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Sun saw the danger of this and returned to China in 1917 to advocate Chinese reunification. In 1921 he started a self-proclaimed military government in Guangzhou and was elected Grand Marshal.[81]

By this time Sun had become convinced that the only hope for a unified China lay in a military conquest from his base in the south, followed by a period of political tutelage that would culminate in the transition to democracy. In order to hasten the conquest of China, he began a policy of active cooperation with the Communist Party of China (CPC). Sun and the Soviet Union's Adolph Joffe signed the Sun-Joffe Manifesto in January 1923.[83] Sun received help from the Comintern for his acceptance of communist members into his KMT. Revolutionary and socialist leader Vladimir Lenin praised Sun and the KMT for their ideology and principles. Lenin praised Sun and his attempts at social reformation, and also congratulated him for fighting foreign Imperialism.[84][85][86] Sun also returned the praise, calling him a "great man", and sent his congratulations on the revolution in Russia.[87] With the Soviets' help, Sun was able to develop the military power needed for the Northern Expedition against the military at the north. He established the Whampoa Military Academy near Guangzhou with Chiang Kai-shek as the commandant of the National Revolutionary Army (NRA).[88] Other Whampoa leaders include Wang Jingwei and Hu Hanmin as political instructors. This full collaboration was called the First United Front.

In 1924 Sun appointed his brother-in-law T. V. Soong to set up the first Chinese Central bank called the Canton Central Bank.[89] To establish national capitalism and a banking system was a major objective for the KMT.[9

In 1946, shortly after the end of World War II, the physicist Louis Slotin stood in front of a low table at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, concentrating intensely on the object in front of him. His left thumb was hooked into a hole on the top of a heavy beryllium dome, fingers bracing the side as he carefully cantilevered it on its leftmost edge. In his right hand he held a flathead screwdriver, its head wedged under the right edge of the dome to keep it from closing completely. Through the gap on the right side you could just barely catch a metallic gleam, a glimpse of the 14-pound plutonium sphere that was slated to become one of the United States’ next nuclear weapons.

Going from plutonium nitrate to a finished bomb core had proven to be a major challenge for the metallurgists at Los Alamos Laboratory. By the time they made the demon core (the third plutonium core, after those in the Trinity and Nagasaki bombs) they had worked out many of the kinks. They first converted the plutonium salt into plutonium metal by reacting it with metallic calcium, a relatively straightforward process. The metallurgists weren’t done, though: Early studies had found that plutonium produced this way is incredibly brittle, cracking with every attempt to make it into the needed shapes. To solve this, the metallurgists tried mixing the plutonium with various other metals to see if they could improve its workability as an alloy, eventually finding gallium to be ideal. The plutonium-gallium alloy of the demon core was hot-pressed into two hemispheres and then coated with a thin layer of nickel to protect the plutonium from rusting; joining these two hemispheres together completed its manufacture.

An opportunity came in the form of Operation Crossroads, a testing program to determine the impact of nuclear weapons on warships. However, now that the wartime pressure was off, the scientists realized that it would be useful to run some more tests on their creation.

the Business Roundtable, which represents the chief executives of 192 of the nation’s largest companies. Most of its members signed a statement declaring that making profits for shareholders isn’t a corporation’s sole responsibility. Instead, companies have a broader mission to serve customers, employees, suppliers and communities, too, the statement said.

Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase and chairman of the Business Roundtable, led the signers who agreed: “Many Americans are struggling. Too often hard work is not rewarded.” Dimon had warned earlier this year in his annual letter to his company’s shareholders that the American Dream was “fraying for many” because of stagnant wages and income inequality.

Corporate America fears the system is failing. As Dalio wrote, this is an “existential” moment. The guardians of capitalism seem to realize that they must respond to right-wing populists and left-wing progressives alike or face a worsening political crisis that is already hobbling the country.

it is natural enough to look at Taiwan’s example and wonder why we didn’t do what they did, or, more pertinently, could we have done what they did?

we keep seeing the culturally embedded assumption that East Asian-style state social control just won’t fly in the good old, individualist, government-wary, freedom-loving United States.

The New York Times: People in “places like Singapore … are more willing to accept government orders.” Fortune: “There seems to be more of a willingness to place the community and society needs over individual liberty.” Even WIRED: “These countries all have social structures and traditions that might make this kind of surveillance and control a little easier than in the don’t-tread-on-me United States.”

We readily – routinely – underestimate the power and impact of randomness in and on our lives

In his book, The Drunkard’s Walk, Caltech physicist Leonard Mlodinow employs the idea of the “drunkard’s [random] walk” to compare “the paths molecules follow as they fly through space, incessantly bumping, and being bumped by, their sister molecules,” with “our lives, our paths from college to career, from single life to family life, from first hole of golf to eighteenth.” 

Although countless random interactions seem to cancel each another out within large data sets, sometimes, “when pure luck occasionally leads to a lopsided preponderance of hits from some particular direction...a noticeable jiggle occurs.” When that happens, we notice the unlikely directional jiggle and build a carefully concocted story around it while ignoring the many, many random, counteracting collisions.

He may not even have had an English-language Wikipedia page on Wednesday morning, but former tax official Mikhail Mishustin is now Russian prime minister.Russia's lower house of parliament, the State Duma, confirmed Mishustin's new role Thursday amid a major political shakeup.

Prior to his appointment, Mishustin served as the head of the Federal Tax Service, where he forged a reputation as a skilled technocrat who successfully reformed the country's fiscal system.

Mishustin is largely unknown to the Russian public and had previously showed little political ambition.

They represent 0.31% of the total population of China. DNA analyses indicate the peoples of central Asia such as the Uyghurs are all mixed Caucasian and East Asian

An admirable intelligentsia, inoculated by education against fashions and fads, would make thoughtful distinctions arising from historically informed empathy. It would be society’s ballast against mob mentalities.

today’s lumpen intelligentsia consists of persons for whom a little learning is delightful. They consider themselves educated because they are credentialed, stamped with the approval of institutions of higher education that gave them three things: a smattering of historical information just sufficient to make the past seem depraved; a vocabulary of indignation about the failure of all previous historic actors, from Washington to Lincoln to Churchill, to match the virtues of the lumpen intelligentsia; and the belief that America’s grossest injustice is the insufficient obeisance accorded to this intelligentsia.

The cancel culture depends on not having so much learning that it spoils the statue-toppling fun: Too much learning might immobilize the topplers with doubts about how they would have behaved in the contexts in which the statues’ subjects lived.

Next week the BirthStrike movement – founded by women who, by announcing their decision not to have children, seek to focus our minds on the horror of environmental collapse – will dissolve itself, because its cause has been hijacked so virulently and persistently by population obsessives. The founders explain that they had “underestimated the power of ‘overpopulation’ as a growing form of climate breakdown denial”.

It is true that, in some parts of the world, population growth is a major driver of particular kinds of ecological damage, such as the expansion of small-scale agriculture into rainforests, the bushmeat trade and local pressure on water and land for housing. But its global impact is much smaller than many people claim.

The formula for calculating people’s environmental footprint is simple, but widely misunderstood: Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology (I = PAT).

This is nonsense. Let’s unpack all of it.

“We” and “They”

The “mainstream media”—I’m going to stop putting that in quotes, but keep imagining that I’m saying it sarcastically—is probably made up of several thousand individuals and then a three-figure number of institutions. At any given moment, on any given story, some number of these people and institutions will communicate facts that are eventually understood to be misleading or incorrect. Some of these people and institutions are better at their jobs than others.

The Enchantments of Mammon by Eugene McCarraher

It is almost impossible to categorise Enchantments of Mammon. This monumental labour of love took two decades to write.

this is an extraordinary work of intellectual history as well as a scholarly tour de force, a bracing polemic and a work of Christian prophecy