The Crespi Ancient Artifact Collection of Cuenca Ecuador

This is a nice mystery that has turned the archeological world on it’s side. It’s a great read and I really hope that you all enjoy what is presented here. Translated from an old scan. Correct, and edited to fit this venue. I doubt that you will be able to find a complete recounting of this story elsewhere in the Western Internet today.

…

Father Carlo Crespi, who comes from Milan, has lived in the small town of Cuenca, Ecuador, for more than 50 years. He was a priest of the Church of Maria Auxiliadora.

Crespi was accepted by the local indians as a real friend.

They (the local indians) used to bring him presents from their hiding places.

Over a period of time the father had so many precious objects stored in his house and the church that one day he received permission from the Vatican to open a museum to display them.

This museum (in the Salesian School at Cuenca) grew and grew Until in 1960 it was one of the biggest museums in Ecuador, and Crespi was recognized as an archaeological authority.

But he has always been a rather embarrassing servant of his church, for he
asserts vehemently that he can prove that there was a direct connection between the Old World (Babylon) and the New World (pre-Inca civilizations); and that goes right against prevailing opinion.

Complicating matters, on 20th July 1962 there was an act of arson and the father’s museum was burnt down.

What Father Crespi managed to salvage from the damaged museum was housed in two long narrow rooms, which were in a terrible muddle.

Brass, copper, sheet-metal, zinc, tin and stone and wooden objects and in the midst of them all pure gold, sheet-gold, silver and sheet -silver.

Eric Van Danken in His book Gold of The Gods says of this Treasure “Let the Vatican grail guardian Father Crespi of Cuenca be the key witness to the pre-
Christian origin of the metal treasures. He said “‘Every’ thing that the Indians brought me from the tunnels dates to before Christ. “Most of the symbols and pre-historic representations are older than the Flood.’”

“Father Crespi has partially stacked his metal plaques by motifs, for example those with pictures of pyramids.

I took a close look at more than 40 objects.

All the pyramid engravings have four things in common: a sun, but more frequently several suns, is depicted above the pyramid; snakes are always flying
next to or over the pyramid; animals of various kinds are always present….

“Professor Miloslav Stingi is the leading South American scholar in the Iron Curtain countries; he graduated in the ancient civilizations of America. today he is a member of the Academy of Sciences at Prague and author of archaeological and ethnological books. In versunkenen Mayasta~dten (1971), for example, is highly acclaimed. Professor Stingl, who was a guest in my house, saw the photographs I had taken at Cuenca. ‘If these pictures are genuine, and everything indicates that they are, because no one makes forgeries in gold, at any rate not on such a large scale, this is the biggest archaeological sensation since the discovery of Troy. Years ago I myself supported the view that the Incas had no writing in the alphabetical sense of the word. And now I am faced with Inca writing. To be able to give a precise scientific verdict I should have to subject each plaque to a detailed and lengthy examination, and compare each one with material already available. For the moment I can only say that I am dumbfounded. The sun was often part of the scenery in known Inca engravings, but man was never equated with the sun, as I see time and again in these photographs. There are  representations of men with sun's rays round their heads and there are men depicted with star points coming from them. The symbol of holy power has  always been the head. But in these pictures the head is simultaneously sun or star. That points to new direct connections.’”


J Golden Barton in 1998 tells of a visit see Father Crespi with Dr. Paul Chessman from BYU and others in the late 1970’s. He writes (ref. 2):  

“High in the Andes mountains of Ecuador lies beautiful Cuenca, a peaceful city with red Spanish tile roofs and worn cobble stone streets. Townspeople go about their daily business happily trading with each other and the native Indians who populate the hills and valleys surrounding the village. 

The Indians speak the tongue of their Quechua" ancestors, who watched the sun rise over the Amazon hundreds of years before. With weathered and rosy cheeks they radiate a simplicity of harmony with the rugged mountains where they have worked time out of mind. 

The men of the tribe wear a single long braid of hair down their back underneath a Panamanian hat. Men, women and children are dressed in the same black and brown earth-tone cloth, edged with bright colored trim. Each shuffle along the paths long known by their forefathers, carrying them back and forth from village to village. Not many tourists travel this way and the service is unrushed but thorough.


“A few blocks from the center of the village stands a Catholic "College of Salesino." 

Young men and women from prosperous families attend this secondary school, its classrooms facing a clay and terrazzo tiled courtyard. 

Entering through a side door, we found ourselves in a small open-air enclosure facing stately, hand-carved wooden gates. 

A friendly young man bid us enter through old wooden doors and ushered us into a private chamber. 

A few moments later, a bearded, monkish-looking man with twinkling eyes and a benign smile arrived and embraced Dr. Cheeseman. Although an octogenarian, he appeared in lively good health, despite his quaking robes which betrayed a shaky hand. 

We had heard that he was senile, but his personal behavior only radiated complete mental  iompetence. 

So this was Father Carlos Crespi, Ecuador's unlikely focus of a unique archaeological controversy that continues to baffle everyone
who has heard about it.


“He led us into an inner court of the school yard, where old Spanish wooden doors faced inward, and the oft-scrubbed floors gleamed with sunlight bouncing off the polished terrazzo. 

We were unprepared for what was to come. 

Father Crespi took a large key from a ring that hung from a braided belt around his robe, then moved to an obscure wooden door and turned the lock. Together with a single helper, he disappeared into the dark room. 

Both soon reappeared with a large piece of metal that had been molded and hammered into a long sheet. 

It looked like it might be made of gold. The sheet was inscribed with a curious artwork beyond identification.


“Next, they dragged something from the darkness too large to be carried, and only with strenuous exertions were they able to lean it against the stucco wall. 

It stands twenty-two inches high and about seven inches wide its weight must have been prodigious. I reached my hand to touch the object and noticed it featured a dark covering, as if it had been painted. 

At first, I supposed it must have been made of lead, because it was soft and almost pliable. 

Then the nails of my fingers bit into the body of the figure through the paint and the gleam from the tell-tale scratch left no doubt that it was made of pure gold.

Our cameras began to click, and in the excitement Father Crespi talked excitedly, hardly stopping to breathe. He was our enthusiastic instructor, showing us each new piece as though it had just been brought to the light of day for the first time.


“What other wonders did his black vault contain, we wondered? The old man's nimble fingers joined the ends of two barren electric wires and the chamber was instantly revealed in the radiance of an incandescent globe. 

The gleam of gold, silver, and bronze everywhere added to the brightness of its interior. 

Shelves of dusty, worn ceramics, starry-eyed idols posturing in hideous stances or strange proportions. 

Stacked from floor to ceiling were hundreds of large cardboard pieces on which were wired metal bracelets, earrings, nose rings, and necklaces, some untarnished by time. Hide-scrapers, tools, implements of war, spears, axes, clubs, of wood, metal and stone were stacked everywhere. 

Father Crespi's mysterious room seemed overburdened with the treasures of an unknown antiquity. It literally over-flowed with bizarre artifacts, many wrought in precious metals. 

Most intriguing were the innumerable plates of bronze, brass and gold. 

Many bore strange inscriptions and hieroglyphic symbols. Others were replete with the engravings of incongruous animals--elephants, snakes, jaguars, wild beasts of every kind. 

The images of horse-drawn chariots were clearly etched into metal, calling to mind Juan Moricz's description of "a Roman chariot" in his underground chamber.

“We photographed a plate inscribed with representations of what appeared to be Egypt's step-pyramid.

Still more plates contained artwork with what looked like Assyrian or Babylonian symbols.

We grew dizzy with the gleaming opulence and historical anomaly all around us.

Newell Parkin, a banker from Bountiful, Utah, Dr. Paul Cheeseman, Wayne Hamby, an undergraduate student from Brigham Young University, D. Craig Anderson, a Utah State University Research Associate, who acted as our interpreter, and I spent the afternoon amid these otherworldly splendors.

In all my travels throughout the world, my visit to the Crespi Collection was to be their crowning experience.

“We asked Father Crespi how he came by such marvelous things. He said he headed the local parish for over fifty years after studying at Italy's University In Milan, where the subject of archaeology had caught his interest.

Following graduation, he became a priest and was assigned to Ecuador's beautiful city of Cuenca to work among the Indians.

In time, he came to love them. Moreover, in South America he had opportunity to further his archaeological interests.

To his great surprise and delight, the religious celebrations over which he presided brought a host of Indians bearing gifts to the kindly man who
performed baptisms and marriages and was their friend in trouble.

Aware of Father Crespi's enthusiasm for archaeology, the grateful Indians brought him ancient objects long hidden in the jungle.

Soon, his collection steadily increased until, after fifty years, it filled many rooms.

“A museum was constructed to house these remarkable gifts, but a few years before our visit it was seriously damaged by an arsonist's fire.

Father Crespi managed to salvage three full rooms of the relics, one
of relatively obscure and unimportant tributes, another filled with items of curious antiquity, but the last was a treasury of gold artifacts.

Residing high among the Andes mountains in an obscure village, the old
man had no interest in fame or fortune.

Few travelers knew of his collection and even fewer scientists.

He was a private person with a big heart and a deep interest in the past.
‘Where and how do the Indians find these incredible things.,’ we wondered.

‘Oh, they just get them from the caves and subterranean chambers in the jungles,’ he answered in an offhand manner.

'There are over 200 kilo-meters of tunnels starting here in Cuenca.

They run from the mountains down to the eastern lowlands near the Amazon."

Wayne Hamby, an assistant to Cheeseman, spent a few more days with Father Crespi to catalogue and photograph the entire collection.

His results went into the files of Dr. Cheeseman, who died after his retirement from the faculty of Brigham Young University.


“Two years following our visit to the kindly priest, I returned to Cuenca with Ben Holbrook, our two young sons, and a pair of Ecuadoran LDS missionaries acting as interpreters. 

We were greeted by a young priest, who informed us that Carlos Crespi had passed away in January 1980, and his collection was no longer available for public view. 

In spite of my efforts to convince him that we had traveled a long distance to view the relics, he stubbornly refused to allow us to see the treasures. 

He insisted that the room with the artifacts could not be shown on orders from the Vatican. 

To my knowledge, no one from the outside world has seen the treasure since the death of the old Padre. “. 

Mr. Barton heard rumors that much of the treasure had been shipped to Rome to the Vatican.

Richard Wingate a Florida based explorer and writer visited Father Crespi four times during the mid to late 1970’s and photographed the extensive artifact collection. He says this concerning his visits:

“IN A DUSTY, cramped shed on the side porch of the Church of Maria Auxiliadora in Cuenca, Ecuador, lies the most valuable archaeological treasure on earth. 

More than one million dollars worth of dazzling gold is cached here, and much silver, yet the hard money value of this forgotten hoard is not its
principal worth. 

There are ancient artifacts identified as Assyrian, Egyptian, Chinese, and African so perfect in workmanship and beauty that any museum director would regard them as first-class acquisitions.

Since this treasure is the strangest collection of ancient archaeological objects in existence, its value lies in the historical questions it poses, and demands answers to.

Yet it is unknown to historians and deliberately neglected in the journals of orthodox archaeology….

‘Ah,’ the priest said, ‘enough flattery, then, let’s take a look.’ Without ceremony, he forced a key into an ancient, rusty padlock and opened the rickety door to his museum.

He touched two bare wires together and a watery yellow light went on.

Father Crespi was smiling like a man with a very remarkable secret.

I was skeptical of the reports I had heard about this place, but now that cautious attitude gave’ way to unabashed astonishment.

Stacked against the far wall were golden mummy cases in the quasi-Egyptian
style with a black, baked-enamel finish.

A dozen complete sets of gleaming, golden ceremonial armor, beaten-gold Chaldean-style helmets, and golden inscribed plaques were piled haphazardly on the floor.

These dazzling memoirs of lost times were scattered among an array of beautifully carved Pacific Oceanic and African-styled wooden statues, shields of a rich, red copper, pottery, canes, sheets, and rolls of silver-colored metal, and strange, unidentifiable gears, pipes, and wheels which might have been parts to long-lost technological systems.

Rolls of intricately figured sheet metal stood haphazardly piled around the shed.

The priest explained that it had been torn off the interior walls of long abandoned, vine-choked buildings in the inaccessible eastern jungle.

The Indian artifact hunters bring this wallpaper in three different metals: gold, a
metallurgically unique, untarnished silver, and an unknown alloy with the appearance of shiny aluminum.

Every square inch of the peculiar sheet metal is decorated with intricate designs, some of them depicting long-forgotten ceremonial occasions and some of them humorous and cartoon like.

The rolls come in heights that vary, for the most part, from eight to twelve feet, and they are often fifteen to thirty feet long.

These lengths are composed of many individual four-foot sheets which have been artfully riveted together.

He showed me a dozen bronze plaques. Seemingly, they were among his favorite acquisitions.

The illustrations borne by the plaques made me catch my breath.

Images of Egyptian princesses and Assyrian gods stared at me with a severity undiminished by the passage of centuries.

One of the plaques bore the image of a Caucasian man writing linear script with a quill pen.

Linear script?

A quill pen?

Needless to say, the Andes Indians did not have a written language when the Spanish arrived, let alone a tool for writing.

There were reportedly fifty-six solid gold plaques originally, but after a disastrous arson in 1962, which local political fanatics claimed credit for, Father
Crespi had molds made by a local casket maker and the best dozen of his precious plaques were duplicated in coffin-handle bronze.

The original gold plaques lie safe today in a bank vault.

“Father Crespi granted me permission to take photographs. Since most museums jealously guard their treasures from photographers, the priest’s open generosity won me over.

Lack of space inside the shed forced me to set up my tripod and camera in the sunlit outer courtyard.

The priest himself brought his treasures out for me to record on film.

Hours passed, and the usual, afternoon equatorial winter rain began.

The Father was growing tired. We quit for the day.

I had exposed over ten rolls of film, taken more than three hundred pictures, and covered only a tiny percentage of the seventy thousand artifacts which filled the museum’s three rooms to their ceilings.

“As it turned out, I made not one but three additional visits to Father Crespi in Cuenca, exposed over three thousand frames, and I still have captured only 2 percent of the collection on film.

Between my second and third trips, the Padre’s treasure hunters apparently hit upon a fresh cache in the jungle caves.

So many new pieces arrived during this period that I was forced to climb over heaps of newly unearthed objects in order to get to certain items that I particularly wanted to photograph.

I found myself in the classic one- step-forward, two-steps-back situation, for new articles were arriving more rapidly than I could take pictures of the old!

“One of the reasons for my continued efforts was my apprehension for Carlo Crespi’s advanced age.

He was born on April 29, 1891, and when he dies, the integrity of the collection is by no means assured.

It might be saved and protected by benevolent church authorities, but an auction to private dealers seems just as likely.

If the priceless museum is somehow disbursed before modern techniques of dating and evaluation can be applied to its artifacts, a great chance for the reevaluation of the history of the Western hemisphere will have been missed.

“In spite of the plethora of startling material in his museum, Father Crespi regrets that he missed acquiring most of the ‘treasure unearthed in the jungle, including most of the best articles, because he simply couldn’t match prices with other bidders.

Maintaining the jungle museum has proven a difficult adventure for the Father in other ways as well.

The collection weathered an arson fire in 1962 which melted many objects, burned others, and substantially diminished its value.

Another fire occurred in 1974.

There have also been instances of outright theft.

A few archaeologists who have heard of the collection are prone to an understandable condescension, because the shedful of artifacts poses a violent offense to the procedural r~es of their fraternity.

The articles in the trove have been discovered in sloppy, unsupervised, surreptitious digs by wholly untrained J ivaro Indian diggers.

Crespi is not even an accredited museum curator.

Although not an uneducated man~he holds a master’s degree in anthropology from a Milan, Italy, university.

The priest has no formal archaeological training, and the time he gives to his immense collection is stolen from a heavy schedule of parish duties, as I saw on my visits.

Crespi, furthermore, occasionally expresses a salty indifference to the judgment of the accepted experts.

The classification system of his museum is best described as chaotic.

It does not make highly publicized acquisitions at blue ribbon auctions, for the Father wouldn’t have the money, even if he had the need.

Nor does it have advanced dating machinery, assistant curators, guards, guides, set hours, or any of the other appurtenances of the respectable, contemporary museum.

And yet the affection in which the Padre is held by his Shuara (Jivaro) collectors, has made it possible for him to accumulate the most significant single assemblage of South American artifacts anywhere.

“Carlo Crespi was raised in the prosperous northern Italian -city of Milan, where, after a youth spent with a comfortably wealthy family, he decided to join the Salesian Fathers. More than fifty-five years ago this missionary order sent Father Crespi to South America.

Ever since that voyage, Father Crespi has lived a life of voluntary poverty, sleeping on the floors of native huts with only a single blanket, and carelessly
eating poor but lovingly offered food.

He has cared for the people, listened to their stories of fabulous deep-jungle temples, explored the treasure-filled Tayos caves, and stubbornly provided a museum for the strange artifacts of the country…

When Father Crespi and his Indian diggers tell of the places where they find their
artifacts, they described giant pyramids, immense, deserted cities, fantastic sacred tunnels, and caves.

The cities, they say, still shine with a mysterious, cool bluish light when the sun goes down.

The tunnels are reportedly large enough to drive a locomotive through.

They have cut-stone entrances and walls which, by native account, are as smooth as glass.

And it is these tunnels, at least according to the Indian explorers, that hold the bulk of the material being offered to the Maria Auxiliadora museum and to other collectors.

It is a fantastic tale, but when one sees the evidence, the thousands of gold treasured trinkets, the story of a vast tunnel system become nearly plausible.

“Although legend tells of this tunnel network honeycombing all of Ecuador and Peru, the only part of it that has, to my knowledge, been documented, is located in the very dangerous Jivaro country, between the Santiago and Morona rivers, near Tayos.

Unfortunately, this area is decidedly out of bounds for the foreign adventurer.

The local Indians have killed at least four inquisitive outsiders in the last two years.

Yet the tunnels of the Shuara tribes (Jivaro) have been photographed.

A naturalized Ecuadorian named Juan Moricz took several rolls of high-quality pictures, verified in this way the accounts the natives have been giving
Crespi, and subsequently lay legal claim to the entire tunnel network.

His grandiose claim was denied by the courts, but his photographs cannot be.

...less than the bullion value of the precious metal.” (p. 139)

The “heavy mineral crust enamel coating” of many artifacts indicates that they were “buried under searing volcanic heat.” (p. 139)

Concerning sophisticated artifacts, like the Phoenician calendars, the golden Middle Eastern helmets, the golden armor, and the golden plaques: these “would bring hundreds of thousands of dollars and perhaps millions on the private market; to suggest that a sophisticated forger unloaded them on the priest for a low price is to deny the greed that motivates forgery!” (p. 140)

Concerning a cast steel shield: “Steel casting is beyond the metallurgical capacity of present day Tayos Indians.” (p. 143)

(B) Fakes

Regarding fakes (which Crespi knowingly purchases in his casual, humanitarian style, at the same time chiding the seller): “The modern solder and hacksaw marks give them away.” (p. 136)

Far from creating fakes in order to reap high profits, some of the Indian diggers in Ecuador have cut up and reshaped genuinely ancient and priceless materials in order to get any kind of price at all for it. We have mentioned earlier the ebony column...carved with the Ecuadorian
national seal and decorated with gold cut from a sheet of mysterious ancient wallpaper.” (p. 139)

Picture (p. 36)—“Obviously genuine copper ‘radiators’ were redecorated by Indian discoverers.”

Picture (p. 39)—“Heavy brass ‘bass viol’ a real-fake soldered together from original thick wall sheeting.” The brass sheet metal is genuine and very old, but the instrument was crafted by modern forgers. One can see where existing designs on the brass sheets were cut through in the
manufacture of the article.

Picture (p. 142)—“Genuine silver wrapped gold trimmed elephant. Yet decorated with modern brass thumb tacks.”

Picture (p. 146)—“Bottom of tin can. Clumsily fire blackened to simulate real volcanic mineral patina on genuine objects. The carbon on this olive oil can be rubbed off on a sheet of paper. The black patina on most of Crespi’s material is enameled to the metal.”

In summary:

“The genuine green porphyry patina on many of the articles,...the enormous
quantities of cheaply bought gold articles, the metallurgical uniqueness of some of the artifacts (such as the platinum nose cone and the radiators), the Mid-eastern artistic motifs, and the abundance of art ides for which little or no market exists (such as the air pipes and the
‘wallpaper’) pose difficult questions for those who carelessly write the collection off as a hoax.”
(p. 140)

References

1. Eric Van Daniken Gold of The Gods (1973)
2. J. Golden Barton The Lost Gold of Ancient Ecuador, Ancient American Vol. 4 Number 25, 1998
3. Richard Wingate Lost Outpost of Atlantis 1980 Everest House Publishing Company
4. Wayne Hamby Voices From The Dust 1977 Osmond Publishing Company

Summary

I hope that you enjoyed this little glimpse in the statist-overturning world of the good Father.

Nations around the world extracting the American occupation forces as a contemporaneous “Sunset Boulevard” insanity prevails

In this article we discuss the necessity of extraction of the American occupation forces that have military bases in most other “independent” nations around the world.

American military bases in an “independent” nation means that that nation is not independent or sovereign. Instead it is a proxy territory under the ownership of the United States.

Which of course means that the wealthy people in that nation want it that way.

The extraction of the American military occupation forces is now a top priority all over the world.

A united Asia has appeared, and a weak America is expecting their proxy nations to die, and be destroyed, so that Washington DC to live on. And those in those nations don’t like that idea. They believe that if the United States wants to fight Asia, that they would prefer to stay out of the fray. Let the USA fight those USA-wars. Leave them out of it.

Either align with Asia or be neutral. That’s their choice, and their decision. And right now, many of these same nations are trying to diplomatically “straddle the fence”; trying to be functionally neutral. But if the USA pushes too hard, they might have to make some decisions that the USA will not like to see.

Here we look at the reality and what is not being reported in the “news”.

What started this…

This entire article was triggered by Ultan who wrote;

Interesting to note the BIG stuff going on in South Korea, too. They are fighting hard to reassert their War capabilities and removing themselves from US operational control over top level military decision making. A move very recently rebuffed by Lloyd Austin, but fast becoming a political hot potato as they enter into a very important election year.

As a client state of the US– as is Japan– this will be a difficult task. They MUST know that annihilation beckons if they remain coupled to the US system entering into a crucial phase and deteriorating Asia-Pacific situation. The US also installed THAAD defensive batteries a few years back despite nearly every single Korean being vehemently opposed to such a move. No effect, but in recent months there has been a LOT of top level political to- and froing between South Korea and the US.
A lot going on there and very little reporting.

What was it the Domain contact told us? Long standing agreements will be broken and many new secret agreements will be made.

I sense China and Korea talking shop. Perhaps Japan, too. As do a lot of Korean analysts.

S Korea is also making big moves toward the North and Moon is very keen to officially end the armistice in place since the 1950s.

Official peace = USFSK bye bye. And good riddance. Prostitution and crime surrounds every base, there. Drugs too. And Korean society don’t do drugs. Same problems in Okinawa.

I know that most Koreans want that occupying force gone permanently. But the huge US– they say it’s Korean but everybody knows it isn’t– naval base on Jeju Island remains a major issue. And of course will quickly be turned to glass if US-China goes hot. As will the THAAD batteries and civilian populations unlucky enough to be nesr them. And there are many.

Everyone in Korea knows this. Everyone. And it causes them much concern. All completely unreported, of course.

But the US deep apparatus is bonded tightly to the Korean elites and won’t be undone easily.

Another worrying trend is that the Korean government has recently started pushing the MRNA rollout agenda VERY hard despite a much freer reporting of the ghastly side effects. 70% target by Spring 2022– and they’re into the schools already. But there’s a lot of resistance. Koreans tend to trust their government generally, but much remains uncertain in this concern.

Please do remember to keep the Korean people in your intentions, if possible, and that the right decisions will be made. I spent many years in Korea and have family there; and I know the Korean government genuinely tries to look after it’s citizens but the US Muppets at the top of a very wealthy society are dug well in there too. And will not be removed easily. No chance. They’ve been feeding at that trough for decades and are well tied up with Japanese elites too despite both countries troubled history.

Kinda like the Taiwanese billionaires. Only loyal to their personal bottom line.

This is a major concern for the average Korean citizen too with property speculation and the cost of living impoverishing many in a country that had until recently eliminated poverty for most folks similar to what China is doing now. And folks there are waking up to that and are not happy. Nor are they stupid. Far from it. They see what’s happening to their country as the same old global elites dig in there too.

A North South Korean unification would be a major setback for US war plans. It’s going to be an interesting story to watch over the next few months.

Hum.

Things for thought.

Then on LinkedIN…

And after I read this, I moseyed over to LinkedIN where I read this from Richard Turrin;

Africa’s digital infrastructure isn’t the next playing field, its "game over" with China providing the majority of digital connectivity on the continent.

According to an Atlantic Council study - "The Digital Infrastructure Imperative in African Markets,” - around 50 percent of Africa’s 3G networks and 70 percent of its 4G networks are built by Huawei.

Meanwhile, as the US and the EU strive for a “Build Back Better World” program to counter China’s BRI, they are missing the real transformation:

“But today, the real competition is in the digital, rather than the physical, realm: the struggle to shape Africa’s technology infrastructure and digital future, as well as how the next generation of Africans will consume, interact, and do business with the world.”

Say what you will about China’s Belt and Road Initiative, at least China was paying attention to the continent and providing critical infrastructure. Where was the US and EU?

Google’s “Project Loon” flew internet-enabled balloons over Kenya with at a cost of roughly $20k per balloon back in 2011 as their plan to connect sub-Saharan Africa.  Its latest project “Taara” has yet to deliver. 

While Google flew balloons, Huawei and ZTE were hard-wiring the continent. If it seems disproportionate and slightly absurd it should.

Don't be surprised that the digital yuan is built into the tech stack:

“With informal markets, which dominate African commerce as the continent moves into the digital world, this technology stack will only rise in importance. A critical example of an area of future competition is in digital currencies, including China’s digital yuan. While the utility of the digital yuan in Africa is currently minimal, the proliferation of Chinese handsets with pre-downloaded apps and wallets that could be loaded to support digital yuan transactions could significantly change this picture within the next ten to fifteen years, as both businesses and individuals embrace the currency.”

Then there are the subsea cables with the 2Africa cable built by China Mobile with service to 16 countries built by a consortium that does include Facebook and Orange. 

Or China’s 7,500 mile “Peace cable” connecting China, the Horn of Africa with Marseille France. At least Google’s Equiano cable will connect Nigeria and South Africa with Portugal.

African nations face a stark choice, follow the Trump administration’s “Clean Network Initiative” that blacklists all China tech and severely restricts their digital growth, or avail themselves of Chinese digital infrastructure and get on with their lives. The choice is simple. 

“Build it and they will come” would seem an appropriate closing line.

Too bad the US and EU seem to have forgotten the saying.

The African nations, as well as the SE Asian nations have a stark choice. And what direction are they moving towards?

They are moving towards China

The South East Asian region are finally coming together.

"...The crusader will be chase out of Asia soon. Peace in the region will finally arrive. As former Malaysia Prime minister Dr. Mahathir used to say, malay has always being a weaker people, but survive the past 2000 years with China as neighbor, and when people from far away came to Malaysia, Malaysia was colonized within 3 years. 

People in Asia (includes Japanese and Korean) will dare to openly ask the crusaders to fuck off Asia in the near future when China becomes significantly stronger. "

This took place for the first time :

Russia, China and a number of significant Southeast Asian countries kicked off their first ever joint naval exercise along the Strait of Malacca, one of the world's most important shipping lanes, on Wednesday, Indonesia's navy said.

The drills come at a time of growing tensions in the Pacific, particularly around the South China Sea, which the United States has a very active and aggressive military presence. All ten members of ASEAN, Southeast Asia's regional bloc, participated in Wednesday's drills.

This article was published in the jakartapost.com with the title " Russia, ASEAN hold first naval drills off Indonesian coast ".

Click to read: https://www.thejakartapost.com/world/2021/12/01/russia-asean-hold-first-naval-drills-off-indonesian-coast-.html.

What is happening?

That article was followed by a post by Sebastion Ibold who wrote…

❓Have you heard about the 🇨🇳#China-🇱🇦#Laos railway?

After 6 years of construction, the China-Laos #railway will be opened as part of the Pan-Asia Railway Network tomorrow on December 2 (coinciding with the 46th anniversary of the establishment of the Laos People’s Democratic Republic).



👉The bullet trains (by CRRC Qingdao Sifang and CRRC Dalian) with a designed speed of 160km/h and a capacity of 720 passengers will connect the capital of Laos #Vientiane and the capital of China's #Yunnan province #Kunming on a total length of 1,024 km.

⏱💵The rail link between the cities will bring down travel time from currently up to 30 hours (by bus) to about 10 hours (Vientiane-Jinghong about 3 hours) contributing to regional integrated development, bilateral trade and increased investments.



🚅🔋The mixed single and double track connection is fully electrified.

🚇The railway connection features 167 tunnels with a total tunnel length of more than 590 km, accounting for 63% of the railway's total distance, the 508 km Yuxi-Mohan section alone has 93 tunnels and 136 bridges - more than 87% of the section being bridges and tunnels with 15 tunnels each stretching more than 10 km.

🚅📦The rail connection will initially be used only by freight trains (operating between 22 freight depots), with passenger services between the line’s 11 stations due to be introduced after Covid-related cross-boarder travel restrictions are lifted.



📄To optimize bilateral cross-border railway transport services, on November 30, China and Laos have signed the first bilateral intergovernmental cooperation agreement in the field of rail transport.

❗️Side info: 

👉The rail connection should also been seen against the background of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (#RCEP) agreement (Australia, Brunei, Cambodia, China, Japan, Laos, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam and New Zealand have submitted their ratifications, and the RCEP is expected to come into force at the beginning of 2022).

👉Foreign trade between China and the #ASEAN grew by 21% Y-o-Y to about EUR 510 billion in the first 3 quarters of this year, accounting for about 14% of China's total exports and imports (in this period).

Laos has High Speed Rail.

Pakistan has High Speed Rail.

Africa has Chinese Medium Speed Rail and getting 5G internet.

And NO, China is not dying

#Didi shows just how dead China’s tech IPOs are in the US, but look to China’s data protection to be repeated elsewhere as four key stories unfold.

Some will say good riddance to China’s US IPOs and see it as a benefit of China “decoupling.” I don’t buy that given that Wall Street pulled in $6.4 billion in fees from China IPOs between 2014 and 2021.

Despite my sadness over the situation, there are four critical stories that you need to follow:

1️⃣ This is a battle over data “the new oil”:

China is enforcing strict data sovereignty over Didi’s ride-share data. It’s hard to judge the granularity of data shared with US investors as part of the listing, but whatever the amount it clearly exceeded the regulator’s (CAC) threshold.

For its part, Didi claims that it is “absolutely not possible” that the company passed data to the US because its servers are all located in China. Maybe, but this did not assuage the CAC, who warned Didi not to list.

The CAC may be overly protective, but the bigger issue of investor access to data during IPOs is real and won’t go away. Didi may be the first with this problem but I don’t expect it to be the last.

Data will now be a high priority for any tech listing something that to date has been ignored in almost all IPOs.

2️⃣ China just closed the “Variable Interest Entity” or VIE loophole:

Separately, China also launched an attack on Chinese IPOs with the ending of its VIE loophole. VIEs are a structure that almost all Chinese firms, use to list in the US. VIEs allows the economic benefits of China’s companies, to pass to an off-shore entity, without changing the share structure in China. Unknown to many, US shares in Chinese companies don’t actually convey ownership.

The VIE structure was key to many US listings and Chinese regulators have banned it for overseas listings except in Hong Kong where it is subject to approval.

3️⃣ The US SEC just launched new reporting requirements:

In case you thought it was just China that had it in for US listings the SEC just announced a major change this week. Companies that use an auditor in a foreign jurisdiction will be required to confirm they are not “owned or controlled by a government entity.” The tricky part is of course the word “controlled.”

4️⃣ Sensetime IPO in Hong Kong!

SenseTime, the AI giant, is listing in HK this week with a $750 million raise. It will be an interesting test of the new system. Hong Kong has to get it right and avoid the PayTM debacle just witnessed in India.

These four factors should make it clear that it’s “Game Over” for China IPOs in the US!

There are a lot of moving pieces to follow and this will be interesting to watch play out!

Paywall? (https://outline.com/eEBg4V)

…

No China is not dying. But the USA is…

I hate to smash it over and over, but unless you are in the corporate world, you cannot understand the GIGANTIC NON STOP RELENTLESS preference shown to blacks, especially black women. And these disgusting beasts are keenly aware of their new untouchable status. On a new project I started at my second job, the “Team Leader” is named LaRonnie. She has not passed the Bar her first try, but hey? Who cares? She was made Team Leader anyway, and the partner signs her pleading “until I pass that thing”. It is enough to make day drinking very seductive.

The world is changing. Asia is powerful and growing. They are opening up the world while the United States, is acting well… like a scene from “Sunset Boulevard”. And this is a fact.

Sunset Boulevard

Sunset Boulevard weaves a magnificent tale of faded glory and unfulfilled ambition. Silent movie star Norma Desmond longs for a return to the big screen, having been discarded by tinsel town with the advent of “talkies.” Her glamour has faded in all but her mind. When she meets struggling Hollywood screenwriter Joe Gillis in dramatic circumstances, their subsequent passionate and volatile relationship leads to an unforeseen and tragic conclusion.

A classic movie.

I think that the United States is like Norma Desmond. A long faded nation that has gone to seed, but still believes that it is beautiful and adored the world over. It hasn’t caught up with the reality of what it is, what it represents, and what it’s actions are heading towards.

After seeing Sunset Boulevard again, I was surprised at how good the film was. While witty, it is savage, dark and original, and is quite simply too good to be missed. The story, while stark, is brilliantly constructed, about a former movie queen haunted by memories of her past greatness, and the script is both canny and knowing, sporting great lines such as "I am big. It is the pictures that got small". Billy Wilder, director of Some Like It Hot and Witness for the Prosecution, both of which are hugely enjoyable, directs briskly, and the black and white cinematography, sets and costumes are fabulous. The music score from maestro Franz Waxman is outstanding, haunting, rich yet beautiful as well.

In many ways Sunset Boulevard is like the reverse side of the coin of A Star Is Born. In that film we have young Vicki Lester going through all the travails and heartache before achieving her goal of movie stardom.

Sunset Boulevard is the reverse. A Star Is Born has its tragic figure in Norman Maine who commits suicide rather than face being a has been. In Sunset Boulevard we have the character of Norma Desmond who has not taken that route. She lacks for nothing in the material world, she wisely saved and invested her money. But the acclaim of the audience is a drug she craves. She's been at the top on the celebrity roller-coaster and now is at the bottom.

Into her life comes Joe Gillis quite accidentally. Fleeing from some repo men looking to take his car, Gillis drives into the garage of what he thinks is a deserted mansion. It looks pretty run down from the outside. Gillis compares it to the house of Miss Faversham from Great Expectations, little knowing how right he was.

Sunset Boulevard for it's time and with the Code firmly in place was a brutal look at the sexual needs of a middle-aged woman. Before Holden knows it, he's giving up his life as an aspiring screenwriter to be a kept gigolo. He doesn't like it, but can't leave it.

When he does, it results in tragedy.

You will never forget the finely etched characters of Sunset Boulevard. You can see it many times as I've done, but if you see it only once you will have it burned in your memory. Especially that last scene before the newsreel cameras where Swanson loses whatever sanity she has left.

She descends down the stairs of her mansion and descends into the comfort of insanity.

Gloria Swanson though is a revelation as Norma, not only wholly convincing but also bringing a desperate and somewhat vampiric glamour to the role. Overall, Sunset Boulevard is a wonderful film, wholly deserving of its masterpiece status.

And, if you haven’t watched the movie, then you should. View the world today on a Geo-political front, and you will see so many parallels to the movie.

America is Norma Desmond.

Yes it is.

In the movie, the Norman Desmond’s butler is seen writing fake fan mail for her to receive in her mail box. Is this not the same thing as modern day “echo chambers”?

In the movie, the innocent screenwriter discovered that he is trapped inside an ornate elaborate mansion as a gigolo. Is this not the same thing as a millions of people who are addicted to hand outs from the United States government. Whether they are poor people on food stamps, a military-industrial complex requiring massive outlays in weapon development, or proxy nations that rely on American “aid packages”?

In the movie, Norma Desmond is treated with respect and admiration for her past, but is now also treated as a tragedy to sell newspapers. Like how people want to look at a car crash. Is this not the same thing as what the You-Tube and Tic-Tok videos portray America as? As the crazy antics of Washington DC as?

Like Norma Desmond, the United States is also lashing out. It is creating a massive campaign of lies and slander against the industry, other actors and all competition. There is no difference between Norma Desmond discussing producers and the movie studios, and the Western “news” media.

Like Norma Desmond it is provoking conflict and trouble everywhere. While Norma Desmond would break things and cause distress, America is creating wars and conflict around the world.

Like Norma Desmond who is spending money so aggressively that it is running out, America too it is spending money that it does not have, and it is falling deeper and deeper in the hole.

Aggressive Military provocations

Here’s an outline of no less than five major provocations from Taiwan to Africa within two weeks of Biden promising to work on improving ties with China – not even including Peng Shuai.

“𝘓𝘪𝘮𝘪𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘸𝘢𝘳 𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘛𝘢𝘪𝘸𝘢𝘯 𝘪𝘴 𝘥𝘦𝘴𝘪𝘳𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦, 𝘜𝘚 𝘮𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘳𝘺 𝘦𝘹𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘵𝘴 𝘴𝘢𝘺”
Strategists admit West is goading China into war...

It took the US only a few days after the summit between Presidents Xi and Biden to sail another warship, this time the USS Milius, through the Taiwan Strait along the coast of China this week. Obviously hardly any news about this event in Western mainstream media. The case of Peng Shuai has been the media headline this week to slash the Chinese government. 

Though warships from the USA, UK and Canada have been sailing through the Taiwan strait and US diplomats and military trainers landing in Taiwan in recent months, Western media completely omits these events but instead is fully complicit to the anti-China propaganda of the “China aggression against Taiwan”. Not to forget about the “death of Hong Kong”, the “genocide of Xinjiang” or the “imminent invasion of Australia” this year.

𝘞𝘩𝘺 𝘥𝘰𝘦𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘞𝘦𝘴𝘵 𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘶𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘸𝘢𝘯𝘵 𝘵𝘰 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘷𝘰𝘬𝘦 𝘊𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘢 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘰 𝘢 𝘸𝘢𝘳 ?

1) Most obvious as China is already or soon to become world’s leading economic power. A war might destabilize China going forward as has been tried before by the USA and allies meddling in Hong Kong and Xinjiang.

2) Less visible but more rooted in governance, the West wants to trigger China starting a war to actually become member of the “war league”; countries who have been raging wars with the USA leading, being practically non-stop in wars for decades with millions of deaths. This when China has not been in any war since decades during the miraculous economic growth. 

Provoking China to fire the first bullet along with the so-called “rules-based order”, the West can definitely paint China as the aggressor that the rest of the world must unite against. 

3) Along with this aim, the Western hegemony based on the Military Industrial Complex (along with Media and Academics these days) is challenged by new strategic collaborations such as the strategic comprehensive partnership between China and ASEAN nations which will not only enhance economic and trade but also include peace, environment, poverty, stability and even a nuclear weapons-free zone in the region. These partnerships of the future are an immense threat to the Military-Industrial Complex hegemony of the West. Division, tension, confrontation and provocation are the tools to disrupt these partnerships and ‘safeguard’ the hegemony.

The West’s political and media agenda for China; luring China into a war and manipulating their own people by omission and lies. With consequences of inciting racism and sinophobia.

Chinese President Xi concluded this week at the China-ASEAN strategic summit with a Chinese saying : “Distance tests a horse's strength, and time reveals a person's integrity" 

https://flv60b020h.larksuite.com/docs/docusKkhCXvwJWRF1hz1XdkavSf

Aggressive Slander

And the slandering of China and the rest of the world is just insane, but with the insanity comes comedy. Check out this pack of lies… unpacked for illustrative purposes…

Indeed.

Those of us who know better see this and laugh. laugh and laugh at the ignorance of those that create this image, and those that believe it.

China has a very ritualized procedure for execution.

[1] The accused gets to wear their best clothes, [2] they eat a McDonald Happy meal, [3] are given a calming drug to sedate them. They are then [4] tied with the reason for their execution and then finally [5] killed by a single bullet to the head.

Next…

Ok, sorry for the digression. Those of us who know how this system works can easily spot the fake shit.

Ok, so let’s get back on track.

But first, let’s look at something nice.

How things are advertised in China

This is an actual advertisement on my LinkedIN feed this morning.

…

Hey dear friends , I would like to share these pictures taken by my brother Mark Dan for me here, I hope you like our Chinese culture and my brother’s art . He is really a great photographer in China .

Then this photo…

The costume of first picture belongs to Tang dynasty which has been past 1400 years , the second and third one belongs to Han dynasty which were very popular 1800 years ago.

And then photo 4…

By the way , we are the largest Sprayer, lotion pump , cosmetic manufacturer in China . Each day we produce around 1.5 to 1.8 million pieces. Many trading companies and distributors buy from us and resell to their clients .

If you are also in this field , just don’t hesitate to contact me . Thanks and nice day!

Now that was nice. Right?

And it gets results…

This is another post of her’s the next day…

Yesterday, an advertisement for our products I posted in linkedin reached more than 100000 readings within 12 hours. In fact each of my post is easy to reach 100000 views everyday.

It has produced a great advertising effect, and I received inquiries from 8 customers this morning.

Today, I am here to sincerely share these experiences with you, not to show off, but to talk with you about how we should make good use of the LinkedIn platform.

As one of the social platforms, LinkedIn is the best platform for developing customers. Because almost all major customers have made their presence in LinkedIn.

The biggest barrier in business is information asymmetry that clients also try hard to seek good suppliers while we are trying to find them.

Therefore, how to let customers in need find us has become the most critical factor. Linkedin provides such a good platform, but many people are afraid to expose themselves.

They always make their profile look professional but never dare to expose themselves.

However, in LinkedIn, no matter how beautiful your profile looked like or how strong your professional skills are, if you don’t expose yourself and never make any activity in linkedin, people couldn’t find you at all, then what are all those could make sense ?

Well, how to correctly expose yourself in LinkedIn is the key.

My suggestion is to share as much as possible sincerely and link as many people as possible.

Some people will think like this:

"The people I linked to are irrelevant to my industry. it is nonsense to connect with them."

Well, I must say this is totally wrong! Of course, we all want to link to direct customers. The goal is clear, but the road is tortuous.

We must understand this truth. Each day I made many friends by my posts, but all these friends are not my customer. However each day I spent lot of time to communicate with them .

Why I must do it ?

Because only sincerity could make real friends. Only real friends will help you to click “like” and comment for your posts, and only if your post could get more “like” or comments , it could get more views ! Only your post get more views, clients will have chance to know your company and send inquires to you.

Where you spent your time, where you gain. Each day I spent lot of energy and time to reply each comments , Because I know , if each time I never make response to my friends , how could they maintain the enthusiasm to make comments for me next time ?

If I didn’t treat friends with full sincerity , how can they treat me back equally ?

Well , think about it and best luck ! Hope you like to enjoy these pictures offered by my brother Mark Dan , you know they are great arts and i do think our efforts deserve you to click a simple ” like ” for us .

Well, we are Sprayer, lotion pump, cosmetic bottles manufacturer , we produce 1.2-1.5 million pieces each day which are the most professional manufacturer in this field.

From Ming Cui

“China colonized Caribbean?” 

In 2018 I travelled twice with a German cruise over 1 month around Caribbean, visited nearly all beautiful islands, talked to many locals. 

in Dominican Republic
on the way to a place of interest, the tour guide pointed to the Bridge we were passing
China built this bridge for us.

He thumbed to me, I were deeply touched.

In Grenada
The tour guide introduced the stadium, thumbed to me as the demonican guy,
China built it for us!
Our boys can play!

In Jamaica, in Panama….

I heard not a single complain from local people About infrastructure set up by China.

All of them thanked for being connected with rest of world.

This is my real experience in the Caribbean
this is not an ideology oriented story.

If you want to know a new culture and people, the single way is be there!

Get the feeling of local people! What really counts👏🏻👏🏻

But America is “off the rails”

MAGA plans…

MAGA conspiracy theorist calls for mass hangings of US senators: ‘The gallows are getting wider’
https://lnkd.in/eN4xRuei

A former Trump aide is trying to build a violent right-wing Christian takeover of the US
https://lnkd.in/e_3Knptp

A Christian legal army is waging war on America
https://lnkd.in/e7dgnDtG

The Supreme Court threatens to undermine the core of protection for American civil liberties
https://lnkd.in/eKmFtbVs

Africa

Howard French on the Stark Differences Between U.S. and Chinese Diplomacy in Africa:

Every year, for many years, either the Chinese premier or the Chinese chairman, meaning the equivalent of our president, has made a multi-country trip to Africa. 

And every single year, high-level delegations of what’s called the State Council, which is basically the cabinet, go to Africa — multiple members — every single year. 

The United States has no equivalent level of engagement with the African continent and until it does, the dynamics of the situation are not going to change. 
When the United States gets around to visiting or engaging with Africa, it typically bundles a lot of African leaders into a room and says “OK, here’s our thing, we’ve just met with Africa.” It doesn’t even give African countries the respect of treating them on an individual basis at a high level and you give some kind of portmanteau speech where you throw the whole continent together.

The feeling that you get, and certainly the feeling that Africans get, is that the Americans are taking a kind of checklist approach to the continent — yes, we know we have to do this every once and a while but it’s never high on the agenda and ok check there it goes.

From Here.

American military occupation bases

Well, obviously they aren’t called that. But that is what they actually are. If a given nation asks the USA to leave, what does it do when the USA says “NO!”? Well, you can easily see where the nations are that want the bases removed. You just look for NGO sponsored color revolutions in the target nations.

Here we will just look over a precious few American military bases in some of the “independent” nations of the Pacific.

Korea

Japan

Australia

In each case, the military presence is sizable and formidable. In fact, the presence is so large that were America desirous of taking over the nation that hosts them, they would be able to do so immediately.

Next…

So what am I saying?

I am saying that while America is collapsing like Norma Desmond, it still has it’s tentacles in a host of other nations. And the only way for the USA to collapse upon itself peacefully is to withdraw from those other nations and downsize it’s military presence.

If it does not, then you can expect either a major global war that will utilize those military assets, or localized military skirmishes as individual nations thwart the stranglehold the Untied States has in that region.

America is Norma Desmond…

video 54MB

video 59MB

But the rest of the world is healthy. Like China

Video. Rufus action to clear a road

Meanwhile, China is friggin’ Awesome.

Check out this video. (Opens up to the streaming media page directly)

An American from San Francisco compares America with China.

China a Modern Miracle

Another one of his videos. Check it out…

America is the sick, ill corrupt Norma Desmond

While…

China is helping rebuild the rest of the world…

After centuries of abuse and neglect by the collective West, China is helping to rebuild the world. Video

So what is the point?

The world can see what is going on. Not only is China thriving, but it is welcoming other nations to partake in the thriving society that China represents. It is welcoming other nations to “hop on board”, while the USA is trying to build a “coalition of the West” that will destroy China “once and for all”.

Other nations are being forced to choose.

Right now, many are publicly trying to stay neutral, but are making backroom deals and hidden plans on what to do regarding their own individual situations. And yes, this is not being reported, but it sure as shit, is what is going on. We will see what happens, but my guess is that Asia is being far more successful than the USA is in this battle of global alignments and friendships.

What do you think?

video

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 2

Articles & Links

Master Index

You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
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America is driving the shit-show that the world faces today

Some very good articles out of Asia these days. They are well worth the read. I’m throwing out my collection, which includes some “fear mongering” tabloid articles out of the UK. After all they are the only ones getting upset with the battle of war-words out of Washington DC and the military build up that is resulting.

…

The “West” is so full of shit.

The West has predicted China’s downfall for 30 years now. I wonder if these reputed publications ever go back to check what they predicted wrongly?

Here is the link to the video: https://lnkd.in/dFSiVD3m

1990. The Economist: China’s economy has come to a halt.
1996. The Economist: China’s economy will face hard landing.
1998. The Economist: China’s economy entering a dangerous period of sluggish growth.
1999. Bank of Canada: Likelihood of a hard landing for the Chinese economy.
2000. Chicago Tribune: China currency move nails hard landing risk coffin.
2001. Wilbanks, Smith & Thomas: A hard landing in China.
2002. Westchester University: China Anxiously Seeks A Soft Economic landing.
2003. KWR International: How to find a soft landing if China..
2004. The Economist: The great fall of China?
2005. Nouriel Roubini: The Risk of a Hard Landing in China.
2006. International Economy: Can China Achieve a Soft Landing?
2007. TIME: Is China’s Economy Overheating? Can China avoid a hard landing?
2008. Forbes: Hard Landing in China?
2009. Fortune: China’s hard landing. China must find a way to recover.
2010. Nouriel Roubini: Hard landing coming in China.
2011. Business Insider: A Chinese Hard Landing May Be Closer Than You Think.
2012. American Interest: Dismal Economic News from China: A Hard Landing.
2013. Zero Hedge: A Hard Landing in China.
2014. CNBC: A hard landing in China.
2015. Forbes: Congratulations, You got Yourself A Chinese Hard Landing….
2016. The Economist: Hard Landing looms for China.
2017. National Interest: Is China’s Economy Going To Crash?
2018. The Daily Reckoning: China’s Coming Financial Meltdown.
2019. Zero Hedge: Seven Reasons Why China Is Facing A Hard Landing In 2019
2020. Forbes: Remember The China ‘Hard Landing’? We Got One.

…But it’s already 2021, and China’s economy is still going strong.

…

But first. When was the last time you thought about just going to a diner, a restaurant and ordering a fine pie? Usually, for most people they order a meal, or get a coffee and the pie, is always an after thought. Well I suggest that you all just go forth and go to a restaurant for the express purpose of eating a nice pie. Maybe a yam or rutabaga pie. And put a scoop of ice cream on top why don’t you?

You know the USA is pushing, and pushing and pushing. they really want China to “lost face” and to do something stupid that America can control. As indicated in this article…

U.S. lawmakers coming to Taiwan on military-focused trip -report

by Reuters

Thursday, 25 November 2021 10:18 GMT

TAIPEI, Nov 25 (Reuters) – Five members of the U.S. House of Representatives are expected to arrive in Taiwan on Friday for a short trip focused on meetings with the island’s defence ministry, Taiwan’s official Central News Agency reported on Thursday.

The trip comes as China has stepped up military and political pressure to assert its sovereignty claims over the island, spurring anger in Taipei where the government has vowed to defend Taiwan’s freedom and democracy.

The report said the delegation would be made up of Mark Takano, chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, and Colin Allred, Elissa Slotkin, Sara Jacobs and Nancy Mace, and would also meet Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen.

Taiwan’s Foreign and Defense Ministries declined to comment.
The de facto U.S. embassy in Taipei did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The five lawmakers are currently in East Asia on a Thanksgiving trip to Japan and South Korea.

It would be the second trip of lawmakers to Taiwan this month.

China’s military conducted a combat readiness https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-opposes-us-legislators-visiting-taiwan-by-military-plane-state-media-2021-11-09 patrol in the direction of the Taiwan Strait earlier this month, after its defense ministry condemned a visit to Taiwan by a U.S. congressional delegation (it said) had arrived on a military aircraft.

The United States like most countries has no official ties with Taiwan but is the democratically-ruled island’s most important international backer and arms supplier, to Beijing’s anger. (Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Kim Coghill)

…

It seems like a bunch of “Representatives” want to have a vacation in Japan, and see the opportunity to stir up some trouble.They are clueless idiots that are playing a game that will have deathly consequences.

From a contributor Uncle Albert in the comments section;

I have been following her blog for quite awhile now…she gets it, MM
Efforts To Groom Us For War With China Are Getting More Forceful

Caitlin Johnstone
58 min ago 6

“China’s massive investment in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) may show China is preparing to fundamentally change the status quo and preparing for possible war with the United States over Taiwan,” the piece begins. “To deter China, the United States must rapidly build up its forces in the Pacific, continue to strengthen military alliances in the region to ensure access to bases in time of conflict, and accelerate deliveries of purchased military equipment to Taiwan.”

The article goes on to narrate about Taiwan’s importance on the global chessboard and why we should all expect a full-scale invasion by Beijing quite soon, casually discusses a direct military conflict between two nuclear-armed nations like it’s no big deal, and calls on the Biden administration to “articulate to the American people why Taiwan’s defense is critical to the United States.”

Then at the very bottom of the article you get to the part that really matters: the information about the author.

“David Sauer is a retired senior CIA officer who served as chief of station and deputy chief of station in multiple overseas command positions in East Asia and South Asia.“

Ahh, okay.

Apparently this “retired” senior CIA officer has been spending his “retirement” churning out war propaganda articles for The Hill with titles like “The US cannot allow China to think it will abandon Taiwan” and “The next US president has a tall order: Keeping China in check“, as well as acting as an expert source for virulent anti-China propaganda rag The Epoch Times.

Would you like to know what this big brave warrior looks like? Would you like to see a picture of this mighty hero who has no fear of leading us all into a third round.

Why is it that all the worst warmongering narrative managers are always weird-looking little nerds who plainly wouldn’t know how to hold their own dicks, much less a gun? Were they bullied so bad in school that they just have to act out their pent-up aggression by helping to incinerate families in the global south over crude oil or something? What the hell is wrong with these freaks?

Anyone who supports the idea of the US and its allies entering into a third world war against a nuclear-armed nation to determine who governs an island off the Chinese mainland is an enemy of humanity. Such a war could easily kill tens of millions of people if engaged with full commitment, which could turn into billions at any time if it went nuclear. 

I hope Beijing never launches an unprovoked attack on Taiwan (unlikely), and I hope the US doesn’t provoke it into doing so (far more likely), but if all this brinkmanship spins out of control and that does indeed happen then entering into such a war to stop it would benefit nobody but a few sociopaths in Washington, Langley and Arlington. And quite possibly not even them.

Contrary to what propagandists like Sauer keep implying, the US is not even treaty-bound to defend Taiwan militarily and hasn’t been since 1979 when the only such treaty was annulled during Washington’s campaign to coax Beijing away from the Soviet Union. Yet because of their steadily escalating propaganda campaign, for the first time ever a majority of Americans surveyed on whether they’d support going to war with China over Taiwan now reportedly say yes. 

At best all these manipulations are geared toward manufacturing consent for pouring vastly increased military resources into the US empire’s ongoing pivot to Asia, which just by itself will necessarily include myriad provocations against the Chinese government which can easily escalate into war at any time. These people are playing games with the lives of every living organism on this planet, and they are suffering no consequences for doing so.

And now Moscow and Beijing are moving further into a military partnership that seems to be getting closer by the year in response to aggressions from the US and its client states, which, I dunno, I’m no historian but maybe might be cause for alarm when you’ve got world powers splitting into two increasingly hostile global alliances. 

Could that lead to something bad? 

It seems like maybe that could lead to something bad.

Cornered animals are dangerous, especially ones with fangs and claws. Dying empires are dangerous, especially ones with nuclear weapons. We’re being aggressively propagandized into consenting to insanely dangerous agendas geared toward maintaining US unipolar hegemony in defiance of the natural movement we are seeing toward a multipolar world. 

We are seeing signs everywhere that the drivers of empire are preparing to do some very, very crazy things in order to stop that movement and maintain their dominance. 

The fact that they are still ramping up their propaganda campaign is concerning, to say the least.

Yes. You are absolutely correct.

We begin our little shit-show by shoving up an article that has seen scant American / UK / Australian media coverage. This is from Reuters and covers Russia, and is all over Chinese media as well.

Russia claims that the United States rehearsed a first-strike MAD nuclear salvo against Russia.

Of course, the USA denies this. So you have the “he said / she said” syndrome. Who should you believe? My guess is that anyone who believes ANYTHING out of the Untied States these days is a fool, and mentally ill. The USA is the poster boy for evil insanity.

You know, why not play with your furry friends?

You know, it’s really easy to make toys for your cat. You can crumple up some aluminum foil. Give them some hair ties to play with, or a disposable stirrer from a fast food restaurant. And they will be amused for hours. If you really want to go all out, there is always the laser pointer option as well.

Moscow Says U.S. Rehearsed Nuclear Strike Against Russia This Month

By Reuters

Nov. 23, 2021, at 9:16 a.m.

By Andrew Osborn and Phil Stewart

MOSCOW/WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Russia’s defense minister on Tuesday accused U.S. bombers of rehearsing a nuclear strike on Russia from two different directions earlier this month and complained that the planes had come within 20 km (12.4 miles) of the Russian border.

But the Pentagon said its drills were announced publicly at the time and adhered to international protocols.

Moscow’s accusation comes at a time of high tension with Washington over Ukraine, with U.S. officials voicing concerns about a possible Russian attack on its southern neighbor – a suggestion the Kremlin has dismissed as false.

Moscow has in turn accused the United States, NATO and Ukraine of provocative and irresponsible behavior, pointing to U.S. arms supplies to Ukraine, Ukraine’s use of Turkish strike drones against Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine, and NATO military exercises close to its borders.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said that Moscow had noted a significant increase in the activity by U.S. strategic bombers, which he said had carried out 30 flights close to Russia this month. That, he said, was 2.5 times more than the same period last year.

Shoigu complained in particular of what he said was a simulated U.S. nuclear strike against Russia earlier this month.

"The defense minister underlined that during the U.S. military exercises 'Global Thunder', 10 American strategic bombers rehearsed launching nuclear weapons against Russia from the western and eastern directions," 

-Shoigu was quoted as saying in a defense ministry statement.

"The minimum proximity to our state border was 20 km."

Shoigu was quoted as saying that Russian air defence units had spotted and tracked the U.S. strategic bombers and taken unspecified measures to avoid any incidents.

The Pentagon pushed back.

"These missions were announced publicly at the time, and closely planned with (Strategic Command), (European Command), allies and partners to ensure maximum training and integration opportunities as well as compliance with all national and international requirements and protocols," 

-said Lieutenant Colonel Anton Semelroth, a Pentagon spokesperson.

The top Russian and U.S. military officers, Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, spoke by telephone on Tuesday but neither side disclosed the contents of the conversation.

Global Thunder, which this year put U.S. nuclear-capable B-52 bombers through their paces, is the U.S. Strategic Command’s annual nuclear and command exercise designed to test and demonstrate the readiness of U.S. nuclear capabilities.

President Vladimir Putin referenced the apparent episode briefly last week, complaining of Western strategic bombers carrying “very serious weapons” close to Russia. He said the West was taking Moscow’s warnings not to cross its “red lines” too lightly.

Shoigu made the comments in a video conference with Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe. He said that U.S. bomber flights close to Russia’s eastern borders were also a threat to China.

"Against this backdrop, Russo-Chinese coordination is becoming a stabilizing factor in world affairs," 

-said Shoigu.

Russia and China agreed at their meeting to step up cooperation between their armed forces when it came to strategic military exercises and joint patrols, the defense ministry said.

(Reporting by Andrew Osborn in Moscow and Phil Stewart in Washington;Additional reporting by Polina Devitt and Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber; Editing by Mark Trevelyan and Sandra Maler)

…

Which then heightens this next article. China and Russia have been coordinating their military activities for some time now, but the latest threats of preemptive nuclear strikes against Asia by American has really shaken everyone up…

How Russia’s ‘deadly’ new military alliance with China could end America’s status as world’s leading superpower

Mark Hodge

4:50 ET, Nov 26 2021
Updated: 7:01 ET, Nov 26 2021

RUSSIA and China’s “deadly” alliance would effectively end the United States’ status as the world’s leading superpower, an expert has claimed.

On Tuesday, Moscow said it has ramped up its military “cooperation” with Beijing in light of alleged threats by Washington including US nuke bombers flying near their borders.

Tensions between the West and Russia are at boiling point over the ongoing conflict in Ukraine and the migrant crisis in Belarus.

Isabel Sawkins, a research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society specializing in Russia, told The Sun Online that Russia and China joining forces could “potentially could be catastrophic” for Western powers.

She said:

"Bringing China into the conversation is a deadly addition for the West.

"This would mean America's standing in the world will be absolutely shot to pieces.

"If you have Russia and China working together the US is going to go into absolute panic.

"Because China is on its way up in the world. It's not only a massive economy - they have so much power.

"You would have China working with Russia and them both having this anxiety over the West - and that brings them together. That's a really terrifying prospect."

In August, Moscow and Beijing took part in joint war games and signed a so-called “brotherhood” pact “establishing twinning relations.”

This week, in light of US drills reportedly 20km from Russia’s border, the Kremlin’s defence minister Sergei Shoigu revealed the two authoritarian powers have stepped up their military alliance.

He said: “Against this backdrop, Russo-Chinese coordination is becoming a stabilising factor in world affairs.”

The two countries agreed during a video call to increase the cooperation between their armed forces when it came to strategic exercises and joint patrols, Russia’s defence ministry said.

Ms Sawkins said if the military partnership develops it will be “terrifying” for the West.

She said: “If Russia and China end up working together – they will want to put America down a few pegs.

"They don't think America deserves to be this global player at the forefront of everything.

"The Biden administration - its reputation has been tarnished by what happened in Afghanistan and this has lead to a lot of people questioning the credibility of the US when it comes to military interventions and activities abroad."

On the implications for Europe and Britain, she said: “It’s terrifying for the UK because we are significantly closer to the border with Russia than the US is.

“We are very, very close to Moscow.”

America would not be able to fight Russia and China by itself.

Isabel Sawkins

Ms Sawkins said that if Russia and China were to attack American forces, the UK would have to step in.

She said: “Europe is going to get caught up in the mess. We need to make sure that we are ready in case there are after strikes – and we have to go in. We have to be on guard basically.

"America would not be able to fight Russia and China by itself. America would need western partners and I think one of the first ones they would come to is us."

Earlier this month, Russia warned relations with the West are “almost at boiling point” as tensions surge over migrants at the Poland-Belarus border.

With Nato and Russian forces playing cat and mouse games, Putin said he would “simply destroy” any country that encroached on his country’s territory.

Recent days have seen US officials warn Russia may be plotting an invasion of Ukraine, with the Kremlin massing 100,000 troops on their border.

And Putin’s regime has been accused of stoking the unfolding migrant crisis between Belarus and Poland and even sent their own nuclear bomber jets into the area.

Belarus – dubbed Europe’s last dictatorship – has been accused of “weaponising” migration against the EU sparking a tense stand-off along their border with Poland with troops on both sides.

This comes after the European Union sanctioned Belarus following its brutal crackdown on anti-regime protestors following a disputed general election result.

China is a police state?

Hum…

Insightful. “Invalid and ill-informed interpretations accompany small kernels of truth in Western media” writes Jerry Grey for Global Times.

- https://lnkd.in/gKpr8mje

Jerry explains:

- How western media skews it constantly in reporting that Chinese people are oppressed while Westerners are not.

- The credit rating system of China which is sensible, and that all other countries have credit rating systems of their own. 

- The ID card of Chinese people and that "most Europeans countries also have one, it's nothing strange". 

- "In terms of surveillance and government control of official data, there isn't much difference between China and the West." 

- As is the case everywhere "in the developed world, social media controls our lives, we pay bills, communicate, entertain and educate .. These transactions create a data history and is stored. China has strong laws about what can be done with data and where must be stored. In the West, the laws are different, data is collected, stored offshore and sold. We read that China is oppressed by state control but we're reading it on the same Western media which is gathering your data and selling it for profit. These media platforms aren't banned in China, they refuse to operate under China's laws, China restricts their methods of generating huge income streams from your data. Western media not only misinform you; they make money doing so! "

- How you can ask "any Chinese person about crime and they will tell you they feel safer. China is in the bottom 10 countries in the world for murders with 0.6 per 100,000 people, compared to the US 5.35".

- "Ask Chinese people about the ubiquitous CCTV cameras, they'll tell you they like them. Walk around any Chinese city and notice the absence of criminal damage and graffiti, trains are spotless and completely safe, walking the streets at night does not bring a sense of foreboding but a sense of safety and security."

- How the "police in China are very good. Western police, however, seem to be closer to paramilitary than they are to public servants ..."

"People [in the west] are led to believe they have a say in their leadership, but offered limited choices, they are told they have freedom but are criticized, persecuted, punished or ostracized for expressing or acting on their freedoms. However, to encourage their electorate to believe they have these freedoms, politicians incentivize and use a compliant media to point toward China and manufacture stories to instill and amplify this fear. They describe China as a "police state," but it's a very wrong description.

A "police state" which really is a threat to Western society is not so in China. China's system protects people and their data from corporate pirates and criminal activities. Not only are Chinese people not afraid of their police state, they prefer it to living in a country riddled with so-called "freedoms."" opines the author.

Russia, China sign roadmap for closer military cooperation

World

Vladimir Isachenkov
Associated Press

Published: November 23, 2021 1:08 pm

MOSCOW – Russia’s defense chief on Tuesday signed a roadmap for closer military ties with China, pointing to increasingly frequent U.S. strategic bomber flights near both countries’ borders.

During a video call, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and his Chinese counterpart Wei Fenghe “expressed a shared interest in stepping up strategic military exercises and joint patrols by Russia and China,” according to the Russian Defense Ministry.

“China and Russia have been strategic partners for many years,” Shoigu said. “Today, in conditions of increasing geopolitical turbulence and growing conflict potential in various parts of the world, the development of our interaction is especially relevant.”

Shoigu pointed to increasingly intensive flights by the U.S. strategic bombers near Russian borders, saying that there were 30 such missions over the past month alone.

“This month, during the U.S. Global Thunder strategic force exercise, 10 strategic bombers practiced the scenario of using nuclear weapons against Russia practically simultaneously from the western and eastern directions,” Shoigu said, adding that they came as close as 20 kilometers (12 miles) to the Russian border.

He also noted a rise in the number of U.S. bomber flights over the Sea of Okhotsk where they practiced reaching the points for launching cruise missiles, saying that it poses a threat to both Russia and China.

“In such an environment, the Russian-Chinese coordination becomes a stabilizing factor in global affairs,” Shoigu said.

Wei praised Russia for successfully countering what he described as U.S. pressure and military threats.

Shoigu and Wei hailed a series of maneuvers that involved Russian and Chinese warplanes and naval ships, and signed a plan for military cooperation for 2021-2025.

On Friday, two Russian Tu-95MS strategic bombers and two Chinese H-6K strategic bombers flew a joint patrol over the Sea of Japan and the East China Sea, prompting South Korea to scramble fighter jets.

The bomber patrol followed joint naval maneuvers by Russian and Chinese warships and aircraft in the Sea of Japan last month.

In August, Shoigu visited China to attend joint war games, which marked the first time that Russian troops had taken part in drills on Chinese territory.

They were the latest in a series of war games in recent years, intended to underline increasingly close military relations between Moscow and Beijing.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, have developed strong personal ties to bolster a “strategic partnership” between the former Communist rivals as they both faced tensions with the West.

Russia has sought to expand ties with China as its relations with the U.S. and its allies sank to post-Cold War lows over Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea Peninsula, accusations of Russian hacking attacks, interference in elections and other disputes.

Even though Russia and China in the past rejected the possibility of forging a military alliance, Putin said last year that such a prospect can’t be ruled out. He also has noted [1] that Russia has been sharing highly sensitive military technologies with China that [2] helped significantly bolster its defense capability.

…

And China is not sitting still waiting for the USA to strike. They are taking every precaution, and developing all sorts of systems to bolster their weapons in strike capability.

China’s Hypersonic Mystery Weapon Released Its Own Payload And Nobody Knows Why (Updated)

The mystery surrounding China’s hypersonic vehicle test last summer has deepened after the craft reportedly launched its own projectile.

By Joseph Trevithick Thomas Newdick Tyler Rogoway

November 22, 2021

A new report says that China’s apparent nuclear-capable hypersonic glide vehicle ejected some kind of payload while barreling through the atmosphere, in its much-discussed test this past summer. If true, this would indicate an intriguing new capability for this already novel weapon, albeit one the function of which is not entirely clear. You can read our original reporting on this ostensible milestone test here.

The Financial Times yesterday reported that China’s puzzling weapon test on July 27 included the presumed hypersonic glide vehicle launching some kind of payload over the South China Sea “as it approached its target traveling at least five times the speed of sound.”

Until now, reports had described a glide vehicle of the type intended to travel into space and traverse the globe in an orbital-like fashion before making its run through the atmosphere toward its target, what’s known as a Fractional Orbital Bombardment System, or FOBS. In this sense, it seemed to have much in common with certain Cold War-era concepts. FOBS offers key advantages in that it can launch strikes from the opposite direction that a large amount of existing early warning infrastructure is aimed at, doing so in a flight profile that is lower than what those systems are geared to provide early warning for.

Aside from the FOBS capability, a hypersonic glide vehicle already offers a less predictable flight path than what traditional ballistic missiles can provide, with the ability to make maneuvers within the atmosphere. This includes during its run-in to its target, making it even harder to detect and defend against.

In a recent interview with CBS News, predating the latest revelation, General John Hyten, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described the July 27 test as having involved “a long-range missile.” Hyten added: “It went around the world, dropped off a hypersonic glide vehicle that glided all the way back to China, that impacted a target in China.”

Now, citing “people familiar with the intelligence,” Demetri Sevastopulo at the FT reports that the glide vehicle in question fired a “separate missile mid-flight in the atmosphere.”

Adding to the overall confusion, the same FT article switches between references to a missile being launched, and delivery of unspecified countermeasures, before referencing unnamed experts who point to the use of these countermeasures as evidence of China’s supposed lead over Russia and the United States in terms of hypersonic weapons.

On the other hand, the White House declined to provide the FT with a comment on the new development, instead offering a blanket statement on the original July 27 test, which it described as “concerning to us as it should be to all who seek peace and stability in the region and beyond.” Also approached by the newspaper for comment was the Chinese Embassy in London, which denied any knowledge of the weapons test having taken place.

Overall, the tone of the reporting is fairly breathless, with a description of “Pentagon scientists […] caught off guard by the advance,” although it is notably thin on actual details of the system, especially how it would be expected to be relevant in a wartime scenario, or even how this the test could lead to such a system. In the meantime, however, some of the more extreme claims made seem to have been removed from the article.

While Sevastopulo at one point describes this payload simply as another missile, the same article notes that “some Pentagon experts believe the projectile was an air-to-air missile,” which seems as illogical as it is improbable. At the same time, the article cites a counter view from unnamed “experts at DARPA” who assume the payload actually consisted of some kind of countermeasures intended to defeat missile defense systems like those now being developed in the United States.

We are told, furthermore, that the DARPA experts are “unsure how China managed to fire countermeasures from a vehicle traveling at hypersonic speeds.” While the release of objects from vehicles flying at hypersonic speeds is an established practice in space — with intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) for example — the difference here is the claim that the payload was released in the atmosphere.

Atmospheric release of a payload at hypersonic speeds by a glide vehicle could well be indicative of a significant technological breakthrough, especially if it involved a guided missile. Either way, this kind of feat is by no means easy to achieve without destabilizing the mothership glider as it careens through the sky at thousands of miles per hour.

People seriously underestimate the challenges surrounding successfully releasing a guided weapon at hypersonic speeds and it achieving stable flight.

— Tyler Rogoway (@Aviation_Intel) November 22, 2021

With all this in mind, it seems clear we have no real idea, at this stage, of what was ejected from the hypersonic vehicle, and for what reason. The FT adds that whatever was launched had “no obvious target of its own, before plunging into the [South China Sea].”

Then there’s the question of whether the test described by the FT is genuinely the first of its kind, or simply the first that’s known about by the sources in question. After all, the July 27 test was followed up by another on August 13 and it’s unclear if this also involved the ejection of some kind of payload.

Chinese officials, for their part, said that the initial reporting by the FT confused a test involving a peaceful reusable spaceplane for a weaponized system, a claim that The War Zone debunked here.

However, the latest revelations, on the surface at least, do seem to suggest the possibility of some type of reusable vehicle with a payload capability, perhaps similar to proposals for a bomber version of the U.S. Air Force’s X-20 Dyna-Soar that was developed by Boeing during the 1960s. This possibility now seems to be gaining ground among nuclear policy experts, as well.

Other possibilities include the release of a reentry vehicle, similar to those used on ICBMs, during its flight through the atmosphere. At first glance, this would actually make some sense as it seems feasible and would allow the system to hit two targets along its flight path instead of one, but dealing with so much additional complexity to enable such a capability makes little sense when you look at the big picture.

Another possibility is the release of some kind of other payload during the lower-altitude end-stage of flight. Whether a hypersonic glide vehicle or a spaceplane, the vehicle would have been able to maneuver to modulate the speed and trajectory for whatever it was launching, at least to a limited degree.

Interestingly, since at least 2019, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the U.S. Army have been exploring the idea of deploying a loitering munition from some kind of platform, possibly a ballistic missile, flying at hypersonic speeds as part of a program called Vintage Racer.

Details about this system and how it is supposed to work are extremely limited.

The Army has separately discussed the possibility of using its future Precision Strike Missile (PrSM) ballistic missile to deploy swarms of loitering munitions or other kinds of drones. While there are some broad similarities in the little we know about these concepts—China’s recent test and the Vintage Racer initiative—there is nothing to say that they are related in any meaningful way.

The hypersonic advances are something that U.S. officials have been alluding to increasingly in recent months, especially as apparent Chinese progress is weighed up against high-profile test failures for equivalent U.S. weapons.

General Hyten described the FOBS-capable hypersonic glide vehicle as “a first-use weapon,” noting that “from a technology perspective, it’s pretty impressive […] I think it probably should create a sense of urgency.”

In this context, “first-use” refers to the types of weapons optimized for launching a first strike, potentially upsetting the nuclear balance between China and the United States. Beijing’s previous nuclear posture was based upon ‘minimum deterrence,’ with a smaller overall weapons stockpile. U.S. officials have predicted that China’s nuclear arsenal will grow from the current estimated figure in the low 200s to up to 1,000 warheads by 2030.

Meanwhile, back in September, Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall also raised the possibility of the Chinese military working on a FOBS-like weapon at the Air Force Association’s annual Air, Space & Cyber Conference. “If you use that kind of an approach, you don’t have to use a traditional ICBM trajectory,” he said. “It’s a way to avoid defenses and missile warning systems.”

With all this in mind, the case for hypersonic defense is only becoming more urgent.

In the United States, for example, Rear Admiral Tom Druggan, the program executive for Aegis ballistic missile defense, last week described the SM-6 missile as “our leading defense capability for hypersonic missile defense.” Druggan added that the island of Guam “would absolutely need” the SM-6 missile to defend against these kinds of attacks.

Guam is well known to be a key target for Chinese missile attacks in a wider conflict. The Missile Defense Agency, or MDA, has also recently selected Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman to compete in developing a new Glide Phase Interceptor (GPI), intended to defeat hypersonic missiles in the midcourse portion of their unpowered flight.

Back in June, the MDA provided an animated video presentation that specifically laid outs its “multi-layered solution to defend against the next generation of hypersonic glide vehicles.” Countering maneuvering hypersonic threats is incredibly challenging and includes very small windows for engagement. As it sits now, there is no robust defense against these systems.

While in many ways perplexing, the limited evidence pointing to the release of some kind of payload by the hypersonic vehicle used in the July 27 test seems to suggest China is working on a truly novel set of advanced technologies. However, with so little information currently available in the public realm, it’s too early to make any hard conclusions about the nature of exactly what was tested and what its impact could be on the already in flux strategic landscape vis-a-vis China.

Update 11/23/2021:

In another development that could be relevant to this mysterious new Chinese weapon, the country’s state-owned Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC) announced yesterday that its FL-64 wind tunnel had passed a series of calibration tests, a major step toward making it fully operational. FL-64, which AVIC’s Aerodynamics Research Institute operates, can simulate speeds between Mach 4 and Mach 8.

“The wind tunnel can meet the test requirements of hypersonic aircraft such as conventional force/pressure measurement, air inlet, dynamic simulation, weapon separation and release, aerodynamic heat and flow display,” according to a machine translation of a story from China Aviation News, an outlet that AVIC owns. The specific mention of “weapon separation and release” is, of course, particularly interesting in light of this recent report regarding this novel Chinese hypersonic weapon.

Perhaps relevant in light of recent events, China's new FL-64 wind tunnel can support testing of "weapon separation and release" for hypersonic aircraft designs at speeds from Mach 4 (technically, high-supersonic) to Mach 8. https://t.co/nHYK5MikcG

— Steve Trimble (@TheDEWLine) November 22, 2021

The Solomon Islands

Global Times pulls no punches naming what nation’s responsible for riots in Solomon Islands, “Australia has fomented riots in Solomon Island”:

"Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare on Friday blamed foreign interference for instigating the anti-government protests over his government's decision to cut 'diplomatic ties' with the island of Taiwan and establish diplomatic ties with the Chinese mainland. Though, he didn't specify who is among the 'other powers' that fomented the violence.

"Sogavare emphasized that the choice to establish diplomatic ties with Beijing conforms to the trend of the times and international laws.

"The Solomon Islands is a country with nearly 690,000 people in the South Pacific region. After Sogavare assumed office in 2019, his administration made a choice to set up diplomatic ties with Beijing. However, the island of Malaita of the country, where most of the rioters are reportedly from, has maintained its relations with the island of Taiwan.

"The New York Times said the Solomon Islands has been in a 'heightened political tug of war,' citing a former Australian diplomat stationed in the Solomon Islands saying that the US has been providing Malaita with direct foreign aid. Such analysis is representative of the US and Australia."

We’ve seen the usual pro forma denials by the United States Empire and its lackey Australia, but the evidence points at them:

"Nonetheless, the Associated Press cited observers as saying that 'Australia intervened quickly to avoid Chinese security forces moving in to restore order.' More importantly, neither Canberra nor Washington has condemned the riots in the Solomon Islands so far, despite the fact that the unrest has violated the basic spirit of democracy and the rule of law. Media coverage of the riots in the US and Australia was 'matter-of-fact' and highlighted the rioters' political opposition to diplomatic relations with China."

Clear echoes of the Empire and its lackey’s behavior during the attempted Color Revolution in Hong Kong which is easy for Chinese eyes to see and point fingers.

"It is clear that Australia's overall attitude, and that of the US, is to connive with and even encourage the unrest, even though the Australian troops and police were sent to keep order in the Solomon Islands. What is right and what is not is obvious. Hence, aren't Morrison's remarks of "not indicate any position" actually a support for the evil doings?"

Of the remaining 15 national entities that continue to have diplomatic relations with Taiwan, four are South Pacific Island nations, thus the importance of seeing the light by the Solomon Islands.

The editor essentially says, the global community’s seen this play before, knows the director at the attempted outcome; so, isn’t it time for the United States to be condemned for their unlawful intervention?

US troops, bases & ships are vulnerable to China’s hypersonic superweapons due to Washington’s naivety, expert warns

Chris Bradford

7:38 ET, Nov 28 2021
Updated: 7:38 ET, Nov 28 2021

AMERICAN air defenses and ships are vulnerable to China’s hypersonic superweapons as officials in Washington appear naïve about Beijing’s military intentions, an expert warns.

Elites within the Chinese Communist Party are pursuing an imperialist agenda as the country aims to seek military parity with the US in the coming years.

Beijing allegedly tested a hypersonic weapon that orbited the Earth in July, and a second missile was launched during the same test event, according to reports in the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal.

The missile fell “harmlessly” into the South China Sea.

Its role remains unknown as commentators speculated that the missile could’ve been used to target or deflect a power’s defenses against a potential hypersonic attack.

Officials in Washington were left scrambling as the test caught them off-guard.

Sam Armstrong, of the Henry Jackson Society, told The Sun: “We’re led to believe that the West was unaware of China’s hypersonic missile.

“Should it be true, it does lead us to question ‘Why are our leaders so naïve about China’s intentions?’”

Armstrong continued: “After the Cold War, there was a degree of naivety and hubris among Western foreign policy elites as they thought they had won the great battle of ideas.”

He warned that China is developing weapons at a speed that are designed to take out enemy vessels.

Armstrong said that American vessels, troops, and military assets are vulnerable and officials in Washington have to realize that weapons are being created with the intention to take on the US.

Space Force General David Thompson warned: “We’re not as advanced as the Chinese or the Russians in terms of hypersonic programs.”

Biden and Xi have agreed to hold talks designed at reducing tensions, but Armstrong says it’s difficult to see what the discussions will achieve.

He said: “China has very little to gain in giving up on its military or imperial ambitions right now.

“It’s difficult to see what President Biden seeks to obtain in entering any talks unless China is prepared to say that its own military expenditure is threatening its own economic development at home.”

Beijing has developed missile targets shaped like US warships depicting a full-scale outline of at least two Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers and a US carrier, pictures show.

China’s high-tech Type 003 aircraft carrier is apparently nearing completion and Beijing has conducted tests using underwater explosives.

The country already has two aircraft carriers that are based on Soviet Cold War-era designs.

The new ship is expected to be a 100,000-ton‘ supercarrier’ and could match America’s powerful Nimitz class vessels.

It will feature more advanced aircraft launching technology, allowing it to launch the FC-31 new generation of stealth fighters much faster.

‘RED ALERT’

Matthew Funaiole, a senior fellow at the CSIS’s China Project, said the new ship would be the Chinese military’s “first foray into a modern aircraft carrier”.

And, officials have tested underwater explosives in what appears to be a strategy to potentially wipe out the US Navy.

Video from the state’s mouthpiece The Global Times shows a large gush of water rising into the air during a simulated attack at an unnamed naval port.

Thousands of pieces of data were collected by sensors as computers analyzed how much of the port had been destroyed.

China has already plowed $1trillion into its military this year and has developed missile and radar systems that can rapidly sink US aircraft carriers.

It has also developed the ability to shoot down American fighter jets and to threaten islands such as Okinawa and Guam.

Deployment of the DF-26 missile dubbed the “Guam killer” has rapidly expanded over the past year, according to a Pentagon intelligence report.

China currently possesses around 100 intercontinental ballistic missiles that have the potential to strike the continental US, but little is known about Beijing’s hypersonic development program.

The DF-17 is equipped with a hypersonic glide vehicle and was showcased in 2019 during a National Day military parade.

While the Xingkong 2 nuclear-capable hypersonic prototype was successfully tested at a target range in northwest China in 2018.

Although fears may be escalating about China’s future potential, the US’ nuclear stockpile considerably outnumber that of Beijing’s.

There’s no indication that Beijing is set to overtake Washington in the immediate years.

The Punch Line

While the morons in Washington DC pretend to be in control of “democracy summits”, and lead in “freedom rankings”, the rest of the world has moved on. They realize that the United States is dead, and that it is just going through the “death spasms” as it slowly succumbs to it’s own internal rot.

Honestly, the impression that I have is that the rest of the world is cautiously waiting, while watching the United States collapse in upon itself.

They will take the “jabs” and the “punches”. They will endure the insults and manipulations and the loss of face. They won’t do anything sudden, provocative or dangerous. Though, you can be quite assured that they are ready to pounce and do some awfully bad stuff if it needs to occur.

Of course, if you are residing inside the United States you won’t see this bigger picture. It will just a a confusing mess while the world around you goes to shit. You will instead believe that the entire world is going to shit.

Nope.

Just the “West”.

The United States is the biggest anchor and those that are tied to the sinking ship that the USA has become will be pulled down into the deep blue, and with a sucking noise will slip deep, deep down into an abyss where no exit is possible.

So why?

With the USA going deep into a state of collapse, why is the USA trying to provoke a war with China?

This is WHY the United States is so arrogantly provoking and pushing China to a war. This video clip explains it all so very completely. Video 3MB

Images of the USA collapse

Here’s karma rushing at full speed toward you…

“In your face” blatant mall robbery. There’s no longer any stability left in American society. It’s every man for himself. Video 4MB

Parana’s swarm a store and clean it out in under a minute. Mob Video 4MB

Jewelry robbery in a mall. Video 1MB

Mob breaks into a family store and cleans it out. video 2MB

Massive mall robbery. video 3MB

Another store robbery. video 6MB

Home invasions are on the rise all over America. video 4MB

Still not convinced? WI parade mass murderer. video 3MB

The Tripartite World Order and the Hybrid World War

19799 Views November 14, 2021 106 Comments

by Dmitry Orlov, posted by permission of the author

General Mark Milley, America’s highest-ranking military officer, has recently gone public with a revelation of his: the world is no longer unilateral (with the US as the unquestioned world hegemon) or bilateral (as it was with the US and the SU symmetrically balancing each other out in an intimate tango of mutual assured destruction). It is now tripartite, with three major powers—the US, Russia and China—entering a “tripolar war.” That is the exact term he is reported to have used at the Aspen Security Forum on November 3, 2021.

This seems strange, since neither Russia nor China is eager to attack the US while the US is in no condition to attack either of them. The US has just got defeated in a two-decade conflict against a fourth-rate adversary (Afghanistan, that is) in the most humiliating way possible, abandoning $80 billion of war materiel and forsaking thousands of its faithful servants in a hasty withdrawal that amounted to a rout. It is about to suffer a similar fate in Syria and Iraq. Its navy just got humiliated in a minor skirmish with the Iranians over an oil tanker. Clearly, the US is in no shape to attack anyone.

So what could Milley possibly mean? He may not sound smart, but he is the most powerful man at the Pentagon. Of course, Milley-Vanilley could just be lip-sinking to some stupid music coming out of the White House (which is currently stocked with some choice imbeciles). This would make sense, since throughout his career Milley carefully avoided anything that smacked of actual military action and therefore carried within it the possibility of defeat, instead choosing to concentrate on such things as producing a report on the impact of climate change on the U.S. military.

Here is Milley captured during one of his prouder moments, standing next to Russia’s General Valery Gerasimov, who saw combat—and victory—as commander during the Second Chechen War. Gerasimov then authored Russia’s hybrid war doctrine (the Gerasimov Doctrine), which allows strategic and political objectives to be achieved through nonmilitary means but with military support and military-style secrecy, discipline, coordination and control. In comparison, our General Milley is something of a cardboard cutout general, with a string that makes his lower jaw move up and down leading to some place within the Washington swamp of political think tanks and defense industry lobbyists.

The Gerasimov Doctrine bears an uncanny resemblance to the Chinese doctrine of unlimited war, indicating that Russia and China have harmonized in their defensive strategies. These doctrines are designed to amplify China’s and Russia’s natural advantages while placing the US at a maximum disadvantage. It is not immediately clear whether Milley is capable of understanding such matters; quite the opposite, it is likely that his job security and career path critically depended on his inability to understand anything above his pay grade. Nevertheless, since he happens to be the mouthpiece for the whole ungodly mess, we need to at least try to take his words at face value and try to think of what his “tripolar war” could possibly mean.

The Russian hybrid war doctrine and the Chinese unlimited war doctrine both give an advantage to countries with strict, centralized control structures (China and Russia, that is) while severely disadvantaging the US, which has a diffuse and internally conflicted power elite split up between two parties and among lots of competing government agencies and private entities with lots of opportunities for both internal and external espionage, infiltration and media leaks.

Russia’s advantages are in advanced weapons against which the US has no countermeasures, such as hypersonic missiles and radio warfare systems, and in a huge and only partially explored resource base, of energy resources especially. China’s advantage is in a huge and highly disciplined workforce that produces a vast array of products which the US must continuously import to prevent its entire economy from shutting down because of supply chain disruptions. On the other hand, both China and Russia find themselves at a disadvantage in facing the large and well-oiled machine the US has developed for its habitual meddling in the affairs of other nations and the undermining of their natural sovereignty. An array of mechanisms, from cultural exports to ad campaigns associated with popular brands to social media initiatives designed to corrupt the minds of the young, exists in order to exert US influence on other nations.

The Chinese and the Russian responses to this threat are almost diametrically different: whereas China builds firewalls and uses strict social controls to contain the threat, Russia’s strategy is to allow the foreign infection to run wild and to let their nation’s innate immune system create antibodies against it and neutralize it. Russia draws its red lines at outright bought-and-paid-for enemy propaganda, inciting armed rebellion, advocacy of terrorism, propaganda of sexual perversion among children, etc. In this way, Russia can not just compensate for this disadvantage but turn it to its own advantage: while the West is becoming increasingly undemocratic and authoritarian with its endless political correctness, social biodiversity requirements and the pursuit of better living through non-reproductive mating, hormone therapy and genital mutilation, Russia remains a free land with a wholesomely conservative social outlook that is quite attractive to people all over the world and is becoming increasingly attractive to many people in the West as they become painfully aware of the wages of sin.

Why concentrate on hybrid/unlimited war instead of an outright nuclear or conventional military conflict between the US and China and/or Russia? That is because both conventional and nuclear military conflict between any of these three nations is an insane, suicidal choice, while those in charge of defining military strategy are specifically not selected for their suicidal tendencies. Neither Russia nor China is known for their wars of aggression, and while the US is extremely well known for its homicidal, violent tendencies (having carried out 32 bombing campaigns on 24 countries since World War II), it is fundamentally a bully, only picking on weak countries that pose no threat. Based on publicly available information, both Russia and China are now quite far ahead of the US in weapons development, to a point where any possible direct US attack on either of them would be self-disarming at best and suicidal at worst.

In the best case scenario, the US launches an attack which is successfully repelled: bombers and rockets shot down, ships sunk, US military bases and port facilities destroyed, possibly US command and control centers also destroyed, as quite pointedly promised by Putin. The US then lays prostrate and at the mercy of its opponents. If its cooperation still leaves something to be desired, some combination of deplorables, despicables, imponderables and indecipherables will be organized just enough to make a bloody mess of what’s left of US government structures and power elites, which will then be replaced with an international peacekeeping force (as an optimistic case) or just left to persist in durable disorder, misery and international isolation.

The worst case scenario is the tired old mutual assured destruction, nuclear winter and end of life on Earth, but it is unlikely for a number of reasons. First, of the US nuclear deterrent triad only the submarine component remains viable, and even it is quite tired. None of the Minuteman missiles has been successfully tested in a long time, and these are ballistic missiles which, once the boost phase is over, follow a perfectly predictable inertial trajectory, making them easy targets for Russia’s new air defense systems. Of the Minutemen that manage to get out of their silos and launch in the general direction of Russia or China, it is unknown how many of their nuclear payloads would actually detonate since these are all quite old and haven’t been tested in a long time either. The US no longer has the ability to make new nuclear charges, having lost the recipe for making the high explosive needed to make them detonate. But that may be a moot point, since at this point no ICBM is likely to be able to penetrate Russian air defenses. As far as Chinese air defenses, it is notable that Russia and China have integrated their early warning systems and China now has four divisions of Russian S-400 Triumph air defense systems and is planning to add more.

Turning to the airborne part of the US nuclear triad, its mainstay is still the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress, the youngest of which is almost 60 years old. It cruises at 260 knots at an altitude of 34000 feet and is the opposite of stealthy, making it easy to shoot down at a stand-off distance of several hundred kilometers. Since this makes it perfectly useless for dropping bombs, all that remains is cruise missiles, which fly at a positively poky 0.65 Mach, again making them easy targets for modern air defenses. There are also some newer stealth bombers—very few and, it has turned out, not too stealthy, putting them essentially in the same category as the Stratofortress, and the cruise missiles they can launch are also those same old subsonic ones.

Lastly, there are the strategic nuclear submarines, which are the only part of the US nuclear triad that is still viable. They remain effective as a deterrent, and they do have the ability to get up close to launch a sneak attack with a good chance that at least a few of the missiles will get through the air defenses, but they can’t possibly hope to get around the inevitability of retaliation which will cause unacceptable, fatal damage to the continental US. This makes them useless as an offensive weapon.

Add to this Russia’s updated nuclear doctrine, according to which any attack against Russian sovereign territory or Russian sovereign interests, whether conventional or nuclear, would open the door to a nuclear retaliation, launched upon warning, and Putin’s solemn promise to counterattack not just against the locations from which a strike is launched but against the centers of decision-making. Considering that Russian missiles are hypersonic and will reach their targets before those of the US reach theirs, and that Russia has the means to shoot down US missiles while the US is unable to shoot down Russian ones, if the US were to launch an attack, those who launched it would be dead before they could find out whether their attack succeeded in causing any damage at all or whether they had just suicided themselves for nothing. All of this adds up to an inevitable conclusion: under no circumstances will the US attack either Russia or China, using either conventional or nuclear weapons.

There are experts who are of the opinion that a world war could spontaneously erupt at any moment without anyone wishing it to do so, just as the world slid into World War I due to a confluence of unhappy accidents. But there is a big difference: the military and civilian leaderships of the warring sides in World War I did not have hypersonic missiles pointed directly at their heads. They thought that the war would be fought far away from their palaces, headquarters and stately mansions. They were, in some cases, quite wrong, but that was their thought originally: why not test our industrial prowess while sacrificing the lives of several million useless peasants?

Now the situation is quite different: any substantial provocation is an automatic self-destruct trigger and all sides know this. Of course, there will be minor provocations such as the US Navy steaming around in the Taiwan Strait or the Black Sea close to the shores of Crimea, but then they do have to earn their keep somehow. In turn, the Russians and the Chinese will periodically up the ante a little bit by shooing them away with a harshly worded radio message or a few shots fired across their bows. But both sides know just how careful they have to be because any serious error will require immediate deescalation and may entail major loss of face. And that, as the saying goes, would be worse than a crime: it would be a mistake.

The provocations of which the US is still capable are likely to grow more and more feeble over time. The US has lost the arms race against both Russia and China and is unlikely to ever catch up. On the other hand, neither Russia nor China is the least bit likely to attack the US. There is no reason to do so, given that they can get what they want—a gradual fading out of US influence—without resorting to large-scale military action. Maintaining a strong defensive posture while projecting power within their expanding spheres of interest would be quite enough for either of them. Thus, all that’s left for the US is hybrid warfare: financial warfare in the form of sanctions, aggressive dollar-printing and large-scale legalized money laundering, informational warfare played out on the internet, medical warfare using novel pathogens, drugs and vaccines, cultural warfare in the form of promoting and defending conflicting systems of values and so on, with military activities limited to the use of proxies, fomenting putsches and civil wars, actions of private military companies and so on.

If Milley is pinning his hopes on being able to provoke a conflict between China and Russia, he is likely to be disappointed. These two very large neighboring countries are synergistic. China has tremendous productive capacity for producing all manner of finished goods but has limited natural resources, is insular and has limited capacity for interacting with the rest of the world except through trade and commerce. Russia, on the other hand, has virtually limitless natural resources but, with a smaller though highly educated population spread out across a vast and somewhat inhospitable terrain, is forced to concentrate its efforts on certain strategically important sectors such as energy and food exports, high-tech weapons systems, nuclear energy, vaccines and energy-intensive products such as fertilizers, plastics and metals where their access to cheap energy provides them with a competitive advantage.

One of Russia’s major strengths is a culturally ingrained ability to understand people from other cultures and to maintain cordial relations even across great cultural divides and enemy lines. Russia has a unique ability to offer stability and security, both through careful diplomacy and by offering advanced defensive weapons systems. The Chinese have been aggressively buying into economies around the world, investing in major infrastructure projects to further their trade, but are sometimes found lacking in diplomatic finesse and in their understanding of local sensibilities, alienating their partners by directly demanding a controlling share in their investments. The Russians, on the other hand, understand that you have to at least kiss a girl before offering to pay her college tuition.

Such finesse tends to be interpreted as weakness by certain Westerners who, over the course of many centuries of fratricidal warfare and genocidal colonialism, have been conditioned to only respect brute force and to understand relationships only in terms of dominance or submission. With the sudden departure of the US from the world stage, many smaller European nations are now actively looking for a new master to lord over them. Both the Chinese and the Russians are likely to leave them disappointed; while Chinese commerce and Russian security (including energy security) will be on offer, they will be on their own and forced to earn their own keep and their oaths of fealty will fall on deaf ears. The Eastern Europeans especially might find it impossible to ingratiate themselves back into the Russian world; the Russians have had their fill of them and their duplicitousness. Their other option will be to go to work for the Chinese.

Russia and China complement each other and are more likely to work with each other rather than against each other in their dealings with each other and with the rest of the world. This is certainly not the case with the US, vis-à-vis either China or Russia. During the 1990s and the naughts, while China was rapidly transforming into the world’s manufacturing hub while Russia was recovering from the setback it had been dealt by the Soviet collapse, the US was able to position itself as the world’s indispensable consuming nation, redirecting a lion’s share of the world’s resources and manufactured products to feed its appetites in exchange for printed dollars (continuously expropriating the world’s savings while exporting inflation) and using the threat of military action against anyone who would challenge this arrangement. But now the situation is different: most of China’s trade is now not with the US but with the rest of the world, Russia is fully recovered and developing slowly but surely, the share of the US in the world’s economy has shrunk, the appetite for printed dollars in the form of US government debt has declined greatly, and as to its former full-spectrum military dominance, see above.

And yet General Milley wishes to fight a tripolar war against two poles that won’t fight each other and aren’t spoiling for a fight with the US either; they just want the US to pack up, go home and no longer darken the horizons around Eurasia. As I took pains to explain above, the US is in no position to challenge either or both of them in an all-out military conflict, or to risk engaging them in a way that runs a major risk of provoking one. What can a giant, sprawling, lavishly funded, corrupt and dysfunctional bureaucracy do under such circumstances in order to justify its existence? The answer is, I believe, obvious: engage in petty mischief, a.k.a. hybrid warfare, but in doing so it finds itself, as I have already explained, at a disadvantage.

The list of petty mischief is long and makes for tedious reading. The best that can be done with it is to make comedy with it. Take, for instance, the imbroglio, worthy of Boccaccio’s Decameron, of Tikhanovskaya the cutlet fairy and phantom president of Belarus, who recently joined the club of bogus replacement leaders, alongside Juan Random Guaidó, phantom president of Venezuela, having failed to seize power from deeply entrenched Byelorussian president Lukashenko, and who is now cooling her heels in neighboring Lithuania. Having recognized the abject failure of Tikhanovskaya’s power grab, the Petty Mischef Department attempted to organize a scandal around a Byelorussian sprinter during the Tokyo Olympics, whose name is… Timanovskaya! You see, they thought that nobody would notice the single-character substitution. The ploy failed, and Timanovskaya is now cooling her heels in neighboring Poland.

There have been other, much larger-scale attempts at petty mischief, similarly ham-handed and similarly spectacular in their failure.

1

There was the attempt to force the entire world to submit to a relentless inoculation campaign (in the works since 2009) in the course of which an interplay between genetically engineered pathogens and genetically engineered vaccines against them would be used to make fabulous profits for Big Pharma while simultaneously selectively genociding the population of certain unfriendly or otherwise undesirable countries. End result: China has largely fought off the pathogen and has produced its own vaccine while Russia has produced several vaccines, the most popular of which has been proven safe and effective and has been turned into a major profit center by being exported to 71 countries and earning Russia more export revenue than arms exports.

Meanwhile, not only are Western vaccines proving less than 50% effective (much less than that for Johnson & Johnson) but thousands of people are actually dropping dead or becoming severely ill from them. Most alarmingly, young, freshly vaccinated athletes are dropping dead from heart attacks right in the middle of a game—dozens of them! The only possible response to this by the authorities—the only one they are capable of—is to double down, requiring everyone to get vaccinated again and again. The marketing strategy of “if our product makes you sick, we’ll give you more of it” is hardly ever effective and, in due course, it is producing open rebellion in many places, shutting down entire industries and generally playing havoc with societies and economies. Mission accomplished!

2

There is an ongoing attempt to force countries around the world to pay a carbon tax for their carbon emissions while those nations that engage in the cargo cult of building solar and wind generation capacity are exempted from it. Lots of expensive climate models kept supercomputers humming and international climate conferences were convened, at which people could wring their hands and wallow in maudlin self-pity over the ever-looming imaginary climate catastrophe. But then came a major complication: both Russia and China managed to turn the situation to their advantage. In the case of China, the case is simple: what allows China to manufacture and export products which the rest of the world loves to import is its use of coal and just a temporary reduction in the use of coal was sufficient to demonstrate that any such constraints would hurt the US through supply chain disruptions more than they would hurt China.

In the case of Russia, the situation is even simpler: from the point of view of carbon dioxide emissions, Russia is the greenest country on earth, deriving the largest share of its electricity from carbon-free nuclear and hydro and low-carbon natural gas. It also has 20% of the world’s forests which, in case of global warming and increased atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, would spread rapidly north across the tundra toward the Arctic circle, soaking up prodigious amounts of carbon dioxide. Thus, the US, and the rest of the West with it, have negotiated themselves into a cul de sac of their own creation, being forced to cause damage to their economies by pursuing misguided decarbonization policies which nobody would have asked them to pursue otherwise. Again, mission accomplished!

3

Yet another attempt at petty mischief is in the area of human rights and democracy. The notion of individual human rights was rather successfully deployed against the USSR, warping the minds of several generations of Russian intelligentsia into being ashamed of their own country (and almost completely unaware of much ghastlier crimes against humanity carried out by the collective West). The Chinese, on the other hand, were barely swayed from their traditional (be it Confucian or Communist) perspective that balances privileges against responsibilities and leaves very little room for such frivolous notions as individual universal rights. But in recent decades the Russians have managed to claw their way back to a more balanced understanding of their own history and a greater awareness of the multiple atrocities perpetuated by those who would criticize them. The rank hypocrisy of those who would use such tactics has also become glaringly obvious through such outrages as the illegal imprisonment of Julian Assange and the exile of Edward Snowden.

The story of Maria Butina, a spectacular individual who is now a member of the Russian parliament, has also made an impression. She was falsely accused of being a foreign agent based on the now discredited Steele Dossier which Hillary Clinton’s camp had concocted in order to slander Donald Trump. Butina was imprisoned for 18 months, spending much of that time in solitary confinement (a treatment that equates to torture). She was forced to plead guilty to a bogus charge before a kangaroo court judge before being released and allowed to return to Russia. She described her ordeal in a best-selling book and anybody who has read it has absorbed, along the way, an important message: there is simply no such thing as the American justice system. A major reason why Butina had been singled out for such treatment had to do with her last name, which differs by just one character from Putin’s: there’s that single-character substitution again! With a name so similar to that of that horrible dictator Putin, of course she’d be found guilty! I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a certain dim-witted miscreant ensconced in the bowels of the CIA or the State Department who comes up with these harebrained ideas by actually scanning documents for similar-sounding names.

As far as democracy, the concept is valuable but applies differently to each nation, based on its unique values and traditions, but the image of it served up in the US, where about half the electorate feels that they were cheated during the last presidential election, or the EU, which is lorded over by unelected pompous nobodies at the European Commission, or the way it was misapplied in Afghanistan, Iraq and other nations invaded and destroyed by the West, has done much to discredit the concept. Joe Biden, who is now working on convening a virtual assemblage of nations he deems democratic, making a list and checking it twice, making sure to exclude anyone he doesn’t deem sufficiently democratic, is too senile to grasp the simple fact that he has lost any right to appeal to the concept of democracy given the way he got elected and what he’s done to Afghanistan.

The image I will leave you with is of a transport plane piloted by the demented Joe Biden and co-piloted by that giggling twit Kamala Harris, with some number of leaders from supposedly democratic nations (who have failed to absorb the lesson of Afghanistan) clinging to its landing gear, and with General Millie-Vanillie sitting in the cargo hold cleaning his gun, getting ready to fight World War III against both Russia and China.

Must see photo

POWELL COUNTY, Ky. — A photograph taken at the scene of a fatal crash in Kentucky is getting plenty of attention because some say it appears to show a man’s spirit leaving his body.

The photo was posted to Facebook by Saul Vazquez, who just happened to be driving by in his truck.

The photo shows two ambulances with state troopers standing in between. There’s a gray area above the troopers’ heads that’s shaped like the figure of a man.

Local media outlets report a motorcyclist involved in the crash later died at the hospital.

Vazquez says the image has not been altered in any way.

…

Ascendant Dem Hawk Wants to Pre-Authorize War With China

by Donald Shaw

in Sludge

October 14, 2021

Virginia Democrat Rep. Elaine Luria, who early this year was elevated within the House Armed Services Committee, wants Congress to pre-authorize President Biden to take military action to defend Taiwan against China.

“The president has no legal authority to react in the time necessary to repel a Chinese invasion of Taiwan and deter an all-out war,” Luria, a 20-year Navy veteran, wrote in an op-ed published by the Washington Post this week. “If the president’s hands remain legally tied in preventing Chinese military action against Taiwan, then an even larger conflict with China is most certainly assured.”

…to “deter” an all out war between Taiwan and China, by starting world war III though a direct violation of one of the Chinese “Red Lines”.

As Luria notes in her article, Republican lawmakers agree with her that Congress, which has the power to authorize war by the U.S. Constitution, should cede its war powers on this matter to the president.

Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) and Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (R-Pa.) have introduced a bill called the Taiwan Invasion Prevention Act that would authorize the president “to use the Armed Forces of the United States and take such other measures as the President determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to secure and protect Taiwan” against China.

The measure had 18 House Republican co-sponsors in the previous Congress.

At the Quincy Institute’s website Responsible Statecraft, attorney Elizabeth Beavers wrote that Luria’s proposal “rests on a fantasy of American exceptionalism in which the United States can and must lead Taiwan to a military victory against Chinese invasion.

“It also defies logic to suggest that such an authorization would deter or prevent large-scale conflict, as it would surely be seen as a provocation by China. By establishing an overly-available military option, Congress would be setting in motion a chain of events that could hamper diplomatic possibilities and make war between two nuclear powers all the more likely.”

Luria has been in Congress since 2019 and she is rapidly gaining foreign policy influence in the Democratic caucus. She was seated this session on the Armed Services Committee’s Readiness Subcommittee and the Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee, which has jurisdiction over acquisition and procurement of items like military ships and submarine-launched weapons. She was also elected in February as the vice chair of the House Armed Services Committee, a committee leadership position that suggests she has the confidence of the chairman, hawkish Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.).

Defense contractors’ PACs donated $42,750 to Luria’s campaigns from January 2019 to June 30, 2021. When she was first a candidate for Congress during the 2018 cycle, Luria promised voters in her district that she would not take donations from corporate PACs, taking a pledge organized by End Citizens United, but she quietly backed out of the pledge in late 2020, when she took funds from the PACs of defense contractors including BAE Systems, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Rolls-Royce North America, which she kept for herself as payback for money she had loaned her campaign.

Luria’s office defended the decision to withdraw from the “No Corporate PAC Money” pledge by saying to the Virginian-Pilot of the corporate PACs she is now taking money from that “all these PAC funds come from individual small dollar contributions from employees.”

But a review of campaign finance data from Code for Democracy reveals that since 2019, the PACs of the top five defense companies, all of which have donated to Luria besides Northrop Grumman’s, have received donations of at least $1,000 from 332 senior executives and that the average amount that these executive-donors have given to them is $2,113. Forty defense executives, who told the FEC their titles included president, CEO, chairman, or director, have given their employers’ PACs more than $10,000 since 2019.

Russia begins mass production of 6670mph Zircon hypersonic nuke missile ‘too fast to block’ as tensions with West rise

Will Stewart
Tariq Tahir

9:56 ET, Nov 27 2021
Updated: 12:02 ET, Nov 27 2021

MASS production of Russia’s terrifying Zircon hypersonic missile has begun, as tensions with the West mount.

The Kremlin boasts that the 6670mph weapon – which carries a conventional or nuclear warhead – is “unstoppable”.

Russia’s relations with the West remain deeply strained amid concerns that thousands of their troops amassed on Ukraine’s border are a prelude to an all-out invasion.

Ukraine’s spy chiefs said they believe a full-scale invasion is planned in the New Year.

The go-ahead for full-scale production of Zircon at a top-secret plant near Moscow follows recent successful tests of the missile.

Most recently, there was a successful test of the hypersonic missile from a frigate in the White Sea on 18 November.

A month earlier the Zircon was fired from a submarine for the first time.

Vladimir Putin has ordered the Zircon missile to be deployed next year by the Russian Navy boasting that it is “truly unparalleled … in the world”.

The Zircon will be deployed on Russian frigates and, later, on submarines.

…

And also Chinese naval vessels in the South China Sea. – MM

Potential Legislation on China Amounts to a New Cold War

Aída Chávez

01 Dec 2021

The $250 billion “Innovation and Competition Act” leverages industrial policy to ratchet up militarization and potentially instigate global conflict with China.

This article originally appeared in The Nation .

Congress is itching to pass a sweeping bipartisan package that threatens to enshrine a new Cold War, this time against China, and they’re counting on the American public’s inattention to get it through by the end of the year. After months of stalling in the House, and a failed attempt to attach the legislation to the annual defense bill, majority leader Chuck Schumer and Speaker Nancy Pelosi struck a deal this week for a bicameral conference on the anti-China legislation.

The US Innovation and Competition Act is a massive piece of legislation purporting to make the United States more “competitive” with China economically, politically, and technologically. Mainstream media outlets and lawmakers have framed the bill as the most expansive industrial policy legislation in US history, and as being crucial for countering China’s economic rise.

But this $250 billion “innovation” bill is nothing more than a dangerous escalation in a multipronged offensive against China. The Innovation and Competition Act leverages industrial policy to ratchet up US militarization and potentially instigate global conflict—all while hindering the global fight against climate change. And just as the “War on Terror” led to a systematic assault on Muslims and people of color, an unbridled security state, and mass domestic surveillance, the language of national security and competition that will arise around a new Cold War could serve to justify racist and repressive policies here at home.

The Innovation and Competition Act would ramp up militarization in the Indo-Pacific, undermine nuclear arms control, and dedicate hundreds of millions of additional dollars to expanding US military presence in the region. Entire sections of the bill are dedicated to deepening defense cooperation in Latin America and the Caribbean, authorizing $12 million annually from 2021 to 2026 for the International Military Education and Training Program, as well as other countries in the Indo-Pacific region, including India and the Philippines. It would also increase Taiwan and Japan’s military capacity.

The USICA would “dramatically change the status quo on Taiwan in a way I think is super-dangerous,” one House Democratic staffer told The Nation.

Domestically, the bill would establish an anti-China bureaucratic apparatus tasked with hunting down “undue” Chinese influence in the United States, which critics warn would exacerbate the racial profiling of Chinese Americans and Chinese nationals living in the US and inflame anti-Asian racism. A provision in the Innovation and Competition Act would enact a policy “to enable the people of the United States, including the private sector, civil society, universities and other academic institutions, State and local legislators, and other relevant actors to identify and remain vigilant to the risks posed by undue influence” of the Communist Party of China in the US and to “implement measures to mitigate the risks.” It allocates $300 million a year for 2022 to 2026 to create a “Countering Chinese Influence Fund,” and would also mandate a comptroller report on the activities of US Sister City participants who partner with countries like China. (There are over 100 US sister cities shared with China.)

None of this is unprecedented, of course. The United States has a long history of treating Asian Americans and immigrants with unfounded suspicion and enforcing racism through policy. In Chae Chan Ping v. United States, a 1889 Supreme Court decision that upheld the Chinese Exclusion Act, Washington justified the racist policies “on grounds that Chinese immigrants were ‘agents’ of China and that their mere presence in the country was akin to war, even if no actual hostilities were taking place,” as Columbia University history professor Mae Ngai wrote in March. And in recent years, US intelligence agencies have increased surveillance and targeting of students and academics of Chinese descent. “I think what we can expect is that we’re going to have a much more supercharged version of what we’ve been seeing over the past few years,” said Anlin Wang, a member of Democratic Socialists of America and Reclaim Philadelphia.

Senate Democrats passed the Innovation and Competition Act over the summer with overwhelming bipartisan support, and many of the most troubling aspects of the bill also have broad support in the House. Representative Gregory Meeks, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has his own version of the legislation, and pushed against the chamber’s “rubber-stamping” the Senate version. His version, the EAGLE Act, is meant to be less aggressive and better on climate. But it doesn’t meaningfully change the substance of the policy, and has less support among Republicans than the Senate version.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders was the only senator who caucuses with Democrats to vote against the bill. Not long after the vote, Sanders expanded on his position in the pages of Foreign Affairs , imploring DC leaders not to start another Cold War. “Instead of extolling the virtues of free trade and openness toward China, the establishment beats the drums for a new Cold War, casting China as an existential threat to the United States,” Sanders wrote. “We are already hearing politicians and representatives of the military-industrial complex using this as the latest pretext for larger and larger defense budgets.”

This hawkish consensus on China has been years in the making, and President Joe Biden shows no intention of diverging from it. Despite his declaration at the United Nations that “we are not seeking a new Cold War” with China or a “world divided into rigid blocs,” the Biden administration has been just as aggressive in his approach to China as former Presidents Donald Trump and Barack Obama. Members of both parties, including most liberals and many progressives, are eager to fuel conflict between the two nuclear powers. Republican Senator Jim Inhofe has said that “we’re in the most dangerous time in our lifetime.”

On the Democratic side, there are lawmakers like Representative Elaine Luria, a former Navy officer who rakes in campaign cash from some of the biggest defense contractor PACs. Luria doesn’t just want bigger military budgets; she wants Congress to pre-authorize war with China.

For months, Pentagon officials, lawmakers, and the national media have focused on China’s growing military capabilities to make the case that the country poses the biggest military threat to the United States and the world. But discussion of the so-called Chinese threat is rarely ever in touch with reality. There is only one country that maintains nearly 800 military bases in at least 80 countries around the world, spends more on the military than the next seven countries combined, and has used nuclear weapons in war. The same country has been directly responsible for countless military interventions. And it isn’t China.

Democratic Socialists of America’s International Committee is among the groups organizing against the looming passage of the US Innovation and Competition Act, and broader US escalation against China. Grayson Lanza, a member of the Asia and Oceania subcommittee and cochair of Orlando’s DSA chapter, echoed the idea that one of the biggest dangers of the bill is that it would create a permanent apparatus for antagonizing China.

“As a Floridian, I’m very in tune with the kind of bureaucracy that develops for the specific targeting of countries, for sanctions and antagonism,” Lanza said, referring to the influence that the anti-Cuban bureaucracy has had both in his state and on the federal level. “Once this gets put into place, and there’s a little bit of momentum behind it, you can’t really undo it. People’s jobs, their careers are going to be based around you, the United States, being an enemy of China.”

There’s also the “profound unfairness” of Washington’s allocating our resources and money into antagonizing China when US infrastructure is crumbling and Americans are without health care and paid leave, Lanza added. It’s a significant amount of money going not just to foreign militaries, but to reinforcing US propaganda networks abroad. One of the measures in the bill, for example, would train journalists “on investigative techniques necessary” to report on China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

“Maybe you don’t like China, but do you really think this is a worthy investment of your tax dollar? Probably not,” Lanza said. “Most people want their money spent on them. They want to see it in their communities. They want to see it in their infrastructure. They want to see it in their schools.”

In a statement this week against the $778 billion Pentagon budget, Sanders criticized the Innovation and Competition Act for including $52 billion in “corporate welfare, with no strings attached, for a handful of extremely profitable microchip companies” and a $10 billion “handout” to Jeff Bezos for space exploration. “Isn’t it strange how even as we end the longest war in our nation’s history, concerns about the deficit and national debt seem to melt away under the influence of the powerful Military Industrial Complex?” Sanders said.

…

So what is going to come out of all this pro-war posturing? Perhaps this next article will give you a glimpse…

China stockpiling ‘flying death sentence’ hypersonic nukes capable of evading US shields in ‘large numbers’

Katie Davis
9:42 ET, Nov 25 2021

Updated: 9:51 ET, Nov 25 2021

CHINA is stockpiling a hypersonic nuke branded “the flying death sentence” that’s capable evading all existing anti-missile shields deployed by America and its allies.

The land-based hypersonic ballistic nuclear missile – known as Dong Feng 17 or DF-17 – can surge to speeds of up to 7,680mph and experts say it is able to “hit every corner of the Earth”.

Wu Qian, of China’s defence ministry, confirmed the country has commissioned DF-17 and DF-26 missiles in “large numbers”.

Beijing unveiled the hypersonic DF-17 nuke in 2019 – offering a glimpse of the “blindingly fast and unstoppable” missile in a four minute clip that July

The weapon contains a hypersonic glide vehicle and can be fitted with a nuclear warhead and is said to be capable of achieving speeds of up to 7,680 mph – or ten times the speed of sound.

Foreign analysts say it’s designed to move at high speed to evade anti-missile defences.

The DF-17 hypersonic missile can theoretically manoeuvre sharply at many times the speed of sound, making it extremely difficult to counter.

It comes as tensions hit boiling between the US and China over Beijing’s increasing occupation of the disputed South China Sea.

An expert has warned China is building mock-up targets of US aircraft carriers “to provoke Americans” as troops train for real-life military operations.

The country has developed missile targets shaped like US warships in its latest warning to rivals.

Sam Armstrong, of the Henry Jackson Society, told The Sun the latest war games are aimed at provoking the West.

He said: “These are working models that are ready to be deployed as a training exercise for a real-life operation against western forces.

“You don’t build a training model of an aircraft carrier unless you’re planning to run a bombing raid on an aircraft carrier.”

Beijing appears to have constructed missile targets depicting a full-scale outline of at least two Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers and a US carrier, pictures show.

Experts believe the targets could be mounted on rails to mimic a moving vessel.

Collin Koh, a research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, said: “I don’t think the desert targets are going to be the final stage. It’s meant for further refinement.”

Wang Wenbin, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson, appeared to deny any knowledge of the mockups when quizzed.

He told a briefing earlier this month: “I’m not aware of the situation you mentioned.”

HYPER THREAT

The snaps raised concerns that Beijing is taunting Washington as tensions over Taiwan “escalate”.

President Xi warned last week that the Asia-Pacific region must not return to the tensions seen during the Cold War.

He said: “The region cannot and should not relapse into the confrontation and division of the Cold War era.”

Meanwhile, it’s reported China’s recent round-the-world hypersonic nuclear weapon fired a second missile while travelling five times faster than the speed of sound.

No country had previously been able to demonstrate this advanced engineering feat and the test is said to have caught Pentagon scientists off guard.

Last month China stunned the world when it emerged it launched a hypersonic missile right around the globe.

Now it has been revealed the weapon is far more advanced than originally thought.

The hypersonic glide vehicle, a manoeuvrable spacecraft which can carry a nuclear warhead, fired a separate missile during its flight in the atmosphere over the South China Sea on July 27, according to a Financial Times report.

Experts at the Pentagon’s advanced research agency Darpa are said to be unsure how China achieved the feat, as scientists say it “tests the constraints of physics”.

…

American Government Isn’t a Democracy

When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”

The message is clear: As long as powerful special interests can use their money to buy influence in Washington, nothing is going to change. If we want to tackle the other issues, we have to stop this legalized corruption first.

Democracy resembles “a dying person who is sinking fast, like the sun setting beyond the western hills”, and will soon be relegated to the museum.

The socialist ideological and social system alone is full of youth and vitality, sweeping the world with the momentum of an avalanche and the force of a thunderbolt.

The socialist system will eventually replace the capitalist system; this is an objective law independent of man’s will. The GOP fools try to hold back the wheel of history, eventually, the revolution will take place and will inevitably triumph.

Report HERE.

WW3 fears as Russia accuses US of staging ‘nuclear strike’ with TEN BOMBERS and puts nuke forces on ‘combat alert’

Mark Hodge
Will Stewart

6:15 ET, Nov 24 2021
Updated: 5:22 ET, Nov 25 2021

MOSCOW has accused the US of secretly staging a mock nuclear attack on TEN bomber planes 20km from their border “putting Russian forces on alert.”

Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said the Kremlin had noticed a significant increase in activity by American strategic bombers, which he said had carried out 30 flights close to Russia this month.

He claims that is 2.5 times more than the same period last year.

Shoigu complained of what he said was a simulated US nuclear strike against Russia earlier this month.

He said: “The defence minister underlined that during the US military exercises ‘Global Thunder’, 10 American strategic bombers rehearsed launching nuclear weapons against Russia from the western and eastern directions.

“The minimum proximity to our state border was 20km.”

Shoigu said Russian air defence units had spotted and tracked the US strategic bombers and taken unspecified measures to avoid any incidents.

His ministry’s TV channel Zvezda interpreted his comments as him saying: “NATO activity dictates the need to maintain nuclear forces on combat readiness.”

The Pentagon has hit back insisting its drills were announced publicly at the time and adhered to international protocols.

This comes at a time of high tension with Washington over Ukraine, with US officials voicing concerns about a possible Russian attack on its southern neighbour – a suggestion Russia has denied.

Moscow has in turn accused the United States, NATO and Ukraine of provocative behaviour, pointing to US arms supplies to Ukraine, Kiev’s use of Turkish drones against Russian-backed separatists and NATO exercises close to its borders.

Pentagon spokesperson Anton Semelroth said: “These missions were announced publicly at the time, and closely planned with Strategic Command, European Command, allies and partners to ensure maximum training and integration opportunities as well as compliance with all national and international requirements and protocols.”

Top Russian and US military officers, Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, spoke by telephone but neither side disclosed the contents of the conversation.

Global Thunder, which this year put US nuclear-capable B-52 bombers through their paces, is the US Strategic Command’s annual nuclear and command exercise designed to test and demonstrate the readiness of America’s nuclear capabilities.

President Vladimir Putin referenced the apparent episode last week, complaining of Western strategic bombers carrying “very serious weapons” close to Russia.

He said the West was taking Moscow’s warnings not to cross its “red lines” too lightly.

Shoigu made the comments in a video conference with Chinese Defence Minister Wei Fenghe. He said that US bomber flights close to Russia’s eastern borders were also a threat to China.

“Against this backdrop, Russo-Chinese coordination is becoming a stabilising factor in world affairs,” said Shoigu.

Russia and China agreed at their meeting to step up cooperation between their armed forces when it came to strategic military exercises and joint patrols, the defence ministry said.

Earlier this month, Russia warned relations with the West are “almost at boiling point” as tensions mount over migrants at the Poland-Belarus border.

With Nato and Russian forces playing cat and mouse games, Putin has said he would “simply destroy” any country that encroached on his country’s territory.

Recent days have seen US officials warn Russia may be plotting an imminent invasion of Ukraine, with the Kremlin massing 100,000 troops on their border.

And Putin’s regime has been accused of stoking the unfolding migrant crisis between Belarus and Poland and even sent their own nuclear bombers into the area.

Belarus – dubbed Europe’s last dictatorship – has been accused of “weaponising” migration against the EU sparking a tense stand-off along their border with Poland with troops on both sides.

Here’s another goldie…

Young Americans feel that American Democracy has FAILED

Here’s the FIRST ITEM ON THE AGENDA for the so-called GLOBAL DEMOCRACY SUMMIT? – “A national survey of 18-to 29-year-old Americans shows more than half believe US democracy has either “failed” or is “in trouble,” and a significant portion also sees the potential for civil war.

Of the 52% polled who said they’ve lost or are losing faith in America’s democratic system, 39% described the country as a “democracy in trouble.”

Another 13% of respondents called it a “failed democracy,” according to research released on Wednesday by the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School.

Of the more than 2,100 young Americans surveyed for the poll, only 7% said they believe the US is a “healthy democracy,” while another 27% consider it a “somewhat functioning democracy.”

In perhaps the polling’s most startling findings, 35% of the young Americans surveyed said they saw the potential for a second civil war in their lifetimes, while a quarter of those polled believed they could see a US state secede within their lifetime.” –

Big, huge changes, in the near future (a tentative list)

24638 Views September 26, 2021 196 Comments

by Andrei for the Saker blog

***

Truly, tectonic changes are happening before our eyes, and today I just want to list some of them but without going to deep into specific analyses, that I plan to do later in the coming weeks. But just looking at this list is impressive enough, at least for me. So, here we go:

The Anglos are circling the wagons:

The planned sale of US/UK SSNs to Australia is nothing short of a HUGE game changer. It is also just the tip of a big iceberg:

The US seems to have de-facto given up on Europe, not only because the UK left or because the EU is crashing and unmanageable anyway, but because the political grip the US had on the continent is now clearly slipping: NATO is a paper tiger, the “new Europeans” have outlived their utility and Russia has basically successfully diffused the threat from the West by her titanic effort to develop capabilities which make an attack on Russia suicidal for any country, including the USA, whether nukes are involved or not.
By screwing over France, the US has jettisoned a pretty useless ally which had a short hysterical fit, but is already going back to its usual groveling and begging (BTW – those who think that de Gaulle was the last French patriot capable of telling Uncle Shmuel to “take a hike” are wrong, Mitterrand was the last one, but that is a topic for another day).
Abandon NATO. Of course, in political/PR terms, the US will continue to declare itself committed to NATO and the EU, but the “body language” (actions) of the US directly contradicts this notion.
Why the Australian SSNs. For all its immense progress since the 80s and 90s, China still has two major technological weak points: aircraft engines and SSNs. It just so happens that these are also two real US strong points. By deploying 8 more SSNs near China, the US is very intelligently maximizing the use of its best assets and hurting China were it will hurt the most. This does come with some very real risks, however, which I will discuss below.

The BRICS is close to becoming useless:

Brazil is currently run by the US and Israel. South Africa is in a deep crisis. As for India, it is doing what it has been doing for decades: trying to play all sides while trying to weaken China. So it sure looks like the BRICS are becoming the “BRICS” which really leaves us with “only” the “RC” alliance which actually has a real name: the Chinese call it the “Strategic comprehensive partnership of coordination for the new era”.

Again, I don’t think that anybody will formally dissolve what was a rather informal alliance to begin with, but de-facto the BRICS seems to be loosing much of its former glamour and illusions. As for Russia and China, they are not going to “save” the former BRICS members out of some sense of sympathy especially not against their own will: let them save themselves, or at least try. Then, maybe.

Also, let’s be honest here, BRICS was an economic concept which was mostly an alliance of weak(er) countries against the big economic and military powers of the North and West.

As for the Russian-Chinese alliance (let’s call it that, even though formally that is not what this is), it is, by itself, already more powerful than BRICS and even more powerful that the united West (US+NATO+EU+etc.).

The SCO is changing (thanks to Uncle Shmuel), fast

If Biden was a secret “Putin agent” (“KGB agent” is the preferred term in the US, at least by those who do not seem to realize that the KGB was disbanded thirty years ago) he could not have done “better” than what he did in Afghanistan. Now, thanks to this galactic faceplant, the small(er) guys in the SCO (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan) are now getting seriously concerned about what will happen next.

Even better, the (very powerful) Iran will officially become a SCO member this month! Again, neither Russia not China “need” the SCO for their defense, but it sure makes things easier for them. Speaking of Afghanistan, Pakistan is already a SCO member, as is India.

It is important to note that the SCO will not become an “Asian NATO” or an “anti-NATO” or anything similar. Again, why would Russia, China and other want to follow a failed model?

They have repeated ad nauseam that their alliances are of unions of (truly!) sovereign states and that this union will not impede on this sovereignty in any ways (besides, neither Russia not China need to limit the others SCO members sovereignty to begin with).

The EU is slowly committing economic and political suicide

Initially, France had a major hissy fit, but is probably not doing the only thing France should do after what happened: leave NATO and slam the door on it, very loudly. De Gaulle or Mitterrand would have done so immediately, but Macron? Being the ultimate spineless fake that he is, it would be miraculous if he did anything meaningful (other than brutally repressing all the riots in France).

At this time of writing the result of the elections in Germany are too close to call, but even if NS2 is allowed to function, the level of russophobic hysteria in Europe is so extreme that the following will almost certainly happen: the EU will continue with its rhetoric until the prices go even further up, at which point they will turn to the only country which the EU desperately need to survive: the much hated and feared Russia. Don’t quote me on that, but last week I remember the following prices for 1000 cubic meters of gas in Europe (just under 1000 dollars), the Ukraine (1600 dollars) and Belarus (120 dollars). I might have memorized this wrong (I was traveling), and this might have changed, but the bottom line is this: only Russia can’t give the EU the energy it needs, and she has exactly ZERO reasons to make those russophobic prostitutes any favors (other than symbolic). And even if my memory played a trick on me, what is certain that the prices for energy are soaring, the EU reserves are very low, and the temperatures falling. Welcome to the real world 🙂

I won’t even go into the “multiculturalism” “inclusivity” “positivity” and other Woke nonsense which most of the EU countries have accepted as dogmas (even Switzerland caved in).

The US is like an aircraft breaking apart in mid-air

As most of you know, I have decided to stay away from internal US politics (for many different reasons). So I will just use a metaphor: the US is like an aircraft which, due to pilot incompetence and infighting, is breaking apart in mid-air with its passengers still arguing about who should be the next pilot as that could make any difference. Some passengers will continue to argue until the hit the ground. Others are engage in “mid-air fistfights” apparently believing that if they succeed in beating the crap out of the other guy, they will somehow prevent gravity from doing what it does.

The reality is much simpler: a system that is not viable AND which cannot reform itself (too busy with self-worshiping and blaming others for everything) can only do one thing: collapse and, probably, even break-apart. Only after that can the US, or whatever the successor state(s) will be called, rebuilt itself into something totally different from the US which died chocking on its own arrogance this year (like all the other empires in history, by the way, the latest one being the Soviet one).

The Russian elections

The results are in and they are yet another galactic faceplant for the AngloZionist Empire. The main Kremlin Party took a hit, the Communists did very well, Zhirinovski’s LDPR lost a lot and a new (moderately pro-Kremlin) party made it in for the first time. Considering the many billions of dollars the West has spent on trying to create a Belarus-like crisis in Russia (Navalnyi, Petrov, Boshirov & Co.), this is yet another truly gigantic failure for the West. If anything, the rise of the KPRF shows that a lot of people are fed up with two things: 1) what they see as a tepid, if not outright weak, Russian foreign policy towards the West and 2) with the liberal (economically speaking) policies of Putin and his entourage. Absolutely NOBODY in Russia wants “better relations” or any kind of “dialog” with the rabidly russophobic West. And to the extend that Russia and the USA simply *have* to talk to each other (being nuclear superpowers) they, of course, will. But the EU as such is of zero interest to Russia. And if Russia needs to get something done (like what anyway?), she will talk to the US, not its EU underlings. For all its problems, the US still matters. But the clowns of the EU?

[Sidebar: the word “Communist” usually elicits a knee-jerk reaction from brainwashed US Americans.  But for the rest of them, let me just say that while I don’t think the KPRF is what Russia needs and while I have nothing good to say about Ziuganov or most of the KPRF leadership, I will say that KPRF does not mean Gulags, hammers and sickles smashing Ukie babies, Russian tanks in downtown Warsaw or any such nonsense.  There are several “Communist” parties in Russia, and none of them are even remotely similar to the kind of party the bad old CPSU was.  So while US politicians feel very witty to speak of the CCP-virus and that kind of nonsense (Ted Cruz is officially my “favorite idiot” in Congress now), this is so far detached from any reality that I won’t even bother explaining it here.]

The COVID pandemic

Wow, just wow. Where do I even begin??? Biden’s speech on this topic was hateful declaration of war on all those who don’t fully accept the “official” White House line. The fact that many (most?) of those who do not accept the official party line DO accept an even dumber version of events does not make it right to force them into choosing between their beliefs and, say, their job, or their right to move around. Again, after listening to Biden I kept wondering if he was a “Putin agent” as his actions are only accelerating the breakup of the “US aircraft” I mentioned above. You can say many things about COVID-dissidents, but you can’t deny them two things: 1) a sincere belief in their ideas and 2) an equally sincere belief that their core freedoms, values and rights are trampled upon by pathological liars and crooks (aka politicians + BigPharma).

They will resist and, yes, violently if needed. Because for them it is a both a matter of personal human dignity and even survival!

At least, and so far, the US still has a powerful Constitution which will make it very hard for the current nutcases in the White House to do what they apparently want to do (force 80M US Americans to obey “or else”). Furthermore, Federal courts cannot be simply ignored. Also, US states still have a lot of power. Finally, most US Americans still hold dear the ideals of freedom, liberty, small government, privacy, etc. But EU countries have no such protections from governmental abuse: true, in the US these are all rights are weakened by the day if not the hour, but at least they have not been *officially* abrogated (yet?).

If you want to see how bad things can get without such rights, just look at the pandemic freak show in Canada, Australia or New Zealand!

Finally, and irrespective of its actual origin (I am still on the fence on that), the COVID pandemic wiped all the make-up and has showed the entire world the true face of the West and its rulers: weak, ignorant, arrogant, hypocritical cowards whose only true concern is to cover their butts and “grab whatever can be grabbed” before the inevitable and final explosion (nuclear, economic or social).

Now back the the Aussie SSNs

The sale/lease of these SSNs is not only a danger for China, but also one for Russia. Simply put, Russia cannot and will not allow the Anglos to strangle China like they did with Japan before WWII. The good news is this: the latest Russian SSNs/SSGNs are at least as good as the latest Seawolf/Virginia class, if not better. Ditto for ASW capabilities. What Russia does lack is the needed numbers (and Anglo submarine fleets are much lager, even “just” the USN alone) and funds, both of which China has (or can have). From the Kremlin’s point of view, the Anglos are trying to create an “Asian NATO”, something which neither China nor Russia will allow. The Chinese already informed the Aussies that they are now a legitimate target for nuclear strikes (apparently, Australia wants to become the “Poland of the Pacific”), while the Russians only made general comments of disapproval. But take this to the bank: the Russian General Staff and the Chinese (who both probably saw this coming for a while) will jointly deploy the resources needed to counter this latest “brilliant idea” of the Anglos. In purely military terms, there are many different options to deal with this threat, which ones China and Russia will chose will become apparent fairly soon because it is far better to do something prevent that delivery from actually happening than to deal with eight more advanced attack submarines.

By the way, the Russians are also semi-deploying/semi-testing an advanced SSK, the Lada-class, which has both very advanced capabilities and, apparently, still many problems. SSKs are not capable of threatening SSNs in open (blue) waters, but in shallower (green/brown) waters such as straits or littorals, they can represent a very real threat, if only by “freeing up” the SNNs to go and hunt into the deep (blue) waters. Also, the main threat for subs comes from the air, and here, again, China and Russia have some very attractive options.

Conclusion: interesting times for sure…

Like the Chinese curse says, we are living in very interesting times. The quick collapse of the Empire and the US is, of course, inherently very dangerous for our planet. But it is also a golden opportunity for Zone B nations to finally kick the Anglos out and regain their sovereignty. True, the US still has a lot of momentum, just like a falling airliner would, but the fact remains that 1) they ran from Afghanistan and 2) they are circling their Anglo wagons shows that somebody somewhere does “get it” and even understood that in spite of the huge political humiliation both of these development represent for narcissistic politicians and their followers, this was a price which absolutely HAD to be paid to (try) to survive.

In my article (infamous) analysis ” Will Afghanistan turn out to be US imperialism’s “Last Gleaming”?” (it triggered even more hysterics and insults than usual, at least on the Unz review comments section) I wrote this: “the British Empire had the means of its foreign policies. The US does not.”

This is now changing.

Yes, what the Anglos (aka 5 eyes) are doing is a retreat. But it is a *smart* one. They are cutting off all the “useless imperial weights” and going for the “smaller but stronger” option. We might not like it, I certainly don’t, but I have to admit that this is pretty smart and even probably the only option left for the AngloZionist Empire. At the very least, it is now clear that the Anglos have no allies, and never had them. What they had where colonial coolies who imagined themselves as part of some “community of civilized, democratic and peace-loving, nations”. These coolies are now left in limbo.

So, who will be the next one to show Uncle Shmuel to the door? My guess is the Republic of Korea. And, frankly, since the DPRK is not a country the Empire can take on, and since China will only increase its (already major) influence on both the DPRK and the ROK, the US might as well pack and leave (maybe for Australia or occupied Japan?).

Okay, end of this overview of developments.

Cheers

Andrei

MM Wraps up with an overview

Ever since 1945, the world was ruled by one singular nation; the United States. It maintained a plurality of global rule. “You do as we say, or be destroyed“.

That days have ended. They are over.

There are now three major nations; USA, Russia and China.

And because of the insanity of the United States today, that has fractured into two balancing forces; Asia against “the West”.

You can easily tell who is who by the population inoculation schedule.

WEST = Population inoculated by mRNA injection.
EAST = Population inoculated by Dead Host vaccine.

The West is collapsing domestically, and on all levels. It’s only way out is to attack and strike at everything everywhere and blame the rest of the world for it’s karmic punishments. And that is what we are seeing now.

USA military movements against China.
USA military movements against Russia.
USA setting up military alliances to counter Russia / China.
USA black operations all around Russia and China.

The USA (the West) is getting desperate. It is willing to do the most horrific things in order to maintain it’s power, but you know the rest of the world isn’t stupid. They are ready to “bitch slap” America into the bronze age.

Right now, all indications are the rest of the world is standing by and trying to peacefully (and quietly) adjust to the new global arrangements, and that means a united and powerful Asia, and a collapsed, cesspool known as “the West”. I figure, and anticipate that all will be settled by 2030. With a grand understanding of what direction the world will vector towards by the end of 2024.

There are many things in play right now.

Don’t get too caught up in them.

Domestically, the Christmas parade massacre by an African-American sex offender on parole that resulted in 8 grandmothers and children killed, and 60 others hurt… all white… has stunned the United States. The looting, the robberies, the black on white and Asian assaults have been going on because the government is not enforcing laws, and the black community knows this. And the non-black community, across the board, is about ready to *snap*.

I can see this, and I don’t even use binoculars.

My guess is that there is a substantive and general change in the “feeling in the air”. Much like what happened in Waco under Clinton, but this is far deeper, far more visceral. There’s this quiet apprehension of “what will be next”. And the pandemic, the war-march media, and the wild spending while crime goes stratospheric has got everyone spooked.

You can tell just by looking at what my post popular articles are. People are alarmed.

At the least, there will see major power shifts in government. But since the government has proven itself to be weak and impotent, I except something far deadlier to occur…

…unreported armed justice. Starting off in “Death Wish” Charles Bronson events, escalating into group actions.

Black thug robs an Asian-American. Get’s shot in retaliation. Video 2MB

In all cases, there will be pockets or places where you dare not venture towards, and places where you are safe and where it is calm.

MM readership should be focusing on affirmation campaigns that maintain this calm stability around them while the rest of the world seemingly enters the massive “meat grinders” known as domestic and international war.

Be safe everyone.

The ONLY way for you all to control your life is to…

Conduct prayer affirmation campaigns.
Run your Fate Forecasts and listen to the warnings.
Participate in your community.
Turn off the “news”. Vault 7 is real.
and…

…wait for it…

…be the Rufus.

video 21MB

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New Beginnings 2

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Hei, There is song for that title , too! Muse - we are f.. f.. : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ac4E_UsmB1g Enjoy! Awesome artwork,…

I have family in Iran When this was going down, my family told me they were bunkering down because they…

hmmmm.... https://rumble.com/v4q7hcq-the-end-of-humanity-as-planned-by-the-global-leaders.html and just maybe with help from Domain and some remnants.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYMMg7bUUAE Cheerful Love GrizzlyBear hug Unuk/Dida