A sitrep on geopolitical events regarding global world changes April 2022

I can't remember a time when war propaganda has been this intense.

-dwp

Crappy title regarding a strange period of time.

Well,  the world is quickly switching from one uni-polar governmental operation to a multi-polar one. And we are watching it in real time. Oh, sure, the “West” is kicking up a fuss, and the United States is in hysterics, but that will fade in time.

Sometime, hopefuly sooner than later, the United States will decide to scrap the decades old RAND plans and accept a new reality.

However, that will have to be forced by necessity, and the rest of the world is waiting for that moment to come. Hopefully sooner than later, as the longer it is delayed, the larger the risk of catastrophic fiasco.

Here, we continue on our menu of current events, and toss in views of what we all used to have. It is a lfiestyle that predates the neocon monsters that have corrupted the United States government so badly. I hope you enjoy this article.

Been there. Done that.

daily picdump 58 3
Been there.

Young boy picks out a girl

This video has been making it’s arounds. A boy is in a Business KTV, and when the girls come out in the lineup, he runs up and picks a girl immediately. LOL video 8MB

The “news” about China

China is falling apart. Andy day now… any day now… the people will “rise up” and accept democracy™ and freedom™. That’s the narrative, don’t you know. Of course the idiots regurigating this bullshit have exactly zero experience with China. They are fine “cannon fodder”. LOL!

From Drudge Report 8APR22.

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2022 04 08 16 05

The fiction is “off the charts”.

On the domestic side

you will only get it if you are married to a man 11
You will only get it if you are married .

Singapore abstains from UN vote on Russia: MFA says awaiting probe on human rights violation in Ukraine

Singapore suddenly adjusted her pro US foreign policy, they now are not so trigger-happy against Russia.  Abstention in UN vote: MFA says Singapore is awaiting findings on human rights violation in Ukraine

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President Biden tells us what defines America

The joke is on democrazy.

NATO is mobilized to confront China

Orders from the USA.
Ukraine-Russia war: China needs to condemn Moscow’s invasion says NATO boss

Apparently, NATOs intention is to control the world, not self defence :

  • NATO to deepen ties with Asian partners amid China’s refusal to condemn Russia – World – TASS
  • Unreasonable, sinister for NATO to push China to condemn Russia – Global Times

Spicy Bean and Beef Pie

This has everything. Meat pie. Beef. beans, and taste! The key is the unique set of ingredients. But all are commonly available.

exps4622 FM153592D03 18 1b 2
Spicy Bean and Beef Pie.

Ingredients

  • 1 pound ground beef
  • 2 to 3 garlic cloves, minced
  • 1 can (11-1/2 ounces) condensed bean with bacon soup, undiluted
  • 1 jar (16 ounces) thick and chunky picante sauce, divided
  • 1/4 cup cornstarch
  • 1 tablespoon chopped fresh parsley
  • 1 teaspoon paprika
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1/4 teaspoon pepper
  • 1 can (16 ounces) kidney beans, rinsed and drained
  • 1 can (15 ounces) black beans, rinsed and drained
  • 2 cups shredded cheddar cheese, divided
  • 3/4 cup sliced green onions, divided
  • Dough for double-crust deep-dish pie
  • 1 cup sour cream
  • 1 can (2-1/4 ounces) sliced ripe olives, drained

Directions

  1. Preheat oven to 425°. In a large skillet, cook beef over medium heat until beef is no longer pink. Add garlic; cook 1 minute longer. Drain. In a large bowl, combine soup, 1 cup picante sauce, cornstarch, parsley, paprika, salt and pepper. Fold in beans, 1-1/2 cups cheese, 1/2 cup onions and beef mixture.
  2. On a lightly floured surface, roll half the dough to a 1/8-in.-thick circle; transfer to a 9-in. deep-dish pie plate. Trim even with rim. Add filling. Roll remaining dough to a 1/8-in.-thick circle. Place over filling. Trim, seal and flute edge. Cut slits in top.
  3. Bake until crust is lightly browned, 30-35 minutes. Let stand for 5 minutes before cutting. Serve with sour cream, olives and remaining picante sauce, cheese and onions.

Serbia says it was blackmailed over UN vote

I am not really surprised.

Article

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American Diner

Once the go-to hangout spot for American teens and a symbol of opportunity for small business owners, diners are one of the most beloved remnants of mid-century America.

Scattered across the country, diners come in many shapes and forms, from roadside railcar-style establishments to tiny hole-in-the-wall restaurants in the country’s biggest cities.

Here’s what diners looked like during their heyday...

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American Diner.

Republica – Ready to Go (Official Video)

Big British group from the 1990s. They made a splash on the music scene and then faded away. They maintained domestic signifigance for some time, but most of the world remains unaware of them.

Good Map ever of Ukraine.

It’s from the Western leadership. So it’s really not all that accurate. But it’s a good map never the less. You can zoom in, and all that. The actual military territories and Russian locations are entirely deceptive. It seems that Russia has made no gains. But that’s not the intention. This is not World War I. Don’t “pull a Hitler” and maintain 19th century thinking.

2022 04 10 21 48
2022 04 10 21 48

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ok Map

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Beijing warns of ‘forceful measures’ if Nancy Pelosi visits Taiwan

It is possible that China may declare Taiwan airspace a “no fly zone”. If so, in this senario, they will shoot down any Taiwan jet and destroy Taiwan military bases that dare to fire the first shot.
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It’s possible, but not probable.
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Imagine if “Xi the great” follows “Putin the great” to declare a ban on accepting US currency.  What will happen to the Western economies, their cost of living, manufacturing supply chain, currency value, and world confident in Holding US treasury debt?
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The truth is that the United States is playing a zero sum game, and blindly believe in its might with nary a second thought.
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  • US House Speaker is expected to arrive in Taipei on Sunday, according to media reports
  • Beijing says Washington ‘must be fully responsible for the consequences’ if it goes ahead
Article

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Nancy Pelosi postpones Asia trip after testing positive for Covid-19

Imagine that. What “bad luck”.
A US Congressional delegation to Asia has been postponed after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tested positive for Covid-19.

The announcement followed a warning by China that it would take strong measures if the trip included a visit to Taiwan, as media reports in the region had claimed.

Pelosi's deputy communications director Drew Hammill said in a tweet on Thursday that the planned Congressional delegation to Asia, to be led by Pelosi over the two-week Congressional break, "will be postponed to a later date."

"After testing negative this week, Speaker Pelosi received a positive test result for Covid-19 and is currently asymptomatic. The Speaker is fully vaccinated and boosted, and is thankful for the robust protection the vaccine has provided. The Speaker will quarantine consistent with CDC guidance, and encourages everyone to get vaccinated, boosted and test regularly," Hammill tweeted.
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Article What terrible luck, eh?

Railcar style diner

Railcar-style diners were modeled after rail carriages or sometimes converted from the original train cars into stand-alone eateries. Diners were constructed in factories and then shipped to their destinations, much like mobile homes, and were relatively affordable to purchase at just $1,000.

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2022 04 08 15 19

Once they arrived, the utilities simply had to be connected. Since diners, or “lunch cars,” had to be shipped using a truck or railcar, they were designed to be narrow.

AUKUS is “Anglo-Saxon small bloc” to serve U.S. hegemony: Chinese FM spokesperson-Xinhua

It’s pretty obvious, and if you tabulate all the public speeches from the USA and from Australia, you can clearly see that the Chinese spokesperson is just stating facts. Why this is signifigant is that the Chinese government is officially recognizing that a military build up prior to an American invasion / war upon China is the purpose of AUKUS.

Listen to the video full content:

Listen

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New Jersey Diners

At one point, nearly 95% of the shippable restaurants were manufactured in New Jersey.

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New Jersey Diner.

New Jersey’s oldest diner, the Summit Diner, opened in 1929, was rebuilt in 1938, and is still open today.

China and Russian Trade in Yuan

China is buying Russian energy with its own currency, marking the first commodities paid for in yuan since Western sanctions hit Moscow.

Here…

Article 1

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And Here…

Article 2

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Until the Great Depression, most diners could be found in the Northeast.

After World War II ended and the suburbs began to boom, more and more people began opening diners nationwide.

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Typical diner interior.

The small businesses could prove extremely profitable for owners. Since the restaurants themselves were so small, and the kitchens so narrow, not many employees were required.

Sneaker Pimps 6 Underground/Lyrics/Kelli Ali

A top charter in the mid-1990s. I wonder if anyone remembers this song. I think it kind of defined what it was like in those years.

Chinese democracy seems to work pretty good.

In a comparative sense. But America has “American” democracy™. That’s superior Right?

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2022 04 08 14 43

With the implementation of cross-country highways in the 1960s, diners continued to grow in popularity.

Travelers along the new highways could stop off and grab a quick bite at the roadside establishments.

2022 04 08 15 24Interior of a roadside diner.

Many diners featured a row of bar stools along a counter, allowing many people to be served without much effort from the diner’s staff.

Sophie B. Hawkins – Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover

Here’s a “blast from the past”. This song was pretty famous back in the 1990s. It is about… well, you know… there is a person, a certain someone… that you really like. But, you know, there are taboos and you cannot have a relationship with that person.

The way the world works

Yeah. This guy has it all figured out. video 14MB

I Don’t Know Who’s Great Resetting Who Anymore

I don’t think you people understand how big of a deal all this economic stuff that is happening actually is. It’s very difficult even for me to watch it all playing out in real time.

Basically, the whole world had agreed to a US-run financial system that was outside of the realm of politics. Then, the United States decided to violate international law and ban Russia from the global financial system, ostensibly because they believed that Vladimir Putin is a very mean person.

This is not smart. There is no strategy here.

RT:

Global economies will be rethinking how safe it is to rely on the US dollar in their foreign currency holdings, the deputy head of the International Monetary Fund, Gita Gopinath, said on Tuesday.

The statement comes after half of Russia’s forex holdings were effectively confiscated by international financial institutions amid sanctions placed on Moscow following the launch of its military operation in Ukraine.

“We are likely to see some countries reconsidering how much they hold of certain currencies in their reserves,” she stated in an interview with Foreign Policy magazine.

Gopinath said the IMF sees “increasing fragmentation” in global payments systems as one of the consequences of the current events. However, she stated that the US dollar, traditionally considered the world reserve currency, is not likely to suffer an “imminent demise.”

Still, depending on how long the crisis in Ukraine lasts, there could be larger effects, Gopinath said. 

I don’t know how many hardline “everything is a conspiracy” people read this website.

Personally, I’m a moderate conspiracy guy. As a rule, I only publish conspiracies that can be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. In terms of my personal mind, I believe some conspiracies that I wouldn’t publish, because I understand they can’t be proved beyond a reasonable doubt.

There is some gray area, of course. You can use deductive logic to conclude something without necessarily having all of the facts documented. For example: when the CIA (or one of its tentacles) releases documents admitting to doing some dastardly thing decades earlier, and then says “yeah, but we stopped doing that,” you can deduce that they are almost certainly still doing it.

The logic is:

      • They lied about doing it in the first place while they were doing it
      • They have a history of saying they stopped doing things and then getting caught still doing them
      • If they were doing it in the first place, and nothing has changed, they still view it as worth doing
      • Everything they want to do in secret is done in secret, under the guise of national security
      • They’ve repeatedly demonstrated that there is no consideration of any type of morality in their secret deeds
      • etc.

So, with for example any of the human experiments that the CIA was involved in – whether it be testing chemical weapons on the public or doing mind control techniques on patients in psych wards – you can assume with very high confidence that, given that they’ve admitted to doing these things in the past, they are still doing them now.

Viewing Everything That Happens as a Conspiracy Can Lead to Tangled-Up, Nonsensical Thinking

I am the first person to admit “conspiracies are real.” I am not some rabid person who goes around condemning people as “conspiracy theorists.” I’m always interested in hearing people out. I think I’m about as open-minded as a person can be without having a gaping hole in my head. I like engaging people in discussion of every kind of idea.

The World Economic Forum’s Great Reset is the most obvious conspiracy of the current year. I don’t “believe” in this – I know it is real, because I’ve read their publications, and seen their policies enacted around the world. However, you have to match your beliefs with facts with reality, or you end up getting sucked into a void.

There is a sect of people who think everything is a conspiracy, and use backward logic to explain anything that happens as part of the conspiracy. Again, I don’t know how many of these people there are, and I know that these people tend to be much more vocal on the internet than people who are not in this subculture. But I have seen a lot of people claim some version of “the West is using the Russia conflict to destroy its own economic system on purpose.”

These people are correct in stating that the US and the rest of the West have a plan – this “Great Reset” thing – to make basically everyone poor, jobless, living in state housing and eating state food, ultimately reducing the population so that the elite can dominate the limited resources remaining on earth. (If you follow the WEF documents and presentations, they are very big into the idea that they are going to use emerging technology to basically become immortal, extending their lives through gene therapy and bionic implants and such, so they believe they will need these resources to build an empire in outer space. They literally believe that and you can read it on their website. It’s not a “theory.”)

So, when you see them destroying the global economic system, it is easy to say “see, this is that thing.”

And indeed: they are clearly spinning this stuff in that direction. You see US officials coming out and saying that it’s time to start riding the bus if you can’t afford an \$80,000 Tesla.

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2022 04 08 10 52
Earlier this month Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told American families to buy electric vehicles if they desire gas savings, now he’s telling them to take the bus.https://t.co/r5Iw6UA9cB pic.twitter.com/CKqrviNwDA

— MRCTV (@mrctv) March 22, 2022

This is clearly part of the program, and they’re exploiting the Ukraine situation to push this agenda.

Meanwhile in France, their dictator just came out and said that he’s going to start issuing food rations when everyone starts starving because of a border skirmish in the former USSR.

However, “everything is going according to plan” just doesn’t work, because ultimately, these big decisions on the geopolitical stage regarding the dollar as reserve currency only serve to empower China.

China can’t be sanctioned because they produce too much of what America uses. China has also formed a global trade network that they could use to blockade the United States.

Diners became popular due to their large menus featuring American food staples like hamburgers, fries, and club sandwiches.

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Diners were popular.

Most diners had galley kitchens that made it easier for cooks to move from one dish to another, making service quicker than in a traditional restaurant.

An American couple adopts a Chinese orphan

Heartwarming. video 34MB

Speaking of hamburgers…

awesome photos 2American burgers.

Do you think that I am giving enough airtime to the humble American hamburger, or is more time needed?

Here’s an accurate meme posted by a Chinese official:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that when the West talks about the "int'l community", they mean: pic.twitter.com/RZNOwDymX2

— Lijian Zhao 赵立坚 (@zlj517) March 17, 2022
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2022 04 08 10 50

Saudi Arabia is going to start trading oil in yuan.

Countries are going to start dumping dollar reserves.

America is going to be a third world country, while China becomes the dominant world power.

So then, if you are going to say that this is all going according to plan, you have to say that the US leadership wants to transfer all of its global power to the Chinese.

But why?

That’s where the hang-up is. It doesn’t make any sense why the US and Western establishment would be interested in transferring power to China.

In order to square that circle, you have to really start going into nutty type conspiracies. And when I say “nutty,” I’m saying that not as an insult, but as an objective descriptor. You would have to come up with an explanation as to how China is secretly on-board with the global Western (frankly, primarily Jewish) agenda.

There is no indicator of that, really at all. In fact, China’s culture is virtually the diametric opposite of Western Jewish culture.

I wrote about this in some detail: What About China, Then?

To make it make sense, you are forced into a few necessary assertions, all of which are fantastical:

  • China has a secret deal with Western powers to implement a feminist-anal-tranny-Jewish slave grid
  • China purposefully did the reverse of the feminist-anal-tranny-Jewish agenda instead of a push for democracy (I guess as some kind of fake-out)
  • For some reason, China has refused all Western attempts to “democratize” (another fake-out?)
  • The Taiwan occupation, the Western-backed Hong Kong riots, and every other thing that the US has done to try to undermine Chinese society was part of a massive fake-out (who are they faking out? People on internet forums?)
  • The West has some kind of secret mechanism through which to ensure that China upholds this theoretical secret agreement, which is why they are willing to surrender all global power to China upfront, without any visible guarantees that China will uphold the secret agreement

None of this, to me, is serious in any way. People try to work backwards from what they see happening, then they hit the brick wall of these fantastical and possibly outright nonsensical assertions which are necessary to uphold the logic train they are riding.

There is no way to say this is all part of the plan without saying the plan is to transfer all power to China, and there is no explanation of why that would be the plan.

The hardline conspiracy people will then start listing off a series of allegedly unexplainable questions, rather than confront the underlying hard wall their logic has hit.

For example:

  • Why would the US transfer its manufacturing base to China in the 1990s?
  • Why would the US implode its own economy and status as a world power?
  • Why are the Chinese allowed to invest in Western infrastructure?

These are fair questions and worth considering. But to claim that the only possible explanation is “a secret deal with the Chinese,” despite the stated problems with that theory, is absurd.

My explanations for these questions are simpler: in general, I would answer those questions with “the West made bad decisions.” I would attribute these bad decisions by a decadent and decaying elite feebly attempting to manage complex systems they don’t understand.

With the first question – the issue of transferring the manufacturing base – this was well documented at the time. Western think-tanks explained in a virtually infinite number of white papers and books that when the Chinese quality of living was escalated, they would “democratize” and integrate with the West. Needless to say, that did not happen. Instead, China installed a new Emperor who organized a wide-ranging program to promote ultranationalism and reinforce traditional Chinese cultural values.

Samuel P. Huntington, who died in 2008 at the age of 81, is one of the globalist thinkers who disagreed with the consensus, arguing that China could, unlike Western countries, modernize and still maintain traditional culturally conservative values, which would then make it “unintegratable” into the Western order, which is based on modernist ideas.

If anyone wants to understand Huntington’s predictions further, they can read his book “Clash of Civilizations.” It’s kind of boring if you don’t have all the background knowledge, but not particularly difficult for someone with high school level reading skills.

This is the map he gave of the different civilizations that were to “clash” in the modern world:

You can overlay that with the above Chinese meme about the “international community.”

Meanwhile, China has spent the last two decades reaching out to these various other civilizations, and most of them get along very well with the Chinese. During the same two decades, the West has been engaged in brutal, pointless, and very expensive wars, serving no clear purpose anyone can explain beyond “Israeli security interests.” (Those countries could have been conquered a lot easier with Netflix and pornography, but the Jews wanted war. That’s the theme of all of this – the globalist agenda is continually undermined by bizarre Jewish psychology.)

The Chinese have also peddled a lot of influence in the West, primarily through being productive and exploiting the transnational ideology of the West.

Finally, to be clear: I don’t doubt that Western politicians have been bribed or that the Democrat Party in particular has a fair number of Chinese intelligence operatives and assets. The story of Fang-Fang the Chinese spy going around having sex with American politicians seems to be true, and that has probably happened a lot without the spies getting identified. But espionage and intelligence operations fit into my paradigm, rather than the “everything that happens wouldn’t happen unless it was a conspiracy” paradigm.

A glimpse of Japan

So cute. video 11MB

Chinese girl in a furry top

She almost looks like a doll. Sheech! video 2MB

“Does China have running water?”

A typical dumb-ass American viewpoint. video 8MB

‘Til Tuesday – Voices Carry

A blast from the past!

As well as being quicker to make, dishes served at diners were cheaper, too.

Items like pancakes, sausages, meatloaf, burgers, and sandwiches were typically served in the restaurants and still are in diners today.

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Good cheap food was available at diners.

The meals were low-priced, making diners popular even before their rise in the 1950s. During the Great Depression , diners provided an inexpensive way for families to go out to eat.

It’s the Same with Russia

These same kinds of issues come up when talking about how Putin is secretly working for Klaus Schwab – but those arguments aren’t even really important enough to address, because at this point, Russia is a de facto proxy state of China. To elaborate: China and Russia are in a binding alliance, and China is a much more powerful country than Russia, therefore: de facto proxy state – at least as regards Russia’s moves on the geopolitical stage. If China was allied with America, Russia would already be crushed (that’s why so many people tried to warn American planners that they had to choose one or the other).

Putin and the Russians obviously have their own objectives and so on; I don’t think they are a vassal state of the Chinese. But it is clear that Putin made sure the Ukrainian intervention was approved by China, and they would not have approved it if they didn’t think it served their interests. As we’ve seen, it has very much served their interests. Frankly, I am virtually positive that the Chinese knew how the US would react and did the math on how this would play out, ultimately resulting in the collapse of the dollar, and thereby the American Empire.

Meanwhile, by every single fact we are able to observe, the decadent leaders of the West are acting as though Russia and China are Iraq and Libya. It appears that they genuinely believe they can use brute force and threats of brute force to come out on top in this conflict. (It’s also worth mentioning that the West, due to the ultra-low moral character of its leaders and the utter lack of any unifying ideal beyond anal sex, has lost the ability to cooperate cohesively as a single body in the way that the Chinese do.)

Please note: Unlike the theoretical secret deals between the West and the Chinese (or Russia), the deals between China and Russia are very much visible and are largely committed to paper.

The West started this conflict, of course. I don’t know when they realized Russia was going to move into the Ukraine, but they had ample opportunity to prevent it by simply agreeing to the previous status quo. They appear to believe that they can create a protracted conflict in the Ukraine like they did when Russia invaded Afghanistan in the 1980s. That shows a fundamental lack of understanding of the situation. Ukraine has historically been a part of Russia. There is not really any such thing as a “Ukrainian identity” outside of being a vassal state. In the west of the country, they tend to feel closer to Poland, and there is some bad blood all around with regards to the USSR. But none of this is in any way similar to fanatical Islam. The US has backed neo-Nazism as a kind of “Ukrainian ISIS,” but you can’t rally a country around cartoonish neo-Nazism (particularly while the entire leadership of the country is Jewish).

The idea of using neo-Nazis as rebels against a Russian occupation or a Russia-backed government in the Ukraine is nonsensical, and reeks of the kind of stupid thinking that led to America’s Afghan debacle. The US government pays people to lie to them, and when people tell the truth, they get fired and end up on obscure livestream interviews answering superchats. These liars are telling the decision-makers that the Ukraine is Afghanistan and a protracted conflict can be used to drain Russia, which will ultimately result in the collapse of the Putin government.

The fact that they have no idea what they’re doing is blatant in the fact that they are sanctioning the entire Russian race. Putin’s support is going up rapidly among the people, many of whom didn’t like his policies before but now feel compelled to rally around him since they are being attacked personally for their race by the West.

Diners typically operate around the clock, allowing patrons to stop by at any time for a meal.

Since diners are open all night long, many pop culture depictions of diners involve a feeling of loneliness and isolation.

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Diners were open 24 hours.

Edward Hopper’s 1942 painting “Nighthawks” shows a diner and its few occupants late at night. The painting is based on a diner in New York City’s Greenwich Village.

So, China Ruling the World, Huh?

We are clearly facing down a world ruled by the Chinese. A lot of people are uncomfortable with that. But most of the discomfort comes from the idea that the Chinese are somehow going to rule us in the same fashion that the US has ruled the world since World War II. They have no such plans for us. The Chinese have a vision of conquering the world through commerce, rather than war, threats of war, and geopolitical maneuvering.

We started out on the issue of the economic dominance of the US, and that economic dominance is indeed the key to everything. However, US economic dominance was entirely a result of US military might.

The reigning US philosophy for global economic dominance has been: “we will literally bomb you.”

Conversely, the Chinese philosophy has been: “we will sell you high quality products at reasonable prices.”

Chinese people do not really even understand what white people are, and they don’t have very much interest in learning. If a Chinese person outside of the major urban centers sees a white person, they don’t register them as a person, but rather as some kind of weird exotic creature that has popped up in their environment for mysterious reasons. The reaction is similar to if you were walking down the street, and saw Doraemon float in on a cloud.

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Doraemon float in on a cloud.

You might stop and look at him in awe, you might take out your phone and take a selfie, you might just ignore him completely because your brain cannot register the existence of a Doraemon floating around.

This is to say: it’s a purely insular culture, which Westerners do not understand any more than they understand us. As an example: instead of trying to trace their origins as a people, the Chinese believe – and teach children in school – that China has always existed. In their thinking, China is the “Middle Kingdom” that sits between Heaven and a mass of strange barbarians who may be interested in buying products.

When the Mongols consistently raided them, stealing their women and wealth on horseback and riding off with the booty, they said “cannot allow.” Instead of mounting an army to crush the Mongols, they built a gigantic wall, and told the Mongols that if they wanted Chinese products, they would have to buy them at the wall.

It is precisely the same logic as a Chinese immigrant family setting up a store in an all black neighborhood and covering the counter, cash register, and expensive items with bulletproof glass.

China has always been, fundamentally, a merchant empire, and that hasn’t changed. If it were not for the belligerence of the West, they wouldn’t have bothered to build up a large military at all. Historically, virtually every war the Chinese have fought has been a civil war, as they don’t look at the rest of the world as enemies or friends, but rather customers and potential customers.

China has de facto economic dominance over most of Southeast Asia and a lot of Africa. They’ve not interfered with any of these countries’ political processes, and they’ve shown no interest in doing so. I’ve repeatedly pointed out that they should have sent advisors to Burma during their (still ongoing) political crisis, given that they’ve got such a large stake in the Burmese economy, but they did not. Even when it is obviously to their benefit, and the problem would not be difficult to mediate, they stick to a policy of non-interference.

Similarly, they had huge investments in Vietnam, but made no attempt to interfere with the politics there. The locals started to resent Chinese being richer than locals. This ended up in massive pogroms of Chinese businesses in 2014. It didn’t get a lot of media attention in the West of course, but it was a pretty big deal. They burned more than a dozen factories, and were just smashing anything with Chinese characters on it (they can’t visibly tell the difference between each other, because Vietnamese people are really just Southern Chinese). They ended up accidentally smashing or burning a bunch of Taiwanese and even Japanese businesses (I guess they didn’t attack Korean businesses, because Korean characters have that circle thing that makes them really obvious).

Several people were killed. China’s response was basically “this is very disrespectful behavior. We cannot continue doing business with you.” They didn’t threaten them with a war, or try to do regime change. The Vietnamese government said they would secure Chinese investments, and then only arrested two people. (The Wikipedia page on these “protests” is not very good, but might be a starting point for people who want to look into it more.)

China pulled most of their investment, and Vietnam continued to pivot towards America, a country that they had relatively recently had a relatively brutal war with. Some Western-owned factories moved to Vietnam from China, but mostly the result of the pogroms and lack of action by the government to the pogroms just meant more money for Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Indonesia – countries where the local barbarians are more amenable to gentlemanly business practices.

Vietnam has effectively been cut out of the One Belt, One Road project, while the Chinese are doing expensive infrastructure projects and building factories everywhere else. Instead of using Vietnamese ports, China is going through neighboring Laos, Burma, Thailand, and Cambodia, then running a waterway shipping line past Vietnam.

This is why they’re going crying to the US State Department about fishing waters. I guess we’ll see how that gamble works out for them. (Obviously, at some point, they’re going to end up begging for the Chinese to come back – assuming they don’t end up being used in some kind of Western military operation.)

Note this: America still has military in Thailand. However, when push comes to shove, Thais are going to side with the Chinese, because dumping money into a country works a lot better for building stable relations than putting your military inside a country.

Chinese girlfriend material

I call’s ’em as I see’s ’em. video 7MB

Baked Saucy Pork Chops

This little variation on Pork Chops is very, very delicious and so easy to make!

Baked Saucy Pork Chops EXPS SDDJ17 17351 B08 03 2b 31
Baked Saucy Pork Chops

Ingredients

  • 2 tablespoons butter
  • 2 bone-in pork loin chops (3/4 inch thick)
  • 1/4 cup chopped onion
  • 1/4 cup maple syrup
  • 2 tablespoons water
  • 1 tablespoon cider vinegar
  • 2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
  • 1 teaspoon chili powder
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 1/4 teaspoon pepper
  • 1/8 teaspoon garlic powder

Directions

  1. Preheat oven to 350°. In a large skillet, heat butter over medium heat. Brown pork chops on both sides. Transfer to a greased 11×7-in. baking dish; sprinkle with onion.
  2. In a bowl, mix remaining ingredients; pour over chops. Bake, covered, until a thermometer inserted in pork reads 145°, 15-20 minutes. Let stand 5 minutes before serving.

Pay attention to this;

If the West wants to fight a bioweapons war, the East can do the same thing.

Two COVID Variants Just Combined Into a ‘Frankenstein’ Virus

The first subvariant of Omicron, the latest major variant of the novel coronavirus, was bad. BA.1 drove record cases and hospitalizations in many countries starting last fall.

The second subvariant, BA.2, was worse in some countries—setting new records for daily cases across China and parts of Europe.

After Biden and Blinkedin warned China that serious consequences would occur if China failed to sanction Russia, there have been outbreaks up and down China with this second subvariant BA.2. No other actions occured (aside fromt he mysterious mid-air breakup of a domestic airliner).

Now BA.1 and BA.2 have combined to create a third subvariant. XE, as it’s known, is a “recombinant”—the product of two viruses interacting “Frankenstein”-style in a single host.

With its long list of mutations, XE could be the most contagious form of the coronavirus yet. “From the WHO reports, it does appear to have a bit more of an edge in terms of transmissibility,” Stephanie James, the head of a COVID testing lab at Regis University in Colorado, told The Daily Beast.

But don’t panic just yet. The same mix of subvariants that produced XE might also protect us from it. Coming so quickly after the surge of BA.1 and BA.2 cases, XE is on track to hit a wall of natural immunity—the antibodies left over from past infection in hundreds of millions of people.

Those natural antibodies, plus the additional protection afforded by the various COVID vaccines, could blunt XE’s impact. For that reason, many experts worry less about XE and more about whatever variant or subvariant might come after XE.

Now, it appears that a deadly variant of the BA.2 has been detected in the USA. It's now known as XE.

The subvariant hasn’t shown up in U.S. tests yet. But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t reached U.S. shores. “It might not be detected by the standard analysis pipeline,” Rob Knight, the head of a genetic-computation lab at the University of California, San Diego, told The Daily Beast. Major new forms of SARS-CoV-2 can require tweaks to testing methods.

XE is a nasty bug, owing to potentially dozens of mutations to its spike protein, the part of the virus that helps it grab onto and infect our cells. And it’s a strong reminder that the pandemic isn’t over. Even with widespread natural immunity and highly effective and safe vaccines, SARS-CoV-2 keeps finding pockets of unprotected people—and opportunities to evolve.

Article

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Diners have appeared in pop culture favorites like “Grease,” “Seinfeld,” “Gilmore Girls,” and “Twin Peaks.”

“In the movies, the diner is a special kind of space, a mythic place, a zone of escape,” film critic John Patterson told the BBC.

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2022 04 08 15 31

Suzanne Vega, who wrote the ’80s hit song “Tom’s Diner,” said, “The attraction of the diner is that it’s a sort of a midway point between the street and home.”

Trade is Better Than War

Frankly, if you read Thomas Jefferson – who was not an Orientalist – his vision for America was not dissimilar from that of the “Middle Kingdom” of China. He thought America should base its relationships with other countries on trade, rather than military or political antagonism (let alone moral lecturing).

This thinking was based primarily on the fact that the US had been a colony, and so understood the complexities of running an empire, which requires you to rule over people in foreign lands. Most all of the original American thinkers thought trade was a better way to interact with and influence the world than direct military rule.

Basically, this thinking ended with the Spanish-American war. Before that, America had wars, but they were all basically necessary (the Civil War is obviously complicated, but it was not a foreign war so doesn’t apply here). Because of the alleged sinking of the USS Maine by the Spanish – which turned out to be a fake news hoax – the US did an “intervention” in Cuba, and then “intervened” in the Philippines.

Irony of all ironies, however, the actual first “intervention” in a dumb foreign conflict was the support for the British during the Second Opium War.

The short story is: The US initially refused to get involved, and then were talked into sending a small number of troops by the British. After a few brief skirmishes, the US signed a neutrality agreement with China, effectively abandoning the British to their stupid adventure in global Jewish drug-peddling (the opium racket was run by the Jewish Sassoon family, and the entire scheme of conquering the Chinese by getting all the peasants addicted to drugs was a Jewish plan that the British went along with – the British have a proud history stretching back to Cromwell of cooperating with maniacal Jewish schemes). Then a US Navy commander went rogue and attacked the Chinese in defense of the British, claiming it was a race war, and “blood is thicker than water.” I agree with the sentiment, of course, but not in the context of a Jewish drug scheme on the other side of the planet.

So: our nation’s first stupid foreign adventure was against the Chinese as a part of a Jewish plot – and thus will be our last foreign adventure.

The Dragon’s Breath blows away the Empire of Dust.

Diners brought together people from different economic levels

Michael C. Gabriele, who wrote “The History of Diners in New Jersey,” told the Telegraph that “diners are the state’s ultimate gathering places — at any moment, high school students, CEOs, construction workers, and tourists might be found at a counter chatting with the waitresses and line cooks.”

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American diner.

During the civil rights movement, diners became a popular place for activists to hold “sit-ins” in restaurants that refused to seat black people, despite many of them employing black people to work there.

In 1964, Congress outlawed segregation through the Civil Rights Act, but many diners in the South continued to segregate their establishments, afraid that “seating blacks would drive away white patrons.”

Worse Things Have Happened to Better People

It goes without saying: no Chinaman ever tried to convince my son to cut his dick off. No Chinaman ever flooded my country with immigrants and pornography. No Chinaman ever called me “goy.”

China is not going to invade America. They are going to allow it to commit suicide. Over time, a new order will be established in America, and that new order will have the option of trading with China. Probably, during the chaos of this collapse, China will buy up a lot of the resources in America, and this will mean that a new emerging order will be tied in to the global economic order run by the Chinese. That’s unfortunate, but hey – your son gets to keep his dick.

A world with China as the central global superpower will be peaceful and based on independent countries engaging in voluntary commerce. It’s sad to see people getting so fussy over it.

I get that it’s also sad that the white man is not going to be the dominant force on the planet anymore. But in truth, we haven’t been for a long time. Everything that we associate with Western dominance in the modern age is really Jewish dominance.

Basically, 80 years ago, white people had a big war with each other and the good guys lost. Everything that’s happened since then has been effectively predetermined – a series of chaotic and revolutionary events driven by the chaotic and revolutionary spirit of the Jewish race. The Jews ultimately destroy everything. They can’t help themselves.

So, here we are.

Railcar-style diners are still manufactured in factories today, but they’re much more expensive to purchase and ship.

New diners can reportedly cost more than $1 million to produce, and restoring or renovating old ones can be extremely pricey as well. Instead, many ’50s-style diners in operation today are built on-site to cut costs.

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American diner.

US oil imports from Russia increase by 43%

If you are confused, well; welcome to the club.

In the past week, the US administration has increased its imports of Russian oil by 43%, reaching 100,000 barrels a day.
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Members Of Congress Are Now Using Words Like “Famine” And “Starvation” To Describe What Is Coming

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I have so much information to share with you today, and I will do my best to be brief. But be warned that this article is going to be longer than usual.  Global events are moving so quickly now, and I believe that they are going to move even more rapidly in the months ahead.  Sadly, the changes that we are witnessing will have a very real impact on the daily lives of every man, woman and child on the entire planet.  As I discussed yesterday, a global food shortage has arrived.  In fact, members of Congress are now using words like “famine” and “starvation” to describe what conditions will soon be like all over the world.

For example, U.S. Senator Joni Ernst just told Fox Business that our planet is facing “impending famine”

About 40 to 45 percent of the production in Ukraine will be decreased this year because of the war and the scarcity of supplies that go into the planting season. And we know that Ukraine also supports about 400 million people around the world with its food products. So we do see that we have an impending famine. And I’ve heard from David Beasley at the World Food Bank that he’s now going to have to take from the hungry to feed the starving.

And U.S. Senator Cory Booker has previously warned that we could soon see tens of millions of people “dying of starvation”

“Democrats and Republicans in Congress need to quickly come together and approve emergency global food aid in order to prevent tens of millions of people, including millions of children, from dying of starvation,” Senator Cory Booker, a Democrat from New Jersey, told Reuters.

They aren’t exaggerating.

Even Joe Biden recently admitted that food shortages are “going to be real”.

The one thing that could provide a ray of hope would be an end to the war in Ukraine.

But it appears that isn’t going to happen any time soon.  In an interview with Fox News on Friday, Volodymyr Zelenskyy stated that his nation will not accept anything less than “victory” in the war…

Special Report’s Bret Baier interviewed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday evening, touching on a wide variety of topics, including what a victory looks like for Ukraine and what Putin is hoping to achieve.

Baier asked the Ukrainian leader at the start of the interview how he believes the “war will end” prompting an explanation from Zelenskyy that only “victory” will be acceptable to his country.

Good luck with all that.

Now that the Russians have pulled their forces away from Kiev to focus on the eastern front, there is a lot less pressure on Zelenskyy to compromise on a peace deal.

And the fact that this conflict has made him one of the biggest celebrities on the entire planet actually gives him an incentive to keep it going.

Meanwhile, millions upon millions of people are already deeply suffering.  In Somalia, we are being warned that an “impending famine” is at the door…

What we are now seeing is impending famine similar to that which occurred in 2010/2011 in which more than a quarter of a million people died – including 133,000 children under the age of five. Although some donors have committed to fund Somalia’s Humanitarian Response Plan (HRP) which seeks US$1.5 billion, not even 4% of funding required to meet Somalia’s humanitarian needs have been allocated. Like the novel coronavirus, which had impacted many of Somali households, the Ukraine crisis has driven inflation and rising costs in Somalia, particularly for food and energy, at a time when families are already incredibly desperate.

The reason why the situation in Somalia has become so desperate is because that nation normally gets more than 90 percent of its wheat from either Russia or Ukraine…

Finally, in the Horn of Africa 13 million people are already suffering from hunger. Ethiopia imports around 40 percent of its wheat from Russia and Ukraine, Kenya 30 percent, and Somalia over 90 percent.

Meanwhile, the food crisis in Yemen just continues to escalate.  One man that was recently interviewed admitted that he and his family “live like ants”

Experts are warning that the world faces a historic famine. The war in Ukraine is only one of many problems plaguing the global distribution of food.

In Yemen, Ghalib al-Najjar skips meals so that his children have enough food. He says he and his family “live like ants or fish…we eat what we can find.”

In Peru, rapidly rising prices for fuel and food have sparked massive nationwide protests

An ongoing wave of violent protests in Peru shows how the Russian invasion of Ukraine is affecting markets around the world, sparking unrest and deepening political divides.

Rising fuel costs originally triggered the protests, which started last week, but quickly intensified into large anti-government demonstrations with marches and road blockades.

So far at least six people have died in the chaos, and protesters continue to block at least nine major roads.

In Afghanistan, it is being estimated that 95 percent of the entire population does not have enough food to eat right now…

Afghanistan has faced grave hunger crises before. Two decades ago, people in the country were so hungry they resorted to eating wild grass.

But the situation in the country now is unprecedented.

Exacerbated by an unusually cold winter and the worst drought in decades, the economic upheaval that came with the Taliban takeover has left 95% of Afghans without enough food.

We haven’t seen anything like this in a really long time.

Overall, the World Food Program is warning us that “285 million people face starvation”

The World Food Program estimates that 285 million people face starvation.

The head of the World Food Program, former South Carolina Governor David Beasley, says the world food supply already faced a catastrophe before the war in Ukraine.

“We’re so short of funds already, and now with Ukraine, we’ve got 50-percent rations for people, for example, in Yemen, I’ve just cut 50 percent rations for eight million people. Niger, 50 percent rations, Chad 50 percent rations. And 50 percent don’t have anything, those who are in extreme need,” Beasley said.

Of course this is just the beginning.  As I specifically warned in Lost Prophecies and 7 Year Apocalypse, conditions will eventually become far more severe than they are at this moment.

Here in the United States, nobody is starving just yet, but the cost of living is escalating at a frightening pace.

According to a Bloomberg report, the average U.S. household will need to spend 5,200 dollars more just to have the same standard of living as last year…

“Inflation will mean the average U.S. household has to spend an extra $5,200 this year ($433 per month) compared to last year for the same consumption basket,” Bloomberg Economics reports.

Having to spend an extra $433 per month to get the same is a hefty, even gargantuan ask for anyone — especially parents who are already struggling to keep a roof over their kid’s heads and food on the table.

And our historic supply chain crisis just continues to get even worse.

In fact, the wait times for computer chips just hit another all-time record high

The wait times for semiconductor deliveries rose slightly in March, reaching a new high, after lockdowns in China and an earthquake in Japan further hampered supply.

Lead times — the lag between when a chip is ordered and delivered — increased by two days to 26.6 weeks last month, according to research by Susquehanna Financial Group.

The system is crumbling all around us, and we really are in the early stages of a full-blown economic implosion.

Initially, it will be the poorest nations that suffer the most.

Millions upon millions of innocent people don’t have enough to eat right now, and that number will rise with each passing day.

Normally, most Americans don’t pay too much attention to what is happening on the other side of the world, but food scarcity is growing in the United States too.

So if you and your family have enough food to eat tonight, you should be very grateful, because at least for now you are one of the lucky ones.

What Chinese houses look like

You know, you can easily see glimpses of China by looking at the backgrounds in the Douxing videos. here, we have a girl dancing in the front of her home, and in her living room. I can tell you that this is normal. This is what China is like, and to all those people who mistakenly believe that the Chinese nation is going to collapse any day, well… don’t hold your breath. video 2MB

Quick Chicken and Dumplings

Using precooked chicken and ready-made biscuits, this hearty dish is comfort food made simple. It’s the perfect way to warm up on chilly nights.

Quick Chicken and Dumplings EXPS CHKBZ18 45977 B10 19 2bC 6
Quick Chicken and Dumplings

Ingredients

  • 6 individually frozen biscuits
  • 1/4 cup chopped onion
  • 1/4 cup chopped green pepper
  • 1 tablespoon olive oil
  • 4 cups shredded rotisserie chicken
  • 3 cans (14-1/2 ounces each) reduced-sodium chicken broth
  • 1 can (4 ounces) mushroom stems and pieces, drained
  • 1 teaspoon chicken bouillon granules
  • 1 teaspoon minced fresh parsley
  • 1/2 teaspoon dried sage leaves
  • 1/4 teaspoon dried rosemary, crushed
  • 1/4 teaspoon pepper

Directions

  1. Cut each biscuit into fourths; set aside. In a large saucepan, saute onion and green pepper in oil until tender. Stir in the chicken, broth, mushrooms, bouillon granules, parsley, sage, rosemary and pepper.
  2. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat; add biscuits for dumplings. Cover and simmer (do not lift cover while simmering) 10 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center of a dumpling comes out clean.

By the 1970s, the rise in fast-food restaurants led to a decline in the popularity of traditional diners.

As McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and Burger King restaurants continued to pop up nationwide, it became difficult for small business owners to compete with the huge corporations also selling cheap, convenient food.

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American diner.

While there were reportedly over 1,000 diners in New York City around 30 years ago, just 398 remained in 2015, according to a Crain’s New York Business article citing the city’s Department of Health records at the time.

England talks. China does.

video 4MB

Indonesia, Australia face limits in coal exports to Europe ahead of Russian ban

First Australia took a hit in coal exports to China, now their remaining market of Russia is also disappearing. <Insert snide remark here.> Article

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How You Know Tech is Grinding to a Halt

One way to view civilization collapse is to say that every nation dies when its marginal costs exceed potential profits. This means that each action is so encumbered — red tape, taxes, unions, corruption — that none of them are worth doing.

At that point, people stop trying to improve things and simply make do with what they have or stop using it. In this way, even technological civilizations revert to third world subsistence agriculture.

The Soviets went out hard because they imposed the burden of socialism on every action. The West has done the same with insurance, unions, high taxes, regulations, and diversity costs.

Individual industries do it too. You may notice that every software product you own is blighted with constant trivial updates, and that almost every company wants to sell you a “service” instead of a product.

For example, why own a software package like Microsoft Office when you can pay a monthly fee to use an online service “in the Cloud” (translation: on servers owned by someone else)? Makes sense, until you realize you are re-buying the software every ten years.

Microsoft realized it had a problem with Windows XP, Windows 7, and Office 2007: if you do something right enough, people will never buy another product unless forced. That means you need to downsize your company.

In other words, the end result of Microsoft would be to make a really good operating system and software, then fire everyone but five guys who answer the emails and keep selling the stuff.

Businesses need to find new horizons in order to stay ahead of this, just like societies constantly need new goals to avoid stagnation, but with all of the regulatory, tax, and affirmative action costs, they cannot afford to do that.

Instead they become rent-seekers, having built something great and now trying to extract as much money out of it as possible. Consequently they want you to pay them fifty bucks a month, however they have to justify it, so they can count on consistent profits and limit their size accordingly.

These are signs of a sick economy, and that usually means a sick society, since it has made crazy-stupid decisions to the point that it no longer operates as an economy but as a tax and rent-seeking cash cow.

All of that is extracted from the average wagie, which means that he pushes his employer to find ways to make more money in the world outside of his borders, at which point globalism — effectively created by unions driving labor offshore at the same time that democracy decided that with the Soviets out of the way, it might as well complete what it started in WW1 and take over the world — becomes a ruthless profit-seeking activity.

We saw this starting two decades ago when grocery stores began offering those little customer loyalty cards. If you got the card, you got better prices and enough coupons to keep you coming back.

As long as they got their $50 a month out of you, life was easy for them. Multiply that amount times their number of consumers times twelve and they know their baseline revenues, which enables them to keep hiring their friends and other bloat.

Software updates are another variation on this. They ship you “free” updates every month that eventually require you to upgrade your gadget because it cannot handle the bloat and waste of the new updates.

When margins overwhelm profit potential, everyone turns into a rent-seeker. “I have this title or ownership, therefore hand me things.”

Entropy wins at that point. No one can act to improve anything, and everyone forms a little hugbox dedicated to preserving the gimmedats of the status quo.

A civilization avoids this state by doing two things: first, it cuts external costs so that margins do not overwhelm profit potential, and second, it socializes mature products by granting monopolies that then cut staff.

If, for example, we decided that Microsoft Office 2019 was the best that an office suite could ever get and had no flaws, it would make sense to transfer it to another authority which would be five guys in an office with a monopoly and no interest in expanding it.

That would force Microsoft to find new fields to till, new mountains to climb, and new visions to dream instead of milking the past in a rent-seeking pattern that ends with everyone paying them a subscription fee just to enjoy normal tools.

We know that tech is grinding to a halt because it has invented nothing new for a long time. The grand visions of Google sputtered and died; Facebook has turned into Second Life; Twitter now seems like a good place to go get state propaganda but not much else.

This means that transition is on the wind. The old ways no longer work. Every time you see a service fee or update, console yourself with the knowledge that this is simply a grave being dug for worldwide democracy and the NWO.

Having a really bad day

daily picdump 36 3
A bad day.

“I wish I could buy property in China”

video 7MB

Diners today face an uncertain future.

In New York City, few original diners remain. However, the recent embracing of nostalgia — think, the rise in speakeasies — has also revitalized the typical American diner.

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American Diner.

A recent addition to New York’s Soho neighborhood is the trendy ’50s-style Soho Diner, part of the Soho Grand Hotel. Other New York diners, like the Waverly Diner and the Empire Diner, have managed to keep their doors open despite changing tastes.

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CIA tries to import insects that devistate crops

China inspects all packages. It’s a 100% full scan policy. This is because for decades, the United States has been busy introducing plagues, insects, and viruses to destroy China via destruction of it’s food base, and in any and all forms. This is known as “hybrid war”.

China has not retaliated…yet.

But if and when they do, the United States will collapse like the house of cards that it is.

This is typical, and apparently it’s a common enough event. Once discovered, the Chinese then send the packages on (minus the insects) and watch who gets the packages. Then the person just disappears after their mandatory interview with the PLA. video 3MB

Meanwhile in India

daily picdump 25 3
Meanwhile in India.

How Are Those Sanctions Working Out, Guys?

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Unfortunately, the sanctions the US put on Russia do not appear to be harming Russia at all, even as they are furthering the destruction of the economy of the West, and setting the stage for a collapse of the dollar as reserve currency.

Russia has just announced that if Europe wants its oil, they’re going to have to pay in rubles. This will heavily reenforce the ruble, of course. Presumably, it will make up for most or all of the damage that the sanctions have caused.

RT:

 Russia will now accept payment for gas exports to “unfriendly countries” in rubles only, President Vladimir Putin said at a meeting with the government on Wednesday.

The president explained that Russia plans to abandon all “compromised” currencies in payment settlements. He added that illegitimate decisions by a number of Western countries to freeze Russia’s assets destroyed all confidence in their currencies.

“I have decided to implement in the shortest possible time a set of measures to change the payments for – yes let’s start with this – for our natural gas supplied to the so-called unfriendly countries in Russian rubles, that is to stop using all compromised currencies for transactions,” the Russian president said.

“It doesn’t make sense to deliver our goods to the EU and the US and get paid in dollars and euros,” he added. 

For those who don’t know the details: it is impossible for Europe to shut off Russian gas any time soon. They will literally freeze to death, or have to figure out some kind of wooden steam system.

People were saying Russian might just shut off the gas and let Europe deal with the situation, but this is much better.

The ruble bottomed out on March 7, and has been largely recovering. It’s only down 13% over the month of war.

If you consider that Russia is currently under the most severe economic sanctions in history by the most powerful economic entity in history – it’s not looking too bad.

That 13% isn’t going to affect anyone’s life in Russia, it only affects international trade. Not a big deal. No one in Russia is suffering from this, unless you consider being denied PornHub, Netflix, and McDonald’s as “suffering.”

This ultimatum to Europe will give it its 13% back.

Meanwhile, the Russian stock market, which was closed on the day of the incursion into the Ukraine, was reopened and is doing fine.

RT:

 Russia’s stocks continued to rise sharply on Thursday as the Moscow Exchange reopened for limited trading this week, after suspending most of its transactions on February 28.

The ruble-based MOEX benchmark went up more than 11% to 2,743 points. The dollar-denominated RTS index of leading Russian stocks was down slightly, to 888.59 points.

The Moscow Exchange resumed trading in 33 Russian equities, including shares of Gazprom, Sberbank, Aeroflot, and other domestic firms. Oil majors Rosneft and Lukoil were both up by 20% and 16%, respectively. Aluminum company Rusal rose more than 14%, while Norilsk Nickel jumped more than 22%. 

So, basically, the US operation against Russia has been like a situation where a guy breaks into your house and is waving around a gun at your family, then he goes ahead and puts the gun in his mouth and blows his own brains out. You’re going to have to clean the brains off the wall, and repair the locks on the door, but otherwise you’re going to be good. The intruder, however, is not so good. He’s just blown his own brains out.

This is all happening very quickly.

It’s hard to keep up with.

But the US has effectively committed a very public suicide in the name of a bizarre moral signaling campaign about how they are very good people and so oppose the very bad Russians.

It now looks to me as though this thing was planned over a very long period of time. Since the Maidan, Russia, presumably working with China, has set a trap for the United States in the Ukraine. They knew that after the revolution, the West wouldn’t be able to help itself, and would move NATO forces into the country, and NATOize the country, and so they planned the response – and understood the US response.

There had to be an invasion, because they had to get the US to act in this deranged way, which is the result of both unfathomable hubris and the general degrading of the culture into a state of nonstop moral panic.

The US has already lost.

Putin has demonstrated hypersonic missiles in the Ukraine. These cannot be shot down by any of NATO’s missile defense systems, meaning if NATO tries to attack Russia conventionally, Russia can strike targets across Western Europe. Moreover, there is just no way to invade Russia.

The only remaining options are to back off or start a nuclear war.

It is looking like they will do some kind of chemical attack false flag hoax in the Ukraine, but I don’t even understand what purpose that serves. The only people who will believe that are the “international Community,” which America is already dragging down to hell with them.

There are other theories. Alex Jones and others are saying that Western intelligence is planning to assassinate Joe Biden and blame Russia. That seems a bit outlandish, but I guess you never know. Still, I don’t really see what purpose that would serve. Russia can just say they didn’t do it. Then what changes?

The wheel is already turning.

The jig is up.

The Church – Under The Milky Way

Continuing with the 1990s theme, perhaps a reader or two might remember this little gem…

Meanwhile in America

daily picdump 50 3
The American way.

Rufus respects his flag

Inside of China. video 3MB

Rufus protects his sister

Family. Rufus. It’s all about a greater purpose. video 1MB

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 3

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • 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.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
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American Conservative Sleepwalkers wading into the dark South China Sea

LDNR authorities have identified the chemical substances US PMCs have brought to the cities of Mariupol, Krasnyi Liman and Avdeevka: botulinum toxin and dibenzoxazepine.  These chemical weapon were brought over from the USA by USAF contracted aircraft and are now deployed by 120 US mercenaries.

-False flag aborted in the Ukraine.
Jabber, jabber, jabber from the war-mongers in America about China and Russia. These people are deranged lunatics. And they are somehow delirious believing their invincibility and superiority. They have funded an enormous war machine, and they are pushing, pushing, and pushing towards WAR!
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Just this week Congress passed a $7 billion dollar anti-China propaganda campaign to villainize China and to prevent Chinese news from ever reaching America. To put this in perspective, the 2020 budget of NASA is $20 billion dollars. So it’s roughly one third of the entire space budget of America. That’s how serious the USA is determined to garner the population on a war-footing.
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Why bother? Americans already consider China the enemy. video 5MB
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Fools.
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Here’s an interesting discussion in the American Conservative circles discussing a war with China. It’s illuminating. Not only on the points of view being bantered about, but the lack of understanding on the true realities, and the absolutely horrific consequences involved.
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Read and be enlightened.
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Top American conservatives including AT’s David Goldman recently debated the risks of preparing for war with China

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Whether the United States should prepare for war with China – and thereby make war almost inevitable – was the matter of a verbal brawl at one of the largest gatherings of American conservatives, the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, Florida, from October 31 to November 2.

The same debate is ongoing in American opinion journals, where the war party is represented by the neo-conservatives of the American Enterprise Institute – Hal Brands, Dan Blumenthal, Gary Schmitt and Michael Mazza – and former National Security Adviser John Bolton.

I was a participant in the debate.

It would have been unseemly to have a polite exchange in a hotel ballroom a few miles from Disney World about the desirability of killing millions of people in a nuclear exchange.

So I wasn’t polite.

Although the arguments on both sides are well known, the Orlando debate merited publication of a lengthy edited transcript, for two reasons.

First, the exchange between former Trump adviser and war-hawk Michael Pillsbury on one side, and former Trump National Security Council official Michael Anton and this writer on the other, set the issues in poignant relief.

Second, the audience of conservative activists, the opinion and organizational leaders of the Republican Party, repudiated the war party by a margin of about three to one, by my informal poll of the audience.

Of the informal guess-timation of participants;

75% of the Conservative opposed a war with China.
25% of the Conservatives were neocons in favor of a war with China.

The American right doesn’t want war with China.

That doesn’t mean war won’t come. Christopher Clark’s magisterial account of the outbreak of World War I, The Sleepwalkers, recounts the intellectual corruption and grandiose irresponsibility of the statesmen who stumbled into World War I.

It’s an old story: If one side mobilizes, the other has to mobilize or be defenseless; if one side believes the other is likely to mobilize, it must do so first. Clark proved – contrary to the usual Anglophile account – that it was the Russian mobilization, urged by the French, that started the war.

By the same token, if the United States attempts to force the issue of Taiwan’s independence, China will pre-empt this by seizing the island. If the United States takes military measures – stationing troops on the island, mining the Taiwan Straits – China will have to consider pre-emptive action.

It’s August 1914 all over again, played as farce rather than tragedy. The European powers had existential interests to defend; the United States has nothing to lose but the perception that it can project its power anywhere in the world, including China’s coasts.

The American military wasted US$6 trillion and thousands of lives in misguided nation-building campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, while China built up a massive high-tech defense in and around its coasts.

This weakened America’s strategic position decisively.

The blunderers who vitiated America’s defense will risk war simply to save their reputations. The war hawks have shown scant interest in rising to China’s technological ambition, which presents a real challenge to America’s leading position in the world.

But they will roll the dice on war over issues that do not bear directly on American security.

America is in NO STATE to take on a war against the combined forces of Russia and China.

Compared to them, the sleepwalkers of 1914 were exemplars of enlightened statesmanship.

Transcript

There follows my edit of the transcript of the conference session on China. I have included all the points of substance, leaving out the ancillary discussion in the interest of space.

Video of the event will be available at the conference website.

Pillsbury: The Hundred-Year Marathon [Pillsbury’s best-selling book] was translated by the Chinese military. No royalties, but they had a little ceremony for me. They make fun of Biden. They say Biden is plagiarizing, it’s the Trump administration policy.

Trump loves to say, if Hillary Clinton had won the election, China would be surpassing us now. But it’s not going to happen on my watch. If you’re close watchers of Joe Biden’s TV interviews, four months ago, he said the exact same words.

China wants to surpass us, but it’s not going to happen on my watch. The Chinese reaction to that is to laugh. Because they don’t expect it to come that soon. But when they do surpass us, I think the level of arrogance they showed today is going to be something that we wish for.

When they do believe that they’re superior to us in a number of ways. We will wish that it was 1947 when the Soviet Cold War began, and we did was, we created the CIA by legislation. We created the Defense Department. We created the National Security Council.

There’s not a single new institution in our government to deal with China. I think there should be.

Goldman: We will spend these next few days complaining about how terrible things are. I hear very little discussion of what we need to do about it. My argument is very simple. We’ve done it before. We did it during the Reagan administration. We did it during the Kennedy administration, we did it under Franklin Roosevelt.

We need to rebuild the American economy and we can only do that with a visionary strategy that galvanizes the imagination of Americans like the Kennedy moon-shot, the Reagan SDI.

The numbers show that the Trump policy towards China was a catastrophic failure. We’re importing now more than 30% more from China than we did in January 2018, when Trump imposed tariffs.

And as for technology suppression?

China’s built 70% of the world’s 5G networks and is proceeding to build the applications on top of that, which constitute the Fourth Industrial Revolution. We can do better than China. We’re better equipped to innovate than China.

But we’re not because we’re crushed by a technocratic elite which has sucked the marrow out of the United States economy and generated enormous wealth doing things that, for the most part, harm us. Nothing short of an intervention by the federal government, namely an industrial policy, will turn that around.

That’s not a classically liberal view of things. Industrial policies are dangerous. They lead to rent-seeking behavior, corruption and too much state power. But that’s what you do in a war, and we’ve got the economic equivalent of a war going on.

The thing that worries me the most is the knuckleheads who spent $6 trillion on forever wars and gutted our military by frittering away our resources. If we’d spent a 10th of that on high-tech weaponry, we wouldn’t be worrying about China’s hyper-velocity missiles or anything else like that.

They will steer us into a confrontation with China that will lead to a war that nobody can win.

John Bolton is the most dangerous lunatic roaming the streets of the United States right now.

If you try to force the independence of Taiwan, any Chinese government that wants to rule China will use military action, Communist or not.

The Chinese Communist Party is Communist the same way the mafia is Catholic. They take it very seriously. But it has very little practical importance for running a Chinese empire. You have to suppress rebel provinces. The only thing we can do with Taiwan is to maintain strategic ambiguity, raise the price of the Chinese taking it by force, which we have no means to stop at this point short of a nuclear war.

We should dissuade them from doing it, maintain Taiwanese democracy and walk the fine line.

John Bolton (on the other hand) would call the question, and that gets a lot of people killed.

John Bolton

If you don’t believe me, read Admiral Stavridis’  marvelous thriller 2034. Spoiler alert: We blow up a bunch of their cities. They blow up a bunch of our cities and we’re back to square one.

Now let me talk about the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which is what’s really critical here. Wars are not won by stealing data, they are not won by spies, they are won by logistics in depth and the willingness to prevail. The first industrial revolution began when James Watt sold his first commercial steam engine in 1776.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution began when China responded to the Covid-19 pandemic by using artificial intelligence applied to massive data sets to predict potential outbreaks. They are now proceeding to roll out the technologies associated with this. This is the real science fiction stuff we’re talking about – 5G permitting groups of industrial robots to communicate on the shop floor and program themselves.

Smart logistics allow individual objects to be tracked from mine to factory to warehouse to ship back to warehouse to truck loaded onto autonomous vehicles and controlled all the way. It allows AI servers to optimize urban traffic and match every passenger and package to a conveyance.

It allows sensors at the base of soybean plants to communicate with drones that deliver fertilizer and pesticides and direct autonomous tractors to harvest them. We’re talking about an explosion of productivity like that of the first and second industrial revolutions.

The main thing the Chinese stole from us was the great idea of the Reagan Revolution that you can have dual-use technologies, which both give you button guns and butter. They foster civilian productivity. They pay for themselves 10 times over, just like the Apollo program did, just like the Strategic Defense Initiative did.

Every single invention of the digital age. No exceptions started with the DARPA project. They were all funded by the Department of Defense.

The Chinese have stolen the American approach. They want to be Reagan in the Cold War against the sclerotic Soviet Union. Now, they’re not as good at it as we are.

My argument is we have nothing to learn; we only need to remember. We know all these things because we’ve done every single one of them.

We only have to dust off the old ideas and get the band back together, and what I put to you is that the conservative movement needs a part of a positive program, a set of solutions to galvanize the American people, capture their imagination, as Kennedy did when he pointed to the Moon, as Reagan did when he promised to defend the homeland against enemy ballistic missiles.

We need a positive view. We need a can-do approach, and we need to found it on the proven track record of the United States of America in pioneering the future for the world.

Anton: I’m just going to go through a couple of historical points to put this in context. In 1842, the Chinese ceded Hong Kong island to the British in perpetuity – in perpetuity. The Chinese regime at the time of Imperial China greatly resented it. And that resentment carried over through Republican China to Communist China, National, etc.

Why is this important?

This is something that was a thorn in the side of the succession of China as a civilization, not of one regime, not of the communist regime of China for 150 years. It bothered them very greatly. They look forward to the day when they could get it back. They were patient and they got it back.

Without conflict, without much of a struggle, with just some gnashing of teeth and hair, pulling and sighing and crying by the British, but they got it back.

A couple of quotes.

“To win without fighting is best.”

Some of you may remember recognize this.

The second one is:

“To destroy the enemy is not the acme of skill; to capture what you want from the enemy, whether that’s a city, a fortress, a ship, an army, that is the acme of skill.”

Those are both from Sun Tzu, a Chinese classic written about 200 BC. This very well encapsulates the Chinese strategy, I would say, with regard to Hong Kong and with regard to Taiwan.

Taiwan is a similar thorn in the psyche of China.

This would be the case, no matter what the regime in Beijing were. It could be, you know, the neocons’ fantasy of a liberal democratic China, and they would still really care about getting Taiwan back. It’s central to the regime’s conception of its territorial national integrity…

One very firm demand of the Chinese government on the international community is Taiwan can never be a full member of an international organization for which statehood is a member and as a requirement, and they make it very plain that they’ll go to war over that.

They’re very, very clear about this.

An Article five guarantee in the NATO charter, for instance, that is a treaty requirement that the United States has got to go to a nuclear war in defense of a place. [Our agreement with Taiwan] is a commitment of sorts. The full extent of it and what it legally obligates us to do is a bit ambiguous compared to an actual mutual defense treaty signed by both sides.

This comes up a lot, especially lately, because we are told constantly that crisis is brewing in the Taiwan Straits.

China’s been patient.

Patience may be running out.

Maybe they’ll try to do something soon.

What we’ve seen now is a pretty dramatic shift toward I still have a bipartisan consensus on China, but now it’s a bipartisan consensus to sort of beat up on them rhetorically not to take any actual action as far as I can see, except some of the things we talked about.

But what, where that rhetoric leads is, you know, we’re obligated to do something about Taiwan and it would be a stain on the national honor and so on and so forth.

And so if something happens, we’ve got to get into a fight.

China’s preference is still to take Taiwan without fighting for it. Time is on their side. Some are saying, some people who claim to know, are saying, Oh no, no, they’re getting impatient and they’re going to … they’re going to do something shortly.

I just have no basis to evaluate that.

But based on historical precedent, I think the Chinese would certainly like to do exactly what they did with regard to Hong Kong, tipped the balance of strategic power, economic power, political power so much against the possibility of continued Taiwanese independence that public opinion in Taiwan comes to accept the notion that we just have to make the best deal we can make.

And then you win without fighting.

You know, a nation of 24 million can only have so big a military and especially against a nation of 1.4 billion … China’s been building up [its military] for decades. The Taiwan-American combination has not caught up either in terms of sheer numbers and certainly not in terms of technology.

So that’s a way of winning without fighting if you have two or three decades to build up so much force on one side that the other side just looks at it and goes, “I can’t win that fight,” then the fight doesn’t happen unless the other side is delusional or crazy brave.

And the last point I will raise, I just want you to think about this.

I’ll tell you the last time a United States aircraft carrier was sunk. It was the battle of Midway, the USS Yorktown, June of 1942. Actually, we did lose an aircraft carrier last year, not a fleet carrier, a smaller carrier, you know why?

Because it burned in San Diego Harbor and the navy couldn’t figure out how to put out the fire.

USS Bonhomme Richard. A compete loss.

And they had to scrap the ship, the USS Bonhomme Richard. Look it up.

The navy crashed four ships in 2017. Read the official reports from the Department of the Navy and the Congressional investigations on those crashes. They were marvels of esoteric writing to try to dodge the cause of what happened, while somehow revealing it between the lines.

If you’re Taiwan and you’re counting on the United States to defend you, what conclusion did you draw from Afghanistan this summer? Did you get the conclusion that here is a great power that knows what it’s doing, that keeps its promises, and that can execute the things that it wants to do?

American military flee Afghanistan just like they fled Vietnam.

Plausibly, if not certainly, the Chinese have had an ability to sink a fleet carrier for the last decade.

And now… ask yourself how the nation would take it.

Right now, there seems to be a massive amount of group think. We’re only allowed to think about this one way. Only one way.

Nobody is allowed to bring up any of the counterfactuals or any, you know, any other outlying considerations.

And when policy is made on that basis, horrible blunders and catastrophes result.

So before the United States commits itself to some policy or before we, whoever we broadly understood as being in this room are right of center conservatives, intellectuals, nationalists want the best for our country, who want the best for our military, who want to maintain our alliance structure with credibility.

But before we commit ourselves to a policy, are we in this room?

Take a stand in favor of X or against Y and make recommendations that other people may read and listen to.

We should be at least thinking about all of these considerations and, in my view, the conversation as it has. I don’t mean this conversation. I mean, the broad conversation on Taiwan has taken insufficient account of the things that I mentioned and others.

Goldman: The most important fact about any country is its people. Taiwan, according to the CIA World Factbook, has the lowest birth rate of any political entity in the world … China does have a demographic crisis, but Japan, South Korea and especially Taiwan are much worse.

So if you simply. Kick the can down the road, maintain strategic ambiguity. What the Chinese will get if they eventually get Taiwan is a bunch of old people. It’s simply, in my view, not worth having a nuclear war over.

The ideal situation is to maintain the status quo as long as possible. Anything else means a war, and the possible loss of American cities. I ultimately don’t care about China. I care about the United States of America. I’m a nationalist and I want what’s best for us.

We can’t abandon Taiwan because it makes us look weak and we lose important economic advantages and leverage against China. We can’t force the issue and start a war.

The Chinese have hundreds of anti-ship missiles.

Michael Pillsbury and I have something in common. He for many years, and I briefly, worked for a great man at the Pentagon, Andrew Marshall, head of the Office of Net Assessment.

Andy told me in 2013 that the Chinese missiles could (and would) sink an American carrier.

Anton: I think the core answer, it is the best outcome is the status quo for as long as possible because any attempt to change the status quo will be worse than the status quo.

There are only two alternatives to the status quo.

One is Taiwanese independence. Well, Taiwanese independence will start a war. Taiwan becoming part of China would be net bad for us. Obviously, if it becomes a part of China through military action, that’s worse than if they just make a deal.

So for as long as the status quo can be maintained, that’s, unfortunately, the best possible scenario. And I just say unfortunately, because it’s an inherently unstable scenario, and it’s also by its very definition, it’s not permanent. The status quo isn’t going to last forever, so let’s stretch it out for as long as we can, and that’s unfortunately about the best we can do.

Pillsbury: President Trump once asked me, How did we used to defend Taiwan? He saw me as the in-house historian who knew all this ancient stuff. Nobody else in the room knew.

So I finally spoke up.

We used to have atom bombs there. We used to have them attached to jet fighters ready to go to hit the mainland with the Chinese made sure that Kissinger took them out in ’74. We used to have a treaty with a garrison and 30,000 troops and a war planning unit underground in Taipei.

Now it’s an art center and a Mongolian barbecue restaurant …

So what do the paranoid group in charge today say when they hear someone like Michael Anton say, oh, we can’t get it in a war, you know, they think that this is American deception.

Of course, the Americans are going to get into a war, which is why they’ve been increasing the deployments and we are moving closer to a nuclear war with China.

It’s not just me saying this, quite a few other people inside the government are saying this as well.

The head of our strategic command in charge of all our nuclear forces, he’s given two interviews. He says the Chinese are engaging in a strategic breakout of their nuclear weapons, including ICBMs, which they are doubling or tripling.

This is the four-star admiral who commands our nuclear forces.

Quite a few other people are talking this way – very different from Michael Anton. They’re more like Churchill. Bill Buckley, the long tradition of Americans like Barry Goldwater …

So I’m going to have to go home to Washington.

So yes, I went to the conservatism conference. A bunch of the people there on the panel said surrender Taiwan. We don’t want to go to war with China. That’s appeasement. Michael and I should clarify his remarks in my humble opinion.

Anton: If they can sink an aircraft carrier and if the only way to stop an invasion of Taiwan is to deploy the forward-deployed aircraft carrier…

…and Yokosuka

and maybe send one or two others out there, which as far as I know, is the only way for the United States to effectively defend the island if the Chinese decide to invade it and they sink one of these 12 to 14 billion dollar behemoths with 6,500 men on board.

What’s the US response going to be at that point?

Pillsbury: Well, we could turn to you and say, I surrender.

Anton: What would you do if you were either the secretary of defense, the president, the head of a Pacific Command and sitting there in Pearl Harbor?

Pillsbury: I’ve been working on this for 30 years. More recently, the US has gotten a much more detailed picture of what it could do.

Exactly which targets inside China could be struck.

Exactly which targets inside China could be struck?

What would happen the first morning?

New York “concrete jungle” cleared of the underbrush.

More and more work is being done on both sides about how a war would happen and both the Chinese and American military have come to a conclusion.

It would be a long war.

Okay, maybe two or three years – I haven’t read.

There’s a brand new book by the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Pentagon under Trump [Elbridge Colby’s The Strategy of Denial, featured in a June 2021 Asia Times webinar].

There’s a  whole chapter on how to recapture Taiwan after it’s been partially taken by the Chinese military.

This is the state of the art thinking.

There’s a new piece of legislation, the Taiwan Defense Act … They say, please, Pentagon, give us a plan for how to avoid a fait accompli taking place on Taiwan. The Pentagon is drafting their response.

We’re moving closer to a war.

It doesn’t help for you to tell conservatives, oh, if we lose an aircraft carrier, what are we going to do then? What would Winston Churchill say?

Goldman: What, Winston Churchill? Just before the fall of Singapore in 1942, according to Andrew Roberts, Winston Churchill said in the event of war “the Japanese would fold up like the Italians because there were the wops of the Far East.”

Winston Churchill, when it came to Asia, was an absolute idiot, and we bailed him out. He was as stupid as Nicholas II who lost the Russian fleet at Tsushima [in 1905].

Bridge Colby has been a dear friend for 20 years who is now hallucinating about what the United States might do to take Taiwan back.

This is crazy.

Anton: Following the logic of what you said – because I haven’t read whatever STRATCOM put out – I  have read certain analyses: not even analysis. There’s speculations that the Chinese are increasing the size of the nuclear arsenal in this underground network of tunnels that we can’t follow and so on.

The official estimate that we have some confidence in is that the Chinese nuclear arsenal is at least 300 warheads, right?

None of which have to be air-dropped anymore.

That means all [delivered by] ICBM hyper-velocity AI-guided missiles. And if you read their doctrine, unlike ours, they formally take a doctrine of minimal deterrence.

That is to say, they have no kind of nuclear warfighting doctrine at all.

They just have city killers.

And if they feel that the territorial integrity of China or the survival of the state is at stake, they’re willing to use those 300 missiles or some portion of them on American cities. The largest 300 American cities would be blasted into radioactive rubble.

The largest surviving American city would be New Bedford, Massachusetts. With it's five gas stations, and two strip malls. -MM

In fact, once as I’m sure you remember in the far-off year of 1996 on one of the more tense moments in the Taiwan Strait, a Chinese general was quoted as saying, “I don’t think the Americans will do anything at the end of the day. They won’t want to trade Los Angeles for Taipei.”

Their nuclear arsenal is now triple what it was.

And they’re going on a more offensive posture with nuclear weapons and this thing ends up going to nuclear war.

How that fits into the seeming “recommendation” you just gave, I have to admit, being somewhat dim, I don’t see because it would seem to make the danger greater.

And I also would ask: What do you think the American people’s response to losing a fleet carrier would be?

My own estimate is it would be the greatest psychological shock we’ve had in a generation, arguably greater than 9/11.

Unquestionably, getting one single city nuked would be the greatest psychological shock the American nation has ever had in its history.

So how do we deal with something like that, given that Taiwan is orders of magnitude more important to China, and they’re willing to do that over this, as they have said, than it is to us?

From a Chinese point of view, Taiwan is like the US "Statue of Liberty". Destroy it and the Chinese would sacrifice their first born in revenge.

From an American point of view Taiwan is a news item that fits in the bottom of a news feed. Nestled somewhere between a Viagra ad and a cute cat video. -MM

Well, I’m going to be the dove here and say that it’s possible to avoid a nuclear war, whether it be over Taiwan or any other place.

I’d kind of prefer to do that.

If that makes me an outlier, I’m at least I’m in good company with that other famous nuclear dove named Ronald Reagan.

Goldman: [to the audience] Who volunteers to be in the first city that gets nuked? Any takers?

No. Not me!

Pillsbury: One wonderful book shocked the hell out of me. It came out of the Hoover Institution 1962. It’s called Wall Street and Hitler. It’s by a professor who went through the Nuremberg war trials after the war.

  • I didn’t know Henry Ford’s photo was in Hitler’s office.
  • I didn’t know the Nazis gave prizes to different American businessmen.
  • I didn’t know that the Nazis knew they lacked synthetic oil production and that they got the technology from America.

It’s a long book and it goes to in great detail what Wall Street was willing to do even as late as 1938-1939. We had a huge debate about getting involved in Europe … A big group in our country in ’38, ’39 wanted to surrender to Hitler – for lack of a better word; surrender.

Anton: What are they trying to do? I mean, the Soviet Union had to be contained because the Soviet Union was very explicitly an expansionist power.

We know the Chinese would like to expand and take Taiwan.

I’m not aware of the Chinese wanting to expand and take other people’s territory.

They want to exert dominance in East Asia and in the western Pacific, and some of that dominance they will exert in ways that will be deleterious to American interests.

That’s irrespective of our ability to be able to prevent and stop that. But I think there are certain things we could probably be doing better that could push back against some of those influences. But it’s not as if unless, you know, Michael Pillsbury could tell me differently.

Like the Chinese after Taiwan, they’re going to invade South Korea and they’re going to invade Japan, and then they’re going to invade Vietnam.

I don’t know. I don’t get the sense of that from them, nor in the sources that I read. Granted, I can’t read Mandarin. They don’t say that they want to do that.

Pillsbury: Specifically, specifically on Japan and in India … the Chinese think this is part of the key.

They hope the Americans don’t do it.

The Japanese stick to 1% of their GDP on defense, which is very, very low. Maybe that will double to 2% over the coming years.

That’s an alarm sign to the Chinese.

The Indians want to. They’re fiercely independent. The British poured poison in their ears as they left that the Americans are going to be a new colonial power.

You know, we don’t have a treaty with them. So we’ve got a long way with the Indians. We have quite a few military exercises … So slowly, we’re improving our military cooperation with India, other countries in the region.

Trump picked up the idea of the Quad as a magic word. Japanese say they invented it. Biden attacked Trump. You don’t, you know, you’re not seeking help from our allies. I think it was not true.

But the Quad, even under Biden, is starting to increase its consultations, mainly about China. So things are moving in the direction of your question.

Some videos describing what is not being said

It’s like a discussion over tea and crackers. Oh “Taiwan is sort of important to the Chinese, well we can convince them…” In your fucking wet dreams. The Chinese no longer has any tolerance for the United States BULLSHIT. Just like Putin has.  These jackasses have no idea who they are dealing with.

I am gonna show you all.

History

Burned into the minds and soul of China. If you all think that China will allow an invasion by any one for any reason, you are very, VERY mistaken. They will rip apart your cities, gut your nations, and then burn it to the ground. They are a serious nation that does not play games.

Atrocities by the Japanese occupation forces 1937. video 6MB

Actual photos, actual sound recordings. Nasty shit. video 11MB

Atrocities by the Japanese inflicted on the Chinese. video 20MB

The Chinese are not individualists. they fight for their community! video 6MB

Defense of Shanghai. video 10MB

Chinese in the Korean war. Video 11MB

Modern Chinese Military

Serious. Dangerous. Well equipped. Superbly trained. video 3MB

Very dangerous. Not a music video. look at the equipment. video 6MB

You all think that American military can airlift and sea transport forces into Chinese waters safely to fight this formidable army? video 3MB

Reread the dialog

They are talking about a “long drawn out war” with China.

What would actually happen?

  • The moment a war starts, the USA GDP will fall to under 50% of what it is now. And that is just if there is another “regional police action”. Not a full-borne war. A full on war, would collapse the GDP to a fraction of what it is now. Perhaps in the single digits. Think 2% to 6%.
  • As such, inflation would skyrocket, and the value of the USD would approach zero. Think $25,000 for a can of Pepsi. That’s pretty pricy even for you Pepsi lovers out there.
  • 99% of all medicines used in the United States come from China. How is America going to deal with providing hospitals medications, and supplies? That means ZERO MEDICINE. When a full 65% of the American population is on some kind of medicine, and you take that away… whether pain medicine, anti-depression medicine, heart or high blood pressure medicine, anti-biotics, aspirin, tums stomach medicine… what will happen? My guess is “Zombie apocalypse”.
  • How are the people going to react to all this? Bare store shelves? Insane prices for gas and heating oil? Electricity? And periodic internet if any? They will be very frustrated, angry and fearful. And they all will have lots and lots of guns…
  • America is a mess domestically. You cannot isolate the long drawn out fighting and overlook how it will affect the domestic population.

America is a mess domestically. video 3MB

And…

  • Any war with China is a war against Russia and China together. There is no fucking way that America is able to fight TWO (x2) above-peer military forces, let alone one. The result would be the destruction of ALL 13 core aircraft carriers, all major naval bases and staging locations.
  • How will the American public react to that.
  • And knowing so…

Conclusion

…America would “push the big red nuclear button”. But it would be too late. American cites would already be rubble.

Funny how NO ONE is addressing this very clear and always present danger. My guess is that they are all collectively idiots of the lowest caliber. And I am being generous.

Consider this memo to all the employees at McDonald’s.

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

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All it takes is one really bad leader; the story of Braxton Bragg, The Confederacy’s Worst General

Have you ever wondered why some people become filthy rich while others remain poor for their entire lives? Ah, well if you haven’t you should of. It pretty much explains the nature of the universe, don’t you know.

Here we are going to look at a a “successful” loser.

We are going to tear his life apart, dissect it and study it. For we want to know how a person who was such a terrible General, so much that everyone realized it, that he still continued and was able to maintain his position without troubles of demotion. Why do some absolutely awful people get into such powerful positions?

No. This isn’t a rehash of the “Peter Principle”.

In the 1969 book, "The Peter Principle," authors Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull wrote that workers in a hierarchical structure get promoted to the level at which they are incompetent and stay at that level for the rest of their careers.

Well, I don’t have the answer to that question. It’s a complex one and involved many factors, but we can look at certain people. We can study them. And they we can see what we would do different if we were in their shoes. We must realize that we are not perfect, and that we have faults.

And the true man (or woman) in control of their life is one that knows their faults and compensates for them.

Introduction

Why did the South lose the Civil War? That question has produced many books, lectures, and heated discussions from both historians and Civil War buffs. Now, it is my personal belief that all it takes is one bad leader to totally destroy a nation and lose a war. Indeed, the tales of all those cities that misjudged Genghis Khan can so very clearly illustrate this. Now, as far as the American Civil War goes, one of the many answers that could be given can be summarized in two words: Braxton Bragg.

Bragg achieved the rank of full general in the American Civil War.

With a military background, he quickly rose through the ranks after his adopted state of Louisiana seceded. (He was originally from North Carolina.) Early on, he led a group of volunteers in capturing a federal arsenal in Baton Rouge. During the first year of the war, he proved to be an apt troop trainer. He later became a corps commander under General Albert Sidney Johnston at the Battle of Shiloh. After Johnston was killed at Shiloh, he was succeeded by P. G. T. Beauregard. When Beauregard left his command for health reasons, Bragg inherited the leadership of the Army of Tennessee, which would be the primary Confederate military force in the western theater of the war.

Most people will not turn down a promotion, especially if it comes with greater pay and prestige—even if they know they are unqualified for the position.

Skilled in training troops and having earned praise for his leadership in early battles, Bragg seemed worthy of his rise in the ranks.

A terrible General

Yet, despite the early signs of success, General Bragg became a strong contender for the title of “worst high-ranking Confederate general.”

There is certainly no shortage of grist for the mill when making the case against Bragg. Quite a few of his fellow commanders, most of whom served under him, were contemptuous of his leadership.

  • Artillery officer E.P. Alexander said that Bragg was “simply muddle headed.”
  • On several occasions generals in his army sent letters to President Jefferson Davis asking that Bragg be sacked.
  • General Frank Cheatham, after the Battle of Stones River, vowed never to serve under Bragg again.
  • After that same battle, General John C. Breckinridge, seething over a failed charge Bragg had forced him to make, challenged Bragg to a duel.

Even General Forrest was infurated

Nathan Bedford Forrest was never known as a commander easy to work alongside, but his greatest outburst against a commander came after the Battle of Chickamauga. Having won a great battle, arguably in spite of his own actions, Bragg refused to follow up his victory with further pursuit of the Union Army. This was too much for Forrest. After nearly begging Bragg for the chance to put his cavalry on the heels of the Union troops, Forrest turned from supplicant to accuser. Forrest said, “You have played the part of a damned scoundrel, and are a coward, and if you were any part of a man I would slap your jaws and force you to resent it.” He then told Bragg that he would never obey any orders from him.

Historians hated him…

Historians have not been gentle with Bragg either.

  • David Donald said Bragg was “tense, punctilious, arrogant, a martinet, and a dawdler.”
  • T. Harry Williams said Bragg “lacked the determination to carry through his purpose.”
  • Douglas Southall Freeman, after comparing Bragg with Robert E. Lee, pondered, “How different might have been the fate of Bragg and perhaps the Confederacy if that officer had learned . . . from Lee.”
  • James McPherson said that it was “bumblers like Bragg” who lost the war in the west.
  • Bruce Catton, with a little more balance in his observation, said, “Braxton Bragg was as baffling a mixture of ability and sheer incompetence as the Confederacy could produce.”

Biography

Even Bragg’s biographers were critical. Grady McWhiney said Bragg had “failed as a field commander,” that he had “no real taste for combat,” that he had no ability to inspire confidence in other commanders, that he was “notoriously inept at getting along with people he disliked,” and that he had failed to learn from his mistakes. To make matters worse, McWhiney noted that Bragg was “not lucky.”

The first volume of McWhiney’s biography, Braxton Bragg and Confederate Defeat, was published in 1969.

It was 1991 before the second volume appeared, and it was authored by one of McWhiney’s graduate students, Judith Lee Hallock.

This prompted another historian to speculate that McWhiney had found his subject “so nauseous that he abandoned the project.” Hallock disagreed, but she had her own criticisms of Bragg. She thinks his worst problem was his inability to establish and maintain group solidarity within his army. After noting other such problems as Bragg’s not being able to distinguish friends from enemies, not recognizing the abilities of his subordinates, and being a poor judge of character, she summed up his faults with this: “He could manage everything but people.”

Private Sam Watkins, in his outstanding memoir of Confederate service titled Company Aytch, expressed continual grumbling from himself and others about his service under Bragg. He said…

“None of Bragg’s soldiers ever loved him. They  had no faith in his ability as a general. He was looked upon as a  merciless tyrant.”

What was Bragg’s problem?

The answers and speculations are many. His health didn’t help his leadership duties. Migraine headaches, boils, and dyspepsia plagued him, especially in times of overwork and stress. He also suffered from rheumatism and nervousness.

Besides the responsibilities of leadership, Bragg was personally prone to drive himself relentlessly in his work. One general said he was “the most laborious of commanders, devoting every moment to the discharge of his duties.”

Bragg likely had psychosomatic problems as well. McWhiney said that at times Bragg “lost touch with reality.”

Compounding all this was his use of calomel, a mercury-based purgative, which had severe side effects. It is also possible that his physicians prescribed opium to Bragg for his ailments. That might explain some of his tendencies to lose track of what he was doing in the midst of a battle.

Halleck said it might also explain his paranoia toward fellow officers.

Grady McWhiney also attributes Bragg’s failures to his penchant for frontal attacks.

This was a topic that McWhiney developed more fully in his book Attack and Die and then repeated in his biography. Southern commanders were obsessed with frontal attacks, which were based on military tactics from previous wars.

Civil War weaponry had made such attacks extremely costly in terms of casualty counts. But if this line of argument is taken, it begs the question of why Bragg was unsuccessful when the same tactics were used by almost every other general in both Northern and Southern armies.

The Theater of War

Since Bragg’s command was in the western theater of the war, most of his battles were in Tennessee. In contrast with Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia which spent much of the war in a confined region of Virginia, the Army of Tennessee, Bragg’s command, covered a wider area and suffered from greater hardships in terms of supply and support from the Confederate government. Bragg was given a near impossible task in defending Tennessee and the western Confederacy.

Consider also the size of the armies of the Civil War.

George Washington led about 15,000 men at the most during his years in the American War for Independence. Andrew Jackson won the Battle of New Orleans with less than 6000 men. Bragg and other full generals were commanding armies four times the size of Washington’s army and ten times the size of Jackson’s.

Bragg is usually given high marks by the historians for his ability to organize and supply his troops. His West Point education and experience in the Mexican-American War had equipped him for leadership. But the logistics and demands of leading an army of such size was beyond even most trained military officers.

Primarily, it was battlefield actions that unhinged Bragg.

Bragg tended to lose his grip on the reality of what was happening in the proverbial “fog of battle.” He judged victories as defeats and defeats as victories. He was indecisive when decisiveness was needed and was decisive when discretion was needed. He exasperated his commanders, lashed out at them at the wrong times, closed his ears to their counsel, and generally destroyed any chances of coherent, unified leadership.

Wins and Losses…

Bragg failed in the western campaign.

He lost Stones River and Perryville and abandoned Chattanooga.

He failed to follow the unexpected and decisive victory at Chickamauga and was not able to hold the seemingly unconquerable defensive position on Lookout Mountain. But then what commander in the west did succeed?

Albert Sidney Johnston lost his life and the Battle of Shiloh.

John Pemberton lost Vicksburg.

John B. Hood abandoned Atlanta and went on to destroy the Army of Tennessee in his epic failures at Franklin and Nashville.

Joseph E. Johnston was perhaps the best commander in the west, but his record was one of strong defenses followed by skilled retreats.

Was Bragg a total failure?

That question calls for a lot of reflection that goes beyond the complaints of his subordinates.

History has not been kind to him.

It is hard to imagine fans of the Confederacy decorating their walls with pictures of Bragg or naming their sons “Braxton” in his honor. To a large degree, McWhiney was on target when he said that Bragg was simply just not lucky.

Conclusion

It’s easy for us, sitting in our comfortable chairs, to judge a man for his deeds or misdeeds over a hundred years ago. But that is not what we are doing here. We are trying to learn from his mistakes, and in so doing, imagine what we would have done differently were we to be in his place.

Here is a man that was very good in military logistics, and was promoted over and over again for various reasons. Eventually reaching the rank of General.

And in that role, he was a failure.

This could happen to anyone, and everyone. Just because you can fix a race car engine, does not mean that you have the ability to be a race car driver. Or if you are a wonderful cook, that you can create and expand a large chain of fast food restaurants. Or, more contemporaneously, if you are quite adept at building casinos and golf courses, you might not be qualified to lead a nation as big as the United States.

Which is a law, I believe that is missing in Robert Greene’s “48 Laws of Power”, which should be “know your limits, and know your strengths”.

To be successful you need to build up, or compile a small group of people that have strengths to complement your weaknesses. If you are strong in organization, but weak in finance, you need to find a strong finance person to work with. And if you are and the finance person are weak in Sales, perhaps you should consider adding a strong and experienced salesman to your group.

This is what Ronald Regan did when he was President of the United States, he staffed competent people, and then managed them. This is what Xi Peng is doing today.

Do not believe that you know everything and that your decisions are always ideal. That is a fantasy.

The idea that one lone person can do it all, and be the ultimate best is a uniquely American fantasy. It is false. Don’t ever believe that you are in your role or position because you are somehow “special” or that “God granted you that position”. Instead look at what you need to make your situation a success, and realize too that your weakness can absolutely kill any prior “good” work that you have accomplished.

Do not fall into the narcissistic trap of self-superiority. Do not believe that you, and only you, knows how to do things. That is an illusion.

Work as part of a team toward well-defined and common goals. You will succeed.

Do you want more?

I have more posts along these lines in my SHTF Index here…

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I also have some interesting articles in my Happiness Section. You all might want to check it out.

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How the USA can win a Trade War with China

As I write this, the “Trump trade war with China” in on it’s third year. It has been one heck of a roller-coaster ride, and today I can definitely say that, contrary to what the mainstream American media reports, China is just happy as can be waiting the “trade war” out.

  • China is not starving, ready to collapse towards famine.
  • There aren’t layoffs of millions of people
  • Huawei hasn’t collapsed, and sitting by waiting for America to develop 5G technology

Here, we review the current state of affairs between the USA and China in the building “cold economic war”, and then investigate options that can move the trade war as a positive win for America. Because right now, it is just floundering. And the only ones really getting “dinged” by it are the Americans that have to pay higher prices for their manufactured products.

This article is all about making America #1.

But first, we need to see things as they actually are. Not as how we want them to be. In many cases that means that we must erase some preconceived notions that we might hold dearly.

To help a person that has collapsed in the street, you need to know WHY he collapsed. Was it heat stroke? A heart attack? A gun shot wound? Or, was he just sleepy. You need to know the TRUE situation in order to provide the proper assistance.

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

The Lose-Lose scenario

At the start of the Donald Trump presidency, myself and others sincerely believed that the trade disagreements between the USA and China could be resolved. We believed in a win-win scenario. One in which both side so the table came back with something resembling success. A win-win for everyone.

But, unfortunately, that did not happen.

Instead, what developed was a policy of “lose – lose”. That is to say, that both sides would lose. However, the idea was for Chinese to lose much more than America would. Thus it would be a positive gain for America, and thus provide the USA with a greater amount of bargaining power.

  • The USA would lose a little bit, but recover quickly.
  • The Chinese would lose a lot, and maybe not recover for decades.

Personally, there is no doubt in my mind that this lose-lose strategy is a NeoCon strategy.

Because it is complete and utter nonsense, and has no bearing what so ever on reality.

As such, it is no surprise that it would be enforced, embraced and cultivated by Neocons within the trump administration. For every time it looked like the trade issues would be resolved, there would be some kind of problem. And each and every problem resolved around a Neocon-related issue.

I like to point my fingers at war-monger extraordinaire John Bolton, but I could be wrong.

To Bolton, the support of allies is proof of US military weakness, not diplomatic strength and he is yet to meet an arms control agreement he likes. The latest casualty amidst their wreckage of the pillars of the US-crafted global order is the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty.
To Bolton, the support of allies is proof of US military weakness, not diplomatic strength and he is yet to meet an arms control agreement he likes. The latest casualty amidst their wreckage of the pillars of the US-crafted global order is the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty.

How and Why

Why in the heck would anyone really want a lose-lose situation? Really, it’s crazy right? I mean, why go to a restaurant that has discount week-old meals for a cheap price when you know that you are going to get sick afterwards? Why do it?

Maybe on the HOPE that there is a CHANCE that you won’t get sick.

The understanding on how anyone would possibly want a lose-lose trade agreement is clear once you see the distortions of reality that neocons live under.

  • China is forever a third-world nation.
  • America is a long-term first-world nation.
  • China is dependent on the United States for labor, food, and status.
  • America doesn’t need China, and we can reopen all our factories again easily.

Each and everyone of these assumptions parrot the American mainstream press. And, as such, each and everyone is completely and absolutely wrong. It’s what Americans WANT to believe, not what is really going on.

PHOTO---China is not what the American mainstream press says it is. Instead it is something else. The mainstream American press produces "news" and "reports" that appeal to American emotions. Not to provide them facts and information. Remember, the only way that America can operate efficiently is with a just and well-informed populace.
China is not what the American mainstream press says it is. Instead it is something else. The mainstream American press produces “news” and “reports” that appeal to American emotions. Not to provide them facts and information. Remember, the only way that America can operate efficiently is with a just and well-informed populace.

People!

A healthy America requires an educated and well-informed populace. Otherwise, America is doomed to suffer through the mistakes of the mass-mob, as well as the manipulations by those that control them.

Changing things around.

Right now, the trade situation is at a standstill.

  • China is waiting everything out. They will let events play out. For they play “the long game’.
  • America is willing to suffer though events as they transpire. They believe that China is feeling the same kinds of pressures that Americana feel. For Americans believe that the Chinese, just like Americans, play the “short game”.

The only thing is… China just isn’t experiencing any kind of serious pressures.

In reality, for the Chinese owned businesses, it’s all just a slight down-tick in trade and a very slight increase in prices on imported goods. The ones that are hurting are the American businesses that operate within China. They are feeling the vast brunt of the trade-wars, as well as their support networks. Most of which are HK based.

 "The Trump administration made a very serious miscalculation in launching the ‘trade war’ with China. It believed that either, or both, the leadership of China would submit to the Trump administrations threats or the Chinese population would not be prepared for a serious struggle with the US. Both calculations have proved entirely wrong. China’s leadership did not surrender to but hit back against the US attacks. Furthermore anyone who follows China’s domestic discussion, on what is now by far the world’s largest internet community, knows that this line was strongly supported by the Chinese population." 

- China prepares for economic ‘prolonged war’ with Trump 

The big issue in China today, and I can tell you this personally, is that there is a global slowdown going on. This slowdown was triggered by the Trump Tariff wars, but was not caused by them. The global slowdown was forecast for years, and China has long prepared for it.

The Chinese play the "long game" and plan in terms of centuries. American play the "short game" and plan on quarterly results (once ever three months).

Thus, as far as the tariff situation is concerned, they are just content to let things play out and allow America to eat itself alive…

Chinese reaction to the Trump Tariff Wars.

China is playing the “long game”. America is playing the “short game” (quarter by quarter). In this situation, the “long game” favors China. The “short game” harms America.

One of the reasons why these authoritarian regimes like China are much  more popular in the eyes of millennials around the world than among  older generations, is that the younger people feel at least China  focuses on the future, invests a huge part of their economic product  into the future, and have a plan. 

Look at the United States. Look at  these countries today. They’re unable to focus on anything beyond next  month. They can’t even formulate a budget. They can’t get anything  through Congress. And all they’re doing is embarrassing themselves. 

-McAlvanay

In the long run, the United States can be harmed immensely unless this situation does not turn around.

First Steps

The very first thing that needs to happen is to do a deep purge of the neocons in the White-house.

President Trump's agenda is at odds at the neocon agenda. In many ways they are direct opposites.

These people do not want any kinds of win-win trade situation. Instead, their world view is one of “us vs. them”. They believe that there can only be two types of people in the world; The “hammers” and the “anvils”.

Neocons hold a mid-1850s midset.
Neocons hold a mid-1850s mindset. They think in terms of nations, wars, and geographical conquest. They do so at the expense of understanding the Earth as a living (kind of) organism that we all inhabit.

Here’s my narrative on one of these neocons. Open it up, as it will open up in a new tab. Read it. All neocons are the same. They do not love America, American conservatism or tradition. They love power and empire building.

Asshole

They believe that there can only be one leader in the world, and that is the United States. They believe this because we have “democracy!” (whatever the heck that is supposed to mean). The rest of the world is to live under our subjugation.

No other relationship is possible.

Now, Donald Trump did actually purge neocon John Bolton from his staff, and then immediately contacted Xi Peng in China wanting to resume trade talks.

The American media of course does not associate the firing of Bolton with China. To them, it's all just a coincidence. Bolton was fired for other reasons, like Saudi Arabia, North Korea, and Syria.

According to the mainstream American press, calling China and Bolton’s firing within minutes of each other was just a coincidence. Nothing more.

What China is

The way that Donald Trump tells it, China’s manufacturing sector is  close to collapse, fatally wounded by Washington’s tariffs on Chinese  imports.

 Last month the American president was celebrating how China’s supply  chain was “breaking up like a toy because companies are moving out”. A  few days later he talked again about how Beijing was desperate to call a  halt to the trade row. “You know why they want to make a deal?” he  crowed. “Because they’re losing their jobs, because their supply chain  is going to hell and companies are moving out of China and they’re  moving to lots of other places, including the United States.”

 But if Trump’s tariffs really are designed to torpedo China’s manufacturing base, he may have to think again.

 Washington will have announced levies on about $550 billion of  Chinese goods, when the full tariff quotas come into effect at the end  of this year. That could affect up to 5% of China’s manufacturing  capacity, according to calculations from Qu Hongbin and Jingyang Chen,  two economists at HSBC.

 But the impact of the tariffs isn’t going to be the same across the  manufacturing sector at large. Much depends on the type of goods being  made. Lower-end, more labour intensive industries such as furniture and  textile production are taking the biggest hit, with companies shifting  their factory lines to countries like Vietnam, Cambodia and Bangladesh.  

-Week in China

China is many things. One thing it is not is what the neocons think. China has leap-frogged the USA in so many areas that it’s just too tiring to elaborate upon. Maybe one or two videos might help add some perspective in this matter.

Some facts. (Opens up in a separate tab.)

China's Global Leadership

But maybe we can ignore the charts, tables and figures. Not everyone can follow them. (Given the really poor state of education in the United States today.)

Rather than the charts of facts and figures that I have in other posts, some informal quick peeks into what is going on in China might be refreshing. Here are things that are EVERYDAY sights in China, but that you will not see in the United States.

For starters…

One of the first things that people are beginning to see when they cross into China and go through Chinese customs is a robotic customs officer. They will instruct you to input your biometics into the Chinese data base.

The robots, named Xiao Hai, have state-of-the-art perception technology and are able to listen, speak, learn, see and walk. Ten robots have started working as customs officers at three ports in China’s Guangdong province, authorities said. They were the first batch of intelligent robots, to be used by Chinese customs at the ports of Gongbei, Hengqin and Zhongshan, Xinhua news agency reported.   The robots, named Xiao Hai, have state-of-the-art perception technology and are able to listen, speak, learn, see and walk. Based on a specialized customs database, the robots can answer questions in 28 languages and dialects, including Cantonese, Mandarin, English and Japanese.   There are some particular problems they cannot solve, and customs officials said they will link the robots to their customer service hotline in the future. With face recognition technology, the robots can detect suspicious people and raise an alarm, according to Zhao Min, director of Gongbei customs.
The robots, named Xiao Hai, have state-of-the-art perception technology and are able to listen, speak, learn, see and walk. Ten robots have started working as customs officers at three ports in China’s Guangdong province, authorities said. They were the first batch of intelligent robots, to be used by Chinese customs at the ports of Gongbei, Hengqin and Zhongshan, Xinhua news agency reported.
The robots, named Xiao Hai, have state-of-the-art perception technology  and are able to listen, speak, learn, see and walk. Based on a  specialized customs database, the robots can answer questions in 28  languages and dialects, including Cantonese, Mandarin, English and  Japanese.  

There are some particular problems they cannot solve, and  customs officials said they will link the robots to their customer  service hotline in the future. With face recognition technology, the  robots can detect suspicious people and raise an alarm, according to  Zhao Min, director of Gongbei customs. 

Then, once you leave customs, you walk out into the bright daylight and confront traffic. China has traffic galore as they are a very populous nation.

Check out this MICRO VIDEO of the amazing traffic technology being implemented in Chinese cities this year…

Chinese traffic lights. As 3D holographic laser light presentations. Meanwhile the USA is still using 1960’s technology in traffic control.

It’s not even funny how much the Chinese have pushed ahead of American technology. While American industry has been hiring “Diversity officers” to hire employees based on minority “disadvantage”, China doubled down and only hires and promotes on merit.

The Chinese are a serious people. They do not play around.

Their products are excellent. For instance, when President Trump shut off all the Huawei 5G products and development in the United States, China said fine. You see most of the Apple, Motorola, and LG products are all designed in China. (Aside from some leadership positions.) Not in the United States.

There will be a retreat in technological, educational, and manufacturing leadership. The attempts by Donald Trump to thwart the global strategic trade supply chain has not been successful, and only aggravates an already dire situation.
There will be a retreat in technological, educational, and manufacturing leadership. The attempts by Donald Trump to thwart the global strategic trade supply chain has not been successful, and only aggravates an already dire situation.

So all the Chinese workers, the engineers, the developers and the designers, they are all inside China. They live in China. They are Chinese, and are paid Chinese wages and salaries. So when the United States government started to crack down on this outsourcing, they politely bowed, and left. They left the American owned companies. They walked across the street. And then they joined the Chinese owned companies. No problem.

With this influx of American-trained talent, China just took off.

They sprinted ahead and are now galloping forward at a healthy clip. The American companies are now in a kind of funky planning stage on how to react to the disruptions in their supply chains.

Check out this MICRO VIDEO of the latest wrap-around visual technology in the new Huawei phones. Pretty darn impressive.

Almost all communication products are designed in China. So if American companies cannot hire the Chinese engineers to make the products, the Chinese companies would instead,

And of course, there is there growing drone and robotics industries. Both of which has dwarfed anything in the United States.

For instance, today all public fireworks displays in China come along with these lighted drone formations. These make an enormous three dimensional visual canvas. This is, I must admit, quite visually stunning. When I first saw this in 2014 I was stunned. And today, it is so very commonplace that no one seems to give it a second thought.

Check out the impressive swarm drones in this MICRO VIDEO below…

Chinese swarm drones.

It’s like those super modern high-speed trains everywhere. “Oh that thing? What you’ve never ridden in one before?”

High speed rail is fast, cheap, clean, economically and ecologically friendly. It is accessible, and a great way for getting from one point to another. There are no long TSA lines. The seats are big, roomy, and the ride is comfortable and smooth. And the cost. Well, the cost is about 1/6 the cost of an airline ticket.

Read more (opens in a separate tab) here…

Why no High-Speed rail in the USA?

People! Seriously, China got started about four decades ago, and kept on running. They are moving forward, and perhaps (from their point of view) it’s a good thing that people are oblivious just how quickly and far that they are advancing.

So you know they are advancing in robotics, and in synthetic memory and minds. How about sex toys? Are you aware of the quality and scope of the Chinese sex toy industry? It’s taking the world by storm, I’ll tell you what.

PHOTO-- Off the shelf standard sex doll. This one is warm to the touch, can talk and converse (in multiple languages) and has some limited mobility circuits.
Off the shelf standard sex doll. This one is warm to the touch, can talk and converse (in multiple languages) and has some limited mobility circuits.

Here’s another sex doll.

They come in a wide range of styles, shapes, weights and performance. Personally, if you are desirous of purchasing a sex robot, I would advise getting the premium model. They come with additional features that help mitigate the price tag amount.

PHOTO--This sex doll has limited functionality, being more a doll rather than a robot. However, it is totally and completely customizable. You can select anything from eye color, skin tone, body softwness, height, check size, and many other attributes.
This sex doll has limited functionality, being more a doll rather than a robot. However, it is totally and completely customizable. You can select anything from eye color, skin tone, body softness, height, check size, and many other attributes.

The point here is that everything from custom genetic designed pets, electric vehicles, to yes, even sex dolls are made in China and they are made well in China.

No one in America is apparently aware of this.

Go ahead, ask an American “China expert” on [1] the gongbei robotic customs officers, the [2] holographic traffic gates at cross-walks, the [3] 5G integration of Shenzhen, or [4] to name all the different makes and models of electric cars debuting out of China this year. He can’t.

And thus… he’s no “expert”.

Just an actor, pretending. He found a nitch a few years back and has been milking it over the years. But, you know, China is not America it’s rate of change is about 20x that of America’s. You need to really pay attention to keep up with all the changes.

Or else you will just be regurgitating “sound box” echo chamber narratives from like-minded individuals.

One of the many, many new housing subdivisions in China.

John Bolton actually stated in late September 2019 that (I am paraphrasing) “… the tariff wars has sent China back twenty years…”.

Twenty years, eh?

Ah, the ignorance is great in this one. Either that, or he has a tumor in his head. It’s a typical characteristic of neocons, don’t you know.

 Most of the companies in the US–China Business Council (an  organisation of about 200 American firms that trade with China) think  that investment will continue to flow. A full 97% of the council’s  members say their operations in China are profitable, and 87% report  that they have no plans to relocate any of their activities to other  countries.

 Some of the difficulties of ‘reshoring’ manufacturing jobs back to  the US were brilliantly revealed by the recent Netflix documentary American Factory too (see WiC464).

 In the meantime there is little sign that the Chinese supply chain is  being eroded, because of the tariff pressure from Washington.

 “Trump’s claim that an exodus of foreign firms will force China to  capitulate to US demands to settle the trade war is wishful thinking at  best,” Lardy concludes. 

-Week in China

Knowing the trade situation as it is, what can be done to salvage it?

That’s what this article is all about.

It’s about us taking a pragmatic, realistic look at the way things are, not at how we wish them to be, and planning on implementation of changes for our own personal benefit.

Let’s look at each issue and figure out how we can reduce or ameliorate the situation successfully. In so doing, let’s tackle the American mainstream (conservative & liberal) narratives. Let’s do it one, by one, and see how we can migrate things into “our” favor.

It sure beats sitting in a dark closet and trying to shoot darts at a target that we cannot see. Eh? Or, to put it another way. We don’t want to go around to tree after tree, pissing indiscriminately.

American mainstream media reporting on the trade wars.
American mainstream media reporting on the trade wars.

Here’s some Mainstream media issues, and what the “informed” American populace thinks about China. Let’s take each one, dissect it, and see what we can do about it. OK.

  • $500 B trade deficit.
  • Global Supply Chain.
  • Made in China is bad.
  • China is ripping the USA off!
  • Chinese are unable to buy American products.
  • Chinese products are poor quality, simple and break down.
  • Chinese workers are slaves that labor for nothing.
  • Fair Trade
  • Dumping products
  • Stealing IP
  • They are dirty Commies!
  • Tariffs will bring back jobs.

For starters let’s tackle the A-#1 reason why the trump Tariff Wars exist in the first place. It is because America is losing $500 billion dollars every year to China, and we (pretty much) need to reduce that amount in order for America to be vibrant, healthy and prosperous.

[Issue 1] We are losing $500 billion every year to China

This is based on the fact that we have a trade deficit in goods for about $500B. This is a fact, Jack.

But, what is the composition of that deficit? Where within that composition can we move things to our advantage, and what parts should we ignore as hopeless?

Well, when we study the deficit we note that it is only based on products. It doesn’t include services. And in this area we have a surplus with China. We export those services to China. There are things that they cannot do, but we can. It’s our strength.

I propose that we increase our strength in this area. Work on our strengths, not play to our weaknesses. No matter how good it sounds politically. Give and take.

We provide services. They give us products.

Why not put a tax on the services that we supply to China? That tax can then be used to offset the tariffs that Americans must pay in imported products.

Play on our strengths. It’s a win-win for Americans.

PHOTO---This is a big win for Americans!

[Issue 2] The Global Supply chain.

Then there’s the global supply chain.

Today we have a global business environment, and no wishing for the “good old days” is going to put that “Genie back into the lamp”. That “train has left the station”.

China imports a lot of natural resources and components from other countries to manufacture and assemble the finished goods. China buys chromium from Africa, and that goes into the metal alloys in cell-phones, drone motors and automobile electronic chip-sets.

Now, China does import other raw materials.

And yes, they do import a lot of raw materials out of the United States. And, no, I’m not talking about wheat, rice, and barley. I’m talking about uranium, and other precious metals that we have. Not to mention coal. China wants our coal. China wants our natural gas. Why not give it to them?

…at a price, don’t you know.

Again, that little bit of extra cost to buy from Americans can be used to offset the imbalance in tariffs. It would be a win-win for the American consumer.

Continue our exports to China, only raise the prices on them. Not prohibitively high, but gradually over time. Another win – win for Americans. Be smart. Think long term.

PHOTO---This is a big win for Americans!

[Issue 3] Made in China.

Not every product made in China is Chinese.

It’s not. Many Japanese, British, German, French, and yes… American products are made in China. Actually 40% of “Chinese” exports are actually products of foreign (multi-national) corporations based in China. Many of which are American owned.

You’d never hear that in the American mainstream media.

Like Apple and their iphone. Like all those hobby drones that you can buy in the stores. Like the automobile electronics found in all the Fords, General Motors and other American cars. They are all American, but manufactured in China.

They are all American products, manufactured, designed and built in China.

Check out this graph…

Chart of the Chinese exports of goods, broken down by resource type, over athe last ten years.
Chart of the Chinese exports of goods, broken down by resource type, over the last ten years.

Thus, all these “Chinese” goods, aren’t really Chinese at all. They may be American, Japanese, South Korean, German etc.

You see, it’s easy to consider trade as products from one nation to another. But the fact is that the way business, and manufacturing is conducted today does not resemble in any way the old “made here, stays here” formula.

We need to take that into account.

We could by law, force American companies to make their products in America. That is, forbidding them to manufacture parts and components outside of America. It would be a law specifically targeting “supply chain management” outside of the USA.

American products should be made in America. We can still buy from China, but those products that are made by American companies need to be made in America.

No tariffs that Americans need to pay. More jobs for Americans. Yet another win-win.

PHOTO---This is a big win for Americans!

[Issue 4] China is ripping us off!

This is pretty much the narrative. It doesn’t matter if you are an American Conservative, a liberal, or a member of the American mainstream media, this is the mantra.

  • Cheap junk in Walmart – China’s fault!
  • High prices for iPhones – China’s fault!
  • Power tool breaks – China’s fault!

US oligarchs and corporations decided to move American jobs abroad not China.

China smiled and took the business. But, seriously, their attitude was "Meh, whatever!". You see, everyone was coming to China to manufacture their products. America had to stand in line.

They raked in the profits, and gave the American consumers some benefit in being able to purchase inexpensive goods.

They came to China with bucket loads of cash. They promised the Chinese the world and gave them blueprints, technical specifications and trained them how to make their products. Then they sat back, drank their chardonnay while the money poured in.

US oligarchs and corporations decided to move American jobs abroad not China.  They raked in the profits, and gave the American consumers some benefit in being able to purchase inexpensive goods.
US oligarchs and corporations decided to move American jobs abroad not China. They raked in the profits, and gave the American consumers some benefit in being able to purchase inexpensive goods.

Yes.

Never forget, US consumers and businesses benefit from inexpensive Chinese goods and labor. So, let’s not blame China for the lost manufacturing jobs. If you want to do something about it instead of eternally complaining then…

…ONLY BUY AMERICAN.

What’s so darn hard about that?

So stop your moaning and groaning. Start today. Stop buying anything that even resembles something imported. Period. You cannot change the world, but you can change your little part of it. Begin now. Begin today.

PHOTO---This is a big win for Americans!

[Issue 5] They don’t buy our products!

This is another outright lie that is somehow broadcast in the United States. The actual reality is quite different. The Chinese place a high value on American products. In fact, in terms of personal value, to a Chinese person, owning a Buick is about equal to owning a Lamborghini. Yes!

It’s one of those jaw-dropping things that boggles the mind of most Americans. For in America, a Buick is considered a robust typical family car. While in China, it is considered the height of luxury, good taste, while at the same time being fiercely loyal to one’s family.

  • In China, the Mary Kay company gives her top saleswomen pink Buicks.
  • Perhaps that’s all part of the reason why GM sells more cars in China than in the US.
  • Not to mention that Apple sells more iPhones in China than in the US.
  • For United States semiconductor giant, Qualcomm, 65% of their revenues come from China.
  • Boeing sold 1000 planes to China in the last five years. 

In fact, most major US corporations consider China as their #1 or #2 market. 

So, yes, China has a very open market and it buys a lot of American services and goods, but a lot of them happen to be made in China. Similarly, corporations such as Starbucks, McDonald’s, KFC etc. profit enormously from their thousands of branches in China.

Starbucks continues to open thousands of new stores each year, mainly outside of the North American market. The company has a five-year plan with several goals to continue driving growth. Starbucks wants to be the employer of choice and invest in those employees who continue to deliver superior customer service. Starbucks has always been on the forefront of valuing employees, especially its part-time staff. The company has stated it will grow to 30,000 locations globally and work on creating new reasons for customers to visit its stores throughout the day.
Starbucks continues to open thousands of new stores each year, mainly outside of the North American market. The company has a five-year plan with several goals to continue driving growth. Starbucks wants to be the employer of choice and invest in those employees who continue to deliver superior customer service. Starbucks has always been on the forefront of valuing employees, especially its part-time staff. The company has stated it will grow to 30,000 locations globally and work on creating new reasons for customers to visit its stores throughout the day.

The Chinese love, just love American products. If you really want to offset the trade imbalance between the two nations, then sell more products to China. This means a retail presence inside of China and far greater social and industrial brands than what is presently established.

The Chinese end up buying more American products (especially if they are made in America) and the Americans take home more money. The Chinese are willing to PAY MORE money for an American product just by virtue of it’s reputation. Don’t squander this advantage.

Sell more products to China, they will be happy, and the Americans will be raking in the money. It’s a win – win for America.

PHOTO---This is a big win for Americans!

[Issue 6] Chinese products are crap

If Chinese products are crap, why do Americans keep spending $500 billion a year on buying crappy things?

Are Americans stupid, or powerless to change things? Is it that the deplorable Americans are just uneducated simpletons. Not hip to the wily ways of the Chinese?

Is that the narrative?

This narrative makes no sense. Not really. Everyone seems to think that all China makes is the cheapest toys in Walmart, but it’s only Americans that makes the computers, iphones and drones that fly in the sky.

Wrong! The roles are actually the reverse.

Don’t forget that BMW manufactures most of their cars in China.

BMW debuted its Vision Future Interaction Concept, a Mirrorless i8 Concept and its Internet of Things concept. It’s a very large suite of new technologies and it’s all extremely impressive. However, BMW wants to make it disappear into the background and make it invisible to customers.
BMW debuted its Vision Future Interaction Concept, a Mirrorless i8 Concept and its Internet of Things concept. It’s a very large suite of new technologies and it’s all extremely impressive. However, BMW wants to make it disappear into the background and make it invisible to customers.

Also, iPhones, Nike shoes and Prada bags are all made in China.

And Chinese brands like Huawei and OnePlus are actually beating Apple. So it’s not as if Chinese can’t make high-end, high-quality products.

They can, and they do.

We need to recognize the true and real state of things. That way we can best be able to decide on courses of action that actually work.

Instead of the progressive liberal Marxist "feel good" legislation.
A polarized world.

That said, if you pay someone $1 an hour, don’t expect amazing products that will last for a lifetime. You get what you pay for.

You can only pick two.
You can only pick two.

Also, Chinese corporations are working their way up the value chain. Chinese high-end smartphones (Xiaomi and OnePlus) are already #1 in large consumer markets such as India; and, within five years, Chinese electric cars will be globally popular as well.

Chinese electric vehicles dominate. More Chinese electric vehiles are made in China than the rest of the world combined.
Chinese electric vehicles dominate. More Chinese electric vehicles are made in China than in the rest of the world combined.

To understand how to take advantage of the global situation, you must first understand it as it exists. We need to see things as they are. Not as we want them to be. That way, we can leverage the situation towards our very own benefit. It will be a win-win for Americans.

PHOTO---This is a big win for Americans!

A win-win for Americans.

LeEco announced its investment in a joint venture between Aston Martin and Faraday Future, a direct competitor of Tesla, further signalling its intentions in the space. The front of the car features an LED loop that can be lit in different spots such as indicators or fog lights. The rear passenger doors, known as ‘suicide doors’ open from a hinge at the rear, as opposed to the front. They’ve also waived a previous law that protected home-grown companies from being gutted by foreign competition, as long as they invest in electric technology.

That’s led to a boom in EV startups such as NextEV and CH-Auto who, along with LeEco, could turn the car industry on its head. Especially given the size of China’s domestic market has now surged past America’s to become the largest economy in the world. Chinese EV companies have also been poaching talent from the likes of BMW to help make China the electric car center of the world.

[Issue 7] Everything in China is made by slave labor

It’s not.

The Chinese have a much stronger work-ethic than Americans have. We might not want to hear it, but it is true.

There is nothing good or bad about it. It has do do with society. The higher percentage that Americans have for leisure transmits in more time to attend church, more time for personal education, and more time to spend with the family and making the best of the life that one has. Let the Chinese work themselves to the bone. Americans don’t need to as we have what is known as work-life-balance. It’s a good thing… for us.

Let others live their lives as they want. If they want to work 12 hour days and on Saturdays, let them. Live and let live.

They also have different laws, different customs, and different culture. Thus comparing labor in China to that of the USA is like comparing apples to oranges.

Here is a brief comparison between three factories. One is an American non-union factory. One is a union American factory. One is a Chinese factory. One of the first things that the astute reader will notice that, aside from the pay, there is little else of value that the union provides the employees.

The second thing that you will notice is that the Chinese employee is granted all kinds of things that an American would never, ever be provided with. Like free housing (as in a personal apartment), free internet, three free meals a day, and many other things unheard of in the United States.

Factory comparision spreadsheet
This is a quick generalized comparison between factories in the United States compared to factories in China. It is a gross simplification on many levels. However there are some things that need to be taken into account. firstly, the Chinese make far less money than their American counterparts. On the other hand, they get many perks and things that Americans can only dream about.

If you want to buy a product at Walmart, and you like it’s price, then go for it.

Sears tried to compete against Walmart, and lost. They offered better quality, warranties, and (for a spell) better working conditions in the factories that supplied the products to them.

It didn’t work.

When I buy something made in Wisconsin, I do not know about the working conditions that the product was created under. What I do know is that I liked the product and so I bought it.

China’s electric vehicle start-up Nio launched its first mass-produced model over the weekend, in a home market marked by competition with companies such as Tesla.  The ES8, which starts at 448,000 Chinese yuan ($67,765) is half the starting price of Tesla’s 836,000 yuan ($126,470) Model X in China.
China’s electric vehicle start-up Nio launched its first mass-produced model over the weekend, in a home market marked by competition with companies such as Tesla. The ES8, which starts at 448,000 Chinese yuan ($67,765) is half the starting price of Tesla’s 836,000 yuan ($126,470) Model X in China.

Complaining about situations beyond your control, outside of your understanding, and trying to moan and groan about it is fruitless. If you think that the Chinese labor like slaves, then DON’T BUY CHINESE PRODUCTS, and shut the heck up.

It’s a win win.

PHOTO---This is a big win for Americans!

[Issue 8] We want Fair Trade and China must lower their tariffs

It’s not as if the only thing that stands in the way of US progress is China’s tariffs. Consider that we imported 8 million cars last year.

We imported Eight Million cars.

Eight / Million / Cars.

Maybe we should buy American goods, before we demand that others buy American products. Eh?

Imported vehicles to the United States. Most of the vehicle imports to the USA come from Canada and Mexico. While China is certainly the leader in automotive manufacture by volume, type, and differentiation, it hardly exports any vehicles to the United States.
Imported vehicles to the United States. Most of the vehicle imports to the USA come from Canada and Mexico. While China is certainly the leader in automotive manufacture by volume, type, and differentiation, it hardly exports any vehicles to the United States.

Also, even if China eliminates their tariffs on our exports, US corporations will find that it’s still cheaper to manufacture goods in China, rather than making them here and shipping them over.

It’s not about nations. It’s about the oligarchy and the companies that they control.

Let’s not forget that the US already has a lot of protectionist tariffs, quotas, barriers and subsidies for various products and business sectors. Every government in the world has to cater to its people and special interest groups.

Finally, since WWII, the US has enjoyed an extraordinary privilege of being able to easily print the global reserve currency and wantonly borrow from the rest of the world.

Be careful what you wish for.

For a true “level playing field,” all currencies must be equal, which Americans won’t easily accept. Yeah. Can you just imagine if China could sanction western countries and arrest western CEOs for violating Chinese sanctions! Like the USA does.

Be careful what you wish for.

Most Americans, American companies, and the company stockholders would be most unhappy if China began to play to the same rules that the United States have implemented over the last four decades.

I would advise that we get on the good side of China. With China as a friend we can merge with shared benefit. Treating them as an enemy does the opposite. Work together for the betterment of all. It’s a win – win for everyone.

PHOTO---This is a big win for Americans!

[Issue 9] They operate at losses and dump products

It is true. There are some state-operated Chinese entities that keep operating while losing money and simply rolling over their debt. China allows that to create employment for its people and also, sometimes, to capture the global market.

However, US corporations such as Amazon, Uber, Netflix and others do the same as well.

Nothing new here.

Moneys flow toward utility. The Chinese fund factories. The USA funds institutions.

China is a nation that values work, labor and production. America is a nation that values medicine, social reconstruction and government, As such, China will make the products that Americans will use under regulation.

It’s just the way things are.

China is a nation that values work, labor and production. America is a nation that values medicine, social reconstruction and government. You can easily see where all the money is going in America. Just look at the top three items. As such, China will make the products that Americans will use under regulation.

Truthfully, the only difference being that the US corporations are subsidized by commercial banks and the Federal Reserve Bank. While the Chinese factories are subsidized by the Bank of China.

We need to recognize that within the framework of utility. When we do, and grasp the true nature of things, it becomes easier to accept the truth. China makes the things that Americans use. Embrace that reality. It will be a win – win for Americans.

PHOTO---This is a big win for Americans!

[Issue 10] They steal our IP

IP = Intellectual Property.

Most of these accusations are unwarranted.

It makes for great arguments, and a pretty decent media platform from which to espouse upon, but really, it’s just nonsensical. No one is sneaking around “stealing things”.

The Chinese company just buys an American company fair and square. Then , since they own the patents and the equipment and the intellectual property, they can do with it as they wish.

Carpetbaggers     

In general, the term  “carpetbagger” refers to a traveler who arrives in a new region with  only a satchel (or carpetbag) of possessions, and who attempts to profit  from or gain control over his new surroundings, often against the will  or consent of the original inhabitants. After 1865, a number of  northerners moved to the South to purchase land, lease plantations or  partner with down-and-out planters in the hopes of making money from  cotton. At first they were welcomed, as southerners saw the need for  northern capital and investment to get the devastated region back on its  feet. They later became an object of much scorn, as many southerners  saw them as low-class and opportunistic newcomers seeking to get rich on  their misfortune. 

If China is stealing our IP, how come Tesla just opened a new plant in Shanghai and Boeing just announced a new factory in China?

If China is a thief, how come Intel Corp. has funded Horizon Robotics, a Chinese startup?

If China is a threat, why does Warren Buffet own 10% of BYD, China’s biggest electric car manufacturer?

Every western hi-tech firm — Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Dell etc. — has branches in China and they wouldn’t do it if China is just stealing their IP. They are not stupid. Are they?

Yes, China required transfer of technology in many industries, but it was a voluntary, consensual business transaction. Driven by greed to conquer the Chinese consumer market, western corporations obliged. Also, arrogance made the West assume that Chinese copycats will never be good enough.

Fast-food giant McDonald's is selling a controlling stake in its China business to a group of investors led by state-owned Chinese conglomerate Citic in a deal worth up to $2.1 billion, the companies said Monday.  The transaction is part of a global business overhaul being carried out by the American company to keep up with changing tastes that have resulted in declining sales.  Under the terms of the deal, Citic Ltd. and its investment management unit Citic Capital will acquire 52 percent of the business while another partner, Washington-based private equity firm The Carlyle Group, will own 28 percent. McDonald's will retain a 20 percent stake.  About two-thirds of the China operation's 2,640 outlets, including 240 in Hong Kong, that are now owned by McDonald's will be refranchised. The China business, which employs more than 120,000 people, is valued at up to $2.1 billion, according to the agreement.  Under McDonald CEO Steve Easterbook's restructuring plan launched in 2015, the company wants franchisees to take over more company-owned outlets, giving local managers more decision-making power to respond to Asian customers.
Fast-food giant McDonald’s is selling a controlling stake in its China business to a group of investors led by state-owned Chinese conglomerate Citic in a deal worth up to $2.1 billion, the companies said Monday. The transaction is part of a global business overhaul being carried out by the American company to keep up with changing tastes that have resulted in declining sales. Under the terms of the deal, Citic Ltd. and its investment management unit Citic Capital will acquire 52 percent of the business while another partner, Washington-based private equity firm The Carlyle Group, will own 28 percent.

There are definitely problems with Chinese espionage and those must be opposed and stopped. However, most people confuse blatant theft of intellectual property with it being given away. And for the last couple of decades, the American companies did just that. They gave the technology away so that the American company owner can make enormous profits in the transaction.

America lost it’s technical edge, so that a hand-full of individuals could profit from it. These Americans sold out America so that they could become filthy, filthy, rich.

For America to become great again, we need to arrest and imprison those that gave away our strengths, our knowledge, our technologies, our resources for their own personal profit. They should be in jail instead of drinking chardonnay in one of their many mansions. It’ll be a win – win for Americans.

PHOTO---This is a big win for Americans!

[Issue 11] But they’re commies!

In spite of China’s “communist” party, CCP, what they have is a unique mix of socialism, capitalism and Confucianism. Don’t treat them as a cardboard cutout, a cartoon of something evil. They are not, and you should be ashamed to fall for the 1930’s-era propaganda template.

Chinese communism is NOT the same kind of communism that we Americans have come to think of. It is something all together different.

The private sector is vibrant — [1] 90% of new jobs are created by private enterprises, [2] venture capitalists are investing more in Chinese startups than in American counterparts, [3] the upper middle class is growing rapidly (200 million), [4] there are 3.5 million millionaires and [5] two new billionaires were created every week last year.

Two new millionaires every week!

China is not your textbook “communist” country.

While the Chinese government is certainly authoritarian, relative to western democracies, it has accomplished an economic miracle over the last four decades that’s unprecedented in human history.

800 million people were lifted out of poverty and the GDP grew 40-fold in 40 years.

That’s why 84% of Chinese trust their government and 68% say that the government is the best institution to lead the country to a better future.

To understand how we can “beat the other team”, we need to understand who they really are, what their tactics are, how they call their plays, and their strengths and weaknesses. It will be a win – win for Americans.

PHOTO---This is a big win for Americans!

[Issue 12] Tariffs will bring back jobs

Tariffs can only bring back jobs if there are American alternatives to the Chinese products. That way the tariffs will price the Chinese products at a disadvantage to American products. And the consumers will want to buy American products.

But…

  • The vast majority of products under the Trump tariff schedule has no comparative American-made alternative.
  • Thus it will be the American consumer that will be paying the tariffs, as they will have no other alternatives.

This is a real big problem, and perhaps the real heart of the problem with the “trade wars” today. We need to realize how legislative actions produce unintended consequences…

In the 1990's Bill Clinton and his Democrat controlled Congress, single-handedly devastated the American ship-building industry. You see, they laid a "wealth tax" on boats. As they (incorrectly as it turned out) that only wealthy people could afford yachts, and small boats.

What happened, is that everyone stopped buying boats. As a result the entire ship-building industry collapsed. It took decades to recover, and even today it is just limping along.

You see, most of the products that Americans buy comes from China, and that there are zero alternatives. This is a problem. This is a really big problem.

Factories do not grow on trees.

You cannot snap your fingers and immediately start making televisions sets, drones, robots, kitchen appliances and shoes from nothing. You need talent, knowledge, machinery and a skilled and talented work force.

But, you do know, that most of the American work force does not have this background. Their background is in the service industries.

Thus creating a factory, or even moving it from China to the USA is a very difficult thing to do. Check out this link (opens up in another tab).

The logistics of relocating a facotry from China back to the USA.

You see, Trump’s 10% or 25% tariff on Chinese goods won’t create enough incentive for most manufacturers to start building products in the US. At the most, US companies will simply move the manufacturing to other developing nations such as Vietnam, Thaliand etc. Moreover, Chinese Yuan has already fallen 10%, thus largely neutralizing the first round of tariffs.

Considering that every major business/lobbying group, corporation and economist is against tariffs and trade wars, it’s highly unlikely that jobs are going return from Asia, Mexico and elsewhere.

Tariffs and retaliatory tariffs can also lead to a big loss of jobs or even a recession. There have already been endless stream of stories about layoffs and lost sales.

While it’s true that some Japanese and German automakers who want to avoid confrontations may build new assembly plants in the US, others may be forced to relocate some existing factories from the US to Europe and China to avoid the cross-border tariffs.

  • Make a favorable environment for other nations to put their factories in America.
  • Reduce regulations so that the factories will want to move to America.
  • Limit the taxes on employers, and on workers so that the American factory worker has a chance to compete.

It will be a win-win for Americans.

PHOTO---This is a big win for Americans!

Conclusion

There won’t be any winner in the trade war. China in 2019 isn’t China in 1990. We should stop treating it as such. That is crazy.

At the same time, the West should be mindful of history — the Opium Wars and the following Century of Humiliation are etched in the Chinese national psyche. China has worked very hard and sacrificed a lot in the last forty years; and they’re not going to give up their dreams. They are a nation of achievers.

The Chinese are a serious nation and do not play around. If this trade situation is not handled carefully, things can turn really bad for America. It’s not going to be anything like Americans expect.

(Aside from the total collapse of America at every level...) I think there are two other options. 

One would be a crisis and defeat.  That is something we have not experienced in America. What that would  look like we can only speculate by looking at other examples of defeated  nations, what has happened to them, and how they have adjusted to their  post-defeat role. 

You might look at the defeated Axis powers after  World War II as an interesting test case, and we have written a little  bit about that. One thing that might even be most disturbing of all, is  that no real crisis ever ultimately expresses itself, which actually,  oddly enough, may be the worst outcome of all. 

That is to say,  everything we see about our world today, the rich getting richer, the  poor getting poorer, democracy sort of ebbing away, people feeling  powerless over their political lives, people feeling less and less a  sense of civic participation or belonging, and we have kind of turned  that up. 

There is an interesting book by Tyler Cohen. He is a very  popular writer now, he wrote Average is Over and The Great Stagnation. He wrote a recent book called The Complacent Class.  If you want to read a book about America’s future in the absence of a  fourth turning, read that book. 

The real rate of return gets lower and  lower, we kind of approach the stationary state, productivity growth  kind of ebbs to nothing, we become a kind of nominal market society, but  one in which all the markets are dominated by a few very large  companies with enormous market power and concentration. 

In that kind of  society, highly stratified, not feeling at all like what we think of as  being America, is, I think, the scariest one, one in which global  problems, problems of global order are not rectified. And it is one that  disturbs me the most. 

-McAlvany

So, let’s get rid of the zero-sum mentality, drop the aggressive posture, come up with tangible goals, and negotiate with respect and a smile.

The tariffs have slowed China’s economy, which grew 6.6 percent in 2018, its slowest rate in almost three decades.
The tariffs have slowed China’s economy, which grew 6.6 percent in 2018, its slowest rate in almost three decades. Meanwhile the United States grew an amazing 1.7 percent. The most astounding growth in decades.

For goodness sakes. Everyone can win. We just need to stop playing the neocon war – war -war game. It’s going to really… REALLY harm the United States. And I do mean BIGLY.

So, let’s think smart. Address things as they really are, and work for a win-win for everyone. Now is the time to do it.

PHOTO---This is a big win for Americans!

12OCT19 Update

 Trump said the U.S. and China have "agreed in  principle" on a preliminary trade agreement. Trump acknowledged that  differences remain on major issues on which the two countries are  divided, but the White House still decided not to push ahead with a  planned increased to tariffs on $250 billion of Chinese goods next week.
The move would have raised those tariffs to 30% from 25%.

"There's  too many factors at play for him to just issue threats to governments,  China's or anybody else's, to just follow along with what he says," said  Wang, referring to the U.S. president's previous threats to slap  additional penalties on Chinese goods.

-USA Today;  Senior China adviser: Trump to blame for delays in securing final trade deal, says China has been 'accommodating' 

Links about China

Here are some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader, might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.

The US involvement in the HK "Democracy Now" movement.
Chinese reaction to the Trump Tariff Wars.
China's Global Leadership
Popular Music of China
The logistics of relocating a facotry from China back to the USA.
Hong Kong and the NED CIA operations.
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Why are Americans so angry?
Evolution of the USA and China.
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year
Trade Wars

China and America Comparisons

As an American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in China.

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

What is China like?

The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

What is China like - 1
What is China like - 2
What is China Like - 3
What is China like - 4
What is China like - 5
What is China like - 6
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 9

Summer in Asia

Let’s take a moment to explore Asia. That includes China, but also includes such places as Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and others…

Summer Snapshots 1
Summer Snapshots 2
Summer Snapshots 3
Summer Snapshots 4
Snapshots Summer 5
Summer Snapshots 6
Summer Snapshot 7
Summer Snapshots 8
Summer Snapshots 9
Summer Snapshots 10
Summer Snapshots 11
Summer Snapshot 12

Some Fun Videos

Here’s a collection of some fun videos taken all over Asia. While there are many videos taken in China, we also have some taken in Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea and Japan as well. It’s all in fun.

Some fun videos of China - 1
Fun Videos of Asia - 2
Fun videos of Asia - 3
Fun videos of Asia - 4
Fun Videos of Asia - 5
Fun videos of Asia - 6
Fun videos of Asia - 7
Fun videos of Asia - 8
Fun videos of Asia - 9
Fun videos of Asia - 10
Fun videos of Asia - 11
Fun videos of Asia - 12
Fun videos of Asia - 13
Fun videos of Asia - 14
Fun Videos of Asia - 15
Fun videos of Asia -16
The best way to cook marshmallows.

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