Tariffs, Power Plays, and the Supply Chain That Went on Vacation Ladies and gentlemen, let us talk about the world economy. Not the polite version they present at conferences with graphs and laser pointers, but the real one—the one that behaves like a marketplace at closing time where everyone is bargaining, shouting, hiding the good merchandise, and pretending everything is under control. Because right now the global economy is not exactly broken. No, no. That would be too simple. What we have instead is a very organized confusion. You see, for thirty years the world agreed on a beautiful idea: everyone produces whatever is cheapest, somewhere far away, ships it across oceans, and everybody wins. Shoes from one country, chips from another, minerals from somewhere nobody can pronounce. Efficiency, they called it. Well. Efficiency worked perfectly until geopolitics walked into the room. Now governments everywhere have discovered a fascinating tool called tariffs. Tariffs are li...
The Six-Planet Alignment Some Say Governments Are Afraid to Explain On February 28, the night sky will stage a spectacle astronomers are calmly calling a “planetary alignment.” Six planets—Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—will appear in a long arc across the heavens. Official explanations say it is a routine consequence of orbital mechanics. Nothing mysterious. Nothing historic. Just geometry. But that explanation is exactly what has started to make some observers uneasy. Because if this event is so ordinary, why has interest in it quietly surged across the internet? Why are amateur astronomers, satellite trackers, and fringe researchers suddenly pointing telescopes toward the same narrow window of sky? And why do some claim this alignment resembles patterns recorded before major disruptions in ancient records? According to the standard model, planets orbit the Sun in roughly the same flat disk. Occasionally, from Earth’s perspective, several appear in the sa...