اخبار 1

The title of this post is directly stolen from The Economist which ran a cover story by this name a year or so ago. They themselves were punning the quote from here . The much awaited China's People Congress ended today with the expected climax - the unveiling of the new Politburo Standing Committee ; the men who will run China for the next five years. More of this in just a little while. This ended a week of speechifying and staged events. First, the two things that stood out during the days preceding the event today.  Xi Jinping opened the Congress with a speech lasting an incredible three and a half hours, reaching new heights of torture and boredom. It was a hugely self confident China strutting about as a world power, with Xi vigorously patting his own back. He outlined some of the directions for the next five years which were typically broad motherhoods, but gave some clues on where they are heading. The most important outcome was the enshrining of "Xi Jinping Thought...

If you are an American, here's a a nice issue to distract you from your fixation about you know who and direct your attention to a different issue you can get all worked up about. Witness each city falling over each other and doing the most stupid of things to land HQ2. Tucson Arizona, where one of the readers of this blog lives ,  uprooted a 21ft cactus and tried to deliver it to HQ1. The mayor of Kansas City actually bought one thousand items from the company in HQ1 and wrote a review of each one of them. Mayors of cities are looking silly in videos that they have made asking Alexa where HQ2 is going to come up and Alexa answering of course, the city they are mayors of. Shall I go on ? If you are wondering what all this hullaballoo is  about, this is all to do with attracting Amazon's second head office. Amazon is based in Seattle (this is HQ1). They want to create a HQ2 somewhere else. And why are cities willing to stand in a line and kiss Bezos' ass (cue the nod to the ...