013 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

A cacophony of singalongs, stifled yawns,
and surprisingly insightful debates
on the existential dread of a four wheeler vacuum

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