toucana

President Trump has been quick off the mark to congratulate Cardinal Robert Prevost on becoming the first ever American to be elected as the new Pope earlier today - under the regnal name of Leo XIV. Vice-president J.D. Vance (a recent convert to Roman Catholicism) may be slightly less happy however, as Cardinal Prevost who originally hails from Chicago but has lived in Peru, recently excoriated the VP on Twitter/X for suggesting that Christian love was subject to a sort of ranking system - a medieval concept known as the ordo amoris - the order of charity, often attributed to St Thomas Aquinas. https://www.ncronline.org/opinion/guest-voices/jd-vance-wrong-jesus-doesnt-ask-us-rank-our-love-others The Cardinal’s response to this back in February was robust - “J.D. Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others” https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/robert-prevosts-post-slamming-jd-vance-surfaces-after-election-heres-what-pope-leo-xiv-said-101746727012007.html

In an interview in Rome, Cardinal Timothy Dolan (Archbishop of New York since 2009) referred to the ‘Pope’ image of Trump as a brutta figura https://x.com/highbrow_nobrow/status/1919095174187417821 The phrase is used in Italian to denote “a crude, grotesque, or deformed image” - the opposite of a bella figura.

His Holiness..

Yet another SignalGate scandal has erupted, as described in a 15m YT video between Andrew Egger of The Bulwark, and Joseph Cox, a journalist from a group called 404.media.co https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4WnMMzoEVs A few days ago, a Reuters photo-journalist Evelyn Hockstein took a photo of NSA Mike Waltz using his smartphone at a White House cabinet meeting (shortly before he was terminated). Enlargement of that image clearly shows Mike Waltz using a modded version of Signal called TeleMessage supplied by an obscure Israeli company. The point of this mod is that it archives active Signal chat threads by routing them via a TeleMessage server to an archival repository. Presumably this was meant to bring the use of Signal by government officials into compliance with the Federal Records Act - as opposed to allowing the Signal chats to be auto-deleted a few days later. A hacker connected with 404.media.co who saw these enlarged images became curious about quite how secure this archival TeleMessage relay system was - and broke into it within about 15 minutes. The hacker obtained plain text versions of messages between officials from Customs & Borders, as well as lobbyists for a Crypto-currency company called Galaxy in conversation with government staffers. The hacker also apparently managed to obtain the group names and passwords for other linked government Signal chats. Telemessage have now shuttered their service. https://www.404media.co/the-signal-clone-the-trump-admin-uses-was-hacked/

I wasn’t quite sure where to put this thread, so it originally appeared in The Lounge, but now seems to have migrated into Politics ! Not for the first time, the board game industry acts a microcosm of the larger pressures likely to be affecting the American economy and world trade in general in the next few months. About a week ago the CEOs of major retailers like Walmart and Target privately warned the Trump administration that the USA was only a couple of weeks away from a retail supply chain melt-down that will see empty shelves and product shortages on a scale unseen since the pandemic of 2020-1. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/walmart-target-trump-tariff-supply-chains/ Shipping analysts are reporting a 40% rise in ‘blank sailings’ from China to USA since the latest China tariffs were announced - as shippers chalk-off scheduled deliveries to American ports. Even worse, this is happening in the April/May time period when Xmas-shopping trade contracts are normally being signed. There is a seven month lead time in actioning these shippings, so retailers already know it’s going to be a bleak Xmas this year. https://www.sea-intelligence.com/press-room/320-transpacific-blank-sailings-rise-rapidly ‘Gloomhaven’ (for those who aren’t board gamers ) is an enormous ‘coffin-box’ size co-op strategy and dungeon crawl game which is campaign based, with 95 unique scenarios and 17 playable classes. If you already have a copy still sitting in its shrinkwrap, then you should just about have time to play through all of it within the remaining 1358 days of Trump’s second term ;-) Handy countdown timer —> https://logwork.com/countdown-h5o4

Hot on the heels of Trump’s latest punitive tariff war against China, comes news that Price Johnson the COO of Cephalofair Games (‘Gloomhaven’, ‘Frosthaven’, ‘Jaws of the Lion’) a small board game design company based in Lafayette Indiana has appeared on CNN, and said that his company is almost completely paralysed by the new tariffs imposed on China. https://cephalofair.com/blogs/blog/planning-our-initiatives-tariffs-part-2 So why are US board game publishers in particular being so badly hit ? The answer is that most modern board games are printed in China, usually either by LongPack Games, a printing company based in Shanghai, or by the Jin Hui Printiing company in Shenzen near Hong Kong, which both offer high volume low-cost printing, warehouse and shipping services at competitive rates that European and American companies simply cannot match. The potential risks of depending on an off-shore supply chain located in China was graphically demonstrated in 2017 when a large warehouse fire in China destroyed the entire EU Kickstarter stock of a brand new board game by Vital Lacerda called ‘Lisboa’ - a game which ironically enough was based on the great earthquake and fire that destroyed the city of Lisbon in 1755. The publisher Eagle Gryphon Games had to delay the launch of that game for months while it was reprinted. The global board game market was said to be worth around $14.37 billion USD in 2024, and is projected to grow to $32 billion by 2032, with a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 10.5% within that forecast period. https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/board-games-market-104972 The US board game market was projected to be worth around $2.87 billion USD in 2025 with a CAGR of 4.23% https://www.statista.com/outlook/cmo/toys-hobby/toys-games/board-games/united-states The grim reality of the situation now facing US board game manufacturers has been documented within the last few days by Cardboard Edison who carried out a new survey that asked US board game publishers —> - 90% say they would have to pass on the increased costs to customers. - 66% say they would have to print fewer copies in smaller print runs. - 56% of the companies say they expect to delay their current plans. - 74% say they will be signing fewer new games from designers, and may claw-back tariff costs from designer royalties - 41% fewer publishers said they would be making dice-based games in particular. - 23% fewer publishers say they will be making board games at all under the new tariff scenario. - 16% say they are considering moving to digital formats - 13% say they are considering moving to PNP (print & play)

President Trump has now fired his National Security Advisor Mike Waltz in the wake of the Signalgate scandal according to multiple press reports. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/mike-waltz-alex-wong-nsa-trump-b2743177.html The former NSA Mike Waltz and his deputy Alex Wong will both be leaving their jobs, marking the first cabinet dismissal of the second Trump administration with just over 100 days in office on the clock - in a manner that echoes the abrupt dismissal of General Mike Flynn as NSA in the first Trump administration back in 2017, after just 22 days in post. Trump was apparently persuaded to sack Waltz by his unofficial HR advisor Laura Loomer a conspiracy theorist who seems to have an unusually intimate level of access to POTUS.

Don't often see an electrical joke :-)

Small correction - REN (Redes Energéticas Nacionals) operate the national grid of Portugal, and REE (Red Eléctrica de España ) operate the Spanish electrical grid system. The Carrington Event which took place in September 1859 happened at a time when high power electrical transmission systems and transformers in the 220/440 KV class simply did not exist. https://www.space.com/the-carrington-event Oddly enough, one of my relatives - a maternal great-uncle Sir Arthur Fleming (1881-1960) was a pioneering electrical engineer who was sent over to Pittsburgh USA in 1899 to train with Westinghouse Electrical Corporation, and he subsequently became an insulation specialist and head of transformer design with British Westinghouse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Fleming_(electrical_engineer) He was knighted for his war-time work in designing the high-power thermionic valves used in British RADAR systems during WW2.

Spain and Portugal have suffered major electrical blackouts affecting capital cities such as Madrid and Lisbon, plus many other regional cities such as Barcelona, Valencia, and Porto. Parts of southern France have also been affected https://news.sky.com/story/spain-portugal-power-outage-latest-large-parts-of-countries-affected-with-traffic-lights-not-working-and-phone-lines-down-13357538 REN the prinicipal electrical grid operator in Spain has blamed rare atmospheric conditions that have affected significant parts of the European power grid system for causing “induced atmospheric variations” which have impacted the operational stability of power transmission lines across the entire Iberian peninsula. They say that it may take up to a week to resolve the problems affecting their 400 and 220 KV transmission lines. What they are referring to appears to be a phenomenon known to power line engineers as GIC (geomagnetically induced currents) which are related to space weather - i.e. charged particles from the sun.The solar cycle is currently on an 11 year maximum for sunspot activity. https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/solar-cycle-progression A recent 2023 AGU article on ‘Expected Geomagnetically Induced Currents in the Spanish Islands Power Transmission Grids’ explains some of the problems: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2023SW003426 "When the Sun is active, it sends out more charged particles that can affect the regions around the Earth where those particles interact with the planet's magnetic field. This leads to a significant increase of electric currents in these media giving rise to geomagnetic storms. This generated electrical fields act like a voltage source and cause electrical currents to flow through the power networks, that can damage the transformers where the circuit is grounded. The currents thus induced in those technological systems are accordingly known as geomagnetically induced currents (GICs). The GIC component of the current flowing in a power transformer disturbs the normal power-frequency operation of the magnetic circuit, causing core saturation, increasing the leakage flux, and generating transformer heating (e.g., Gaunt, 2014). GICs also generate harmonic distortion and voltage unbalance that may lead to the misoperation of protective devices, causing the tripping of over-current relays. If the infrastructure damage and tripping of transmission lines spreads it may result in cascading outages and extended power disruptions."

According to this BBC report, president Trump “stands strongly behind Peter Hegseth” and thinks he is “Doing a great job”. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g8r701lrno Which implies that POTUS is completely satisfied with the performance of his hand-picked muscle-bound, alcoholic Fox TV mediocrity - complete with his Christo-Fascist Jerusalem Cross and Deus Vult tattoos - in destroying the military leadership of the USA.

It was always a given that other Signal threads of this type would come to light. The buried lede in this case is the recent chaos within the Pentagon that has prompted the disclosure of this latest scandal. https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/20/ullyot-pentagon-hegseth-chaos-00300695 “The Pentagon is in total chaos” - according to this story from Politico - following the resignation of senior spokesman John Ullyot who resigned, and then went public two days later with an excoriating attack on Hegseth and his team for their “falsehoods” about why three top Pentagon officials were fired last week - supposedly for the unauthorised sharing of sensitive information - exactly the same offense that Peter Hegseth himself was quite blatantly guilty of. According to this account in The Independent, the latest Signal scandal involves a thread called ”Defense | Team Huddle” which was originally started by Peter Hegseth himself during his Congressional confirmation hearings back in January, in order to coordinate his support on Capitol Hill. But he carried on accessing this Signal thread on his personal phone after being confirmed in post, and used it to share the same attack plan details that were shared in another Signal group that Jeffrey Goldberg was party to, on Saturday March 15. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/hegseth-signal-second-chat-yemen-wife-b2736476.html "In the days before the Yemen attack, aides reportedly warned Hegseth not to use the “Defense | Team Huddle” group chat to discuss any sensitive operational details. He was also “encouraged” to move discussions from his personal device to his government phone. But Hegseth never made that transition." Exactly why he thought it necessary to share such sensitive information with his wife, personal attorney, and his own brother remains a matter of conjecture. Politico believes that Hegseth will shortly be fired by Trump.

Dear Mr President According to a recent memo sent by Thomas Lee, managing partner and head of research at Fundstrat Global Advisors, some macro fund managers he has spoken to recently are quietly wondering if you are insane ? https://finance.yahoo.com/news/fund-managers-worry-trump-might-174000541.html Do you have any views on this matter ?

Speaking of which..

It has many uses..

The Chinese captions in that video use the expression 乡巴佬 xiangbalǎo - “country bumpkin” - (lit. ‘countryside - close to - fellow’) to mimic JD Vance’s attempt to use the word ‘peasant’ as an insult.

JD Vance is now being mercilessly trolled by the Chinese government on 小红书 xiǎo hóng shu - (‘little red book’) - China’s equivalent to Instagram - with humorous little animations of Chinese ’peasants’ pointing out that US tariffs will make his eyeliner cost more ! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmUs6sL4vwc

The current proprietor of The Atlantic is Laurene Powell Jobs https://www.thewrap.com/laurene-powell-jobs-atlantic-praise-signalgate/ Laurene Powell Jobs is the widow of Steve Jobs who founded Apple. She purchased The Atlantic in 2017, six years after the death of her husband in 2011, and she is a billionaire (worth $15 billion) in her own right. She also seems to be in the process of inheriting the mantle of the legendary Katherine Graham who became the publisher of The Washington Post after the death of her husband Philip Graham in 1963. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katharine_Graham Graham appointed Ben Bradlee as editor, and backed him fearlessly in the face of enormous hostile pressure from the Nixon administration over the publication of follow-up articles about the Pentagon Papers (first published by the New York Times in 1971), and then memorably backed her editor when he went to press with articles about the Watergate Scandal written by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein from 1972 onwards. Watch this space..

Yes. I’d agree with all of that. The Song dynasty (960-1279) was a period of quite violent social transition. It was progressively conquered and pushed southwards, before the surviving members of the royal court were quite literally driven into the sea by the Mongols at the Battle of Yamen. The attachment that many Chinese still feel to their ancestral roots is seen quite dramatically during the ‘Golden Week’ of the 春節 chun jíe Spring Festival, when many millions of Chinese travel back to their rural villages to celebrate the Chinese New Year with their parents and extended families.

Because the Chinese are literate (and subtle) enough to understand that he meant it as a crude insult ! The contrast in traditional Chinese social hierarchy between 农民 and 商人 which I alluded to, was one that existed in Imperial China all the way back to the Tang dynasty (618 - 907) - if not before. The present relationship between the agrarian values of rural China, and their modern high technology industrial base are fairly complex and quite ambivalent at times - yet one more reason why they don’t appreciate derogatory comments from westerners, and sometime colonial oppressors like JD. Vance.

If JD Vance was looking for media attention when he spoke to Fox news last Thursday then he probably succeeded beyond his wildest ambitions. While defending president Trump’s insane trade tariffs, the vice-president launched into a tirade against the ‘globalist economy’ which included this gem: "To make it a little more crystal clear, we borrow money from Chinese peasants to buy the things those Chinese peasants manufacture.” https://edition.cnn.com/2025/04/08/china/china-slams-vance-peasants-remarks-intl-hnk/index.html This remark has now gone viral on Weibo 微博 - the Chinese microblogging site - with some 140 million views, and countless downvotes and negative responses from many commentators, including Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian who replied “It’s both astonishing and lamentable to hear this vice president make such ignorant and disrespectful remarks.” JD Vance who in the past proudly embraced his own poverty stricken childhood in rural Appalachia with a 2016 memoir entitled “Hillbilly Elegy” completely overlooks the fact modern China is a country where factory floors are lined with industrial robots, cities are embracing homegrown electric vehicles and remote counties are connected by a nationwide web of high-speed railways. The Chinese word for a ‘peasant’ is 农民 nong min which simply means a ‘farmer’. If JD Vance had ever done the slightest research on this subject, then he might have found out that historically speaking 农民 is not a term of reproach in China. The ‘peasants’ are in fact traditionally regarded as the foundation and bed-rock of the entire Chinese social system. It was the 商人 shang ren or merchant class who were always despised and regarded as the lowest of the low in China !

Testing

During a recent House foreign relations subcommittee on 1st April 2025, Republican Texas Congressman Keith Self had this to say from the podium: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/keith-self-congress-quoted-joseph-goebbels/ The full significance of this quotation might be better appreciated by citing the language and context in which it was originally spoken (see below): The words first came from Jospeh Goebbels on October 16th 1933 when he was announcing a new National Press Law making it a crime to practice journalism in Germany except as a licensed member of a nationwide closed shop called Der Reichsverband der Deutschen Presse - headed by one Dr. Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment in Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. https://time.com/archive/6751737/foreign-news-consecrated-press/ “Houston - You have a problem ! ”

Congressman Jake Auchincloss (D-Massachusetts 4th) has raised an interesting point about a possible interplay between these latest trade tariffs, and meme crypto-currencies which the Trump administration recently quietly exempted from Federal Securities & Exchange regulatory oversight. https://www.banking.senate.gov/newsroom/minority/senator-warren-and-representative-auchincloss-call-on-sec-to-explain-legal-loophole-for-trumps-meme-coins

They would probably ask 'Mr Green' (his father Fred) what to do next..