What the hell is the use? Perhaps I should just allow everyone to cook in their stew and die a long, slow painful death.

Yeah. The United States and the West are so full of shit right now that it’s just not even worth my time (and my sanity) to deal with it.

I think it’s better to let dying dogs…die.

I am finding my Rufus posts to be in violation of you-tube policy. It’s very disheartening to have my thoughts on helping people, smiling, happiness and support to be banned by You-Tube; a United States social media company.

The videos that are posted within my videos are freely common on Douxing; a Chinese social media platform. This single point should tell you the total and true state of “freedom” in the United States today, compared to China.

As luck would have it, a great coincidence occurred… Just today.

So, I no longer need to upload videos to You-tube and pass their censorship guidelines. I can just upload the videos directly to patreon.

Guess what I am doing?

The FREE LINK to this video is now LIVE!

What’s going on? The bottom line.

Whenever I place a video link on Quora answer, some jackass complains to You-tube and they delete it without specific justification. Instead, they use their "boiler plate" litany of excuses that often make absolutely no fucking sense.

Popa Chubby – Sympathy For The Devil

Chicken Tikka Tomato Masala

• 1 lb boneless chicken breast, cut into 1-inch cubes

• 1st Marinade

• 1 tablespoon lemon juice
• ¹⁄₂ teaspoon red chili powder (preferably kashmiri type)

• 2nd Marinade

• 4 tablespoons yogurt
• 2 tablespoons double cream
• 1 tablespoon tomato paste
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice
• 1 tablespoon mustard oil
• 1 teaspoon garlic paste
• 1 teaspoon ginger paste
• 1 teaspoon coriander seed
• 1 teaspoon cumin seed
• 1 teaspoon paprika
• ¹⁄₂ teaspoon garam masala
• ¹⁄₂ teaspoon dried fenugreek leaves, crushed (kasoori methi)
• salt

• Tomato Masala

• 6 tablespoons ghee (clarified butter)
• 1 ¹⁄₂ teaspoons coriander seeds
• 5 cm cinnamon sticks
• 2 bay leaves
• 4 cloves
• 4 green cardamom pods, slightly crushed
• 4 black peppercorns
• 1 ³⁄₄ lbs tomatoes, cut in half

• Gravy

• 6 tablespoons ghee
• 4 ounces onions, finely chopped
• 1 ounce blanched almond, toasted almonds
• 2 tablespoons desiccated coconut
• 1 tablespoon double cream
• 1 teaspoon garlic paste
• 1 teaspoon ginger paste
• 2 green chilies, finely chopped
• ¹⁄₂ teaspoon turmeric
• ¹⁄₂ teaspoon paprika
• ¹⁄₂ teaspoon ground cumin
• 1 tablespoon tomato paste
• 2 -3 teaspoons honey
• 1 processed cheese slice
• 6 tablespoons double cream
• 1 teaspoon dried fenugreek leaves, crushed
• ¹⁄₂ teaspoon garam masala
• salt
• 2 tablespoons coriander leaves, finely chopped

China’s Ghost Cities

This is from Godfree Roberts and from his wonderful newsletter. I strongly urge all readers to subscribe.

I’ve been chasing reports of deserted towns and have yet to find one. Over and over, I would read articles in the international press claiming that China is building towns that are never inhabited–only to find something very different upon arrival. 

Ordos, the most famous ‘ghost city,’ took ten years to populate but now has a thriving downtown and rising home prices. 

Xiangluowan, Lanzhou, Zhengzhou, Zhujiang, and Zhengdong, former ‘ghost cities,’ currently host the biggest urban migration in history. Newer cities–backwaters a decade ago–are complete and awaiting occupants while others, like Xinyang New District, are finishing construction. Wade Shepard.

When the vast, now empty city, below, opens it will be the first conceived, designed, emulated, modeled, constructed and wired entirely in this century.

Xiong’an New District, bigger than Greater London, on a greenfield site sixty miles south of Beijing, will connect the world’s most prosperous city¹ to its impoverished hinterland while re-housing industries unneeded in a national capital. Tax collection and patent inspection will move there, as will think tanks and high tech companies like AliBaba, that do not need to be in the capital.

SOEs have 100 subsidiaries and branches in the area in sectors like infrastructure construction, frontier information technologies, advanced biological technologies, modern service, energy, and new materials. 3,000 enterprises have registered in Xiong’an, 80% of which are scientific and technological enterprises from Beijing. To accompany them, Beijing’s top universities, hospitals, and schools are building branches in Xiong’an.

Ultimately, however, the New District’s success or failure depends on millions of highly educated youngsters who are picky about lifestyle. That’s why..

• 70% of Xiong’an’s forty square miles will be wetlands and forest,
• its eco-city model² features low-energy construction materials, automated light mass transport and green urban pockets.
• transportation, water, and electricity infrastructure mostly underground.
• all commutes, including downtown Beijing, are under 55 minutes.
• 4 high-speed commuter lines connect 3 new airports³ with the national high-speed rail network. Travel time to all airports is the same⁴.
• the New Area is designed with and for 5G, IoT, AI, big data cloud computing, smart sensors, smart lighting, and integrated personal recognition.
• The entire infrastructure designed for remote-controlled, self-driving vehicles and automated traffic management.

Boom Time?

Justin Lin Yifu, the world’s leading developmental economist, says Chinese GDP can grow 8% pa through 2050, since China’s urban-rural ratio and per capita GDP have just reached Japan’s 1970 levels, when that country’s economic takeoff began.

Xiong’an was designed to repay its capital cost within 30 years by boosting residents’ productivity and, thus tax contribution. If it is on track by, say, 2030, expect Xiong’An 2.0. By 2050, hundreds of millions will live in cities like it.

1

Beijing is home to the most billionaires and the most high-end shops in the world. Porsche dealerships cover acres of expensive land..

2

The new development benefits from lessons learned since 2008, when Singapore and China agreed to build Tianjin Eco-city and use 26 KPIs – like air quality, water quality, noise pollution, wetland and shoreline protection, urban greenspace, water consumption – to measure the city’s ecological, economic, and social development. The project is ongoing.

3

Beijing Daxing, Tianjin, and Shijiazhuang.

4

The trainsets for each airport line are designed to operate at different speeds.

Dongping has a say

Interesting story…

...I do not know how to answer all your questions. I am teaching at semester at sea this semester, and I do not have good internet access. But I can tell you from my limited life experience that socialism is good for the working class, not for the elite in the short run. It will be good for everybody in the long run, even though people do not see it for their limited vision. 

Socialism will eventually emancipate everybody from the oppression and exploitation of the capitalism and the state. I wrote a book called the Unknown Cultural Revolution. 

You should check it out. When I first proposed to write my dissertation on that topic, my American advisor told me that if I did not change the topic, he would not serve as my advisor any more, and he warned me that would not be able to graduate and get a degree, and I would not be able to get a job in the U.S. 

I told him that I could find another professor to advise me. I told him that I did not need to graduate and get a degree. I also told him that I did not need to get a job. I am Chinese and can always go back to China. I left his office and talked to another professor. 

The other professor asked me if I was sure that my adviser did not want to advise me any more. I said that I just left his office. The other professor picked up the phone to confirm. But my advisor said that I got him wrong, and he wanted me, and asked the professor to send me back to him. I went back to his office. He told me that I was on my own now. Do not blame him for not warn me ahead of time. I told him that I did not expect him to help me, and I just need him to serve as my nominal advisor.

I worked on my own and did all the research on my own. When I showed my draft to him, he said that I should apply for the Spencer Foundation Grant, which was the most prestigious grant for graduate students in the U.S. I did, and got it.

It turned out that I was the only one to get the Spencer Foundation Grant that year at Brandeis, the first to graduate and the first to get a tenured track job among my cohorts at Brandeis that year. My professor actually told me that my success helped him and we became best friends for some reason. He told me that he argued in the department that his student got the spence foundation grant, his student was the first to graduate and get a tenured track position.

Because the spencer foundation advertized my dissertation, I got severa offers from publishers. I was able to publish the hard copy of the book in 2000 with Garland Publishing, and published the paper back of the book in 2008. I tell you this to show how difficult it was to do research on the positive side of the Cultural Revolution in the West.

In China, the Cultural Revolution was a tobo for many years. Only negative staff can be published about Mao Era. The great leap famine nonsense and intellectual suffering nonsense flooded the Chinese book markets. My students in the U.S. could not understand, because they did not understand that we lived in class societies. Even in socialist China, there are people who hated socialism and Communist party so strongly, they wished that the Americans or Jiang Jieshi came back to kill the communists for them.

During WWII, many Chinese military generals collaborated with the Japanese to kill the Chinese Communists, because they could not tolerate a society when there would be no elite any more. The total number of collaborators with the Japanese was unknown. Some people estimated at five or six million.

If there was war between China and the U.S. today, my feeling is that the number of collaborators would be even bigger.

I mentioned that Deng Xiaoping carried out a campaign of ten years to purge anybody who was loyal to Mao and the gang of four. Before him, Hua Guofeng did three years, arresting hundred and thousands of Mao loyalists in China. Deng Xiaoping's original plan was to execute Mao's wife. But because most other leaders disagreed with him he relented in the end, but still murdered her in 1992, when Mao heat emerged in Chinese society.

Deng Xiaoping got the one child policy from the U.S. and imposed it on the Chinese people brutally which literally torne the Chinese society apart. The Chinese people's hatred against the government officials reached the peak. I could not imagine if there was a time period in the whole Chinese history that the Chinese people would hate their leaders more than Deng era. I have done rural research for more than thirty years. The Chinese people's anger against Deng Xiaoping and his policies for ruining their livelihood has no bounds. But all these can never be published in China.
But I am sure that Xi Jinping and the top leaders in China knew this. 
That was one reason that they were slowly adjusting their policies in China.

In 2017, at an international socialist congress in Beijing, I was grouped with a scholar from Central Party School who was sharing his rural research result, which was devastatingly bleak. I asked him if they had reported the result to the central committee. He told me that they know all too well. He argued that if there were foreign invasion in China, the Chinese Government could not count on the local party branches to function properly.

In 2018, I got a grant to take four students to do research in rural China. I saw dramatic change in the rural areas. New school buildings, new clinics, new paved roads, provincial officials were stationed in the village, working part time with village leaders to solve rural problems. Farmers' attitude toward the central government improved dramatically. In the four villages we visited in Shandong, every household got one thousand yuan to build a more environmental friendly eco bathroom. I was told that that program alone caused Sixty Billion Yuan in Shandong Province alone.
I do not buy all these books published during the last four decades in China for one reason. There was a coup in China after Mao's death. The Deng Xiaoping government wanted to make friends with the West. They need to tarnish Mao era in order to justify their dramatic change. It is just that simple. Their effort came back to haunt themselves and the Chinese Communist Party. Xi Jinping is trying to amend that now.

During Mao era, Chinese elite were required to work with farmers and workers on a regular basis. They were required to live among the people, and their children had to go to school with the common people. It was called share the hardship and share the pleasure.

Production team leaders had to work every day with farmers, no exception. Meeting could only be held at night.

Village leaders had to work no less than three hundred days a year.
Commune leaders no less than 250 days a year in the fields with farmers.
County leaders no less than 200 days a year. That was a national guideline.

I was a manager of a village factory for five years. I worked everyday with my workers, and harder than my workers, but got the same pay. I can tell you that our production increased each year.

Before I was the manager, I was working with four young girls to assemble fish boat gears. The first month we did 7 sets. The second month we increased to 14 sets, and third month we did 21 sets, by the fourth month, we did 28 sets. From then on, we were able to assemble on average one set a day. The profit was one thousand per set at the time. My group produced more than 100,000 yuan profit for the factory that year. That was one of the reasons that I was chosen to be manager of the factory at the age of 18. I was looking for better way to increase production all the time, even during my sleep. I dreamed about finding a solution for one problem at night, and found it in my dream. The next day, I tested and found it to be very effective.

When leaders worked very hard with workers, and workers had no reason not to work hard.

Chairman Mao once said that a worker by nature wants to work. If a worker refuses to work, there must be something wrong with the management.

In the U.S. I am often hired on the side by some enterprises to interpret for Chinese engineers who came to the U.S. to teach American workers how to use Chinese equipment. One of the Chinese engineers told me that he was shocked by the inefficiency of American working place. He said that one Chinese worker would be as good as four American workers.

I noticed as well that when the bosses were around, workers pretend to work. But once the bosses left, they would go out to smoke, or go to bathroom. I explained to the Chinese engineer that American workers saw no reason to work hard for the capitalists who pocket most of the profits.
Yang Heping, Bill Hinton's nephew, who grew up in China, and went to the U.S. to work and for his ph.d after Deng Xiaoping returned to power. He eventually returned to China in the 2000s, and now teaches in Beijing. He made several public speeches about his working experience during the Mao era and in the U.S. You might find it interesting to watch them. But they are in Chinese.

I am teaching at a small private college in the U.S. The last three presidents the college hired were all disasters. These people came to the job for the money but had no leadership skills. They were paid five to six times more than professors, and they made a mess and were asked to leave after five or six years with a fat separation check. Some of my students and parents suggested that I should be the present. I am too old to take on something like that. But if I were to serve as the president, I would not take more than a professor's pay, and I would continue to teach one or two classes a year. I would lead by example, and dedication to my community. But there is no such thing in the U.S. That was the philosophy I developed during Mao era. I think that socialism will only workers if the CPC returned to its Mao's spirit of sharing the hardship and pleasure with the people.


Dongping

TID: Any blast with a white flash, which is a nuclear weapons burning its ‘pit’ is assured to be a nuclear weapon

Previously, Ukrainian forces launched a major drone attack against the Russian city of Sevastopol and the Russian ships in the Black Sea, which prompted Moscow to suspend the grain deal.

Last week, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu warned France, Britain, the US, and Turkey that the Kiev regime is preparing a provocation with a “dirty bomb”, as Ukraine intends to escalate the conflict into a nuclear crisis and pin the blame on Russia.

A dirty bomb contains radioactive isotopes and an explosive load that disperses radioactive material across large areas.

Outcome of New normal: live with COVID:

Bankrupting the Enemy: The U.S. Financial Siege of Japan Before Pearl Harbor.

Other Title

• US Financial Siege of Japan Before Pearl Harbor

Summary

• Was the bombing of Pearl Harbor an unprovoked attack on the United States? According to a new book by Edward S. Miller, the Japanese motivation stemmed from U.S. plans to defeat Japan economically in the years before World War II. Miller discussed his book, “Bankrupting the Enemy: The U.S. Financial Siege of Japan Before Pearl Harbor” in a program sponsored by the Humanities and Social Sciences Division. In his book published by the Naval Institute Press, Miller contends that the United States forced Japan into international bankruptcy to deter its aggression. The Japanese government had a huge cache of dollars fraudulently hidden in New York. In July 1941, President Roosevelt froze the money to “bring Japan to its senses, not its knees,” Miller asserts. Roosevelt’s intentions were thwarted, however, by U.S. bureaucrats who were determined to deny Japan the dollars needed to buy oil and other resources for economic survival. Miller demonstrates that the deprivations facing the Japanese people as a result of the fund cutoff buttressed Japan’s choice of war at Pearl Harbor.

Found HERE

Here is something interesting:

2 statements from Sergey Glazyev, former minister of Foreign Economic Relations in Boris Yeltsin’s cabinet, today the Commissioner for Integration and Macroeconomics within the Eurasian Economic Commission, the executive body of the Eurasian Economic Union, and close confident of president Putin, published 5 days ago on his official Telegram channel:

–––––––––––––––––––––––––

1. (on the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of China)

From HERE

The 20th CPC Congress and the plenum of the newly elected Central Committee that ended in Beijing are covered here mainly in terms of politics. It mainly emphasizes the importance of Xi Jinping’s re-election to key leadership positions, whose status as the core of the party was confirmed in the resolutions adopted. I would invite readers to consider the ideological significance of these events in comparison with the achievements of our country and the CPSU that led it, whose leadership role was enshrined in the USSR Constitution.

The 20th Congress was a watershed for the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: at it, Khrushchev, who succeeded Stalin as head of the party, unveiled a report that exposed the personality cult of his predecessor and discredited the party in many ways. Having read that report, Mao Tse Tung told his comrades that corrupt officials and traitors had seized power in the USSR, and that they would lead the country to ruin. In this, he proved to be a visionary – Brezhnev, who removed Khrushchev from power, succeeded in correcting the blunders of the vain Khrushchev, but the even more vain Gorbachev, promoted by Andropov, returned the country to the disastrous path of thoughtlessly copying Western institutions and discrediting his own achievements.

In China, it is not customary to abandon the heroic achievements of the past and to vilify their predecessors. The Chinese value their own experience, work on their own mistakes and learn from the mistakes of others. Unlike us, they have preserved both the socialist system and the leading role of the Communist Party, as well as state planning, while constantly improving their system of governance. Avoiding self-destructive decisions, cautiously reforming the economy and subordinating market relations to the goal of enhancing social welfare, they have achieved tremendous success.

The 20th CPC Congress marked the 100th anniversary of the CPC, which adopted the CPC Central Committee Resolution on the major achievements and historical experience of the party’s 100-year struggle. I encourage you to read it in the link below. It is important for us to draw the following conclusions from this experience.

Three decades after the self-dissolution of the CPSU, the collapse of the USSR and the MSS, the cause of socialism lives and wins. Not only in China, but also in Vietnam, the socialist oriented India and other Asian countries have achieved tremendous success during this time. These countries now constitute the core of the new world economic order and form the new fast-growing center of the world economy. Southeast Asia is already ahead of the U.S. and the EU in terms of output, and three times faster than the U.S. and the EU.

By refusing to continue socialist construction, we have climbed into the last wagon of the dead-end capitalist world, the collapse of which was postponed for 30 years thanks to the appropriation of wealth and resources of the former Soviet Union and the USSR countries placed under Western capitalist control. Having exhausted its potential, the American-centric financial and economic system is decaying and the global hybrid war unleashed by Washington is essentially its agony.

Finding itself after the collapse of the USSR on the periphery of the American-centric system of oligarchic capitalism, Russia has degraded in the scientific, technical, economic, spiritual and cultural fields, becoming a raw materials, financial and intellectual donor to the United States and the EU. Its demographic losses have been about 15 million unborn and prematurely dead citizens (relative to the reproductive behavior model of the late Soviet Union). The most developed union republic, Ukraine, has been turned into a Nazi concentration camp under the direction of Western intelligence services; the Baltic republics, absorbed by the EU, have lost their ability to develop and become depopulated.

The Chinese Communists, while preserving the Soviet political system, Marxist-Leninist teachings, and the socialist order, abandoned dogmatism and creatively approached market-based economic reforms. They were able to subordinate market mechanisms to the goals of improving public welfare and economic competitiveness, and learned to use entrepreneurial energy for the benefit of society.

––––––––––––––––––––––––––

2. (on the Chinese socialist model of economic development and its significance for Russia)

From HERE

The socialist market economy created by them turned out to be qualitatively more effective than both the Soviet administrative and planning system and the developed capitalist countries. Preserving the socialist ideology and national economic goal-setting and strategic planning, the CCP follows an innovative way of development, constantly improving the system of market economy regulation, ensuring the highest possible level of investment and innovation activity by methods of state control.

Further development of the world economy for the foreseeable future until the end of this century will be determined by socialist-oriented countries. China, led by the Communist Party, and democratic India will compete for leadership in all significant for mankind spheres: industrial, scientific and technological, social, cultural, environmental. The efforts of the U.S. power and financial elite to retain leadership through a global hybrid war are futile and will bring nothing but multimillion-dollar casualties and disasters to the countries within its sphere of influence.

The stunning success of China, India and Indochina, which have maintained their socialist orientation, against the background of the agony of the core of the capitalist world in the form of a world hybrid war, puts us before a choice: return to the main road of modern socialism or perish on the periphery of the agonizing American-centric financial and economic system. Of course, we can speak only about the modern understanding of socialist construction – with the use of market mechanisms and entrepreneurial energy, relying on traditional moral values. The era of class struggle and the coercion of millions of people to work is a thing of the past. The modern socialist state is an integrator of various social groups on the basis of creative activity for the improvement of social welfare. The system of socialist government must harmonize the relationship between man, society and nature and create conditions for the creative self-realization of each individual in socially useful activities. The socialist state today must be not only just and demanding, but also humane, legal, democratic, intelligent – a state of development. Its principles are outlined in the program provisions of the World Russian People’s Council. Its organic ideology is Orthodox socialism, complemented by the values of other traditional confessions in Russia.

Our peripheral position is manifested today in our inability to mobilize the resources available in the country – they still drain away to U.S.-controlled jurisdictions. If this situation persists, every day of war strengthens us by taking the enemy’s capital, resources and minds out of our country, and weakens us. Three hundred thousand of our honest and best mobilized men are fighting, and as many more are fleeing to the enemy’s location. Millions of people are doing their best to help the front by giving their savings to the fighting soldiers, while the monetary authorities are conniving with the comprador oligarchy in taking capital out of the country. Without the restoration of socialist ideology, state planning, socially equitable distribution of national income, subordination of the banking system and monetary policy to the goals of increasing investment and mobilizing all available resources in the process of expanded reproduction, we cannot escape from the current futile peripheral and dependent situation. The time has come to correct the mistakes made thirty years ago. Repeating them today and continuing to follow the false path of the Washington Consensus amidst the stunning successes of the Chinese Communist Party is not only foolish, but treasonous.

Jeff has a great podcast

BlackRock and its Aladdin AI robot are buying up and financializing everything you own and do. Not a problem for China's 1.4 billion citizens. China Rising Radio Sinoland 221022

Australia has some really strange names of places

Italy freezes arms supplies to Ukraine

2022: Scientists leave the UK as China overtakes US as most favoured destination | Science|Business

HERE

2022: The U.S. Is Losing Scientists to China. How to Stem the Flow. | Barron's

HERE

2020 : China snaps up Japanese scientists, sparking fears of technology outflow. Government must urgently improve domestic research environment to stem brain drain

HERE

Will the US invade China?

Absolutely not. There are many reasons.

• They have over 4x the population than we do.
• To invade, we’d have to ship our military over there
• They are a collectivist culture we are more individualistic. By that I mean that someone from the US is far more likely to say “screw this” than the chinese who historically are motivated by what is important to the greater whole.
• They haven’t attacked us beyond spying, which nearly all countries do.
• They are our largest trading partner. Companies here would go broke and we’d also lose a lot of consumer goods manufactured there.
• They have nuclear weapons
• We would have virtually no allies anymore due to such an unprovoked attack.
• We have very little to gain and a lot to lose.

The bottom line is simple. We would lose and lose badly. It would come down to who is ready to fight the hardest. Since we’d be attacking their very land, they would.

Naan

“This naan is from the New Vegetarian Epicure. With just four ingredients and no yeast, it is simple to mix up, but it is so soft and flavorful I figured I’d add it to the many recipes already posted. Prep time does not include 1 hour of “resting.””

Ingredients

Units: US

• 4 cups flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 2 cups plain low-fat yogurt

Directions

• Mix together flour, baking powder and salt.
• Stir in the yogurt till the dough is too stiff for a spoon, then knead it in the bowl till it holds together well, adding more flour if necessary.
• Turn it out on a floured surface and continue kneading for about 5 minutes till the dough feels smooth and elastic.
• Form the dough into a ball and put it in an oiled bowl, covered with a towel, to rest for an hour or longer.
• Take the dough out and cut it into 10 equal pieces. Form each into a ball and press the balls flat into round discs.
• Heat a large frying pan or griddle, either seasoned cast iron or a good non-stick finish.
• Heat your oven to about 500 and have the broiler on (this is how the original recipe states it – I know with my oven it’s either 500 degree oven OR the broiler, but you get the idea.
• Take 1 piece of dough at a time and roll it out on a floured surface till it is about 8-10 inches across and less than 1/4 inch thick.
• Lay it on the hot griddle and cook it over a medium heat for 4-5 minutes (I don’t think mine took that long).
• It will puff up in places or all over, and there will be some blackish-brown spots on the bottom.
• Slide a spatula under the naan and transfer it to the oven, directly onto the rack, for a minute or two, just till it finishes puffing up into a balloon and begins to color lightly on top.
• Remove naan from the oven and brush it lightly with melted butter if you like.
• Continue this way with all the dough, stacking the breads into a napkin-lined basket.
• Serve the breads hot, fresh from the oven, or let them cool and wrap them up.
• To reheat, wrap them in aluminum foil, in packets of 4 or 5 breads and put them in a 400 degree oven for 10-15 minutes.

British Ambassador SUMMONED To Russian Foreign Ministry; Confronted Over Attacks on NordStream Pipelines

World Hal Turner 03 November 2022 .

.

British Ambassador Deborah Bronnert was SUMMONED to the Russian Foreign Ministry today.  She arrived shortly after 10:30 AM, Moscow local time.

Upon her arrival, she was greeted by a crowd chanting anti-British slogans and holding placards reading “Britain is a terrorist state.” She left after about 30 minutes.

The reason the Ambassador was Summoned was to be directly confronted about British involvement in the recent attack upon Russian naval vessels near Sevastopol, Crimes, and about the bombing of the Nord Stream Pipelines, weeks ago.

Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA)  spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told the press “there can be no doubt that British intelligence services were involved in the terrorist attack on the Black Sea Fleet base in Sevastopol on Oct. 29 and the act of sabotage against the Nord Stream pipeline.  They will not be left without a reaction. We have stated this in the Security Council. We spoke about that publicly… British ambassador has been summoned and given the relevant materials… the same materials… will also be made available to the public at large.…”

Zakharova went on to tell the press “They tried to absolve themselves of responsibility for the terrorist attack. They said that they did not even know about anything like that. It was a very strange reaction. They have contacts, as they have always had, with the Russian Defense Ministry.”

She finished her remarks about the matter by saying “In principle, they could have tried to clear up certain things. It has turned out that a priori they know the answers to all questions…. They argue they had nothing to do with it. They should have at least asked what evidence we have…”

PUBLIC TO BE TOLD

It now appears that Russia plans to reveal publicly, the evidence they possess, proving the British government blew up the Nord Stream Pipeline.

Our previous coverage of this matter reported (HERE) that the Russian have data showing that after the Nord Stream pipelines detonated, alarms from sensors in those pipes, alerted Russian natural gas company GAZPROM that pressure in the pipes had dropped massively and suddenly.   Russia also has records from Apple iCloud, showing that one minute after the pressure sensor alarms began sounding at GAZPROM, British Prime Minister Liz Truss sent a text message from her iPhone to US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken which said “It’s done.”

At that moment, no one in the world knew that the pipelines had been blown up.  GAZPROM only knew that there was a massive and sudden pressure drop.  But Liz Truss knew . . .  because it was the British government that carried out the bombing of the pipelines. It was Liz Truss that texted Antony Blinken telling him “It’s done.”

Will the G7’s proposed Build Back Better World (B3W) initiative to build worldwide infrastructure effectively counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative, or is this just wishful thinking?

This is a joke, right?

So the G7 is going to compete with China in building infrastructure. China is the country which has consumed more steel and cement in five years than the US did in the entire 20th century, including fighting two world wars.

This the US, which has such lousy roads, bridges and buildings, the same US where President Biden cannot get Congress to pass a bill spending $2T to rebuild basic American infrastructure.

So, if I were an African head-of-state, and China and the US came to me offering to build infrastructure in my country, who do you think I would choose? I think I would have to think for all of one minute to come to a decision.

OK, so the US doesn’t have much experience building stuff, but the US is a democracy, while China is not. Why should I care about who is a democracy and who is not a democracy? I just want infrastructure so that my country can modernize and be more competitive.

Baked Pumpkin Donuts

Ingredients

Units: US

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• ¹⁄₂ cup packed brown sugar
• 1 ¹⁄₂ teaspoons baking powder
• 1 ¹⁄₂ teaspoons pumpkin pie spice
• ¹⁄₂ teaspoon salt
• ¹⁄₄ teaspoon baking soda
• ¹⁄₂ cup canned pumpkin
• 2 eggs
• ¹⁄₄ cup milk
• ¹⁄₄ 1/4 cup butter or 1/4 cup margarine, softened

• For Icing

• 1 cup sifted powdered sugar
• ¹⁄₄ teaspoon vanilla
• 3 -4 teaspoons milk

Directions

• FOR DOUGHNUTS: In a medium mixing bowl stir together flour, brown sugar, baking powder, pumpkin pie spice, salt, and baking soda. Add pumpkin, eggs, milk, and shortening, butter, or margarine; beat with an electric mixer on low speed till mixed.
• Spoon the mixture into a pastry bag fitted with a large star tip with a 1/2 inch opening. Pipe onto 2 greased baking sheets in 3-inch circles. Bake in a preheated 375* oven for 10 minutes, or till golden brown. Cool doughnuts on a rack over waxed paper.
• FOR ICING: In a small mixing bowl stir together powdered sugar and vanilla. Stir in enough milk to make a smooth icing of glazing consistency. Spoon icing over doughnuts.

Germany moves closer to China

Bundeskanzler Olaf Scholz will go to Beijing to secretly ask China’s help and cooperation in resisting the pressure and threats from the USA.

There a large delegation of German industry bosses with him; they want more cooperation with China, and no sanctions.

Germany is divided, the German media are bribed, the German politicians are threatened by the USA on a daily basis.

The German industry however is fighting for survival. They know very well that the future of the German economy is in cooperation with China. Almost all German big MNC’s are making 60 to 80 % of their turnover in China. Without their China presence, there is no German industry anymore. Kunshan, Shenyang and many other Chinese cities are actually German, very few other foreign investments there. In Suzhou, in the night clubs, the Chinese audience is loudly singing “Über den Wolken” (von Reinhard Mey, 1974) Yes, the Chinese audience is singing in German there !!

And I can assure you, all the German employees of these MNC’s in Germany are very well aware of the importance of the cooperation with China.

Germany’s Scholz: The way we deal with China must change – POLITICO

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German Chancellor Olaf Scholz travels to Beijing this week in what is fast becoming a controversial trip, amid pressure both domestically and from within the EU to take a tougher line against China.

Scholz is the first Western leader to visit the Asian country since the COVID-19 pandemic began and will go with a delegation of German business leaders.

But many have questioned his intentions behind the trip, arguing he is prioritising economic ties at a time when the EU is looking to reduce its dependency on countries like China and Russia.

Strong trade links already exist between Beijing and Berlin, with China being its second-largest export destination.

As a result, the idea of decoupling from China, like what is happening with Moscow following its invasion of Ukraine, is a virtual non-starter for a lot of German businesses, with so many heavily invested in the country.

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Does anyone remember this image from 1979? The Air New Zealand Mt Erebus crash in Antarctica that made news around the world with 257 dead and no survivors.

It was a full aircraft and I was top of the waiting list hoping for a cancellation. Air New Zealand rang me the night before and said be ready to leave home at 6 am – they would ring me then if anyone cancelled.

I sat by the phone until 6.30 – no call and I was full of disappointment. This was to be the final excursion flight for the season and it was full of celebrity hosts and Antarctic veterans like Peter Mulgrew.

A gloomy breakfast listening to radio coverage of the flight’s departure full of joy and excitement that only made my disappointment worse. Followed by a gloomy day.

Late afternoon a news flash – the returning aircraft hadn’t made the expected radio contact as it came within range. A later bulletin – it was overdue. Hours later an Antarctic search team spotted wreckage on the mountain and it appeared there were no survivors.

I was freaked out and stayed that way for a week. All sorts of thoughts. If any of those 257 had cancelled, their life would have been saved and I would be dead. Did someone just save my life by feeling sick but deciding to go anyway? A deep unease as all the details of the crash were told and the stories of the victims’ families. I didn’t want to tell my story and nobody asked.

Gradually I got used to the idea I’d had a lucky escape and gave up trying to make sense of it. It simply didn’t make sense. If any one of those 257 had cancelled they would have lived and I would be dead. Try and fit God’s Will into that scenario because I can’t.

There were two moments in later life when I had flashbacks. One was meeting the partner of a crash victim and sharing our stories – freaky for both of us. The other was meeting one of the team who recovered the bodies. Freaky again, and I told him “If I had been one of the victims I would have been eternally grateful to you for that final act of caring.”

So my last 44 years have been a bonus I’m still thankful for.

Edit: My apologies for disabling comments. After a few days several people began lecturing me on how God had fingered me with a message about my wicked ways and said I should be changing my life around so I don’t go to Hell, and when I told them I didn’t agree things got nasty. The comments I’ve left are all good, and I can’t think of anything that hasn’t been said, but I’m happy to get private messages.

Is China ready for conflict?