Stella Cotsakis

Into Left-Wing/ Progressive Politics , Oh and I make paintings :) From Philadelphia, Pa. Let's go Phillies

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

This is a pretty powerful gesture by Trump: it's the very first time in the entire US-China relationship that a president of either country has personally welcomed his counterpart at the airport.

In fact it's the first time that Trump greets another leader at the airport in Washington, period.

He did greet Putin at the airport last year, the only other time he's done that, but that was in Anchorage, not Washington.

Anyhow, the pattern remains that Trump has more respect for sovereign countries, who can say no to him, than for vassals. Which I wish European leaders would eventually learn, but I'm not holding my breath...

[Stella Cotsakis @foggy520]

Correction on previous work

[Afshin Rattansi @afshinrattansi]

Russian🇷🇺 Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov:

‘The West likes to interpret the United Nations Charter in a selective way, and they like to pick out specific articles and provisions that meet its political goals and plans.

If they wanted to sever Kosovo from Serbia, they did that and stated that this was the right of peoples to self-determination.

When, several years later, a referendum was organised in Crimea and in Kosovo there was no referendum, they stated that in Crimea people had no right to realise their right to self-determination and that the territorial integrity of Ukraine was violated.

There are many examples similar to that.’

[Stella Cotsakis @foggy520]

Oils on canvas, 120cm by 150cm, 16th of September 2026

[Working Class History @wrkclasshistory]

#OtD 16 Sep 1973 Chilean communist folk singer and musician Victor Jara was murdered by Pinochet's troops following his US-backed coup a few days before. He was brutally tortured and shot over 40 times in the Chile Stadium https://t.co/OvQtSfOedQ

[Rina Lu🇷🇺 @rinalu_]

Putin has repeatedly said that Russia learned an important lesson from Yugoslavia: cooperating with the West did not mean Russia’s interests would be respected.

Declassified documents make the before-and-after fascinating.

June 15, 1998. Clinton calls Yeltsin about Yugoslavia. Yeltsin promises to pressure Milošević and push him toward negotiations.

But he also gives Clinton an explicit warning: if NATO attacks Yugoslavia without UN Security Council authorization, it will be a serious blow to Russia-NATO cooperation.

Then the conversation turns to money.

Russia desperately needs financial support. Clinton assures Yeltsin that he backs additional IMF and World Bank funding, praises Russia’s new reformist government and tells him it is exciting investors.

Nine months later, NATO bombs Yugoslavia without Security Council authorization.

Yeltsin condemns it. Primakov, already flying to Washington, turns his plane around over the Atlantic.

Then comes the rest of 1999.

Islamist militants invade Dagestan. Russia is hit by devastating terrorist attacks. The Second Chechen War begins.

Putin has his own interpretation of what Russia learned from that sequence.

The declassified documents show the warning that came before Belgrade.

What followed afterwards raises a much darker question.

Coincidence?

[𝘊𝘰𝘳𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘦 @OopsGuess]

Washington is trying to extend its terrestrial hegemony into orbit.

Beijing’s answer is simple:

Space is not America’s private hunting ground.

You do not get to lose your monopoly on Earth and then declare the heavens another battlefield simply because military dominance is the only language you still trust.

China has no interest in turning outer space into another war zone.

And the things you cannot force into submission on Earth will not suddenly become yours in orbit.

Space belongs to humanity, not to the Pentagon.

The American empire does not become infinite just because it looks upward.

[In Defense of Communism © @id_communism]

📌 "It is difficult for me to imagine what "personal liberty" is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment. Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible"

- Joseph Stalin, Interview to Roy Howard, 1 March 1936

[Avgerinos Thanassis @AvgerinosMoscow]

Δεν θα ξεχάσω τον γέροντα στο Άγιο Όρος που μου έλεγε τις προάλλες: «Δεν ήξερες ότι πρέπει να φεύγεις τρέχοντας όταν βλέπεις "γκαλερί" από εικόνες αραδιασμένες σε γραφείο λαϊκού; Άλλος είναι ο (επιχειρηματικός) λόγος, που μας τις προβάλλει κι όχι η πίστη του. Οι γονείς σου πόσες εικόνες χρειάστηκαν στο εικονοστάσι για να σας μεγαλώσουν; Η επίδειξη είναι έπαρση, θράσος και αλαζονεία, ενίοτε και βλασφημία, δεν κάνουμε τις εικόνες ούτε κόσμημα, ούτε μπιμπελό. Μακριά!». Ακόμη τρέχω...

[OTD: Russian Revolution 1917 @onthisday1917]

#OTD The Petrograd Soviet votes for the transfer of power to the working class by an overwhelming majority. The Mensheviks and SRs demand a second vote, pressuring delegates to overturn the decision. It is ratified again: by 279 votes to 115 with 51 abstentions.

[ᶜᵒᵐᵐᵉᶰᵗᵃʳʸ Julian Paul Assange ™️ @QJulianPaul]

🚨"The goal is to extract money from the US and Europe through Ukraine and return it to the hands of a transnational elite (Globalist Agenda 2030)"

"The goal is not to win any war, but to maintain permanent conflicts that feed that power circuit"

[Stelios nikitopoulos @stenikito]

"Είμαι τραγούδι, είμαι λαός...". Σαν σήμερα, το 2001, πέρασε στην αιωνιότητα ο Στέλιος Καζαντζίδης. Η κηδεία και η ταφή του έγιναν στην Ελευσίνα.

[Working Class History @wrkclasshistory]

#OtD 13 Sep 1879 Annie Kenney, cotton mill worker and pioneering direct action suffragette, was born. She and her friend and possible lover Christabel Pankhurst sparked the adoption of militant tactics across the movement https://t.co/MCaYShr8h6

[Afshin Rattansi @afshinrattansi]

🇷🇺🇺🇦 Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: Trump has been too WEAK to tell the truth about the Ukraine proxy war

‘Trump came in saying he would end the war in 24 hours. I supported him in saying that because the war could end in 24 hours.

We need a President of the United States with the ability, the intelligence, the gumption, the guts to stand up and say publicly NATO will not enlarge to Ukraine. This was a wrong idea, a bad decision and a provocation, and we’re ending it.

Trump probably has heard this. It’s been murmured here and there within some of his team, but they don’t say it publicly.

And what instead happens is that the military-industrial complex of the United States and the endless warmongers of UK, which is just a warmongering shell of a former empire, but Starmer, joins in chorus, saying, we have to continue the war. Or we make demands at this moment for an unconditional ceasefire without taking into account the root causes of the war.

And Trump has been too weak or lacking understanding or without the political guts. I don’t know what it is, but he’s been too weak to tell the basic truth, which could have ended the war in 24 hours.

And maybe this meeting is happening because maybe Witkoff told the truth to Putin, ‘yeah, we agree with you. NATO can’t enlarge’, well have Trump say it. It’ll be a completely different world if the President actually acknowledges something truthful about this situation.’

-Prof. Jeffrey Sachs on Going Underground

[CHINA MFA Spokesperson 中国外交部发言人 @MFA_China]

MFA Spokesperson’s response to claims that “Chinese AI advantage would pose U.S. national security risks”:

AI is a consequential technology for the future of humanity. The world needs open & inclusive AI for good and for all. Fear-mongering, confrontation and vicious competition would hamper efforts toward sound global AI governance.

[Rina Lu🇷🇺 @rinalu_]

Putin made Russia great again

[Russia X 🇷🇺 @Rusia_HD]

🚨 RUSSIA TEARS UP THE DEAL!⚡

🇷🇺 Russia: "Russia has completely severed its natural gas pipeline supply to Western Europe, effective immediately."

🇪🇺 EU Chief: "You cannot just freeze half a continent! This is brutal, ruthless blackmail!"

🇷🇺 Putin: "You weaponized your sanctions against us. Why should we keep warm the hands that try to strangle us?" 🔥🔥

🇪🇺 EU Chief: "This is an act of economic warfare! You will suffer total global isolation for this!"

🇷🇺 Putin: "Isolation is a myth of the West. Cold winters, however, are very real."

[Marxist-Leninist Reading Hub @MLReadingHub]

"A man who has no free time to dispose of, whose whole lifetime apart from the mere physical interruptions by sleep, meals, and so forth, is absorbed by his labor for the capitalist, is less than a beast of burden. He is a mere machine for producing Foreign Wealth..." Karl Marx

[Marcello Musto @MarMusto]

Today is the 159th anniversary of Marx's Capital.
See my article "Why Karl Marx Kept Reworking Capital, Volume I" in @jacobin for the history of its writing 👇
https://t.co/8tRmM9rneN

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

By now, it's amply clear that the big bosses of US frontier AI labs are really, really scared of China.

And, fascinatingly, part of the answer why might be a tiny place in Inner Mongolia that you've probably never heard of: Ulanqab prefecture.

Heard of it? Didn't think so.

Even myself, who's traveled to Inner Mongolia twice, had never heard of it before researching this story.

This is because, at first glance, this place is pretty unremarkable. Check its Wikipedia page (https://t.co/QviNOPyRbP) and you’ll see the only thing it’s famous for is being the birthplace of He Pingping, who briefly held the Guinness record for world’s shortest man.

That’s it, that’s the list!

Otherwise, it's just a sparsely populated - 1.5 million people, minuscule by Chinese standards - stretch of windswept grassland on the Mongolian plateau.

Except there is one number that tells you there is more to this place that meets the eye: this tiny prefecture consumes nearly 1% of all of China's electricity - and that number is growing by double digit numbers every year.

And yes, I did write **consume**, not produce.

In fact, when you divide Ulanqab's electricity consumption by the number of households living there, each household in this remote corner of Inner Mongolia "consumes" about 105,000 kWh in electricity, roughly 10 times the U.S. average. Insane electricity consumption numbers.

So what are the Ulanqabese doing? Are they all running 10 American households' worth of appliances?

Here is another number that might clue you in on the answer: over the past few years, this unremarkable prefecture has quietly signed over half a trillion yuan (and, yes, that’s trillion, with a "T") worth of investment deals from all the major Chinese tech giants.

What is going on, you'll have guessed by now, is the most ambitious data center buildup anywhere on earth - and it's really surprising this hasn't been talked about more because the scale is beyond anything else, and by an immense margin.

Take Elon Musk's so-called "Colossus" datacenter in Memphis, Tennessee which he pitches as "the world’s largest AI supercomputer."

According to their own numbers (https://t.co/DZvBvJioua), Colossus has 200,000 chips, which, let's be clear, is already super impressive.

In datacenter lingo, this converts to roughly 5000-6000 "racks": you know, the fridge-sized cabinets full of blinking lights you see in every movie scene set in a server room.

How many racks are they building in Ulanqab? Over 5 million.

Yes, about one thousand times the scale of "Colossus" 🤯

I tripled-checked the number: it is indeed the official number published by authoritative sources such as "Science and Technology Daily", the official newspaper of China's Ministry of Science and Technology (https://t.co/PsbGlLbv5A).

This is an absurdly large amount of compute.

What we see appearing in this Inner Mongolian steppe may be the closest thing to a world brain humanity has ever built - a place where a large share of the world's thinking will physically happen.

And - as we'll see - what makes this story so fascinating is not just the scale, but why it's getting built in this particular patch of Inner Mongolian grassland which combines a number of characteristics unlike anywhere else.

If you believe, as I do - and as both China and the US obviously do as well - that AI will be the defining technology of the 21st century, this makes Ulanqab one of the single most relevant geopolitical places in the world right now.

The full story - the Chinese government plan Ulanqab is part of, energy prices, chips and the strategic questions this raises - is here: https://t.co/iqvSvcaOGc