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Wednesday, May 28, 2025 - 00:54 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

Hail, Men Of Culture, Hail!

The Greatest Game has seen a temporary ceasefire with America kicking the Chinese can for another 90 days about May 12th, and putting the European Union on an early-July clock. Notably, this was declared after the E.U. specifically requested "respect" after the U.S. had dangled 50% tariffs beginning June, in keeping with the "Strength, Respect, Strategy" theme identified previously. Concurrently, after the local elections concluded without any real surprises, our Prime Minister has observed "major world powers reassessing strategies", and emphasized that "Singapore... cannot afford to be passive" at his swearing-in, again basically matching the analysis offered here at the start of May.

Further dissection of said overarching strategy will have to wait a little longer, though, pending some recaps:


Strength, Again

The previous post had covered the historic election of the Lion of America, Pope Leo XIV, and it can hardly be missed that the original Leo was the first of just three popes (from a total of 267 thus far) to be acclaimed Great; given this, one can hardly avoid recognizing the connotation of Making (The Papacy) Great Again, despite misleading media efforts to paint the staunchly-conservative pontiff as "anti-right".

Probably more strikingly, the new Pope Leo's maiden blessing would refer to the "weak (but always courageous) voice of Pope Francis" in praising his predecessor, which on second thought sounded somewhat odd - was the focus on "weak" truly necessary here, even considering the Church's sometime appreciation for the meek? This would have to be considered a bit of a diss from just about any other sovereign leader, and it may be telling that the Vatican would soon disavow widespread (fake) social media posts claiming that the new Pope had said that "A leader who mocks the weak... is not sent by God".

And, speaking of (deep-)fakes...


You Read It Here First


None of this is real


The late-April projection on Hollywood under threat had seen GEOTUS mull a 100% tariff on foreign films barely a week later, which received its fair share of industry support. Not that this is likely to stop the A.I. tide, however, with Google answering China's Kling with their Veo 3 video generation service - plus accents. Frankly, whoever wins, human actors are probably gonna lose, what with million-dollar advertisement shorts looking well within their capabilities already. Sure, A.I. videos still have their flaws - note the unconvincing waving (0:08), foreground/background confusion (0:58), skipping footsteps (1:26) and inconsistent character appearances (2:14) etc. in the NK Fellowship MV, for example - but many of these can conceivably be mitigated via clever framing and post-editing.

Facial deepfakes have for one gotten so convincing that the U.S. House of Representatives recently passed a bipartisan bill targeting them, and one imagines mainstream virtual actors not being all that far away, what with deceased former stars routinely being resurrected. Related to this, the U.S. has also uncovered illegal smuggling of NVIDIA chips to China back about late February in conjunction with the local police, about a month after it was predicted here (again), but it's not as if deductive logic and talking sense is appreciated nowadays...



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Next: Once Supreme


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