We think of global geopolitics as a contest among the superpowers with large populations and landmasses: the US, China, Russia, and Europe. But islands are now the most critical hinge points of geopolitics: Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Kharg Island, Greenland, the BVI, Bouvet Island, Ireland, the Falklands, Cuba, and an inland island surrounded by dragons known as the City of London. Trump sees himself at war with the @CityofLondon, its agents, and Britain's global network of islands. We are in an archipelagic era. drpippa.substack.com/p/there…

People will want to take the time to watch this upcoming interview with .@DrPippaM:

U.S.-Canada Trade: What happens next? Can Canada actually break away from its biggest trading partner—or will the bottom line force Canada to find a way to work with the U.S.? Join Dr. Pippa Malmgren @DrPippaM and Mike for analyses, insights, and perspectives you won’t find anywhere else. Friday, September 25. Download the podcast or watch on YouTube.

What it takes for Bitcoin to be untouchable, according to Former White House Economic Adviser Dr. Pippa Malmgren: "The adoption rate and the proof of concept is so clear that the markets overwhelm the policymakers" "You cannot turn this off. It's so effective." 🏛️

I'm back on x!! Thank you so much @x support!!

In China Your Own Your Likeness A Supreme Court Just Found. Here is the US, we will have decades of movie and record companies sending us to the Stone Age. A familiar face appears on the video call. The voice is right. The cadence is right. The slight pause before the punchline is right. It is not them. On Monday, September 7, 2026, China’s Supreme People’s Court drew a legal line through it. The top court issued its first dedicated judicial guidelines on AI disputes, making clear that creating or distributing a recognizable digital replica of another person—face or voice—without consent is an infringement of personality rights. The guidelines land at a precise historical pressure point. China is racing the United States for AI dominance while President Xi Jinping has repeatedly warned that the technology must remain “secure and controllable.” The court, through Vice President Tao Kaiyuan, framed the 24-article opinion as an attempt to “balance development and security”—let the horse run fast, but keep it from kicking the barn down. The core rule is simple and sharp: you do not get to mint someone else’s face or voice as raw material. Cloned faces, cloned voices, and the use of those replicas to spread false or defamatory claims—especially sexual defamation—are now explicit grounds for liability. Victims can seek rapid injunctions when waiting would cause harm that is hard to repair. Service providers who are notified of infringing output and fail to act promptly can be held liable. Users who deliberately prompt systems to generate harmful content can be held liable too. That last point matters. The court is not treating the model as a mysterious black box that swallows responsibility. Both the person who types the prompt and the company that serves the model sit inside the accountability chain. The opinion also reaches beyond deepfakes. Algorithmic price discrimination—“killing the familiar,” the practice of showing different prices to different customers for the same good without justification—is called out. So are AI hallucinations when they produce false information that damages rights. The court left some questions open on purpose, saying consensus has not yet formed and experience must accumulate before the next layer of rules is written. This is not China’s first move. Labeling rules for AI-generated content already took effect in September 2025. Earlier regulations targeted deepfake livestreams of public figures. What is new is a national judicial map that lower courts can actually use when a neighbor, a celebrity, or a small business owner walks in with a video that looks and sounds exactly like them saying something they never said. The technology that made the problem cheap is the same technology that made the problem urgent. A few years ago, high-quality face and voice cloning required specialist labs. Now a phone and a handful of public clips can produce a replica good enough to fool a family member on a video call. That compression of capability is why the court moved from general principles to specific red lines. The deeper story is not only legal. It is about who owns the surface of a human being once that surface can be photocopied at industrial scale. A face used to be expensive to counterfeit. A voice used to be expensive to steal. Both are now cheap. The Supreme People’s Court just announced that cheap does not mean free. Whether other jurisdictions follow the same bright-line approach—or keep treating deepfakes as a patchwork of existing privacy, defamation, and publicity laws—will shape the next decade of identity. For now, in China, the replica is no longer an unregulated gray zone. It is evidence. And the person whose face or voice was taken has a court they can walk into.

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" - The irony here: Sagan had a very high security clearance. He was badged. Project A119 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projec…

Some further thoughts on the new round of peace negotiations with Putin over Ukraine. Moscow is offering the United States not "peace in exchange for business," but rather "business in exchange for war." The Kremlin is offering Washington major Russian-American deals, access to energy resources, the Arctic, critical minerals, infrastructure and investment projects. The main objective is to buy American consent to the normalization of the war Russia is waging against Ukraine. Kirill Dmitriev is effectively selling Washington precisely this model of future relations. The head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund and Putin’s special envoy has been systematically working through the channels of Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, whose value lies exactly in their direct access to Trump’s inner circle. Following the meeting with Putin on September 5, the Kremlin once again separately reported that major Russian-American projects had been discussed in detail. At the same time, Moscow is offering an entire package of economic "normalization." It includes Arctic oil and gas, LNG, heavy oil, lithium, copper, nickel, platinum, rare earth metals, nuclear energy, infrastructure and aviation. Long-term purchases of American aircraft have been discussed, which would require the lifting of aviation sanctions, as well as compensation for American companies for losses incurred after leaving Russia. Energy and the Arctic are the central components of the proposal because this is where Russian and American interests could potentially be linked for decades. Russia needs technology, capital and sanctions relief to develop difficult oil and gas fields and LNG projects. American companies are being offered access to resources. For the Kremlin, the main benefit would come when American companies invest billions of their own dollars in these projects. After that, imposing new sanctions on Russia would also mean losses for American businesses. Sakhalin-1 demonstrates how Moscow is trying to create such mutual interests in practice. On August 15, 2025, the day of the Trump-Putin summit in Anchorage, Putin signed Decree No. 559, which opened a legal pathway for the return of foreign investors. For Exxon, this concerns its former 30% stake and approximately $4.6 billion written off after the company left Russia. Exxon has publicly denied plans to return, but talks continued: Reuters reported on a non-binding framework agreement between Exxon and Rosneft, while the Wall Street Journal reported contacts between Neil Chapman and Igor Sechin, and Darren Woods discussed the issue with Trump. Putin has meanwhile extended the deadline for transactions involving the stake until January 1, 2027. Moscow is effectively offering Exxon the opportunity to recover billions in lost value in exchange for restoring an economic relationship with Russia. Gentry Beach and Novatek show that such a model can be put into practice. According to The New York Times, the Dallas-based investor, who has ties to the Trump family, signed an LNG agreement with Novatek after the Anchorage summit. Beach himself said that the project had been discussed “at the highest levels” in Moscow and Washington. This is already a concrete American private-sector interest for which improved relations with Russia have financial value. Moscow is using critical minerals to exploit American dependence on China. Putin has offered American companies access to Russian deposits of lithium, nickel, platinum and rare earth metals. But in February 2025, he explicitly included the so-called “new territories” - the Ukrainian territories occupied by Russia - in the proposal. This makes the Russian offer particularly revealing: American businesses are effectively being offered an economic interest in resources located in territories seized by Russia as a result of the war. The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant illustrates even more clearly how business can become an instrument for normalizing the consequences of the war. Bloomberg reported on options involving American participation in or control over the plant, with the electricity it generates potentially being divided between the parties. In other words, a Ukrainian facility seized by Russia is no longer being discussed solely as an issue of occupation, but also as the subject of a potential economic agreement. Even the proposals concerning aluminum follow the same model - access to the Russian market in exchange for the lifting of restrictions. In February 2025, Putin proposed returning approximately 2 million tonnes of Russian aluminum per year to the US market. Separately, he proposed an approximately $15 billion project in Russia’s Krasnoyarsk Krai involving a hydroelectric power plant and new aluminum production. There are also more extravagant proposals designed to sell Trump the image of a grand historic deal. In October 2025, Dmitriev proposed a “Putin-Trump tunnel” beneath the Bering Strait: 112 km long, costing approximately $8 billion and taking up to eight years to build, potentially with the involvement of Elon Musk’s Boring Company. The economic feasibility of such an estimate is questionable. But the political product is obvious: a major project, Trump’s name and a symbol of a new US-Russia partnership. The same function is served by the $14 trillion figure Dmitriev uses to describe the potential of economic cooperation. It emerged after Zelenskyy said on February 6, 2026, that Ukrainian intelligence had obtained documents concerning a so-called “Dmitriev package” worth approximately $12 trillion. Following The Economist’s publication, Dmitriev called the $12 trillion figure “fake news,” but immediately raised the estimate to more than $14 trillion and claimed that American businesses had already lost more than $300 billion because of sanctions. There is no documentary evidence confirming the realism of this figure. For now, it is a populist argument aimed at an American audience: confrontation with Russia costs you money, while cooperation could bring in far more. And American capital is already responding to the opportunities, although so far largely outside Russia itself. On January 29, 2026, Lukoil announced a deal with Carlyle to sell LUKOIL International GmbH, which holds international assets with a book value of approximately $22 billion. The deal is subject to OFAC approval. Reuters also reported competing bids from Chevron and Quantum Capital, as well as interest from Exxon and ADNOC. In other words, when Russian assets become available and the Treasury allows a transaction to proceed, major American businesses immediately show interest. On the other hand, the Carlyle example currently demonstrates the willingness of American capital to buy Russian assets, rather than the willingness to invest in Russia. Lukoil is selling its foreign assets precisely because of sanctions pressure. This is effectively a consequence of pressure on Russia, rather than evidence of successful normalization. For the Kremlin, the next step is much more important: to ensure that American money flows not into the purchase of assets from Russia, but into new projects inside Russia itself. OFAC demonstrated another vulnerability in the sanctions system in 2026: American interests can outweigh the desire to maintain pressure on Russia. In March, General Licenses 133 and 134 were issued, followed later by 134B and 134C, allowing transactions involving certain shipments of Russian oil, including cargoes belonging to Rosneft, Lukoil and sanctioned tankers. The reason was the US-Israeli war against Iran, problems surrounding the Strait of Hormuz and the threat of an oil shortage. Dmitriev did not cause this. But Moscow saw the lesson clearly: if Russian oil is needed by the US to solve another problem, sanctions can become secondary. The main obstacle to the Russian model currently lies in Congress. On August 7, the Senate voted 86-11 in favor of the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, which provides for increased pressure on Russia’s energy sector, financial system, shadow fleet and major buyers of Russian energy. A companion bill introduced by McCaul and Hoyer has already been submitted to the House of Representatives. The 86-11 vote shows that, outside the president’s inner circle, the idea of a rapid return to business as usual with Russia does not yet have political consensus. Moscow is therefore not currently working with the entire American system, but with its most receptive elements. Opposing this are a significant part of Congress and the security establishment. The Treasury Department is taking a more situational approach: sanctions can be eased when broader American interests require it. Why does Moscow need economic cooperation with the US if China and Chinese capital are available next door? China already buys Russian resources, but it cannot lift American sanctions, return Russia to the dollar-based financial system, or weaken the transatlantic sanctions regime. American investment offers the Kremlin much more: capital and technology, political legitimacy, less dependence on China, and potentially an American lobbying constituency interested in maintaining stable relations with Russia. Moscow already has some initial results, but they remain contradictory. There is Beach-Novatek, the negotiations surrounding Sakhalin-1, Carlyle and Lukoil’s international assets, interest from Chevron and Quantum, and a series of OFAC exemptions. But Carlyle is benefiting from a sanctions-driven asset sale, Exxon is seeking to recover its own losses, and OFAC eased restrictions because of an energy crisis. This is still not the systemic normalization that the Kremlin wants. Moscow’s real success will begin when American businesses start investing new money directly into Russia and become interested in protecting those investments from future sanctions. An even more significant threshold will be reached if American capital becomes willing to enter projects connected to occupied Ukrainian territories and assets seized during the war. The struggle is therefore no longer about whether individual US-Russia deals are possible - they are. The question is whether the Kremlin can turn these deals into a system in which American domestic interests emerge that would favor accepting Russia’s aggressive policy on the European continent.

Hi all! If anything happens to my account @DrPippam (like it stops working). I’ve created @DrPippaMalmgren here on X. I’m having trouble with regard to my control over the password/access. I’ll keep posting here for now. But if I have to, I’ll move over to @DrPippaMalmgren

Steve Kerr says Roger Federer taught his Warriors team the secret to sustained success wasn’t outworking everyone, it was building a life around your craft you never want to escape from “I’ll tell you a great story about Roger Federer. We were playing in China with the Warriors in 2017. Roger was in Shanghai for the Masters tournament, so we invited him to come speak to the team.” “Draymond Green asked him, ‘How do you sustain success? How have you managed to win majors 20 years after you first won one?’ Everyone was expecting him to say, ‘I work harder than everybody,’ the will, all the clichés.” “Roger Federer says, ‘I get up every morning and I make breakfast for my kids. Then I take them to school and drop them off. Then I go practice tennis for about two hours, and I’ve figured out a really good routine where I don’t destroy my body, but I can get all the work in I need.” “‘Then I go have lunch with my wife. In the evening, we cook dinner together. The kids are all home from school. We ask them about school. There’s so much joy in the house. We put them to bed, and then I put my head on the pillow and go, “Man, that was just a great day.” And I’ve been doing that for 20 years.’” “And it was like, yes. That’s it. That’s the formula. That’s what leads to sustained success. He loves tennis. He loves his family. He loves life. It’s not outworking everybody and banging your head against the wall, ‘I’m going to be better than everybody.’ It’s allowing your natural talent to shine through with a work ethic, with a great family life, with perspective, with peace, with mindfulness.” “It’s perspective. It’s joy. It’s passion. It’s mindfulness. It’s an awareness that we are truly lucky. To get the most out of ourselves, it’s our daily rituals and experiences and love and joy.”

Dr. Subodh Kumar Singh’s dedication to pediatric cleft care stems from a childhood shaped by severe hardship. Born into a modest household in Varanasi, India, he was just 13 years old when his father, a clerk, passed away unexpectedly. Left in deep financial crisis, Subodh and his brothers took on odd jobs, selling homemade soaps, candles, and goggles on street corners, to help support the family while he completed his schooling. Driven by his family’s sacrifice and a resolve to uplift others in need, he worked tirelessly to clear his medical entrance exams, ultimately completing his medical degree and specializing in plastic surgery at Banaras Hindu University. In 2001, Dr. Singh established the G.S. Memorial Hospital in Varanasi in honor of his late father, aiming to make quality reconstructive surgery accessible to the poor. Recognizing that children born with cleft lips and palates in rural India face severe social stigma, malnutrition, speech difficulties, and abandonment, he partnered with the global non-profit Smile Train in 2004 to provide completely free corrective operations. His team also built outreach networks and nutritional support programs to track down and nurture malnourished infants in remote regions who were otherwise deemed unfit for surgery. Seeing his younger, vulnerable self in every impoverished child, Dr. Singh turned his medical practice into a life-long mission of service. Over the decades, Dr. Singh and his team have performed tens of thousands of free cleft surgeries, surpassing 40,000 procedures, along with thousands of free reconstructive operations for burn victims. His work gained global recognition through the 2008 Oscar-winning documentary Smile Pinki, which chronicled the life-changing surgery of one of his young patients. Today, his hospital serves as an international training center where surgeons from around the world learn his techniques, ensuring that his vision of healing and restoring dignity to underprivileged children continues to expand globally. When Dr. Singh first launched his dedicated cleft initiative, he quickly realized that offering free surgeries wasn't enough, many of the poorest rural families could not afford the few rupees required for bus fare to reach his clinic in Varanasi. To overcome this, he established a network of grassroots outreach workers and former patients to travel into remote villages, personally track down affected infants, and provide their families with transportation money, temporary lodging, and warm meals. Furthermore, because severe cleft palates often leave infants severely malnourished and unable to nurse, Dr. Singh created a targeted nutritional intervention program, supplying specialized feeding bottles and high-protein supplements to build up the infants' weight until they were healthy enough to safely endure anesthesia and surgery. #drthehistories

THE COMPANY THAT BUILT THE WORLD'S FIRST SUPERCONDUCTING QUBIT JUST QUIT QUANTUM COMPUTING. NEC in 1999, created the first superconducting qubit ever realized, the breakthrough IBM and Google's entire modality descends from. NEC, this week per Nikkei, machine development stopped, effort scrapped. The stated reason was due to the timeline to return on investment is too long. The researchers, including the research lead, are moving to Fujitsu, which is still building, 256 qubits today, 1,000 this year, 10,000 by 2030. NEC didn't conclude quantum fails. Its own pioneers walked across the street to a rival's quantum program. The talent still believes but their balance sheet doesn't have the capabilities anymore. Quantum's shakeout has started. $INFQ $IONQ $QBTS ethereum:0x4a220e6096b25eadb88358cb44068a3248254675

The Real McCoy, How The Phrase Started Steam locomotives in the 1870s were magnificent, loud, and almost comically needy. They could haul a nation’s freight. They could not, for very long, haul themselves. Every few miles the train had to stop so a man with an oilcan could crawl among axles and bearings and feed the machine by hand. Leave it hungry and friction cooked the metal. Feed it late and the whole schedule collapsed. American railroads were, in a very literal sense, running on interruptions. The man who noticed this most clearly was not sitting in a drafting office. He was shoveling coal. Elijah McCoy was born May 2, 1844, in Colchester, Ontario, the son of George and Mildred McCoy, who had escaped enslavement in Kentucky and reached Canada on the Underground Railroad. He grew up around machines the way some children grow up around books: taking them apart, putting them back, listening for the click that meant a thing had been understood. At fifteen his parents sent him across the Atlantic to Edinburgh, where he apprenticed in mechanical engineering and came home with credentials that should have opened every shop floor in the industrial North. They didn’t. An engineer with Scottish training was still, in the eyes of American railroads, a man they would rather put in the boiler room. Michigan Central hired him as a fireman and oiler: shovel coal, oil the journals, keep the beast from eating itself. The problem was simple enough to state and hard enough to solve that entire timetables bent around it. Steam engines needed constant lubrication. Stopping to provide it wasted hours, burned money, and wore the iron anyway. McCoy designed a small, stubborn answer: a lubricating cup that used the engine’s own steam pressure to drip oil onto moving parts while the train kept moving. No halt. No oilcan pilgrimage. Just a continuous, measured feed of the one thing that kept steel from grinding steel to powder. On July 23, 1872, the United States Patent Office issued him Patent No. 129,843 — Improvement in Lubricators for Steam-Engines. The device was almost insultingly elegant. That was its danger and its fortune. Competitors could copy the idea. They could not, at first, copy the reliability. Cheap cups leaked, starved a bearing, or dumped oil like a drunk. Trains that ran on knockoffs broke. Trains that ran on McCoy’s cup kept going. So the men who actually had to live with the machinery would be blamed when an axle seized fifty miles from a roundhouse — stopped asking for “a lubricator.” They asked for his. The genuine article. The one that worked when the cheap ones failed. Railroad lore says they asked for the real McCoy. Whether that rail-yard demand is the true birthplace of the phrase is a fight etymologists still enjoy. A Scottish whisky slogan, “the real McKay,” was already in print before McCoy’s patent. McCoy’s lubricator spread from Michigan Central to railroads across the continent, then onto steamships, factory engines, drills, and mines. By the turn of the century, versions of the automatic oiler were ordinary industrial furniture. The man who had been barred from the title of engineer had quietly rewritten the tempo of the industrial age. Over a lifetime McCoy collected some fifty-seven patents, most of them refinements on the same obsession: how to keep metal moving without destroying itself. In 1916, in his seventies, he patented a graphite lubricator for the hotter superheater locomotives. He also turned his attention to the domestic world his labor had helped accelerate: a folding ironing board, a lawn-sprinkler design, even an improved rubber heel. In 1920, at seventy-six, he founded the Elijah McCoy Manufacturing Company in Detroit. The locomotives are museum pieces now. The sentence remains. When someone wants the thing itself — not the lookalike, not the almost, not the version that will do until it doesn’t — they still reach for his name. Not the copy. The real McCoy.

95% of the money in a modern economy is electronic, and no parliament ever voted to hand its creation to private firms. Ole Bjerg, Copenhagen Business School, TEDxCopenhagen, 2016. He teaches in a department of management, politics and philosophy, which is why he asks the question economists skip: not how the mechanism works, but who was given the power and by whom. His answer connects money creation to instability, to inequality, and to decisions sitting outside any democratic institution. Watch the stretch where he moves from the accounting to the constitutional question, then names the alternative he backs. A dark stage, a suit, a single title card. Nobody privatised it in public. It just ended up private.

Small portable nuclear reactors are going to be mass-produced as part of the overall effort to find alternatives to fossil fuel generators to power AI data centers, etc. Unfortunately, the Aussie-designed Unity reactor uses nuclear fission rather than fusion, which would represent a genuine breakthrough in energy generation. Nuclear fusion has been developed and used in highly classified space programs, nuclear submarines, etc., but even after decades and US Navy patents (Salvatore Pais) being released for portable nuclear fusion reactors, the general public is only allowed to get its hands on portable fission reactors. Trump Praises Aussie Engineer Behind Nuclear Reactor Small Enough to Fit on a Truck theepochtimes.com/world/trum…

BREAKING: A Starcloud competitor founded by Robinhood co-founder is dramatically scaling its push to build AI data centers in space. Cowboy Space has leased a 291,000-square-foot facility near Seattle to manufacture rockets and orbital data-center hardware - the largest industrial lease signed in the Puget Sound region so far this year. The company, which raised a $275 million Series B in May and is working with Nvidia, plans to begin launching its own heavy-lift rockets as early as 2028. Its unusual architecture would turn the rocket’s upper stage itself into a solar-powered orbital data center after reaching space. The facility is expected to support roughly 300 jobs as Cowboy moves to compete with Starcloud and SpaceX in the emerging race to put large-scale AI compute into orbit.

Neoliberalism does not mean the reduction of the state. Instead, the state is reorganized by controlling elites to protect monopoly power and capital accumulation, often producing greater inequality and insecurity. As economist Luigi Zingales says "the greatest threat to free markets is not the working class or government regulation, but powerful business incumbents who use political influence to suppress competition." Video credit: @INETeconomics @J_K_Galbraith

BREAKING: @DIU_x and Honeywell have successfully flown an aircraft for more than four hours from Seattle to Alaska over the Pacific without GPS, using quantum magnetic navigation. A major step toward GPS-independent navigation in jammed environments, with plans to demonstrate the technology on a U.S. military C-17 Globemaster III later this year.