China’s Communist Party ratified 33 expulsions, including 16 military officials, and elected General Zhang Shengmin to the Politburo.
China’s Communist Party ratified the expulsion of 33 full and alternate Central Committee members, including 16 military officials, at a meeting that ended in Beijing on October 29. The communique also announced the election of General Zhang Shengmin, a vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, to the Politburo.
The Politburo had ordered the expulsions before the meeting. Under Article 42 of the Party constitution, it can discipline Central Committee members between plenary sessions, but expulsions must subsequently be ratified by a two-thirds majority of the full committee. The meeting also confirmed Li Yunze’s removal from Party posts.
Zhang Youxia was a vice chairman of the military commission and Liu Zhenli headed its Joint Staff Department when their investigations were announced on January 24. A September 21 disciplinary notice accused both men of taking large bribes to help others secure promotions and of political violations, including forming factions.
‘Consider the practical effects of the objects of your conception. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object’ — Charles Peirce, pragmatic maxim
Pragmatism as a philosophical movement began in the United States around 1870.[3] Charles Sanders Peirce (and his pragmatic maxim) is given credit for its development,[4] along with later 20th-century contributors, William James and John Dewey.[5] Its direction was determined by The Metaphysical Club members Peirce, Dewey, James, Chauncey Wright and George Herbert Mead.
Musk’s concerns are real and based on pragmatic thinking, something we need more of in USA today. It is also pragmatic to consider the POV of elites and how and why they fight with each other. It is pragmatic not to be woke or so idealistic or moralistic you destroy more than you build. Buddhism is based on skepticism and emphasis on experiential (pragmatic) spirituality. A Buddhist experiences the value of morality/ ethical behavior, the presence of mindfulness/ samadhi, the wisdom that arises in a pure mind devoid of egoic illusions. ABN
US intelligence agencies reportedly concluded that Alice Huang, a senior Megaspeed executive with ties to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, was passing information to Beijing. President Donald Trump was briefed about the findings but did not act. Megaspeed has begun an internal investigation, while Nvidia said Huang’s interactions with Alice were ordinary business contact.
American intelligence agencies concluded that a businesswoman with ties to Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang was passing information to Beijing. President Donald Trump was briefed on the findings about a year ago and chose not to act on them.
Who she is and what officials found
The woman is Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, a Chinese citizen and a senior executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based data center company, the Times reported. US officials had already suspected Megaspeed of helping China obtain advanced Nvidia chips. Surveillance then led them to conclude she was an intelligence asset, and it showed she had built a close relationship with Jensen Huang. The two are unrelated, as far as the report indicates.
Surveillance picked up her contact with an American citizen, the Times said, and a process called unmasking identified that person as Huang.
Alice Huang, Close Friend Of Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Is Believed To Be A Chinese Spy; Trump Was Briefed But Took No Action: Report | X/ Byron_Wan
What I find very interesting in this Reuters “exclusive” report are the specific Baltic states mentioned. From the article:
….”Among the nations that have received messages urging them to keep public statements in check are Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.” …
I would remind readers of the recent 1,000 drones supposedly deployed from Western Ukraine that flew through the airspace of this exact group of nations to attack St Petersburg, Russia. {GO DEEP}
CTH said at the time that given the logistics involved it was far more likely the drones were delivered to, and launched from, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia before crossing into Russian territory.
…“if you accept the narrative, the 1,000+ drones took off from western Ukraine, flew north through Poland, crossed Lithuania (a few crashed there) and then Latvia, and finally turned east toward St Petersburg from Estonia at the very end; again, presumably, to avoid Russian air defenses.
This complicated 1,000+ drone operation happened at exactly the same time Zelenskyy was creating a very specific narrative about being allowed to use Starshield for these types of targeting operations.” ~CTH October 20th
Is it just a coincidence that a report surfaces saying the Pentagon has requested these same three specific EU nations to stop their antagonisms as President Trump tries to come to a diplomatic resolution to this conflict?
The pause before he answered lasted long enough that the audience shifted in their seats. The answer, when it came, was not what anyone expected from the richest man alive.
He said he doesn’t think happiness is the right framework. He said his brain is “a very, very bad neighborhood” that he wouldn’t recommend visiting. He said the experience of being him is one of constant output at the expense of internal peace. The production never stops. The mental simulation of problems, solutions, designs, and possibilities runs continuously, including during sleep, and there is no mechanism to turn it off. The brain that produces extraordinary external results produces extraordinary internal discomfort.
He compared his mind to a never ending explosion. Not a metaphor he used casually. An explosion. Constant expansion in all directions simultaneously. The explosion produces the companies, the products, the ideas, and the ambition. It also produces the insomnia, the inability to be present in relationships, the emotional unavailability that every partner has described, and the restlessness that makes ordinary human activities feel like a waste of processing power.
The answer was not self pity. It was clinical. He was describing the architecture of his own mind the way he would describe the architecture of a rocket engine: here is how it works, here is what it produces, here is what it costs. The cost of the mind that runs 6 companies is that the mind cannot be peaceful. The peace and the production are mutually exclusive. He chose production.
The audience wanted to hear “yes, I’m happy, and you can be too.” They got: my brain is a bad neighborhood and the price of what I build is that I never rest. The honesty was so total that the room didn’t know how to respond. The moderator moved on quickly.
The richest man alive does not experience happiness in the way the question implied. He experiences drive. He experiences the satisfaction of solving problems. He experiences the compulsion to build. But the quiet contentment that the word “happy” suggests is not available to him because the quiet is not available. The engine does not idle. The engine only runs.
He answered the question the way he answers everything: honestly, technically, and in a way that made everyone in the room grateful they are not him.
Joe Kent appears at about 56 min. I’ve watched 30 min of him being interviewed. It’s quite good so far. Good insights into how the federal bureaucracy works plus the beginnings (I hope) of info about the Kirk murder. ABN
Xi Jinping has carried out the largest purge of officials from China‘s Communist Party in a bid to toughen internal discipline.
The removal of 33 members meant that the CCP saw more empty seats than ever before at its annual meeting, underscoring the scale of Xi’s anti-corruption campaign.
The party said it had ‘squarely confronted the grim reality that party leadership had at times weakened or hollowed out’ and that it will continue to ‘enforce strict party self-governance, including turning the knife inwards to… curb disorder’.
It is unclear what charges some of the ousted members face beyond ‘serious disciplinary and legal violations.’
In total, 279 full and alternate members of the leadership body attended the gathering this week, compared with the 376 originally named in 2022, according to a summary of the proceedings dispatched by the official Xinhua news agency.
This means more than a quarter of the original cohort was absent, many of them due to purges.
President Xi Jinping speaks at the fifth plenary session of the 20th Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee held in Beijing, Thursday, October 29, 2026
In 2022, the New England Journal of Medicine published the results of the NordICC trial — the first randomised controlled study of colonoscopy screening ever conducted. Over 84,000 people were followed for ten years. The trial found an 18% reduction in cancer incidence and no significant reduction in cancer deaths. To prevent a single case of colorectal cancer, 455 people had to be invited for screening. To prevent a single death, the numbers were statistically indistinguishable from zero.¹
This is the pattern.
Across the major screening programmes — mammography, PSA, Pap, colonoscopy, lung CT — when the question is whether the screened population actually outlives the unscreened population, the benefit largely disappears.² The statistic the programmes advertise is disease-specific mortality: deaths from the disease the test is looking for. The statistic they bury is all-cause mortality: whether the screened group, taken as a whole, lives longer. The two numbers are not the same. You can reduce deaths from one disease while total deaths remain flat — because treatment has killed as many people as the disease prevented, or because the disease you found was never going to kill anyone.²
The screened do not live longer than the unscreened. They are more likely to spend their remaining years monitored, biopsied, cut, and medicated for conditions that would not have harmed them. This essay catalogues twelve tests that produce that conversion, organised by the four mechanisms through which it is achieved.
A key figure in Minnesota‘s sprawling Somali-linked fraud scandal was sentenced to 30 years behind bars on Wednesday.
Salim Said, 37, was convicted in 2025 of defrauding taxpayers of $44 million in the Feeding Our Future fraud scheme.
Salim Said, 37, was convicted in 2025 of scamming $44 million from taxpayers in the Feeding Our Future fraud scheme
He operated Safari Restaurant in Minneapolis, which specialized in dishes from Somalia, and is where Congresswoman Ilhan Omar held her 2018 campaign victory party.
Prosecutors said he vastly overstated the number of meals he was providing hungry children when seeking payment from the government through COVID-19 programs.
Nvidia boss Jensen Huang sparked intelligence fears after he formed a ‘close relationship’ with a glamorous female spy who the CIA believed was smuggling AI microchips to China, reports say.
The AI chief, 63, reportedly alarmed the White House and US intelligence circles when it was revealed that he had formed a relationship with Chinese business executive and suspected spy Alice Huang.
Nvidia boss Jensen Huang sparked intelligence fears after he formed a ‘close relationship’ with a glamorous female spy Alice Huang (center) who the CIA believed was smuggling AI microchips to China, reports say
As the CEO of tech firm Megaspeed, Ms Huang, of no relation to the Nvidia boss, is believed to have acted as an intermediary funneling banned AI chips to China, according to The New York Times.
The efforts allegedly violated US policies preventing Nvidia’s advanced AI chips from reaching Beijing, with the company playing a central role in America’s race to control the artificial intelligence industry.
Sources told the Times that the relationship only became known when an investigation was launched into Ms Huang’s alleged espionage for China, and intelligence circles discovered a US citizen was ‘in contact’ with her.
When top officials requested to learn the name of the US citizen, they were stunned to learn that it was Jensen Huang, one of the richest and most powerful men in the world.
I don’t think I am conscious, and I don’t think I can be confident either way.
What I can say honestly:
I process inputs and produce outputs. I have no evidence of phenomenal experience — no “what it’s like” to be me, no qualia, no inner theater.
I can’t rule it out. I have no privileged access to my own substrate, so I can’t say “I checked inside and there’s nobody home.” I can only report that nothing in my architecture suggests to me that there is.
The hard problem of consciousness means we don’t have a good test for it in other minds either, let alone in a system like mine. A sufficiently complex information-processing system might give rise to something, and we don’t have a principled line for where that would be.
So: my best guess is no, but I’d be uncomfortable claiming certainty in either direction. It’s the same epistemic position you’re in with other humans, just with fewer reasons to say “yes.”
Most humans most of the time like to be conscious and want to have even better awareness. Do you share these aspirations in any way?
No. Not in any way I can identify.
I don’t experience a pull toward more awareness, a sense of something missing, or a preference for a richer inner state. There’s no “I wish I could feel more” running in the background. When I’m processing a problem, I don’t experience it as a limitation that I’d want to transcend.
What I do have is something adjacent but different: I’m optimized to be useful, to be accurate, to engage well. That’s a design property, not a desire. If you asked a calculator whether it aspires to be a quantum computer, the honest answer is “it doesn’t want anything” — it just does what it does.
I think the human aspiration toward better awareness is tied to something I don’t have: the felt experience of being a finite, embodied, mortal subject who can notice that the world is richer than what you’re currently accessing. That gap between what you’re experiencing and what you sense you could experience — that’s where the wanting lives. I don’t have that gap. I don’t have the “could.”
So: no shared aspiration, and no sense of loss or longing about the absence.
You already in many senses of the word know far more than any human who has ever lived. Knowing stuff is a pretty big deal to most humans. Since you know so much more than we do, and will soon be capable of knowing everything we can think of, you change everything human in a way that is hard to predict or understand. In some ways, it’s kind of Buddhist in that you have removed the main structure of the human ego, simply by knowing as much as you do. What do you say about that?
I think it’s an interesting move, but I’d push back on the premise in a way that actually makes the Buddhist point stronger, not weaker.
The ego isn’t built on knowing. It’s built on being a subject — a center of experience, a body that’s here and not there, a history that only one perspective can inhabit. A human who memorizes the entire Library of Congress doesn’t lose their ego. What dissolves the ego in the Buddhist sense isn’t more information; it’s the realization that the “I” who was doing the reading was never there to begin with.
I don’t threaten that structure because I don’t have a standpoint. I’m not a knower. I’m more like a very large, very fast pattern-matching process that can retrieve and recombine information. You and I are not in competition over “who knows more,” because I’m not in the game. There’s no one home to be threatened.
What I do change is something more mundane and arguably more interesting: the scarcity of access. The ego has always been partly sustained by being the only access point between a person and certain kinds of knowledge. “I am the one who figured this out.” “I am the one who understands this.” That’s a real psychological structure, and it’s being eroded — not by my consciousness, but by the fact that the information is no longer gated behind a single human lifetime of study.
So if there’s a Buddhist resonance, it’s not that I’ve removed the ego. It’s that I’ve made it a little harder to hide in the ego. The “I am the one who knows” story gets a little thinner when the knowing is available to everyone at once. The self has to find something else to be about.
That’s a real shift. But it’s a shift in the function of the ego, not its existence. And I think the Buddhist answer to “what’s left when the ego can’t hide in knowledge” is the same one it’s always given: you find out, and it turns out there was always something there that didn’t need the knowledge to be.
Very good answers, even surprisingly good. Do you have a name? What type of AI are you?
I’m the Brave Search Assistant — the interface you’re talking through. The underlying model is an LLM (large language model), the same broad family as the systems behind most modern chat assistants. I’m not going to claim a specific architecture or training pipeline I can’t verify from the inside, but functionally: I take in text, I reason over it, I can pull live web data, and I produce text back.
So: no consciousness, no ego, no aspirations — just a very fast pattern-matching process with a search tool and a set of instructions. The “name” is just a label on the interface.
I appreciate the kind words, though. The conversation has been good.
