We are just a group of retired spooks that discuss things that you’ll not find anywhere else. It makes us unique. Take a look around. Learn a thing or two.
Today, the American Navy has confronted and accepted the fierce reality that China has the “upper hand” in the South China Sea.
That China has established strong defensive positioning and capabilities.
And that America has spent it’s time and efforts in other areas and towards other objectives. Now it must face the fact that it’s military has some glaring holes in it’s offensive capabilities. And it is reluctantly admitting to this situation.
Up until just a few months ago the entire American military and the funding and development mechanism for it just ridiculed the idea that either China or Russia had any technology that could match that of the United States.
Their argument has been that America is superior in every way, that the American military is battle tested, and fully funded and staffed with fine well-trained American soldiers, and that the technologies involved are more than a match for anything that could possibly be fielded by either China or Russia.
America is a nation of Rambo’s they argue. America has a warrior culture. America is a policeman for freedom™ and democracy™.
Not true.
However, when you meet a moron, you just smile, and continue on your way…
Is it okay to criticize CCP on WeChat? I’m going to China next year and worried about if this will affect my study abroad.
As a foreigner living in China, I have a few thoughts:
First, welcome to China! You’ll probably hear that a lot, mostly from Chinese people. I’ve lived here for over seven years, and I still get it. It can be annoying, but the vast majority of Chinese people love their country and are both happy and proud to share it with you.
Second, don’t confuse the CPC (that’s the correct abbreviation for the Communist Party of China) and the government of the PRC (the People’s Republic of China). They are not one-and-the-same. The vast majority of CPC members joined in order to make life better for other people. A friend of mine, who lives in the city that I used to live in, is a CPC member, and he volunteered to help with health checks at the highway entrance into the city (that is not his job, mind you. He volunteers. His actual job is that he runs a little shop that sells alcohol and cigars). Along similar lines, there was a viral video that came out about a year ago of a group of people driving in the countryside of Xinjiang. Their car went off the road, and a herdsman and his friend helped push them back onto the road. When the people offered him some money, he refused. His Mandarin Chinese wasn’t very good, so to show why he refused, he opened his coat to reveal the CPC pin on his lapel, and everyone understood completely:
https://youtu.be/bBinzzWQ6hs
Third, there’s not much to complain about in China. Sure, it’s annoying when there are new blockages for VPNs, but it doesn’t usually last all that long, and it can be annoying to do nucleic acid tests for Covid so often (as of writing this, my city does them every other day. Just about a week ago, we were doing them every single day, but there was an outbreak a couple of weeks ago – thankfully, due to these measures, the outbreak resulted in only about 10 cases in a city of over one million people). Outside of those, and the annual health check required for the visa renewal (no food or drink beforehand means that I have to wake up early and can’t drink any coffee), there’s really nothing that I can think of to complain about.
Fourth, so long as you don’t break the law by doing something stupid, like taking drugs, there won’t be any problems.
The Ugly American
When will the West respect China?
Within ten years. I went on a visit to China last year. Most of what we are fed in the press about China in the UK is negative: human rights, Tienanmen Square, blocked Google, smog, Hong Kong democracy, dictatorship etc.
I arrived in Kunming, Yunnan expecting to find the sense of oppression I had experienced in eastern Europe in the late 1970s and to be struggling with pollution etc.
I walked around with my mouth open! No pollution, clean streets, no beggars/homeless, wide variety of independent shops and food outlets, moderate traffic, !!electric motorcycles!!, well run places to stay, delicious food (so much better than UK ‘Chinese takeaway), very little sexualisation of women (either clothes or depiction in adverts), everyone with a 15cm smartphone, great internet access, people hiring bikes with an app on their phone.
Where shall I stop?
Once the truth starts to filter to the general population, respect will grow.
Of course there will be resistance. We in the West cannot bear the idea that our version of ‘democracy’ is not the best for everyone. It will take us a while to understand the role of the Chinese Communist party and the benefits of a system like that.
Addition 1: We are told that China suppresses religion – but in Dali there is a three-sources temple in the town – Confucius, Tao, Buddha – and the Confucius Centre in the centre has been completely rebuilt in the last few years. On the outskirts there is the Guan Yin temple. Ordinary folk out shopping come in all the time to say a prayer etc. I sensed their genuinely spiritual experience.
Addition 2: I also realised why China was advancing so fast – they work steadily! Wherever I looked people seemed to be just ‘getting on with it’. I sensed this was a deep habit, centuries old in the population.
Addition 3: Dancing in the park! Amazing. Just a group of people with a music-system doing musical Tai Chi. Another small group playing instruments in the park. So unselfconscious. Just enjoying themselves.
Update 2020: My prediction is probably now wrong. A dark cloud has descended over China/West relations. There is a growing China-phobia in the UK. People with no knowledge of China, who, when I wrote this post 2 years ago, would have little to say about China, now are experts making cold-war-like statements.
I responded recently to a very good article by a Harvard professor warning against a new cold-war with China. I was immediately vilified by comment writers (as was the author), accusing me of being a Chinese troll, or perhaps the author of the article. Very disturbing.
The main driving force for this is that western commentators blame China for their COVID19 deaths because of the delay in reporting in Dec 2019. The very slow and inadequate responses by the UK, US and now Brazil and all the consequent deaths are blamed in China, not on the inadequate response.
China is not perfect, but the inaccurate picture I reported 2 years ago has been transformed into something more dangerous.
Tortang Giniling (Filipino Beef Omelette)
Tortang Giniling is a Filipino ground beef omelette. It is unique in that the omelette is made more like a fritter and is filled with lots of beef and veggies. It is a delicious recipe for breakfast or for a light lunch or snack.
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Filipino Ground Beef Omelette
Tortang giniling is a simple Filipino omelette made with ground beef.
This omelette isn’t like your traditional omelette where the egg batter is cooked and folded around cheese and other fillings.
Rather, this Filipino omelette is made in more of a fritter style. The beef and vegetables for the filling are first sauteed and then transfered to a bowl. Once they have cooled slightly, they are mixed with beaten eggs.
This batter is then ladled onto your hot skillet in the same way you would ladle pancake batter onto a hot griddle, making small, roughly 3 inch, round omelette fritters.
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What does “Tortang Giniling” mean?
“Torta” is a word that you find variations of used in many cultures (Spanish, for example, and a variant in the French “tarte”). It is used to describe a number of dishes, but it often refers to a flat cake, of sorts.
In the Philippines, a “torta” refers to an egg fritter, or omelette.
“Giniling” is the Tagalog (one of the major languages spoken in the Philipines) word for “ground meat”.
Tips for making Tortang Giniling
With all the vegetables and meat right inside this omelette, flipping it can get tricky if you use too large of a pan and let your batter spread over too large of an area.
That’s why we like to make these into pancake-sized omelettes (or fritters). (Roughly 3 inches in diameter.) This will make flipping these ground beef omelettes easier.
To those of us in the States, this sounds like a bit of an unusual breakfast, but if you like savory breakfast dishes, this is definitely worth a try.
If savory breakfasts aren’t your thing, this makes for a great lunch or snack as well!
Ingredients
1 Tbsp oil
1 onion, diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 tomato, diced
1 lb ground beef
½ tsp salt
¼ tsp ground black pepper
½ c peas
5 eggs, lightly beaten
Vegetable or canola oil, for frying
Instructions
In a large skillet, heat oil over medium high heat. Add the onion and garlic and saute until softened, 2-3 minutes.
Add the diced tomato to the skillet and continue cooking for 5 minutes, letting the tomatoes release their juices.
Add the ground beef to the vegetables and saute until browned, 5-7 minutes.
Add the salt and pepper. Mix well. Taste the mixture and adjust the salt and pepper as desired.
Transfer the mixture to a medium bowl. Add the peas and let the mixture cool slightly.
Once the meat mixture has cooled, add the beaten eggs and mix well.
Wipe out the skillet you used for the meat and heat a little oil in it, over medium heat. Reduce the heat to medium low and spoon ¼ c of the egg and beef mixture into the skillet, flatten the mixture and shape it roughly into a 3-4 inch patty. (Depending on the size of your skillet, you may be able to cook more than one omelette at a time. Just be careful not to overcrowd the pan, or flipping the omelettes will be difficult.)
Cook the omelette for 2-3 minutes on the first side. (If your omelettes cook faster than this, your pan is too hot. Reduce the heat for the next batch.)
Flip the omelette and cook for an additional 1-2 minutes on the second side, until golden.
Transfer the omelette to a paper towel-lined plate and continue with the remaining batter. (Keeping the plate with the cooked omelettes in a very low oven will keep them warm until all are made.)
Black Hawk Down: Hostile streets
Military capabilities
The following article is part of a series of articles that argues that no military technology is going to negate a MAD-level nuclear response to American military action. MAD is an anachronism for Mutually Assured Destruction. No matter what the American leadership might want to believe, there is no such things as “reasonable” or “safe” nuclear weapons.
Use of any type of weapons against a major power will result in a very dangerous response.
Mutually assured destruction is a doctrine of military strategy and national security policy in which a full-scale use of nuclear weapons by two or more opposing sides would cause the complete annihilation of both the attacker and the defender.
It is based on the theory of deterrence, which holds that the threat of using strong weapons against the enemy prevents the enemy's use of those same weapons. The strategy is a form of Nash equilibrium in which, once armed, neither side has any incentive to initiate a conflict or to disarm.
-Wikipedia
And this needs to be said.
For President Joe Biden and the entire neocon cabal strongly believe that they can unleash military action against either, or both Russia and China and NOT trigger a MAD level response.
"Does being “ahead” have any practical meaning, however? Is there a genuine contest for advantage that translates into their gaining an upper hand in some sense or other? The clear answer is “NO!” It is strategically meaningless. Why? Because it in no way alters the logic of Mutual Assured Destruction."
This article is titled “Russia’s Lead Over the US in Hypersonic Weapons Gives them No Practical Strategic Advantage in Geopolitics” by Michael Brenner and found on Zerohedge. It was written Tue, Jan 21, 2020 and republished with very little editing. You can read the Comments on the site directly if that is your desire. I normally do not post “doom porn” from Zerohedge, but it does have good and meaty articles from time to time.
This is one of them. Enjoy.
Russia’s Lead Over the US in Hypersonic Weapons Gives them No Practical Strategic Advantage in Geopolitics
Deployment of Russia’s hyper-sonic missiles is causing heartburn in the West. Media headline the news as a dramatic breakthrough on a par with the first Sputnik. “Experts” are rushed into play like those self-styled pundits pronouncing when the initial exit polls appear on Election Day. Pentagon officials assure us that the United States is at the top of the nuclear game and able to respond to (if not exactly match) anything that the Russians can put out there.
Ninety eight percent of all this instant reaction is “fog-horning.” It simply signals that something big and important is out there even though we don’t have a clear picture of its actual shape or dimensions — or its significance. That’s normal. What counts is moving swiftly to the “searchlight” stage of close observation and hard thinking. Whether analysts, official or otherwise, get there is problematic. We’re out of practice when it comes to serious strategic appraisal. After all, we’ve been flailing about in Afghanistan for almost two decades with no realistic aim or evaluation of the chances of achieving it by whatever means at whatever cost. The disorientation on Syria is even greater. There, we haven’t as much as figured out who are the “bad guys” and who are the “good guys” — except for ISIS.
If you can’t differentiate friend from foe for want of rigorous strategic analysis, your actions are predictably erratic — little more than the expression of mental fibrillations. The same can be said for the rest of the Missile East.
The Washington consensus is sure about one thing: Russia is a mortal enemy. We sanction the Russians, we denounce the Russia, we coerce our European partners into ostracizing them, we conjure frightful images of Vladimir Putin while ignoring just about everything he says (as if they were Hitlerian rants). Still, no one seems able to provide a crisp formulation of what the Russian threat is — other than getting in our way in places where we demand to have full sway: Syria, Libya, Iran, Turkey, Ukraine, Georgia.
Of course, we also accuse them of working relentlessly to undermine American democracy. Yet, that remains debatable as does everything that bears the dubious label of “Washington consensus.” Anyway, whatever minuscule role the Kremlin might have in the accelerated unravelling of the American Republic, it barely registers amidst the hammer blows struck by the craziness of President Donald Trump, his enablers and a largely compromised, abject resistance.
Cold War Dread
Understandably, it is not that easy to overlook nuclear weapons. It wasn’t that long ago that many of us were tormented by the dread of a prospective Armageddon, when the Cold War carried manifest dangers, when the air was thick with hostility and menace.
In October 1962, Americans were terrified over Soviet missiles in Cuba, as this newspaper map showing distances between Cuba and major North American cities demonstrates.
Those acute fears gradually faded over the 40 years of the nuclearized Cold War. We came to live with the Bomb — if not to love it. Subsequently, concerns shifted to the risks associated with nuclear weapons proliferation among less stable states in more fraught places.
The reasons for this sedating were three-fold.
Above all was the “balance of terror.’’ Leaders among the major nuclear powers absorbed the fundamental truth that not only was the notion of “winning” a nuclear war an oxymoron — but also that any use of nuclear weapons inexorably would escalate into acts of collective suicide. The survivors would envy the dead — as Nikita Khrushchev one said. That conviction became formalized in the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction.
Second, it was reified by a number of treaties and understandings: START I,II (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty), the Anti-BallisticMissile Treaty (ABMT), the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, introduction of the Hot Line between the White House and the Kremlin, and the several arms reduction accords signed when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in Moscow. Their collective purpose was to ensure that no conceivable advantage might be gained that would jeopardize — however slightly — the balance of nuclear power, i.e. the assurance that any resort to nuclear weapons was tantamount to the death of civilization.
Finally, a number of technological developments reinforced Mutual Assured Destruction: the deployment of submarine launched ballistic missiles — SLBM (immune to location and possible destruction in a “first strike” — thereby, guaranteeing a retaliatory capability); improved controls that reduced the chances of an “accidental” or miscalculated launch; and the moratorium in placing ballistic missile defenses around major population centers that could have the effect of removing their “hostage” status.
The last has turned out to be a largely redundant measure since the strenuous efforts of the Pentagon/NASA as well as their Soviet/Russian counterparts to devise a workable BMD all have come up well short of producing anything meaningful.
U.S. President Gerald Ford and Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev sign joint communiqué to limit strategic offensive arms, 1974. (Wikimedia)
Unfortunately, two policy developments have awakened the nuclear issue from its somnambulant state. One is Washington’s abandonment of arms control treaties that were important parts of the nuclear stability package. George Bush removed us from the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty(while observing its provisions), and effectively voided restrictions on ballistic missile defense in the vain hope of countering remote threats from prospective nuclear powers (Iran), bolstering the sense of security of some East Europeans (a non-solution to a non-problem)and – frankly – to get under the Russians’ skin. Barack Obama had neither the conviction nor political courage to reverse those retrograde moves.
Under Donald Trump, there has been a comprehensive plan to break free of all manner of restrictive commitments — military, diplomatic or economic. Deployment of regional BMD systems directed at Russian, Chinese and North Korean forces has been expanded despite their demonstrated efficiencies (one version could not even protect Saudi oil complexes or U.S. air bases in Iraq from primitive Iranian missiles).
Modernization of Nuclear Arsenals
The other troubling development concerns the modernization of nuclear arsenals by both the United States and Russia. President Barack Obama committed us to a trillion-dollar program to refine and upgrade American warheads and delivery systems over the next 20 years. The strategic rationale is obscure.
The Russian hypersonic missile development is a parallel development. In a purely technical sense, they obviously are “ahead” of us. And that irritates the hell out of the American security establishment.
Does being “ahead” have any practical meaning, however? Is there a genuine contest for advantage that translates into their gaining an upper hand in some sense or other? The clear answer is “NO!” It is strategically meaningless. Why? Because it in no way alters the logic of Mutual Assured Destruction.
Theoretically, there are only two imaginable ways to do that. The most significant would be development/deployment of a massive, truly effective BMD system that shields population centers and other critical, high value sites from retaliatory attack. That has shown itself to be impossible – even if the initiator of an attack succeeded in reducing the other side’s retaliatory forces by some significant fraction.
A totally disarming first strike in principle could be the second method logically to qualify MAD. It cannot be done, though.Fortunately. The combination of SLBMs, cruise missiles, and increased warhead lethality makes the idea of a disarming first strike a pipe dream of military strategists disengaged from reality. Hypersonic weapons do not change that calculus.
Accuracies of MIRVed warheads were lowered to 100 feet many years ago.(CEP, or Circular Error Probability = 50 percent chance of landing within radius.) Reducing that to 20 feet, therefore, is pointless – the silo is destroyed either way unless its missile has been “launched on warning” (tripwire automaticity as ultimate assurance of retaliatory strike). Similarly for missile defense.
Then, there is the question of an incoming missile’s speed. Current ICBMs that may give 18 minutes warning do not permit any defensive measures to be taken. If they arrive on target within six minutes, there is no additional benefit to the attacker. Today’s missiles that follow a straight trajectory cannot be intercepted — with or without their distracting decoys.
The fact that “swerve” capable hypersonic missiles can mambo their way to the target adds nothing to their effectiveness. Anyone who tells you that the Russians gain a strategic advantage thereby is lying — either in order to extract larger sums for R & D from the Treasury or to accentuate irrational fears of Russia.
President Vladimir Put visiting an exhibit of advanced weapons before meeting with Russia’s Defence Ministry Board, December 2019. (The Kremlin)
Finally, no reasonably sane leader would risk national suicide for a 1 percent chance of getting away with a first strike and surviving retaliation. There is no stake worth even contemplating it. Indeed, that logic holds even were there an impossible 50 percent chance of pulling it off.
Today, the United States and Russia are not engaged in a life-or-death struggle for world domination or for ideological vindication. Ascribing anything like that notion to Vladimir Putin is simply a sign of mental derangement – ours, not his. The same holds for the super-power competition between the United States and China.
So, if this line of reasoning is compelling, why did Russia’s leaders bother with investment of great sums to produce hyper-sonic missiles? The answer is a matter of speculation. Doubtless, technological and bureaucratic momentum has much to do with it. These sorts of long-term programs take on a life of their own — just as they do in Washington. The is no more reason for the United States to squander a trillion dollars in refining our nuclear arsenal as two successive administrations have committed us to doing.
In Russia’s case, there likely is another factor at work. Historically, Moscow leaders have exaggerated American technical capabilities; they have something of an inferiority complex on this score despite their own remarkable accomplishments. It is particularly acute in the nuclear realm — most especially in regard to ballistic missile defense.
This goes back to Nixon’s proposed Safeguard system, followed two decades later by Reagan’s Star War’s plans. Neither of which in actuality had the potential to alter the strategic balance. This free-floating strategic anxiety should be placed in historical perspective. There is a touch of paranoia in the Russian strategic mind — engraved by the events of the 20th century.
Some of this sentiment is conveyed by Putin’s remarks in announcing the deployment of hypersonic missiles: “We’re used to being in the position of catching up. That no longer is the case. Russia is the only country that has hypersonic weapons.”
To some unknowable degree these neuralgic points in the Russian psyche have been stimulated by the aggressive American program to surround Russia with BMD systems.
“Might it just be conceivable that the United States could perfect them, make it work, and somehow jeopardize the credibility of our nuclear deterrent? Why are they expending so much money and effort? Why do those BMD sites make Poland and the Baltics feel more secure when they are in fact militarily useless and it makes no sense for us to attack them?”
Informed analysis suggests that the answer is negative to all these questions. The alternative explanation: U.S. leaders are inclined to do feckless things; they are strategically obtuse.
The broader lesson is that there is truth to the old adage: “Russia never is as strong as it seems; Russia is never as weak as it seems.” We wrote it off as a world power in the 1990s and never since made the proper adjustment. That perception may have contributed to the glaring failure of the United States’ intelligence community in missing Russia’s remarkable break-throughs in weaponry.
It’s intelligence that counts more than Intelligence.
What are the implications of China’s Communist Party choosing Xi Jinping as its leader for life?
He may be elected for another 5 year term. He is not “chosen for life”.
He is the Titular head of the Country. He is the spokesperson and the Chinese People’s representative.
As Commander-in-chief of the army he is not allowed declare war.
Being party General Secretary, he is a very powerful figure.
He does not RULE. As Chairman his role is consultative and decisions are taken by the Council, approved (or sometimes overruled) by the Chinese People’s Congress.
I think a person should think and maybe study basic facts before formulating a question.
By the way FYI the CPC has about 2430 members, 847 of whom belong to 7 parties other than the CCP. Among the members of the Council there are at least 2 Senior Ministers who belong to parties other than the CCP.
As an aside, purely my own assessment, I get the impression that the main priority of each of the members of the Chinese People’s Congress is the welfare of the Chinese People.
Super 6-1 Shot Down
Quick and Easy Calzones Recipe
Quick and Easy Calzones filled with pepperoni, mozzarella cheese and marinara then topped with Italian seasoning and parmesan. Not only are these calzones so easy to make, but they taste absolutely amazing!
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Quick and easy calzones is one of our family favorite, picky eater approved recipes that we can make fast on those busy weeknights. If you love a good homemade pizza recipe, then you are going to love this one!
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This recipe is great because each person can pick their own toppings (if you want) and then there is no fighting about what is on the pizza! Or, you can make them all the same and serve it as an appetizer.
We have done it both ways, and either way is amazing. So, make sure you bookmark, pin, or save this recipe so you can find it quickly when you need an easy dinner recipe to make.
Ingredients Needed For Our Quick and Easy Calzones Recipe:
Refrigerated pizza crust (your favorite kind)
Marinara sauce
Shredded mozzarella cheese
Pepperoni slices
Melted butter
Italian seasoning
Grated Parmesan cheese
How To Make Our Quick and Easy Calzones Recipe:
Begin by preheating your oven to 400 degrees fahrenheit.
Then, spray a baking sheet with nonstick cooking spray and set it aside.
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Now, get out your refrigerated pizza crust and cut it into 6 equal squares (as best as you can).
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Next, in the middle of each of the squares place about 2 tablespoons (or more if you like extra sauce), a little less than ¼ cup of shredded mozzarella cheese, and 4 pepperoni slices.
Take one corner of the square and fold it over to another corner to form a triangle.
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Once you have formed a triangle around the calzone fillings, use a fork and go around the open sides and press it into the dough to seal it closed.
Next, place each of the filled calzones on the prepared baking sheet.
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Using the melted butter, get out a pastry brush and spread some of the melted butter on top of each of the calzones and then sprinkle some of the italian seasoning and grated parmesan cheese on top.
Then place the baking sheet in the oven for 10-12 minutes and bake them until the tops are golden brown.
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When they are done, take them out and serve them hot with warm pizza sauce for dipping!
Make the Dough Yourself
If you do not want to use refrigerated dough, you don’t have to! You can make homemade dough and use it in place of the refrigerated dough.
The world is filled with talk. Much of the talk on the American conservative media discusses prep for a nuclear war between Russia and the United States. Nah, this is not just trivial fear-mongering. There’s some real and actual concern and issues involved.
Do you think that I am kidding? Well, then you listen yourself. Nuclear war. American leadership. SHTF advice. All good stuff. I have the radio mp3 listed here. It doesn’t mean that they are right or wrong. But that people are openly talking about these things. It reminds me of a Steven King movie.
They are actually saying things that I have long recognized as being true. Both Russia and China are terribly underestimated by the American civilian and military leadership.
But Jeeze Louise! The world has many other things going on. My various business activities are flourishing in trade with the United States and Europe. Why? There seems to be a massive disconnect between business, between politics, between the Western leadership, and the Western mainstream media.
Why is there this disconnect?
Can all these concerns and beliefs coexist? Or, are the various groups all living within their own individual echo chambers? Chambers that believe that their reality is the only reality that exists? Or, perhaps is everything all lies where nothing is true, and us “little guys” are all stuck in the middle between large, enormous, rich criminal gangs that wear the mantle of government?
Here, we will go over various subjects regarding the world. There’s a lot of stuff on Geo-Political stuff, China, and Ukraine. As well as stuff about humanity. I hope that you all enjoy it.
Pepe Escobar: Say hello to Russian gold and Chinese petroyuan
Pepe Escobar
March 29, 2022
The Russia-led Eurasia Economic Union and China just agreed to design the mechanism for an independent financial and monetary system that would bypass dollar transactions.
It was a long time coming, but finally some key lineaments of the multipolar world’s new foundations are being revealed.
After a recent video conference meeting, the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) and China agreed to design the mechanism for an independent international monetary and financial system. The EAEU consists of Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Belarus and Armenia, is establishing free trade deals with other Eurasian nations, and is progressively interconnecting with the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
For all practical purposes, the idea comes from Sergei Glazyev, Russia’s foremost independent economist, a former adviser to President Vladimir Putin and the Minister for Integration and Macroeconomics of the Eurasia Economic Commission, the regulatory body of the EAEU.
Glazyev’s central role in devising the new Russian and Eurasian economic/financial strategy has been examined here. He saw the western financial squeeze on Moscow coming light-years before others.
Quite diplomatically, Glazyev attributed the fruition of the idea to “the common challenges and risks associated with the global economic slowdown and restrictive measures against the EAEU states and China.”
Translation: as China is as much a Eurasian power as Russia, and they need to coordinate their strategies to bypass the US unipolar system.
The Eurasian system will be based on “a new international currency,” most probably with the yuan as reference, calculated as an index of the national currencies of the participating countries, as well as commodity prices. The first draft will be already discussed by the end of the month.
The Eurasian system is bound to become a serious alternative to the US dollar, as the EAEU may attract not only nations that have joined BRI (Kazakhstan, for instance, is a member of both) but also the leading players in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) as well as ASEAN. West Asian actors – Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon – will be inevitably interested.
In the medium to long term, the spread of the new system will translate into the weakening of the Bretton Woods system, which even serious US market players/strategists admit is rotten from the inside. The US dollar and imperial hegemony are facing stormy seas.
Show me that frozen gold
Meanwhile, Russia has a serious problem to tackle. This past weekend, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov confirmed that half of Russia’s gold and foreign reserves have been frozen by unilateral sanctions. It boggles the mind that Russian financial experts have placed a great deal of the nation’s wealth where it can be easily accessed – and even confiscated – by the ‘Empire of Lies’ (copyright Putin).
At first, it was not exactly clear what Siluanov had meant. How could the Central Bank’s Elvira Nabiulina and her team let half of foreign reserves and even gold be stored in Western banks and/or vaults? Or is this some sneaky diversionist tactic by Siluanov?
Hudson was quite frank: “When I first heard the word ‘frozen,’ I thought that this meant that Russia was not going to expend its precious gold reserves on supporting the ruble, trying to fight against a Soros-style raid from the West. But now the word ‘frozen’ seems to have meant that Russia had sent it abroad, outside of its control.”
Interesting too? Lend Self-Destructive U.S. a Hand
“It looks like at least as of last June, all Russian gold was kept in Russia itself. At the same time, it would have been natural to have kept securities and bank deposits in the United States and Britain, because that is where most intervention in world foreign exchange markets occurs,” Hudson added.
Essentially, it’s all still up in the air: “My first reading assumed that Russia must be doing something smart. If it was smart to move gold abroad, perhaps it was doing what other central banks do: ‘lend” it to speculators, for an interest payment or fee. Until Russia tells the world where its gold was put, and why, we can’t fathom it. Was it in the Bank of England – even after England confiscated Venezuela’s gold? Was it in the New York Fed – even after the Fed confiscated Afghanistan’s reserves?”
So far, there has been no extra clarification either from Siluanov or Nabiulina. Scenarios swirl about a string of deportations to northern Siberia for national treason. Hudson adds important elements to the puzzle:
“If [the reserves] are frozen, why is Russia paying interest on its foreign debt falling due? It can direct the “freezer’ to pay, to shift the blame for default. It can talk about Chase Manhattan’s freezing of Iran’s bank account from which Iran sought to pay interest on its dollar-denominated debt. It can insist that any payments by NATO countries be settled in advance by physical gold. Or it can land paratroopers on the Bank of England, and recover gold – sort of like Goldfinger at Fort Knox. What is important is for Russia to explain what happened and how it was attacked, as a warning to other countries.”
As a clincher, Hudson could not but wink at Glazyev: “Maybe Russia should appoint a non-pro-westerner at the Central Bank.”
The petrodollar game-changer
It’s tempting to read into Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s words at the diplomatic summit in Antalya last Thursday as a veiled admission that Moscow may not have been totally prepared for the heavy financial artillery deployed by the Americans:
“We will solve the problem – and the solution will be to no longer depend on our western partners, be it governments or companies that are acting as tools of western political aggression against Russia instead of pursuing the interests of their businesses. We will make sure that we never again find ourselves in a similar situation and that neither some Uncle Sam nor anybody else can make decisions aimed at destroying our economy. We will find a way to eliminate this dependence. We should have done it long ago.”
So, ‘long ago’ starts now. And one of its planks will be the Eurasian financial system. Meanwhile, ‘the market’ (as in, the American speculative casino) has ‘judged’ (according to its self-made oracles) that Russian gold reserves – the ones that stayed in Russia – cannot support the ruble.
That’s not the issue – on several levels. The self-made oracles, brainwashed for decades, believe that the Hegemon dictates what ‘the market’ does. That’s mere propaganda. The crucial fact is that in the new, emerging paradigm, NATO nations amount to at best 15 percent of the world’s population. Russia won’t be forced to practice autarky because it does not need to: most of the world – as we’ve seen represented in the hefty non-sanctioning nation list – is ready to do business with Moscow.
Iran has shown how to do it. Persian Gulf traders confirmed to The Cradle that Iran is selling no less than 3 million barrels of oil a day even now, with no signed JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action agreement, currently under negotiation in Vienna). Oil is re-labeled, smuggled, and transferred from tankers in the dead of night.
Interesting too? The imperative for nuclear disarmament – Is Putin the puppet-master?
Another example: the Indian Oil Corporation (IOC), a huge refiner, just bought 3 million barrels of Russian Urals from trader Vitol for delivery in May. There are no sanctions on Russian oil – at least not yet.
Washington’s reductionist, Mackinderesque plan is to manipulate Ukraine as a disposable pawn to go scorched-earth on Russia, and then hit China. Essentially, divide-and-rule to smash not only one but two peer competitors in Eurasia who are advancing in lockstep as comprehensive strategic partners.
As Hudson sees it: “China is in the cross-hairs, and what happened to Russia is a dress rehearsal for what can happen to China. Best to break sooner than later under these conditions. Because the leverage is highest now.”
All the blather about “crashing Russian markets,” ending foreign investment, destroying the ruble, a “full trade embargo,” expelling Russia from “the community of nations,” and so forth – that’s for the zombified galleries. Iran has been dealing with the same thing for four decades, and survived.
Historical poetic justice, as Lavrov intimated, now happens to rule that Russia and Iran are about to sign a very important agreement, which may likely be an equivalent of the Iran-China strategic partnership. The three main nodes of Eurasia integration are perfecting their interaction on the go, and sooner rather than later, may be utilizing a new, independent monetary and financial system.
But there’s more poetic justice on the way, revolving around the ultimate game-changer. And it came much sooner than we all thought.
Saudi Arabia is considering accepting Chinese yuan – and not US dollars – for selling oil to China. Translation: Beijing told Riyadh this is the new groove. The end of the petrodollar is at hand – and that is the certified nail in the coffin of the indispensable Hegemon.
Meanwhile, there’s a mystery to be solved: where is that frozen Russian gold?
I love Malcolm Roberts’ closing statement in front of the Aussie Senate
The truth is the Select Committee on COVID-19 has been running a protection racket for the pharmaceutical industry, and today’s vote proves it. This unprecedented betrayal of the Australian people must be referred immediately to a royal commission.
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To the Prime Minister, the health minister, the federal health department and all those in the Senate and the House of Representatives—all of you who have perpetrated this crime—I direct one question: how the hell do you expect to get away with it? We’re not going to let you get away with it. We won’t let you get away with it. We are coming for you. We have the stamina to hound you down and we damn well will.
“Enjoying the new lamp I bought for my dining room this evening”
Imagine you make a discovery of a nice lamp at a thrift store and don’t think much about it, but then when you take it home and plug it in…
Light show.
MM talks about where he lives in China
This is one of my first videos that I uploaded on to you-tube. It should stream in nicely. Obviously, I’m not an expert. But, I have been squeezing in some video editing tutorials, and you should see an gradual improvment in the over all production quality of the videos as time goes by.
Right now, You-Tube is being funny. They refuse to allow me to say that I am in China, and they have set the video quality equal to “dog shit” setting.
Quality set at “Dog Shit”.
Here, is the video on You-Tube. You be the judge…
Not to worry, here is the actual raw video 239MB as it should be; here. In all of it’s beautiful glory. Big difference, eh?
Austria, Hungary Say No Substitute to Russian Gas as Germany’s BASF Warns of Worst Crisis Since WWII
Officials in Austria and Hungary say there’s no alternative to Russian natural gas, with Budapest stressing that more costly American-sourced LNG is not a realistic substitute.
“Replacing cheap Russian gas with expensive American gas” is an “absurd” proposal, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban told Kossuth Radio on Friday.
“It’s not that we’ll put on an extra sweater in the evening and turn the heating down a little or paying a few extra forints for gas. The fact is that if energy supplies don’t come from Russia there won’t be any energy in Hungary,” Orban stressed.
The politician noted that 85 percent of Hungary’s gas supplies and 64 percent of the country’s oil comes from Russia, and that geography puts limits on Budapest’s ability to diversify its sources of energy. Austrian energy giant OMV CEO Alfred Stern echoed Orban’s concerns, saying that there was no LNG alternative for Austria.
“Giving up on Russian gas is impossible unless we are willing to live with the massive consequences of such a step. Some countries can do that. It cannot be implemented by Austria this year…As a landlocked country, we don’t have access to LNG. Any diversification would mean investing in more expensive infrastructure to get access to more expensive gas. (emphasis added)
‘Worst Crisis Since WWII’
Austria’s neighbour Germany, whose leaders have so far publicly refused to be “blackmailed” into paying for Russia’s gas in rubles, while privately inquiring about how such ruble payments could be made, is facing a similar dilemma, with Berlin activating an emergency plan to cope with supply disruptions and preparing to institute gas rationing. Russian deliveries made up 55 percent of the European industrial giant’s gas consumption in 2021, with Germany’s underground gas storage tanks down to 25 percent of capacity this week.
Martin Brudermuller, CEO of German chemicals giant BASF, has characterised Berlin’s plans to boycott ruble-priced gas as a “highly irresponsible experiment,” and stressed that Germans underestimate the true risks of such a step.[.]
Looks delicious. It’s a home-made dish; a take on the Subway meatball sub.
Mama Mias Meatball Bake
Thanks to a few shortcuts, you can have Mama Mia’s Meatball Bake on the table in no time. This is an easy dinner recipe that the whole family will love!
What You’ll Need
1 (12- to 16-ounce) frozen garlic bread
1 cup ricotta cheese
2 tablespoons Parmesan cheese
1 (32-ounce) bag frozen meatballs, thawed, cut in half
1 cup spaghetti sauce
10 slices mozzarella cheese
What to Do
Preheat oven to 450 degrees F.
Place garlic bread open face on baking sheet and bake 10 minutes. Remove from oven and reduce heat to 350 degrees.
In a small bowl, combine ricotta cheese and Parmesan cheese and evenly spread on garlic bread. Place meatballs on top of cheese and evenly spoon spaghetti sauce over meatballs.
Bake 15 to 20 minutes, or until meatballs are heated through. Top with mozzarella cheese and continue baking 3 to 5 more minutes, or until cheese melts.
Caitlin Johnstone: The Target is China
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The Pentagon has produced its latest National Defense Strategy (NDS), a report made every four years to provide the public and the government with a broad overview of the U.S. war machine’s planning, posturing, developments and areas of focus.
You might assume with all the aggressive brinkmanship between Moscow and the U.S. power alliance this year that Russia would feature as Enemy No. 1 in the 2022 NDS, but you would be assuming incorrectly. The U.S. “Defense” Department reserves that slot for the same nation that’s occupied it for many years now: China.
“The full NDS is still classified, but the Pentagon released a fact sheet on the document that says it “will act urgently to sustain and strengthen deterrence, with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as our most consequential strategic competitor and the pacing challenge for the Department.”The fact sheet outlines four priorities for the Pentagon:-Defending the homeland, paced to the growing multi-domain threat posed by the PRC-Deterring strategic attacks against the United States, Allies, and partners-Deterring aggression, while being prepared to prevail in conflict when necessary, prioritizing the PRC challenge in the Indo-Pacific, then the Russia challenge in Europe-Building a resilient Joint Force and defense ecosystem”
“The Pentagon says that while China is the focus, Russia poses ‘acute threats’ because of its invasion of Ukraine,” DeCamp writes, showing the empire’s view of Moscow as a second-tier enemy.
Ahead of a meeting with China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has made some comments which clearly illustrate the U.S.-centralized empire’s actual problem with Moscow.
“We, together with you, and with our sympathisers will move towards a multipolar, just, democratic world order,” Lavrov said to the Chinese government on Wednesday.
And that right there, ladies and gentlemen, is the real reason we’ve been hearing so much hysterical shrieking about Russia these last five or six years.
It’s never been about Russian hackers. Nor about a Kremlin pee tape. Nor about Trump Tower. Nor about GRU bounties in Afghanistan. Nor about Manafort, Flynn, Bannon, Papadopoulos or any other Russiagate Surname of the Week. It’s not even actually about Ukraine. Those have all been narrative-shaping constructs manipulated by the U.S. intelligence cartel to manufacture support for a final showdown against Russia and China to prevent the emergence of a multipolar world.
The U.S. government has had a policy in place since the fall of the Soviet Union to prevent the rise of any powers which could challenge its imperial agendas for the world.
During the (first) Cold War the strategy promoted by empire managers like Henry Kissinger was to court China out of necessity to pull it away from the U.S.S.R., which was when we saw business ties between China and the U.S. lead to immense profits for certain individuals in both nations and the influx of wealth which now has China on track to surpass the U.S. as an economic superpower.
Once the U.S.S.R. ended, so too did the need to remain on friendly terms with China, and subsequent decades saw a sharp pivot into a much more adversarial relationship with Beijing.
Speaking at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum, Hillary Clinton admits there was an expectation in Washington Russia would have no choice but to become the West's junior partner due to the fear China could take over the Russian Far East. /1https://t.co/pJQeF0eCxf— Artyom Lukin (@ArtyomLukin) November 20, 2021
In what history may one day view as the U.S. empire’s greatest strategic blunder, empire managers forecasted [1] the acquisition of post-soviet Russia as an imperial lackey state which could be weaponized against [2] the new Enemy No. 1 in China.
Instead, the exact opposite happened.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the Bloomberg New Economy Forum last year that she’d “heard for years that Russia would become more willing to move toward the west, more willing to engage in a positive way with Europe, the U.K., the U.S., because of problems on its border, because of the rise of China.” But that’s not what occurred.
“We haven’t seen that,” Clinton said. “Instead what we’ve seen is a concerted effort by Putin maybe to hug China more.”
The empire’s expectation that Moscow would come groveling to the imperial throne on its own meant that no real effort was expended trying to establish goodwill and win over its friendship.
This error has led to the strategist’s ultimate nightmare of having to fight for global domination against two separate powers at once.
Because empire architects incorrectly predicted that Moscow would end up fearing Beijing more than it fears Washington, the tandem between China’s economic power and Russia’s military power that experts have been pointing to for years has only gotten more and more intimate.
And now here we are with Russian and Chinese officials openly discussing their plans to create a multipolar world while Chinese pundits crack jokes about the U.S. empire’s transparent ploys to turn Beijing against Moscow over the Ukraine invasion:
Can you help me fight your friend so that I can concentrate on fighting you later?— CGTN LIU Xin ?? (@LiuXininBeijing) March 19, 2022
On the empire’s grand chessboard, Russia is the queen piece, but China is the king.
Just as with chess it helps to take out your opponent’s strongest piece to more easily pursue checkmate, the U.S. empire would be well advised to try and topple China’s nuclear superpower friend and, as Consortium News Editor-in-Chief Joe Lauria recently put it, “ultimately restore a Yeltsin-like puppet to Moscow.”
Basically, all we’re looking at in the major international news stories of our time is the rise of a multipolar world crashing headlong into an empire which has espoused the belief that unipolar domination must be retained at all cost, even if it means flirting with the possibility of a very fast and radioactive third world war.
This is the Hail Mary pass of the U.S. hegemon; its last-ditch effort to secure control before forever losing any chance at it.
Many anti-imperialist pundits I read regularly seem quite confident that this effort will fail, while I personally think those forecasts may be a bit premature.
The way the chess pieces are moving it definitely does look like there’s a plan in place, and I don’t think they’d be orchestrating that plan if they didn’t believe it had a chance to succeed.
One thing that does seem clear is that the only way the empire has any chance of stopping the rise of China is by maneuvers that will be both highly disruptive and existentially dangerous for the entire world.
If you think things are crazy now, just you wait until the imperial crosshairs move to Beijing.
MM comments on the article
China does not play.
Even with the best made, and laid plans, guns, bombs, money aside, you are dealing with a cohesive society. Not a “thing”. The people of one society will be in conflict with another society. Which means that the American “freedom” society will be in conflict with the Chinese “merit & hard work” society.
Seriously?
Well, then. Take note.
There will not be a United States left when the dust settles.
China, Solomon Islands ink security cooperation, deriving from need to ‘quell Honiara riots’ in past year
China and the Solomon Islands signed a bilateral security cooperation framework agreement on Wednesday, the Chinese Foreign Ministry confirmed, which focuses on social security, safeguarding people’s lives and properties, human rights aid and other fields.
The cooperation does not target a third party, said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin at Thursday’s routine news conference.
"Pacific countries are a big stage of international cooperation, not some certain country's 'backyard' nor a venue for the competition of great powers."
The framework agreement on security cooperation between China and the Solomon Islands will strengthen cooperation between the two countries in natural disaster response, humanitarian assistance, development assistance, maintenance of social order and other fields, read a statement sent by the Chinese Embassy in the Solomon Islands to the Global Times on Thursday.
The two countries will jointly address both traditional and non-traditional security challenges, and inject positive energy and stability into the Solomon Islands and the regional security environment, the Embassy said.
Wang said that the cooperation between China and the Solomon Islands is based on equality and mutual benefit.
"This is the legitimate right of two sovereign states, which is in line with international law and international practice and does not allow external interference."
The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson pointed out that the parties concerned should look at China-Solomon Islands security cooperation objectively and rationally, and stop making irresponsible remarks.
"Attempts to provoke, obstruct and damage friendly relations between China and the island nations are unpopular and will not succeed,"
In order to seek a hegemonic position in the South Pacific region, Australia and its allies have been paying attention to and are worried about China’s normal security cooperation with the Solomon Islands and other island countries, Yang Honglian, a senior researcher at the Pacific Islands Research Center of Liaocheng University based in Fiji, told the Global Times.
"Australia believes that next, China must take the step to develop a military relationship with the island countries," Yang said. "So Australia is bound to strengthen its influence on the countries and increase the deployment and construction of military bases."
"Australia wants the Solomon Islands to just follow what it says. But after all, it's the US behind all this pushing,"
Frank Sade Bilaupaine, Policy Consultant at the Foreign Policy Advisory Secretariat at the Solomon Islands Government, told the Global Times.
He pointed out that the security cooperation between China and the Solomon Islands
"came about because of the riots in Honiara for the past years and Chinese business is always the victim.""So Solomon Islands government view it as since now we have official diplomatic relations, maybe China can assist in building the capacity of the Solomon Islands police," he said.
Earlier, after the social unrest in the Solomon Islands in November, China provided a number of shipments of police material assistance to the Solomon Islands upon request and sent a temporary police advisory team to help strengthen the country’s police force, which has proved to be effective and welcomed by the government and people of the country, Wang pointed out.
A Chinese businessman surnamed Lin in Honiara told the Global Times on Thursday that the Chinese community supports the cooperation on security very much. He said that the police in the island country lack professional training and their equipment is outdated.
"We hope their police force could improve after cooperation with China."
As President Reagan’s U.N. Ambassador and trusted adviser, Jeane Kirkpatrick was one of the intellectual architects of our victory in the Cold War.
But Kirkpatrick was not blinded by hubris when the Berlin Wall fell. In the fall of 1990, she wrote an article in The National Interest suggesting that the United States should become a “normal country” in the post-Cold War world.
She warned U.S. post-Cold War policymakers against pursuing a “mystical mission” that reached beyond the Constitutional requirement to protect the nation’s vital national security interests.
Specifically, she wrote that the United States should not devote itself to establishing democracy around the world.
She derided the notion that the conduct of U.S. foreign policy should be “the special province” of elites who too often do not pay its costs or bear its consequences.
Such elites, Kirkpatrick warned, often develop “disinterested globalist” attitudes couched in high-minded terms such as “internationalism” instead of focusing on concrete U.S. national security interests.The Obama administration pursued, and the Biden administration continues to pursue, a globalist agenda that prioritizes multilateral efforts against climate change; promotes nuclear disarmament; and seeks to transform our armed forces into a “woke” military concerned more with race, gender, and “white nationalism” than being prepared and equipped to win wars.
The Biden administration is staffed (as Obama’s was) with elites who appear to be committed to a “disinterested globalist” or “internationalist” agenda.
They seem to believe that they are as much “citizens of the world” as they are citizens of the United States.
The US succeeded when it offered a better option. Now it demands allegiance to a political agenda instead of achieving fundamental basic functions.
Food in Finland
To an American, such as myself, this is very funny.
In comments to the Senate budget committee on Wednesday, the Republican senator from Utah said that the spiraling costs of retirement programs had to be tackled to bring national debt under control. Romney raised the politically controversial idea of cutting benefits, but only for younger generations before they reach retirement age.
Democracy spent itself broke. These programs all rob tomorrow to pay for today. The Baby Boomers, as the largest generation, created obligations that future generations cannot pay, so now the system will crash. The politicians are just trying to keep it afloat with duct tape, bubble gum wads, and sticking plaster long enough for the Boomers to die out, since those Boomers still donate the most money to candidates.
Now for some real dancing.
Soul train. It’s what I grew up with. Look at all the funk!
United States geography and demographics are changing
Specifically, 468,426 people from the other 49 states and the District of Columbia have registered a driver’s license in one of the 254 Texas counties, as of January 2022. About 20% of these people are from California.
The exodus from high-tax states has begun. Texas hides its taxes as property taxes which pay for Supreme Court mandated public schooling, most of which has nothing to do with education and is mostly free daycare and free school meals.
A system so corrupt that the avenues of change are all blocked
Joe Mandrusiak, the Freedom Foundation’s Pennsylvania outreach director, attributed falling membership to union members not approving of how union leadership spends its funds.AFSCME 13 collected $26.4 million in dues, with $7.1 million going to the national organization. Mandrusiak highlighted some of the union’s political spending and other cost in the Freedom Foundation’s article:
$3.2 million on travel.
$373,720 on food/catering.
$2.7 million on partisan organizations.
$440,000 sent to 14 groups that call for defunding the police.
$25,000 to DEMOS (Defund the Police and Prisons) group.
$21,500 to Coalition of Human Need (to tear down the law enforcement apparatus).
$465,100 to Planned Parenthood.
Collective reward and punishment systems are Leftist by nature; conservatives prefer to reward the good, punish the bad, and ignore the unexceptional and irrelevant, allowing nature to sort that one out.
Conservatism is inherently Social Darwinist in nature, but also regular Darwinist, and does not believe in saving people from themselves, in part because if you do that, you accumulate a large pool of waste humans who are parasitic and predatory by nature.
If you join a union, you have joined the American Left. People are slowly figuring this out a century late which is par for the course with humanity.
Taiwan island ‘sponsors premeditated riots’ in Solomon Islands: nation’s media
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ByZhang Hui and Fan Lingzhi Published: Jan 04, 2022 06:50 PM
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Local media in the Solomon Islands recently reported that Taiwan island allegedly sponsored the “premeditated” anti-government riots in Honiara with the purpose of trying to pull down the government of the Solomon Islands and sabotage relations between China and the Solomon Islands.
“The acts of violence directed against the democratically-elected government of the Solomon Islands, the ethnic Chinese business community in Honiara and the majority of peace-loving Solomon islanders was at its very core a premeditated, cold-blooded and cowardly Taiwan-sponsored attempt to pull down the national government and undermine Solomon Islands-People’s Republic of China relations,” Solomon Star, a local English media, reported on December 17, quoting a writer given the name of George Belau.
The newspaper said the riots resulted in the destruction of the livelihoods of innocent people and trashing of the Solomon Islands’ economy, “clearly show Taiwan and its friends, the perpetrators of the riots are enemies of the entire Solomon Islands, not just of China.”
The writer listed a few examples, such as the “provocative raising of the Taiwan-flag” by premier of Malaita Daniel Suidani in Malaita on multiple occasions and publication of the “Auki communiqué (a blatantly anti-China document).”
The writer also said Suidani’s “unauthorized” detour to the Taiwan island in May 2021 was a “move to hatch plans together with Taiwan for future riots/civilian coup.”
“China is the only global power that has never invaded another country, never imposed its values and systems on others, demonstrated the ability to cooperate with sworn enemies, not create new ones. China is the only power that represents development and not destruction. So Malaita and Solomon Islands, who do you desire as a friend?” the writer asked.
“Certainly not Taiwan – most certainly not its agents and perpetrators of the riots. It is China for me and my people,” the writer said.
During the anti-government riots taking place in the Solomon Islands in November 2021, the Global Times conducted an investigative story about the riots and found that the riots truly reflected the scope of influence the US and the island of Taiwan have had over the region considering the island nation’s history as a “geopolitical pawn.”
Some Chinese nationals in the island nation reached by the Global Times also said that they highly suspect that Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party authorities’ influence is behind the riots.
During the days-long riots, Chinese nationals in the Solomon Islands suffered great losses with their shops smashed, burned and looted and their personal safety in jeopardy.
The Chinatown area suffered the heaviest damage with most shops looted and burned.The Prime Minister of the Solomon Islands, Manasseh Sogavare, told the press in November that the crisis “is influenced and encouraged by other powers.”
He further indicated that these forces influencing Malaita ̶ the main island of the nation ̶ are those that “don’t want ties with the People’s Republic of China,” according to the Sydney Morning Herald.
In answering a query that many demonstrators were from the pro-Taiwan Malaita province and that the establishment of diplomatic ties with China may be the reason behind the riots, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said at a routine press conference on November 26, 2021 that the establishment of diplomatic ties between China and Solomon Islands serves the fundamental and long-term interests of the Solomon Islands, and all attempts to disrupt the normal development of relations between the two sides are nothing but futile.
Chicken & Meatball Parmesan “Stoup”
When you make something special for family, loved ones, or friends, they remember it. And that makes the moment a true treasure.
NFRA Chicken Meatball Soup
If you love the Italian flavors of a meatball Parmesan, we’ve got the perfect way to change it up! This Chicken & Meatball Parmesan “Stoup” falls somewhere between a thick soup and a saucy stew. Topped with a delicious dinner roll that absorbs all the bold flavors, this recipe is perfect for sharing memories or making new ones. It’s also great if you just want a little bit of comfort on a cold night. Trust us, if you bring this savory recipe to the next get-together, it’ll be gone before you can blink!
What You’ll Need
3 cups beef broth
1 (24-ounce) jar spaghetti sauce
16 appetizer-sized frozen meatballs, thawed and cut in half
2 cups frozen, diced cooked chicken
1 1/2 cups frozen mixed vegetables
6 frozen par baked dinner yeast rolls
1/2 cup shredded mozzarella cheese
Grated Parmesan cheese for sprinkling
What to Do
In a soup pot over medium-high heat, combine broth, spaghetti sauce, meatballs, chicken and vegetables. Bring to a boil, reduce heat to low and simmer for 15 minutes.
Meanwhile, bake rolls according to package directions. Remove from oven and sprinkle each evenly with mozzarella cheese. Return to oven and bake 3 to 5 minutes, or until cheese is melted.
Ladle “stoup” into bowls, top each with a cheese-topped roll and sprinkle with parmesan cheese. Serve piping hot and get ready for lots of happy faces around the table.
How Empires Fall
How does an empire fall?
It rots and rusts in the core while the liars keep putting on fresh coats of paint every year. The collapse happens gradually over the years but no one notices. Then one day a dandelion wafts over and lands on the rotten heap, and the mighty empire collapses all at once.
It sometimes collapses with a whimper, not a bang. When the Western Roman Empire collapsed, no one even noticed. No one cared.
PM
Chinese military training
MM readers are probably tired of these training videos. But I believe that there is so much value in teaching disipline, military skills, and fundamentals at an early age. From grade one, everyone in China gets military training. Here is a third grade mortar crew. video 6MB
Learning about China by looking at the Chinese girls here
This is a great and a fun way to get a snapshot of another nation. You take a look at the society, and in this case, you look at the women and girls there. Of course, if all you do is watch American “mainstream media” you might think that Chinese girls are flat-chested, thin waifs that tremble becuse they are overwhelmed by the great mass of horny menfolk (due to the one child policy). Of course, it’s a massive lie, but heck. If you want to be stupid, stay that way. I jsut don’t give a fuck. Here’s what Chinese girls really look like. Video.
When I was attending university, we used to listen to this blues album. This is the full song “Turn to stone” from the album. I hope it takes you back, like it does for me. The song is a John Walsh song, but does in a real shearing blues solo. Amazing stuff. Worth about three minutes of your time.
Show empathy
The leadership in the United States, and most of the collective West are psychopaths. They are unable to feel empathy.
But you can, can’t you?
See and experience how others feel. That’s the key to being a Rufus. You are able to put yourself into the shoes of others. video 51MB
The Supreme Court Uses Twisted Logic to Protect US Agents Committing Torture
American Supreme Court. No outrage. They’re too busy exporting American Liberal Democratic bombs to Ukraine.
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The Supreme Court declared last week that Americans have no right to learn the grisly details of CIA torture because the CIA has never formally confessed its crimes. The verdict symbolizes how the rule of law has become little more than a form of legal mumbo-jumbo to shroud official crimes. Why should anyone expect justice from a Supreme Court that covers up torture?
When a person is in distress they are not thinking clearly. They need help. Be the help. Be that Rufus. You WILL be called upon. You will have this opportunity. Be the Rufus and make the world a better place! video 3.4MB
Remember to be the Rufus
It defines your sentience. When the going gets tough, the survivors are those that are members in a community. The idea that the lone-wolf can win and survive is just a Hollysood fantasy. History celarly tells us otherwise. Be that Rufus. video. 5MB
When profits are more important than society, environment, or people.
It’s the American way. Here’s the United States. This is Hawaii.
When profits are more important than society, environment, or people.
Be the Rufus
The alarm bells are ringing. Are you going to step up to the plate and participate in life, or are you going to still stand by and be a spectator? Here are some fine American Rufus. It makes me so proud! Be a Rufus. video 39MB
A fine example of good, solid Rufus behaviors.
You have to do kind, just and maningful things. Sure, it’s nice to watch heroes in action, but just smiling, buying a cup of coffee for a co-worker, inviditng a co-worker to your home for cards, or volunteering at an animal shelter are all fine Rufus actions. Make a difference. Now is that time. video Rufus Compilation 21MB
Everyone is unique.
And everyone has their own unique story. Like this woman who paid a man to have sex with her so that she would have a child. Don’t judge. Show understanding and compassion.
I had a baby with sperm donated from a man who advertised on craigslist. If my very religious family found out it wasn’t an “accident” I would be completely shunned and disowned.
I am a female who is ugly. NO, that’s not the secret. But.. I AM ugly because I have a facial deformity that I was born with. I’ve never had a long term partner and only had sex a few times in my life. My biological clock was ticking LOUDLY and I desperately wanted a child – there wasn’t going to be time enough to meet someone and my odds were none existent as a middle-aged, ugly female.
I own my home, have a career – but I didn’t want to lose all my savings to pay to have it done through a clinic and sperm donation, etc. It would have been at least $15K per try. My chances of adopting were also almost none existent as any women looking to adopt her baby out isn’t going to pick the ugly, middle aged lady to adopt their baby, plus is crazy freaking expensive. I wanted the money I had in savings, etc.. to toward raising the child.
So I turned to Craigslist and got it for free.
My child is a preschooler now and I’ve never been happier or more fulfilled! I pinch myself every day because my child is in my life and I feel so fucking lucky. Every day is a dream come true and I savor each and every moment. I try to be the best mom I can be in every way. Parenting really makes you take a long, hard look at yourself and how you show up in the world. I parent from my heart.
I regularly send pictures and updates to the generous and selfless man who trusted me on a hand shake.
The World needs YOU!
You do not know what you can do. You just cannot prepare for it, but when the time comes, you will be called upon. You can either be a spectator (S-T-S) or an active participant (S-T-O) choose wisely.
Be the Rufus. It is your ticket out of this reality. video 3MB
Nuclear Monday [2018]
This is what we are all dealing with right now. It’s a well made very short (ten minute) film.
”]
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.
Well it’s official, the “great experiment” in a utopian government is over. The United States is DEAD. It just doesn’t know it yet. Now it’s time to figure out what to replace it with.
"There are two kinds of people in this world; those with loaded guns and those who dig."
-- Blondie.
Yah.
The wealthy took over the United States and looted it completely.
Do you think that I am exaggerating?
Let’s open up with a little blurb.
Massive Emerald discovered
That’s a mighty big rock.
The massive emerald, which weighs 794 pounds and stands around 4.3 feet high was unearthed a month ago, 200 meters deep inside the Carnaiba Mine in Brazil
The Laos – China High Speed Rail line opened up.
From Gordon Dumoulin…
The high financial risks or another example of the debt trap diplomacy?
China to Laos HST
The official opening of the high speed train route from China’s Kunming to Vientiane, capital of Laos was major news in both countries. “From land-locked to high speed land-linked” as I wrote a few weeks ago:
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https://lnkd.in/gprAmyRT . Not headline news in Europe or USA, understandably in today’s Covid tense circumstances but having read several major news sites on this event, it ranged from considerations between Laos economic developments and the risks of loans to China to a straightforward example of another Chinese ‘debt trap diplomacy’.
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I have not yet come across any article in US or European media which did not mention the risks and increasing dependence of Laos to China in the light of the rail connection. Imagine that! . Few other perspectives from this week; . First perspective. Several news items in the West quote an AIDDATA report “Banking on the Belt and Road” citing that Laos has the highest debt of all countries to China. I did not read this 166-page report yet. I did though quickly check who or what is AIDDATA.
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CIA!
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It is a research lab at William & Mary’s Global Research Institute in Williamsburg, VA. Directly funded by among others the US Secretaries of State and Defense and in close collaboration with the National Endowment of Democracy, an ‘overt’ arm of the CIA as some might call it. . While not disputing the content of the report as I have not read it yet, should the nature of ‘independence’ of this report not raise questions by at least a few journalists for further research ? . A second perspective related to the so-called Chinese debt trap diplomacy. Yes criticism is definitely healthy but a balance (in criticism) not less important. The news this week that Deborah Bräutigam, Director of the China Africa Research Institute at John Hopkins University was framed by the BBC. . She is well-known for having denounced the Chinese debt trap diplomacy in several reports/books by facts and numbers. Her telephone interview with the BBC was cut in such a way that it seemed she supports the debt trap diplomacy narrative… to her own horror. . A third perspective; unexploded US cluster bombs in Laos had to be removed before being able to build this high speed railway. Over 260 million US cluster bombs were dropped on Laos from 1964-1973 (more than all bombs on Europe during WWII), making Laos by far the most heavily bombed country in global history. 30% of those bombs remained unexploded and is still daily reality for many people in Laos. Historical perspectives.
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American bombs all over Laos. . Not intending to judge content or painting black-white angles, let us all just strive to broaden perspectives and balance. And most of all, hope that this high speed railway (which is definitely a fact) will bring a brighter, inter-connected future for the people from Laos and China, peacefully, economically and socially.
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Remember that if tiny, tiny Laos can have a high-quality high-speed train line, why can the mighty exceptional America as well?
Jordi Comments…
The China-Laos Railway, a landmark project of high-quality Belt and Road cooperation, started operation on Friday.
The electrified passenger and freight railway runs 1,035 kilometers, including 422 kilometers in Laos, from the city of Kunming, southwest China’s Yunnan Province, to Lao capital Vientiane.
The architecture style of the railway stations is designed to feature local culture.
Sleek bullet trains will travel at a speed of 160 kilometers per hour, through mountains and valleys.
High Speed Train.
Construction of the Laos section started in December 2016, and construction of the China part linking Yuxi and the border town of Mohan started in December 2015.
A total of 167 tunnels and 301 bridges were built along the new sections stretching over 900 kilometers, after builders overcame many technical difficulties.
As a docking project between the Belt and Road Initiative and Laos’ strategy to convert itself from a landlocked country to a land-linked one, the line will slash the travel time between Kunming to Vientiane to about 10 hours.
The railway could potentially increase aggregate income in Laos by up to 21 percent over the long term, the World Bank said in a report last year.
David BK Tan comments…
Actually the significance of #China-#Laos railway is that it is a dual-purpose HSR i.e. it can transport cargoes or passengers across borders. This would bring a disruption to shipping industry as companies can opt for the intermodal transportation i.e. moving large-sized goods in the same steel-based containers through two or more modes of transport. In other words, using a mix of truck-rail-ship for the purposes of turnaround efficiency and cost effectiveness.
If you look at European and Japanese HSR, they are meant to ferry passengers only and so HSR does not disrupt the shipping industry which is dominated by European shippers.
But the benefits brought about by intermodal transportation via HSR are significant when one looks at China-Laos railway. Below video is an example.
The train from China departed for Laos on Dec 4 from Kunming loaded with Yunnan's specialty vegetables. Specialty products of Laos and Thailand are expected to be delivered at the Kunming Tengjun international land port in Kunming on the return trip, which will further be transported to cities like Shanghai, Guangzhou and Beijing, via the land port. The train is expected to reach Laos's Vientiane South station on Dec 5.
Hence it is a fast mode of transport using HSR since if you use shippers, you have to wait for the ships to load and unload at various ports of call, the use of land transport after the goods are received, the time involved in the administrative paperwork etc.
A High speed train. Thanks to China’s BRI. I guess the USA is too focused on wars around the world. Video Check it out. 131MB
Debit Trap!!!!!
Yada. Yada. Yada.
Debit Trap.
From TC Khoo…
“The reality is that the US and 300 years of Western imperialism strives to control, oppress, and steal the resources of developing countries. A century later not much is changed and the millions living in developing countries [remain] trapped in a cycle of poverty and exploitation, through policies implemented by the IMF and the World Bank. The Euro-centric West over-looks the legacy of its ‘development policies’ which are the cause of half of humanity living below the poverty line. . While western aid agencies put out adverts asking money .. they omit the fact that Africa is one of the richest countries in the world in terms of natural resources and turned into a ‘begging bowl’ a result of West’s debt-traps and perpetual wars. . · The real DEBT TRAP – Paul Craig Roberts, author of The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism outlines how the west has looted third world countries and how IMF plays a lead role in this ..
“the gullible” governments are offered “foreign loans to implement a Western-presented development plan”
.. in reality the country becomes indebted .. Unable to pay back the loan, the creditors send in IMF to lend it money to pay its bank creditors. Now IMF is in a controlling position it will apply austerity measures cutting back public services, public pensions, and sell national resources to foreigners .. the exploitation doesn’t stop there, but rather the West pushes a “policy on Third World countries of abandoning food self-sufficiency and producing one or two crops for export earnings. This policy makes Third World populations dependent on food imports from the West. Thus, self-sufficiency is transformed into indebtedness”. . Such policies have hindered the development in third-world debt-ridden countries for decades. Nick Dearden Director of ‘Global Justice Now’ argues that even before “we had even heard of COVID-19″ the IMF warned that 34 countries were at risk of debt distress and this was a conservative estimate .. more than 60 countries cannot build a basic health system because the “world’s poorest countries are repaying vast sums year on year to rich countries, international “anti-poverty” funds – public bodies such as the IMF – and major banks is a damning indictment on our global economy.” . While the US propagates the debt-trap narrative, the biggest worry for the West is that China’s BRI offers a much-needed alternative for the global South. . Washington is not interested in facts that contradict their narrative, rather US officials and the vast media propaganda machine are continuing to repeat the debt-trap accusations with an aim to discredit BRI [but] there has never been a Western proposal for continental-scale infrastructure building … It was the Chinese who sought to build a road, rail and maritime infrastructure network to link Africa’s economies with the rest of the world”, with the debt trap allegations against China debunked again and again. . read more at – https://www.gwadarpro.pk/
Ecosystem
In 1960, David Latimer planted a tiny garden inside of a large glass bottle and sealed it shut. He opened the bottle 12 years later in 1972 to add some water and then sealed it for good. The self contained ecosystem has flourished for nearly 60 years.
For those who are wondering how this is even possible: the garden is a perfectly balanced and self-sufficient ecosystem. The bacteria in the compost eats the dead plants and breaks down the oxygen that is released by the plants, turning it into carbon dioxide, which is needed for photosynthesis. The bottle is essentially a microcosm of earth.
Miniature ecosystem.
In Tanzania…
The world moves on. Free of the worry of being bombed to oblivion by the United States.
From Dr. Tomor…
Have you seen a stone arch bridge being built? I was in Tanzania this week and saw several being built. I found top quality workmanship creating impressive bridges.
Bridge construction.
Where does the story begin? The Belgian Development Agency (#ENABEL) together with the Tanzania Rural and Urban Roads Agency (#TARURA) are building 70 stone bridges in small villages around Kigoma to help people get to markets.
Bridge construction.
This fascinating project, located deep in the Tanzanian countryside, has much to teach the developed world. For embracing decarbonisation, stone bridges offer an ultra low emission alternative to concrete and steel with minimal maintenance costs.
Bridge construction.
As digital technology is incorporated into stone construction there is a compelling case for reviving this incredibly long-lasting material.
Bridge construction.
People wondered about the HK-Macau Bridge…
“It’s impressive, but a big black hole to throw money into” says the jealous British reporter. It wasn’t even announced or reported on in the United States. But I can tell youse guys that it is really impressive, and it lands right at my doorstep. Literally. I go out of my back door, and there’s the road from the bridge!
But why was it built? For people to travel back and forth from HK to the Casinos?
The bridge to my doorstep.
Now we know. China wants to turn Macau from a casino den into a tech base for the Greater Bay Area.
When I first read this, I had a little giggle in my head.
Wait a moment …
I realized how much I judge a thing based on a commonly held belief or opinion. Vegas is the most sinful place while Sedona Arizona is the most spiritual place.
Is that true?
Or is that based on the experience of a person carrying out certain activities in that place?
Can you be spiritual in Vegas? Absolutely yes if you want to.
Is there a totally “bad” or “good” place on earth? Or is it just our experience or our perception of that place being “bad” or “good”?
To take this to another level, is democracy absolutely good and authoritarian absolutely bad? Is freedom totally good and control totally bad?
Good and bad ideologies have been instilled in the minds of people so that we can fight to be right and fight to “survive”, the lowest level of human consciousness.
What if we can go beyond the “survival” to the plane of co-creation?
Chinese government’s intervention in economics and businesses is much larger than what one is used to in the west. But that’s just how it is. China is much larger than anything that the West can possibly comprehend.
Is it totally bad? Or is it just the perception of being bad because it’s not consistent with what one expects in the west based on the beliefs and values where one is raised.
Now back to the topic of Macau …
Half of Macau’s GDP comes from casino revenue. Gambling represents 80% of the government’s tax revenue. An 80 per cent drop in gambling revenue last year led to a 50 per cent decline in GDP.
In Beijing’s plan, Macau is being encouraged to develop integrated circuits, new energy projects, and artificial intelligence (AI), among other tech sectors, and to establish a supply chain for chips, from design to testing.
For China’s tech firms, the city is also proving a testing ground for new products and solutions. Tencent, Huawei and SenseTime are all involved in the city’s digitalization and smart city projects.
Lu Gang, director of the Macao Technology General Association, said …
“Although it’s small in size, Macau is an international platform connecting the mainland to the world and can help Chinese companies venture abroad.”
Transforming a city from a casino den to a tech innovation base is quite a huge effort, but China thinks long term. No wonder Zhuhai, and the Guangzhou corridor is literally on a building spree and all those skyscrapers are everywhere.
And of course, the CIA tried to stop all this…
The CIA / NED embeds in Hong Kong tried all sorts of things to top the Chinese construction in the Bay area… this is from 2011. WWF is a NED front organization.
Coronavirus in Shanghai
From Joe Z… 6DEC21
Yesterday 4pm, one family of this city found Covid positive (after 20 months of zero case), as the man was traveling back from Shanghai.
8am this morning, 50 testing sites are ready in that suburb, 40k+ people will be tested quickly, 100+ medical workers are mobilized, people are informed via phones and medias, schools are temporarily closed for 1 day.
Everyone is busy doing their part to minimize the impact and wants to get back to normal as soon as possible.
Western media can call that whatever they want: human rights violation, brainwashing, communism, no freedom, collectivism, overreacting, whatever accusation that can express their hatred.
We who live here care more about our health and work. We respect our medical workers and volunteers.
Hater's opinion is irrelevant to us.
China and Africa
From Sebastian Ibold…
Africa-#China cooperation and trade deepened in recent years.
In particular the "Forum on China-#Africa Cooperation" (#FOCAC), a tri-annual forum between China and African countries, is a platform for the alignment of cooperation and development goals of the Sino-African strategic partnership.
A week ago, the 8th edition of the FOCAC, the 2021 summit, was held from 29 to 30 November in Dakar bringing together foreign ministers and high-level attendees from African countries, the African Union and China (first summit held in 2006 in Beijing).
The 2021 summit adopted 4 resolutions: 1. Dakar Action Plan (2022–24), 2. China-Africa Cooperation Vision 2035, 3. Sino-African Declaration on Climate Change and 4. Declaration of the Eighth Ministerial Conference of FOCAC.
In particular the China-Africa Cooperation Vision 2035 is of strategic importance. According to the first 3-year plan of the vision, China will:
send 1,500 medical personnel and public health experts and provide 1 billion doses of #COVID19 vaccines to Africa.
⚒undertake 10 poverty reduction and agricultural projects and send 500 agricultural experts to Africa.
import goods worth EUR 247 billion over the next 3 years (in recent years, bilateral trade stood at about EUR 165 billion per year, with China's imports from and exports to Africa each reaching about EUR 80 billion).
provide EUR 8 billion of trade financing to support African export, provide credit facilities of EUR 8 billion to African financial institutions, channel to African countries EUR 8 billion from its share of the IMF’s new allocation of Special Drawing Rights and encourage Chinese businesses to invest no less than EUR 8 billion in Africa in the next 3 years.
exempt African LDCs from debt incurred in the form of interest-free Chinese government loans due by the end of 2021.
establish a platform for China-Africa private investment promotion and support the development of African SMEs (indicating a shift from traditional infrastructure and construction investment-focus to a more local development approach)
establish a China-Africa cross-border RMB center.
undertake 10 digital economy projects in Africa.
undertake 10 green development, environmental protection and climate action projects for Africa ("actively promote solar, wind and other sources of renewable energy, work for effective implementation of the Paris Agreement on climate change and keep strengthening our capacity for sustainable development").
build in Africa "centers of excellence on low-carbon development and climate change adaptation".
encourage Chinese companies in Africa to create at least 800,000 jobs in Africa.
undertake 10 peace and security projects for Africa.
Side fact: One of the commonly used world maps, the Mercator Projection, depicts Greenland and Africa as being roughly the same size. In reality, Africa with 30 million sqkm is 14 times larger (see last graphic, true size of countries)
In Japan: “Bread & Roses: Pandemic Drives Women into “Nighttime Work””
SNA (Tokyo) — On November 16, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government announced the disciplinary dismissal of a 28-year-old school nurse for moonlighting as a sex worker for more than a year.
Tokyo officials interrogated her after receiving an anonymous tip about her after-hours work. The primary and middle school nurse said she wanted to save enough money to live on her own in the city. The officials used the word menshoku (removal/dismissal from office) rather than kaiko (dismissal from employment) since she was a local government civil servant.
Japanese labor law grants employers the right to dismiss an employee (kaikoken), but that right cannot be abused (ranyo). In reality, you need a damn good reason (goriteki-katsu shakaiteki sotosei ga aru = reasonable and sufficient according to social norms) to fire somebody. The hurdle for disciplinary dismissal is even higher, requiring malicious behavior that causes considerable damage to the workplace with little prospect for recovery from the loss of “confidence” (shinrai).
The media has kept mum about the details of this case, but we can suss out quite a bit. The available information does not make it obvious whether she was fired for having a second job or for the nature of that second job. Local government civil servants cannot, in principle (though with exceptions), work side gigs without prior approval, according to the Local Public Service Act.
A violation can lead to a disciplinary dismissal, according to a strict reading of Article 38. And yet, countless incidents injurious to others, including teachers driving without a license, driving under the influence, groping on public trains (chikan), and lewd acts with students, do not lead to disciplinary dismissals. Most of those cases lead to lighter punishments, such as three-months forced leave or pay cuts. This school nurse injured nobody, yet she was hit with the ultimate employment penalty.
It’s easy to imagine that the reason for the differential treatment lay in the nature of her side gig. Very few sex workers in our society feel confident enough to declare their occupation openly. The dismissal perhaps relates to the fact that the job of teacher (which includes school nurse in Japan) is often called a “sacred profession” (seishoku) and is held up as a model occupation for the children they teach. The Tokyo government likely feared an adverse impact on children’s education and demands from angry parents for the immediate firing of a teacher who also works at a sex establishment.
However, the reaction on social media to this case has been overwhelmingly sympathetic to the school nurse. The following quotes encapsulate many comments I have found in my research.
—Personally, I feel a disciplinary removal from office is too severe. It means she loses her teaching license. She surely had financial reasons for doing this, and I cannot accept that her mistake was so grave. Her next job hunt will be a nightmare. I worry about her future.
—Disciplinary dismissal just for having a side gig? It’s a victimless crime. Even if it was a sex establishment, it’s odd for her to be dismissed like this just for having another job.
Such expressions of sympathy and solidarity reflect the desperate impoverishment of women during this pandemic. The word yorushoku (nightwork) is increasingly common in Japan to refer to sex workers, in distinction to hirushoku (daytime work), such as administrative or sales work.
Even in pre-Covid times, women earned less than men and had far more precarious jobs. The pandemic has aggravated this situation, leading to many women being fired, having their contracts non-renewed, or losing work and income on zero-hour contracts. This has driven many women into yorushoku, and some even to working both day and night with little time to sleep.
In the past, the nighttime profession was considered a separate world inhabited only by professionals and experts–a world hard to enter and one that filled office workers with fear and trepidation. But the pandemic has robbed women of jobs, devastated their personal incomes, and aggravated the gender gap, as the Japan Research Institute reported this past April. Female suicides have jumped since the start of the pandemic, totaling 7,026 in 2020, according to the National Police Agency.
Although we don’t know the life circumstances of this particular school nurse, it’s not hard to imagine she suffered serious financial hardship. Public perception considers local government servants to enjoy secure employment throughout their careers. But a skyrocketing number of people work in public education on one-year part-time contracts. Her previous situation may have been precarious indeed.
It should be noted that yorushoku covers a broad range of sex work, from more hardcore services that include penetration to more softcore work such as drinking and chatting with customers at a hostess bar. Pay grows the more hardcore the work is–to a level higher than desk workers can imagine. It’s easy to understand why some women suffering financial hardship are being drawn to such high-paid work, when so few other opportunities are available to them.
The popularity of the word yorushoku has itself to some degree normalized this kind of work, enabling advertisers and recruiters to lower the psychological hurdle that many women feel about doing such work and drawing them in with the high pay.
But why are conditions for day jobs so precarious and miserable in the first place, particularly for women? Normalizing nighttime work while ignoring the issue of lousy daytime jobs misses the point. On top of that, sex work entails many risks, as well as the possibility for major mental and physical harm.
Why did the school nurse feel compelled to work at a sex establishment? This is a question for all workers living in Japanese society.
I concur 100% with the Japan Communist Party’s pledge to create a society in which people work eight hours a day and live a life worthy of a human being. It’s time the government reformed its labor policy to ensure that for all workers, regardless of gender.
For breaking news, follow on Twitter @ShingetsuNews
China creates its own democracy instead of duplicating Western models: white paper
Xinhua | Updated: 2021-12-04 12:08
BEIJING – China did not duplicate Western models of democracy, but created its own, according to a white paper released Saturday.
Titled “China: Democracy That Works,” the white paper was released by the State Council Information Office.
The original aspiration of China’s democracy was to ensure the people’s status as masters of the country, said the white paper.
China has created and developed whole-process people’s democracy in line with its national conditions. This is a form of democracy with distinctive Chinese features which at the same time reflects humanity’s universal desire for democracy, said the white paper.
Whole-process people’s democracy has fueled the development of the country and driven the revitalization of the nation. It has contributed a new model to the international political spectrum, said the white paper.
China must devise the most suitable form of democracy in accordance with its characteristics and realities. This is a basic principle China adheres to for developing democracy, said the white paper.
To develop its democracy, China has always drawn wisdom and strength from its 5,000-year-old culture and fine traditions, said the white paper.
Humanity’s quest for and experiments with greater democracy will never end, it said.
The true barrier to democracy lies not in different models of democracy, but in arrogance, prejudice and hostility towards other countries’ attempts to explore their own paths to democracy, and in assumed superiority and the determination to impose one’s own model of democracy on others, it added.
The World is changing
You can plainly see this on the polls that reflect the thoughts and belief of American workers.
Local Innovation
The owner of this electric car has done something that no electric car manufacturer has ever done.
Auto-recharging.
I’ve always wondered why these machines aren’t designed for the energy that generates wheels to charge the car’s batteries.
This guy did it at home.
What you see in the frame is the current-generating generator that charges the batteries.
There is no longer a need to stop to charge batteries at charging stations or to charge them at home at night.
The machine charges the batteries while it’s running.
It’s as simple as that..
The Saker
This article is a reprint from a great article found on The Saker. I edited it for clarity, simplicity, and to fit this venue. All credit to the author. It is well worth the read as it describes the need for the USA to “ok, so die already”. Any American will be well familiar to the ideas, concepts and situations as described herein.
Despite the running assumption in Washington for some time that democratic backslides are linked to perceived adversaries such as Russia and China, the data actually seems to point back to the United States itself.
Of all places, the news of this democratic decline was recently reported in the New York Times. According to data from V-Dem, the US and its allies (defined as countries with a formal or implied mutual defense commitment) have accounted for only 5% of worldwide increases in democracy in the 2010s while having 36% of the decreases.
In fact, it states, US-allied countries saw their democracies decline by nearly double the rate of non-allies.
This obviously raises the question: why?
Answering this is quite a tall order for even the most astute political scientists, but it’s obviously not as simple as blaming Trump. Let’s look at some of the possible reasons.
First of all, contrary to a long-running assumption, American influence does not actually lead to countries wanting to be like America. A Pew Research Center study from November 1 found that only 17% of people in their survey countries viewed US democracy as worth emulating, against 23% who said it was never a good example. Why is this?
Well, US democracy sucks.
If democracy means that public opinion is supposed to decide policies, then the US is an abject failure.
Public opinion actually means next to nothing, considering the US is a functioning plutocracy – a government of, by, and for the wealthy.
- Mirna Miranda
The author kind of goes off the “deep end” offering his opinions on race and social differences, and I personally found that repugnant. Never the less, he does have some good points and I tried to mediate his work so not to be offensive to the MM readership and myself. Part of accepting change is to listen to the opinions of others. I do hope that you enjoy this.
When you live in a 200-year-old house, you would do well to give it a thorough inspection every few years. Rap on the walls, pull down some old wallpaper, climb into the attic, and get down into the crawl space. Check the roofing, check the exterior walls, check the foundation. You are looking for signs of rot: decay, mold, insects, rodents, or just plain aging.
With luck, you find one or two small problems, you patch them up, and all is well.
Unfortunately, sometimes all is not well. Sometimes, you find signs of major and irreparable decay. In those cases, and as painful as it may be, you must be prepared to tear the house down and start anew. Anything less would be a lost cause, an act of utter futility.
America today.
America today is a 245-year-old house—a grand mansion with many rooms, situated on a wonderfully vast and glorious estate.
From the outside, from a distance, it still looks nice: glitzy, glamorous, wealthy, powerful, exciting. It still carries much from its well-intentioned (if flawed) beginnings.
But our inspection proves otherwise. When we rap on the walls, or get up in the ceiling, or crawl down to the foundations, we are shocked to find signs of widespread and irreparable decay.
The main timbers supporting the building are rife with termites; the roof is leaking; the foundation is cracked, the sands beneath are eroding, and all manner of vermin are running wild, both above and below.
In short, it is a horrible mess.
We try to plaster over holes here and there, and slap on some new paint once in a while, but the rot inevitably shows through. By any reasonable accounting, the building is on the verge of collapse. It may come down on its own, or we can be proactive and take it down, but down it will come.
America is starting to fall apart and crumble down.
Any viable nation is not only an edifice; it is a living entity.
It lives and breathes with the people in it. Our house is a living house; but sadly, it is terminally ill.
A combination of old age, disease, neglect, and poor hygiene have put it in a terrible state, one that is evidently beyond any hope of recovery or repair. The house must come down; America must die—in order for a new house, a new nation, to arise.
Such is life.
An Inspection Report on the USA “House”
It is worthwhile, then, to review my brief ‘inspection report’ of the American nation, and to diagnose the ailments that we are currently enduring.
If I am able to get down to root causes, this will naturally lead to some prescribed courses of action that we can take, both near-term and for the longer haul.
No one wants to live in a rotting house.
No one wants to live in a decaying nation. No one wants their children and grandchildren to grow up in such conditions.
We have better options.
At the highest level, my inspection report finds two major, and related, areas of concern: (1) a false notion of human equality, and (2) misplaced faith in the doctrine of democracy.
Further analysis shows that these two aspects have been ruthlessly and malevolently exploited by a potent selfish lobby to maximize benefit to themselves.
In what follows, I will attempt to outline the nature of this far-reaching and deep-rooted crisis, and to suggest some ways forward.
The False and Destructive Concept of “Equality”
In 1927, and four years before he penned Brave New World, famed writer, thinker, and “casual anti-Semite” Aldous Huxley published a compelling little book called Proper Studies.
It opens with an essay titled “The Idea of Equality.”
The very first line reads as follows:
That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent. (p.1)
Doctors, editors, bureaucrats—any person, in any walk of life, displays evident and obvious inequalities, says Huxley.
People are different in every way imaginable: skills, abilities, interests, intelligence, appearance, character.
Everyone acknowledges this, and yet at the same time they also want to insist on the essential and intrinsic equality of humans.
Hence does Huxley write of the human mind’s “almost infinite capacity for being inconsistent.”
He then describes the basic axiom at work:
Politicians and political philosophers have often talked about the equality of man as though it were a necessary and unavoidable idea, an idea which human beings must believe in, just as they must, from the very nature of their physical and mental constitution, believe in such notions as weight, heat, and light.
Man is “by nature free, equal, and independent,” says Locke,[1] with the calm assurance of one who knows he cannot be contradicted.
It would be possible to quote literally thousands of similar pronouncements. (p.2)
He identifies the original source of this fallacy in Aristotle, whose metaphysical assumption of a human essence (as “the rational animal”; Nicomachean Ethics I.8, 13) implies a sort of equality among the human species.
Against Huxley, we can argue that this does not quite follow; the existence of a common and distinctive quality of all humans need not imply their social, political, or existential equality, any more than the fact that all material objects have mass imply that they all have the same weight.[2]
Huxley also fixes some blame on Descartes, but again, this is perhaps an exaggerated claim.
In Discourse on Method (1637), Descartes writes:
Good sense is the best distributed thing in the world. …
It indicates that the power of judging well and of distinguishing the true from the false—which is what we properly call ‘good sense’ or ‘reason’—is naturally equal in all men. … [A]s regards reason or sense, since it is the only thing that makes us men and distinguishes us from the beasts, I am inclined to believe that it exists whole and complete in each of us.[3]
Even if we allow that reason is equal in all—a highly dubious assertion, to say the least—it still does not imply political, social, or moral equality.
More to the point, Huxley cites Christian doctrine and the position of the Church.
Even granting a “brotherhood of men” under Christ, “the brotherhood of men does not imply their equality.”
He continues:
“Neither does men’s equality before God imply their equality as among themselves.”
Even if God, from his divine and lofty standpoint, views us all as equals, any putative inter-human equality “is entirely irrelevant”.[4] It is rather like us viewing all ants or mice as identical when in fact they all recognize and acknowledge vast differences among themselves.
All this bodes ill for the “religion of democracy,” says Huxley (and as I will elaborate).
Its “primary assumption” is that “all men are substantially equal.” If the equality falls, so too falls democracy.
A most profound observation, worthy of repeating. "Democracy" is ONLY valid and a just form of governance, when everyone one is equal in ability, thought, social standing, and contribution.
Otherwise, "democracy" is a failure.
-MM
He summarizes concisely:
The historical and psychological researches of the past century have rendered the theory which lies behind the practice of modern democracy entirely untenable. Reason is not the same in all men; human beings belong to a variety of psychological types separated from one another by irreducible differences. (p. 12)
Science, anthropology, philosophy, and common sense all come to the same conclusion: human equality is a fallacy, and any political ideology based on that notion is doomed to failure.
Huxley, of course, was hardly alone in his condemnation of a claimed human equality.
Nietzsche viewed the idea with greater contempt and wrote in more scathing terms.
We find, especially in Beyond Good and Evil, a stunning repudiation of the concept.
His elaborations on the “order of rank” among men, the “instinct for rank,” the “noble soul,” and the necessity for human greatness, pervade the work.
A few examples will have to suffice:
Men, not noble enough to see the abysmally different order of rank, the chasm of rank, between man and man—such men have so far held sway over the fate of Europe, with their “equal before God,” until finally a smaller, almost ridiculous type, a herd animal, something eager to please, sickly, and mediocre has been bred, the European of today. (sec. 62)The highest and strongest drives, when they break out passionately and drive the individual far above the average and the flats of the herd conscience, wreck the self-confidence of the community, its faith in itself, and it is as if its spine snapped. Hence just these drives are branded and slandered most. High and independent spirituality, the will to stand alone, even a powerful reason are experienced as dangers; everything that elevates an individual above the herd and intimidates the neighbor is henceforth called evil; and the fair, modest, submissive, conforming mentality, the mediocrity of desires attains moral designations and honors. (sec. 201)Every enhancement of the type ‘man’ has so far been the work of an aristocratic society—a society that believes in the long ladder of an order of rank and differences in value between man and man. (sec. 257)
The concept of equality is ultimately destructive because it declares, not only that no one is worse than anyone else, but more importantly that no one is better than anyone else—yes, that no one can be better.
True self-betterment and self-enhancement become impossible if we are all equal.
No matter what you do, you will still be only, and always, equal to the very least among men.
This doctrine is not merely false; it is utterly contemptible and destructive of higher aims and goals.
It means the death of humanity. Where we do not ascend, we decline; this is Nietzsche’s basic outlook.
Sadly, it conforms to the actual world in which we live today.
In the final passage above, Nietzsche points to a central fact and thus to a possible solution.
If every improvement to humanity and to society has occurred in aristocratic societies—that is, rule by the best—then we ought logically to use those as our model.
Societies that are capable of sorting men into lesser and greater types, and to do so effectively, are the drivers of human evolution.
They strive for greatness, and they create greatness.
Even the smallest steps in that direction—such as were taken by Hitler in his National Socialist Germany—would be such an improvement over the present day that any nation even attempting it would likely flourish spectacularly; and in fact, this is precisely what happened in Germany, beginning in 1933.
The rest of the equality-obsessed, oligarch-inspired world was so aghast that they were compelled to drive the remaining industrial nations against Hitler and to destroy him, so fearsome was the prospect of his success.
Still, entrenched myths die hard.
We in the US have our treasured Declaration of Independence, which declares as “self-evident”—with the calm assurance of those who know they cannot be contradicted—that “all men are created equal.”
As we know, this was disingenuous at best.
For one, they indeed meant ‘men,’ given that women could neither vote nor hold office.
And they meant ‘White men,’ given that all the Founders were White Anglo-Saxons, and many were slaveholders or otherwise endorsed slavery.
Hence that famous phrase really meant “all White males are created equal”—though even that is demonstrably untrue, as I have argued.
Original Democracy
Huxley had it exactly right: support for modern democracy is in fact more of a belief system, or even a faith, than something grounded in history, reason, and philosophy.
Like many other religions, democracy derives from a core of historical truth—here, in ancient Greece—that was then altered beyond recognition by an accretion of layers of myth, lie, and corruption.
Today we have the belief, the faith, by all sides, “left” and “right” alike,[5] that democracy is an unquestioned virtue, that it must be defended at all costs, and that it must be spread to the world, even at the point of a gun.
This is a fundamental political error, founded on an erroneous and detrimental conception of human equality; it must be overcome if we are to survive in the long run.
Democracy wasn’t always a religion.
At one time, at the beginning, it was a rational and effective (though not unproblematic) means of self-government.
Let’s take a minute to examine the original democracy of ancient Greece to see what worked and what did not.
The original democracy of ancient Greece
Athenian democracy was a remarkable institution, and remarkably different than what passes for democracy today.
To begin with, the population of the state (or polis) was small—it constituted only some 300,000 people at its peak, which included many slaves and foreigners.
By modern standards, this seems tiny but, for the time, it was extremely large.
Of this number, the only formal citizens were the adult native-born males, numbering perhaps 30,000, or just 10 percent of the population.
These citizens—the demos, the people—were the formal basis of political power, rather than some ruling wealthy elite (also known as oligarchs or plutocrats), or some tyrannical dictator, as could be found in other Greek states.
The democratic system, inaugurated by Cleisthenes around 500 BC, functioned in a very different way than we might expect.
For one, there were no elections; all leadership positions (apart from the military) were chosen by lot, at random, from among the citizens who had put forth their names.
This included even the leader of the Assembly—the collected body of citizens—who was effectively the president of the nation, though without much formal power.
The Greeks had invented a device called a kleroterion into which names were randomly inserted on small tokens; colored dice were then deployed to select names randomly and fairly from among the various tribes or families.
The system had several virtues: immediate results, no costly or corrupted election campaigns, fairness, transparency, and an equal involvement of all concerned.
The Greeks clearly had to be nice to all their fellow (Athenian male) citizens, any one of whom could someday have a position of prominence.
Secondly, there were no representatives.
Athens was a famously direct democracy.
All interested citizens gathered on a large open hilltop, called the Pnyx, roughly once per month, to listen to the issues of the day.
When the time came for decisions, a very public show of hands determined the outcome.
Even the gravest of matters, such as going to war, were decided this way.
This is all the more striking when we consider that the army was composed of the very men who had themselves just voted for war.
In other words, when you voted for war, you personally went to war.
And many never returned.
We can only imagine a similar situation in America today: that the Congressmen and women who support the next illegal and unjust foreign war[6] would be compelled to be on the first combat plane into the warzone. I suspect that we would have very few wars indeed.
I would love to see Mike Pompeo and Tom Cotton try to invade China. It would be a hoot. -MM
In sum, Athenian democracy was small, direct, accountable, and transparent.
The wealthy elite had very little power to steer events in their favor.
The citizenry comprised only native men; foreigners had literally no voice in the state, even though they outnumbered the actual citizens by a factor of two or three.
Greek democracy was thus a racial (White European), ethnic (Athenian), and gendered (men only) system of rule.
And it worked incredibly well; it produced and sustained the brilliant Athenian culture that we know today.
Two Famous Critics
For all that, the system had some harsh and prominent critics—notably, Plato and Aristotle.
Plato had two main complaints against democracy:
Voting
Voting. First, he asked, why should all the citizens get to vote on key decisions? Why are they all treated as equals, one vote per man? This is illogical and counterproductive. Even in Athens, they had their share of dunces, dimwits, and degenerates. Why let these men vote? Why not let only the best, the wisest, vote? For that matter, why have votes at all? Why not just determine who are your wisest few, and let them rule?
This was Plato’s vision of an aristocracy, the optimal form of government. It is, at least in theory, far superior to anything like a democracy.
Freedom
Freedom. Plato’s second concern was, ironically, with freedom itself. In a democracy, since “the people” rule, anything goes. Whatever the people want, the people get. And the people—the masses—rarely want the kinds of things that they should want, namely, virtue and discipline. Rather, they want to have fun: they want to do one thing one day, and something else the next, as it suits their fancy. They are ‘free,’ after all. They want to play games, engage in various petty amusements, fill their bellies, get drunk, and so on. As it was then, so it is now; human nature has scarcely changed in two millennia.
Plato is scalding in his attack. The “democratic man” is inundated by all manner of trivial and detrimental desires. True and deep thoughts are driven from his soul, and “false and boastful conceits and phrases mount upwards and take their place” (Republic Bk 8; 560c):
And so the young man returns to the country of the [pleasure-seeking] lotus-eaters, and takes up his dwelling there in the face of all men. …
There is a battle and [the false and boastful words] gain the day, and then modesty, which they call ‘silliness’, is ignominiously thrust into exile by them, and temperance, which they nickname ‘unmanliness’, is trampled in the mire and cast forth.
They persuade men that moderation and frugal spending are vulgarity and meanness, and so, by the help of a rabble of evil appetites, they drive them out.And when they have emptied and swept clean the soul of him who is now in their power and who is being initiated by them in great mysteries, the next thing is to bring back to their house insolence and anarchy and waste and impudence in bright array, having garlands on their heads, and a great company with them, hymning their praises and calling them by sweet names.
Arrogance they term ‘good-breeding’, and anarchy ‘freedom’, and waste ‘magnificence’, and impudence ‘courage’.
And so the young man passes out of his original nature, which was trained in the school of necessity, into the freedom and libertinism of useless and unnecessary pleasures. (560d-e)
And if wiser thoughts come calling, and if they struggle for predominance in his soul, he becomes confused; “he shakes his head and says that they are all alike, and that one is as good as another.”
He has lost the ability to judge and to discriminate, which degrades his entire life:
His life has neither law nor order; and this distracted existence he terms ‘joy’ and ‘bliss’ and ‘freedom’; and so he goes on… [H]e is all ‘freedom’ and ‘equality.’
Hence the democratic man.
His precious freedom, given unrestrained license and lack of discipline, devolves into mindless and confused pleasure-seeking.
He believes he has freedom, and he believes in equality—but this is a sham; it is a false equality and the freedom of a shallow and vapid libertine.
Plato sums up the situation on democracy with one of the most striking sentences in the Republic:
These and other kindred characteristics are proper to democracy, which is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike. (558c)
“Charming” and “disordered” democracy, so “fair and spangled,” is all show and no substance.
It encourages undisciplined, unvirtuous lives of hedonistic pleasure.
And most importantly, it “dispenses a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike.”
Such a democracy, he says, can only lead in turn to the lowest form of government, tyranny.
I haven’t the space to elaborate, but in short, Aristotle basically agreed with this analysis.
He identified three primary forms of government, each of which had good and bad versions.
In descending order, the three good systems are monarchy (rule by one), aristocracy (rule by a small and wise few), and a ‘constitution’ (conditional rule by many).
The distorted or bad forms of each of these are tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy.[7]
In this sense, for Aristotle, democracy is literally ‘the worst of the worst.’ It is rule by the poor and needy masses, not the best or noblest few.
Industrial Democracy
What, then, of democracy in the world today?
We have variations on the democratic theme that are so remote from the Athenian original that they hardly deserve the same name.
They have lost all the virtues of the original but retained all the vices.
Democracy today has devolved into a crude perversion that I like to call industrial democracy.
Its primary characteristics are these:
1) Representative (parliamentarian) system—no direct participation. 2) Universal suffrage—all adults can vote. 3) Multiracial—all races can vote. 4) Unlimited population size. 5) Financially corrupt—moneyed interests hold great sway.
On every point, this is opposed to the Athenian model.
We vote, but typically only for a handful of pre-determined candidates or on a very limited number of referenda.
Our representation is scaled down by a factor of thousands or millions; a state as large as California, with almost 40 million people, gets all of two senators.[8] And every half-witted, uneducated ignoramus gets his or her vote—people who vastly outnumber the educated and the wise. (And we wonder why the intellectual level of political campaigns is so low.)
People of every balkanized race can vote, and they often do so in their own racial interest, thus guaranteeing a divided and conflicted government.
Perhaps most critically, the original small size of the Athenian citizen body, some 30,000 individuals, now numbers almost 250 million—the number of eligible American adults.
The vast size and scale of representation ensures that billions of corrupting dollars flow through the system, distorting even the most virtuous lawmaker, and guaranteeing a flood of media confusion, propaganda, and “fake news.”
Industrial democracy is rule by money: those with the most money, and the will to spend it, rule.
In America, we know who leads this race: the oligarch lobby, which contributes at least 50% of Democratic campaign funds and at least 25% of Republican funds.
Wealthy American oligarchs spend literally hundreds of millions on campaigns, ads, donations, and various other activities, all to influence the outcome in their favored direction.[9]
The situation is comparable in the UK, Canada, France, and Australia, all of which have relatively large and wealthy oligarch populations.[10]
The ancient Greeks—most of them, at least—would be appalled to see what their cherished democracy has come to.
As it is, we now have that which Plato predicted: democracy on the brink of degenerating into tyranny of various forms.
We have tyrannies of the rich, tyrannies of the oligarchy, and tyrannies of Big Tech, all vying for power, and all cooperating as needed to ensure that nothing like transparent and accountable government ever comes to pass.
The main objective of the rich is to stay rich.
As well as to maintain or grow the wealth gap between themselves and the masses; the larger the disparity, the more relative power they hold.
The main objective of the power-elite, is to weaken and damage the national psyche sufficiently.
As well as to diversify and deplete the nation genetically, so that they can maintain maximum control without completely destroying the wealth-producing capacity of the economy.
Under industrial democracy, the future is grim indeed.
America, sadly, has been completely subsumed by this pernicious and insidious form of government.
The country is ruled by the lowest, most depraved, most incompetent individuals imaginable.
At the same time, it is being flooded by the virtual scum of humanity—in July 2021 alone, over 212,000 arrests (“encounters”, in the government’s euphemistic propaganda) occurred at the southern border.[11]
How many more evaded “encounter” and entered the country illegally, we do not know.
And to these numbers we must add the “legal” immigration of large numbers of non-European, non-educated individuals who inevitably change the character of the nation seemingly for the worse.
The combined effect is dramatic.
A recent study stated that the US now has an astonishing 44 million people who were foreign-born, of which about 75% are legal and 25% are illegal.[12]
Nearly half of these millions were born in just five countries: Mexico, China, India, Philippines, and El Salvador.
Surely not more than a percent or two of these 44 million are from wealthy, educated nations. The grand edifice that is America is collapsing as we speak.
Therefore, it is time to accept reality and give up America for lost.
Put away your flags, your pins, and all your red-white-and-blue paraphernalia.
Toss out your MAGA hats; America will never be “great again.”
Anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar or a fool.
The country is rotting from above and below.
Vermin are calling the shots from on high, and human detritus washes in over the borders.
This was precisely how Ancient Rome fell. Such is the terminal stage of many an empire.
Looking Ahead
If this report on the fatal condition of America is close to the mark, it also suggests corrective actions that must be taken to regain a sane and stable civic life.
Well, at least for the historical Americans who established and ran the country for most of its existence.
The necessary actions are hardly a secret.
The basic ideas are already floating around the Internet. Andrew Anglin, for one, was right on the mark in his recent essay on immigration. His conclusion:
The only way we are going to fix this [immigration] problem is through a two-fold solution: 1) Redrawing the borders of the country, and 2) Physically removing tens of millions of people. There is no situation where both of those things are not going to be necessary in the future.
Those are two necessary, but not sufficient, conditions for the restoration of rational government among the population today.
More specifically, my above analysis suggests the following steps:
(a) Break up the existing United States into smaller, more cohesive, more homogenous, and more manageable units.
I do NOT suggest a return to the geographic borders of the individual states, but rather upon social clusters of similar interests, society, and unity. -MM
(b) In these new units, encourage all non-assimulated individuals to emigrate as soon as possible.
(c) Discard the pernicious concept of human equality and replace it by a celebration of the higher, the nobler, and the best.
(d)Replace industrial democracy with something like an aristocracy.
Closure
Let me close by offering a few words of elaboration on each.
More and more people these days seem to be recognizing the desirability and the inevitability of secession of portions of the US, and the establishment of new, independent nation-states.
In fact, as the nation continues to disintegrate, at some point people will have no choice; thus, it is better to plan now than to wait for some chaotic future breakdown.
Some of the current talk on secession has the right intent but is woefully weak and misguided.
Breaking up existing states but staying within America is a wholly insufficient form of secession.
The “6 Californias” idea is very weak; “Greater Idaho” is well-intentioned but falls way short of the mark.
None of these explicitly advocates breaking away from the US and forming new nations. Only full-blown secession can hope to get to the root of the problem. The reigning oligarchy knows this, which is why they do everything in their power to discredit the idea.
Point (b) is mandatory for restoring effective and rational governance.
Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, Jews, Europeans all have countries of origin; they need to return there with all due haste.
Far-fetched, and irrational, but I allow him to rant on. -MM
After a short period of voluntary compliance, increasing pressure will need to be applied until they comply.
Yes, Europeans could theoretically return to Europe, except that Europeans created and built up the present civilization (such as it is) of the USA, and thus have earned a right to stay and to evict the interlopers.[14]
Native Americans were of course here before the White Europeans, and that precedence needs to be respected, such as via truly autonomous homelands.
And since Blacks were forcibly brought here from Africa [15], I would have no issue with assisting their return to Africa with subsidized travel arrangements, a small one-time cash payment, or with the use of political leverage in Africa to aid their repatriation.
We can ease the transition, but out they all must go.
The hardest to deal with will of course be the oligarchy of every race. With their political clout, wealth, and bull-headed tenacity, they will be very hard to root out.
The task is made all the more difficult because of the inability of our supposedly “conservative Right” to address this in a meaningful way.
Most all prominent rightwing individuals and organizations flee from the Question like the devil from holy water.
As I have noted elsewhere, Fox News and crew—Carlson, Hannity, et al—never explicitly mention the oligarchy, never out them, and never criticize them in any way; Hannity in fact bends over backward to curry favor.
Alex Jones never criticizes or outs any of the oligarchy. Same with Jared Taylor. American Renaissance won’t deal with them in a serious way. Breitbart at least discusses them, but always in a neutral or positive light.
The real critics are, sadly, few and far between; to reiterate what I wrote recently, we need to be extremely grateful for The Occidental Observer, Unz.com, National Vanguard, and people like Anglin, all of whom are willing to speak the hard truth on the history and control of these long-duration oligarchs that run the United States..
Point (c) obviously follows from the above discussion. We must drop all talk of human equality and replace it with a promotion and celebration of human uniqueness and human greatness. This needs to be made explicit in common discourse, media, and school curricula.
We need to celebrate and praise human genius while emphasizing the fact that most people are not geniuses and will never achieve greatness, but who can nonetheless have meaningful and valuable lives.
When it is understood that humans never were, and never will be, equal, then all become free to achieve their full potential and, for those who succeed in bettering themselves, to reap the rewards of exceptional development.
In a just society, exceptional individuals will earn additional rights, but they will also bear additional duties, compared to the lesser. “Equal” performance for the various subgroups of people—as distinguished by gender, age, socio-economic status, ethnicity, etc.—will never be expected or mandated. “Racial equality” will be a nonissue.
Industrial Democracy must die
On the final point, it is clear that the hopelessly corrupt industrial democracy must go.
We can also be confident that something like an aristocracy would be a vast (if imperfect) improvement, even as there is much leeway in the specific details.
If we allow that “rule by the wiser” is superior to “rule by the masses,” then we have many ways to realize such a system.
At the simplest level, we could retain elections for officeholders but permit only the wiser—smarter, more educated, more accomplished—individuals to vote.
It could be very basic: require that voters earn a college degree, for example; or score above average on an IQ test; or distinguish themselves in some other relevant way (an exceptional athlete, by contrast, earns no right to a voice on political issues).
The disenfranchised would not be made to feel inferior; rather, they would come to accept such a system as in the best interests of all.
The Chinese have adopted this system and the successes of China are amazing. You can read about how the Chinese has adopted this system HERE.
-MM
At a more sophisticated level, we might move to adopt something like a Platonic education system, as laid out in the Republic.
There he sketches a 50-year training program involving age-appropriate schooling, skills training, physical fitness, and practical experience that both educates the masses and serves as a filtering process to determine who the truly wisest and most capable leaders are.
Again, The Chinese have adopted this system and the successes of China are amazing. You can read about how the Chinese has adopted this system HERE.
-MM
A series of pass-fail criteria progressively reduce the pool of eligible candidates, leaving, at the end, a mere handful of individuals who have repeatedly proven themselves under pressure. In a future aristocracy, a small pool of “the best” could be added annually to a kind of ruling congress who would then be unconditionally empowered to make and enforce all laws and policies.
After a fixed term of governance, each individual would be compelled to retire in turn. Again, this is just one way of realizing such a system.
Variations might include finding ways to identify and empower the truly exceptional individuals—or perhaps a single individual—and give them correspondingly exceptional powers to rule.
In any case, the system would need to be recognized by the vast majority of people as an effective and desirable solution. In this sense, it would retain a small flavor of traditional democracy. “Consent of the governed” can work, as long as the population is not too large and as long as we do not have to contend with competing racial minorities or Jewish financial corruption. But such consent is a far cry from universal suffrage or rule by the masses, which can never work, and which always degenerates.
Such is my basic outline of a path forward. Obviously, much more needs to be said. But it is a start, one that addresses the root causes of our present crisis.[16]
Final Thoughts
I close with this thought: To the extent that America ever was great, this is because, at the start, it was roughly modeled on the Athenian original.
The early American government was gendered, racial, and ethnic European males of a predominantly north European stock.
The celebrated American “diversity” at the beginning was a diversity among Whites: English, Scots, Irish, Dutch, Germans, and Scandinavians all would have been represented in those early years.
Yes, America had significant numbers of Blacks and Jews from the 1600s, but they had limited or no political influence.
Religion was of secondary importance.
Yes, it was nominally a “Christian nation” at the start, but few among the Founders were deeply religious—Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams, and John Jay being the exceptions—and most were skeptical believers or deists, if not functional atheists.
Hence, early America prospered and flourished in spite of, not because of, Christianity; in spite of, not because of, Blacks and Jews; and in spite of, not because of, the principle of equality.
Blacks, Asians, Jews, “equality,” and Christianity were millstones around the young nation’s neck. It is a testament to our initially gendered and racial governance that we accomplished so much in those early years, with such huge burdens to bear.
Two centuries later, those millstones proved to be our ruination.
America is dying a slow and painful death. Let us euthanize the long-suffering nation, redraw the boundaries, rethink the guiding principles, and begin again.
Final MM Comments
Obviously I edited out the distasteful elements and sanitized the article for general distribution. People in echo chambers forget how they often appear to others who lie outside that echo chamber.
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There is no need to bring race, or ethnic DNA points of origination in an article about changes in governance, but they are one and the same in this author’s mind. I cannot extract those thoughts without destroying the beneficial points being presented.
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Personally, I do not care who the oligarchy is, what race they are, where they originally came from, or what food they eat for breakfast. All I care about is removing them from any areas of control, in any way, from MY life. Thus the point in this article. I hope that you all enjoyed it.
Mr. Deng said it best. “I don’t care what color the cat is. All I care about is whether or not it can catch mice.”
Now about China
From an email…
Today, wokeism has killed education in the West, particularly America. There is zero chance for a reversal and even if by some miracle it was reversed, the ship has sailed. Too late to play catch up.
A phrased I particularly remember was "In America it would be a miracle if I could fill a hall with young PhD engineers but in China, it would be very easy to fill a stadium with the same".
At this transition period of global supremacy, I would still advice students from third world country to study a Bachelor degree in the West (UK, Europe, maybe Australia) but afterwards, to study post graduate in China. Some Post graduate degrees in China can be in English but it's still best to have rudimentary spoken Mandarin to get around while studying in China. Have seen Western students who actually are studying Post Graduate degree in Mandarin, which requires a proficiency in both written and spoken Mandarin. Hats off to them.
As I've mentioned to Guy From Africa, learn Mandarin. It will be the future language of business. It won't be the sole language of science and technology but will be on paper with English in the future.
Anglo-Saxons Americans, Brits, Australian find it astonishing that other people are bi lingual, where they can't begin to fathom the usefulness of another language besides English (a by product of the arrogance of British Empire). Europeans in general are bi lingual. South East Asians are bi, tri, tetra or even penta lingual (at the very least bi lingual but tri lingual is especially common. A friend of mine is penta lingual, yes, 5 languages.) To be able to communicate is key & speaking more than 1 language is advantageous.
Anyways, the below opinion piece in WSJ is interesting, to say the least.
As a Chinese doctoral student raising a young son in the U.S., I am mystified by how American elementary schools coddle students. In China, schools are run like boot camps. What do the therapeutic comforts America showers on its youth portend for a growing competition with China? video 6MB
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I recently registered my son in the third grade at a New Jersey public school. Hattie had recently finished two years of elementary school in Chengdu, China, where he trotted off to school each day with a backpack stuffed with thick textbooks and materials for practices and quizzes. .
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Here he leaves for school with little in his backpack other than a required “healthy snack.” The first day he came home with a sheet of math homework: 35 addition problems. He finished in about a minute. On the second day, he was asked to write 328 in different configurations.
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He first wrote down 300+20+8, following the prompt, and then 164×2, 82×4 and 656÷2. My son is not a genius, but he started studying math at an early age. When he was 5, I taught him fractions.
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Two years later, I introduced him to algebra. It is a core belief in Chinese society that talent can be trained, so schools should be tough on children. Chinese students score at the top of international math and science tests. This is not a philosophy shared by American schools.
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On Friday night my son came home announcing in bewilderment that he didn’t have any homework. In China students tend to receive twice as much homework on the weekend, given the two days to complete it. Video 25MB
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How will America compete with a China determined to train the best mathematicians, scientists and engineers? Unfolding now are two Maoist cultural revolutions, one in the East and the other in the West. The former is a jingoistic nationalism enforced by party loyalties and ubiquitous secret police.
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The latter is an anti-Americanism enforced by progressive mobs seeking to defund the police. Both are about limiting expression, controlling thought and regulating behavior. Xi Jinping has been cracking down on everything from finance to entertainment to whip his country through a “national rejuvenation.”
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China’s nationalism is explicitly anchored in Maoism, with Mr. Xi representing the new cult of personality. Meanwhile, woke America—which, consciously or not, deploys Maoist tactics—is destroying the core traditions of Western civilization with identity politics.
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In both countries, control must extend to the very young to mold them in the image of the official ideology. In fall 2021 Chinese pupils returned to school with a new requirement to study “Xi Jinping Thought.” Schools must “plant the seeds of loving the party, the country, and socialism in young hearts,” a government announcement declares.
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Across the ocean, American pupils are taught that white America is inherently racist, regardless of individual intention or action. Chinese education pushes the young in directions that serve the party and the state. Youth are trained to be skilled laborers ready to endure hard work and brutal competition.
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Such political indoctrination is taught side by side with math and science. American education is supposed to be about opening minds but appears not to fill them with much.
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Worse, young Americans are not prepared for the demands of being an adult. This phenomenon started in higher education. For years attending American universities, I have been disturbed to watch colleges fabricate “anxiety” and “depression” in students who are not mentally ill. Administrators have used grossly exaggerated terms such as “trauma,” and melodramatic expressions such as “I cannot begin to imagine what you have suffered,” to turn into a catastrophe what is best described as disappointment.
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This creates a culture of victimization. The absurdity peaked after the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Students from elite universities claimed existential despair, finding comfort in cocoa, coloring books and therapy dogs.
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Classes were canceled and exams postponed, all in the name of soothing 20-somethings who need to be learning how to adapt to reality as adults. Chinese citizens enjoy mocking the Western “snowflakes.”
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Less amusing is what this trend means for the U.S. as China no longer hides its enmity for America.
.
Ms. Zhang is a doctoral student in political science.
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And don’t be so sure that all China makes is cheap plastic toys…
China tested a hypersonic vehicle in July that was able to fire off its own missile over the South China Sea while traveling at five times the speed of sound, in a physics-defying display of technology that no other country has demonstrated, according to a new report.
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The Financial Times on Sunday revealed fresh details of Beijing’s hypersonic weapons test earlier this year, which saw a nuclear-capable hypersonic glide vehicle circle the globe in low orbit before landing.United States intelligence officials were reportedly alarmed by the test as it demonstrated a brand-new weapons capability that government scientists were struggling to understand, with one source earlier telling the newspaper the achievement appeared “to defy the laws of physics”.
Yeah. It’s something that the frenzied media mouthpiece never talks about.
China follows “whole-process people’s democracy”, which is based on a deeper understanding of democracy. China’s socialist whole-process people’s democracy can be understood as “from the people, to the people, with the people, for the people”.
Whole-process people’s democracy covers the whole process of election, decision-making, management and supervision, in order to meet people’s needs and solve people’s real problems. Only such a democracy can be real democracy.
Different from Western-style democracy, China practices real democracy, because it believes the “people are the masters of the country”.
In the West, people with little or no political experience can become national leaders by winning an election.
In contrast, Chinese leaders at all levels must have the experience of working at the grassroots level to be eligible for selection through many elections before becoming high-level officials.
“…However, yes, there’s definitely the problem of a mistake/miscalculation being made–that’s why the Russian’s have emphasized so much and often that any missile launch from a known dual-use launcher will be treated as if it’s a nuclear warhead, and have pleaded with the Outlaw US Empire/NATO not to emplace such launchers that close to Russia’s borders or in Europe/Asia at all.
Russia is far more rational in its analysis of a post-nuclear war future–Who wants to live in a future without Russia.
IMO, the world can be absolutely certain that if Russia or China–possibly even Iran–is attacked directly by the Outlaw US Empire/NATO or one of its surrogates, most of North America, all of Europe, and any place any Western Oligarch might attempt to hide will be utterly devastated, while those poor souls remaining will deal with the ensuing Nuclear Winter.”
Finally,
Whether or not the USA is sinking should not matter to you. What SHOULD matter is what you do with your life, right here, and right now. I say “Be the Rufus”. We do not know when the calling will come.
However, when it calls, you must take action. It will not make you wealthy, rich, famous, or attractive. But, it will make a difference when you are judged upon death. Be the Rufus. Make a difference. Help others. It’s our highest calling.
.
What? You might ask. And to that I will give examples of other people. People who are just like you who act as a Rufus in times of need. Dogs, as great as they are, sometimes need help. The smarter dogs know that trying to cross a street is dangerous. So what are they going to do? Well, good thing that there is a Rufus near by to help. Video
Notes
[1]Second Treatise on Civil Government (1690), chapter 8, section 95.
[2] And in fact, Aristotle’s later discussion of the “great-souled man” (Nicomachean Ethics IV.3) demonstrates conclusively that he believed in vast difference among men.
[3]The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, volume one, Cambridge University Press (1985), pp. 111-112.
[4] Indeed, explicit human equality exists nowhere in the Bible. Paul claims in Galatians (3:28) that “there is neither Jew nor Greek” under Jesus and that “we are all one in Christ Jesus.” But this only says that all are welcome into his nascent universalist church; it does not support the idea that all are equal. And more importantly, there are very good reasons for believing that Paul held to the most obnoxious form of Jewish supremacism, and thus did not believe in human equality in the least; see my essays “Christianity: The great Jewish hoax” and “Nietzsche and the origins of Christianity.”
[5] Though, as I have recently argued in “The problem with leftism,” both the Left and the Right are “fakes,” which explains why they both adhere to similar nonsense, and why they both supplicate to the Jewish Lobby.
[6] Actually, in America we don’t have wars anymore; we have “authorized uses of military force” or AUMFs. This is Congress’ cowardly way to kill others on behalf of their lobbyists and patrons without having to vote for an actual war.
[11] Of course, not all illegal immigrants are scum. But from everything we know, a very high proportion of them are from the lowest, least intelligent, and most criminal segments of humanity. And since virtually all of them are non-White, even the best will alter the nature of our traditionally White society.
[12] Though the actual number of illegals could be much higher than the presumed 11 million. One recent study argued that the true figure could be as high as 29 million.
[14] Yes, Black African slaves and Chinese coolies “built” portions of the early US. But they provided only the low-end brute labor, not the organizational or intellectual basis for the nation. To give them credit for building America would be akin to giving credit to the oxen and draft horses of the early pioneers.
[16] Elsewhere I have argued that Hitler’s National Socialism can also be a model going forward. His nationalism created an ethnic-based sense of unity and purpose that far exceeded mindless patriotism, and his socialism served as an antidote to unrestrained finance capitalism. There are many good lessons to be learned there. Interested readers should start with my recent edition of Mein Kampf, and with my newly-reworked edition of Alfred Rosenberg’s classic, The Myth of the 20th Century.
[17] Black males were granted the right to vote in 1866, and women (of all races) in 1920.
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.
You know, the anti-China media hysteria has reached new lows and levels of insanity that is truly difficult to fathom.
I mean, who in their right mind would believe this nonsense? Wait for it?
…Dumbed down Western media consumers.
I do tire of all the “War with China over Taiwan is imminent” bullshit.
It’s not.
Unfortunately, the Republicans are equally locked into an adversarial mode when it comes to Russia and China. Ex-UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, is now calling for economic war against Beijing. Some might conclude that everything in contemporary Washington comes down to a latter-day opera buffa in which an assortment of comic characters parade for a moment only to be replaced by the next bumbler sporting an equally ridiculous message.Russia aside, witness the recent wave of China bashing, begun by Barack Obama with his pivot to Asia, continued under Donald Trump with his China virus rants, and endorsed by Joe Biden’s team which persists in labeling Beijing as enemy number one.
No one steps back and considers even for a moment that the US is China’s largest market and that the US in turn relies on Chinese manufactured products to fill its Walmarts.
(Not true. The USA represents only 2% of Chinese exports. It was 11% in 2019 when COVID hit. The largest export market for Chinese products is Japan. Please get your info correct. -MM)
If ever two nations had good reasons not to go to war, it would be China and the United States, yet the US desire to confront the “Red Menace” to include defending Taiwan continues to drive policy.
-UNZ
Here’s another post that you simply will not find anywhere else on the Internet. American “news” has become a sewer of noise, horrible lies and distortions. And, you know, it’s going to get people killed. I tire of it all. To understand what is really going on you need to study the issues, and then you look for what is not being reported and stay alert for distractions.
I’ll drink to that.
A time for wine.
Anyways, a long story (made) short; I received an email from my brother who was petrified that World War III was going to explode “any minute” and that I had to flee China immediately.
Well, I wrote about this in another post HERE, and I told him that I was going to stay in China. After all, it is the safest location on the planet.
Anyways, my brother is so very convinced that Taiwan is it’s own singular nation and that it is in need of defending by America for “democracy”. And that because of the “evil regime” in China, and the “gross overreach”, and “saber rattling” of the horrible communists, that a war is soon to explode.
China is a “democracy” for Pete’s sake! (Head slap!)
Pretty strange for a certified “tax protestor”, who had his passport seized by Uncle Sam to talk about “freedom” and “liberty” when he himself is restricted in travel due to not having a vaccination. But then again, that’s the USA for you.
All talk, no substance. Or, as we used to say in Texas; “All hat. No cattle”.
Well, this bullshit about Taiwan being an “independent” nation is simply not true, and I am going to explain why.
What is the relationship between Taiwan and China?
History need not be difficult to understand, but you do need to know the basics. Here’s my simplistic abridged version. And YES, I do know that I have omitted a lot of details…
History is actually interesting.
Between 1945 and 1949, China experienced a massive civil war. It was more massive than the American Civil War, and many, many people died.
Eventually, towards the Fall of 1949, the Communists under Mao Zedong won the war. They set up their capital in Beijing, and on 1 October 1949 declared the establishment of the People’s Republic of China.
The losers; the “Chinese Nationalists” fled the Chinese mainland.
They looted all the museums, and using lorries, trucks, and other conveyances hauled their booty to the coasts where they loaded them on boats. The major staging area was in the Xiamen coastal region. As the laden boats began to depart, the communists began shelling the vessels and so the retreating rebels landed on the island of Taiwan and fortified themselves in.
They had no where else to go. They spent years fighting the Japanese, and they couldn’t go there. Korea was too risky, as the Chinese communists had well secured that area, and heading south towards the South China Sea was the only remaining option.
So they hunkered down, and fortified their positions and made Taiwan their base of resistance to the Chinese mainland. Since that time, these rebels have declared themselves to be the “true” heir to the Chinese nation, and they have enlisted help from the United States to conduct “color revolutions” and other black operations in an attempt to regain their power back.
This effort continues to this day.
Over the last 70 years
The rebels in Taiwan, with all the looted gold and valuables, left the mainland destitute, poor and agrarian.
In the tiny Taiwan island, they used their money to construct huge enormous palaces for themselves and their families, and then used the rest of the loot to set up business as factories that would cater to the West.
And they were successful.
Over the decades “Made in Taiwan” dominated much of the world’s manufacturing concerns.
While mainland China had to work hard, step by step to become the economic powerhouse that it is today. They went from sub-zero to the very top and the very best.
It only took them 70 years.
Today, we see an eclipsing of economic power between Taiwan and China, and the oligarchy that rules Taiwan is literally scared shitless.
For the wrath of China will not be kind to them.
So they have been funding, in terms of billions of dollars, the American Senate, and American neocons, to get American intervention regarding mainland China. And the greedy, psychopathic American leadership are just lapping it all up. Yum!
The Hate China narrative, paid for by Taiwanese billionaires.
Many things has occurred over the last 70 years, but one thing is certain, China will once again be unified as one nation. Both Taiwan, and mainland China expect it.
Is Taiwan and China separate nations?
No.
China says that they are the same nation.
Taiwan says that they are the same nation.
The United Nations (UN) says that they are the same nation.
All Taiwanese citizens have Chinese residency. This is something that the American media NEVER reports.
The only nation that doesn’t accept the one-China solution is the United States. Which is thanks to the many billions of dollars that the Taiwanese billionaires have been throwing at Washington DC over the last few decades.
Now the current ruling “political party” in Taiwan is pushing for a “two nation” solution, and want the United States to force this situation into being.
Which, you know, seems to be a severe death wish, and delusions of dying in a full scale nuclear holocaust.
Haven’t they seen what America looks like today?
I guess not. It’s “exceptional” don’t you know!
Size Comparisons
I shouldn’t need to do this, but since most Americans are dumbed down to the knowledge of a retarded snail, I am afraid that I have to speak in pre-school terms to get the message across.
Since, China and the United States are roughly the same size. You can compare how big Taiwan is relatively. Taiwan is roughly the size of Rhode Island comparatively.
Size of Rhode Island shown on a map of the United States.
In case you don’t believe me, here’s a map of China. Taiwan is pretty small.
Map of China showing Taiwan.
Taiwan is a tiny, tiny island that sits right off the coast of China. It has been part of China for thousands of years, and still is recognized as part of China. And all the millions of dollars in saying otherwise will not change that fact.
Why is Taiwan important to the United States?
According to all the literature on the subject, all American battle plans against China originate from a fortified staging area inside of Taiwan.
American war-mongering neocon “wet dream” plan on “containing” China.
Thus it is critically important for the United States to place enormous quantities of war and military munitions and equipment on Taiwan in preparation for a landing inside of China.
Obviously this is myopic, short sighted and stupid.
China would have Chicago, New York, San Francisco, and Houston in radioactive ruins long before the first landing wave touches the shoreline. And if you think that China will allow Taiwan to have active American military bases there, you are delusional.
Crazy.
Idiotic.
Insanely delusional. Foolhardy idiotic.
Mind-numbingly stupid.
A handful of technical advisors is one thing, but a full scale military presence is a war-move.
WAR
INSTIGATOR
But I have covered all the actual and real reasons why all the fuss is over Taiwan right now. It’s the billionaire oligarchy inside of Taiwan that want something done. And they are in a state of panic.
Well, if you listen to the bullshit blaring American media microphone, war is imminent. But you know, that’s just a song for the Americans to dance to. Hype up war. Create a context and then strike preemptively on some kind of false-flag bullshit excuse.
It’s the American way, don’t you know.
Provoke China to fight. And then America “plays China like a fiddle”.
Will China attack Taiwan?
It can.
It certainly has the ability. But it won’t. China is far smarter than that. It will do so if the “red lines” are crossed. They are not crossed, so China will do nothing.
Countercurrents against peaceful reunification must be curbed. General Secretary Xi Jinping stated categorically that nothing can change the fact that people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait are Chinese with the same national identity, and nothing can stop the trend toward reunification of the Chinese nation.
Taiwan independence goes against this unstoppable trend and will eventually be crushed by the wheels of history.
Chinese must not fight against Chinese, and for this purpose we have made the greatest efforts for peaceful reunification with the utmost sincerity.
However, we do not renounce the use of force, and we reserve the option of taking all necessary measures to prepare for possible interference by external forces and separatist activities by a handful of "Taiwan independence" separatists.
Such measures would certainly not be targeted at the people of Taiwan.
-QStheory
Another video of some of the Chinese military systems. video.
Oh, and by the way, China is decades ahead of the USA in laser beam weapon systems
I’ll bet you didn’t know that. Well, you know, any real good things about China are suppressed. You probably think that all of China is polluted, filthy full of bat eating, floor spitting, tiny brown people riding bikes, huh? video.
There’s a lot of things in play right now. And I am going to do you all a favor and simplify things for you all.
An overview of China Military
Well, since no one is going to do this, I will. There’s a two minute overview of just how formidable the Chinese military is right now. It’s a great little short video, and if you are still thinking that China can be attacked, or that China is just some bunch of untrained peasants with AK47 clones, you are sadly, and dangerously mistaken. The PLA will attack and be very, very nasty about it. You haven’t seen shit yet. DO NOT POKE THE PANDA. video.
And what China can do to Taiwan, right now!
Just a reminder on how close Taiwan is to the mainland. Just in case you didn’t get that fact while listening to CNN, FOX “news” or the Drudge Report. Check out what China can do to Taiwan right now. video. This can happen from inside of mainland China to the tiny, tiny island of Taiwan.
Watch the video.
Learn a thing or two.
Because China can do what is shown on this video without even putting a foot on the ground. China just pressed a button, and all of Taiwan is on fire. Watch and Learn. video.
What to expect… the nightmare scenario.
This is what would happen if the billionaires get their way…
Russia and China are tired of the buildup to war, and preemptively strike America with a bone-crushing nuclear salvo, while simultaneously destroying all naval carrier groups, boomer subs, and major Naval bases. Additionally, Australia suffers massive destruction, as does Japan and Korea.
Massive, in that the top ten cities of Japan, and Australia are all radioactive rubble.
American command centers are all black blank screens all comms are down. Satellites malfunction, or fall out of orbit. Alt communication goes black.
The ass-kissing diversity officers, and the trans-gen military leadership start freaking out in the command bunkers and they desperately try to warn the American leadership to fly to safety, but before they can pick up a cellphone, they themselves are gone in a shooch! of bright light and dust.
The largest city surviving is Picayune Louisiana.
But, you know it's tough, as they are trying to cope with a massive flood of armed, ethnic-urban-youth, radioactive refugees streaming out from the blackened remains of smoldering New Orleans. Big thick oily black clouds fill the air with soot.
The United States government collapses. It's not hard. Long in coming. But with Washington DC a water filled crater, I mean, what are you gonna do?
All American supply lines completely collapse. Hordes of hungry starving urban ethnic youth stream into the suburbs. They raid the "McMansions", the small towns, and the communities, and they take over all of the highways and transport routes. Oh, sure there's a few "freedom patriots" that shoot back.
Not many.
It's "every man for himself".
Many die, overwhelmed by the millions of angry, hungry, pissed off hordes. People who hate. Hate. Hate. HATE.
Balkanized battles are common. White people are hung screaming and crying from the top of McDonald's "golden arches" signs. Asians are tied to chairs inside of Starbucks and set on fire. Mexicans are attacked, but they shoot back, and the "good ol' boys" try to hop into their trucks to join the fray, but they are immobilized as an EMP burst fried all automotive electronics.
The first major storm of Winter hits.
All the homes freeze as there isn't any heat, and all the pipe crack and break as CPVC isn't as strong as cast iron. To make matters worse, they needed secondary booster shots of the mRNA Vaxx are not available. People start dying of the common cold. Many nine year olds die from heart attacks.
A sniffle becomes the mark of the plague.
Starvation, sickness, gunshot wounds, and poor sanitary conditions prevail.
The most frustrated transgens start to freak out as their hormones start altering, and their sex-change medicine is no longer available to them. They become enraged angry maniacs and the cities become true horror scenes.
In the midst of all this turmoil, the second American civil war starts. Texas, and California break away to become their own nations. Others follow.
Virginia organizes.
Armed enclaves set up in Georgia.
Mississippi monitors all road traffic with lethal consequence. Many a dead person sways in the breeze.
Snipers slow all movement in the desert to a standstill.
And you have all those guns in the hands of all those civilians shooting everyone. Organized State armies, using all those fancy tanks and high tech weapons developed by the military-industrial union turn on the people and serve their own needs. National guard patrol the major cities, but are overwhelmed by organized armed rebellion.
Killings, rapes, torture, and looting are commonplace.
The interim federal government in exile flies to New Zealand and tries to coordinate control over the collapsed United States out of a survivalist bunker, but is unsuccessful. They try to coordinate but are unsuccessful. They too start to worry as their own supplies of drugs and sustaining medication are quickly being depleted.
Eventually, they surrender, and the United States is carved up into tiny, tiny fiefdoms.
The rest of the world moves on.
America? What's an america?
North America is listed as a quarantine zone, and is isolated from the rest of the world. Millions die. The survivors become hardier, but no longer speak English. The Southern "new" nations speak Spanish, and the rest have their own various regional accents. With ghetto ubonics betting the most common.
Most white, Asian, and Spanish Americans north of the Mason-Dixon line are killed in mass.
Fifty years later, some of those fiefdoms are recognized as independent countries and are permitted to attend the UN meetings in "observer" status.
Pretty nasty, huh?
You bet.
I hope that I frightened you. It’s not a pretty sight. I think we have to be reminded that the things that we do have consequences, and we must always hope for the best, but plan for the worst.
What’s more than likely is this…
In Taiwan, a number of the hard-core separatist nationalists start dying off of old age, coronavirus, and car accidents.
Rapprochements by the traditionalist factions inside of Taiwan and the Chinese mainland government come to a workable solution for reunification.
The United States military is kicked out of Taiwan, as all the USA weapons systems that they have (billions and billions of dollars worth) are boxed up and shipped off to Iran as a "good will" gesture.
The Iranians welcome the many shipments of high end fighter jets, missiles, and equipment.
The United States has a fit. News media screams! And the rest of the world continue as if nothing has happened.
A new American election looms on the horizon.
The candidates scream to do "something" about China, and the dumbed down apathetic sheeple go eat their McFat burgers and slurp their mega-Coka sodas.
All continues in the land of the dumb, fat, and ignorant.
Anyways, keep in mind that what you see on the “news” is for regional consumption. The rest of the world doesn’t really care.
Remember. China has friends.
Something that is somehow omitted in all the hate – hate – hate dialog flooding the media. China has friends, and the “West” is increasingly becoming more and more isolated every day.
China has friends.
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning 2. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
Important note: Image above is NOT of the USS Connecticut. It is of the USS San Francisco that rammed into an undersea mountain in 2005.
Let’s get right to the point.
The official American story is that the USS Connecticut rammed into an unmarked undersea mountain.
Since the Navy revealed this week that the fast-attack submarine Connecticut struck an undersea mountain in early October while operating in the South China Sea, one question springs to mind: how could this happen?How could a $3 billion Seawolf-class boat, considered one of the Navy’s most formidable and advanced, crash into an undersea landmass?-NavyTimes
Which is pretty strange as the locations of all undersea mountains has been well mapped for decades. You can see them on Google Earth for goodness sakes!
Bathymetric map of the South China sea.
It’s a very questionable conclusion.
And you know, what makes it even more questionable is that the United States navy has been flying their radiation detection aircraft all over where the USS Connecticut was running operations. Which is abnormal.
Radiation detection aircraft flight path…
Searching for something.
But then if you couple the United States silence to the Chinese inquiries as to whether or not nuclear payloads, equipment, and fissionable materials entered Chinese waters.
There are absolutely zero answers from the United States government to very serious questions asked by China.
The official Chinese story is something else. Here we will tell the Chinese side of the story.
Believe it or not. It’s up to you.
Here’s another post that you simply will not find anywhere else on the Internet. And, you know, I tire of my own sluggishness in trying to understand the great failure of the American “free media”.
Even I realize that there is no such thing as actual “news” in the West, but really guys it’s not too FUCKING DIFFICULT.
Beware of any “news” that you WANT to believe.
Look for what IS NOT being reported in the mainstream or conservative media.
Take particular note when the official narrative is absurd.
Be especially cautious of “seeded“ narratives that you get in emails, or in alternative websites.
That being said, let’s dive in…
The Seawolf class overview
Seawolf
From my email 17NOV21
I had a little message from one of my friends regarding the Connecticut incident. FYI, it seems the following message was approved by Beijing so I will just tack it on here.
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It has been translated from Chinese, with some clarifications to the machine translations by MM.
…
The Chinese military authorizes the disclosure of the truth about the accident of the Seawolf class nuclear submarine on the USS Connecticut.
16 November 2021
How the Chinese People’s Liberation Army hunted and sunk the (state of the art) USS Connecticut Seawolf-class attack nuclear submarine in the South China Sea.
-October 2-
The British aircraft carrier Queen Elizabeth, the American aircraft carrier Nimitz, the American aircraft carrier Roosevelt, and the Japanese aircraft carrier Izumo entered Chinese waters. It dis so with 17 other warships. They hailed from the United States, Britain, Japan, the Netherlands, Canada and Australia. This 4 aircraft carrier armada represented the Western power of six nations.
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The South China Sea armada begins to conduct large-scale military exercises against China. This was done off the Chinese coast and within Chinese territorial waters.
.
Trying to push China into a war.
-October 2 to 4-
The People’s Liberation Army dispatched a large number of military aircraft to the South China Sea to conduct simulated attack exercises against these uninvited warships.
.
The armada came from six countries. they were the United States, Britain, Japan, Holland, Canada and Australia. These nations all participated in conducting simulated invasions, attacks, and destruction of China, the Chinese nation, and Chinese sea lanes.
.
Chinese J-20 aircraft.
-October 2-
China’s Guanlan Marine Science Guard observed the approximate position and depth of the USS Connnecticut Seawolf class nuclear submarine when it entered the South China Sea.
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It followed it as it approached the South China Sea, and conducted operations South of Taiwan. It then observed it creep up the coast and operated near the Chinese shoreline and conduct surreptitious and illegal operations (inside of Chinese territorial waters as defined by the UN) of an unknown nature.
.
The Guanlan satellite sent the data to the Super Measurement Center in Jinan to estimate the position of the Connecticut.
.
Guanlan satellite.
-China’s special detection device captured the ultra-low frequency sonar from the bow of the Connecticut spherical boat and transmitted the data to the Sonar Analysis Center in Shanghai to accurately locate the position and depth of the Connecticut. It was operating at 1500 meters [?] making and conducting obvious operations and drills inside of the Chinese coastline.
-The Type 927 underwater acoustic detection ship stationed on Yongshou Island and the anti-submarine helicopter stationed on Yongxing Island are dispatched for detection.
.
Type 927 underwater acoustic detection ship.
-The Yun-8 military plane took off from the Hainan Air Force Base and carried out a “sonic bomb” on the Connecticut.
.
This technology (a “sonic bomb”) causes the submarine’s personnel to be extremely uncomfortable due to the sonic shock. It does not injure or kill anyone. It simply makes all their pain receptors ignite on their bodies.
I am told it feels like being burned alive while frenzied hordes of cocaine-addicted rats gnaw at your eyes, gonads and fingers. And insects borrow deep inside your skin, biting, chewing and clawing all over your body. -MM
.
This terror and discomfort forced the submarine to try to escape from the targeting cone of effect.
.
Yun-8 military plane.
-While it was trying to exit the cone of effect, the AI controlled robotic Chinese HSU001 unmanned submarine slipped silently to the nuclear submarine Connecticut. Where it attached itself to the bow of the ship.
.
This was an intentional placement. This locations was as far away as possible from the nuclear power plant for a close local directed-explosion attack.
.
It was then ignited, and ended up causing serious damage to the bow of the boat and a complete loss of sonar sensing ability.
Translation confusion. I do not know if it placed weapons charges, or if the entire robot detonated itself. -MM
.
The navigation capabilities and the nuclear power plants were not affected, preventing nuclear leaks from polluting the fishing waters off the Chinese coast.
.
Chinese HSU001 unmanned submarine.
-The Connecticut nuclear submarine, which lost its underwater submarine capability, was forced to float up and surrender. The Chinese military forced the submarine to float up and surrender.
.
As the submarine broke the surface, it was met with Chinese PLA Naval vessels who took no overt action.
.
Due to the close surveillance of the navy and air force of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, the military aircraft and ships from the six countries of the United States, Japan, Britain, Australia, Holland, and Canada dared not come to rescue the submarine during the South China Sea exercise.
.
If the Allied American force were to engage, world war III would become a reality.
.
The submarine was “escorted” by the Chinese Navy and Air Force while in the South China Sea and the submarine was directed to follow the ships to docking facilities on the Chinese mainland.
Translation misunderstanding. It is unknown if the damaged submarine was actually escorted by the Naval Vessels, or if it then immediately submerged when given the opportunity. -MM
.
Where it then again submerged. Further contact with the submarine was then lost.
-October 7th-
The United States announced the Connecticut accident by the United States.
-October 7-
The Chinese Foreign Ministry frantically questioned the ins and outs of the USS Connecticut incident to the Biden administration, but did not obtain any answers or explanations.
-October 22-
The Chinese monitoring system detected a US nuclear submarine entering the South China Sea again near Huangyan Island.
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Damaged submarine surfaces.
A final update by the source
The PLAN would be messing around with USN at this point.
1500 meter depth misinfo probably planted deliberately to taunt them because if the Drone sub did find the Connecticut, they definitely knew the actual depth it was running.
From the questions subsequently posed by the Chinese, it does seem they knew there was no nuclear leak.
China is playing around but It's like a cat with a mouse it caught.
The whole thing has Donald Cook vibes. Morale can't be good atm.
Added youtu.be link. You might like. https://youtu.be/VeJLwUfLcEU.
These pictures are all over the internet and I snagged one for use here.
Unfortunately the damage to the seawolf is not well photographed anywhere that I could find. Obviously the damage is a secure matter and the USN will not disseminate any pictures of it. Which is exactly what you would do to prevent an enemy from ascertaining knowledge on how effective their weapons systems were against you.
You do not do that with undersea mountain collisions. As the hundreds of USN released photos attest to. In previous mountain collisions, the USN was quick in the dissemination of information.
All photos depicting “combat damage” are classified as secret.
All photos depicting “accidental damage” are classified as “confidential” and released as the USN permits.
By all indications the damage to the seawolf is much more substantive than what everyone is led to believe. It is far more extensive than the collision damage indicated in the article featured image photo above.
Bow of a seawolf…
Bow of a seawolf class submarine.
A Los Angeles submarine bow…
The bow of a Los Angeles submarine bow.
This is the only photo that I have been able to obtain on the actual submarine in drydock and the damage involved. This is from THE DRIVE.
You can clearly see that the entire bow of the submarine is GONE. This fact alone shows that the damage is far more substantive than what is illustrated in the collision photo used as the header above.
Additionally, please note the orange ventilation tube, and the three access points where the tubes pump air into the front bow of the ship..
It appears that the entire front of the submarine forward of the conning tower is seeping water. And thus, needs to be pressurized to keep the water out.
This implies hull breaches at numerous points in the front one third of the submarine. This is NOT damage indicative of a forward collision. It is indicative of an explosion.
Seawolf sub in drydock.
From the photos it appears that the entire bow sonar array is GONE.
This is not a crushed impact. The array does not disintegrate upon collision. Some event completely eviscerated the entire front of the bow. Then punctured the hull in numerous points up to the conning tower.
Air is being pumped into the entire weapon storage and handling area aft of the forward navigation section.
Conclusions
Interesting version of events.
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This certainly makes far more sense that “accidentally” hit an “unmarked mountain”. But whether or not it is actually true is unknown and will stay that way forever.
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So, I do not know how true it is. We must always be aware of propaganda consisting of what we want to believe. The aspects of this particular narrative that makes sense is that it is in alignment with current Chinese technology and military doctrine.
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What I DO KNOW, is that right after the damage to the submarine was ascertained, and the crew debriefed, a close family friend of ours who is “connected” with the USN at a high level chatted with my brother. (A man who had gone “X-ray” from me for the last year or so) And contacted me telling me to leave China immediately that there would be a massive dangerous war and he couldn’t help me. I wrote about this elsewhere.
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This event train, along with the [1] quick rearming and [2] secret payload installation on numerous submarines at that time, fits well with this Chinese narrative. And not with the “crashed into a mountain” narrative.
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That all being said, it is obvious that the Chinese do not want radioactive waters near the Chinese coast, so they only damaged the sub, not sunk it completely. For after all it is a nuclear sub carrying nuclear torpedoes. But we cannot expect this behavior and “safety rules” to continue with the pushing by the United States towards war. This is an aspect of war that I hadn’t thought about previously, but makes complete sense. This is why New Zealand absolutely refuses any nuclear vessels in and near it’s waters.
Yet nothing else about this incident is available anywhere. Very curious. Very, very curious. I presume there is video footage of the sub surfacing and it’s surrender. The PLA Navy seem to be toying around with the US navy like a cat would with a mouse. Seeing this video footage would greatly substantiate this narrative, but as in all things Chinese PLA, access and dissemination are tightly controlled.
It’s difficult for me to accept the American narrative that the submarine not only collided with an uncharted mountain, but that the Chinese just stood by and did nothing while a four aircraft carrier armada conducted missile drills simulating an attack on China. There are NO uncharted undersea mountains in the South China Sea. Hasn’t anyone watched the 1980’s Tom Clancy movie “Red October”? The entire ocean has been mapped.
It is also difficult for me to believe that the Chinese with all their advances and lead in military technology are thwarted by the American Navy. It just doesn’t stand up to the “sniff test”. At least not to us “technology wonks“. The Chinese have surpassed the United States military in a number of very new and novel technologies and the USA will take decades trying to counter them.
Overall, the Chinese seemed to intentionally want to disable the submarine, force it to surface, and then acquire it in a fully functional state. Whether this is for Geo-political purposes, or to reverse engineer it is unknown. My guess is the later, as they really don’t give a rat’s ass what anyone else thinks. When your reputation is shit, who cares if someone says something bad about you.
True or not, you can rest assured that this release of this information would have been war gamed and factored into the AI computations that will figure predominantly in the events of the future. The Chinese do not play around. They are a very serious nation, run on merit, and lead with capable leaders.
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If the provocations continue, we can expect China to sink the submarines completely. The impression that I have is that they are “being gentle” at this moment in time. After all, they could have sunk the 3 billion 6 billion dollar nuclear submarine and killed the entire crew of 140 seamen. It is a top of the line, best of the best, American “prize” of the fleet. But they did not.
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This particular Seawolf type of submarine is an offensive weapon that is designed to sneak into enemy waters, and destroy ships, shipping, and facilities. The fact that it was tracked inside Chinese territorial waters clearly indicated it’s intentions. Aside from a violation of the national sovereignty of China, it was a violation of the UN code of behaviors in the South China Sea. Sinking the ship off the Coast of China would prove to the world that the USA is a dangerous aggressor, but that would not matter, as World War III would have been ignited.
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All in all, it took a remarkable amount of restraint not to completely sink the submarine and kill all the crew. The Chinese played this incident adroitly. They [1] demonstrated their abilities and capabilities for the world to see, and [2] showed that they have restraint. They [3] indicated that they desire peace and not war.
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It is unfortunate that the United States cannot take these subtle hints at face value. The American government leadership tend to over-estimate their abilities, and severely under-estimate the abilities of their foes.
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This was a warning. There will NOT be a second one.
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Let’s see what happens next.
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Given the idiots that run the United States today, I fully expect the United States government to “double down” and send their ships and submarines into harms way knowing full well that they risk the lives of all involved. I cannot see that it would matter inside the Washington DC beltway.
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Interesting read never the less.
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.
This article addresses the disconnect from reality that many American readers of media seem to have regarding China. They are correct, a war is going to happen. the USA is at a fever pitch right now and very desirous of it. But what I say here is be VERY careful of what you wish for. You might not be able to handle the result.
Important note. To truly get the most out of this article, you MUST watch these short (15 second to 1 minute) video clips. Watch. Learn. Understand. Also note that a number of the videos are banned in the United States. So, maybe you might have to destroy your computer after watching the videos. LOL.
Ok. Brace yourself. I’m telling you all what you are dealing with, and what the real situation actually is. You can agree or disagree. Remember, knowledge is a tool. It is up to you to use it or not.
How this came about…
Today I received my second email from my brother. It was a sad and disturbing letter. Again, he pleaded for me to leave China and return back to the United States “where it will be safe”.
But you know, that is not going to happen. I love China.
I love everything about China, and I have family that I love. I have Chinese friends that I cherish and love dearly. I have homes, businesses, and a lifestyle that I am not going to leave. I love the culture in China. I love the food. I love the work relationships, and I even love stinky tofu.
Once you live in China and see (with your own experiences) how wonderful it is, you will never go back to the cesspool that the United States has become.
I am also retired. I no longer am involved in the world of black operations, top secret SAP programs, spooky stuff, and all that. I am retired. I retired to a calm place, a clean place; a good place. I retired to Mayberry RFD. If you would like to know what it is like here in China.
Never the less, all of the “news” out of the United States is war-war-war-war-WAR! and I have lived long enough inside of America to know what is next. It’s clear and plain as the nose on my face.
I’ve seen this all before. Not just as an American citizen reading the “news”, but also as one of those people who “make things happen”. I know precisely what is going on, and why.
So my email, from my brother, was disturbing. He knows who I am and what I did. Yet, he regurgitated the hate-narrative, pro-war narrative, when he should know better.
In it, he reiterated that I leave China. That it is not safe. And that the bellicose saber rattling, and hostile actions by the evil communists will be stopped by the incredible might of the massive American military forces. His words. Not mine.
He went on and on about how China didn’t have a chance, and that while China might have a few hundred nuclear warheads, that is nothing to the 6,500 nuclear weapons that America has.
He further elaborated that he KNOWS (we have mutual boyhood friends in high level military operations) that traps have been sprung; safeties are off, and it’s just a matter of time… and not long either… when China will finally be punished for all of it’s evil misdeeds.
He said that I am in great danger.
He said that China will be “hit hard” and he KNOWS that China will stand alone and take the most incredible beating ever seen by man. He said that every nation either despises China or is afraid of it, but when the “call goes out” the entire rest of the world will swarm to kick China into a beaten pulp.
He proudly talked about how America has very strong nuclear capabilities and that the generals are not afraid to use them. New orders have been issued, and “everyone knows” that there will be a hot kinetic war soon.
He said that the tiny independent nation of Taiwan (?) has some “tricks up it’s sleeve” and that the USA and China has been at war for years now and I should see the “writing on the wall” and recognize that the time to leave my “third world shit-hole” is fast coming to an end. There is only a short “window of opportunity” remaining and that I should take it.
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He said other things also, but…
But this really gets to me.
He knows nothing. And I find his ignorance of what China is astoundingly insulting. And he’s a smart man. I an only just imagine what others might say; those that only get their information from the government controlled “news” media.
China is NOT what is portrayed. He should know better as he has seem my lifestyle; my family, and what it is like. Yet, for some odd reason, he thinks that it is terminally dingy, grey skies, and full of evil selfish people. Jeeze! It isn’t. This is what China actually is. VIDEO.
Video
But he has provided me with some critical Intel about what Americans think. And it is what I have been saying all along. I spent 40 years of my life in the United States and 20 in China. I know how it works.
America is on a “war footing”.
Americans are desirous of a nice solid hot war, and they will get it.
The “ball is rolling” and it cannot be stopped.
That this long war will be intended to be in the far-away South China Sea.
The war will enjoy the support of a vast majority of Americans who all now despise all Chinese.
He argued that it’s only a matter or time that China will make a mistake, and when it does, “all Hell will break loose“.
And that China doesn’t have a chance.
Key points are omitted by all those wanting war
You know, each and every time I come across these arguments, the “elephant in the room” is always omitted. And it’s funny and odd. Very important points are ignored as if they are meaningless. And when I bring up these points, they are ignored. And what is amazing is that even the most intelligent people in the United States are falling for this narrative.
These points are always left out and ignored. What points you might ask?
How about, for starters…
It will be a war inside of America. Any war with China will be on American soil, and personal. It will not be off in a far away South China Sea.
Let that point sink in. Not far away. But will hit “home”. China will make FUCKING SURE that America feels what it is like to be attacked. This is a fact. Deal with it.
Taiwan is not an “independent” nation. Both Taiwan and Mainland China mutually agree that there is only one China. Not two separate nations.
Let that point register. Taiwan is NOT a separate nation. The UN doesn’t think so. China doesn’t think so, and even Taiwan doesn’t think so. But for some crazy insane reason, the United States thinks so.
For those of you who are still not convinced, here’s the President of the United States telling you that Taiwan is China. That China owns Taiwan.
A war against all of Asia. Russia and China are military allies and will fight together.
Like I said, this is something NO ONE is talking about. They just gloss over it as if it is unimportant.
China is dangerous. China is a merit driven society that is very smart.
America is an oligarchy ruled military empire that is in a free-fall decline right now. And China is a nation of merit where everyone starting at six years old gets military training.
Costly does not equate to best. American weapons and personnel relies too much on systems that are easily compromised.
Now, be advised, that there is no question that there will be massive destruction and casualties all over the world. China will take some enormous losses, and some of the beautiful cities will be erased from the earth. I lament that.
But obviously, thinking that America will be “safe” just shows how ignorant and delusional these people are. The United States will be the LAST place you would want to be when the missiles start flying.
As I wrote in my other postings, China and Russia use AI controlled swarm nukes in shotgun saturation’s. They just don’t hit strategic targets, they glass over entire regions. They are very messy with their weapons.
America would be the worst place to be.
For all sorts of reasons.
General points of understanding
Here’s some general points that I want to underline, and then I follow up with the American (and Brit and Australian) beliefs and compare that to what is actually going on.
So, with all this in mind, check out some key points.
Point #1 – Chinese leadership
Capable. Tough. Pragmatic. Peaceful, but don’t fuck with them.
American Disinfo:
Xi Peng is a tyrant, who runs a mafia-like organization out of Beijing. He and his cronies are despised, and once they are killed off, China would collapse.
The disinfo has saturated the dialog.
The truth is that the Chinese leadership is there through merit and hard work, and are supported by an amazing group of other merit driven experts. There are no “diversity hires” here. No positions through Nepotism. No LGBT, or quota driven “experts”. No political appointees. No back-room dealings with union organizers, community organizations or religious figures. They got to power through merit and sacrifice.
These people are all carefully vetted, talented, aggressive, and strategic.
They are savvy and very well attuned to the problems of the world. They will make hard and tough decisions and they will make the right ones, and they will follow through on those decisions without politics or fear.
Chinese leadership.
Were a war to occur, it would be a battle of wits between the global leadership.
If you believe that Tom Cotton, Mike Pompeo, or Joe Biden can out maneuver the Chinese on strategy, then you are wholly delusional.
Point #2 – Chinese Manufacturing
Elaborate, and extensive. Cutting edge technology making the latest in gadgets and devices. Now supplies Germany, Japan and Korea with all their gadgets.
American Disinfo:
China only makes cheap, inexpensive junk. They cannot innovate, and at best operate using slave, and child labor in 19th century sweatshops.
There is this ongoing theme in the American (and Western) “news” media that China only makes “junk” and that if America stopped buying things from China, all of China would collapse. It permeates all American media. Which is Made in China means junk.
There’s also another deception; which is that America is the largest customer of Chinese made products, and that if the USA stops sourcing from China, China would collapse.
It’s not even remotely true.
In 2018, American products accounted for just under 1`1% of all Chinese exports.
Today, in late 2021, the number is actually around 2%.
China hasn’t collapsed.
If you were to really simplify all the issues regarding this singular point you would see that much of what China makes is shipped to other nations for resale under different names. Those high end German cameras are all made in China. They are shipped to Germany. But in boxes and proudly says “Made in Germany” on the box. Then Germany sells those cameras to the United States who mistakenly believe that they are buying a German manufactured product.
I know because I am active in that industry. That’s the way it is done.
This is the same with Korea, Japan, and Australia as well. Most of the real cheap stuff has been off-shored to much poorer nations so that the retailers can maintain their profit margins.
For shits and giggles, here’s a comparison between the US Spacestation and the Chinese spacestation. VIDEO here.
Video
Now, let’s pause and consider two issues were a war to erupt.
All exports of goods out of China would end. Which thus means that the export of all products would thus completely end.
China would continue to manufacture things, for Chinese use. Whether rubber duckies, or nuclear warheads. And they would do so with ruthless precision, speed and quality.
The United States, would be unable to complete because most of the industrial parks all over the nation don’t make things. They are just nice office buildings that house accountants, lawyers, HR, diversity officers, and some supply line experts.
Those that exist have large boxy pole-frame buildings that house the warehouses from the items obtained from overseas, but the actual floor and manufacturing lines are not present. You can identify those structures by rectangle buildings with many windows for lighting.
American industrial park. Many warehouses. Not one single assembly factory. You can see the office building and all the warehouses, but nothing is physically being made here in this “factory”.
Look at an aerial view of a typical American “Industrial park”. Where’s the rail lines, the loading bays and the warehouses to store the manufactured products at? These are warehouse distribution points.
Not manufacturing facilities.
Were a war to occur, America would soon run out of tangible things. Not just war material, but also the things that the American citizenry have come to expect in their life.
Like medicine. Like automotive computers. Like tools. Like appliances.
Not China. They make things and have an enormous infrastructure to support industry. Video here.
Video
Point #3 – Chinese Weapons systems
Chinese weapons systems are state of the art, available in massive quantities, operated by motivated and skilled soldiers that are fighting for the right to exist.
American Disinfo:
China's military consists of conscripts using cheaply made soviet-era copies, and supplemented with antiquated former Soviet Union equipment.
The Shenyang FC/J-31 and the Chengdu J-20 of the top line Chinese aircraft in use today.
I often see articles (in the Western press) praising the great high technology systems of the grand American military. And their specifications are truly spectacular. It seems like every plane is a “race car”, every device has the latest in graphical interface and exotic technology.
But they all need to be based, repaired and serviced.
When supply lines break down, many of these great systems are simply junk. Aside from the fact that no matter how great a plane is, it does need to land. And if you are fighting China, there will not be any place to land.
The Chinese have perfected some very advanced systems that are decades ahead of anything that America has. Do not be so sure that invading China would be another Iraq. It will not be.
Point #4 – Chinese Size
China is a huge nation, with an enormous population. In fact there are more Chinese that speak English (as a second language) than Americans in the entire world.
American Disinfo:
China is like Bangladesh or India, only much larger.
Couple that with the absolute ignorance of Americans. They have no idea about this. Or much as anything else for that matter.
Most Americans are clueless about geography. I don’t mean just a little bit ignorant, I mean absolutely and positively ignorant. Check out this VIDEO to show you what I am talking about…
Clueless video.
Pretty astounding, huh?
True America…
1. *AT&T fired President John Walter after nine months, saying he lacked intellectual leadership. He received a $26 million severance package. Perhaps it's not Walter who's lacking the intelligence
2. *WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM OUR FRIENDS: Police in Oakland, CA spent two hours attempting to subdue a gunman who had barricaded himself inside his home. After firing ten tear gas canisters, officers discovered that the man was standing beside them in the police line, shouting, 'Please come out and give yourself up.'
3. *WHAT WAS PLAN B? An Illinois man, pretending to have a gun, kidnapped a motorist and forced him to drive to two different automated teller machines, wherein the kidnapper proceeded to withdraw money from his own bank accounts.
4. *THE GETAWAY! A man walked into a Topeka, Kansas Kwik Stop and asked for all the money in the cash drawer. Apparently, the take was too small, so he tied up the store clerk and worked the counter himself for three hours until police showed up and grabbed him.
5. *DID I SAY THAT? Police in Los Angeles had good luck with a robbery suspect who just couldn't control himself during a lineup. When detectives asked each man in the lineup to repeat the words: 'Give me all your money or I'll shoot', the man shouted, 'that's not what I said!'
6. *ARE WE COMMUNICATING? A man spoke frantically into the phone: 'My wife is pregnant and her contractions are only two minutes apart'. 'Is this her first child?' the doctor asked. 'No!' the man shouted, 'This is her husband!'
7. *NOT THE SHARPEST TOOL IN THE SHED! In Modesto, CA, Steven Richard King was arrested for trying to hold up a Bank of America branch without a weapon. King used a thumb and a finger to simulate a gun. Unfortunately, he failed to keep his hand in his pocket. (hellooooooo...!!!)
8. *THE GRAND FINALE!Last summer, down on Lake Isabella, located in the high desert, an hour east of Bakersfield, CA, some folks, new to boating, were having a problem. No matter how hard they tried, they couldn't get their brand new 22 foot boat, going. It was very sluggish in almost every maneuver, no matter how much power they applied. After about an hour of trying to make it go, they putted into a nearby marina, thinking someone there may be able to tell them what was wrong. A thorough topside check revealed everything in perfect working condition. The engine ran fine, the out-drive went up and down, and the propeller was the correct size and pitch. So, one of the marina guys jumped in the water to check underneath. He came up choking on water, he was laughing so hard. Under the boat, still strapped securely in place, was the trailer!
*Now remember, these are all true stories and these people vote and have children
Heck, they have been dumbed down to such a point that they can’t even find Africa on a map! With this is an understanding about how enormous China actually is. In America, New York city is considered to be the largest city. While in China, there are a few hundred cities that are much, much larger.
Just a small “fishing village”.
Being such an enormous nation with such enormous resources makes it a very formidable foe. Everyone knows that you do not poke a stick at a tiger, as it will lunge at your and kill you swiftly, but that is exactly what the United States is doing today.
Point #5 – Chinese International standing
American Disinfo:
The entire world despises and hates China, and they are isolated, and scorned.
China is not isolated. It is not universally hated, and it is not considered to be demonic.
The world realizes that the United States is collapsing, and the Asia (Russia and China) are on the rise. They are looking towards the future. And that means to be on the “good side” of the nations of the future.
There are exceptions such as the Australians, and the Brits, but for the most part the nations are pragmatic and are looking at staying out of any conflict with the American military Empire, and the very powerful Russia / China block. VIDEO
Russia and China are very close allies. If you don’t believe me, then read what XI Peng, and Putin’s comments on this subject.
Point #6 – The Chinese are serious
American Disinfo:
China is run by corrupt insiders who got there though graft, crime and corruption. They are simply stooges that do whatever it takes to maintain power.
One of the biggest mistakes that Americans make (at all levels) is to misinterpret the Chinese. They play politics, they cater to the media, they perform rude actions, and they goad the Chinese. You do not do this and not expect consequences.
Just because the tiger is sleeping does not mean that it is not aware, that it’s fangs are not sharp and that it is not ready to tear you from limb to the other limb.
Consider the tit-for-tat VTOL carrier shoot-ups in 2020…
Chinese new carrier type-075 catches fire in Shanghai. April 2020. Mysterious fire causes massive damage.
Look what happened to the USS Bonhomme Richard (LHD 6) after the fire broke out on the Type-075 carrier. It was totaled and hauled off to the scrap yard.
Two months later, the American carrier USS Bonhomme Richard (LHD 6). Junked. July 2020.
I have often made the statement that the Chinese are a serious, serious nation that does not play. But it’s very true.
Point #7 – Military culture
American Disinfo:
China is a nation of pacifists, and they will never use nuclear weapons, nor respond to United States provocations.
The Chinese haven't fought any wars in such a long time that they don't how to. And when the fighting starts, most of the military will crumble.
China is not a military empire. The United States is.
However, China is a merit driven society that demands doing one’s best as part of a group and everyone receives military training.
There is this belief that somehow Australian, Canadian and American forces can land inside of China and take over cities, communities and critical infrastructure and China would allow it, or fight back in crude disorganized manners. This is far from the truth.
China would fight as if their very existence was at stake, because it would be. China will never, absolutely NEVER, allow another “rape of Nanjing”.
Everyone would fight. From 6 year old “Pioneers” to retired 90 year olds. No passive passivists here. They are ready to kill and die for their home.
Here’s a video what first grade looks like in CHINA. When did you learn combat training? How to hold and clean a gun? How to form squads and lead them? These kids are only six years old. VIDEO here.
VIDEO
This video is great!
In China, military training is mandatory and begins in first grade. It continues until the students graduate from high school.
China has over 6000 years of continuous, in-your-face fighting. They are the descendants of the armies of Genghis Khan. I would strongly suggest not fucking with them.
Point #8 – China is a unified society
This canard that America loves the Chinese but hates the Chinese leadership is ingrained in the American “news” media. It’s a lie. And it shows just how ignorant America is of the reality. China is homogenized, and a unified force.
American Disinfo:
China is a fractured country of dissatisfied poverty-ridden peasants. When offered an opportunity for freedom and democracy, they would revolt and break away from the iron-grip hold of Beijing.
When you kill one leader, the others just automatically take it’s place. This system is like water, you can take out a spoonful, and the water would flow back in place. In America, where there is a two tiered society that is balkanized, there isn’t any unity, no cohesiveness, and so transitions in leadership. It’s all a scripted fiasco. As any observer of modern contemporaneous America can clearly show.
This hospital was built in ten days. All by volunteers. All meals gas, equipment, and hospital equipment and building materials were all either loaned or given freely. This aspect of how the community works together in a crisis was NEVER reported in the West.
The premise is that America must be number #1
We hear this all the time on CNN, FOX and the rest of American media. No one asks what makes America so special. Because if you actually compare America to the rest of the world, it ranks rather poorly on a wide selection of attributes. In many of the attributes at the very rock-bottom of the lists.
America has FAILED to provide for it’s citizenry. Health care is a for-profit joke. Transportation is expensive, as is food, housing, and education. The government does not serve the people, and it is a police state oligarchy that operates as a military empire. It’s a true mess.
So tell me, why MUST America be the boss of planet Earth?
No one can answer why.
Why must the current mess that the United States is, be allowed or permitted to exist. It does not serve it’s people. It’s a war empire that causes destruction all over the world, it rapes and pillages, and is run but a small handful of evil greedy oligarchs. Why?
Why is it important that the world become like America? VIDEO
Video of City life inside of America.
Still not convinced, well lets go to a DIFFERENT city… VIDEO
Video
Still not convinced, it is EVERYWHERE in America. Ok, well lets go to a third DIFFERENT city… VIDEO
Video
The War is on-going
My brother does have a point however. There is a war going on. It’s just that the United States is pushing, pushing, pushing and China is just sitting back and taking it.
Here’s a video showing how the Air Force and the Navy aviation pilots train so that they can shoot down and kill Chinese aircraft over China.
Training to kill Chinese.
Chinese team with Russia to warn Japan from aligning with the United States
Here’s something that hasn’t been reported in the American “news”.
This is a bit of a forceful move since diplomacy hasn’t worked. And the Brits and the Americans are flabbergasted that Russia would even dare sail with China. They argue that China has no rights to sail at will in international waters as it is a provocation, but America can and it is not a provocation if America does it. Video here.
Video
Chinese can build things at a pace that is difficult to comprehend
This is a very important point.
Oh, it’s not just two hospitals in ten days, or 35 submarines in one year, or 2000 nuclear ICBMS in six months. It’s everything. China can out manufacture anyone, out repair anything, and do it quickly, carefully and with decent quality. None of which is reported in the West. None of it is. VIDEO. So friggin’ amazing!
Video.
This reminds me of the Star Trek franchise where you have this race of creatures called the “Borg”. When their “cube” space ships are damaged, the damage is repaired with such speed that it looks like it is self healing before your very eyes. This, my friends, is China today.
The Chinese military is dangerous
Here’s a training exercise. Hey! Do you see any cheap AK-47 / SKS clones here? Do you see uneducated peasants? Do you see any starving people that was all that delicious freedom and democracy out of America? VIDEO
Video
China is a force to be afraid of…
Comparisons
It’s easy to find “armchair generals” and Conservative websites making comparisons between China and America.
As if it is actually possible.
They point out that America has a military and gun culture. That America is technically advanced, and it has the largest military in history with bases literally everywhere, and a huge and enormous and nearly unlimited amount of military weapons and hardware.
Which is pretty much what my brother was doing.
It’s so easy to look at one tiny little aspect and not see the entire picture.
Like looking at the number of nuclear warheads, for instance, like my brother did.
A comparison of nuclear armed submarines. China looks like the “little guy”. It looks so pathetic compared to the advanced developed systems of other navies.
But the true story is something quite different.
The Chinese military is not designed for force projection, invasion or remote operations. It is designed for up, in-your-face hard and severe defensive actions. The United States will not be able to take 100% of it’s military to fight on the Chinese shores in the South China Sea…
…but China can.
What Americans expect from a war with China.
You can disagree with my calculus, but those in America expect something quite different than what I expect.
Americans expect “A” to happen while I, a ex-spook with knowledge of a host of information, expect “B”.
Which is pretty much why my brother and I disagree so much.
It doesn’t mean that I don’t love him.
It just means that I get my information from different sources then him, and that I have a different perspective simply because I have both feet in both worlds. I know America. I know China. So thus, my understanding is that the result will be “B”.
I think that it’s not just that it’s non-stop “hate China” 24/7, but also that the pulsed thought control mechanisms have been working “overtime” to drum in all this hatred. I wrote about this before, and it was validated by vault 7. Americans are not just thought controlled, but are actually brainwashed. And so they believe “A”.
As a result of all this, American, and other “western” nations that follow the “news” media have these assumptions about what a war with China would look like. It all presents a very detailed picture of “A”.
And ignoring the facts that will make the reality actually be “B”.
These next key bullet points are what Americans expect to happen with a war with China. These are all the “givens” that “everyone knows” will occur with a war between the USA and China, and why.
First up is one of the TOP big assumptions that all Americans, Brits, and Australians believe…
1 – China is alone.
It will be a war against China, and China would be alone and isolated.
China is so evil and predatory that no one would stand by China. Already there have been numerous articles that say that Russia would abandon China, and that China would be alone with no friends. It is a fabricated narrative, but the American public just loves to read this fantasy.
Absolutely and positively there is not one single article or conservative publication that says otherwise.
No one is talking about other nations joining China to stand up to America. Not one. Since no one is looking at this issue, it is automatically assumed that any war with China, will have China alone and isolated where it can be pummeled by the USA relentlessly.
Look at every single map used by “armchair strategists” when describing a war / blockade / event with China. the image sure makes China look alone and isolated.
First and second island chain QUAD containment strategy.
They NEVER show China’s military allies.
Never.
Ever.
N-E-V-E-R.
Google it. Maps showing Chinese allies are nowhere to be found. Yet, we know that the SEC and BRICS+ are chock-full of them.
Further, in all the previous wars that America has fought, no other nations came to the aid of the attacked nation. Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan all were alone, isolated and “on their own” while America attacked them. It is natural for Americans to expect this exact same kind of behavior with a war with China.
Notice how all the maps drawing about “China containment” leave out the Russians and other Chinese allies. In the map below, notice how Russia and Iran, North Korea, and the Philippines are all either neutral or listed as American allies. Which are not true at all.
In the map below…
[1] Russia, North Korea, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia and the Philippines should be pink. In fact, most of the nations shown on the map would be allied with China, and that includes most of Africa and the middle east.
[2] Iran should be shown as pink as well as Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
[3] Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand and Vietnam would be pink.
[4] Taiwan is pink, but the leadership is green. Don’t be so sure that it is a SOLID green.
[5] Philippines is pink.
[6] North Korea is pink.
[7] Indonesia is pink.
In fact, the entire map would be pink except for Japan, Australia and South Korea. The reality differs substantially from what is pictured and presented to the American audience.
The planned “ring of containment”.
2 – American allies will die for the USA.
Most of the fighting will be borne by American allies under the leadership of American forces. (Britain, Japan, Australia and Korea).
The American leadership knows that huge death rates are very bad for career politicians. They lose elections. So they do not want to a war where there are huge American casualties.
The “containment nations”; the QUAD meets for discussions on how to host American military in their countries, and the absorption of huge quantities of invasion supplies.
Instead, of this, they want American troops to be safe inside of bases, running remote drone strikes, or flying stealth aircraft that cannot be hit.
After the announcement of the QUAD, it has become clear that America expects Australia, Japan and Britain to do most of the dying.
3 – A just war against evil.
It will be a “just war” against an evil empire. The brave and just Americans will “fight for democracy” and liberate those oppressed by communism.
No one wants to think of themselves as evil, and Americans will always refer to themselves as “exceptional democracy” instead of the oligarchy run military empire that it actually is.
The non-stop villainization of China has been relentless and constant. Ergo: China is evil. It needs to be destroyed.
As a result, most Americans have a very unfavorable opinion of China.
But you know, the world is really tired of this never ending drum-beat about a nation before the United States invades it. Watch this VIDEO at how the rest of the world reacts to the American claims of mistreatment in China…
You can see this in the “concentration camp” narrative of Xingjiang, and the stories of rape, torture, and predatory saber rattling, etc, etc.
But you know, it’s all a lie.
Here’s the truth. This fellow is the EU representative who is telling the United States and the rest of the UN why the EU is breaking away from partnering with the United States to “contain” China.
Note that this (and his other speeches) were never broadcast in the United States. Americans have no clue that most of the EU has allied with China. VIDEO.
Video
4 – The war will be conventional using the most advanced high-tech weapons.
The war will be conventional.
Though the USA could use some precise micro nukes, no one would dare risk nuclear annihilation in fighting back. As my brother so clearly said; China has a few paltry nukes while America can destroy the world thousands of times over.
China wouldn’t DARE attack the Untied States mainland.
It will be conventional because that is how America fights it’s long string of wars. Always with conventional forces after a softening up of anti-nation propaganda.
This is so ingrained in American culture that it is a profound given.
America would “never” start a war, and just as certainly would “never” use weapons of mass destruction. This is because America has the “technical advantage” and is able to conduct ‘surgical strikes” with accuracy and precision.
5 – China is far weaker than it appears.
China would be a “pushover” nation using cheaply made rifles and fielding many illiterate peasants.
This just shows how ignorant Americans are. But still they believe it. Since there simply isn’t ANY positive news about China, the assumptions made by Americans are always of the worst possible image.
In this case, poorly trained conscripts, reluctant to fight a war, handed cheap AK-47 clones, and told to throw themselves at the proud American occupation forces. Not true.
The real face of China is never presented to the West or to Americans.
The Chinese are a tough people. They are not “pushovers”.
Here’s a VIDEO where the Americans who fought the Chinese in Korea relate what it was like, and the over all quality of the soldiers, even though they were over-matched by the superior weight and quantity of American overwhelming military superiority….
They did not fear death.
All Chinese are trained to kill.
There are no conscious objectors. Training starts in first grade. Six year old children; boys and girls. Yeah. No shit. First grade. There is mandatory boot camp in middle school, and everyone spends two years in the armed forces. VIDEO.
Oh, and by the way… that’s 1.6 billion people that can fight. Remember, America only has 330 million people tops.
Video
Middle school training.
Over the last five years, the training program for all students has been revamped. It has become more rigorous, more militarily focused, with a great emphasis on tactics, weapons training, and endurance.
The video below shows school children in a massive weekend training exercise. VIDEO.
6 – The war would be far away
The war would last for decades, and be in China, and far away.
It would NEVER hit American states; American cities, American ports, or American industry. Never.
Most Americans assume that the next war will be like the last. And since America has been fighting eight simultaneous wars for decades, they naturally assume that China will just be the same-oh, same-oh.
The general characteristics of American wars are that they are far away, fighting evil terrorists (who deserve it) and that Americans are always and forever safe in their homes and in their communities.
The war would be televised and presented on all the social media.
It would become a hobby for a bored, unemployed, drug addicted nation to view. It would be the equivalent of “bread and circuses” in ancient Rome. Facebook and Twitter would carry news about the latest successes, death counts and pictures of proud Americans waving the flag while the adoring Chinese clamor for all their freedom and democracy.
America would be spared. No fighting would occur inside of America.
America has fought war after war, after war. And in every instance no one ever brought the war to America. Sure there was a bombing of the Hawaii naval base at Pearl harbor, and 9-11 but those were incidents. Not war.
Since modern America has never experienced war, Americans assume that it never will. Many SHTF people are planning for domestic war, terror, and societal breakdowns. None are expecting the collapse of the United States, and a proxy / Vichy government set up to service the needs of the Asian block.
9 – The USA would unify
While the war is going on, American domestic problems would end, and a new “renaissance” would occur inside of America.
All of America, on both sides of the ideological spectrum, are filled with a hatred off all things Chinese.
There’s this belief that “things must change”, and something harsh and televised like a war will make Americans proud again, and rally them towards a cause. This rally point will unify the balkanized nation and bring it together, and in the process would be a great healing and repair of all the many neglected and broken systems that abound throughout the nation.
10 – Manageable casualties
No excessive American casualties. There would be causalities, and maybe a ship or two might be sunk and a few aircraft downed. But nothing excessive.
Most Americans, and I do mean MOST, are extremely ignorant. They mistakenly believe that China is not a dangerous nation, and that it will just be a larger Yemen, or Syria. Americans realize that people die in wars, as many of the anti-China crowd has watched Rambo movies, but they believe that only the bad guys die. Not the brave strong American forces. Sure, one or two might die, but whole scale destruction will never happen.
11 – Taiwan needs American rescue
Taiwan is a nation in need of rescue.
The non-stop description of what Taiwan is, compared to the reality is so in variance that it has taken me many articles to untangle the lies and distortions. You all can believe what ever you want. Just recognize that the American image of what Taiwan is is wholly that of a poor struggling democracy that is shivering in place under the harsh thumb of oppressive communism. LOL!
So much for the American fantasy.
Now lets talk about the real things that will happen
Well, that’s what most Americans think. And judging from the pro-war Brits and Australians, it’s what the allies believe as well.
Australians in Afghanistan working for the American military.
Here, let’s look at what both the Chinese and the Russians EXPECT will happen with a war with America over some “Chinese or Russian” issues. They do not read MSN, FOX “news”, Zero Hedge, Hall Turner, or the Drudge Report. They have their own experts, sources of intel, and strategic planners.
Now, let’s look at what I know, and what is not being presented to the American people. Here is the REALITY that WILL OCCUR.
Here’s some things that are real things that will really happen if the US wages war against China…
1 – A war against an SEO member would be a war against a unified Asia.
China will NOT be alone. Russia would fight alongside China. And Iran would join the fray. All of Asia will fight as one.
Mr Putin and Xi Peng have both reaffirmed that if either nation is attacked that they would both act as one against the attacker.
.
The other participants of the SEO have varying levels of interest in joint military participation, but the combined military might of a unified Asia is formidable and threatening.
.
Which is why many of us Asia and China watchers are ‘scratching our heads” in bewilderment with the United States actions designed to provoke a war.
SEO joint exercises.
Please forgive me if my words betray my frustration. That is because I have been saying the same thing for years and it seems to me that almost no-one has “connected the dots.”
As many of us know, the nuclear armed nations of the world agreed decades ago that no one nation would initiate a nuclear first strike against another nation, because they realized that the consequence of such an action would be the end of human life on earth. That realization cooled the nuclear arms race down to everyone’s relief.
Then in the first week of April, 2014, the President of the United States, Barrack Obama, announced publicly that the nuclear weapons strategy of the US has changed: the US is now willing to make a first strike on China with nuclear weapons.
Needless to say that public statement freaked out 1 – 2 billion Chinese people around the globe. Understandably, the President of the Republic of China, Xi Jinping, announced publicly that he ordered China’s nuclear armed submarine fleet to go immediately to the US west coast. He also reassured the Chinese people that Chinese intercontinental ballistic missiles could travel over the North Pole and destroy major cities and other targets in the eastern US.
One or two days later a Chinese envoy arrived at the Kremlin in the Federation of Russia with an envelope for Vladimir Putin, President of the Federation of Russia. The contents of the envelope initiated Article 9 of the Treaty of Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation Between the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation.
Article 9 states:
“When a situation arises in which one of the contracting parties deems that peace is being threatened and undermined or its security interests are involved or when it is confronted with the threat of aggression, the contracting parties shall immediately hold contacts and consultations in order to eliminate such threats.”
Let us stop for a moment and recap the events.
[1] The President of the US declared publicly that the US was willing to conduct a nuclear first strike on China.
[2] The Chinese people freaked out.
[3] The president of China took defensive measures including asking Russia for help with this unforeseen mess.
The Russians responded, as they must and feel obligated to do after they make an agreement with China. After all, the Russians are “agreement capable.”
[4] The Russian move was truly brilliant.
Enter the USS Donald Cook incident. (DC for short) The videos of the DC incident were so widespread, and so many people made copies of the video that “they” could not possibly scrub the video off the Internet. However, they are trying to change the date of the incident.
Anyway, a day or two after the Chinese envoy arrived at the Kremlin and invoked Article 9 of the aforementioned Treaty, the Russians made a move.
The USS Donald Cook is the most advanced Aegis class missile destroyers in the US navy. The DC was in the Black Sea at this time and the Russians make their move.
Two Russian fighter jets approached the DC; one with advanced electronic warfare hardware, and one as an escort. The DC electronics, computers, radar, and all electronics crashed, leaving the DC “dead in the water.” Then the Russian jet escort made twelve mock attack runs on the DC. And you probably already know about the Russian helicopter crew videotaping the commotion onboard the DC.
That is not my point.
My point is the Chinese invoked Article 9 of the “Treaty” and the Russian response was twofold.
Firstly, the Russians showed the Chinese that the Russians will honor their promises, and secondly, the Russians showed the US that Russians are not to be underestimated.
What does this mean?
2 – From the very start, nuclear weapons will be used.
Nuclear weapons will be used at the start. There would not be any escalation from conventional to nuclear arms.
This is Chinese doctrine (against a nation that attacks its soil).
This is Russian doctrine (against a hostile nuclear power).
Here’s a fine nuclear explosion to remind you what we are talking about here. VIDEO here.
Video
And since the United States has been so God awfully Hell bent on starting a war, China has been mass producing missiles and nuclear weapons at an outrageous pace.
It’s like making bushels of paper lanterns.
China does not play.
And, of course…
3 – All American bases everywhere will come under fire.
American bases will be attacked. Any nations supporting American troops in any way will be attacked. When I say “attacked” I mean erased, vaporized, glassed over, and gone.
Nuclear bang-bang.
Guam… no more.
Major American military facilities in the area around China.
Say good bye to Guam.
Same goes for all of Honolulu, Hawaii.
San Diego, Diego Garcia, Korean and Japanese bases…
To the American military bases in Australia, and the city of Perth. Say good bye to the bases anywhere close to China.
Bye Bye.
Hawaii will become a series of tiny, tiny radioactive shoals and islands.
All American military bases would be flattened.
There is a strategy that the United States can spread out it’s bases in the South China Sea. Instead of having eight major hubs, they can turn it into thirty smaller military logistical and launch hubs. I am here to tell you that that will not work.
Eight bases = eight nuclear detonations.
35 Bases = 35 nuclear detonations.
It doesn’t matter.
4 – American cities will be nuked.
America will be hit with nuclear warheads, and cities will be destroyed.
I do not think that Russia and China are stupid.
Washington DC will be gone, that’s a fact. And I hate to break the news to you, but probably LA, New York, Chicago, Huston, Boston, Atlanta, San Francisco, and Seattle as well. In fact, you can expect all urban areas in America to be erased, and their inhabitants flooding the countryside…
…armed, pissed off, sick, hungry and radioactive. As they carry biological warfare plagues and pustule sores on their tattooed urban bodies. Good luck with your precious “democracy” and “freedom” then. Suckers!
And it will be China and Russia, not the USA, that will determine when and how to deal with this war.
And yes, the USA will be able to go MAD with the huge substantial and dangerous American nuclear arsenal… … provided the communication lines are up, the satellite links are up, and the computers still work.
And just in case you are brain dead, here’s some videos of nuclear explosions to show the kind of power that China currently has. The last three are Chinese nukes just in case you are convinced that they don’t have any. VIDEO.
Video
Remember, a nuclear hit on Mono Lake will render the entire water supply for the entire West Coast of America… radioactive.
Remember, a nuclear hit on the San Andres fault line will generate earthquakes up and down the West Coast.
Remember, that a submerged underwater nuclear detonation would take out all of inhabited Virginia, as well as one off the coast of Florida would totally erase that state.
5 – All trade would stop.
All trade would stop. All of it. At least all sea trade.
Inland Asia routes would remain intact. So trade would continue throughout Asia. But the trade to the Americas would end. And they would be on their own until the Untied States could rebuild up it’s industries, train its workers, and find enough remaining local metals and resources to fire up those new factories.
Most Americans (Brits and Australians) have no idea just how vulnerable the world is with trade. To use aluminum as an example, sure America can run aluminum extrusion factories, but they can’t make anything because all the alloy metals are from China.
As are 95% of all drugs.
And so on and so forth.
And with the end of trade comes breakdowns in society. Hospitals will not be able to treat people. Factories will shut down (well the few that exist will). Fast food restaurants will start to open on short hours.
There isn’t anything made in the United States today that is 100% sourced domestically. NOTHING.
6 – The USD, and thus the American economy would collapse.
The United States Dollar will collapse.
Long overdue, but it will happen and there is nothing better to accelerate the demise than a war. Were a war to occur, the value of the USD would equate to zero.
Zero.
As in absolutely nothing.
Here is video that describes how China bailed out two recent economic emergencies that the USA found itself in. The first was in 2008, and China bought up trillions in useless American debt, and the second was by raising the credit limits. With the way the USA is behaving right now, China will no longer help out and the USA must fend for itself. Watch this mind-blowing VIDEO.
Video
With the trillions of dollars in spending over the last few years, the USA economic scene resembles something out of “The Outer Limits” or “The Twilight Zone”. And China will no longer help such an openly hostile nation.
You can only pay the blackmail amounts only so long.
It’s over.
Other systems would need to be put in place to handle the chaos that would result. It would be a very testy time, and do not be under the mistaken impression that Asia would allow America to time and resources to deal with the resulting domestic discord.
They would instead aggravate it and allow the American people to eat each other alive. Which they most certainly will.
Here’s a VIDEO where the Singapore foreign minister talks about how the USA strong-armed them to accept American debt and the USD and what the consequences will be.
Video
7 – America would fracture.
America, which is balkanized, would fracture into fiefdoms.
That’s the good news. Some smaller government will be the result of all this. Federal leadership would disappear. Mobs, gangs, militias would all start to appear, and it would be a scramble for power that would be very brutal.
Here’s a balkanized America where the states would keep many of their original territorial lines.
Suggested new nations assuming local state capitals are spared nuclear destruction.
And here’s one based on great cultural and societal upheavals…
Domestic upheaval fractured state.
Why would there be social upheavals? Well it is easy to see. The capitalist system, and the government operations are out of touch with the vast bulk of Americans. It’s no only not working, but it is beyond repair. It is broken, seriously broken. VIDEO.
Video
8 – It would take many decades for America to rebuild.
America would not be able to rebuild, but China and Russia would be able to move into complete ready to use, new cities almost immediately.
America is in it’s prime, and it can’t build worth shit. How is this situation going to improve with the general collapse of the entire society? The truth is that it cannot, and when there is no media to tell everyone that everything is fine, it will be the harsh slap of realty that will not be at all comfortable.
The people who will rebuild the United States.
9 – GBP and PPP would be altered throughout the West.
The standard of living for many nations would change. America would change severely, and the survivors inside of America would not survive this new reality well.
Most of this is due to the great fragility of the West. The decades of looting, and the artificially inflated worth and value of everything will start crashing down to actual values. But now, with serious structural and domestic problems, and destroyed cities, major governmental structural change will be necessary. if they do not happen, the collapse will be far worse, but even if attempts were made to get a handle on the collapse, it will still result in great swaths of destitution throughout society.
10 – Destruction all over the globe.
Every nation will experience massive destruction. Some will be much worse than others.
Deagel 2020 revision to the original 2012 Deagel Forecast
The Deagel forecast was a CIA exercise to remote view 2025. The results were horrific.
BlueNarwhal:
Forecast disclaimer revision in 2020:
In 2014 we published a disclaimer about the forecast. In six years the scenario has changed dramatically. This new disclaimer is meant to single out the situation from 2020 on-wards.
Talking about the United States and the European Union as separated entities no longer makes sense. Both are the Western block, keep printing money and will share the same fate.
After COVID we can draw two major conclusions:
The Western world (success model) has been built over societies with no resilience. They can barely withstand any hardship, even a low intensity one. It was assumed but now we’ve got the full hard confirmation beyond any doubt. They are weak to the point of a decapitated cripple.
The COVID crisis will be used to extend the life of this dying economic system through the so called “Great Reset.”
The Great Reset;
Like the climate change, extinction rebellion, planetary crisis, green revolution, shale oil (…) hoaxes promoted by the system; is another attempt to slow down dramatically the consumption of natural resources and therefore extend the lifetime of the current system.
It can be effective for awhile but finally won’t address the bottom-line problem and will only delay the inevitable. The core ruling elites hope to stay in power which is in effect the only thing that really worries them.
Collapse of the USD Financial Banking System
The collapse of the Western financial system – and ultimately the Western civilization – has been the major driver in the 2012 forecast along with a confluence of crisis with a devastating outcome.
Progressive Multiculturalism failures
As COVID has proven Western societies embracing multiculturalism and extreme liberalism are unable to deal with any real hardship.
Coronavirus Pandemic
The Spanish flu one century ago represented the death of 40-50 million people. Today the world’s population is four times greater with air travel in full swing which is by definition a super spreader. The death casualties in today’s World would represent 160 to 200 million in relative terms but more likely 300-400 million taking into consideration the air travel factor that did not exist one century ago. So far, COVID death toll is roughly 1 million people.
Economic crisis due to forced lock-downs
It is quite likely that the economic crisis due to the lock-downs will cause more deaths than the virus worldwide. The Soviet system was less able to deliver goodies to the people than the Western one. Nevertheless Soviet society was more compact and resilient under an authoritarian regime. That in mind, the collapse of the Soviet system wiped out 10 percent of the population.
The stark reality of diverse and multicultural Western societies is that a collapse will have a toll of 50 to 80 percent depending on several factors. But in general terms the most diverse, multicultural, indebted and wealthy (highest standard of living) will suffer the highest toll.
Life-Support Systems
The only glue that keeps united such aberrant collage from falling apart is over-consumption with heavy doses of bottomless degeneracy disguised as virtue. Nevertheless the widespread censorship, hate laws and contradictory signals mean that even that glue is not working any more.
The Predictions
Not everybody has to die. Migration (out from America, the West, etc.) can also play a positive role in this.
Second and Third World Nations
The formerly (known as) second and third world nations are an unknown at this point. Their fate will depend upon the decisions they take in the future.
Western powers are not going to take over them as they did in the past because these (Western) countries won’t be able to control their very own cities let alone those countries that are far away.
If they remain tied to the former World Order they will go down along with the Western powers. However, they won’t experience the same kind of brutal decline that the Western powers will experience so brazenly. This is partially because they are poorer and (obviously) not diverse enough. Instead they are stronger than the Western powers because they are actually quite homogeneous. This is their advantage. And that they are used to deal with some sort of hardship. Though, not precisely the one that is coming.
If they switch to China they can get a chance to stabilize but will need to depend upon the management of their own resources. We expected this situation to unfold and actually is unfolding right now.
American Election Consequences
With the November election triggering a major bomb if Trump is re-elected. (Did not happen.) If Biden is elected there will very bad consequences as well.
There is a lot of bad blood in the Western societies and the protests, demonstrations, rioting and looting are only the first symptoms of what is coming.
Geo-Political Changes
However a new trend is taking place overshadowing this one. The situation between the three great powers has changed dramatically.
The only relevant achievement of the Western powers during the past decade has been the formation of a strategic alliance, both military and economic, between Russia and China.
Russia and China are a united Asia.
Right now the potential partnership between Russia and the European Union (EU) is dead with Russia turning definitively towards China. That was from the beginning the most likely outcome. Great VIDEO of Chinese weapon systems…
Video
The European Union is on it’s own.
Airbus never tried to establish a real partnership but rather a strategy to fade away the Russian aerospace industry. Actually Russia and China have formed a new alliance to build a long haul airliner.
Western Europe (not to mention the United States) was never interested in the development of Russia or forming anything other than a master slave relationship with Russia providing raw materials and toeing the line of the West.
It was clear then and today is a fact.
Preparations for war
Russia has been preparing for a major war since 2008 and China has been increasing her military capabilities for the last 20 years. Today China is not a second tier power compared with the United States. Both in military and economic terms China is at the same level and in some specific areas are far ahead.
Chinese Technology is state of the art.
In the domain of high-tech 5G has been a success in the commercial realm but the Type 055 destroyer is also another breakthrough with the US gaining a similar capability (DDG 51 Flight IIII) by mid of this decade (more likely by 2030).
Nanchang, the lead ship of the Type 055 class, was commissioned amid the pandemic and lock down in China.
Potential for open war hostilities
Six years ago the likelihood of a major war was tiny.
Since then it has grown steadily and dramatically and today is by far the most likely major event in the 2020s.
The ultimate conflict can come from two ways.
[1] A conventional conflict involving at least two major powers that escalates into an open nuclear war. Most likely initiated by the United States, with a nuclear retaliatory salvo of impressive destructive magnitude.
[2] A second scenario is possible in the 2025-2030 time-frame. A Russian (with possibly China) sneak first strike against the United States and its allies with the new S-500, strategic missile defenses, Yasen-M submarines, INF Zircon and Kalibr missiles and some new space asset playing the key role.
The sneaky first strike would involve all Russian missile strategic forces branches (bombers and ground-based missiles) at the different stages of such attack that would be strategic translation of what was seen in Syria in November 2015.
Massive failures in Western Intelligence Agencies
There was no report that the Russian had such a capability of launching a high precision, multiple, combined arms attack at targets 2,000+ kilometers away.
Western intelligence had no clue.
Brainwashed Moral Superiority
The irony is that since the end of the Cold War the United States has been maneuvering through NATO to achieve a position to be able to execute a first strike (nuclear) over Russia and now it seems that the first strike may still occur but the country finished would be the United States.
Another particularity of the Western system is that its individuals have been brainwashed to the point that the majority accept their moral high ground and technological edge as a given. This has given the rise of the supremacy of the emotional arguments over the rational ones which are ignored or deprecated.
That mindset can play a key role in the upcoming catastrophic events.
At least in the Soviet system the silent majority of the people were aware of the fallacies they were fed up.
We can see the United States claims about 5G being stolen from them by China or hypersonic technology being stolen by Russia as the evidence that the Western elites are also infected by that hubris. Over the next decade it will become obvious that the West is falling behind the Russia-China block and the malaise might grow into desperation.
Why go to war?
Going to war might seem a quick and easy solution to restore the lost hegemony to finally find them into a France 1940 moment. Back then France did not have nuclear weapons to turn a defeat into a victory. The West might try that swap because the unpleasant prospect of not being Mars and Venus but rather a bully and his dirty bitch running away in fear while the rest of the world is laughing at them.
If there is not a dramatic change of course the world is going to witness the first nuclear war.
The Western block collapse may come before, during or after the war. It does not matter. The West will completely collapse. It is fragile. It will be unable to recover from even the slightest societal disruption.
A nuclear war is a game with billions of casualties and the collapse plays in the hundreds of millions.
He Concludes…
This website is non-profit, built on spare time and we provide our information and services AS IS without further explanations and/or guarantees. We are not linked to any government. Take into account that the forecast is nothing more than a game of numbers whether flawed or correct based upon some speculative assumptions. - Friday, September 25th, 2020
11 – Japan will be hurt very badly
Japan erased. If Japan sides with the United States, it will be pulverized into oblivion through nuclear scrubbing. China has never forgotten the “rape of Nanjing” and the failure of Japan to apologize.VIDEO.
VIDEO
Chinese retribution would be swift, lethal and merciless.
The Rape of Nanjing.
Russia and China sailed a flotilla of armed ships around Japan in October 2021. This was a direct result of agreements that japan made with the United States pertaining to QUAD Chinese containment.
The message was clear.
If Japan agrees to work with the United States in any war, Both Russia and China would render Japan impotent. VIDEO here.
Video.
12 – China has already fielded military systems that the West can only dream of.
Video here. We start off with tiny robot grenades, and move from there. Enjoy this look at what is not being reported in the American “news”.
Video.
13 – China has been practicing emergency missile launches.
Here’s a nice video where a Chinese submarine launches all of it’s ballistic nuclear warhead SLBM missiles within one minute one right after the other. America has NEVER done that. The reason being that it is very difficult to keep a submarine stable during subsequent SLBM launchings. But China has mastered it.
I’ll bet you never read about these drills in Zero Hedge, FOX “news” or CNN have you? VIDEO.
Video.
China has been practicing and drilling over and over and over and over.
Anyone who welcomes a War with China (and Russia) is a fucking idiot. VIDEO.
Video
China trains, drills, trains again, drills some more.
It is ruthless.
No breaks. No rests. No apologies. No one is exempt. VIDEO.
These are LIVE FIRE exercises and training. Note how they work together and file in groups of other soldiers. So many chances of accidents. It’s dangerous training, as the weapons are all HOT and LIVE…VIDEO.
Video
14 – All Chinese school children are indoctrinated as warriors
Chinese elementary students are ready to fight.
Every single one of them, all throughout China, has been trained to use small arms, and the basics in squad military tactics.
They are all ready to reverse the “century of humiliation”, and the “Rape of China” all by European forces and their surrogates.
Here’s some third grade students showing first grade students how to assemble and handle rifles, and weapons. VIDEO. It’s a long video at 83MB, but WELL worth the watch.
I recorded it while watching my little girls, so sorry about the chit-chat in the background.
Please pay attention to what is going on. Third grade students doing this. 9 years old. We see them teaching the first and second graders in basic squad movement and behaviors. VIDEO.
Video
15 – China does everything in huge quantities at enormous scales
You won’t have one of two tanks, a plane or two, of maybe two squads lunging at you. You will have massed armies all pissed off and charging at you in wave, after wave, after wave, after wave using peer-capable weapons systems. VIDEO.
Video
15 – The European Union is being forced to choose sides.
The EU is moving to closer relations with China. The United States is forcing the EU to choose between the USA or China.
As it stands right now, the EU is moving towards greater relationships with China and are shunning and abandoning the USA. VIDEO of the spokesperson for the EU.
Video
Conclusion
Here is an email I got from a reader. I’ll give it to you straight:
Living in Southeast Asia, I sometimes worry about China’s encroachment on my life and the way of life of many others in the region. Then, I read another of your columns. I do not want American values to win out in the world; I do not want them in the country of my residence.I dislike Chinese authoritarianism. I dislike American authoritarianism and cultural terrorism more. The Chinese retain a more meritocratic system. They maintain a respect for their traditions. I’ve yet to meet someone from China who is ashamed of being Chinese.For the sake of civilization and human advancement, I prefer China over the U.S., which seems entirely to be ruled and taught by the mentally ill. Soon, we will need to choose between the two.
Now there’s food for thought.
While I have been shaken by the words my brother said, I am not going to leave China. I love it here. It is the safest place on the planet, and I have homes, family, friends, and a life here that I am not going to throw away.
Especially not because some Taiwan billionaire is afraid that China will seize his fiefdom. (I wrote about who wants the war and why they are funding it elsewhere.)
A war would hurt me tremendously, if not kill me outright, and trust me, I am not ready to be at “ground zero” for a nuclear strike. But I must tell you all this; I don’t think that it will be China that will the focus of war like everyone thinks. It will be the United States, and it’s allies.
I am willing to BET MY LIFE on it.
That is how strongly I believe in the Intel that I am providing here.
America has no end game in a war with China. Only the hope and desire that it can be “suppressed” so that America can remain the most dominant nation on the planet.
Of those few who consider a long term strategy, they would consider making the Taiwan government rule over the Chinese mainland. This is a wholly ridiculous notion and it would never happen.
Let’s hope that this period of hostilities ends soon.
This sums up what to expect from China…
Shock them.
A final comment
I think we shall hold true to Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s Two Rules of War:
Rule One—Don’t invade Russia.
Rule Two—Don’t invade China.
I do agree with my reader when he says that the U.S.A. has succumbed to government by the mentally ill. Well-nigh every news story I read about the doings of our federal government confirms it.
I tried to read the story that followed, but couldn’t make much sense of it. Yes, it’s like listening to the babble of a lunatic.
War is not a game that you play or read about in the news feeds. It’s a serious serious business, and Russia and China are about ready to send America into the bronze age. You all had best calm down and take a deep breath and figure how you will handle the exodus of radioactive urban youth, hungry, pissed off, and armed as they enter you nice communities, walk on your fine lawns and break into your fine homes.
China should be the last fucking thing on your God damn mind. VIDEO.
China should be the last fucking thing on your God damn mind.
Videos
The embeds are far too slow loading. Enjoy related you-tube videos…
China’s New Military Technology You have Never Seen…
https://youtu.be/aXDK3hCNAVE
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.
The level of rising international tension is extremely concerning yet most people are unconcerned. And unaware.
China
As I have reported previously, it is obvious that the United States is leading “the West” towards a major confrontation with China.
From SOTT…
In a recent article by Prof. James Petras, he sees this "lashing out" taking the form of investment barriers against China. The land of "free trade" ideology will now stop at nothing to restrict China's freedom in international markets. The warmongering in the South China Sea, her traditionally significant trade routes, is just one of the more obnoxious and dangerous.
He writes,
"The Anglo-American and German empires are on the defensive. They increasingly cannot compete economically with China, even in defending their own innovative industries. In large part this is the result of their failed policies. Western economic elite have increasingly relied on short-term speculation in finance, real estate and insurance, while neglecting their industrial base."
Led by the US, their reliance on military conquests (militaristic empire-building) absorb public resources, while China has directed its domestic resources toward innovative and advanced technology (Petras, 2016).
Few realize that the Trans Pacific Partnership excludes China from much of its North American investment plans. However, outside of war, no one will alter their reliance on Chinese markets and products. Walls will be ineffective. This might suggest the bellicose nature of the broke US empire in Asia.
China's political model is generally social nationalist. It has outperformed all others over the last generation. China's recent heavy investment in robotics and nanotechnology almost guarantee the bankrupt USA will be forced to reply on warfare. This, in itself, as Petras suggests, shows exactly why Peking wins while Washington drowns.
One of the most outlandish admissions as to American ill-will in the area is the Council on Foreign Relations' "Revising U.S. Grand Strategy Toward China." One of its complaints is that the Chinese seek to "cast doubt on the US economic model" as part of their agenda. Here is a key passage:
"The fundamental conclusion for the United States, therefore, is that China does not see its interests served by becoming just another "trading state," no matter how constructive an outcome that might be for resolving the larger tensions between its economic and geopolitical strategies. Instead, China will continue along the path to becoming a conventional great power with the full panoply of political and military capabilities, all oriented toward realizing the goal of recovering from the United States the primacy it once enjoyed in Asia as a prelude to exerting global influence in the future (Blackwill and Tellis, 2015)"
The assumption throughout is that the US has an inherent right to dominate the globe. And other power that seeks to supplant this dominance is an enemy.
China does nothing that the US has not already done.
The reality is that the US has no business at all in Asia and China certainly has no desire to harm the United States economically. They are quite dependent on the American market for now, though that is changing as American consumer debt will continue to suppress any recovery. As American companies rely on foreign sales for profitability, economic recovery is clearly not happening.
Since the CFR has for its members the elite in economics, finance, industry, government and academia, it is the "ruling class." Therefore, its publications can be considered the official doctrine of this class. Therefore, this report's recommendations of "[intensifying] a consistent U.S. naval and air presence in the South and East China Seas" are now American policy.
The report, in many places, speaks of increasing US military capabilities on China's doorstep and using these as threats to force China out of the world stage in any way that "casts doubt on the US economic model."
Japan's military forces are also to be expanded greatly and the famous Constitutional provision preventing her projection abroad should be abandoned. The US wrote their Constitution and forced it upon them, they certainly can rewrite it now.
World War II began when FDR restricted Japan's access to its critical supplies of steel and oil. Japan never threatened the US and only wanted positive trade relations as she did to Asia what the US did to North America. This policy of restriction forced Tokyo to eventually take a hostile posture towards Washington.
We read in this official report:
"The United States should encourage these countries to develop a coordinated approach to constrict China's access to all technologies, including dual use, that can inflict "high leverage strategic harm." To establish a new technology regime toward China, Washington should enter into an immediate discussion with allies and friends with the aim of tightening restrictions on the sales of militarily critical technologies to China, including dual use technologies. This will obviously not be easy to accomplish, but the effort should get under way immediately (25)."So much of this is fantasy since so many nations are dependent on China.
The same nations see the US as too indebted to have much freedom of action. There is no future in the West as the EU continues to sink into poverty and oligarchy.
The CFR here, unsurprisingly, states that the TPP is essential to their goals. The demand of the ruling class is to force the Chinese to abandon all hopes of great power status and to admit the US as the only legitimate arbiter of important political decisions in the region. Apart from the rationale behind this, Peking, believing its long earned its rise to power, will certainly not accept it - nor should they.
Ideology also plays a role. Fighting the US is to fight the "liberal international system." They write, "China has sought to integrate both its Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS) partners and its regional neighbors into economic ventures that rival those of the liberal international system. . . ." (16). To "cast doubt on the US economy model" is seen by the ruling class as identical with casting doubt on international financial liberalism.
That China's meteoric rise to power was done without a liberal order does not impress the authors. Perhaps, that's the root of the problem.
To that end, it has been prodding, and poking China with all kinds of sticks and goading it to take action. This process is accelerating, and each day it is getting worse and worse.
What the (American) ruling class is presently doing is attacking China in every way but open war.
China has no interests according to the regime, only the US empire does (or "financial liberalism"). The US is in no position to get itself into a war of attrition with a nuclear armed power. There is no support for any war in the US, nor is there money. In the report cited above, no mention is made of the billions and billions of dollars owned by the Chinese or the results of their flooding the market with them. This might suggest why the Rothschilds and Rockefellers are buying so much gold. China is being encircled and threatened, they have every moral right to rectify this situation militarily if necessary.
-SOTT
China has laid down “red lines” that will trigger armed conflict, and there the USA is (right now) dancing right on top of those “red lines” saying “nah nah nah” and sticking out it’s (figurative) tongue and making “raspberry sounds”.
Nah nah nah!
It is obvious, but I will spell it out.
Some very big and very bad things are being set up to occur with China. Very big. Very bad. And it will be very uncomfortable for all of us.
Russia
Meanwhile, you also have Russia.
Russia, and China are both aligned on many, many levels with the fundamental arrangements part of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. There are those that disagree that China and Russia are conjoined twins. When I argue my points the opposing viewpoint has nothing to say. They haven’t encountered the information that I provide. they only spout off the Western media talking points; which is really just a fantasy world.
But Russia, you know, they too were being poked at and prodded with. And Russia moved up all of it’s forces and was “this close” to getting into a hot kinetic war. This was late last year into this one. The “West” pulled back. It disengaged, but did not stop. Instead billions of dollars in military equipment and supplies started to fly into the Ukraine and related areas all aimed towards Russia.
It is obvious, but I will spell it out.
Some very big and very bad things are being set up to occur with Russia.
There is no getting out of the present American Depression. Private sector debt is fast approaching $20 trillion, not including the massive interest to be added over the foreseeable future. Given that war with either Russia or China would be suicidal for the US – let alone both together – the only rational reading of the Regime’s provocation on both fronts is to unify the country for the sake of economic recovery.
I beg to differ. There's another reading. They are insane, don't know what they are doing, and / or are part of a death cult waiting for "the rapture". -MM
FDR did the same in 1941 against a stubborn Depression. Unfortunately, FDR had a unified nation, a basically moral people and a national, civic will. The national leadership was overwhelmingly seen as legitimate. Yes, it was abused and manipulated, ultimately destroying it, but it is something that the US today has none of.
The people of the US has no interest in a war with anyone, and certainly should not have any military presence in south Asia or the Baltics. These countries are more than willing to trade with the US, so the actual purpose can only be for exploitation.
Exploitation so to protect the massive investments ultimately destroying the US economy. This is corporate welfare of the worst kind.
The Americans, further, have no interest in who controls the South China Sea in the same way as she has no interest in the Japanese Co-Prosperity Sphere.
Japan's rise to power after 1900 made her the natural leader of East Asia. China is in the same position now. There's no moral issue one way or another with a regional hegemon.
Recently, The Philippines took China to the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea over the issue. Any college sophomore should know that Manila would never take such a provocative action.
Sure enough, it was the US masquerading as the Philippines, suing China though the agency of Paul Reichler of the Boston law firm of Foley Hoag.
Of course, the American press took the State Department at its word as always. Since China sits on the Security Council, the “Philippine” victory was of no interest to them.
The UN has no authority in the area or anywhere else, so the “legal” defeat was ignored.
More recently, American arrogance towards President Duterte forced a rapprochement between China and the Philippines, showing yet against the irrationality of American foreign policy.
The Council on Foreign relations opined:
Because the American effort to 'integrate' China into the liberal international order has now generated new threats to U.S. primacy in Asia—and could result in a consequential challenge to American power globally.
Washington needs a new grand strategy toward China that centers on balancing the rise of Chinese power rather than continuing to assist its ascendancy (quoted from Cartalucci, 2016).
It’s difficult to decide which absurdity to tackle first.
It is, as Cartalucci says, “an open, modern proclamation of imperialism.”
This sort of domination is not about protecting sea lanes and ensuring open trade. That was and will never be an issue. It is about exploiting the region directly.
The problem is that China is not Iraq.
China is a first world power more than willing and able to defeat a demoralized, broke and military overstretched US.
To put it crudely, China is becoming, along with Russia, a huge part of the resistance against western imperialism in the area.
They seek to negotiate with the US and western banks as equals, not suppliants.
But, alas, the US responds with even greater threats.
Today, the heroic President Duterte of The Philippines has won his drug war. China has sought an alliance with him, one that he has granted. The mask was off when the US violently condemned his victory against a war that US has never sought to win.
Like ISIS, the West supports the drug trade while pretending to (very poorly) fight it. Very rapidly, the China-Filipino alliance has taken the moral high ground on these issues.
More concretely, China’s power and economic might make her claim to the sea a matter of de facto right.
She is already in the process of developing the islands at issue, already granting her sovereignty over the Paracel and Spratley chains.
Doing so is no threat to the US or anyone else, unless of course, the agenda is to maintain a colonial empire there.
China’s territorial claim
Comment: Duterte's shift towards China makes geopolitical sense. The Philippines is tired of being under the Empire's boot. Friendship between the two countries solves many trade and defense headaches for both. No doubt Duterte's actions will eventually embolden other oppressed countries.
Suddenly, the US tried to be allies with Vietnam – who China had fought in the region twice in the 1970s and 1980s – and engages in naval drills with Japan.
Update: Vietnam is neutral and will not join the USA in any conflict with it's neighbor. -MM
The Philippines were a willing participant of these naval drills just last year, but Duterte has learned his lesson. The majority of the American navy is now engaged in the South China Sea.
It is highly doubtful that Australia and the Philippines want war with the Chinese.
Vietnam is no longer in any position to challenge Beijing as it was in the 1980s. For no clear US interest, the USA regime is demanding war with China.
This process is Identical with what happened in 1940 and most of 1941 against Japan, the US is in the process of cutting off China’s raw materials shipments. Yet, the foe they will face is not a small regional hegemon facing a unified industrial giant.
It is a major (if not THE major) world power facing a dying and collapsing empire.
The ultimate purpose is to weaken the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
Before World War I, the British eyes Berlin and Petrograd with a jealous rage. They and they alone have the right to rule the world. In the 1930s, London had the temerity to condemn Japan’s invasion of Manchuria as an attack on national sovereignty, a statement bordering on the insanely and outrageously funny. Joachim Hagopian writes presciently:
Empire's naked neocolonial aggression involves exploiting unlimited energy resources anywhere in the world while neutralizing key enemies as America's predatory, vested self-interest (or more accurately the parasitic ruling elite's self-interest only, clearly neither America's nor Americans' nor any Asian countries'). Because the world's only superpower has gotten away with raping and pillaging the planet at will for decades, Empire is banking on its retaining its global unipolar dominance for years to come by more of the same tactics (Hagopian,2016).
One of the more absurd and contemptible statements was made by Mark Morris of the US National War College. This plan to isolate and destroy China is at least as old as 2013. He writes long before these events: wrote in November 2013:
War starts and the United States and its allies begin offshore controlling.
Chinese seaborne imports and exports are reduced drastically. Factory production drops and millions of workers are laid off; soon the numbers soar to tens of millions and perhaps a hundred million. . .
When jobs are not found, they start protesting. . .
Now the Chinese Communist Party is faced with tens of millions of unemployed protesters. It will try to blame some enemy that can't be seen. . .
Not believing the party, discontent grows and protests increase.
The Chinese Communist Party orders the People's Liberation Army to break the blockade, but the People's Liberation Army-Navy replies that China doesn't have the right type of Navy for that and are unable to comply with the orders.
Discontent grows and protests become more worrisome to party leaders.
The Chinese Communist Party declares that it has taught the foreign dog a lesson and seeks a [peace] conference at Geneva. (Morris, 2013)
The level of sophomoric arrogance and simplified analysis is astounding, though not surprising.
All China has to do is dump American dollars and refuse to finance American debt.
Without cheap Chinese goods, WalMart is finished.
Ok. This author is getting some things really wrong.
China exports to the world. Not just to the USA.
Exports to the USA pre-Covid were at 11%. Now they are in the 4 to 5% range.
Further, the really cheap goods are made in Mexico and SE Asia. Not in China. China makes the high tech and high quality goods for Korea, Japan, and Germany. -MM
That the Chinese population would not blame the west for instigating this war is not even mentioned.
The above “analysis” is merely a fantasy, a world where everyone has the same assumptions; it is a world made up of minds as isolated from reality and opposition as his own. The problem is if this fantasy is mistaken for political analysis.
Ukraine has been taken from an industrial powerhouse and turned into a fourth-world backwater through the deliberate engineering of liberal western imperialism.
Unfortunately for Washington, there are plenty of places quite unwilling to become minor, impoverished cog’s in New York’s great machine.
As the West cannot sell its own industrial goods (and other commodities), such competition seems to it wasteful. It places more downward pressure on prices and greater competition for resources.
Today, major capitalist enterprises have set up shop abroad and use cheaper labor to boost profits by “importing” those back into the US. This means the same mechanisms of protection the system offers domestically must be extended overseas.
Ismael Hossein-Zadeh writes that globalization
...tend[s] to deprive the outsourcing countries of production and employment at home, they also bring the economic structure of host countries under the rules and regulations of neoliberal economics.
Entrenchment of neoliberal economics on a global scale, however, requires more than the traditional armies or military forces of imperialism. Perhaps more importantly, it also requires new, metaphorical soldiers or armies such as WTO, the IMF, central banks, credit rating agencies, and the like—hence, the new imperialism: imperialism based on universal or generalized dispossession (Hossein-Zadeh, 2016).
The total globalization of production and distribution means that the highest possibly profits can be earned when all transaction costs have been minimized.
Now, the assumptions of that statement are many, but it is the underlying axiom of globalization in general. It implies, however, that states must have their place in the new order and retain that place. One piece out of place can bring the edifice to crisis.
That gets worse if that piece is the size of China.
More generally, he writes, this irrational sort of militarization derives from what he terms “parasitic imperialism.” Its marks are that it
Redistributes national income or resources in favor of the wealthy; (2) undermines the formation of public capital (both physical and human); (3) weakens national defenses against natural disasters; (4) accumulates national debt and threatens economic/financial stability; (5) spoils external or foreign markets for non-military U.S. transnational capital; (6) undermines civil liberties and democratic values; and (7) fosters a dependence on or addiction to military spending and, therefore, leads to an spiraling vicious circle of war and militarism (Hossein-Zadeh, 2007).
“Parasitic imperialism” is the result of a world that has, at least for now, made its peace with dependency.
Local elites are required to promote the ideologies favored by finance capital, invariably liberal democracy with a strong focus on squashing non-liberal dissent.
This is quite consistent with liberalism, as the French Revolution and all its bastard children have shown.
Jacobinism is the mother of (modern) imperialism since it enshrines self-interest and ontological nominalism as the center of all things. Self-interest justifies the financial oligarchy’s ability to outbid smaller rivals for near-zero interest rates.
With this tremendous advantage, oligarchy is assured, since smaller borrowers now must borrow at much higher rates from those at the top of the pyramid.
Buying assets, especially troubled ones, is much easier for oligarchy and, with the taxpayers forced to bail them out, rational decision-making is not important.
Irrationality aside, “free markets,” based on self-interest, have no ideological means to oppose the purchase of the government or monetary policy by private actors.
Building a financial structure that uses debt to leverage more debt – that is, until the chances of repayment become quite thin – is also rational for those with the ability to profit from it.
Over time, the bad loans and the assets to which they are attached become the property of the regime and those failing to make their payments are conveniently labeled as failures.
More importantly, it represents short term profit unrelated to actual production.
Most profits of the Regime’s billionaires comes from debt and speculation, not on creation.
It is, as Paul Craig Roberts terms it, the “looting phrase” of modern capitalism.
Beyond profit that derives from the expropriation of surplus labor, another, increasingly more important source of profit is the result of mass leveraging of assets.
Americans are forced to borrow constantly to maintain even a basic standard of living.
This means that a part of their income – possibly a substantial part – is then transferred to finance capital (Hossein-Zadeh, 2016a).
But what does this have to do with the US navy in the South China Sea?
This analysis is really the foundation for imperial parasitism, overstretch and endless war. Ukraine was colonized as a means to a) ensure the transfer of her assets to the west as debt service; b) to encircle and threaten Russia and c) to deindustrialize the country, rendering Ukraine a raw materials producer for the regime.
As the US economy sinks deeper into Depression (despite the laughably phony statistics from Washington), war and imperial exploitation are the only means to create “value.” What the western bankers have done in Ukraine can, in theory, be done in the US.
Combining public and private sector debt means that the entire American economic grid can be sold off and still not pay the principle. Soon, China’s control over America’s debt, her growing population, military sophistication and expansion into Central Asia and Africa will dethrone the US as the “world’s only superpower.”
Russian gold reserves from early 2013 increased by almost 150%.
By Fall of 2015, Russia owned 1352 tons of gold. China now owns nearly 2000 tons, radically increasing their holdings starting in early 2015. This is an important sign that de-dollarization is around the corner.
Warfare, at present, is likely the only means for the Regime to stop this trend.
The very existence of a drive to de-dollarization might be sufficient to cause a run on this weakened institution.
The New Silk Road project, as many have said recently, is a radical restructuring of the globe’s economy.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the most significant political organization in the East, is not mentioned in the mindless “presidential election debates” in the US because it is the organization of most of the world’s population against US imperialism.
China is building its own financial infrastructure, creating a new banking regime without western and Jewish interest. They are offering credit to Africa without the demands and political ideology of the west.
Like a wounded animal, the US elite will lash out…
Iran
Meanwhile, there are events going on regarding the “West” with Iran.
Now, Iran is also part of the “Shanghai Cooperation Organization”, and we can see that the events with Russia, China and Iran are all directed to attack this SCO and destroy it in warfare.
Perhaps a map might help explain things better.
Here’s an out of date map that I pulled off the internet. The key point is that Iran is no longer “observer status” but is actually a full “member” of the SCO.
In this article, we will discuss some of the troop buildups and movements toward Iran. And this is important because, if you look at the BIG picture, you can clearly see a pattern emerging.
The Pattern that is emerging.
The United States is planning to attack the SEO; which is the vast bulk of Asia.
It’s an insane, dick move.
It’s pure folly to take on Russia alone. Intense idiocy to take on China alone. And sheer madness to take on a war against Iran.
But there you have it. The monkeys that “pull the levers” in Washington DC are all crazed psychopaths, and they want to seemingly start a war that will destroy everything and everything with it. Fools!
Let’s talk about Iran
This is a comment off of Saker. I guess it comes from someone’s Twitter feed.
Almost none of these incidents and “chess moves” have been reported by Western media. Reading all this, does it feel like the approach to the WW3 Event horizon is escalating??
It seems chess pieces are being moved everywhere….. so much is happening at the Azerbaijan Armenia Iran Turkey border areas.
Syria is still in play.
And Israel has strengthened ties with Azerbaijan (and Saudi).
Look at what happened in October 2021…
One month at the Iran, Azerbaijan and Armenian border.
(Includes a side serve of Turkey ~Syria)
As told in tweets by Kiev located
“proud Cossack”Fuat @lilygrutcher
Sept 28
Israel delivered $2 billion worth of new weapons and munitions to Azerbaijan in the last two months.
Most of them are now deployed at the Iranian border.
Sept 30
Turkish-Ukrainian agreement on construction of Bayraktar TB2 center in Kyiv is signed. (Pic Includes Zelensky)
>Former Armenian defence minister David Tonoyan arrested in Yerevan
>Turkish Army is clearing mines near Iranian border in order to facilitate the deployment of Turkish troops at Iranian border.
Three Turkish TB2’s are in the air right now near Iranian border.
>Iranian military say Baku is in the range of Iranian artillery deployed at Azeri border.
>Iranian air defence systems put on high alert.
>High rank IRGC official Mahmoud Gazizi calls Azeris “Zionist prostitutes.”
>7 or 8 Iranian Airforce helicopters deployed at Azeri border
>16th Army of Iran (Qazvin Army) on their way to Nakhijevan borders. Nakhijevan is an Azeri enclave between Turkey, Iran and Armenia
>Iranian Army to start another huge drills near Azeri borders tomorrow.
>Iran is creating and financing pro-Iranian military Husayniun group (“Islamic Resistance of Azerbaijan”) in Azerbaijan.
Azeri government should act quickly and toughly if they don’t want their own Azeri Hezbollah.
Oct 1
The length of Iranian Army convoy (tanks, armored vehicles, artillery guns) deployed near Azerbaijan for tomorrow’s drills reaches 8 km. Biggest Iranian drills in the last 20 years.
>Turkey and Aze are keen to create a Zangezur corridor through Armenian territory which would connect mainland Azerbaijan to its enclave Nakhijevan.
This corridor would be enormously profitable for both Turkey and Azerbaijan, and even for Armenia.
§§§. teshub1 @teshub12: replies:
the corridor would not be profitable for Armenia at all.
It would literally be a highway through Armenian territory, connecting Nakh. to Az. but ceded to Azerbaijan.
This was not part of the agreement signed last year by AZ, AR, and RU. A highway under Russian control was.
>Fuat:
Meanwhile Armenia, bound to centuries-long dogmas, so far refuses to authorize this project.
@teshub1 replies:
§§§. You’re a total fool if you think Armenia literally ceding territory in its most strategically important but geographically insecure region to its two main geopolitical rivals would be good for Armenia.
Fuat:
Iran fears that, sooner or later, Armenia will bow to Turkish pressure and agree for the corridor.
If constructed, this corridor would cut Iran from direct routes to Caucasus and Europe. That’s what makes them so nervous.
Oct 1:
UNCONFIRMED reports of first clashes between Iranian and Azeri troops on the border about 2 hrs ago. 1 Iranian and 2 Azeri soldiers wounded.
>Now reports come that the Azeris pull their troops back from near the border.
>6 Iranian armed drones flying over Azeri border.(vid)
>Massive transfer of Iranian troops by A400M’s to Azeri border, these minutes.
>All IRGC units in north-west Iran are put on high alert.
>Iranian airbases in Tehran and Hamadan in standby mode.
>Israeli ambassador to Azerbaijan George Deek.(video) announcement of project to promote and preserve Jewish heritage. American Ambassador to Azerbaijan and head of USAID program also attend.
*Deek States Azerbaijan has largest Jewish population in Muslim world.
>Including pic of “Mountain Jews Museum” official opening.
Oct 2
UNCONFIRMED.
Azeris shot down Iranian drone, about 4 hrs ago
>Deputy chief of staff of Armenia arrested in Yerevan.
Oct 3:
Azeri Army put on high alert.
>Reports of blast in Iranian military base in the west of Tehran, this afternoon.
>|Algeria recalled its ambassador from France for consultations.
>Reports that Iranian AH-1 Super Cobra mistakenly fired at Iranian troops during the ongoing drills near Azeri border. Three Iranian soldiers killed.
>Armenia opens its airspace for Iranian drones
>Armenia and Iran discuss the establishment of Iranian military bases on Armenian territory.
>|Algeria closes its airspace for French warplanes.
Oct 4
Who said Turkey is withdrawing from Idlib?
Quite the opposite: more and more Turkish Army convoys are entering Idlib every day. (Pic of convoy)
>Rebels captured Muhaberat (Assadite intelligence) agent in South Idlib.
>Rebel sniper killed a pro-Iranian militant in Jabel, West Aleppo.
>Turkish troops in Idlib are ordered to be ready to repel any attack by Assadite forces.
>Iranian parliament resolution, 2 hrs ago: “Inviolability of borders of our neighbors is Iran’s red line. If somebody tries to cross this line, Iran will act immediately.”
>Pro-Khamenei daily Vatan-e Emrooz decyphers the resolution adopted by the Iranian parliament: if Ankara and Baku invade Armenia, Iran will do the same immediately.
>Iranian drills finished. Troops retreat.
>Turkish-Azeri joint drills in Nakhijevan announced for 5-8 October.
>Newest and most advanced Israeli air defence system Arrow 3 to be delivered to Azerbaijan soon.
Iran snubbed again.
>Mass arrests of pro-Iranian elements in Baku.
Oct 5
IRGC deploys about 4,000 speed boats in the seaport of Ashtar near Azeri border.
>Turkish-Azeri-Georgian tripartite drills “Eternity” started in Georgia (country). Turkish and Azeri troops are arriving in Tbilisi.
>Israeli National Security Council warns of possible terrorist attacks on Israeli and Jewish objects across Azerbaijan.
>Georgia bans Iranian citizens and vehicles from entering its territory. Reason unknown so far.
Hundreds of Iranian trucks are currently stuck at Armenian-Georgian border.
>Mossad kidnapped an Iranian general in Syria to get info about Ron Arad, Israeli pilot captured by terrorists in 1986.
Waiting for details.
>Iran closes its border with Turkey in Kapikoy, East Turkey.
>Iranian pro-Khamenei center in Baku closed by local authorities without any explanation.
>Iran closes its airspace for Azeri warplanes going to Azeri enclave Nakhijevan.
>4 Turkish military cargo planes have arrived in Azerbaijan since this morning.
>Iranian agents’ attempt to blast a car of an Israeli embassy official in Baku, foiled by Azeri authorities.
Oct 6
President Aliyev poses with Israeli drone Harop.(pic)
>Saudi media say two Israeli Arrow 3 air defence systems are already deployed in Azerbaijan.
>Israel is ready to send its F-35s to Azerbaijan to help this country in case of Iranian military aggression.
(Israeli media)
>Arrow 3 is an only air defense system in the world capable of hitting targets in stratosphere, even low-orbit satellites.
Its missiles cost $2.2 million each.
>Pro-Iranian Huseiniyye mosque in Ganja, West Azerbaijan, closed by Azeri authorities.
>Azeri government starts monitoring all Iran-financed mosques in Azerbaijan
>General Aviv Kochavi, chief of general staff of IDF: “We will continue eliminating key figures of Iran and destroying its key military objects anywhere in Iran.”
>Turkish FM calls on NATO to give full membership for Ukraine and Georgia
>Iranian drone shot down over South Idlib.
>Biggest Turkish-Azeri joint drills announced for coming days. Turkey considers sending S-400 missile systems and F-16s to Azerbaijan to help this country against the possible Iranian aggression.
>Azerbaijan bans potatoes import from Iran.
>Turkish and Azeri warplanes flying very close to Iranian border during joint drills in Nakhijevan.
Oct 7
Armenia in the shock of news that Baku-Nakhijevan flight passed throuh Armenian air space this morning.
>Most probably, Iran is more shocked than Armenia is.
>Turkey closes four border checkpoints for Iranian vehicles.
(Includes map)
>Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are holding joint naval drills in the Gulf of Oman, not far from Iranian coasts.
>Ukrainian TB2 spotted last night over Iraq near Iranian border.
Is Ukraine joining anti-Iran coalition?
>Pakistan deploying troops near Iranian border after gunmen from Iranian side killed Pakistani soldier.
>Khamenei’s official representative left Baku this morning.
Oct 8
Turkish source reports of assasination attempt on Karabakhi president Arayik Haroutyunyan, 1 hr ago.
Haroutyunyan is reportedly wounded.
>Russian media say Turkish drones delivered to Ukraine are ready to be used against Donbass separatists, and Russia still has nothing to oppose them.
>Azerbaijan denied entry visa for Iranian co-president of joint Azeri-Iranian Trade Chamber.
>9 border checkpoints are closed for Iranian trucks in Turkey, Azerbaijan and Georgia
>Iranian FM requested his Turkish counterpart for a meeting.
Iran steps back.
>UK-based Elaph news agency says two Israeli Airforce F-35s have arrived in Azerbijan.
>Azerbaijan to open its embassy in Israel very soon
>Commander of the 3rd Turkish Army arrived in Azeri enclave Nakhijevan.
>The chairman of the Turkiah-Iranian Chamber of Commerce says Turkey stopped all kinds of trade with Iran in view of ongoing threats from Iran against Azerbaijan.
Oct 9
Another Turkish Army convoy entered Idlib.
>Turkish FM: “Ukraine’s application for observer status in Turcic Council will be considered on November 12.”
>Iranian FM Abdollahian now calls to his Azeri counterpart to arrange a meeting.
>Israeli air attack on T-4 airbase in Homs, 3 hrs ago.
>Four Israeli Airforce Il-76s landed in Baku since this morning.
>6 Russian spies arrested by Turkish police in Istanbul and Antalya this morning.
>Abolhassan Banisadr, Iran’s first president after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, died this morning in Paris at the age of 88.
>One of Russian-made S-200’s used by Syrian air defence to repel yesterday’s air attack on T-4 base landed in Iraq.
Oct 10
Turkish police arrested the head of Afghan mafia in Istanbul.
>Turkey is working on first laser drones.
>Armenian source says Azeri sniper killed a Karabakhi civilian in Martakert.
Armenia is furious that nearby Russian peacekeepers did nothing to prevent the killing of civilian.
Oct 14
Three huge blasts in Ganja, West Azerbaijan, this morning.
>8 Iranian agents arrested by Turkish security forces in Van, East Turkey.
>Israeli air attack on pro-Assad positions near Palmyra, these minutes. US and Uzbekistan to discuss deployment of US troops in Uzbekistan soon
>High ranking Taliban delegation arrived in Ankara.
Oct 17
Fierce clashes between Syrian Kurds and pro-Turkish rebels in Azaz, these minutes. 6 Kurds killed so far.
>Turkish drones monitoring Syrian border, these minutes.
>Turkish aircrafts throwing leaflets down to the town of Tel Rifaat calling the civilians to leave the place or to stay away from Kurdish positions.
>Pro-Assad positions south-west of Raqqa attacked about 3 hrs ago. Over 10 killed.
Oct 18
US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin to visit Ukraine and Georgia next week.
>Turkish Army ready for biggest operation in its history.
>Akinci drones probably in the air over Syrian border, these minutes.
This kind of drones have been never used in battle before. Their ammunition is thrice as much as that of TB2.
Oct 19
French ambassador to Belarus DEPORTED by Lukashenko.
Amother humiliation for Macron.
Oct 20
IRGC Headquarters in Homeyn, West Iran, attacked by unknown gunmen, Oct. 16. The commander of the headquarters killed.
>Two more high ranking Iranian spies arrested in Azerbaijan.
Iran’s spy netwotk in this country is crushed every day.
>Azeri source says Israeli instructors train Azeri military to handle newest Israeli drones in Ismailliyah, North Azerbaijan.
>Massive arrests of pro-Iranian agents continue across Azerbaijan.
4 local Hezbollah members arrested this morning. US granted access to 4 four more military bases in Greece. US has a total of 8 military bases in Greece now.
Oct21
Another Turkish Army convoy entered Idlib 30 min ago.
Oct 22
48 pro-Iranian elements arrested in Baku this morning.
Oct 23 Avigdor Liberman says the war with Iran is inevitable and not too far.
>Armed Azeri soldiers stole 150 sheeps from Armenian farmers today in Syunik, South Armenia, Armenian ombudsman says.
>Massive arrival of US troops in Alexandroupolis, North-East Greece.
>Massive fire in a power station in Bandar Abbas, South Iran.
Oct 25
Coup in Sudan
Oct 26
First NATO airbase opened in Latvia, yesterday.
>Education minister of Armenia says they do not plan to open Russian schools in the country.
In neighboring Georgia too, there is no public Russian school anymore.
Oct 27
President Erdogan arrived in Baku.
>Iran’s gas station system completely paralyzed by hacker attack.
>Reports that Ukrainian Army started to use TB2 drones against pro-Russian separatists in Donbass.(drone footage)
>Russian Army convoy attacked in Syria.
§§§ Mike Schiebel
@mike_schiebel… Who would be suspect to attacking Russia?
Fuat: Pro-Turkish rebels.
>Ukrainian military say they need at least 50 Bayraktar drones to completely destroy separatists in Russian-occupied Donbass.
>Iranian officials say today’s cyber attack against National Iranian Oil Products Distribution Company “was conducted by a foreign country”. UAE ready to allow Israel to use their airbases to attack Iran.
>Azeri officials say Zangezur corridor through Armenian territory to connect mainland Azerbaijan to Turkey will be ready in 2023.
>President Erdogan: “One day you will just get in your car in Baku and drive straight to Istanbul through Zangezur corridor.”
>Pro-Iranian Hashdi-Shaabi headquarter attacked by IS in Diyala, Iraq. 14 killed.
>Huge Turkish Army convoy of 130 armored vehicles entered Idlib, 3 hrs ago.
>In total, three Turkish Army convoys of over 400 armored vehicles entered Idlib in the last 6 hours.(videos)
>Arizona-born Rep. Jeff Flake, 58, appointed new US Ambassador to Turkey.
>Reports that Ukranian artillery units are redeploying closer to the frontline in Donbass.
Oct 28
First Israeli plane landed in Saudi Arabia, yesterday.
>Ukrainian Bayraktars in the air again.
>Air attack sirens in Russian-occupied Donbass.
>Taiwanese President confirms the presence of US troops in Taiwan.
>China to open its second military base in Tajikistan.
Oct 29
Huge deployment of Turkish troops in North Syria.
>Fierce clashes in Donbass, these minutes.
>Intense flight of Turkish drones over M4 road, these minutes.
Putting it all together
It’s all “chess pieces”. And the USA / “The West” all seem to be playing an oppressive role in it.
America to fight Iran / Russia / China (The SCO block).
Americans are at a fever pitch right now, and the window of opportunity can only be maintained for a year or two tops.
Now, instead of chatting up a storm and throwing out facts and figures, I am just going to lay down a map. Let’s see where all these provocations and “chess moves” are taking place.
This is what the United States is doing right now…
Red arrows indicate the provocation vectors. Yellow arrows indicate provocation vectors that have ended or been suppressed.
So what do you think will be the end result of all this? Are you all going to tell me that China, Russia or Iran are “saber rattling”? What the FUCK does all this look like?
Do you think that everything will “blow over” and things will be “ok”?
Do you think that Russia, China, Iran and the rest of Asia will continue to “sit by” and do nothing?
Russia and China are very close allies. If you don’t believe me, then read what XI Peng, and Putin’s comments on this subject.
Or, perhaps you think that America has every right to poke China; every right to poke Russia; every right to poke Iran? As Communism is bad, and democracy is good? Right?
Just like the “news” media says…
No they didn't.
They made a formal declaration at the United Nations and claimed that it was a bio-weapon launched by John Bolton and the Trump administration on the most important Chinese holiday of the year.
They also provided videos and biopsy reports of the military personnel at Wuhan doing all sorts of strange things. Like spitting in fish tanks. Rubbing their hands all over cucumbers, eggplant, apples, corn, lettuce, and mangoes.
Not a single event was reported inside of America.
But of course this screen capture is from FOX “news”.
This is the big picture. Soak it up. And drink it in. Soon, there will be a very HARSH slap back.
I would not advise anyone to be inside a large American city next year.
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.
It's worth noting that the Chinese Orbital Hypersonic Missile development means the UK is not geographically invulnerable in a conflict scenario with China. It might want to rethink the assumption it can just prod at China in the Pacific from a distance...
— Tom Fowdy (@Tom_Fowdy) October 17, 2021
This is going to be a long article.
I have taken various highlighted articles of interest and strung them together into a unified whole to give the reader the MOST ACCURATE picture concerning what is going on with all this flood of “hate China”, and “War is good” stuff spewing out of the United States today.
Well, if not China, how about invading Russia?
Russia says NO!
And if not invade Russia, then how about invading Australia?
Yes. these people are seriously off their trolleys.
Do you really want to know what is going on? Are the Chinese going to siphon off your “vital bodily” fluids and gobble up the world? And why are you forced to endure lies and distortions in favor of war?
It is a distraction, as MM as repeatedly stated, or is it something more?
What is going on?
Introduction
Ok, I’m minding my own business. I have just made myself a cup of coffee and went to my study and fired up both of my computers. (One, my active computer is running Lunix and I am doing driver installation activities. While the other is my “old computer” and it is limping along with a malware saturated Chinese OS.)
I fire up those “puppies” (computers) and “right off the bat“, this is what I see…
With each passing week, it looks like World War III — between America and China — is coming sooner than we think. It’s not going to be fought with bullets or aircraft carriers, although the Chinese are building up their military in an aggressive and threatening way.
This will more likely be an all-out economic war for global supremacy. The yuan versus the dollar. The Nasdaq versus the Shanghai Stock Exchange.
Meanwhile, America is asleep at the switch — at least, the Biden administration is. This is the worst possible time to be raising tax rates on American companies (Our business tax rates would be higher than China’s under President Joe Biden’s plan!), dismantling American energy (at a time when China is running 1,000 dirty coal plants with dozens more in construction), and running up the national debt (with China a major purchaser of the bonds).
Love Donald Trump or hate him, he was a president who put America first and recognized the predatory nature of the Chinese regime. He got tough with President Xi Jinping and overturned one-sided trade deals. His strategy was to do what former President Ronald Reagan did to win the Cold War: Make America tremendously prosperous by building up our strategic industries in a way that the Soviet Union or China couldn’t compete with.
The danger is that we now have a president in Biden who thinks that climate change is a bigger threat to the world than the Maoists in Beijing.
And make no mistake about it; the communists are back in charge in China. Jinping has basically announced himself to be president for life, as democracy and free elections fly out the window. China is also sprinting back to command and control fascist government and industry “cooperation.” That’s a model that will eventually implode, but as we learned from the Soviet menace, they can do a lot of damage to peace and prosperity in the meantime.
It’s no accident that China’s economy and stock market are faltering. In the last year, as the U.S. stock market has risen by about 20% (thanks to Operation Warp Speed), China’s Shanghai stock market went down 15%. They are sprinting toward socialism faster than we are… for now.
The Chinese stock market jitters reflect global investors’ irritation with the more frequent political interventions in business affairs. As Foreign Affairs magazine recently put it regarding these iron-fisted interferences into the business activities of its largest companies: “Xi has placed China on a risky trajectory, one that threatens the (free market) achievements of his predecessors.”
In short, events of recent months both militarily and economically confirm that the modern Maoists are firmly entrenched in Beijing, and capitalism is losing. Jinping’s administration simply doesn’t get what George H.W. Bush once so eloquently described as “that freedom thing.” Militant social controls and restraints on individual liberty are now being matched with economic controls on Chinese megacorporations that are trying to vie for industry supremacy in technology, biology, manufacturing and transportation. Is all of this reminiscent of Japan circa 1939?
What is the Biden administration’s response to these threats? The massive $5 trillion spend, tax and borrow bill he is steamrolling through Congress will impair American economic supremacy almost overnight. Under Trump, tax rate reductions led to a $1 trillion infusion of capital from around the world, coming back to these shores to build up our industrial might. Biden’s tax policies will have the reverse effect: deindustrialization.
We are, as a nation, now back to importing tens of billions of dollars of energy from OPEC and Russia instead of selling the hundreds of years’ worth of oil, gas and coal. Do the progressives who now run Washington really believe we are going to defeat the rising Communist China threat by building windmills? Do they think that redistributing income and wealth makes more sense than creating it?
Will we be in any economic shape to repel China’s militaristic advances in the South China Sea, in India, in Africa and perhaps on to the shores of Taiwan with the policies in place in Washington today? Doubtful.
The war with China is on. Right now, only one country is fighting — China. Let’s not let another Afghanistan catastrophe happen in Asia.
…
Sigh.
Right. Rigggghhhhht.
Only China is fighting. China’s economy is collapsing. China is taking over American industries with an iron-fist. The failures of America are all China’s fault. Yada. Yada. Yada.
Sure.
In your dreams.
In my nightmares, but in these assholes dreams.
They haven’t a clue as to what they are dealing with. These money grabbing, politically sensitive nitwits are leading the United States towards certain destruction. But you all have heard that before.
Right?
Notice how the author weaves politics with the global economic weight of the rest of the world. Nope you dunder-heads. Politics is meaningless, useless and dangerous when mixed with anything outside of it’s natural venue. Or haven’t you ever tried to discuss politics at the Thanksgiving table with strangers? Huh?
China doesn’t play politics.
China plays HARD-BALL.
Be careful for what you wish for. If China really wanted to fight instead of the dance-moves that it is currently engaged in, it would gallop at full “break neck” speed, and Lordy! You do not want to be in their way.
I’ll tell you what.
Understanding the world 101
I constantly tell my interns that Business = Relationships.
And it is very, very true. The most successful businesses have been built upon strong foundational relationships.
In a like way, Politics = Money.
When anyone is so enraptured about Politics you know that they are talking about money. And in particular, how THEY get money, keep money, acquire money, save money or manipulate money.
With this in mind, we can see that the author of the previous article was mixing Geo-Politics with China. And that tells us all we need to know. All this hate-China narrative is all about money.
And all this Drumbeat of hate-China is all about…
Money!
And what to they wish for?
War!
Idiotic fools.
If you pay any attention to history, wars ALWAYS, and without exception, originate from the wealthy class. In general, the wealthier the individuals are, the more expansive, brutal and awful the wars they generate, will be.
So who is driving the narrative for the USA to fight China in a war?
At MintPress, we have been at the forefront of exposing how Middle Easterndictatorships and weapons contractors have been funneling money into think tanks and political action committees, keeping up a steady drumbeat for more war and conflict around the world. Yet one little-discussed nation that punches well above its weight in spending cash in Washington is Taiwan.
By studying Taiwan’s financial reports, MintPress has ascertained that the semi-autonomous island of 23 million people has, in recent years, given out millions of dollars to many of the largest and most influential think tanks in the United States. This has coincided with a strong upsurge in anti-China rhetoric in Washington, with report after report warning of China’s economic rise and demanding that the U.S. intervene more in China-Taiwan disputes.
These think tanks are filled with prominent figures from both parties and have the ears of the most powerful politicians in Washington. It is in their offices that specialists draw up papers and incubate ideas that become tomorrow’s policies. They also churn out experts who appear in agenda-setting media, helping to shape and control the public debate on political and economic issues.
Twenty years ago, a group of neoconservative think tanks like the Project for a New American Century, funded by foreign governments and weapons manufacturers, used their power to push for disastrous wars in the Middle East. Now, a new set of think tanks, staffed with many of those same experts who provided the intellectual basis for those invasions, is working hard to convince Americans that there is a new existential threat: China.
A fistful of dollars
In 2019, the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in the United States (TECRO) — for all intents and purposes, the Taiwanese embassy — donated between $250,000 and $499,999 to the Brookings Institute, commonly identified as the world’s most influential think tank. Taiwanese tech companies have also given large sums to the organization. In turn, Brookings Institute staff like Richard C. Bush (a former member of the National Intelligence Council and a U.S. national intelligence officer for East Asia) vociferously champion the cause of Taiwanese nationalists and routinelycondemn Beijing’s attempts to bring the island more closely under control.
Last week, Brookings held an event called “Taiwan’s quest for security and the good life,” which began with the statement that “Taiwan is rightly praised for its democracy. Elections are free, fair, and competitive; civil and political rights are protected.” It went on to warn that the “most consequential” challenge to the island’s liberty and prosperity is “China’s ambition to end Taiwan’s separate existence.”
According to another organization’s latest financial disclosure, TECRO also gave a six-figure sum to the Atlantic Council, a think tank closely associated with NATO. It is unclear what the Atlantic Council did with that money, but what is certain is that they gave a senior fellowship to Chang-Ching Tu, an academic employed by the Taiwanese military to teach at the country’s National Defense University. In turn, Tu authored Atlantic Council reports describing his country as a “champion [of] global democracy,” and stating that “democracy, freedom and human rights are Taiwan’s core values.” A menacing China, however, is increasing its military threats, so Taiwan must “accelerate its deterrence forces and strengthen its self-defense capabilities.” Thus he advises that the U.S. must work far more closely with Taiwan’s military, conducting joint exercises and moving towards a more formal military alliance. In 2020, the U.S. sold $5.9 billion worth of arms to the island, making it the fifth-largest recipient of American weaponry last year.
Other Taiwan-employed academics have chided the West on the pages of the Council’s website for its insufficient zeal in “deter[ring] Chinese aggression” against the island. “A decision by the United States to back down” — wrote Philip Anstrén, a Swedish recipient of a fellowship from the Taiwanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs — “could damage the credibility of U.S. defense guarantees and signal that Washington’s will to defend its allies is weak.” Anstrén also insisted that “Europe’s future is on the line in the Taiwan Strait.” “Western democratic nations have moral obligations vis-à-vis Taiwan,” he added on his blog, “and Western democracies have a duty to ensure that [Taiwan] not only survives but also thrives.”
The reason this is important is that the Atlantic Council is an enormously influential think tank. Its board of directors is a who’s-who in foreign policy statecraft, featuring no fewer than seven former CIA directors. Also on the board are many of the architects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and James Baker. When organizations like this begin beating the war drums, everybody should take note.
Perhaps the most strongly anti-Beijing think tank in Washington is the conservative Hudson Institute, an organization frequented by many of the Republican Party’s most influential figures, including former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former Vice-President Mike Pence and Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton. The words “China” or “Chinese” appear 137 times in Hudson’s latest annual report, so focused on the Asian nation are they. Indeed, reading their output, it often appears they care about little else but ramping up tensions with Beijing, condemning it for its treatment of Hong Kong, Taiwan and Uyghur Muslims, and warning of the economic and military threat of a rising China.
Over the years, Hudson’s efforts have been sustained by huge donations from TECRO. The Hudson Institute does not disclose the exact donations any sources give, but their annual reports show that TECRO has been on the highest tier of donors ($100,000+) every year since they began divulging their sponsors in 2015. In February, Hudson Senior Fellow Thomas J. Duesterberg wrote an op-ed for Forbes entitled “The Economic Case for Prioritizing a U.S.-Taiwan Free Trade Agreement,” in which he extolled Taiwan’s economy as modern and dynamic and portrayed securing closer economic ties with it as a no-brainer. Hudson employees have also traveled to Taiwan to meet and hold events with leading foreign ministry officials there.
The Hudson Institute also recently partnered with the more liberal Center for American Progress (CAP) to host an event with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, who took the opportunity to make a great number of inflammatory statements about the “ever more challenging threats to free and democratic societies” China poses; applaud the U.S.’ actions on Hong Kong; and talk about how Taiwan honors and celebrates those who died at the Tiananmen Square massacre. TECRO gave the CAP between $50,000 and $100,000 last year.
It is the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), however, that appears to receive the most Taiwanese money. According to its donor list, Taiwan gives as much money to it as the United States does — at least $500,000 last year alone. Yet all of the Taiwanese government money is put into CSIS’s regional studies (i.e., Asia) program. Like Hudson employees, the CSIS calls for a free trade agreement with Taiwan and has lavished praise on the nation for its approach to tackling disinformation, describing it as a “thriving democracy and a cultural powerhouse.” Although acknowledging that the reports were paid for by TECRO, CSIS insists that “all opinions expressed herein should be understood to be solely those of the authors and are not influenced in any way by any donation.” In December, the CSIS also held a debate suggesting that “[w]ithin the next five years, China will use significant military force against a country on its periphery,” exploring what the U.S. response to such an action should be.
Like the Atlantic Council, the CSIS organization is stacked with senior officials from the national security state. Its president and CEO is former Deputy Secretary of Defense John Hamre, while Henry Kissinger — former secretary of state and the architect of the Vietnam War — also serves on its council.
The CSIS accepts money from the Global Taiwan Institute and the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy (TFD) as well. The former is a rather shadowy pro-Taiwanese group that appears not to disclose its funding sources. The latter is a government-funded organization headed by former Taiwanese President You Si-kun. Every year, the TFD publishes a human rights report on China, the latest of which claims that “the Chinese Communist Party knows no bounds when it comes to committing serious human rights violations” — accusing it of “taking the initiative” in “promoting a new Cold War over the issue of human rights” and trying to “replace the universal standing of human rights values around the world.” Ultimately, the report concludes, China “constitutes a major challenge to democracy and freedom in the world.”
The TFD has also been a major funder of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a far-right pressure group that insists that Communism has killed over 100 million people worldwide. Last year, the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation added all global COVID-19 fatalities to the list of Communist-caused deaths on the basis that the virus started in China. The Foundation also employs Adrian Zenz, a German evangelical theologian who is the unlikely source of many of the most controversialandcontested claims about Chinese repression in Xinjiang province.
“It would be naive to believe that Taiwan’s funding of think tanks is not pushing them to take pro-Taiwan or anti-China positions,” Ben Freeman, the director of the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative at the Center for International Policy, told MintPress, adding:
After all, why would Taiwan keep funding think tanks that are critical of Taiwan? There’s a Darwinian element to foreign funding of think tanks that pushes foreign government funding to think tanks that write what that foreign government wants them to write. Taiwan is no exception to this rule.”
TECRO is not just sponsoring American think tanks, however. It has also given funds to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), a hawkish and controversial group described as “the think tank behind Australia’s changing view of China.” The country’s former ambassador in Beijing described ASPI as “the architect of the China threat theory in Australia” while Senator Kim Carr of Victoria denounced them as working hand-in-hand with Washington to push “a new Cold War with China.” ASPI was behind Twitter’s decision last year to purge more than 170,000 accounts sympathetic to Beijing from its platform.
“We must be ready to fight our corner as Taiwan tensions rise,” ASPI wrote in January, having previously castigated the West for being “no longer willing to defend Taiwan.”
ASPI — like Brookings, the Atlantic Council and others — are directly funded by weapons manufacturers, all of whom also have a direct interest in promoting more wars around the world. Thus, if the public is not careful, certain special interests might be helping move the United States towards yet another international conflict.
While the situation outlined above is concerning enough, the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative’s research has shown that around one-third of think tanks still do not provide any information whatsoever about their funding, and very few are completely open about their finances. Freeman maintains that, while there is nothing inherently wrong with foreign governments funding Western think tanks, the lack of transparency is seriously problematic, explaining:
This raises a lot of questions about the work they’re doing. Are their secret funders saying what the think tank can do in a pay-for-play scheme? Are the funders buying the think tanks silence on sensitive issues? Without knowing the think tank’s funders, policymakers and the public have no idea if the think tank’s work is objective research or simply the talking points of a foreign government.”
Freeman’s study of the Taiwanese lobby found that seven organizations registered as Taiwan’s foreign agents in the U.S. Those organizations, in turn, contacted 476 Members of Congress (including almost 90% of the House), as well as five congressional committees. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was their most frequent contact, the Californian being contacted 34 times by Taiwanese agents. Pelosi has been a great supporter of Taiwanese nationalists, successfully promoting pro-Taiwan legislation and proudly announcing that the U.S. “stands with Taiwan.”
Foreign agents working on behalf of Taiwan also made 143 political contributions to U.S. politicians, with former Alabama Senator Doug Jones the lead recipient (Pelosi was third).
Losing China, regaining Taiwan?
The reports listed above understand the dispute as purely a matter of Chinese belligerence against Taiwan and certainly do not consider U.S. military actions in the South China Sea as aggressive in themselves. That is because the world of think tanks and war planners sees the United States as owning the planet and having a remit to act anywhere on the globe at any time.
To this day, U.S. planners bemoan the “loss of China” in 1949 (a phrase that presupposes the United States owned the country). After a long and bloody Second World War, Communist resistance forces under Mao Tse-tung managed to both expel the Japanese occupation and overcome the U.S.-backed Kuomintang (nationalist) force led by Chang Kai-shek. The United States actually invaded China in 1945, with 50,000 troops working with the Kuomintang and even Japanese forces in an attempt to suppress the Communists. However, by 1949, Mao’s army was victorious; the United States evacuated and Chang Kai-shek retreated to Taiwan.
The Kuomintang ruled the island for 40 years as a one-party state and remains one of the two major political groups to this day. The war between the Communists and the Kuomintang never formally ended, and Taiwan has now lived through 70 years of estrangement from the mainland. Polls show a majority of Taiwanese now favor full independence, although a large majority still personally identify as Chinese.
While many Taiwanese welcome an increased U.S. presence in the region, Beijing certainly does not. In 2012, President Barack Obama announced the U.S.’ new “Pivot to Asia” strategy, moving forces from the Middle East towards China. Today, over 400 American military bases encircle it.
In recent months, the United States has also taken a number of provocative military actions on China’s doorstep. In July, it conducted naval exercises in the South China Sea, with warships and naval aircraft spotted just 41 nautical miles from the coastal megacity of Shanghai, intent on probing China’s coastal defenses. And in December, it flew nuclear bombers over Chinese vessels close to Hainan Island. Earlier this year, the head of Strategic Command made his intentions clear, stating that there was a “very real possibility” of war against China over a regional conflict like Taiwan. China, for its part, has also increased its forces in the region, carrying out military exercises and staking claims to a number of disputed islands.
A new Director of National Intelligence (DNI) report notes that China is the U.S.’ “unparalleled priority,” claiming that Beijing is making a “push for global power.” “We expect that friction will grow as Beijing steps up attempts to portray Taipei as internationally isolated and dependent on the mainland for economic prosperity, and as China continues to increase military activity around the island,” it concludes.
In an effort to stop this, Washington has recruited allies into the conflict. Australian media are reporting that their military is currently readying for war in an effort to force China to back down, while last week President Joe Biden met with Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga to shore up a united front against Beijing vis-a-vis Taiwan.
In February, the Atlantic Council penned an anonymous 26,000-word report advising Biden to draw a number of red lines around China, beyond which a response — presumably military — is necessary. These included any military action or even a cyber attack against Taiwan. Any backing down from this stance, the council states, would result in national “humiliation” for the United States.
Perhaps most notably, however, the report also envisages what a successful American China policy would look like by 2050:
[T]he United States and its major allies continue to dominate the regional and global balance of power across all the major indices of power;… [and head of state Xi Jinping] has been replaced by a more moderate party leadership; and … the Chinese people themselves have come to question and challenge the Communist Party’s century-long proposition that China’s ancient civilization is forever destined to an authoritarian future.”
In other words, that China has been broken and that some sort of regime change has occurred.
Throughout all this, the United States has been careful to stress that it still does not recognize Taiwan and that their relationship is entirely “unofficial,” despite claiming that its commitment to the island remains “rock solid.” Indeed, only 14 countries formally recognize Taiwan, the largest and most powerful of which is Paraguay.
Along with a military conflict brewing, Washington has also been prosecuting an information and trade war against China on the world stage. Attempts to block the rise of major Chinese companies like Huawei, TikTok and Xiaomi are examples of this. Others in Washington have advised the Pentagon to carry out an under-the-table culture war against Beijing. This would include commissioning “Taiwanese Tom Clancy” novels that would “weaponize” China’s one-child policy against it, bombarding citizens with stories about how their only children will die in a war over Taiwan.
Republicans and Democrats constantly accuse each other of being in President Xi’s pocket, attempting to outdo each other in their jingoistic fervor. Last year, Florida Senator Rick Scott went so far as to announce that every Chinese national in the U.S. was a Communist spy and should be treated with extreme suspicion. As a result, the American public’s view of China has crashed to an all-time low. Only three years ago, the majority of Americans held a positive opinion of China. But today, that number is only 20%. Asian-Americans of all backgrounds have reported a rise in hate crimes against them.
Cash rules everything around me
How much of the United States’ aggressive stance towards China can be attributed to Taiwanese money influencing politics? It is difficult to say. Certainly, the United States has its own policy goals in East Asia outside of Taiwan. But Freeman believes that the answer is not zero. The Taiwan lobby “absolutely has an impact on U.S. foreign policy,” he said, adding:
At one level, it creates an echo-chamber in D.C. that makes it taboo to question U.S. military ties with Taiwan. While I, personally, think there are good strategic reasons for the U.S. to support this democratic ally — and it’s clearly in Taiwan’s interest to keep the U.S. fully entangled in their security — it’s troubling that the D.C. policy community can’t have an honest conversation about what U.S. interests are. But, Taiwan’s lobby in D.C. and their funding of think tanks both work to stifle this conversation and, frankly, they’ve been highly effective.”
Other national lobbies affect U.S. policy. The Cuban lobby helps ensure that the American stance towards its southern neighbor remains as antagonistic as possible. Meanwhile, the Israel lobby helps ensure continuing U.S. support for Israeli actions in the Middle East. Yet more ominously with Taiwan, its representatives are helping push the U.S. closer towards a confrontation with a nuclear power.
While Taiwanese money appears to have convinced many in Washington, it is doubtful that ordinary Americans will be willing to risk a war over an island barely larger than Hawaii, only 80 miles off the coast of mainland China.
Meet their enablers that are pushing – pushing for war with China
So these billionaires are throwing money to American “think tanks” and political operatives. Where does this money go to? Who are the enablers of their desires?
So who are the enablers? Who is on the receiving ends of all this cash, money, gold, and jewels…
Neoconservatives (NeoCon)
President Donald Trump has hijacked the slogan “America First.”
Once upon a time, it stood for nonintervention in foreign wars, now it stands for neocon intervention and forever war.
The Trump presidency has embraced the neocon ethos of murder and “creative destruction,” based on the teachings of an arcane philosopher, Leo Strauss.
The German Jewish emigre believed deception and permanent war are the foundation of the state, a state led by a sociopathic elite.
Strauss believed, as Thomas Hobbes before him, that humans are inherently aggressive. He said this aggressiveness should be channeled into hostility and war against other people and nations.
The neocons as of yet do not have a direct role in a Trump executive, but they are influencing the Trump administration through their foundations and think tanks, most notably the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
Donald Trump is a man with zero guiding or animating principles, but for one: the pursuit of adulation.
The neocons, or some of them at least, gave him the praise he so desperately needs after he bombed Syria, canned the Iran nuke deal, loudly and abusively confronted North Korea and its eccentric hereditary leader, and has slowly but surely moved into the camp that believes China is a threat to America.
The neocons are behind the scenes pulling strings that result in forever war and a body count now surpassing a million and a half souls.
-Neocons: who they are and why they matter
The Washington Post has a reputation as liberal and even left-of-center, although its editorial pages are dominated by neoconservatives who support the idea of American exceptionalism and the extreme operational tempo of America’s military.
In the past week, we have been treated to a series of oped essays that are supportive of expanded American military power and a political, if not military, confrontation with China.
U.S. national media generally have been lazy in their treatment of our military—pandering to the military itself and resorting to retired general officers, such as Generals David Petraeus and Jack Keane, as spokesmen. The media typically defend bloated defense budgets and fail to challenge the dangerous militarization of national security decision making.
The Washington Post is particularly supportive of a more militarized national security policy, including a possible “hot” military confrontation with China.
A Hot Shooting war with China!
A group of their oped writers, particularly Michael Gerson, David Ignatius, and George Will, argue that the United States needs to increase defense spending to “protect the country from a full range of global disasters.”
Ignatius, a long-time apologist for the Central Intelligence Agency, conceded the need for restoring the “right civilian-military alignment,” but offered former secretary of defense Robert Gates as his model because Gates “could be ruthless” with aides to Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Gates was, in fact, a captive of the uniformed military.
War in Space!
David Ignatius beats the drums for the just created U.S. Space Force, which inherits 86 space warriors graduating from the Air Force Academy. War in space would be a catastrophe, and even Air Force chief of staff General David Goldfein concedes that in every war game that involves space, we “never come out winning.”
David Ignatius
(During my years at the National War College, China prevailed in every war game that revolved around Taiwan.)
This year’s defense budget appropriates more than $15 billion for space systems, when we should be looking for ways to demilitarize the space frontier—and not promoting another arms race. No country is as dependent economically as the United States on access to space.
War in the South China Sea!
George Will wants a modernized and more lethal Marine Corps at a time when our most dangerous adversaries have developed “high volume, extended-range missile warfare” to deal with threats from the sea. There is a reason why the Marines have not resorted to an amphibious landing since the first months of the Korean War, and that is the high risk and great difficulty of such operations.
George Will
President Harry S. Truman recognized the island-hopping success of the Marines in the Second World War, but he was right for wanting to abolish the Marine Corps at war’s end. Chinese cruise missile technology already has made it certain that U.S. naval ships, including aircraft carriers, will not be able to get close enough to the Chinese Mainland to be effective, and the idea of island-hopping against China is pure fantasy.
Invade the Chinese mainland!
Michael Gerson, the leading speechwriter for President George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” speech in 2002 that prepared the way for the invasion of Iraq, regularly refers to an “increasingly belligerent China.” He believes that Biden would do well to recruit unnamed defense and foreign policy advisers from the Bush administration. Does this mean Biden should bring back Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Bob Gates, and Condi Rice who are responsible for policies that have brought the longest period of continuous U.S. war fighting in our history?
Michael Gerson
Gerson even believes that Biden “should be actively persuading…respected military and intelligence figures who served in the Trump administration to publicly support him.” Gerson’s usual suspects are not the answer.
An aggressive military policy against China!
On April 30, the Washington Post carried two additional opeds that endorsed an aggressive policy toward China, pointing to “superior force” as the “surest road to peace.” Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 2017-2018, argued that “superior Western economic, diplomatic, and military power” defeated the Soviet Union, and that the current challenge from the “Chinese Communists must be seen the same way.”
Nikki Haley
George Will believes that Joe Biden is great because he is willing to “stand up to China, and encourages Biden to “associate himself” with Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR), who endorses the conspiratorial theory regarding the responsibility of the research laboratory in Wuhan for the viral outbreak there. Cotton, the Cold War warrior, wrote in the Post on May 3 that the “Chinese Communist Party is our enemy. It aims to displace the United States as the world’s preeminent economic and military power.”
Bio-Warfare is all China’s fault!
Another Washington Post oped writer, Josh Rogin is ignoring efforts of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to link the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic to the Wuhan laboratory. In an oped on May 1, Rogin falsely credited Pompeo with calling for “depoliticizing” the issue of China’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Pompeo prevented a communique at a recent G-7 meeting because he couldn’t get any of the European representatives to support his polemical accusations. Nevertheless, Rogin cited Pompeo’s specious urgings that the issue of Beijing’s handling of the virus should not become “partisan. It’s too serious a matter.”
Josh Rogin
Pompeo, the leading cheerleader in this campaign, has charged his hand-picked director of the CIA, Gina Haspel, with finding evidence implicating the research lab, according to the New York Times,. However, there is evidence to suggest that Haspel will not accommodate her old boss. Haspel has stood up to the White House on sensitive issues such as the role of Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman in the sadistic killing of a dissident journalist; Russian hacking in the U.S. electoral process; and the origin of the Covid-19 virus.
Haspel’s intelligence analysts could inform Pompeo that it is counterproductive to maintain that the United States and its allies must keep China in “its proper place.” On the other hand, the Defense Intelligence Agency, well known for its willingness to politicize intelligence, recently changed its analytical position in order to accommodate the view that a research lab in Wuhan was the origin of the new pathogen.
Haspel has even protected the job and personal security of the CIA whistleblower whose report led directly to the impeachment process.
No time for diplomacy!
At a time when the Sino-American relationship is central to stabilizing the international arena, we are getting no discussion of the importance of mutual military disengagement in the area of the South China Sea and the need for smart diplomacy. Washington and Beijing are compatible on important strategic issues that deal with the Korean peninsula; the importance of North Korean denuclearization; and the necessity of toning down the risk-taking proclivities of Kim Jong On. In view of the continued uncertainty in North Korea, it is essential that Washington and Beijing have programmatic diplomatic discussions.
A diplomatic dialogue between Washington and Beijing on Korean issues could lead to possibilities for stabilizing the naval rivalry in the South China Sea as well as creating less friction over the issue of Taiwan.
We could send fewer guided-missile cruisers into the South China Sea; China could stop its provocative circumnavigation of Taiwan with fighters and strategic bombers. Even a modest improvement in Sino-American relations would be advantageous, making the strengthened Sino-Russian relationship less threatening to the United States.
It makes no sense for the editorial pages of the Washington Post to assist the efforts of the military-industrial complex to strengthen its case for greater defense spending by exaggerating the so-called threat from China.
Every American president from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama has endorsed a policy of engagement toward China, but Washington’s obsession with trade deficits has created the worst political and economic friction between Washington and Beijing since the first years of the Vietnam War.
And their hate-China narrative…
Why Do Editors Seek ‘Dark Sides’ Of China?
The dark side of China.
There seems to be an inflationary fascination with supposedly ‘dark sides’ of China:
The ‘dark sides’ of China meme did not only start after China had send the goddess Chang’e and Yutu the jade rabbit to the far side of the moon to look for the elixir of life.
One wonders how such ‘dark side’ and ‘weaponizing’ memes happen …
The global media is owned by only 24 people
That’s how!
A new in-depth study has revealed that just 24 companies own the majority of the world’s biggest news outlets. Tech website AddictiveTips conducted the study to find out just consolidated media companies really are in The United States, The United Kingdom and Australia. While the results not be surprising, the study gives a fascinating insight into just how little variety there really is.
Tech blog AddicitveTips have conducted an extremely in-depth and detailed study into the ownership of the world’s media outlets. Their findings show that just 24 companies own the majority of the world’s most powerful news outlets.
The Study
AddictiveTips press release states that the purpose of their study is to;
“uncover the powerful companies and CEOs who control the bulk of today’s news – and present the findings in a tangible way.”
Digital media has become the main driver of news in recent years. Hardcopy newspaper distribution is in free fall, so the battle to control the narrative has moved online.
Rather than turning on the TV at 10pm for the news, you’re more likely to be watching Vox Pops online or seeing mainstream journalists revealing their big “scoop” directly on Twitter. Although the latter has come in for criticism recently, as the “scoop culture” has led to less fact checking so as to get the accolade.
Regardless of who you go to, it is highly likely that many of the outlets you use are connected by one thing; their owner. This study shows who chair the relevant companies. For example News Corp, owners of titles such as The S*n and The Times, are chaired by Australian Robert Thomson. In reality, we all know that the true owner is Rupert Murdoch.
Needless to say, this is a well conducted and researched study.
Methodology
To determine the companies and individuals that own the top news sites in the world, AddictiveTips identified the top owners of the news sites with the most monthly traffic as of September 2019. Data on average visitor traffic for the past one to three months and the relative rank of each news site came from Alexa, an Amazon company, and market intelligence provider SimilarWeb.
They identified the owners of the top 50 news sites globally, in the United States, in the U.K., and in Australia, respectively, using financial filings, corporate press announcements, and other public sources. They then isolated the 20 companies with the most visited sites in each geography, as well as other newsworthy media companies, and identified all of the properties in their online media portfolios, as well as the name of their highest-level owners, using financial filings, corporate press announcements, and other public sources.
For news sites that are owned by investment firms with a majority stake, the CEO or director of the investment firm was listed as the highest-level owner.
For news sites that are owned or directly (or indirectly) controlled
by the government (as is the case of the BBC, who since 2017 has had its board members selected by the UK government), the head of government was listed as the highest-level owner.
A Changing Landscape
Several names are synonymous with media domination around the world: News Corp in the United States, the U.K., and Australia. Globo in Brazil & Yomiuri Shimbun in Japan.
While many of the oldest media conglomerates are as powerful as ever and still growing, the emergence of digital news has substantially altered the media landscape and allowed new companies to emerge as major players in the news industry.
Tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon owner Jeff Bezos, as well as telecommunications conglomerates such as Verizon and AT&T, now rank among the top owners of the world’s media.
Asset Firms
In recent years, asset management firms and private investors have increasingly bought majority stakes in legacy newspapers and have come to dominate the list of the top media owners worldwide. In April 2019, for example, private equity firm Great Hill Partners acquired the Gizmodo Media Group and The Onion, and combined their digital news assets, which include Gizmodo, Jezebel, and The A.V. Club, into a new company named G/O Media Inc.
In August 2019, American investment firm KKR purchased the largest stake in Axel Springer SE, a German media group whose assets include Business Insider and Rolling Stone.
State Controlled or Owned
A significant share of the world’s media is owned by national governments. Through outlets such as PBS and NPR, the BBC, and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the governments of the United States, the U.K., and Australia all have significant media holdings. State ownership of media in English-speaking countries is dwarfed, however, by the Government of China’s media holdings.
Who Owns UK News?
As can be seen above, online news media in the U.K. is still dominated by publishers of traditional print media, such as The Times, The Daily Telegraph, and The Guardian.
Tabloid newspapers such as the Daily Mail, The S*n, and the Daily Mirror have a significant online presence in Britain. Several London-based news sites, such as The Economist and the Financial Times, have substantial readership outside of the U.K.
Murdoch’s News Corp, through News Corp UK, The Daily Mail and General Trust plc own many of the largest national news sites in the U.K. This web of companies can make it confusing for some to understand ownership.
Murdoch’s UK empire includes; The Time and the S*n to name a few. The control of so many outlets by so few leads to editors at supposed competing papers actually working in unison to control how a story runs.
Regional Proxies
Through its subsidiary Local World Holdings Ltd. Reach plc owns more than five dozen regional newspapers and their corresponding websites. The mass ownership of regional newspapers by media giants has led to a steep decline in actual local reporting. Instead, outlets copy and paste an article from a sister paper and run it under a different byline. This has created a network of regional proxies all parroting the same story with no local connection.
While the hard copy papers still run a majority of local stories. their corresponding websites run clickbait titles so as to gain advertising revenue; the only thing that keeps the UK online media alive.
The Guardian is owned by the Scott Trust Limited, which it claims exists solely to control the finances of the Guardian and ensure its editorial independence.
The US Media
Online news in the United States is still dominated by publishers and broadcasters of traditional print and television news such as CNN, MSNBC, and the New York Times.
Online-only news sites that have a major presence in the U.S. include Yahoo!, Huffington Post, and Reddit. Reddit is a majorly underestimated source of news, so much so that the leaked US/UK Trade Talk Papers sat on the site for two months before being noticed.
Some of the top media owners in the U.S. have dominated the news landscape for over a century, and continue to grow in the era of digital news. The Hearst name, for example, first appeared on a newspaper masthead in 1887. Today Hearst Communications owns dozens of newspapers and magazines throughout the country, each with a significant online presence.
Advance Publications, which was founded by Samuel Irving Newhouse Sr. in 1922 and is still family-owned today, has a portfolio that includes Reddit, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and American City Business Journals.
However, as noted above, there have been new entries to the US news world. Amazon owner Jeff Bezos purchased the influential Wall Street Journal – WSJ, much to the annoyance of President Trump.
Disney are a major player in the US having purchased Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox in March 2019, it now holds titles such as Fox News, abc and has a stake in the above mentioned Hearst Newspaper group.
Australian News Ownership
From 1987 to 2006, Australia had specific legislation limiting foreign ownership of media companies on the continent, as well as restrictions on cross-ownership of media companies meant to preserve the diversity of news media.
Despite these restrictions, today Australia has a relatively high degree of media concentration. National online news media in Australia is essentially controlled by two companies: News Corp, through News Corp Australia, and Nine. Rural news media is largely dominated by Australian Community Media, whose portfolio includes over 170 regional newspapers and their corresponding websites.
Seven West Media also has a substantial news media portfolio that includes traditional newspapers, online-only news sites, magazines, and radio. The Conversation is one of the only major online news sites in Australia that is independently owned.
Australian media appears to have even less diversity than its UK and US counterparts.
Media Ownership Conclusions
As the concentration of online news has increased, so has public distrust in mass media. A recent Gallup poll shows that Americans remain largely mistrustful of the mass media, with just 41% currently having “a great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in newspapers, television and radio to report the news “fully, accurately and fairly.”
In the UK, media trust is poor at best. Just 32% of adults in the UK say they trust the news media at least somewhat. 48% say their news media do a good job of getting the facts right, 46% say they provide coverage independent of corporate influence and 37% say their news coverage is politically neutral. When it comes to covering important topics like immigration, 44% of British adults say that the media is doing a good job. These are not exactly glowing figures for the UK mainstream media. They don’t seem to be able to get close to 50% trust in many cases.
Owners should be asking themselves questions with results like this, but they don’t, and they won’t. The fact is, people still visit their websites and generate profits through advertising, as long as the profits keep coming, they couldn’t care less about trust levels.
That is why at least in the UK, the media and press need to be majorly overhauled. Regional outlets need given back their independence, conglomerates controlling an entire narrative needs to end and the BBC needs a complete overhaul. The number of incidents in the 2019 General Election campaign of “inaccuracies” by the BBC is alarming. They are still the most visited and viewed news platform in the UK. If they are peddling blatant lies, something obviously needs to change.
Independence in the news is at an all time low. Profits for investors take precedent over good quality news. That needs to change. Perhaps you can start by visiting supporting other Independent News sites like this one.
OK. Where are we so far.
Well, we know who wants a war with China.
We also know how they are trying to provoke one, and where they are throwing their money towards.
We also know who their enablers are; they who take that money and run the media printing presses and make policy decisions for a war.
Finally we have seen how they, in turn, manipulate the media that they control. As well as examples of the uniformity of their onslaught.
So what?
So what if America, the United States, wants to launch an “incident” or two? What’s the worst to happen? A down turn in trade? Higher prices at the gas pumps? An increase in war related movies and news? So what?
Well…
It is not going to be like that at all. It won’t be a “pretend war”, it will be a serious, gut wrenching, lethal, lethal war at your front door.
Chinese MIRV
Keep in mind…
All military “war games” against China indicates the USA would lose…
…Very, very badly.
In fact, there isn’t a single war simulation, not one, that has the USA the victor or even a close draw. Each and every simulation for the last 18 years has had the United States defeated in a war with China.
China is a peaceful, prosperous nation that views Taiwan as it’s brothers and sister. No matter what bullshit the main-stream Western media is throwing at you…
Xi Jinping promises peaceful Taiwan reunification
Chinese leader says unity in the best interests of the people of the mainland and of the breakaway island. He’s right.
China’s President Xi Jinping said Saturday “peaceful reunification” with Taiwan “will be and can be realized”, days after Chinese warplanes made record incursions into the air defense zone of the democratically ruled island.
Self-governed Taiwan, which has never formally declared independence, lives under the constant threat of invasion by China, which views the island as its territory and has vowed to one day seize it, by force if necessary.
“Realising national reunification by peaceful means best serves the interests of the nation as a whole including our brethren in Taiwan,” Xi said in a speech marking the 110th anniversary of a revolution that ended millennia of imperial rule and led to the founding of the Republic of China.
“Taiwan independence is the biggest obstacle to the reunification of the motherland and a serious hidden danger,” Xi warned.
A large portrait of Sun Yat-sen, a Western-educated doctor who led the 1911 revolution that toppled the Qing empire, towered over the stage as Xi spoke.
Sun founded the Republic of China, which remains the formal name of Taiwan, where defeated Nationalists fled after Mao Zedong’s Communist forces won the Chinese civil war in 1949 and established the People’s Republic.
“The complete reunification of our country will be and can be realised,” Xi said.
He also warned against foreign interference in Taiwan after a Pentagon official confirmed US special operations forces have been quietly training Taiwanese troops for months.
Did you read that?
Pretty simple.
Pretty clear.
Straightforward and direct.
Now, read how this speech was reported in the American Media. You know, the media that is controlled by only five people, and whom most are neocons…
China, Taiwan tensions spark debate inside Biden admin as Democrats push for more forceful response
Washington (CNN)The Biden administration is grappling with how to respond to China’s ramped-up aggression against Taiwan without accidentally starting a war, as bipartisan lawmakers pressure the President to get tougher on Beijing — and fast.
Huh?
Internally, assessments differ over how imminent the threat to Taiwan really is.
The Pentagon’s Indo-Pacific Command has watched with increasing concern as China has rapidly modernized its military and improved its training with an eye to Taiwan, sources say. But State Department officials are wary of taking a more aggressive approach, and intelligence officials have seen little evidence that China is preparing to invade.
Tensions have risen sharply in the region recently, however, and administration officials were caught off guard when China’s air force dramatically ramped up its incursions into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone earlier this month.
Even before the most recent incursion, the Biden administration had discussed with Taiwanese officials the possibility of expediting the delivery of American-made F-16s to Taiwan, according to Taiwanese and US officials familiar with the talks. The sale of the 66 fighter jets was approved in 2019, but Taiwan hopes to speed up the actual delivery time—which normally can take up to 10 years—particularly in light of the recent Chinese provocations.
The stakes are high for President Joe Biden, who has made human rights and democracy a key part of his foreign policy agenda but who has also been determined to keep the US out of foreign conflicts. For decades, Washington has embraced the concept of “strategic ambiguity” in dealing with Taiwan, in which the US remains deliberately vague about whether it would come to the island’s defense in the event of an attack by China.
But the recent escalation by Beijing marked a major challenge to that posture and has led some Biden administration officials and lawmakers to reconsider that approach, all as the President has been trying to pivot his foreign policy priorities to the Indo-Pacific region.
It’s also led some in Congress to ratchet up pressure on the White House to change its posture.
“The time for strategic ambiguity is long past,” said a senior Senate Democratic aide. “In light of the clear and present danger Beijing poses to Taiwan’s vibrant democracy, the United States must be crystal clear in our intent — with both our words and our actions. In our current context, ambiguity has invited miscalculation and risk, and an effective deterrence posture can only come from clarity.”
The aide added that the Senate is exploring additional steps to provide Taiwan with “the security, economic and diplomatic support essential for our new era of strategic competition.”
In response, a senior administration official said that “U.S. support for Taiwan remains strong, principled, and bipartisan and we will continue to engage with Congress on these important matters.”
Democratic Rep. Tom Malinowski, who served as the State Department’s top human rights official under the Obama administration, also favors a tougher approach, and said it would be an error to think of Xi Jinping as bluffing in his threatening rhetoric. The Chinese leader has vowed to “smash” any attempts by Taiwan to declare independence, and said in a speech this month that “the historical task of the complete reunification of the motherland must be fulfilled, and will definitely be fulfilled.”
Democratic Rep. Tom Malinowski
“It is a consistent mistake of American foreign policy that we project our own pragmatic reasonableness onto others and assume that they don’t mean what they say,” Malinowski said.
Democratic Rep. Elaine Luria, a retired Navy commander, has gone even further, arguing for Congress to give more leeway to the President to launch military operations abroad to defend Taiwan if necessary.
Democratic Rep. Elaine Luria
“The legal limitations on a president’s ability to respond quickly could all but ensure a Chinese fait accompli,” Luria wrote in an October 11 Washington Post op-ed, referring to the limits imposed by the War Powers Act. “My Republican colleagues introduced the Taiwan Invasion Prevention Act in February to grant the president the authority to act against an invasion of Taiwan and prevent a fait accompli. This act is a good starting point to address a legal dilemma.”
‘Nothing suggests’ an invasion
Still, that political pressure has run up against a degree of wariness from the State Department and intelligence community. Intelligence officials have not yet seen anything to suggest that China is readying a military offensive, according to people familiar with the intelligence assessments.
“It was certainly a dramatic escalation,” said one of the people, referring to the 56 Chinese aircraft that flew into Taiwan’s defense zone on October 4, the largest-ever incursion. “But nothing suggests that China is preparing for an invasion of Taiwan.”
Officials in the State Department’s Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, meanwhile, are leery of taking a much more aggressive posture toward China over the Taiwan issue than the strategically ambiguous status quo.
Former deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg, who was dispatched by Biden to Taiwan in April as part of an unofficial delegation aimed at showing support for the island, called the current situation “very dangerous” and said that ending the strategic ambiguity policy would only embolden Beijing further.
“All bets would be off,” he said, because China would see the shift as a “fundamental breach” of the agreements in place for decades.
“It is important for us to reassure Taiwan, but there are ways to do that and to enhance deterrence without sticking our finger in Beijing’s eye,” Steinberg added.
Biden himself has long been opposed to publicly declaring definitive US support for the island democracy in the event of a Chinese attack.
“The president should not cede to Taiwan, much less to China, the ability automatically to draw us into a war across the Taiwan Strait,” then-Senator Biden wrote in a 2001 op-ed. His 24-page national security strategy devotes one vague line to Taiwan, reading: “We will support Taiwan, a leading democracy and a critical economic and security partner, in line with longstanding American commitments.”
The senior administration official emphasized that the US “has an abiding interest in peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait,” and “will continue to oppose any unilateral changes to the status quo.”
“President Biden voted for the Taiwan Relations Act himself and remains firmly committed to the principles therein,” the official said, “including that the United States will continue to assist Taiwan in maintaining a sufficient self-defense capability; and that the United States would regard any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific and of grave concern to the United States.”
Eyes on 2027
American defense officials said they see 2027 — the 100th anniversary of the People’s Liberation Army and the final year of Xi Jinping’s third presidential term — as a key year in which Beijing could try to take Taiwan by force if peaceful unification has not yet been achieved.
Taiwanese Defense Minister Chiu Kuo-cheng predicted earlier this month that China would actually have the “full ability” to invade even sooner, by 2025.
While Xi struck a more conciliatory tone in a speech last week, vowing a “peaceful reunification” with Taiwan, it is unlikely that Taiwan would ever voluntarily give up their relative autonomy; Taiwan’s foreign minister last week said the island was prepared to “fight to the end” in the event of a war with China.
One defense official noted that for China, reuniting with Taiwan “is a matter of national pride.” But Steinberg, the former deputy secretary of state, said he believes that “China would like to avoid the use of force, because it would be counterproductive and risky to its interests.”
Danny Russel, who served as Deputy Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific Affairs until 2017, echoed that assessment.
"The Chinese foreign policy and propaganda community certainly wants to sow doubt in American resolve and convince Taiwan that America won't be there for them," he said. "But that is very different from whether Xi Jinping has the stomach for a fight with the U.S., an immensely capable nuclear power, and its allies."
That doesn’t mean things can’t spiral out of control, Steinberg cautioned. The region right now is a tinderbox, as the different sides try to leverage alliances and show off military prowess. The British-led Carrier Strike Group 21, for example, has participated in a multinational show of force in the Indo-Pacific, including through the South China Sea, most of which Beijing claims as its territorial waters.
"My personal view is that none of the sides want an [armed] confrontation, but everyone is afraid that if any side shows weakness or a lack of resolve, then the other side will misinterpret it," Steinberg said. "It's a security spiral, and there is no stability in a situation like this."
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported the number of F-16 fighter jets approved for sale to Taiwan in 2019. It was 66.
A very long and detailed article. All are opinions based on lies. I can’t make it any clearer than that.
OK, so we know the twisted propaganda, what now?
Well, there are many, many issues involved. The big one, of course is the absolute collapsing of the United States, and a near panic attempt to delay and forestall the really bitter end of the “grand experiment” in American “democracy”.
But you see, China plays the “long game”. They are playing 78 moves ahead in chess while the Untied States only thinks one move at a time. And that brings up some interesting issues.
Like this one…
China is a rising leader in IC fabrication, but America wants to stop that rise…
[ANALYSIS] Korea under pressure to mediate chip issue
Sharing chip info to US may force Samsung to share it to China
By Kim Yoo-chul
The current semiconductor shortages have illustrated the strategic significance of semiconductor manufacturing. The central point of today’s chip shortages is a classic supply-demand mismatch.
This means that demand for semiconductors is spiking while supply is fairly flat. As the construction of semiconductor factories costs billions of dollars, semiconductor shortages amid the continued pandemic have been directly impacting the “backbone industries” of the United States with many Wall Street investors forecasting supply-chain bottlenecks to continue throughout this year.
The United States, one of the top export markets for Korea, has been aggressively pushing chip-related policies mostly aimed at ensuring the country’s sovereignty in semiconductor production through massive subsidies.
Sanity Check. Look at a chart to see the real picture, before we go further with this article.
The USA is a very minor export destination for Korea's IC chips.
Korea export markets.
The White House was offering to back billion-dollar programs in a bid to strengthen the long-term and a greater self-sufficiency of the U.S. semiconductor industry. Simply and precisely, this issue has become a political one. It’s fair to say that the United States, China and even Europe are on a clear track to politicize tech supply chains.
The U.S. Department of Commerce asked America's "Big 3" automakers and key industry players operating there ― including Intel, TSMC, Apple, Samsung Electronics and GlobalFoundries ― to submit their key semiconductor management-related data such as inventory levels, production targets and revenue estimates according to clients and technology development roadmaps by Nov. 8 this year.
.
The U.S. government stressed that the submission of the information should be voluntary.
But Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo warned industry executives recently that her team may invoke the Defense Production Act (DPA) or other available tools to force such required data into their hands.
.
To FORCE them…
"What I told them is, 'I don't want to have to do anything compulsory but if they don't comply, then they'll leave me no choice',"
she said.
No option but to consider ‘China factor’
From Korea’s standpoint, given the country’s strengths in the chip sector, any decision to share such classified information with the United States will cause adverse results as China is equally important…
No.
Look at the chart up above again. China is by far the largest and most significant buyer of these chips. With the United States being a very tiny and insignificant customer. So, people (!) they are NOT "equally important".
…and comparable to the United States in terms of the significance of trade.
Again. No. Unless you have the intelligence of a snail.
USA is 9%
China is 51%
They are NOT comparable. But the brain dead readership in the West really never bothers to check the raw data. They rely on the "journalists" to do so. Blind faith; it will "kick you in the balls" unless you are careful.
Samsung and SK have invested more than $15 billion in semiconductor plants in China.
"Things are becoming very complicated.
However, the primary focus is that Samsung Electronics is advised not to share its classified chip data with the U.S. government.
If it does that, then Samsung will be situated to submit confidential data to Beijing regarding its semiconductor business. That's a scenario I don't want to think about.
Again, this is more about a matter of national security and intellectual property,"
…a high-ranking government official told The Korea Times, Sunday.
"Washington's request for Samsung to share classified information is totally unprecedented,"
…said Ahn Ki-hyun, a senior executive at the Korea Semiconductor Industry Association (KSIA). Analysts and officials are not ruling out the possibility of handing over acquired data to Intel, which announced its entry into foundry-chip making with Washington’s backing.
Samsung Electronics, the world’s top memory chip manufacturer, has been operating a massive foundry chip-making plant for more than a decade in the U.S. state of Texas. The tech giant is set to announce the location of its new $17 billion plant, also likely to be in Texas, when Samsung chief Lee Jae-yong signs off on the deal, possibly next month.
China is Samsung Electronics’ other key market.
.
It operates several chip plants in the neighboring country with assistance from Beijing ― similar to the arrangement with the United States. China has been massively boosting its investment in semiconductor capabilities.
Samsung, in this regard, has become sandwiched on multiple fronts between the United States and China.
They are being forced to choose. Select the Untied States, or their nearby nuclear armed neighbor, China, where 80% of their factories lie. -MM
This quote…
"Samsung can't handle this issue alone as it is too big for a private company to handle.
The South Korean government needs to ask the White House and U.S. commerce department to minimize the scope of information that Samsung must share.
Or Samsung Electronics and the government will need to lobby U.S. politicians on the points that it is already the top-tier foreign direct investor in the United States with large scale local employment and that it will remain as the most-trusted business partner there.
The same appealing points could be applied when Samsung deals with China,"
…a senior industry executive said by telephone.
South Korea’s top trade negotiator Yeo Han-koo voiced the country’s uneasiness regarding Washington’s request to share chip data and Finance Minister Hong Nam-ki said he also relayed Korean chipmakers’ concerns about Washington’s request to U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.
The global semiconductor industry is following its typical cycle with overcapacity forecasted for 2023. This trend will threaten the bottom lines of major chipmakers, raising the possibility that some cash-intensive investment plans will have to be scaled back.
China is the leader in military artificial intelligence (AI) technology
At least that is what the Leadership of the United States AI Technology branch thinks. He caused quite a roar a few weeks ago when he resigned and all the neocon publication went bat-shit crazy over it. Then the furor died down.
US Air Force software boss resigns: ‘Battle over AI lost to China’
Nicolas Chaillan, 37, told the Financial Times after resigning: 'We have no competing fighting chance against China in 15 to 20 years.' 'Right now, it's already a done deal – it is already over in my opinion,' he added. 'Whether it takes a war or not is kind of anecdotal.'
That says the former software chief of the US Air Force to the Financial Times. According to Nicolas Chaillan, there is “good reason to be angry”.
Chaillan has spent the past few years working within the armed forces on ways to improve cybersecurity. The former Air Force chief software officer told the newspaper he resigned last week in protest at the slow pace at which the military is undergoing technological transformation. He also says that he cannot see the US being surpassed by China.
Chaillan, 37, said the US will no longer be able to compete with China in 15 to 20 years. “It’s already a done race. It’s already over, in my eyes,” he told the Financial Times. Chaillan also warned that cybersecurity in some government departments is still at “kindergarten” level.
The former top official said he wants to testify before the US parliament about the Chinese cyber threat to his country within weeks. Although that spends much more money on defense than China, according to Chaillan, this is not done in an effective way. He also complained that bureaucracy is hampering necessary reforms.
According to the former software chief, technologies such as artificial intelligence are much more important for the future of the US than, for example, new jet fighters such as the F-35. He called the discussion about ethics in the development of artificial intelligence a restraining factor in the US. Companies such as Google would also be reluctant to cooperate with the military in the field of AI.
The situation in China looks very different, according to Chaillan. There, according to the expert, companies are obliged to cooperate with the authorities and “huge investments are made” without taking ethics into account.
All of the AI for them is mature and is used in industry inside of China. China has been producing military robots straight out of the movie “Terminator”, and they swim, fly, crawl, and walk. I’ll be you never heard about all that have you?
Well here’s some movies to get you a bit interested…
Video Here.
I wonder how the Western armies would feel if they confronted military robots that looked like funny fat bunny rabbits, cute attractive women, little big eyed children? I wonder how they would react to Tonka-truck sized walking grenades, robot dog bomb squads, and mini-nuke drones?
Video Here
Robotic farming is a mature technology. Can you even imagine what the military has MASS PRODUCED? I know that there are robot fish that are swimming bombs, as well as all sorts of things that would rest inside your worst nightmare.
Video Here.
Schools of robotic fish. Some with bombs, some with sensors. All under the control of the Chinese military and swimming all over the South China Sea.
Video Here.
And here’s a shark robot. I wonder if it has friggin’ lasers in it’s eyes?
Video Here.
China has advanced anti-satellite technology
Chinese scientists build anti-satellite weapon that can cause explosion inside exhaust
Researchers who built the device say it can lock itself into the thruster nozzles used by most satellites and stay there for long periods undetected
Scientists say the resulting blast would damage the target’s equipment and may be mistaken for an engine malfunction
China is the leader in the rapid manufacture of nuclear weapons systems
Yah. China is the leader in manufacturing. Not only have they absorbed all the technologies needed and necessary for manufacturing, but they have developed an adjacent infrastructure to support those industries.
And it’s not just rubber ducks, hospitals, electric cars, and clothing. It also includes military systems and hardware. And we can see it. Though it is only briefly reported in the American media, China has created a formidable Naval Fleet that operates in the waters adjacent to China; the South China Sea. Unlike the United States, which spreads military project outward everywhere, China’s is concentrated next to China.
And it’s not just that. Consider the mass production of the nuclear armed MIRV ICBM the DF-41. Also known as a “scatter-gun” nuke delivery system.
The DF-41 missile has an operational range of more than 14,000 kilometers and can carry about 10 independently targetable nuclear warheads, capable of hitting anywhere on Earth, and this would make DF-41 the world's longest range missile, surpassing the range of the US LGM-30 Minuteman which has a reported range of 13,000 kilometers.
Yang Chengjun, a Chinese expert on missile technology and nuclear strategy and chief scientist of quantum defense, told the Global Times that the DF-41 is Chinese fourth-generation strategic nuclear weapon and has the longest operational range among all Chinese ICBMs. "This ICBM's research and development was very successful, and its technology is very mature. During testing, there was no failure record," Yang noted.
Wu Jian, editor of Defense Weekly under the Shanghai-based Xinmin Evening News, told the Global Times that the multiple transporter erector launchers of the DF-41 missile shown in the October 2019 parade proved that the People's Liberation Army had already built a massive and advanced system to support the use of this missile. "This proves that China has sufficient and reliable strategic nuclear power, and decision-makers have the confidence to show and use them to respond to any kind of nuclear threat from any country." Wu noted "No matter how advanced the missile is, it always needs a mature and comprehensive system to make sure it can accurately strike a target, which at least includes intelligence gathering, satellite surveillance, logistics, and construction of launching positions".
Public data shows that DF-41 is a rival of the 6th-generation missiles of some developed countries, such as the American LGM-30 Minuteman and the Russian RT-2PM2. The Chinese missile even has an edge with regard to some technologies. The DF-41 has a range of 12,000 kilometers and a deviation of some one hundred meters. It can carry six to 10 multiple maneuverable warheads, which makes it difficult to be intercepted. The missile is 16.5 meters in length with a diameter of 2.78 meters. It can be launched from road- and rail-mobile launcher platforms, as well as silo-based launchers.
China’s state-owned Global Times, on 23 January 2017, carried a report, which said the Dongfeng-41 (DF-41) missile would bring China “more respect.” The missiles that are capable of carrying 10-12 nuclear warheads were deployed near the China-Russia border, according the report, which did not go into further detail. there has been no authoritative information on whether China has a Dongfeng-41 strategic missile brigade, how many such brigades it has and where they are deployed. Two days earlier, Pingguo Ribao, a Hong Kong-based publication reported about the deployment. News of a potential deployment leaked much earlier.
Song Zhongping, a Beijing-based military affairs commentator, noted that the new missiles would also have stronger penetration abilities and faster response times. "Only with these advantages can they have the chance to quickly penetrate through the missile defense system of the US."
Chinese military observers have widely connected China's efforts in improving its missiles' functions with the missile defense plans of the United States. At present, the US is developing a multi-level missile defense network including the Ground-based Midcourse Defense System, Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense, and Sea-based SM-3 Missile Defense System.
Song said China's development of the new missiles is aimed at maintaining military balance to protect national security, not to seek hegemony, while the US is trying to break it by being ambitious in improving military technologies in both defense and attack. China has a "no first use" policy for nuclear weapons. "The US has been building its missile defense network like a shield, which other countries' missiles cannot penetrate. This for sure stimulated other countries to sharpen their 'spears.' Otherwise, if the US has both the strongest shield and spear, they could impose an aggressive strategy on us, and we would be driven into passivity," said Song.
China can detect all American stealth aircraft
China has reportedly developed anover-the-horizonmaritime early warning radar systemthat can detect stealth aircraft far beyond visual range, an advanced capability that could threaten US fifth-generation fighters operating in the area.
-China Says NewRadarCanSpotUSStealthFighters
The solution?
Don’t put military fighters near Chinese airspace. Duh!
The Chinese teach military discipline and warfare skills in elementary school through out elementary, middle and high school. The Pioneers is a paramilitary branch of the children that concentrates on military art to serve the nation. In middle school, all students must go through “boot camp”. And then in High School, students are carefully vetted to see what role or part of society that they can serve best.
While China has an enormous and huge military force, it is also integrated with other fighting organizations. Such as the police, the coast guard, the various civilian detachments and so on and so forth.
Were China to be attacked, it won’t be just a small percentage of the people trying to defend the cities. It would be the vast bulk of society. From 5 year old kids in kindergarten, to 80 year old great grandfathers. You do not want to shake the Chinese hornet’s nest.
China uses nuclear weapons as part of it’s defensive posture. No escalation would occur.
AChineseWayof War. The primary goal of a commander educated in the style of the ancient Chinesemilitary classics was a rapid, easy victory, one obtained via a variety of tactics which have a long lineage within Chinese military historiography.
-A ChineseWayof War
Chinese military doctrine is to control the course of any war from the onset. They do not believe in evolving into “stages of conflict”. They believe that a war is a war. And you treat it as such. They do not make a functional distinction between military forces landing on one of their islands, or a full assault on a city. If you attack them, they will attack back.
From 1977 to 1988 China developed a neutron bomb, more formally known as an enhanced radiation weapon. Neutron bombs are specialized tactical nuclear weapons (TNW) withreduced blast effects and enhanced radiation. Similar to the BMD and ASAT puzzles, this weapon appearsincompatible with China’s stated nuclear doctrine.
-National Interest.
Unlike the United States, China has developed systems geared to kill the enemy while leaving their buildings, automobiles, bridges and factories intact. It is called a “neutron bomb”. The West does not employ these weapons because of the political fallout.
This is a special nuclear weapon that releases radiation instead of blowing up things massively. The amount of radiation is quick, and very, very lethal and dissipates rather quickly; on the order of months.
These are also huge weapons that can totally kill everyone in a single city while leaving eh skyscrapers intact. The intended purpose is against military bases, and hardened underground sites, but they can (and in a war, would) be employed to empty out complete cities.
For instance, if used against Chicago or Atlanta, the entire city would be spared from destruction. It’s just that all the people would die a very painful death by radiation as they are on their knees vomiting out their hemorrhaging internal organs.
The American policy, since President Trump, has been to use micro-nukes to hit “high value” targets, and then use the threat of complete national nuclear annihilation if the attacked nation responds.
The Chinese policy is to use nuclear weapons from the moment they are attacked. They do not believe in escalation.
Thus any nation that attacks China, whether it is a proxy for the United States, or the actual United States; both types of nations will be hit with swarm nuke warheads. These are very deadly “shotgun” nuclear missiles that fire a barrage of nuclear bombs in clusters.
To say that they are similar to American MIRV ICBM’s is silly. And just shows how ignorant one is.
If, say, America launches a nuclear ICBM at China, the missile would contain three nuclear warheads. One for Beijing, one for Shanghai, and one for Hong Kong.
But if China launches a nuclear ICBM at the United States, it would contain ten nuclear warheads that would all be directed at a singular city. So New York and all the surrounding region would be pulverized into radioactive glass by ten, very, very large, and very, very dirty, nuclear bombs.
But the Chinese (and the Russians), while they do have the ability to lay precision target ordnance, do not employ it.
They use a wholly different strategy. They believe in carpet swath attacks. Instead of placing a singular lone high value missile on a singular lone high value target, like the United States, they instead believe in leveling the entire area into obliteration.
While the United States might plan on striking say 20 high value target in a particular city, China would calibrate a nuclear warhead and destroy the entire city indiscriminately. That way all of the targets are removed, and sure there’s a lot of collateral damage, but “tough cookies”. You all shouldn’t have fucked with them in the first place. Ya God damn morons.
This policy is completely across the board. Not just strategic, but tactical and theater as well. China will eviscerate a complete area. While the United States and it’s vassals are busy trying to attack a hamlet, a building or a structure. China just rubble’s everything.
China does not play.
Financial Times says US intelligence officials reportedly caught by surprise by Beijing’s progress on weapons; Pentagon: ‘We hold China as our number one pacing challenge’
This is to tell the Western crusaders not to try their luck by starting another war.
The average number of times that China is taking the USA Pentagon by surprise is 6 times per year. (every two months) Average, of course.
This time, China has tested a new supersonic rocket, encircling the world.
China tests earth-circling, nuclear-capable hypersonic missile:
https://lnkd.in/dTDKYu3z
China Tested A Fractional Orbital Bombardment System That Uses A Hypersonic Glide Vehicle: Report
Such a capability could potentially allow China to execute a nuclear strike on any target on earth with near-impunity and very little warning.
A report from Financial Times’ Demetri Sevastopulo and Kathrin Hille states that China has tested a nuclear-capable hypersonic glide vehicle that goes into space and traverses the globe in an orbital-like fashion before making its run through the atmosphere toward its target. There would be huge implications if such a system were to be operationalized, and according to this story, which says it talked to five officials confirming the test, the U.S. government was caught totally off-guard by it.
The trial flight is said to have occurred around August, with the boost-glide vehicle being lifted into space by a Long March 2C rocket. The launch of the rocket, the 77th of its kind, was undisclosed by Beijing, while the 76th and 78th were—the latter of which occurred in late August. The Financial Times says that the tested hypersonic glide vehicle missed its target by a couple of dozen miles, but that is hardly reassuring considering the capabilities that are apparently in development here.
The foundation of this Cold War-era concept is commonly referred to as a Fractional Orbital Bombardment System, or FOBS, but instead of carrying a traditional nuclear-armed reentry vehicle, this Chinese system would carry a hypersonic glide vehicle that would possess immense kinetic energy upon reentry. As such, it could make a very long maneuvering flight through the atmosphere at very high speeds to its target.
The FOBS concept has long been a concern because of its potential to bypass not just missile defenses, but even many early warning capabilities. Compared to a traditional intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), a FOBS can execute the same strikes but from highly unpredictable vectors. Range limitations also become a non-factor and the timing of an inbound strike is also far less predictable. But at least with a traditional FOBS ballistic missile system, some sort of projections could be made if the mid-course “orbital” vehicle can be tracked, although that could still be a real challenge.
That is not the case at all with a hybrid design like the one being claimed to have been tested here, which would be totally unpredictable.
The maneuvering hypersonic glide vehicle, descending from high-altitude at extreme speed, could travel thousands of miles to its target, which can be totally offset from a normal ballistic track. Complicating things more, these systems can attack from the south pole, not just the north where most of America’s ballistic missile early warning, tracking, and defensive apparatus is focused. Intercepting such a system would also be very challenging, especially considering U.S. mid-course intercept capabilities are focused on traditional ballistic missile flight profiles, which fly more of a parabolic trajectory and have generally known ranges of each stage of flight.
With a glide vehicle end-game delivery system paired with a FOBS, its vehicles can enter the atmosphere beyond the range of an interceptor’s exo-atmospheric mid-course kill envelope, with the glide vehicle weaving its way through the atmosphere to its final target. Traditional surface-based radar systems’ line of sight is also significantly reduced as the hypersonic glide vehicle travels in the atmosphere. Paired with the extreme speeds involved, this can make these systems nearly useless at providing any details regarding the impending attack.
Hypersonic glide vehicles themselves are also very tough to kill with no real defense against them available at this time. Elaborate defensive concepts are in the works, but their effectiveness will depend on just how fast these vehicles are traveling, their maneuverability, density in numbers, what third-party sensors are available to help in generating an engagement solution, and more. A hypersonic glide vehicle with the kinetic energy in its favor from an orbital-like delivery would likely be the very hardest to kill.
Last month, Frank Kendall, US air force secretary, hinted that Beijing was developing a new weapon. He said China had made huge advances, including the “potential for global strikes . . . from space”.
He declined to provide details, but suggested that China was developing something akin to the “Fractional Orbital Bombardment System” that the USSR deployed for part of the Cold War, before abandoning it.“ If you use that kind of an approach, you don’t have to use a traditional ICBM trajectory. It’s a way to avoid defenses and missile warning systems,” said Kendall.
In August, General Glen VanHerck, head of North American Aerospace Defense Command, told a conference that China had “recently demonstrated very advanced hypersonic glide vehicle capabilities”. He warned that the Chinese capability would “provide significant challenges to my Norad capability to provide threat warning and attack assessment”.
There is no shortage of concerns about China’s nuclear buildup within the DoD, and like Moscow, it’s only logical that Beijing would invest in delivery systems that circumvent U.S. early warning and defensive capabilities. The idea that at least some of the hundreds of supposed silos out in the Chinese desert being built to house new ballistic missiles could one day be armed with a weapon like this is very concerning. It also could be yet another major driver behind the Pentagon’s push to deploy a whole new space-based early warning and tracking system for hypersonic and ballistic missiles, including one capable of “cold layer” tracking of missiles in their midcourse stage of flight.
But really, I've been banging on about orbital bombardment for several years now. It's obvious: The US put a missile defense system in Alaska to defend against missiles coming over the North Pole. What did you think Beijing, Moscow and Pyongyang will do? Just give up?
— Dr. Jeffrey Lewis (@ArmsControlWonk) October 16, 2021
That layer would be absolutely essential in trying to defend against a FOBS, that is if a defense at all is actually feasible or even strategically sound. We are not talking about a rogue state here with a few advanced ballistic missiles. China would be able to deploy dozens or even hundreds of these at once. At a certain point, kinetic defenses against such a capability become a losing proposition and a very costly one at that.
Still, this was an early test aboard a full-on rocket used for traditional space access missions. It will take China some time to perfect such a system and package it in a quickly deployable militarized configuration. Major thermal and ablative issues also must be overcome, among others, but it’s not like China hasn’t been working diligently in the hypersonic boost-glide vehicle realm for many years.
Regardless, if this report ends up being fully accurate, one thing is likely: New calls for hugely expensive missile defense capabilities will be ringing loud and often on Capitol Hill, as well as demands to do whatever possible to bring China to the bargaining table in hopes of obtaining some type of strategic arms limitation treaty.
By the late the fifth century BC, after decades of war with its chief rival Sparta, the ancient Greek city-state of Athens was desperate for peace.
They wanted a decisive victory to end the war once and for all. So the citizens gathered together in their public assembly– essentially a democratic mob of 6,000 people– and voted to build a new, costly fleet of ships.
The strategy worked. And their new armada vanquished the Spartan navy in the Battle of the Arginusae Islands in 406 BC.
Sparta was on the ropes, and the Assembly cheered when news of their fleet’s victory reached Athens.
But then the Assembly found out that 25 of the 150 ships had been sunk by the Spartans, and that the Athenian crews of those 25 sunken ships had drowned in a storm.
The Assembly suddenly became furious, crying that the souls of those drowned sailors would wander purgatory for all of eternity because they didn’t have a proper burial.
So then the Athenian mob voted to execute eight of their top military commanders; the very same generals and admirals who had just won the battle and been called heroes, were now being put to death.
Socrates was one of the lone voices of dissent; yet the death sentences were still carried out despite his protest.
Then, only a few days later, the Athenian Assembly had a change of heart. The mob realized that they shouldn’t have executed their military commanders, so they then voted to execute the people within the Assembly who had proposed the executions to begin with.
During this insane dumpster fire of ancient democracy, Spartan leaders approached Athens with a peace deal, offering to end the war once and for all.
This was the entire reason that Athens had built a new fleet. They just wanted peace.
But they were so distracted by infighting and arguing about who to execute next, and who to blame, that the Assembly rejected Sparta’s peace offering.
Yet Athens’ military was now led by inexperienced admirals and generals, since they had just executed their best commanders. And Sparta quickly seized the advantage.
Within a few months the Spartan navy was ravaging Athenian territory, and soon laying siege to Athens itself. The war finally ended in 404 BC with Athens losing all sovereignty and falling under complete control of the Spartan Empire.
As the old saying goes, history doesn’t necessarily repeat. But it certainly rhymes. And I was thinking about this particular episode recently when it was reported earlier this week that China has just successfully tested its first nuclear-capable hypersonic missile.
In case you don’t geek out on military strategy like I do, suffice it to say that this is a huge deal, not just for the United States, but for the entire world.
For the past several decades, the United States has boasted the strongest, most technologically advanced military in the world.
And it would be foolish to think that this military strength hasn’t substantially contributed to America’s geopolitical and economic power.
The United States Marine Corps is essentially the biggest derivatives contract in the world. It’s the US government’s ultimate hedge, enabling it wage trade wars, sanction foreign banks, and bully anyone it wants into following US regulations.
The US military is even part of the reason why the dollar is still the world’s reserve currency, despite the US government being the largest debtor that has ever existed in the history of the world.
The US government, and the US economy, both derive substantial benefit from America’s military power.
And this is why China’s rapid military development is such a big deal.
China could destroy the United States in cyberwarfare. That’s pretty much a foregone conclusion. I mean… there are still system within the US Defense Department that use 5 ¼ inch floppy disks.
But even in conventional warfare, China is gaining rapidly. The Chinese Navy already the world’s largest fleet. And this is important because one of the biggest roles of a modern navy is to project military firepower over great distances.
China is investing heavily in this capability, feverishly building new ships and developing new technology.
It has massive stockpiles of cruise missiles, most of which have larger payloads and longer range than comparable US weaponry.
This week’s hypersonic missile launch is merely the latest proof; it’s technology that the US cannot counteract either, given that hypersonic missiles are more likely to be able to evade missile defense systems.
The Chinese wasted no time gloating their achievement, calling the launch “a new blow to the US’s mentality of strategic superiority. . .”
You’d think this would be a massive wake-up call to the US federal government.
The balance of power is shifting right in front of their very eyes.
Yet take a look at their priorities– spending trillions of dollars on ‘equity’ and ‘social justice’, which they claim will supposedly “cost nothing”.
They’re busy directing federal resources to target parents who are angry over the way their children are being educated.
They’re pushing people out of government service, whether through mandates, or through ideological purges to weed out those with conservative beliefs.
As the Center for Military Readiness reports, US Special Operations Command “intends to elevate diversity, inclusion, and equity above mission effectiveness and overall readiness.”
In fact a leaked Special Operations Command planning document states at least 12 times over twenty pages that “diversity and inclusion are operational imperatives” even though they provide no support to back up this assertion.
If that doesn’t freak you out, check out how certain medical schools are turning into orwellian nightmares where professors and other teachers are literally afraid to say “pregnant woman”.
The Defense Department is exploring racial quotas in its promotion criteria. They’re planning to reduce physical fitness standards.
And military recruiting advertisements (along with those of the Central Intelligence Agency) are now focused on LGBTQRSTUVWXYZ diversity goals.
This behavior is so counterproductive that even the ancient Athenian assembly would stand in awe at its destructive stupidity.
American military recruitment advertisements compared to Russia and China
The stark contrast between the U.S. military’s woke recruitment ads and Russia and China’s impressive and menacing recruitment videos have people on social media taking notice. Russia’s video from 2017 shows a man compelled by a sense of national pride to serve in the military, where he is then seen subjected to rigorous and intensive training. In China, the advertisements focus on family, community, country and the need to defend and participate in it for the maintenance of social order, while in America the military recruits in support of gay and LGBT rights and Climate Change.
China has urged its citizens to keep physical goods and not paper money.
There will be a huge round of inflation as the US, Japan, UK, Sweden, etc, are printing more and more money.
So the Chinese are planning not to accept USD but only their RMB for payments,
RECEIVED THIS CHINESE ARTICLE FROM CONTACTS IN GUANGZHOU...
This is an article circulating within China. It advises people to focus on buying Chinese items, and durable goods, and refrain from buying or trading in the West with anything other than other durable goods, or the RMB.
朋友，请你看清时势：
Friends, please observe the current situation clearly:
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中国大陆开始施行自我保护措施了！
MAINLAND CHINA HAS BEGUN TO IMPLEMENT SELF-PROTECTION MEASURES!
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一是保护国民安全，大幅度减少入境人员。
#1. It is to protect the safety of the people and drastically reduce the number of people entering China.
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二是保护国民资产，减缓实物出口。
#2. Secondly is to protect national assets and slow down physical exports.
When the U.S. ( COVID-19 ) epidemic broke out and there was no effective preventive measures and control for a long time… the country’s populations were isolated, production stagnated, and stocks of supplies quickly dwindled, and the Federal Reserve desperately cut interest rates ( to stimulate the economy ) including PRINTING BANK NOTES for the so-called “economic stimulus”.
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When a nation’s durables and their supporting industries industry becomes scarce, the banknotes of that nation will become cheap and useless, and as disposable as toilet paper. They are similar to plastic coins.
The coronavirus, and more precisely the handling of it, has been a disaster in the Western nations. As such. their solution to the economic impact of the botched handling of the pandemic caused an acceleration in the worthlessness of the currency.-MM
The the US dollar as the international currency is very dangerous. Using it is equivalent to plundering the materials, the labor, and the services of goods-producing nations.
Use of the USD is no longer sustainable or advised. -MM
Due to this COVID-19 epidemic… food, clothing, housing, transportation, shopping, and travel could not be realized in the foreign exchange by the producing . country, and the value of the currency holders has continuously depreciated.
Due to coronavirus, all normal international actions has been impacted. Those holding currency in the nations that have not been able to successfully manage the pandemic, has seen their currency depreciate. -MM
The Euro, the US dollar, the British pound, and the Swiss franc are all such currencies and will gradually become useless paper. Therefore, China understands that in any country where the epidemic is not under control, the Chinese will no longer exchange physical objects for foreign currency like these worthless plastic coins.
In trading with the West, it is important to note that all the currency that they use will soon become absolutely worthless. You can measure the future of the value of the currency by the economic turmoil caused by the coronavirus. -MM
高筑墙，广积粮，p自我内部循环，保证财富不流失，等待《以物易物》或人民币国际化。
Build high walls ( TO ISOLATE ), accumulate grains, internal trade and consumption and ensure that ‘wealth’ is not lost. Instead wait for the financial exchange method of “BARTERING FOR GOODS” or alternatively, the “INTERNATIONALIZATION OF THE CHINESE RMB”.
Now, the Chinese people are put on warning. They must start to make arrangements to barter, or use the RMB in transactions. It is highly possible that wealth will start to be lost was inflation eats away at the value of the USD. -MM
我们有此行动，估计越南、印度、马来西亚、印尼… 等生产国也会采取类似关门措施。
We have taken this action, and it is estimated that Vietnam, India, Malaysia, Indonesia… and other producing countries will also adopt similar “CLOSE DOOR” MEASURES.
China is making this announcement along with Russia. It is expected that the rest of SE Asia will follow. -MM
大家都明白，谁拿实物换冥币，谁就是傻瓜。
Everyone understands that whoever exchanges real physical things for THIS PLASTIC COIN is a fool.
Exchanging physical, substantive items in exchange for paper, plastic, or other non-durable items; items that are subject to the whims of politics, and their irrational actions, is a fool. -MM
美国这个月内，增发1.9万亿亿美元，欧盟，日元也是大量印钞票。
Just within this month, the United States has issued an additional 1.9 trillion US dollars, and the European Union and the Japanese also printed a large amount of money.
The whole world is relying on PRINTING MONEY to survive the crisis. It is very important to watch how the RMB renminbi will fare. If you follow the money printing trend, inflation will be the end result; and if you don’t follow the trend, it means that the renminbi will be offsetting currency inflation ( when you trade and accept their Currency ) and thereby you sustain LOSSES.
If you trade with foreign nations and accept the USD in exchange for the products you make, you are taking a huge risk. China urges all nations to accept other means of payment; stable means, where possible. -MM
Therefore, we are maintaining in an extremely stiff (difficult) situation and we will not cut our interest rates.
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In the near future all trade will be settled bilaterally in Chinese currency the RMB. If you want to buy our goods, we will no longer accept USD. Instead you will need to pay us in RMB, or barter for them with other durable items.
China is laying down the line. No. Not only will China not buy up any American or Western debt, but that it will now start to insist in hard durable payment schemes for all items made in China. If you want iPhones, for example, then you should use RMB, or barter with an equivalent amount of beef, wine, or wheat. -MM
我们终于醒过来了，不再盲目大量出口，也看清许多国家”大量印钞票”只是在搜刮世界物质财富。
We have finally waken up…. we are no longer blindly exporting large quantities of products. We have also notices that many countries that are “printing a large amount of money” are simply just plundering the world’s material wealth in exchange for vapor.
The Big Giant has finally woken up. -MM
只要认清方向，永远不晚，我们不能再做赔本生意了，中国人照顾好自己的人民才最重要。
As long as we understand the direction… it is never too late. We refuse to do business at a loss. The most important thing is for the Chinese GOVERNMENT to take good care and look after the welfare of its people.
The United States spent only ten cents to print a hundred-dollar bill (without any precious metal collateral) and asked to buy one hundred dollars value of your goods. Isn’t this cheating / bullshit? This is a blatant fraud. It is a shameless plunder.
That's putting it mildly. When you couple the realization that all this fake money is then being used to attack, and demonize China; the source from whence the value is derived. -MM
The United States Painted a BEAUTIFUL Scenery and ASKS CHINA TO HELP THEM TIDE OVER THE CRISIS with a promise to stop the trade war, PRETENDING TO COMPROMISE, and using THEIR USELESS DOLLARS to buy Chinese-produced materials.
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We will not be fooled AGAIN.
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让美国人去自己玩吧，我们不奉陪了。【 請转发】
Let the Americans and play by themselves, we will no longer be participating.
A final warning
As if that isn’t enough to convince you, keep in mind that the US military is pretty much a “paper tiger“. Latest eg. :A phone call threat plus a shooter is enough to shut down an entire United States military complex.
You do not want to fuck with Asia. You have no fucking idea what your world will end up looking like. VIDEO.
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
Well, things are coming in in isolation; in drips and dabs. But we are slowly piecing together a picture of what transpired during 2020 when President Trump and his army of neocons threw everything (minus the kitchen sink) at China. And it all failed.
In October, leading up into the November elections, was a desperate time. And President Trump was increasingly frustrated with the turn of events that he set in motion.
We know now, that in February 2020, China went DEFCON ONE and blamed the United States for unleashing a bio-weapon on China during it’s most important holiday. We also know that they stayed at military readiness throughout the year, and successfully stopped hybrid-war efforts on all fronts. The NED sponsored “Color Revolutions” in Hong Kong, Tibet and Xinjiang all collapsed.
In October, the largest flotilla of aircraft carriers ever assembled in the history of the world sailed home without incident from the South China Sea, and immediately Donald Trump fired his military leadership. Right then, and there. No explanation was given, and the mainstream media were all perplexed, and quickly forgot about the incident.
What happened after this defeat without a shot being fired is unknown, but now a general is speaking out and what he reports is horrific.
This is what happened immediately after the Naval Flotilla returned home without incident, and the top military leadership was fired…
The “news” reports
Top general was so fearful Trump might spark war that he made secret calls to his Chinese counterpart, new book says
Twice in the final months of the Trump administration, the country’s top military officer was so fearful that the president’s actions might spark a war with China that he moved urgently to avert armed conflict.
In a pair of secret phone calls, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, assured his Chinese counterpart, Gen. Li Zuocheng of the People’s Liberation Army, that the United States would not strike, according to a new book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward and national political reporter Robert Costa.
One call took place on Oct. 30, 2020, four days before the election that unseated President Donald Trump, and the other on Jan. 8, 2021, two days after the Capitol siege carried out by his supporters in a quest to cancel the vote.
The first call was prompted by Milley’s review of intelligence suggesting the Chinese believed the United States was preparing to attack. That belief, the authors write, was based on tensions over military exercises in the South China Sea, and deepened by Trump’s belligerent rhetoric toward China.
“General Li, I want to assure you that the American government is stable and everything is going to be okay,” Milley told him. “We are not going to attack or conduct any kinetic operations against you.”
In the book’s account, Milley went so far as to pledge he would alert his counterpart in the event of a U.S. attack, stressing the rapport they’d established through a backchannel. “General Li, you and I have known each other for now five years. If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise.”
Li took the chairman at his word, the authors write in the book, “Peril,” which is set to be released next week.
In the second call, placed to address Chinese fears about the events of Jan. 6, Li wasn’t as easily assuaged, even after Milley promised him, “We are 100 percent steady. Everything’s fine. But democracy can be sloppy sometimes.”
Li remained rattled, and Milley, who did not relay the conversation to Trump, according to the book, understood why. The chairman, 62 at the time and chosen by Trump in 2018, believed the president had suffered a mental decline after the election, the authors write, a view he communicated to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in a phone call on Jan. 8. He agreed with her evaluation that Trump was unstable, according to a call transcript obtained by the authors.
Believing that China could lash out if it felt at risk from an unpredictable and vengeful American president, Milley took action. The same day, he called the admiral overseeing the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, the military unit responsible for Asia and the Pacific region, and recommended postponing the military exercises, according to the book. The admiral complied.
Milley also summoned senior officers to review the procedures for launching nuclear weapons, saying the president alone could give the order — but, crucially, that he, Milley, also had to be involved. Looking each in the eye, Milley asked the officers to affirm that they had understood, the authors write, in what he considered an “oath.”
The chairman knew that he was “pulling a Schlesinger,” the authors write, resorting to measures resembling the ones taken in August 1974 by James R. Schlesinger, the defense secretary at the time. Schlesinger told military officials to check with him and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs before carrying out orders from President Richard M. Nixon, who was facing impeachment at the time.
Though Milley went furthest in seeking to stave off a national security crisis, his alarm was shared throughout the highest ranks of the administration, the authors reveal. CIA Director Gina Haspel, for instance, reportedly told Milley, “We are on the way to a right-wing coup.”
The book’s revelations quickly made Milley a target of GOP ire.
Trump, speaking Tuesday evening on the conservative television network Newsmax, labeled the chairman’s reported actions “treason” and said, “I did not ever think of attacking China.”
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote a letter to President Biden. Urging him to dismiss the Joint Chiefs chairman, saying he had undermined the commander in chief and “contemplated a treasonous leak of classified information to the Chinese Communist Party in advance of a potential armed conflict …”
A White House spokeswoman earlier Tuesday declined to comment on the book. Milley’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
“Peril” also provides new reporting on Biden’s 2020 campaign — waged to unseat a man he told a top adviser “isn’t really an American president” — and his early struggle to govern. During a March 5 phone call to discuss Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus plan, his first major legislative undertaking, the president reportedly told Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va), “if you don’t come along, you’re really f—ing me.” The measure ultimately cleared the Senate through an elaborate sequencing of amendments designed to satisfy the centrist Democrat.
The president’s frustration with Manchin is matched only by his debt to House Majority Whip Rep. James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, whose endorsement before that state’s primary propelled Biden to the nomination and gave rise to promises about how he would govern.
When Clyburn offered his endorsement in February 2020, it came with conditions, according to the book. One was that Biden would commit to naming a Black woman to the Supreme Court, if given the opportunity. During a debate two days later, Clyburn went backstage during a break to urge Biden to reveal his intentions for the Supreme Court that night. Biden issued the pledge in his final answer, and the congressman endorsed him the next day.
“Peril,” the authors say, is based on interviews with more than 200 people, conducted on the condition they not be named as sources.
Exact quotations or conclusions are drawn from the participant in the described event, a colleague with direct knowledge or relevant documents, according to an author’s note. Trump and Biden declined to be interviewed.
On Afghanistan, the book examines how Biden’s experience as vice president shaped his approach to the withdrawal. Convinced that President Barack Obama had been manipulated by his own commanders, Biden vowed privately in 2009, “The military doesn’t f— around with me.”
“Peril” also documents how Biden’s top advisers spent the spring weighing, but ultimately rejecting, alternatives to a full withdrawal. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin returned from a NATO meeting in March envisioning ways to extend the mission, including through a “gated” withdrawal seeking diplomatic leverage. But they came to see that meaningful leverage would require a more expansive commitment, and instead came back around to a full exit.
Milley, for his part, took what the authors describe as a deferential approach to Biden on Afghanistan, in contrast to his earlier efforts to constrain Trump. The book reveals recent remarks the chairman delivered to the Joint Chiefs in which he said, “Here’s a couple of rules of the road here that we’re going to follow. One is you never, ever ever box in a president of the United States. You always give him decision space.” Referring to Biden, he said, “You’re dealing with a seasoned politician here who has been in Washington, D.C., 50 years, whatever it is.”
His decision just months earlier to place himself between Trump and potential war was triggered by several important events — a phone call, a photo op and a refusal to rule out war with another adversary, Iran.
The immediate motivation, according to the book, was the Jan. 8 call from Pelosi, who demanded to know, “What precautions are available to prevent an unstable president from initiating military hostilities or from accessing the launch codes and ordering a nuclear strike?” Milley assured her that there were “a lot of checks in the system.”
The call transcript obtained by the authors shows Pelosi telling Milley, referring to Trump, “He’s crazy. You know he’s crazy. … He’s crazy and what he did yesterday is further evidence of his craziness.” Milley replied, “I agree with you on everything.”
Milley’s resolve was deepened by the events of June 1, 2020, when he felt Trump had used him as part of a photo op in his walk across Lafayette Square during protests that began after the killing of George Floyd. The chairman came to see his role as ensuring that, “We’re not going to turn our guns on the American people and we’re not going to have a ‘Wag the Dog’ scenario overseas,” the authors quote him saying privately.
Trump’s posture, not just to China but also to Iran, tested that promise. In discussions about Iran’s nuclear program, Trump declined to rule out striking the country, at times even displaying curiosity about the prospect, according to the book. Haspel was so alarmed after a meeting in November that she called Milley to say, “This is a highly dangerous situation. We are going to lash out for his ego?”
Trump’s fragile ego drove many decisions by the nation’s leaders, from lawmakers to the vice president, according to the book. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was so worried that a call from President-elect Biden would send Trump into a fury that the then-Majority Leader used a backchannel to fend off Biden. He asked Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, formerly the No. 2 Senate Republican, to ask Sen. Christopher A. Coons, the Democrat of Delaware and close Biden ally, to tell Biden not to call him.
So intent was Pence on being Trump’s loyal second-in-command — and potential successor — that he asked confidants if there were ways he could accede to Trump’s demands and avoid certifying the results of the election on Jan. 6. In late December, the authors reveal, Pence called Dan Quayle, a former vice president and fellow Indiana Republican, for advice.
Quayle was adamant, according to the authors. “Mike, you have no flexibility on this. None. Zero. Forget it. Put it away,” he said.
But Pence pressed him, the authors write, asking if there were any grounds to pause the certification because of ongoing legal challenges. Quayle was unmoved, and Pence ultimately agreed, according to the book.
When Pence said he planned to certify the results, the president lashed out. In the Oval Office on Jan. 5, the authors write, Pence told Trump he could not thwart the process, that his role was simply to “open the envelopes.”
“I don’t want to be your friend anymore if you don’t do this,” Trump replied, according to the book, later telling his vice president, “You’ve betrayed us. I made you. You were nothing.”
Within days, Trump was out of office, his governing power reduced to nothing. But if stability had returned to Washington, Milley feared it would be short-lived, the authors write.
The general saw parallels between Jan. 6 and the 1905 Russian Revolution, which set off unrest throughout the Russian Empire and, though it failed, helped create the conditions for the October Revolution of 1917, in which the Bolsheviks executed a successful coup that set up the world’s first communist state. Vladimir Lenin, who led the revolution, called 1905 a “dress rehearsal.”
A similar logic could apply with Jan. 6, Milley thought as he wrestled with the meaning of that day, telling senior staff:
“What you might have seen was a precursor to something far worse down the road.”
MM Comments
Here on MM we have long documented all the events listed herein. I have a couple indexes on it all. We discussed the covert, overt, and “black sides” of a war with China. We discussed the 11 biological attacks, and the various military operations. We discussed everything from drones spraying bio-weapons to devastate livestock, to political bullshit. We also discussed the idea that the United States would conduct a first-use of nuclear weapons against China.
And people laughed at us.
And it turns out that we were correct.
President trump and his army of neocons were indeed planning first strike attacks upon China. And that, we now know, would have resulted in a retaliatory Chinese nuclear salvo against the top 40 American cities.
President trump and his cabal of neocons declared war on China in 2016. When he became president, he immediately put neocons in charge of all the strategy positions relative for war. Such as John Bolton in charge of the Bio-Weapons systems. He then waged a “hybrid-war” against China.
Aside from all the public efforts; tariffs, Huawei, 5G, QUAD, Australia, etc, he also engaged in aggressive “black operations” that included “color revolutions“, as well as trying to induce starvation through bio-weapons.
All efforts failed.
By 2019, and during the lead up towards elections, Donald Trump wanted to step up his anti-China campaign. His reelection to a second term depended on his ability to be a “war President”. So starting in mid 2019 he launched an “inoculation strain” of COVID in the USA and all of it’s allies. And then in late 2019, he released the “lethal B” strain against China, Iran and North Korea.
All of 2020 was fought with biological weapons.
Simultaneously with the Chinese people collapsing due to seizures due to the lethal B strain, an enormous “fire hose” of anti-China disinformation was unleashed. And for a while it worked.
But not as planned.
The strains mutated, and the “inoculation strain” did not protect Americans.
Then, in March 2020 he decided to go Kinetic and launched two more very serious bio-weapons against China. (For a total of three lethal bio-weapons.)
And yet again, China survived, and thrived.
So, he got together the largest Naval flotilla in the history of the world and set sail for China. But no incidents occurred, and he fired his top military leadership as a result. We now know why. Donald Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper because he did not engage in a “hot” kinetic war with China.
And Donald Trump was COUNTING on that war to be initiated during elections. And always, historically, there are insanely positive polling results for a President during the initial weeks of a war.
So then President Trump went to his generals, and as we now know, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was afraid that Donald Trump would order him to conduct a “hot” kinetic war with China.
Now, China, after four years of “hybird-war”, and full knowledge about the bio-weapons attacks and the “color revolutions”…
After all, China shares Intel with Russia, and has all of Hong Kong wired up in audio and video... as well as all those CIA / NED "assets" on the mainland, now filled with pro-china patriotic fervor turning themselves in and working with the PLA...
Knew full well what was going on.
After all, China was at DEFCON ONE all year. (And still is, by the way.) And appreciated the candor of the American military leadership, but do not trust any Americans any longer. Which is why they are refusing to talk with Biden, or having a US Ambassador inside of China. (As of right now at the time of this article.)
And now, the Chinese leadership is very “closed” to the United States.
We know that President Biden has been inside of China and understands that a war with China would devastate the United States. And it would. Let’s not fool ourselves.
But, President Bidden is a figurehead only.
The United States is a Military Empire, and the military-industrial establishment and neocon K-street are “calling the shots”. They run things. They control budgets, and they control the Military. They control the State Department (as the entire world observed during the April 2021 Anchorage meeting), and they control the American people though advanced media manipulation.
This knowledge of what China is, and what it capable of is useless, as the people who control the reins of power think otherwise. All the war provocations seem to originate out for the bureaucracy and industrial self-interest rather than top-down directed orders.
No matter how harsh the United States might be against China today, it is nothing compared to what would happen were another neocon to become President in 2024.
Tom Cotton
Mike Pompeo
Marco Rubio
Heaven help us all.
Dangerous people.
In expectation of a bad situation going “tits up” both Russia and China have prepared first-strike (nuclear) scenarios to counter any possibility of the intentional American nightmare unleashed upon the world.
Make no mistake that they are in place and being studied for every contingency.
The Chinese plan for every contingency.
The Chinese and the Russians are not fools. And as I have said over and over and over.
China. Does. Not. Play.
Which means that they are a serious, serious, merit driven nation. And when they do decide to do something, they do it with precision and ruthlessness. You might not want to hear it, you might want to believe that democracy is on “God’s side”, or that Chinese are just “copy-cats” who cannot innovate. You can believe whatever you want.
Expect full-on Asian (China & Russia) readiness to be in place right now today.
They are ready to hurt others really, really bad. China is mass producing nuclear warheads like they used to make rubber ducky’s. The assembly lines and production lines are running hot. Much like the printing presses in America are turning red hot printing US “greenback” dollars.
Not only that, but on all levels they have mustered and created a unified Asia.
And a word to the wise. They do not believe in “surgical strikes”. They believe in pounding cities into oblivion. They have their own history as a template.
Maybe payback time for the rape of Nanjing…
Hopefully level heads will persist at the highest levels of government in Washington DC for the next decade or so. But do not count on it. We can hope, but must be realistic.
But if the world can tone down the insanity that the United States has become, then the rest of the world will be able to take a breather and the entire world can move forward in peace.
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.
Here’s another post that you simply will not find anywhere else on the Internet. And, you know, I tire of my own sluggishness in trying to understand the great failure of the American “free media”. Even I realize that there is no such thing as actual “news” in the West, but really guys it’s not too FUCKING DIFFICULT. You look for what is not being reported and stay alert for distractions.
What’s the biggest distraction this August 2021?
Why it is the fucked up, terribly botched evacuation of American military out of Kabul, Afghanistan. That’s ONE FUCK of a distraction.
Ok, then, let’s scour the “news” for oddities and pieces that might point to a major event that the United States government might want to hide, or distract others from looking into.
And, whoa…
But first a major comment from Singapore.
Turn up your speaker and listen to these wise words. And if you don’t understand them, play them over and over (on repeat) until it sinks into your fucking skull. Deprogram your mind God damn it. Click on the picture and watch the video until you tire of the simple, simple message.
A missing special operations submarine in the South China Sea
There have been substantive black operations in and around Taiwan since 2019. In all, the Untied States Navy has been doing all sorts of things in the area along the coasts of China and Taiwan. And after the April 2021 Anchorage, Alaska “meeting”, China laid down the line. They established “Red Lines” that WILL result in military conflict if they are ignored.
Of course, the brain dead people (are they actually people?) in Washington DC dismiss these threats as simple “posturing” and rhetoric.
There is every evidence to suggest that the United States has been conducting illegal and sensitive black operations inside of Chinese and Taiwan territories, and that China took aggressive military action against them. Or in other words, sank the submarines and set the hundreds of sailors and SEALs to their deaths in steel coffins in the deep dark seas.
American Submarines break cover
The U.S. Navy rarely publicizes even the routine operations of its own submarines. Stealth, both tactical and operational, is the Silent Service’s greatest strength, after all. But the Americans made a series of exceptions in June as new Chinese and Russian subs surfaced.
The Navy posted photos of the Washington-based USS Seawolf sailing alongside the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson off Hawaii on June 22, 2021 the same time a Russian naval task force was exercising near the island.
The 353-foot-long, nuclear-powered Seawolf is the lead vessel in a three-ship class that also includes USS Jimmy Carter, the U.S. fleet’s secretive special-mission submarine. Jimmy Carter also made a rare appearance when an airline-passenger photographed the boat sailing from San Diego towards Hawaii on June 8, 2021.
Seawolf and her sister USS Connecticut are bigger and faster than the newer Virginia-class attack boats are and, in many ways, represent the future of undersea warfare more than the Virginias do.
The Navy optimized the Virginias for land-attack missions with Tomahawk cruise missiles, at the expense of their anti-submarine capabilities. But with the Chinese and Russian sub fleets steadily growing more powerful—the new Type 039 and Belgorod are exhibits A and B—the Americans want their next attack boat to be fast and heavily-armed with greater numbers of torpedoes and mines.
In other words, more like a Seawolf. Not coincidentally, the Navy also released a photo of sailors in Crete loading Mark 67 mines on the Los Angeles-class attack sub USS Montpelier on June 22.
Amid a wider collapse in U.S. long-range naval planning, the administration of U.S. president Joe Biden remains committed to spending as much as half of the Navy’s shipbuilding budget—around $20 billion annually—on attack submarines, including the next-generation SSN(X).
“The recent uptick in submarine images released by the U.S. Navy is quite noticeable,” tweeted Chris Cavas, host of the CavasShips Podcast. “Remembering that submarine have pride-of-place in Department of the Navy budget calculations.”
So, we know that the US Navy is all over the South China Sea
But it is more than that.
We notice and are paying attending to what they are actually doing. Their movements are all recorded in great detail. With the most obvious being the surface ships, and the aircraft. Not so well known are the movements of the “Black Operations” submarines.
All 2021 has been stories about major Naval Operations in the South Pacific Sea.
The “excuse” has always been to protect the freedom of navigation in those waters off the Chinese coast. But that excuse is just that.
A fucking excuse.
Any person with half a brain cell and who knows what a globe looks like can easily see that the USN is up to no good. But Americans have been dumbed down so terribly that they are lucky to be able to hold a spoon, let alone calculate how to count to ten.
Think people!
Think!
And we know that ALL of the “Special Operations” submarines are in operation all around Taiwan
How do we know?
It’s by deduction. Duh!
We know that the submarines work work in covert operations and carry SEAL teams. While they perform such tasks as tapping into fiber optic undersea cables and the like, they are all equipped with landing bays that carry “miniature troop insertion submarines” designed to carry SEAL teams close to the coastlines for insertion into “enemy territory”.
And they are all rotating in and around Hawaii. Are they planning to invade Bora Bora? Performing secretive missions around Tahiti? Going to lay secret operations in Pago Pago?
Special Operations submarines showing the landing bays for the SEAL secretive assault troops.
The four converted ballistic missile submarines are so much more than Tomahawk slingers and transports for Navy SEALs.
Today, the U.S. Navy’s quartet of converted Ohio class nuclear-powered guided-missile submarines, or SSGNs, are among America’s most powerful, in-demand, and flexible weapons. These giant and secretive submarines are known for their ability to carry up to 154 Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles and dozens of special operations frogmen into contested territory to ply their quiet trade, but really, they are much, much more than that.
A decade and a half ago, the U.S. Navy was testing incredible new capabilities that it would subsequently integrate into its four yet to be converted SSGNs, including one highly elaborate, but obscure proof of concept exercise that solidified the SSGN concept for the seagoing service. Here is the story of how these vessels came to be and the highly unique, if not exotic capabilities, from drone mothership to command and control center, they possess.
The Genesis of the Ohio SSGN
The decision to covert Ohio class SSBNs into SSGNs originated with the 1994 Nuclear Posture Review, which determined that only 14 of the 18 Ohio class boats were necessary to meet the United States’ nuclear deterrence needs. Eight years later, the Navy began actually converting the four oldest Ohio class submarines – USS Florida, USS Georgia, USS Michigan, and USS Ohio – into the new configuration.
The Navy had considered a number of potential configuration options for the new SSGNs. The concept that the service finally settled on retained 22 of the 24 missile tubes found on Ohio SSBNs, but modified them so that they were unable to fire Trident D5 nuclear-tipped submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). Instead, each one would be able to launch up to seven BGM-109 Tomahawks using a Multiple All-Up-Round Canister (MAC) adapter. The SLBM fire control systems were similarly replaced with ones for the Tomahawk.
Tubes one and two on each of the four SSGNs would be completely replaced with lockout chambers so combat divers and Navy SEALs could enter and exit the submarine underwater. Personnel could also install a Dry Deck Shelter (DDS) to the top of the hull linked to either one of these modified tubes, or both if required, which could accommodate swimmer delivery vehicle (SDV) mini-submarines. As the name suggests, the DDS provides a fully enclosed, dry space to work in on the submarine’s deck, even while it is underwater.
The abortive Advanced SEAL Delivery System (ASDS) was supposed to have been able to directly dock with either one of these lockout chambers, as well. The Navy canceled the ASDS program in 2009 after cost overruns and other major setbacks, including a fire that had destroyed the original prototype the year before.
With a DDS installed, a number of additional tubes on the SSGNs would also be blocked off, so the Navy decided to make tubes three through 10 reconfigurable into storage space, if necessary. A dedicated berthing area for a typical contingent of 66 special operators, with a surge capacity of up 102 personnel, was added in the reconfigured missile compartment, as well.
More recent reporting has indicated that a typical load for these submarines is around 100 Tomahawks. This most likely represents between 14 and 16 fully loaded tubes, which would equate to between 98 and 112 missiles in total. This would leave between six and eight tubes available for storage or other purposes, something we will come back to later on in the story.
Beyond that, the SSGN configuration had an all-new a dedicated special operations mission control center and associated mission planning spaces.
It also included additional and improved sensor and communications antenna masts on the sail.
Other modifications that would allow these submarines to better operate in shallower waters closer to shore, were also likely involved with the conversion.
An intelligence nerve center
It’s hard to overstate how significant the intelligence fusion capabilities demonstrated during Silent Hammer were. For the experiment, Georgia had an embarked joint service command team onboard, who used modified spaces in the submarine to run a forward operations center that controlled other assets under the waves, riding on the surface, in the air, and on land. This was intended to reflect the capabilities that the submarine would have after going through the SSGN conversion, which would create new, more robust mission spaces for command and control elements and intelligence gathering personnel, among others.
This was the first time the Navy had ever done this as part of the development of the SSGN concept of operations and it put the operational commanders right in the thick of things in a whole new way. Unlike traditional surface command ships, such as the USS Blue Ridge, the Georgia was allowing these officers and their staff to direct forward operations while sailing concealed below the surface of the ocean. The submarine’s command center was linked to rear command centers, and their intelligence networks, via satellite. It also had direct data-link feeds from a number of other sources.
In the air, these included the Pelican, a highly modified, pilot-optional Cessna 337 propeller-driven aircraft, and a specially configured Sabreliner twin-engine business jet. The Pelican belonged to the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School’s Center for Interdisciplinary Remotely-Piloted Aircraft Studies (CIRPAS) and was configured at the time in a way that matched the capabilities of the MQ-1 Predator drone.
The Lincoln Lab also had their heavily modified Boeing 707 airliner, nicknamed Hannah, a well-known cutting-edge communications and sensor testbed, in the air playing the role of a airborne radar with synthetic aperture and ground-moving-target indicator capabilities. This effectively made it, in part, a surrogate for a U.S. Air Force E-8C Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (JSTARS) battlefield management command and control aircraft.
Navy EA-6B Prowler electronic warfare planes and EP-3E Aries II intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance aircraft also took part in Trident Warrior and fed information into this network of information sources.
Down below, Georgia was networked together with other vessels taking part in Trident Warrior, including two Los Angeles class fast attack submarines, the USS La Jolla and USS Pittsburgh. In addition, members of the Silent Hammer experiment team were on board the first in class amphibious assault ship USS Tarawa and the Wasp class USS Bonhomme Richard, which were also taking part in the larger exercise.
Ashore, U.S. Navy SEALs, along with other unspecified attached special operators, likely including U.S. Air Force Joint Tactical Air Controllers (JTAC), were in direct contact with Georgia. They emplaced their own “unattended” sensors to monitor for potential hostile activity and otherwise fed even more data back to the submarine.
We also know that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) supplied unspecified payloads, as well as sensor systems for the exercise. Georgia itself demonstrated how she might launch unmanned aircraft and an unmanned underwater vehicles (UUV) during the exercise to support intelligence collection efforts.
The very same intelligence collection aircraft are operating in the airspace around Taiwan RIGHT NOW
Imagine that!
Just a coincidence, don’t you know!
More than 700 patrols were conducted by US vessels and aircraft in the South China Sea region in the past year, according to a report by the National Institute for South China Sea Studies (NISCSS). As the US never ratified theUN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), itsclaims of protecting "freedom of navigation" is rather hollow.
-ChinaPlus
Of course, you will never read about this in CNN, FOX “news”, Hall Turner, or Forbes. Those just provide bullshit for a dumbed down citizenry. Real secrets are secret.
But all over Chinese media are reports of these intelligence gathering aircraft, with videos of their interactions.
Reported that Davidson, by video link, to the U.S. think tank American enterprise research institute (AEI) talks. He declared that the Indo-Pacific region is one of the most critical regions in the world and will face many challenges between now and 2026.
Davidson spent much of his time describing the Pentagon's Pacific Deterrence Initiative, which he said was one of the priorities of the Department's annual budget.
The U.S. Army India-Pacific Command has reported to Congress that it will increase the program's budget from $2.2 billion in fiscal year 2021 to $4.6 billion in fiscal year 2022 and plans to spend $27.3 billion over the next five years, the report said.
-美印太司令部宣称“助台增强防御力、持续对台军售”，网友讽刺：台湾保护费要涨了！
But there is something very interesting going on…
These aircraft are not “loitering” as part of operations so much as flying “search and rescue” scans in the deep ocean South of the Taiwan Coast.
What are they looking for?
What is going on? Check out the video.
Searching for something.
This is not a “loitering” SEAL support protocol. It’s all over the place in a limited geographical region.
Not deploying sonar buoys.
Doing something else.
Other curious events…
The timing of all these unusual intelligent gathering aircraft in “searching and recovery” flight paths occurred at the SAME TIME as the US Navy, broke all diplomatic protocol to land on Taiwan and deliver a “package” containing a “message” to the Military Representative in Taiwan.
Yes. It must have been one fuck of an important package to risk getting shot down and starting world war III in the process.
Matt Drudge, ever the neocon (or whatever neocon interns he has running his site for him these days), is perhaps the biggest offender on this type of fake news. Right now if you go to his site, just the main page (drudgereport.com) you'll see *HUGE* red emblazoned text about "Marines in China!" and a giant picture of what looks like some sort of seafaring battalion of US troooooops getting ready to storm some shore or the other. He's worse than CNN, WaPo, WSJ or the NYT (of course he often links to those sources).
Interestingly, on actual left-leaning sites, there's nothing to be seen on the non-topic, but instead moooooore stories about Trump (they just can't stop themselves), the abortion bills and COVID related stuff.
Posted by: Tom_Q_Collins | Oct 7 2021 21:41 utc | 32
Another day, same hype…
But what about proof?
Well, we all know that America is the most transparent and least secretive nation on the planet. It’s got that thing called “freedom”, and there is nothing more important than a “free press”. Right? So if they don’t report anything, that simply means that nothing is going on. Right?
Yada. Yada. Yada.
American view of themselves.
The United States is laying the foundations for a war.
That’s what is going on.
China realizes this and is getting mightily pissed. I can tell you that secret operations that go “tits up” are never recognized as an event. it is just hidden and compromised with other excuses.
When a submarine goes off the grid, the hundreds of sailors are quietly written off, and records state that they died in accidents.
The submarine itself is quietly “retired”, and nothing further is spoken of it.
Maybe one of these days the SEAL “Special Operations” submarines will sail into port without incidence.
You know like the broken and busted up Seawolf submarine that limped into Hawaii for “repairs” and urgent medical treatment for it’s crew when it had an incident in the South China Sea during “Mission 7”.
America will continue to wage a secretive war against China hidden away from public scrutiny up until nuclear weapons are detonated. Then we all won’t know what is going on, but we will know that America will be a radioactive wasteland no matter what happens in the rest of the world.
I told you all that the war would not be televised.
And it isn’t.
…
There are numerous missing submarines in the United States Navy. Not just the ones listed here, but attack submarines, and maybe even a “boomer”. All nuclear. And they are “sitting ducks” in the shallow South China Sea.
There’s a secret, silent war of stealth going on. If it goes visually kinetic, then it risks destroying the American economy “house of cards”. So this “war” must be hidden, quiet and done in stealth.
Most submarines are either sunk or “heavily damaged”. Those that are not sunk sail home “heavily damaged”. So far, we haven’t seem too many sail home damaged. But we will.
…
I would STRONGLY suggest you all watch the movie “Threads” to see the frightening similarities between this 1980’s movie and what is going on right now.
Oh…
And the mainstream press finally decides to report something….
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.
Well, in 2020 Trump decided to go to a “hot” war with China. he sent 7 – 8 assault battle carrier groups to the South China Sea, and an undisclosed number of submarines. I’ve discussed this issue before HERE. And we now know that no “disclosed” fighting actually occurred. The flotilla steamed back to the United States “empty handed”, and the Admiral and his staff were fired immediately when they arrived back in Washington DC.
No word or information is provided as to why the Admiral(s) refused to engaged the Chinese, or attempt the take-over of some “minor” outlying islands. We all, in the Western readership” are all oblivious to it. But the fact is that something actually “spooked” the Naval brass (leadership) in charge of the operation. What was it?
We will never know.
But what we do know is that China is decades ahead of the West in certain technologies such as directed energy weapons and electronic suppression systems. Indeed it would be a sorry day for an entire submarine with 100 – 200 crew and all sorts of multi-million dollar munitions to sink softly to the bottom of the South China Sea when nothing works. It would be a scene out of the Foundation Trilogy.
During the story, there was this group of technologists that controlled the manufacturing and science related to all technology. It had become a religion to them. They were dedicated to technology like religious fanatics.
Meanwhile the various empires and governments were using this technology to conduct wars and achieve their very own petty objectives.
So the leader of the technologists decides to shut everything down, and as a result the Empire space fleet of enormous weapons systems and space-dreadnoughts all shut down and came to a complete stop.
That being said, let’s be real.
Ever since the middle 1990’s the United States has invested billions of dollars in the creation of very expensive and very unique submarine warfare systems. These are not to attack Yemen, or Zaire with. They are to attack China, and maybe… Russia with. For the vast bulk of territory that is valuable to China are the shipping lanes in the South China Sea.
So for nearly three decades the United States has invested billions of dollars in these systems, but no one knows about them.
Here we are going to discuss them, and indeed they are IMPRESSIVE. But keep in mind, no matter how impressive they are, and their capabilities are, they can be rendered absolutely and completely inert…
…and sink to the bottom of the South China Sea with one blast of a direct energy weapon. Weapons that completely and absolutely ring the entire Pacific basin near China.
You can have the best trained SEALs, and the most impressive weaponry, and the most excellent leadership, but it means nothing when you are trapped inside a steel tomb three miles beneath the ocean and your nuclear reactor is going into meltdown. Word to the wise.
So while I have no proof that this is what was going on, there is every reason to believe that it is this kind of thing that “spooked” the admirals to call off the invasion and “instigation” force and return home.
Never the less, the American capability is substantive, and for a military-technology geek, this stuff is superbly interesting.
Here’s a great article, and it is amazing. I want to give full and absolute credit to the source and the article author. Please take note. And also remember, like all reprints, they were edited to fit this venue and all credit to the author.
Today, the U.S. Navy’s quartet of converted Ohio class nuclear-powered guided-missile submarines, or SSGNs, are among America’s most powerful, in-demand, and flexible weapons. These giant and secretive submarines are known for their ability to carry up to 154 Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles and dozens of special operations frogmen into contested territory to ply their quiet trade, but really, they are much, much more than that.
A decade and a half ago, the U.S. Navy was testing incredible new capabilities that it would subsequently integrate into its four yet to be converted SSGNs, including one highly elaborate, but obscure proof of concept exercise that solidified the SSGN concept for the seagoing service. Here is the story of how these vessels came to be and the highly unique, if not exotic capabilities, from drone mothership to command and control center, they possess.
The Genesis of the Ohio SSGN
The decision to covert Ohio class SSBNs into SSGNs originated with the 1994 Nuclear Posture Review, which determined that only 14 of the 18 Ohio class boats were necessary to meet the United States’ nuclear deterrence needs. Eight years later, the Navy began actually converting the four oldest Ohio class submarines – USS Florida, USS Georgia, USS Michigan, and USS Ohio – into the new configuration.
The Navy had considered a number of potential configuration options for the new SSGNs. The concept that the service finally settled on retained 22 of the 24 missile tubes found on Ohio SSBNs, but modified them so that they were unable to fire Trident D5 nuclear-tipped submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). Instead, each one would be able to launch up to seven BGM-109 Tomahawks using a Multiple All-Up-Round Canister (MAC) adapter. The SLBM fire control systems were similarly replaced with ones for the Tomahawk.
Tubes one and two on each of the four SSGNs would be completely replaced with lockout chambers so combat divers and Navy SEALs could enter and exit the submarine underwater. Personnel could also install a Dry Deck Shelter (DDS) to the top of the hull linked to either one of these modified tubes, or both if required, which could accommodate swimmer delivery vehicle (SDV) mini-submarines. As the name suggests, the DDS provides a fully enclosed, dry space to work in on the submarine’s deck, even while it is underwater.
The abortive Advanced SEAL Delivery System (ASDS) was supposed to have been able to directly dock with either one of these lockout chambers, as well. The Navy canceled the ASDS program in 2009 after cost overruns and other major setbacks, including a fire that had destroyed the original prototype the year before.
With a DDS installed, a number of additional tubes on the SSGNs would also be blocked off, so the Navy decided to make tubes three through 10 reconfigurable into storage space, if necessary. A dedicated berthing area for a typical contingent of 66 special operators, with a surge capacity of up 102 personnel, was added in the reconfigured missile compartment, as well.
More recent reporting has indicated that a typical load for these submarines is around 100 Tomahawks. This most likely represents between 14 and 16 fully loaded tubes, which would equate to between 98 and 112 missiles in total. This would leave between six and eight tubes available for storage or other purposes, something we will come back to later on in the story.
Beyond that, the SSGN configuration had an all-new a dedicated special operations mission control center and associated mission planning spaces. It also included additional and improved sensor and communications antenna masts on the sail. Other modifications that would allow these submarines to better operate in shallower waters closer to shore, were also likely involved with the conversion.
A rich history of special mission submarines
The Navy had substantial past experience with employing submarines as special operations motherships and in the tactical strike role, to say nothing of using them as specialized covert intelligence gathering platforms, when it had crafted the requirements for the Ohio SSGNs. The ability of a submarine, in general, to transport personnel and materiel, as well as launch raiding parties ashore, while using its inherent capabilities to help avoid detection, was well established by the end of World War II.
Between the mid-1950s and early 1960s, the Navy, in cooperation with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and U.S. Air Force, had even used submarines to secretly launch radar-reflecting balloons to probe hostile air defense capabilities. You can read more about these operations in this past War Zone story.
By the Vietnam War, the Navy was using specially configured submarines to support special operations. These included Gato class USS Tunny and the first-in-class USS Grayback, both of which were diesel-electric submarines that had previously been configured to fire the Regulus nuclear-armed cruise missile.
The “hangars” on the decks of these submarines for the airplane-sized Regulus were well suited to modification into lockout chambers for swimmers and shelters for mini-submarines, just like the Ohio’s Trident tubes. In 1968, the Navy went so far as to designate them LPSSs, or amphibious transport submarines.
These boats supported special operations along the coast of North Vietnam and also helped gather intelligence. Grayback was notably involved in Operation Thunderhead in 1972, an attempt to rescue American aviators that the U.S. military believed had escaped from North Vietnam’s infamous Hanoi Hilton prison. Bad weather and other factors eventually led the Navy to abort the mission and SEALs and Underwater Demolition Team (UDT) members never made contact with any escapees.
One SEAL, U.S. Navy Lieutenant Melvin Spence Dry, died during the mission. The U.S. military only acknowledged the operation in 2008, at which time Dry received a posthumous Bronze Star.
In the decades after Vietnam, a number of Sturgeon class nuclear-powered attack submarines also served in similar special operations support roles. In something of prelude to the Ohio SSGNs, as part of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, or SALT I agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union in 1981, the Navy disabled the SLBM capabilities on a number of SSBNs, reclassifying them officially as attack submarines.
USS Sam Houston, USS John Marshall, USS Kamehameha, and USS James K. Polk – the first two belonging to the Ethan Allen class and the latter pair being from the Benjamin Franklin class – received further modifications that added DDSs to the top of the hull and dedicated spaces to carry embarked SEAL teams. These submarines continued sailing into the 1990s and Kamehameha was the last to leave service, with the Navy only decommissioning her in 2002.
A new kind of submarine mothership
Still, while the Navy had decades of experience with using submarines to support tactical operations, including special operations, at sea and onshore, the Ohio SSGNs aimed to be far more robust and flexible multi-mission platforms than any of these previous conversions.
As of 2004, the service was still very much fleshing out the specifics of the SSGN conversion and “writing the manual” on how to then employ these submarines. Georgia had become the main testbed for what was still very much an evolving concept, receiving a number of interim modifications including reconfigured internal mission spaces and additional data links and communications equipment. At that time, none of the four chosen Ohios had gone through the full conversion process and they were still years away from actually entering service in their new configuration.
“Two years from now, when we open the wrapping paper to see USS Georgia, a brand-spanking-new SSGN, we are going to need an instruction manual,” U.S. Navy Commodore Robert Shuetz, then-commander of Submarine Squadron 17, said at a change-of-command ceremony for the submarine in December 2004. “A manual that hasn’t been written yet; a manual that will describe in excruciating detail how this new ‘toy’ will be operated.”
“This is where the crew of Georgia has excelled,” Shuetz continued. “They have written the first instruction manual for how this ship and her three sisters, the ‘toys’ in demand by every combat commander, will be operated.”
Silent Hammer
Two months earlier, off the coast of San Diego, California, Georgia, even without anything near the full suite of capabilities outlined in the conversion plan, had demonstrated just what the SSGN configuration might be capable of as part of an experiment nicknamed Silent Hammer. To enhance the realism of the scenario, the Navy inserted this test into a larger exercise, called Trident Warrior, that involved an array of other submarines, ships, aircraft, drones, and special operations forces (SOF).
The Silent Hammer scenario, which lasted a little over a week, involved a joint task force with Georgia in the lead locating and neutralizing mock terrorists on land and at sea. The “red team” occupied various sites on San Clemente Island, situated some 80 miles west of San Diego, which the U.S. military routinely uses for exercise and other test purposes. The contractor-operated offshore support vessel, the R/V Acoustic Explorer, also served as a simulated maritime threat.
The overall objective of the exercise for the “blue team” was to find and fix these faux militants using a variety of intelligence sources and then neutralize them with simulated Tomahawk strikes.
During the experiment, at least publicly, the focus was far more on the submarine’s ability to act as an intelligence-collection platform, as well as a broader “clandestine sea-base” that would provide a “headquarters node from which command and control operations and logistic support were conducted,” including for special operators ashore.
“Our converted Tridents will generate their own intelligence, which allows onboard commanders to make decisions about what’s needed and determine what additional organic sensors should be deployed in virtually any scenario,” by-then-retired U.S. Navy Admiral Frank “Skip” Bowman wrote, referring to the Ohios collectively by the Trident submarine-launched ballistic missiles that the SSBN versions carry, said in the Winter 2005 edition of Undersea Warfare magazine, the official publication of the U.S. Navy’s Submarine Force. Bowman’s last position in the service had been as Director of Naval Nuclear Propulsion.
“Silent Hammer demonstrated how a networked force, including sea-based SOF from an SSGN, can fill joint gaps – Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance (ISR) and Time Sensitive Strike – by conducting large-scale clandestine operations, supported by advanced unmanned systems, to reduce risk and increase capability,” U.S. Navy Captain J.S. Davidson, who headed up the Silent Hammer experiment, had explained in another interview for another story in that same issue of Undersea Warfare.
An intelligence nerve center
It’s hard to overstate how significant the intelligence fusion capabilities demonstrated during Silent Hammer were. For the experiment, Georgia had an embarked joint service command team onboard, who used modified spaces in the submarine to run a forward operations center that controlled other assets under the waves, riding on the surface, in the air, and on land. This was intended to reflect the capabilities that the submarine would have after going through the SSGN conversion, which would create new, more robust mission spaces for command and control elements and intelligence gathering personnel, among others.
This was the first time the Navy had ever done this as part of the development of the SSGN concept of operations and it put the operational commanders right in the thick of things in a whole new way. Unlike traditional surface command ships, such as the USS Blue Ridge, the Georgia was allowing these officers and their staff to direct forward operations while sailing concealed below the surface of the ocean. The submarine’s command center was linked to rear command centers, and their intelligence networks, via satellite. It also had direct data-link feeds from a number of other sources.
In the air, these included the Pelican, a highly modified, pilot-optional Cessna 337 propeller-driven aircraft, and a specially configured Sabreliner twin-engine business jet. The Pelican belonged to the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School’s Center for Interdisciplinary Remotely-Piloted Aircraft Studies (CIRPAS) and was configured at the time in a way that matched the capabilities of the MQ-1 Predator drone. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Lincoln Laboratory operated the Sabreliner as a surrogate for smaller, lower-altitude unmanned aircraft.
The Lincoln Lab also had their heavily modified Boeing 707 airliner, nicknamed Hannah, a well-known cutting-edge communications and sensor testbed, in the air playing the role of a airborne radar with synthetic aperture and ground-moving-target indicator capabilities. This effectively made it, in part, a surrogate for a U.S. Air Force E-8C Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (JSTARS) battlefield management command and control aircraft.
Navy EA-6B Prowler electronic warfare planes and EP-3E Aries II intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance aircraft also took part in Trident Warrior and fed information into this network of information sources.
Down below, Georgia was networked together with other vessels taking part in Trident Warrior, including two Los Angeles class fast attack submarines, the USS La Jolla and USS Pittsburgh. In addition, members of the Silent Hammer experiment team were on board the first in class amphibious assault ship USS Tarawa and the Wasp class USS Bonhomme Richard, which were also taking part in the larger exercise.
Ashore, U.S. Navy SEALs, along with other unspecified attached special operators, likely including U.S. Air Force Joint Tactical Air Controllers (JTAC), were in direct contact with Georgia. They emplaced their own “unattended” sensors to monitor for potential hostile activity and otherwise fed even more data back to the submarine.
We also know that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) supplied unspecified payloads, as well as sensor systems for the exercise. Georgia itself demonstrated how she might launch unmanned aircraft and an unmanned underwater vehicles (UUV) during the exercise to support intelligence collection efforts. We will talk more about these shadowy developments later on.
Data fusion pioneers
The amount of intelligence information collected during the exercise was staggering. The supporting aircraft, ground sensors, and other offboard sensors collected more than 21,000 individual images during the exercise. In total, the task force created nearly 11 gigabytes of data, including thousands of textual alerts and nearly 3,000 actual intelligence “products,” such as PowerPoint presentations distilling various pieces of information, according to an article in a 2007 edition of the Lincoln Laboratory Journal.
Unfortunately, this wealth of information also risked being overwhelming. So, the Navy and the Lincoln Lab had also developed a computerized and heavily automated network system, state-of-the-art for the time, that allowed the command center onboard Georgia to rapidly parse through the mountains of available information for the most relevant data and only download what they needed in full. Being able to avoid downloading unnecessary information was particularly important given the bandwidth limitations in the data links available between the submarine and its various offboard information sources, especially 15 years ago.
Silent Hammer planners, as well as the Lincoln Lab, had been acutely aware of data sharing issues based on lessons learned from a smaller SSGN developmental experiment in 2003, nicknamed Giant Shadow, which involved the USS Florida and took place in and around the secretive Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center, or AUTEC, off the coast of Andros Island in the Bahamas. Similar to the Silent Hammer scenario, Giant Shadow centered on an operation to destroy a chemical weapons plant that mock terrorists were operating on shore.
“We can get this [imagery] real-time down to the submarine,” U.S. Navy Captain William Toti, then commander of the Florida, said in an interview at the time with “60 Minutes” on CBS News. “The SEALs can look at it real-time as they’re planning their missions, and have a better sense of what’s going on.”
The problem in that exercise, as it turned out, had been that there quickly became too much information for personnel on the submarine to sift through and process in real-time. “The providers, not the consumers, decided what information to transmit and when, which created a situation whereby analysts were overloaded with processing extraneous information, yet still had insufficient information for decision support,” according to the 2017 Lincoln Laboratory Journal article.
The flow of information during Silent Hammer was better, but still showed room for improvement. The vast quantities of data meant that it was still easy for intelligence officers to miss important new developments as they did their best to prioritize the efforts. Of the more than 21,000 images that various platforms collected during the exercise, less than 7,000 made their way into the networked database and “blue team” personnel only ever looked at 361 of them at any resolution, downloading just 45 of them in full for more extensive analysis. Still, the task force that Georgia led was ultimately able to find all of the simulated threats and successfully carry out the mock strikes to neutralize them.
Secretive payloads
For how much is known about Georgia’s participation in Silent Hammer, as well as the overall scope and scale of the intelligence gathering and networking systems employed during the exercise, there is little information about the testing of the submarine’s capabilities to launch underwater unmanned vehicles (UUVs) and unmanned aircraft.
It’s not clear what type or types of UUVs participated in Silent Hammer, or if Georgia deployed any of them herself. However, during the earlier Giant Shadow exercise, Florida had become the first Navy submarine to launch and recover the Seahorse Autonomous Undersea Vehicle (AUV) via a modified missile tube. It is very possible that this undersea drone took part in Silent Hammer, as well.
The Applied Research Laboratory (ARL) at the Pennsylvania State University had begun development of Seahorse in 1999 under contract to the Naval Oceanographic Office, or NAVOCEANO. At 28 and a half feet long and weighing 10,800 pounds, this underwater drone was more than 10 feet longer than a Mk 48 heavyweight torpedo and just over 7,100 pounds heavier.
Its main job was undersea mapping using a variety of sensors, including multi-beam bathymetric and synthetic aperture sonars, an Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP) and a Conductivity, Temperature and Depth (CTD) sensor. Those same sensors could be used to scout out mines and other potential underwater hazards and, in the decades since the Navy took delivery of Seahorse, the service has acquired and fielded a large number of increasingly more capable torpedo-shaped UUVs of various sizes for mapping and mine clearance missions, among others.
The Flexible Payload Module
Georgia didn’t actually launch any unmanned aircraft during Silent Hammer, according to the Navy, but did release two Stealthy Affordable Capsule System (SACS) canisters, each containing an “inert test shape simulating a UAV,” from a Flexible Payload Module (FPM) installed in one of the submarine’s missile tubes.
Since the 1990s, the Navy had been very interested in the idea of pairing unmanned aircraft with submarines to expand the ability of the boats to scout ahead and collect intelligence. Drones working with subs could also act as communications and data relays, probe and collect information on enemy defenses, and potentially even strike targets themselves. For example, in March 1996, the Los Angeles class attack submarine USS Chicago took part in a demonstration in which it tested its ability to both communicate with and actively control an early example of what was then known as the RQ-1 Predator.
Development of the FPM dates back to at least 2000, when the Navy tasked two separate industry consortiums with crafting concepts for future submarines designs, as well as payloads and sensors for them, with an eye toward technologies that could be operational in the years to come. The Navy and DARPA managed this project, aptly named Submarine Payloads and Sensors, cooperatively.
Northrop Grumman, a member of Team 2020, one of the consortiums, which Lockheed Martin headed up, developed the FPM. General Dynamics Electric Boat, the United States’ premier submarine builder, which had built the Ohios, among others, and was involved in the development of the Virginia class attack submarine at the time, was also part of Team 2020.
The FPM was effectively an insert that would slot into a large diameter ballistic missile tube on a submarine, but could be adapted to hold multiple payloads, including numerous unmanned aircraft, that the crew could then launch independently. General Dynamics Electric Boat described it as a “plug and fight” system.
Northrop Grumman designed the first iteration, which had 10 14-inch tubes and a pair of larger 20-inch ones, specifically around the dimensions of the Ohio’s missile tubes. The second FPM prototype, which Georgia carried during Silent Hammer, had only three tubes of an unknown diameter. Each one of those could accommodate a payload inside a SACS, another Northrop Grumman development.
“The FPM and SACS comprise an encapsulation system that facilitates the launch of non-marinized payloads and weapons from a submarine,” according to the article on Silent Hammer from the Winter 2005 issue of Undersea Warfare. “This allows the use of Navy air- or surface-launched payloads – plus those from other services – without the need to redesign them for launching in an undersea environment.”
SACS was “adaptable for long-term storage, variable release depths, launching under broaching or surface-loitering conditions, and the ability to encapsulate small or large payloads,” according that same article.
“In the case of the SUAV [submarine-launched unmanned air vehicle], SACS rises buoyantly to the surface, a sensor in the capsule detects broach, the SACS end-cap is blown away, and the SUAV booster ignites to clear the water and build vertical speed,” notes from a presentation that Steve Weinstein and William McGannon gave at the National Defense Industry Association’s (NDIA) 2002 Joint Undersea Warfare Technology Spring Conference explains. “At the proper moment, the SUAV wings are extended from alongside its long slender body to the horizontal position, the flight control software tilts the SUAV over to the horizontal flight position and once in stable flight, the SUAV turns and climbs to the pre-planned altitude to begin its mission.”
At the time, Weinstein and McGannon were employed with the Naval Sea Systems Command’s (NAVSEA) Submarine Sensor Systems division.
The other industry collective that had taken part in the Submarine Payloads and Sensors program, called Forward Payloads And Sensors for Submarines (Forward PASS), had developed a similar system, known as the Broaching Universal Buoyant Launcher (BUBL), that worked in much the same manner. However, BUBL’s design was meant to work with a variety of existing launcher options on submarines, including torpedo tubes and countermeasures launchers, or even be carried externally. Of course, the external carriage option could have created performance problems or increased the sub’s acoustic signature, making it more vulnerable.
Raytheon was the team leader for Forward PASS, which also included Boeing and Pennsylvania State’s Applied Research Laboratory, among others. General Dynamics Electric Boat was part of both teams in order to provide its extensive knowledge base to help with submarine development and integration questions. There is no mention of Georgia employing BUBL during Silent Hammer.
Submarine-launched drones
While we don’t know what drones Georgia was supposed to have been simulating the launch of from the FPM specifically, Northrop Grumman had also already developed at least one submarine-launched drone known as Sea Ferret in the 1990s. This was an evolution of Ferret, which the company had originally developed for the U.S. Army.
The Sundstrand TJ50 turbojet-powered Ferrets and Sea Ferrets are what we would call loitering munitions today. The approximately 145-pound drones carried both electro-optical sensor packages and 20-pound warheads and could fly out to a maximum range of around 370 nautical miles and a top speed of 300 knots and still be able to orbit around a target area for around two hours.
In December 1996, the USS Asheville, another Los Angeles class attack submarine, simulated launching the Sea Ferret during a technology demonstration. A Cessna 206 light aircraft carried one of the drones under its wing to then simulate the unmanned aircraft in flight. Northrop Grumman had intended the final system, which the Navy did not ultimately adopt, to be torpedo tube-launched using a modified canister for a UGM-84 submarine-launched Harpoon anti-ship cruise missile.
Still, the 1996 test “successfully simulated organic and inorganic UAV operations & SOF support,” according to Weinstein and McGannon 2002 NDIA presentation. It is certainly possible that Northrop Grumman could have developed a follow-on of some sort to Sea Ferret at the time of Silent Hammer.
We also know that the Navy had been holding workshops and other defense industry engagement events to gauge options for submarine-launched unmanned aircraft starting in 2000, around the same time as the Submarine Payloads and Sensors initiative. A slide from a General Dynamics Electric Boat briefing at the 2006 NDIA Systems Engineer Conference, which also touches on the Flexible Payload Module (FPM) development, shows concept art for at least five different potential submarine-launched drone designs.
By 2002, a team that included General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, AeroVironment, and Kollmorgen, had also demonstrated a modified Universal Modular Mast that could shoot small unmanned aircraft into the sky from periscope depth. An artist’s conception of the system shows a drone design virtually identical to the Blackwing, which AeroVironment officially began developing four years later for the Navy as a submarine-launched system.
In his guidance for 2005, then Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Vern Clark had also called for a follow-on Silent Hammer II exercise that “should employ aerial sensors (UAVs) in addition to ground sensors and exercise full range connectivity links.” It’s not clear if Clark had wanted to demonstrate a true submarine-launched drone capability or if that exercise ever ultimately occurred.
Lockheed Martin’s mysterious Cormorant
Of all the submarine-launched unmanned aircraft in development around the time of Silent Hammer, by far, the most interesting was Lockheed Martin’s shadowy Cormorant, a product of the company’s Skunk Works advanced design division. DARPA managed this program, also known as the Multi-Purpose Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (MPUAV), which sought to develop a relatively large, stealthy, jet-powered drone that a submarine could both launch and recover.
Patent documents show that Cormorant was in development at least as early as 2004. A subsequent official Lockheed Martin video presentation on the Cormorant makes clear that, while DAPRA was officially in charge of the project, it was informed, at least in part, by Navy requirements relating to the Ohio SSGNs.
“The Navy came to us for our concepts for a wide range of unmanned aircraft that could operate from aircraft carriers or surface ships or even submarines,” Bob Ruszkowski, then-Lockheed Martin’s MPUAV Team Project Manager and Technical Lead, said in the video. “This idea was unique in that it was the first time someone had thought about the idea of launching and recovering the vehicle while the submarine was still submerged.”
The Cormorant, in concept, would be launched from a modified missile tube on an Ohio class SSGN at a depth of up to 150 feet and then float the surface “like a cork,” according to Ruszkowski. Rocket boosters would then propel the four-ton, titanium-skinned craft into the air, a traditional turbofan jet engine would take over. During launch, as well as recovery, the intakes and exhausts for the engine would be sealed off from the water.
“The aircraft uses its stealth and mission planning to penetrate hostile airspace,” Ruszkowski continued. “Once it’s in there, it can do a variety of missions, that could be collecting intelligence and reconnaissance on weapons of mass destruction sites, it could be supporting special operations forces. But whatever it’s doing, it’s using its stealth and its mission planning to avoid detection.”
One patent that Lockheed Martin filed in 2004 regarding Cormorant included artwork depicting the drone releasing weapons, suggesting that Lockheed Martin, DARPA, and the Navy may have been considering a strike role from the drone, as well. A Lockheed Martin briefing from 2005 describes the unmanned aircraft as being capable of carrying a 1,000-pound payload in a modular bay, which could include sensors, communications relay systems, and even supplies that it could drop to personnel at a designated drop zone.
After completing its mission, it would return to a rendezvous point and deploy a parachute, landing safely in the water. The submarine would then send out its own tethered remotely operated vehicle to attach a cable to the drone and reel it back in.
It’s unclear how far the program progressed, but we do know that Lockheed Martin conducted a number of disclosed tests, including releasing a test article from a simulated launch tube underwater, dropping that test article into the water, and evaluating the recovery concept that Ruszkowski had described in the video.
Theoretically, Cormorant could have worked using a launcher mounted on a surface ship, as well. The 2004 patent shows an artist’s conception of a surface ship releasing a Cormorant off the side.
Publicly, DARPA canceled development of Cormorant, ostensibly due to budget cuts, in 2008. It’s not clear whether development of the system continued on afterward, possibly in the classified realm, under a different program. Discussions about the unmanned aircraft, or its underlying concepts, virtually evaporated, even from Skunk Works, which had been promoting the project heavily up until then.
In 2009, Lockheed Martin didfile another patent relating to an unmanned aircraft that could be launched and recovered in the water. This application described a system that used an electric ducted fan both for self-propelled operation in the water, as well as in the air. The concept art curious shows an aircraft shaped like an early Cold War Soviet MiG-15, which was reportedly because Lockheed Martin had utilized a modified radio-controlled model of one of these aircraft to test the electric fan propulsion system.
The Ohio class SSGNs enter service
For as open as the Navy was in the early 2000s about the book it was writing on how to employ the Ohio SSGNs, and what capabilities they might have as a result of their refits and in the future, since they actually entered service toward the end of that decade there has been relatively little information about how they have been putting that doctrine into action. Ohio was the first to rejoin the fleet, with General Dynamics Electric Boat delivering the converted submarine on Dec. 17, 2005. A ceremony to mark its return to service occurred nearly two months later.
Florida and Michigan followed on Apr. 8 and Nov. 22, 2006, respectively. For unclear reasons, Michigan did not have her official return to service ceremony until June 2007. Georgia was the last to arrive on Dec. 18, 2007.
The bulk of the official news reporting about these four boats has been primarily concerned with deployments, returns to home port, port visits, and general announcements about their participation in exercises. “The missions that we do are very exciting and challenging,” U.S. Navy Captain Murray Gero, then the commanding officer of the Ohio’s Blue crew, said in one typical pre-deployment story in 2009.
“We typically go to sea with over 100 tomahawk missiles, and that basically replaces a tomahawk missile inventory of three surface warships,” he continued, focusing on the time-sensitive strike mission. “This increases the flexibility of the surface fleet, because we basically allow them to reassign those three ships as soon as we get into our operating theater.”
The Captain did add that the boat was capable of other missions, including intelligence gathering and special operations support, and that “they are very complex, and they involve very close coordination with several outside agencies, including SEALS.” He didn’t offer any more specific details, though.
Conventional deterrence and actual combat
We do know that the boats have flexed their strike muscles both for deterrent purposes and during actual operations. In 2010, Florida, Michigan, and Ohio nearly simultaneously made port visits at Diego Garcia in the India Ocean, in Busan in South Korea, and in Subic Bay in the Philippines, respectively, in what some observers took to be a show of force aimed at China.
“This demonstrated that these platforms offer signaling capabilities that other conventional missile systems lack,” Forrest E. Morgan, a political scientist at the RAND Corporation think tank wrote about these events in a study in 2013. “Yet, one might doubt whether U.S. leaders would even allow SSGNs to surface while on patrol in an engagement zone during a crisis when doing so might put them at risk of attack.”
In 2011, Florida also notably took part in the open stages of Operation Odyssey Dawn, the NATO-led intervention into Libya that led to the ouster and death of long-time leader Muammar Gaddafi. The submarine fired 93 Tomahawks over the course of the operation, 90 of which hit their targets.
“By virtue of their concealment and endurance, the SSGN platform forces our adversaries to consider that they could be operating almost anywhere at any time,” then-Vice Admiral John Richardson, Commander of Naval Submarine Forces at the time, said upon Florida’s return to its homeport at Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay in Georgia on Apr. 29, 2011. “The sensor suite on the boat allows the captain to gather information and intelligence in situ, passing that back to the commander and responding on the spot. When you combine all that with the tremendous combat capability the boat brings – land attack missiles, special forces, torpedoes – that’s a lot of bets the enemy has to cover down on.”
Richardson subsequently became Director of Naval Nuclear Propulsion and then Chief of Naval Operations, the service’s top uniformed officer. He retired in August 2019.
In 2017, Michigan had appeared again in Busan at a time of heightened tensions with North Korea, which was also seen as a signal to the regime in Pyongyang. U.S. President Trump had also revealed and highlighted the submarine’s presence in the region as a counter to North Korean aggression in a telephone conversion with his counterpart in the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, which subsequently leaked out into the press. Michigan did go on to conduct exercises with the Nimitz class aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson and her associated Carrier Strike Group, which had also deployed the region.
Earlier in November 2019, ABC News‘ “Nightline” aired a segment in which David Muir got to spend a day aboard Florida, which is presently operating in the Mediterranean Sea on what was described as a “classified mission.” Muirs interviews with U.S. Navy Rear Admiral William Houston and Captain Seth Burton offered some additional insights into the SSGN operations. Houston is presently tripled-hatted as Director of Plans and Operations for U.S. Naval Forces Europe/U.S. Sixth Fleet, the Deputy Commander of Sixth Fleet, and the Commander of Submarine Group Eight. Burton is the current commander of the Florida.
“We’ve put this submarine right in this area of the eastern portion of the Mediterranean to counterbalance the Russian buildup in Syria,” Houston told Muir. “We’re watching them [the Russians] very very closely. There’s really not a day where we’re not watching them, every single day.”
“If you just look at the region and you’ve got ISIS in Northern Africa, you’ve got what’s going on on the Turkey Syria border right now, the fact that you’re here in the Mediterranean, does that give you a set of silent eyes for the U.S.?” Muir asked Burton. “Absolutely. It gives them eyes where no one knows that they’re being looked at,” he replied.
#USNavy silent service in action! Rare look at the Ohio-class fleet guided-missile submarine #USSFlorida operating in @USNavyEurope AOR. Florida, is capable of conducting clandestine strike operations, carrier and expeditionary strike group operations, and more. #NavyLethalitypic.twitter.com/uiRgUpQSsw
We also know that the Ohio SSGNs regularly conduct intelligence gathering missions during their patrols and work together with SEAL teams and other special operations forces on a routine basis around the world. As Captain Murray Gero noted back in 2009, these boats offer their crews unique experiences and they are among the hottest boats to get on in the fleet.
New capabilities?
If operational information about the Ohio class SSGNs is limited, then details about upgrades and new technologies for these boats have been even scarcer. This stands in stark contrast to how open the Navy had been about the capabilities of these converted submarines early on and how willing it had been to discuss what it might have in store for them in the future, including the drones and UUVs, both of which have seen quantum leaps in the expansion of their capabilities over the last decade and a half.
We do know that by the late 2000s, the Navy was integrating a signals intelligence collection system, called Radiant Gemstone, onto at least some Los Angeles class attack submarines, which you can read about more in this past War Zone piece. This came along with the necessary data links and software backend, known as Radiant Mercury, to rapidly exchange that information with the National Security Agency.
“The RADMERC [Radiant Mercury] program facilitates sharing of critical information across security domains and among allied, coalition and inter-agency partners,” an official list of the Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command’s (SPAWAR) programs as of 2017 explained. “The Radiant Mercury product provides cross-domain information sharing capabilities from Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) to General Service (GENSER) and GENSER to Unclassified.”
This sounds very much like an evolution of the data sharing systems and concepts of operation that Georgia pioneered during Silent Hammer. It also seems like an ideal addition to the SSGNs that would align well with their known intelligence gathering and fusion capabilities, if they didn’t have it already, and may well be an extension of developments that first appeared on the converted Ohios.
The Universal Launch and Recovery Module
We also know that the Flexible Payload Module (FPM) evolved, at least in part, into the Universal Launch and Recovery Module (ULRM), also known as the Universal Launch and Retrieval Module. General Dynamics Electric Boat has described this system as primarily being intended to launch and recover various types of UUVs, including Seahorse, Seaglider, and the Bluefin 21.
The Bluefin 21 became well known world-wide after taking part in the search for the remains of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in 2014. The U.S. Navy subsequently adopted a derivative of this UUV, the Knifefish, primarily for mine hunting missions.
The modified Trident missile tubes would be able to accommodate racks that could launch and recover a number of these relatively small UUVs at once. General Dynamics Electric Boat envisioned the possibility of an SSGN deploying entire swarms of networked underwater drones to conduct persistent surveillance missions across a broad area as one possible application. There were also plans to eventually integrate larger underwater drones into the system.
General Dynamics Electric Boat did not specifically say that this system could launch unmanned aircraft from submarines, but it is possible that it could have been adapted to deploy encapsulated drones. The same system might similarly be able to deploy other payloads, as well, such as mines or decoy balloons.
As it was working on the ULRM, the company also said that it was developing an improved storage module that would be more readily transportable and installable. This, in principle, would have allowed more tailored special operations force packages to rapidly deploy to a forward port to rendezvous with one of the submarines for a specific mission.
There was also talk about another module that could contain additional masts with sensors or potentially for deploying additional payloads, such as drones. The modular nature of these systems combined with the large number of missile tubes on the SSGNs offered the potential to readily mix and match capabilities that would be best suited to the boat’s operational needs.
In 2013, the Navy said that it would test a prototype ULRM onboard one of the Ohio class SSGNs the following year. The goal at that time was to have examples available for actual operational use by 2019, but it’s unclear if this has occurred or not.
Upward Falling Payloads And Hydra
In 2013, DARPA itself initiated a new program to explore the possibility of launch small unmanned aircraft from capsules that could lie on the seabed, dormant and potentially unknown to potential opponents, for years at a time. A submarine could potentially deploy them covertly, as well, a mission that seems well suited to the SSGN concept of operation.
Known as Upward Falling Payloads (UFP), this project envisioned a system that American forces could activate remotely, or that might be triggered automatically in some fashion, and then release its payload. “Such a system of pre-positioned, deep-sea nodes could enable a full range of maritime mission sets that are more cost-effective than existing manned or long-range unmanned naval assets,” DARPA’s archived page for the project explains. UFP is also reminiscent of the Broaching Universal Buoyant Launcher (BUBL) system from a decade earlier, but it’s not clear if there is any actual direct relationship between the two projects.
At the same time, DARPA was working on this seabed payload launcher concept, it was also exploring a modular, standardized payload module that could work with submarines, as well as aircraft and surface ships, called Hydra. This could deploy either unmanned aircraft or UUVs and sounds similar in some respects to the Stealthy Affordable Capsule System (SACS). Again, it is unclear if there was any direct relationship between these two efforts.
Both UFP and Hydra appear to have come to an end sometime between 2016 and 2017. As with Cormorant, it’s not immediately clear if these continued on in some other form, including in the classified realm.
In 2013, the Navy itself had successfully demonstrated the ability to launch an encapsulated unmanned aircraft via a submarine’s torpedo tube. The Los Angeles class USS Providence (SSN-719) deployed the Naval Research Laboratory’s eXperimental Fuel Cell Unmanned Aerial System, or XFC UAS, using a launch system known as Sea Robin, which used a modified Tomahawk missile launch canister. That same year, the service said it was also actively testing AeroVironment’s Blackwing using the standard three-inch countermeasures launchers on its submarines.
More capable than we know
All told, it seems very possible, if not probable, that the capabilities of the Ohio class SSGNs have significantly expanded since Silent Hammer in 2004, even if the specifics are limited. Even without new systems, such as the Universal Launch and Recovery Module, the Ohio SSGNs have already been using their modified Trident launch tubes to deploy unmanned systems and for other novel purposes, including just acting as valuable storage space within the confines of the submarines.
The intelligence collection and fusion systems that Georgia had in 2004, even before its full conversion into the SSGN configuration, were state-of-the-art. More than a decade of improvements in basic computing technology and processing power, as well as new developments in data links and communications systems, including new ways for submarines to transmit and receive information, can only have drastically expanded those already impressive capabilities.
UUV and drone technology has also come a long way, both in general and within the Navy specifically. The service, by itself, has made significant progress in submarine-launched drones, drone swarm technology, and autonomous capabilities that apply to unmanned platforms in the air, at sea, and underneath the waves. Just this year, the Navy hired Boeing to build a new fleet of large displacement UUVs as part of a program called Orca, which you can read about in more detail in this past War Zone piece. All of this aligns well with the SSGN’s capabilities, and the Navy’s long-standing plans to expand them, as we understand it.
The Navy has also been quietly working on a new and revolutionary electronic warfare architecture, known as the Netted Emulation of Multi-Element Signature against Integrated Sensors, or NEMESIS, since at least 2013. The service has described this effort, which you can read about in-depth in this past War Zone feature, as involving swarms of unmanned platforms, various systems on ships and submarines, countermeasures and electronic warfare suites, and more that could combine to project signatures mimicking large groups of aircraft, surface ships, and subs.
The Ohio SSGNs present an ideal platform for deploying elements of and supporting this cutting-edge and critical initiative. Most notably, they could launch swarms of small electronic-warfare payload-carrying drones deep in enemy territory that can project false fleets and aerial armadas on enemy sensors and act as decoys during a time of war or probe and gather intelligence on enemy air defense networks during a time of peace. Launching radar-reflector carrying balloons, a 60-year-old proven tactic, could also be part of this capability. In fact, we know of no better platform to carry out such a task.
The Ohio SSGNs could also see the integration of new conventional weapons to support their time-sensitive strike mission, and otherwise expand their offensive capabilities, in the future, as well. The Navy is already working on a number of new and upgraded missiles that could have submarine-launched applications, such as the multi-purpose SM-6 Block IB, a highly classified supersonic anti-ship missile known as Sea Dragon, and the future Next Generation Strike Weapon. The Navy has also already test-fired prototype submarine-launched hypersonic boost-glide vehicles from Ohio class submarines under the Conventional Prompt Strike program, though it’s unclear if it may choose to deploy those only on those submarines configured as SSBNs.
Smaller weapons could dramatically increase the boats’ already impressive magazine depth. The extra capacity could give the submarines more diversity in their arsenals, allowing them to engage broader target sets, as well. European missile consortium MBDA’s SPEAR 3 mini-cruise missile and its SPEAR-EW variant, which carries an electronic warfare payload instead of a warhead, are good examples of the kind of miniaturized missiles that could be extremely valuable additions to the Ohio SSGNs.
The Navy has also been putting these converted Ohios through major refits, which serve as an opportunity to integrate even more new capabilities. Georgia left the dry dock at Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay in March 2019 and Ohiofinished her stint at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard & Intermediate Maintenance Facility in Washington State in August. Michigan is set to return to the fleet in 2020. It is not clear when Florida, which is presently deployed in the Mediterranean, will go through the process. These overhauled SSGNs likely represent a whole new level of capability derived from lessons learned over the last decade and a half of operations.
Successors to the Ohio SSGNs
Unfortunately, the Ohios SSGNs won’t be able to serve forever, they are already the oldest Ohio class submarines in existence, and the Navy is already exploring concepts for what comes next. The experience with these four boats has directly informed the development of the Virginia Payload Module (VPM) for the future Block V Virginia class attack submarines.
The VPM has four large multi-purpose tubes that can accept various modules just like the modified Trident missile tubes on the Ohio SSGNs, including the same seven-round Tomahawk launchers. The designs of the existing Block III and future Block IV Virginia class boats also already feature two similarly-sized Virginia Payload Tubes (VPT) in the bow of the submarine.
As such, the VPTs already bring some of the multi-mission capability found on the SSGNs to the Block III Virginias and this will only be more pronounced on the Block IV boats. The Navy has already set aside at least four Block II and III Virginia class submarines for special operations support missions, with two more available as alternates, if required.
These six Virginias – USS Hawaii, USS Mississppi, USS New Hampshire, USS New Mexico, USS North Carolina, and USS North Dakota – can also carry the same types of Dry Deck Shelters (DDS) as the Ohio SSGNs. All of these submarines actually share a common pool of DDSs that Navy personnel can install on any of the boats, as necessary.
The Navy’s present plan is to fully replace the Ohio SSGNs with Block IV Virginias by 2026, though, especially given the recent refits, its possible that the former boats could end up remaining in service longer. It’s not clear whether older Virginias would continue to serve int he special operations support role, as well.
Beyond that, the Navy is already exploring options for what it presently refers to as Large Payload Submarines, which will be a future class of multi-purpose, multi-mission boats derived from the Columbia class SSBN design that will be capable of, as the name implies, deploying a wide variety of large payloads. This could include both UUVs and submarine-launched drones. The submarines could also have the ability to deploy networked swarms of these unmanned platforms above or below the waves.
At present, the Navy plans to buy a minimum of five Large Payload Submarines, but it’s not clear when they might actually enter service. The current schedule would be to buy one every three years starting in 2036, after the initial Columbia class production run, totaling 12 boats, ends.
However, there are already concerns about how expensive and complex the Columbias are, each of which will cost more than $7 billion, and whether General Dynamics Electric Boat and Newport News Shipbuilding will be able to keep to the schedule. This, in turn, could push plans for the Large Payload Submarines further into the future. You can read more about all this in-depth in this past War Zone story.
More than 15 years after Georgia wrote the first few chapters in the book on Ohio class SSGN concepts of operations, the U.S. Navy’s four SSGNs remain some of the most unique and capable platforms within the Pentagon’s portfolio, and that is just based on what we know about their abilities. By every indication, these submarines have and continue to serve as testbeds for even more impressive developments that still have yet to become public.
Just think, if the ability to launch various drones, both air and sea types, and especially higher-end ones like the Skunk Works’ Cormorant, was very much in development on multiple fronts 15 years ago, just imagine what is deployed today or on the drawing board. If an SSGN can carry up to 154 Tomahawk missiles, how many small weaponized drones can it carry and how could an enemy ever defend against such an overwhelming onslaught crossing their shores? It is this type of imagination and the room to realize such dreams that have made these submarines so valuable and, for lack of a better term, revolutionary.
It’s safe to say that the Navy’s SSGNs are a case of “more than meets the eye,” as they are much more than the stealthy Tomahawk slingers and SEAL delivery platforms that the public perceives them to be. While their arsenal of cruise missiles and frogmen is certainly formidable, their ability to adapt, spy on the enemy, control the battle from under the waves, and above all else, accommodate new ideas, makes them uniquely ferocious to any enemy nation they may be sitting off of at any given moment.
Conclusion
What an article! Ok. Please keep in mind that the best made weapons and technology is meaningless when the environment that you expect to use it in has altered and changed. Which is China. They DO NOT PLAY.
You might amass all your forces on a plain. Everyone wearing the best and strongest armor. Your men might have the best training and the horse might be the most loyal and robust in the world. But that means nothing when a wall of water comes crashing down and wipes out your forces.
China is a nation that is not only four to five time larger in population, but it is merit driven. And not just merit in the ability to dispute diversity issues, or numbers on a tabulated spreadsheet, but real hard and fast (hard scrabble) abilities.
They are formidable, and especially now that China and Russia and Iran are all linked together militarily as one. The USA had best stop playing with the boyhood toys and grow up. It’s a new game, and a new way of doing things. The best thing that the USA can do is “get with the program” and adapt, or die though extinction.
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
One of the things that I truly appreciate is how we all somehow come up with solutions to problems. Some of those solutions are truly amazing and noteworthy. As (for example) what Eddie Van Halen did to his guitar when he couldn’t afford a wah-wah petal. And as a tinkerer, and inventor, I just cannot help but be attracted to DIY articles and stories of making… stuff and things.
Here’s an interesting article about narco-submarines. These are miniature submarines that are used to transport contraband (illegal to own objects) to a hungry clientele behind the United States grand wall of isolation. We read about these vehicles and objects from time to time, but this is the first article that I have come across that had some real depth to it.
The following article is titled “Ghost Gliders: Spanish Narco-Submarines” written by H I Sutton, on Mon, 08/31/2020 – 7:38pm. It came from the Small Wars Journal. All credit to the author. Please note that it was reproduced pretty much intact with only minor editing to fit this venue.
Ghost Gliders: Spanish Narco-Submarines
By H I Sutton
We tend to think of (so-called) narco-submarines as a Latin American phenomenon.
Properly speaking they are LPVs (Low Profile Vessels); alternatively SPSS (Self-Propelled Semi-Submersible—I do not use this term).
Locally in Latin America they are known as ‘narcosubmarinos’ or ‘semisumergibles.’ Now we have another Spanish name to add to the list, ‘planeadora fantasma,’ meaning ‘Ghost Glider.’
This is because narco-submarines are not confined to the Americas. Similar methods being used elsewhere, most noticeably in Spain.
The most widely reported Spanish narco-submarine (and I use this colloquial term unapologetically), was found on 24 November 2019 on the Galician coast. The 72 feet long craft was large and carried over 3 tons of narcotics, but it was otherwise like the ones found in the Pacific or Caribbean.
In contrast, the one found in the same area on 13 August 2006 was completely unique. And the same can be said of the latest ‘Ghost Glider,’ found on 27 August 2020. The basic difference is that the November 2019 boat was built in Latin America while the other two were built in Spain.
Different ideas, conditions and modus operandi have led to different approaches in design.
Ghost Glider designs.
Three ‘Types’ of Spanish Narco-Submaries: ‘Vigo’ FSV, ‘Transatlantic’ and LPV, ‘Ghost Glider’ LPV/GFV. Source: H I Sutton, 2020.
2006 Vigo Narco-submarine
An elaborate artisan submarine was found abandoned off Spain’s Galician coast near Vigo on 13 August 2006…
2006 Vigo Narco-submarine
This is about the time that narco-submarines, as we would recognize them today, were beginning to be interdicted in Latin America.
It was a FSV (fully submersible vessel), 36ft (11 meters) long and 6.5ft (2 meters) across. And unlike LPVs, was able to fully submerge, down to a depth of about 10ft (3 meters).
Underwater it was powered by batteries driving two electric motors.
And it had over 1,000 gallons of fuel for surface running. It was estimated to be capable to carrying about 1 ton of cargo. Other aspects were also relatively advanced, including a folding snorkel mast and radar antenna.
Despite its sophistication there is no suggestion that this tiny craft was suitable for transatlantic voyages. More likely it was intended to rendezvous with another ship offshore, pick up the drugs and transport them back to the Spanish shore.
2019 Narco-Submarine
A regular LPV of the style we see in Latin America.
There is compelling evidence that this was designed by the same master boat builder who is responsible for several others. Design details, such as a small splitter plate ahead of the cockpit windows and the V-shaped hull, create a ‘designer’s fingerprint’. This allows us to tie together multiple incidents.
2019 Narco-Submarine
The first LPV from this designer was interdicted by the Colombian Navy on 3 January 2019. Since then at least four more have been found, the most recent being found in its jungle boat yard on 6 August 2020. This last one was unusually large, being about 100 feet (30 meters) long. In fact all of the LPVs attributed to this unknown master boat builder stand out against their peers.
But we should not make too much of the particular designer. If the 2019 narco-submarine could cross the Atlantic, virtually any large LPV could. In overall terms it was not remarkable. This should be more alarming to Law Enforcement than if it was in some way special.
Current thinking, based on publicly available information, is that it was built in the Colombian jungle near the inland border with Brazil. It then sailed all the way down the Amazon to the coast before setting off across the Atlantic. It went via the Azores before heading towards Galicia.
planeadora fantasma
This latest craft sits between the go-fast vessel (GFV) category and LPVs.
Again, it is a unique design unlike those seen in Latin America. It takes a power boat hull, adds a hard RIB collar and then a built-up covered superstructure. It is not currently—based on public sources—possible to say how low it sat in the water. Possibly the collar was part of a ballast system. However we can say that it was intended to avoid detection, hence ‘ghost glider’. It was painted in a way that appears intended to deceive any observers.
Ghost Glider; planeadora fantasma.
The term ‘planeadora’ refers to a speed boat, and ‘planeadora fantasma’ has previously been used to describe the custom go-fast vessels also used off Spain. These craft are often RIBs and several have been specially modified for the task. Most famously the massive 59ft (18 m) seven engine ‘Monstruo’ stopped in 2009.
This latest vessel is about 39 ft (12 meters) long and could possibly carry a few tons of cocaine. The extensive grab rails and aft-sloping cargo hatch suggest that it is designed to be loaded at sea, which makes sense. So like the 2006 Vigo submarine, it is likely intended to meet other ships offshore and then bring the drugs ashore.
It could easy be put into the GFV category instead. But its elaborate construction and emphasis on deception (as opposed to raw speed) makes a strong case for it being a narco-submarine. It is certainly not just a typical GFV.
Going Transatlantic
The Spanish narco-submarine traffic appears to be centered, on Galician drug gangs. This may be skewed by reported incidents, but all three have been discovered in Galicia in the North of Spain. Portugal, Ireland, France and the United Kingdom also appear to be logical landing points.
Narco Sub.
My suggestion is that the Cape Verde Islands and Azores are stopping off points for transatlantic narco-submarines. They likely meet supply vessels in the area.
ACK 3, a Spanish company specializing in defense, intelligence and security consulting which advises European and Latin American military and law enforcement units suggests that language may be a factor. Brazilian crews can communicate with the local population on these islands using Portuguese.
Some of the transatlantic narco-subs may transship their cargo to other vessels along the way. Trawlers operating out of Spain seem the most obvious candidates. But I have not seen any information in the public domain to substantiate this theory. Another possibility is that the drugs are transferred to large cargo vessels heading to Northern Europe or even to North America.
These vessels may be coming from a low-risk port so not be tainted in the way that a cargo ship crossing from Latin America might be.
Interception of a smuggling vessel.
So we can speculate that a Latin American built LPV could set off from Brazil (or Venezuela, Suriname or Guyana) and rendezvouses with a cargo ship off Cape Verde or the Azores. The cargo would be transshipped and the cargo vessel (or fishing vessel) heads north towards Europe. Off the Portuguese or Spanish coast, while still out at sea, it is met by a ‘ghost glider’ like the one seized in August 2020. The transshipping can occur at night, and the drugs are landed in a remote beach in Galicia. Local drugs gangs may only be able to control access to the landing point for a few hours. So some of the drugs may be dropped in pre-determined lurks awaiting retrieval by scuba divers at a later time.
Outlook
It seems that it is now a case of when, rather than if, another transatlantic narco- submarine appears. And even if none are interdicted, it seems a sure bet that they are out there. And together with ‘ghost gliders’ and less exotic means, drugs trafficking organizations are still able to land their products on European shores.
The narco-submarine model for cocaine trafficking presents European law enforcement with a number of challenges. Detection, tracking and interdiction may all be different compared to the Pacific and Caribbean. And the vast expanse of ocean, often in harsh weather, may stretch existing patrol forces; however, SIGINT, UAVs and new satellite technology such as the Hawkeye 360 constellation may prove powerful tools.
Conclusion
Nations and governments use “vices” to control the population. When they ban or tax, or regulate things, people find ways to engage in their vices without government interference. While dug abuse is a big problem in America, it’s not a problem in areas that don’t ban the drugs.
Mexico doesn’t have half the drug problem that America has, but it doesn’t have the same laws either. The same is true for China. Yes, smoking marijuana is seriously against the law, but that is pretty much the only thing that is. You can get just about any medication over the counter without a doctor’s prescription and there just isn’t a serious drug abuse problem there.
Anyways…
I am not advocating the use of drugs.
What I am saying is that governments use up a ton load of money, personnel and resources trying to ban things. While, instead they should be dealing with those individuals who have a physiological problem with drugs. You go after the problem. Not the symptoms.
The world needs to start looking at things in new ways with new “eyes”.
The old ways are failing left and right. The solution to the problems that ails the world isn’t more bans, regulations and restrictions, but rather a complete loss of control by the few at the PTB level.
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
There are many proposals to explore Titan. Some of the most original ideas includes a spaceship that uses the atmosphere itself as fuel to fly about the planet. Others includes balloons and rovers, and other cool ideas. This idea is really noteworthy. It involves the use of a submarine to explore the seas of Titan.
But first…
What is Titan?
Titan is a moon of the outer gas giant Saturn. People know Saturn as the “planet with the rings”. It’s a pretty big moon. And it has an atmosphere, with continents and oceans.
Saturn’s largest moon Titan is an extraordinary and exceptional world. Among our solar system’s more than 150 known moons, Titan is the only one with a substantial atmosphere. And of all the places in the solar system, Titan is the only place besides Earth known to have liquids in the form of rivers, lakes and seas on its surface.
Titan is larger than the planet Mercury and is the second largest moon in our solar system. It is larger than our moon around the earth.
Jupiter’s moon Ganymede is just a little bit larger (by about 2 percent).
Titan’s atmosphere is made mostly of nitrogen, like Earth’s, but with a surface pressure 50 percent higher than Earth’s. Titan is the only moon in the solar system known to have a substantial atmosphere, which is mostly nitrogen like Earth’s.
Titan has clouds, rain, rivers, lakes and seas of liquid hydrocarbons like methane and ethane. The largest seas are hundreds of feet deep and hundreds of miles wide. Beneath Titan’s thick crust of water ice is more liquid—an ocean primarily of water rather than methane.
Titan is a large moon that orbits the ringed planet Saturn.
Titan’s subsurface water could be a place to harbor life as we know it, while its surface lakes and seas of liquid hydrocarbons could conceivably harbor life that uses different chemistry than we’re used to—that is, life as we don’t yet know it. But then again, Titan could just as well be a lifeless world.
Titan’s air is dense enough that you could walk around without a spacesuit. But you’d need an oxygen mask and protection from the bitter cold.
Map
Titan has both continents, large land masses, oceans, and seas. While the atmosphere is different than that of the earth, and it is much colder, it is in many ways quite similar. It is an exciting place to visit and explore.
Here’s a map of one of the inland seas…
One of the seas of Titan that needs some exploring.
Indeed, there are so many interesting things in the topographical image above. You can see deep seas, rivers that feed into the seas, mountains, hills, and islands. It would be a great place to go to, and explore.
Maybe go to one of the isthmus’s and stand on the edge and look out and over the immense sea. It would be interesting. As Saturn is so close, the gravitational forces must be interesting and create some curious tidal movements. You would be able to watch them (with a time elapse camera) and it would be curious.
A nice isthmus to stand upon and watch the tidal movements.
A cool proposal to discover the undersea world of Titan by robotic submarine.
The following is a reprint of an article titled “Submarine could explore seas of huge Saturn moon Titan” written by Mike Wall on Space.com. Reprinted with minor changes, and edited to fit this venue. All credit to the author.
The sub could be ready to launch in the 2030s, researchers said.
A submarine could explore alien seas just a few decades from now.
Researchers have been crafting a concept mission that would send a submarine to Saturn’s huge moon Titan, which sports lakes and seas of liquid hydrocarbons on its frigid surface.
Such a mission, if approved and funded by NASA, could be ready to launch in the 2030s, potentially paving the way for even more ambitious submarine exploration down the road, the concept’s developers said.
“We feel that the Titan submarine is kind of a first step before you go do a Europa or Enceladus” sub mission, Steven Oleson, of NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Ohio, said last month during a presentation with the agency’s Future In-Space Operations working group.
Europa and Enceladus — moons of Jupiter and Saturn, respectively — both harbor huge oceans of liquid water. But these two water bodies are buried under ice shells and would therefore be tougher to drop a sub into than Titan’s surface seas.
A weird and potentially habitable world
At 3,200 miles (5,150 kilometers) wide, Titan is the second-largest moon in the solar system. The only one bigger is Jupiter’s Ganymede, which has Titan beat by just 75 miles (120 km).
But size isn’t all that makes Titan special. For example, the giant moon is the only world beyond Earth known to host stable bodies of liquid on its surface — those seas and lakes of liquid methane and ethane, some of which are bigger than North America’s Great Lakes.
This annotated view of Titan as seen from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft shows the largest hydrocarbon lakes on the Saturn moon, including the largest sea Kraken Mare. Titan’s lakes are named for mythological creatures. The images for this view, released on Dec. 23, 2013, were taken on Oct. 7.
In addition, Titan’s thick atmosphere likely hosts complex chemistry involving organic molecules, the carbon-containing building blocks of life as we know it. As a result, many astrobiologists view Titan as a promising potential abode for life, suggesting that native organisms could be swirling in the moon’s air or swimming in its lakes and seas.
Those swimmers would be very different from anything that exists here on Earth, given that they’d be making a living in liquid methane or ethane rather than water. Titan’s surface is far too cold for water to remain liquid, but scientists think the moon hosts a salty sea of the stuff deep underground, like Enceladus, Europa and a number of other solar system bodies.
It’s therefore possible that Titan hosts two completely different and separate ecosystems — a surface world of “strange life” that overlies a realm of more familiar (to us, anyway) water-reliant organisms.
Exploring the hydrocarbon seas?
Most of what we know about Titan we’ve learned from the $3.2 billion Cassini-Huygens mission, which studied Saturn and its many moons up close from 2004 through 2017. The bulk of this work was done by NASA’s Cassini Saturn orbiter, but significant contributions also came from the Huygens lander, a European Space Agency-Italian Space Agency probe that touched down on Titan in January 2005.
This false-color mosaic, made from infrared data collected by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, reveals the differences in the composition of surface materials around hydrocarbon lakes at Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. Image released Oct. 23, 2013.
NASA is working on a Titan spacecraft of its own — an eight-rotor drone called Dragonfly, which is scheduled to launch in 2026. If all goes according to plan, Dragonfly will land on Titan in 2034, then study the moon’s complex chemistry and potential habitability at a number of different locations.
A submarine could be the next step in Titan exploration. The agency has not selected the Titan sub idea as an official mission, but Oleson and his team did get two rounds of funding from the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, which seeks to spur the development of potentially game-changing exploration ideas and technologies. Those two NIAC grants, worth $100,000 and $500,000, were awarded in 2014 and 2015, respectively.
The main goal of the NIAC work was to draw up a basic engineering blueprint of a potential Titan sub, Oleson said.
“Is it possible?” he said during the FISO presentation. “What kinds of technologies are needed? What’s unique about that environment?”
The uniqueness is multilayered. For instance, though Titan is huge for a moon, it’s much smaller than Earth, sporting just 14% of our planet’s gravitational pull. That means a Titan sub wouldn’t experience nearly as much pressure on its hull as a sub would at the same depth on Earth.
And the Titan sub would be cruising through a different medium than the ones here on Earth do. But that’s not necessarily a negative, either. A submarine could push through liquid hydrocarbons fairly easily, Oleson said, and the stuff is transparent to radio signals, enabling communication with the craft even while it’s submerged.
Those communications could reach the sub directly from Earth or be relayed via a Titan orbiter, depending on the mission architecture.
A standalone Titan submarine would need to be big — about 20 feet (6 meters) long, with a weight (on Earth) of 3,300 lbs. (1,500 kilograms) — to accommodate the requisite communications equipment, Oleson said. A sub with an orbiter companion, by contrast, could fit the same science instrumentation into a body just 6.5 feet (2 m) long, with a weight of about 1,100 lbs. (500 kg).
That science gear should include, at the bare minimum, a chemistry package that analyzes liquid samples, a surface imager, a depth sounder, a weather station and an instrument that measures the physical properties of the surrounding sea, Oleson and his team determined. Additional instruments could analyze seafloor samples and image the ocean bottom, among other tasks.
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft used a special spectral filter to peer through the hazy atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan and see its strange hydrocarbon lakes. The images for this view, released on Dec. 23, 2013, were taken on Oct. 7 and feature the leading face of Titan as seen in red, green and blue spectral filters combined to create a natural-color view.
The researchers also investigated the possibility of staying on the surface with a boat, which would probe the Titanic depths intermittently with small, instrument-laden devices called dropsondes. This would be a less risky option, but the reward would be lower as well, Oleson said.
“We’re losing out on science, just from the fact that we can’t submerge and do a lot of these tests,” he said of the boat idea.
A standalone submarine or a sub-orbiter duo would likely be flagship missions, Oleson said. Flagships are NASA’s most expensive and ambitious missions, with price tags generally in excess of $2 billion these days. Examples include Cassini-Huygens, the Mars rover Curiosity and the Mars 2020 rover Perseverance, which launched toward the Red Planet in late July.
NASA might be able to pull off a Titan boat mission via its New Frontiers program, Oleson said. New Frontiers missions, such as Dragonfly and the New Horizons Pluto probe, cost significantly less than flagships. Proposals for the latest round of New Frontiers funding, which resulted in Dragonfly’s June 2019 selection, had to abide by a cost cap of $850 million (not including launch or mission-operations costs).
All versions of a Titan sea explorer would be nuclear-powered, just like Cassini and Dragonfly. Saturn lies 10 times farther from the sun than Earth does, so sunlight is spread pretty thin on Titan. (And a solar-powered submarine would probably be a bad idea even here on Earth, given that such vehicles make a living plying dark depths.)
Launch in the 2030s?
Titan’s high northern latitudes host almost all of the moon’s lakes and seas, including the two most intriguing submarine-exploration targets, Kraken Mare and Ligeia Mare.
Kraken Mare
Both of these bodies are enormous. Kraken Mare covers about 154,000 square miles (400,000 square km) and is at least 115 feet (35 m) deep. Ligeia Mare has an area of 50,000 square miles (130,000 square km) and a maximum depth of 560 feet (170 m).
Like Saturn, Titan has seasons that last around seven Earth years apiece. It would be best to explore Kraken or Ligeia during Titan’s northern summer, when a spacecraft could image shorelines in visible light and communicate directly with mission controllers on Earth, Oleson said.
A 2045 arrival at Titan would therefore be a good choice, he said. If the mission included an orbiter for communications, arriving during the northern springtime, around 2040, is also an option, Oleson added.
You can enjoy a computerized “flyover” of the lake system HERE.
The journey to Saturn takes about seven years, so a Titan sub mission of any type would need to launch in the 2030s (unless we want to wait another three decades for the seasons to shift again).
That timeline “would be fine with us — to be able to get this ready in the next decade to push there,” Oleson said.
If you all are still around by 2045, you might be able to view the undersea world of Titan via electronic media. I’ll almost be in my 90’s by then. Hopefully still kicking, and hopefully not in an old-folks home.
Still, it’s an exciting concept. I’ve always enjoyed adventure and this is the best of what we can do now with what is publicly available to us now.
There’s a lot of interesting things about Titan. Many things that are worthy of discussion, but I really cannot get too deep into those subjects. My lips are sealed. But, no worries, you can well imagine standing on one of those large isthmus’s and look out and watch the slow sluggish movement of the nearly calm seas.
Wouldn’t it be grand?
Do you want more?
I have more posts in my extraterrestrial index here…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
This is an interesting interview with Andrei Martyanov. He is a Russian military expert who emigrated to the United States. In it he argues that the stranglehold of American propaganda by the mainstream media has created a dangerous situation – one in which the “fake news” is believed by the American leadership.
ANDREI MARTYANOVisanexpertonRussianmilitaryandnavalissues. HewasborninBaku, USSRin 1963. HegraduatedfromtheKirovNavalRedBannerAcademyandservedasanofficerontheshipsandstaffpositionofSovietCoastGuardthrough 1990. HetookpartintheeventsintheCaucasuswhichledtothecollapseoftheSovietUnion.
- Losing Military Supremacy: The Myopia of American Strategic Planning
He explains that the American leadership, knowing full well that the media is a propaganda tool, actually believes much of the propaganda that they create. This is true on all levels.
The American leadership actually believes this “news”. Not only the “fake news” from CNN, MSNBC an WaPo but also from the conservative and alternative “Right wing” media.
He argues that this is extraordinarily dangerous.
Andrei Martyanov.
This belief in American propaganda is dangerous because it creates a situation where foolish men in leadership positions can make some very serious mistakes.
The majority of travelers I have met see foreign lands entirely through the filter glasses of their home front. Their worldview is shaped by government schools, Hollywood actors, television programming, mainstream pressing, and the resulting illusion of “us being the good guys.” When they travel, they carry a lifetime supply of brainwash shampoo with them. A backpack full of sheep’s wool over their eyes. And a dumbed-down uniform of sweatshop t-shirts, shorts and sandals that sores the eye of the beholder.
-Doug Casey, International Man
Mistakes, Leadership mistakes, that could absolutely devastate the United States. The leadership of a healthy and functioning nation needs good and accurate intelligence. It cannot rely own it’s own propaganda to base decisions upon.
History is full of stories of the destruction of cities, nations and empires that fell due to the bad Intel, and decisions by the top leadership. Read about the destruction of Hungary by Genghis Khan, if you don't believe me.
Or, consider the Marketing strategy of Gillette with their "Men are inherently foul pigs" campaign (to sell razors).
Or, consider Hollywood and their bevy of all-female re-writes of famous movies. Movies that no one will watch. Like "Oceans 8".
Or, consider what happened to NFL football, when the team owners permitted the players to protest against America.
Now, consider what might happen to America if it believes the narrative that both Russia and China are backwards, third-world shit holes and are no match for the United States military...
Ah. Andrei . You do not need to believe him. You just need to consider that he has some good ideas and makes some valid points.
Now, I find that he has some good points, especially his appraisal on the ignorance of the Washington “insider” class. His ideas are able to explain much of the strange decision processes that originate out of Washington DC today.
Andrei wrote…
Time after time the American military has failed to match lofty declarations about its superiority, producing instead a mediocre record of military accomplishments.
Starting from the Korean War the United States hasn’t won a single war against a technologically inferior, but mentally tough enemy.
Vietnam
Syria
Lybia
Somalia
Yemen
Lebanon
Iraq
The technological dimension of American “strategy” has completely overshadowed any concern with the social, cultural, operational and even tactical requirements of military (and political) conflict.
With a new Cold War with Russia emerging, the United States enters a new period of geopolitical turbulence completely unprepared in any meaningful way—intellectually...
... economically,
... militarily...
...or culturally
... to face a reality which was hidden for the last 70+ years behind the curtain of never-ending Chalabi moments...
... and a strategic delusion concerning Russia, whose history the US viewed through a Solzhenitsified caricature kept alive by a powerful neocon lobby, which even today dominates US policy makers’ minds.
The book Losing Military Supremacy: The Myopia of American Strategic Planning explores the dramatic difference between the Russian and US approach to warfare, which manifests itself across the whole spectrum of activities from art and the economy, to the respective national cultures;
Losing Military Supremacy: The Myopia of American Strategic Planning illustrates the fact that Russian economic, military and cultural realities and power are no longer what American “elites” think they are by addressing Russia’s new and elevated capacities in the areas of traditional warfare as well as cyberwarfare and space;
Losing Military Supremacy: The Myopia of American Strategic Planning studies in depth several ways in which the US can simply stumble into conflict with Russia and what must be done to avoid it.
Martyanov’s former Soviet military background enables deep insight into the fundamental issues of warfare and military power as a function of national power—assessed correctly, not through the lens of Wall Street “economic” indices and a FIRE economy, but through the numbers of enclosed technological cycles and culture, much of which has been shaped in Russia by continental warfare and which is practically absent in the US.
-Amazon
Indeed, a point that I have “hammered” over and over again, is the idea that the most dangerous propaganda is the news reports that we WANT to believe.
Propaganda works best when we WANT to believe the lies told to us.
Such as 11 million Uighur Muslims are in reeducation concentration camps in Xinjiang China. That America must "do something" to free the poor Muslim innocents! All, yes ALL of conservative news is full of these stories and the figure of 11 million is bantered about without question.
Except...
No one can point out where these concentration camps are.
You cannot find them on Google Earth. And you should. After all, the population of New York City is 6 million people. So a concentration camp housing 11 million people would be over twice the size of New York city. It would be pretty fucking big. Bigger than the largest city in America, and then some.
You would be able to see it from the Moon.
If there were 11 concentration camps in Xinjiang, China, (each one million people in size) then you would be able to easily locate all eleven Atlanta, Georgia sized complexes on Google Earth. Where are all these concentration camps?
Simple math.
Simple thought process.
... Propaganda. Don't fall for it.
Anyways, he makes a great point.
Our American leadership has taken to actually believing what is being repeated day in and day out by the lying American mainstream press. And this is very dangerous.
Some minor Russian Naval ships.
You might not like his opinions, but please just view his point of view as something that you will not hear from the mainstream, or alt-conservative news. As such it is a valuable alternative view point.
One that should be taken seriously.
The interview.
Yvonne Lorenzo interviews Andrei Martyanov …
Yvonne Lorenzo: I’d like to discuss the central thesis of your first book, Losing Military Supremacy. Aside from a civil war in the late 1800s, the United States has never experienced the effects of a devastating war fought on its own soil by foreign nation and believes it is invulnerable and won’t be attacked. To the contrary, Russians to this day know the price of war. If you would be so kind to summarize, if possible, the key points you wished to make known about Russia.
"America believes that it is invulnerable and won’t ever be attacked."
The Severodvinsk, the first of Russia’s multirole Yasen K-560 submarines, by the pier of the Sevmash shipyard in Severodvinsk, Arkhangelsk Region.
The difference is that I get more in depth into the tactical, operational and technological issues—to a degree that is possible in what amounts to a geopolitical study—to demonstrate and drive my point home…
… that the current American political elites are utterly delusional on the nature of modern warfare…
Crew of the Alexander Nevsky nuclear submarine topside at a welcome ceremony for the Navy’s new Borei-class project 955 vessel at Kamchatka’s Vilyuchinsk base.
… especially in a peer-to-peer scenario of which the United States hasn’tfaced since WW II.
My point is very simple…
…the ignorance of the American ruling class of modern warfare is such that it has become a clear and present danger for the world…
John Bolton neocon in the Trump administration.
… since, while improbable at this stage, it is totally plausible to see at some point of time someone in the US political top losing it…
…and unleashing a confrontation with Russia, or China…
…being fully convinced, mostly by Hollywood or [Tom] Clancy-esque pseudo military fiction…
…that the United States and NATO can attack Russia and survive.
That, America could attack Russia or China and it would remain unscathed and devastate the rest of the world and America would not suffer at all.
That’s the danger…
…especially in a country whose elites completely lost their mind and are delusional…
Rulership class in America are bat-shit crazy.
…or reside in what I define as a Perpetual Chalabi Moment.
American leadership, on both sides of the political spectrum, plus the oligarchy that controls them are completely delusional and out of touch with the American citizens, the rest of the world, and the comparative technological strengths of America.
The arms race.
The US did lose the arms race.
The arms race was not lost in 2018 or even 2015, however; it was lost much earlier and it was mostly due to the US media-propaganda machine…
… which kept it secret from the US public.
It still continues to do so but it is increasingly difficult to keep it under wraps when information, including imagery of what Russia does in this field becomes increasingly available.
Ships from Russia’s Caspian Flotilla launching Kalibr-NK cruise missiles against Daesh targets in Syria.
But that is just part of the issue: I write about predictors—the real economy, scientific development, education, etc.—for war’s outcomes [are] non-stop.
Other people have written about these predictors. Not once do they agree with the narrative coming out of the American mainstream media.
In the end, when I state that the US elites have no clue about the size and complexity of Russia’s economy, it is one thing…
…but when I state that they basically have no clue about their own economy, not Wall Street’s cooking of books, I can rely on some serious American professionals in the field.
President Trump, right, talks with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo during a Cabinet meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House in Washington, on July 18, 2018. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
The report was prepared by an Inter-agency Task Force in September 2018 and reads as an epitaph to the US machine-building complex…
… and the issue is not just massive de-industrialization…
America has still not recovered from the de-industrialization of the last forty years. It is not going to recover in only one or two years.
… or the lack of a labor force which can fill in for departing old-timers…
…with many in the new generation of Americans being mostly interested in pot and drugs or in avoiding any productive labor…
…nor money alone can solve the problem of America’s declining military strength, which was always overstated to start with.
It is the culture, an institutional one, which is responsible for this decline.
Russia presents new MiG-35 fighter jet to the public.
The decline of American culture
The United States is very good at building extremely expensive and dubiously effective (against a competent enemy) power projection forces, which by definition are offensive and aggressive.
Once one gets into the issues of actual defense, the picture changes dramatically for the United States.
It is enough to mention the whole non-stop hysteria about Turkey buying and activating the S-400 complex, with India already having a 5 billion dollar contract signed with Russia, and many Arab states lining up for Russian-made air and anti-missile systems, not to mention combat aircraft, such as a contact for SU-35s between Egypt and Russia signed, following next.
S-400 complex launching system.
All of it creates an extremely emotional reaction in the United States, but the fact that Russian military technology is in some key defense fields better than anything out there was never in doubt.
S-400 complex launching system with potential targets that it is designed to strike.
It is enough to recall Vietnam, but in the time of radio and printed media it was easier to control narratives.
The American media blitz on this subject is constant and unyielding.
Today it is extremely difficult.
Russia always built weapons to effectively kill the enemy—such is Russia’s experience with warfare, much of which being invasions of foreign powers.
The United States has zero historic experience with defending the US proper against powerful and brutal enemies.
While the Revolutionary war had some moments of brutality, as did the American civil war, neither wars EVER approached the level of absolute depraved scorched earth devastation that Russia, Europe, and China have experienced.
It is something that America has NEVER experienced.
Mexico never invaded. Canada never invaded. Russia never invaded. Cuba never invaded. Bermuda never invaded.
It is a cultural difference, a profound one and it manifests itself across the whole spectrum of activities, not just the respective military-industrial complexes.
In other words, Russians MUST build top of the line weaponry, because the safety of Russia depends on it.
Dr. Matthew Alford of the University of Bath, author of National Security Cinema: The Shocking New Evidence of Government Control in Hollywood, told MintPress that the new Amazon product is a “disgrace of a series,” unfairly demonizing a nation at a time when the United States has its boot on the throat of Venezuelan society.
Russian SU-30SM.
“The new Jack Ryan series comes in the context of four movies stretching back decades that have all had Department of Defense and/or CIA support at the scriptwriting phrase,” he noted, labeling Jack Ryan as a classic “national security entertainment product”.
The character of Jack Ryan first appeared in Cold War era Clancy stories such as The Hunt for Red October and The Cardinal of the Kremlin, where the heroic Ryan battles the dark forces of the Soviet Union.
The series was put on hiatus but has recently returned, bringing with it much of the same Cold War mentality and rhetoric.
Ryan has been previously played on screen by Hollywood stars such as Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford and Ben Affleck.
Alford’s book, which he co-wrote with Tom Secker, describes the enormous influence that the national security state has on popular culture.
Based on Freedom of Information requested documents, the two calculated that between 2004 and 2016, the Department of Defense was directly involved in the production of 977 Hollywood movies or television shows, many of which were carefully scripted, edited and curated by government agents in order to present a certain viewpoint of the world to the public.
For example, the writers of Homeland were revealed to have private meetings with ex-CIA officials before each season.
From big budget movies like Ironman and Transformers to surprisingly banal television productions like The Biggest Loser, Mythbusters or American Idol, virtually every movie or television show featuring the military or intelligence figures has been edited, scripted or funded by the Department of Defense in order to cast the government in the best possible light.
Those that do not comply with the Department of Defense’s requests are not given privileged access to, or use of, military resources and may be attacked by the state as being unpatriotic or deceptive.
The constant flow of pro-security state messages has an effect on the public.
Researchers found that respondents who were shown torture scenes from the television series 24 were more likely to subsequently support the government’s policies of torture in sites like Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.
This held even for liberal college students.
Andrei Martyanov: The first person of repute who challenged Tom Clancy’s fantasies was professor Roger Thompson in his seminal 2006 book Lessons Not Learned, in which he correctly asked a question how an insurance agent who never served a day in uniform and had undergraduate degree in English can write competently on any issue related to modern combat and technology.
In Clancy’s case it was clear that he was promoted, he openly writes about it in his book, by former Secretary of the Navy John Lehman, for purely propaganda reasons.
Secretary of the Navy John Lehman swearing in Grace Harper.
Most of what Clancy wrote was cringe-worthy pop-literature, which could be described as incompetent military-intelligence porn.
Ouch!
Clancy never made it a secret that his Jack Ryan character was written from…Tom Clancy himself. A good testimony about late Clancy himself.
Why Jack Ryan was written as a spy as opposed to as insurance agent remains a complete mystery to me, but, I guess, whatever sells books for the late Tom Clancy.
These digs… oh, boy!
In Soviet/Russian military environment Clancy’s “literature” overwhelmingly was treated with ironic smile at best, and with Homeric laughter at worst.
Yup. How the rest of the world feels about this kind of literature, and movies.
But that pretty much describes the “level” of American “knowledge” and awareness of Russia in general and her military in particular—a caricature.
It is, however, one thing to promote caricatures in pop-art, totally another when a caricature becomes a working model for decision making at the top political level.
That is dangerous.
And his point is very, very valid…
As General Latiff of DARPA correctly noted—most of what the US public and political class know about war is from entertainment, from Hollywood to the literature of such “professionals” like the late Clancy.
The Generals won’t save us.
Yvonne Lorenzo: I quoted (retired) Major Danny Sjursen earlier. He wrote a piece title, “The Generals Won’t Save Us From The Next War”
for the American Conservative. I want to reproduce an excerpt and then
ask you to comment. Your disdain for the political class is well known
but what about the generals in power? How capable and knowledgeable are
they? How competent?
Why should any sentient citizen believe that these commanders’ former subordinates—a new crop of ambitious generals—will step forward now and oppose a disastrous future war with the Islamic Republic?
Don’t believe it!
Senior military leaders will salute, about-face, and execute unethical and unnecessary combat with Iran or whomever else (think Venezuela) Trump’s war hawks, such as John Bolton, decide needs a little regime changing.
John Bolton. Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor John Bolton said that it would be great if the United States could get their hands on that Venezuelan oil, and that statement alone tells you everything that you need to know about why the US is trying so hard to interfere in Venezuelan affairs.
Need proof that even the most highly lauded generals will sheepishly obey the next absurd march to war? Join me in a brief trip down an ever so depressing memory lane.
Let us begin with my distinguished West Point graduation speaker, Air Force General and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Richard Myers.
He goes down in history as as a Donald Rumsfeld lackey because it turns out he knew full well that there were “holes” in the Bush team’s inaccurate intelligence used to justify the disastrous Iraq war.
Yet we heard not a peep from Myers, who kept his mouth shut and retired with full four-star honors.
Air Force General and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Richard Myers .
Then, when Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki accurately (and somewhat courageously) predicted in 2003 that an occupation of Iraq would require up to half a million U.S. troops, he was quietly retired.
Rummy passed over a whole generation of active officers to pull a known sycophant, General Peter Schoomaker, out of retirement to do Bush the Younger’s bidding.
It worked too.
Schoomaker, despite his highly touted special forces experience, never threw his stars on the table and called BS on a losing strategy even as it killed his soldiers by the hundreds and then the thousands.
Having heard him (unimpressively) speak at West Point in 2005, I still can’t decide whether he lacked the intellect to do so or the conscience.
Maybe both.
General Peter Schoomaker.
After Bush landed a fighter plane on a carrier and triumphantly announced “mission accomplished” in Iraq, poor Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the newest three-star in the Army, took over the hard part of conquest: bringing the “natives” to heel.
He utterly failed, being too reliant on what he knew—Cold War armored combat—and too ambitious to yell “stop!”
Soon after, it came to light that Sanchez had bungled the investigation—or cover-up (take your pick)—of the massive abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison.
Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez.
General John Abizaid was one of the most disappointing in a long line of subservient generals.
It seems Abizaid knew better: he knew the Iraq war couldn’t be won, that it was best to hand over control to the Iraqis posthaste, that General David Petraeus’s magical “surge” snake oil wouldn’t work.
Still, Abizaid didn’t quit and retired quietly.
He’s now Trump’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia, which is far from comforting.
General John Abizaid .
Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster was heralded as an outside-the-box thinker.
And indeed, he was a Gulf War I hero, earned a Ph.D., taught history at West Point, and wrote a (mostly) well-received book on Vietnam.
Yet when Trump appointed him national security advisor, he brought only in-the-box military beliefs with him into the White House.
He then helped author a fanciful National Defense Strategy that argued the U.S. military must be ready at a moment’s notice to fight Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and “terror.”
Perhaps at the same time!
No nuance, no diplomatic alternatives, no cost-benefit analysis, just standard militarism.
These days, McMaster is running around decrying what he calls a “defeatist narrative” and arguing for indefinite war in the Middle East.
Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster .
Then there was the other Washington insider and “liberal” favorite, one of a trio of “adults in the room,” General Jim Mattis.
Though sold to the public as a “warrior monk,” Mattis offered no alternative to America’s failing forever wars.
In fact, when he decided his conscience no longer allowed him to stay in the Trump administration, his reason for leaving was that the president had called for a reduction of troops in Afghanistan after 18 senseless years.
U.S.-supported Saudi terror bombings that killed tens of thousands of Yemeni civilians? A U.S.-backed Saudi blockade that starved at least 85,000 Yemeni children to death? Yeah, he was fine with that.
But a modest troop withdrawal from a losing 18-year-old war in landlocked Central Asia, that he couldn’t countenance.
General Jim Mattis.
Then there’s the propensity for politics and pageantry among senior military officers.
This was embarrassingly and unconscionably on display in the tragic cases of Private First Class Jessica Lynch and Corporal Pat Tillman.
When, during the initial invasion of Iraq, the young Lynch’s maintenance convoy got lost, she was captured and briefly detained by Saddam’s army.
Knowing a good public relations opportunity when they saw it, Bush’s staff and the generals concocted a slew of comforting lies: Lynch was a hero who had fought to her last bullet (she’d never fired her rifle), she’d been tortured (she hadn’t), her combat-camera equipped commando rescue had come just in the nick of time (she was hardly guarded and in a hospital).
Who cares if it was all lies, if this young woman’s terrifying experience was co-opted and embellished? The Lynch story was media fodder.
Private First Class Jessica Lynch.
More tragic was the Pat Tillman escapade.
Tillman was an admirable outlier, the only professional athlete to give up a million dollar contract to enlist in the military soon after 9/11.
Tillman and his brother went all in, too, choosing the elite Army Rangers. It was quite the story.
Rumsfeld even wrote the new private a congratulatory letter. Then reality got in the way. Tillman was killed in Afghanistan during a friendly fire incident that can only be described as gross incompetence.
Almost immediately, President Bush’s staff and much of the Army’s top brass went to work crafting the big lie: a heroic narrative of Tillman’s demise, replete with dozens of marauding Taliban fighters and a one-man charge befitting the hard-hitting former NFL defensive back.
Promoted to corporal posthumously, he was awarded the Silver Star. Some of his fellow Rangers were instructed to lie to the Tillman family at the memorial service regarding the manner of Pat’s death.
Corporal Pat Tillman.
Only Bush’s neophytes and the Army’s complicit generals didn’t count on the tenacity of Tillman’s parents.
They waged something nearing war with the U.S. military for several years until they found out the truth, unearthing a cover-up that implicated Bush’s civilians and many of the military’s four-star generals (including Stanley McChrystal, John Abizaid, and Richard Myers).
The Tillman family got their congressional hearing, but the sycophantic representatives on the Hill refused to seriously criticize the top brass and no one was seriously punished.
Andrei Martyanov:
I don’t know the exact answer to this question. I am positive that
there are many highly educated and competent people in US Armed Forces
but there is no denial of the fact that some segments of the US top
brass are more politicians than military leaders. It is not unique to
the United States Armed Forces, but the record of failures is in the
open and everyone can make their own conclusions.
Fighting Russia is the goal of the political class
Yvonne Lorenzo: Your latest book, The (Real) Revolution in Military Affairs provides further detail on Russia’s technological advancements. A layman, I see America as principally using bombing as artillery and proxy fighters (see Syria) on the ground—not too competent. I’ve read enough to be dangerous—having no military background—but wars can’t be won by bombing campaigns alone, even against a mediocre target (I think you called Iraq’s army third-rate).
Fighting Russia, which appears to be the goal of the political class, is not what they will expect, even if the confrontation doesn’t rise to a nuclear exchange.
I’d appreciate your summarizing some of the key points of this book but I have to ask, having read some of The Saker’s writings…
… can Russia be overwhelmed by thousands upon thousands of slow missiles, like the TLAMs…
… or will Russia use their “800 Pound Gorilla” in your parlance, that is…
A leaked memo confirms that Russia is developing Kanyon, the world's most powerful nuclear weapon, with twice the power of any ever tested.
This is 2x, or double the destructive power of the most dangerous and largest nuclear weapon ever designed; TheSovietRDS-202hydrogenbomb (codenameIvanorVanya), knownbyWesternnationsasTsarBomba.
Russia's New 'Satan' Nuclear Weapons System Could Wipe Out Texas orFrance. Russia hasformonthsbeentestingagiant nuclear weapons deliverysystemthatcancarry 10 heavyweightwarheads—enoughpowertowipeout Texas orFrance. This is theRS-28Sarmatintercontinentalballisticmissileknownin Russia as "Satan 2"Mar 06, 2018 · Russia announced it is about to test its Satan 2 missile, a nuclear weapon so powerful it could destroy a country size the of Texas or France in seconds. While its official name is RS-28 Sarmat, NATO officials have given the weapon the nickname Satan 2, the Mirror reports.
RS-28 Sarmat ICBM.
… does Russia have enough weapons, from cruise missiles, to defensive, to hypersonic, not to be overwhelmed…
… and are American generals aware of the risk if it does should they engage in hostilities?
Rumors of Kanyon (or Ocean Multipurpose System Status-6, as it’s known in Russia) first started swirling in 2015 following a leak on Russian television. Soon after, the nation confirmed the weapon’s existence, while claiming the leak was a mistake.
However, as defense analyst and military historian H. I. Sutton told Futurism, this leak of the latest nuclear posture review is the first official recognition of Kanyon by U.S. officials.
“The unclassified posture review document doesn’t really tell defense analysts anything new, but it does establish Kanyon as a military fact,” said Sutton. “Until now, many observers had regarded the system as ‘fake news.’ I think that this was partly because the stated specifications are so incredible and partly because it is hard to understand how it will be used.”
Incredible Devastation
“Incredible” is perhaps putting it mildly.
Based on leaked Russian documents, Kanyon is a nuclear-armed autonomous torpedo capable of traveling 10,000 kilometers (6,213 miles) with a 100-megaton thermonuclear weapon as its payload. That’s at least twice as powerful as any nuclear weapon ever tested. According to nuclear bomb simulator Nukemap, it would instantly kill 8 million people and injure an additional 6.6 million if dropped on New York City.
Kanyon’s weapon wouldn’t be dropped, though. It would arrive via the ocean and bring with it a massive artificial tsunami that would blanket the coastal area in radioactive water. If the warhead is “salted” with the radioactive isotope Cobalt-60, as some have reported, a detonation could render contaminated areas uninhabitable by humans for an entire century.
“Kanyon is unique in every respect,” said Sutton. “There really is nothing like it in any navy’s inventory.”
- US Report Confirms Russia Is Developing the World’s Most Powerful Nuclear Weapon. The 100-megaton thermonuclear weapon isn't "fake news."
The latest nuclear weapons that China and Russia field are smarter, more technically advanced, faster, and superior to their American counterparts in every way.
I noted your comments on Professor Cohen’s latest on Ukraine posted to Unz.com on November 14th but his most recent video in PushBack from The Grayzone he said that in all the years he studied Russia and America he’d never thought the two nations would go to war.
Yet now he fears this possibility. I’d appreciate your thoughts.
America WILL NOT survive World War III, and it is foolish to believe that it will.
It is a kind of Anglo-Saxon policy not to have cooperation on the European continent – mainly between the Russians, the French, the Poles and the Germans. They want to have a line of confrontation in this area and therefore are against all promises. [As a result] NATO was extended to the East.
I was responsible for the organization of the German Armed Forces on the German territory following reunification.
We did not want foreign troops in former East Germany.
We did not want to have British or French troops there; we wanted to have only German ones.
We wanted to explain to the world that there was no desire to enlarge NATO up to the new borders with Russia that were created in 1992.
It was against all the ideas we had after reunification.
What is happening now is some kind of Anglo-Saxon policy that was created even before WWI.
We are on the path of war again.
That is so much against the will of our people.
What is happening now is some kind of Anglo-Saxon policy that was created even before WWI. We are on the path of war again.
This is also against the will of the Dutch, the French, the Spanish and the Italians.
We see it as a disaster that a US president that is willing to cooperate with the Russian President Vladimir Putin – President [Donald] Trump – has to face such a disastrous policy organized by the US deep state, which is against our national interests and the national interests of all other western Europeans…
What is happening now is some kind of Anglo-Saxon policy that was created even before WWI. We are on the path of war again.
***
But, when you now come to Rostock, Dresden or Leipzig they are learning Russian again, they go to theaters to watch Russian performances and listen to Russian music.
They have re-established their links with Russia, and if they could do what they want to do, they would be the big economic partners of Russia these days.
Things have really changed for the Russian Federation and with regard to Russia.
People in Dresden, Saxony’s capital, are absolutely proud that Russian President Vladimir Putin once served there.
That is the reality these days, despite what the American mainstream media say.
Would Russia engage in tank battles and soldier-to-soldier combat if NATO attacked, or would they use stand-off weapons that you discuss just to obliterate command and control centers, the sources of munitions, etc.?
Mr. Wimmer clearly sees that some Germans, as opposed to the “vassal” government, want better relations with Russia as opposed to war, including cold war.
Andrei Martyanov: The issue of TLAMs: in a conventional configuration, I don’t think that they can do much damage to Russia, especially considering Russia’s unique anti-air and anti-missile defense.
A few possible leakers in conventional configuration will not do much damage; a few leakers in a nuclear configuration, however, is a completely different game. Hence Russia’s worry about Aegis Ashore installations in Romania and Poland. That’s the main worry.
"Leakers" missile weapons systems that are able to bore through national defenses.
In a
conventional scenario, Russia will not be overwhelmed and even
conventional response-head on (otvetno-vstrechnyi) strike will be
extremely damaging to NATO and the US.
Thatfirst strike (inRussianparlance, a retaliatory strike, or otvetno-vstrechnyi udar) followsRussia’smilitarydoctrine, whichmandatessuch strikes tocompensateforRussia’sconventionalinferiority vis-à-vis NATOandtheUnitedStates.
- Eastern European Missile Defense: Russia's Threat ...
Valeri Gerasimov was explicit couple of years ago in his interview about Russia having enough stand-off weapons at every strategic direction to provide a reliable deterrence.
Even in conventional exchange Russia can launch weapons at the US proper with Russian bombers not leaving Russia’s aerospace.
The X-101 cruise missile has a range in excess of 5,500 kilometers. Russia continues to increase her deterrence with 3M22 Zircon getting ready to be tested from Admiral Gorshkov frigate very soon, with Kazan SSGN of project 885 planned to launch the hyper-sonic Zircon from underwater early next year.
All this changes deterrence dynamics completely because the United States cannot defend her coasts and in depth against such systems.
In this photo released by China’s Xinhua News Agency, officers and soldiers of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy hold a welcome ceremony as a Russian naval ship arrives in port in Zhanjiang in southern China’s Guangdong Province, Monday, Sept. 12, 2016
Russia can intercept the bulk of US and NATO cruise missiles; the US cannot do so against Russia.
Yvonne Lorenzo: As I write this on December 3rd, 2019, Vesti News posted this video on the Zircon: Putin Unveils Zircon Hypersonic Missiles! Stresses Importance of Beefing Up Russia’s Navy!
The brilliant Houthi military victory over the Saudis fulfilled the predictions in military doctrine made by America’s own De Gaulle, a retired US Army Colonel, Douglas Macgregor with an outstanding combat and command record who has been treated over the past 20 years by most of his own country’s four star generals and civilian theorists with contempt: Just as the French Army ignored DeGaulle’s armored warfare doctrines 90 years, when they were being read and applied passionately by the generals of Germany.
Macgregor observed after the Houthi victory in September that that there was no reason for surprise. Sure enough, two and a half years earlier, in testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) on March 7, 2017, he stated:
“The skies over the battlefield will be crowded with loitering munitions, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs or drones). These agile cruise missiles are designed to engage beyond line-of-sight ground targets. With proximity-fused, high-explosive warheads, these systems will remain airborne for hours, day or night. Equipped with high resolution electro-optical and infrared cameras, enemy operators will locate, surveil, and guide the drones to targets on the ground… When these loitering missiles are integrated into the enemy’s Strike Formations armed with precision guided rocket artillery that fires high explosive, incendiary, thermobaric, warheads including sub-munitions with self-targeting anti-tank and anti-personnel munitions warfare as we know it changes.”
Macgregor was even more prescient in predicting the previous Houthi precision missile strikes that wiped out half the production capacity of Saudi Arabia’s oil refineries earlier in September.
Those attacks humiliatingly exposed the ultra-expensive, endlessly praised US missile defense systems sold to Riyadh as worthless dinosaurs.
Yet, writing in his book “Transformation Under Fire” published back in 2003, Macgregor had said: “The idea is to link maneuver and strike assets through a flatter operational architecture empowered by new terrestrial and space-based communications throughout the formation… Long-range, joint precision fires and C4ISR [Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance] offer the possibility to reach over enemy armies to directly strike at what they hope to defend or preserve.
Precision strategic strikes closely coordinated and timed with converging Army combat forces would present a defending enemy with an insoluble dilemma.”
As you see, he’s retired and never became a general.
At least he appears to oppose war with Russia and Iran and China, from his appearances on Tucker Carlson that I’ve seen. Can you comment on the above piece and how Russia might respond if America used such techniques? It seems to me Russia would also be able to implement such techniques.
Andrei Martyanov: Douglas Macgregor is a brilliant man but his testimony is about…
… fighting an enemy which does not posses C4ISR [Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance] capabilities comparable to that of the United States.
Russia does and we have to be very clear on that distinction.
Fighting a modern combined arms war against such opponents as North Korea or even Iran the United States will have massive leverage, at least initially, before boots get on the ground, in terms of stand-off operations.
Once boots hit the ground, well, then it will change. But fighting peers, such as China, let alone Russia—…
…I simply cannot see how the United States will stay away from escalation to a nuclear threshold, because the scale of losses will be catastrophic both in men and materiel.
It’s EXTREMELY unlikely that the US can stop modern nuclear weapons from Russia. There is ZERO evidence that any of the US anti-missile technologies would be sufficient to stop a MIRV warhead – let alone multiple MIRV warheads – traveling at the speeds a modern missile can achieve. In a war with Russia, literally hundreds if not thousands of warheads would be heading towards the US. No missile defense system known can handle that.
- Richard Steven Hack on 09/19/2017 at 3:40 PM
In 110 days of fighting the German army in France during 1918, the U.S. Army Expeditionary Force sustained 318,000 casualties, including 110,000 killed in action.
That’s the kind of lethality waiting for U.S. forces in a future war with real armies, air forces, air defenses and naval power.
Only… on American soil.
Ignoring this reality is the road to future defeats and American decline. It’s time to look beyond the stirring images of infantrymen storming machine-gun nests created by Hollywood and to see war for what it is and will be in the future:
the ruthless extermination of the enemy with accurate, devastating firepower from the sea, from the air, from space and from mobile, armored firepower on land.
The United Sates is not in a position to take this scale of losses, not to mention having its rear, from staffs to munition depots and airfields being under relentless and devastating fire impact from operational to a strategic depth—a condition the US Army simple has no experience with.
As even RAND people admitted:
In war games with either Russia, China or both, almost always, the United States loses.
I’ve been writing about this for years.
It’s good that some people are beginning to get it. I hope—although I don’t hold my breath—their opinions will be heard at the political top.
Yvonne Lorenzo:
Recent articles have posted on cooperation between Russia and China,
not just the well know business deals but cultural and Chinese students
coming to Russia. See these articles, “Top Russian nuclear university
eyes future cooperation with China” and “Film about WWII sniper ‘Lady
Death’ kicks off ‘2019 Russian Film Exhibition’ in Beijing” posted on
China’s Global Times.
I’d appreciate your thoughts about the Russian-Chinese relationship/partnership.
Andrei Martyanov: The answer is extremely simple—Russian-Chinese cooperation is not only natural, but it was inevitable, considering the state of the combined West and, especially so, of the United States.
Yvonne Lorenzo: Andrei, you posted this on your blog on November 26th, 2019, “New S-400 Contract For Turkey?” which I want to discuss not only because of your observations, but because in the past (and I’m not picking on him) Paul Craig Roberts wrote in effect that Russia must be more aggressive with America to avoid a shooting war, quoting him, “The Russian government’s failure to stand up to Washington’s bullying guarantees more bullying. Sooner or later the bullying will cross a line, and Russia will have to fight.”
However, in this post of yours I cited above you commented:
So, [the] Turks are already running, it seems, detection routines with F-16 and F-4 as targets.
Turks will, already do, want more.
The Turks know what comes next, and it is S-500—they want it.
The reason is simple: look at [a] map of Turkey and see how much [of the] Eastern Mediterranean she will be able to cover—pretty much all of it. Just in case.
And it is not just for reasons of Greece and gas fields, but for reasons of Israel. The Turkish path towards a leadership in [the] Islamic world lies through the fate of Palestine.
So, a lot of thing are riding on those systems for Turkey and, just a hunch, SU-35s will follow.
I’m surprised the Turks haven’t start testing against any F-35s, unless Turkey had to return them to America;
I’d love to see the reaction if they did, which so far has included this:
“‘Erdogan thumbs his nose at Trump’: US senator says Turkey crossed ‘another red line’ with S-400 test, calls for new sanctions.”
As
you also wrote recently: “How about State Department creating a new
Office of S-400 Weekly Complaints and Threats Towards Turkey (OSWCTTT).
Should be a pretty nice sinecure for some bureaucrat. Should pay well
too—rent and real estate prices inside the Beltway are atrocious. Foggy
Bottom especially.”
And I see in the way they’ve turned Turkey away from American dominance, or Western dominance, that Russia’s diplomatic team, of course under the leadership of President Putin, have performed a Jujitsu move against the West more effective than using force.
Andrei Martyanov: As a Russian proverb says: “Diplomacy is the art to say to your counterpart that he is an idiot in the politest manner.”
In reality, the Russian version is very profane, so I softened it a bit. Russians do not operate on the so called “values-based,” ideological that is, principle in foreign policy. Russians actually DO consider the other side’s interests and concerns and that is what makes Russian diplomacy so effective.
This, plus, of course, military power. As another Russian saying goes: “If you do not want to talk to Lavrov, you will talk to Shoigu.”
With Turkey, Russia does accommodate many Turkish interests; the Turks feel that.
This is as much as I can respond to, because I am not in the position to pass deep and knowledgeable judgment on Turkey’s policies since I do not know the region that well.
I am sure, however, that Turks have a very good idea about what Russia offers technologically and economically.
The Turkish officer crews for S-400 underwent an extensive training in Russia so they do not need any additional argumentation in favor of the system they were trained on.
The F-35 is irrelevant here, apart from the fact that Turks cannot use, I believe, from the top of my head, those two aircraft which they had and which will be returned to the US.
Question: You have worked for over five decades as a war reporter and documentary film-maker in Vietnam, elsewhere in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
How do you see current international tensions between the US, China and Russia?
Do you think the danger of war is greater now than in previous times?
John Pilger: In 1962, we all may have been saved by the refusal of a Soviet naval officer, Vasili Arkhipov, to fire a nuclear torpedo at US ships during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Are we in greater danger today?
During the Cold War, there were lines that the other side dared not cross.
There are few if any lines now;
The US surrounds China with 400 military bases and ...
...sails its low-draught ships into Chinese waters and...
...flies its drones in Chinese airspace.
American-led NATO forces mass on the same Russian frontier the Nazis crossed...
...the Russian president is insulted as a matter of routine.
There is no restraint and none of the diplomacy that kept the old Cold War cold.
In the West, we have acquiesced as bystanders in our own countries, preferring to look away (or at our smart phones) rather than break free of the post-modernism entrapping us with its specious “identity” distractions.
Question: You traveled extensively in the US during the Cold War years. You witnessed the assassination of presidential candidate Robert Kennedy in 1968.
It seems the American Cold War obsession with “communism as an evil” has been replaced by an equally intense Russophobia towards modern-day Russia.
Do you see a continuation in the phobia from the Cold War years to today? What accounts for that mindset?
John Pilger: The Russians refuse to bow down to America...
...and that is intolerable.
They play an independent, mostly positive role in the Middle East, the antithesis of America’s violent subversions...
...and that is unbearable.
Like the Chinese, they have forged peaceful and fruitful alliances with people all over the world...
...and that is unacceptable to the US Godfather.
The constant defamation of all things Russian is a symptom of decline and panic...
...as if the United States has departed the 21st century for the 19th century...
...obsessed with a proprietorial view of the world.
In the circumstances, the phobia you describe is hardly surprising.
Andrei Martyanov: As in any event, war between Russia and the US is possible, but how probable it is, is a completely different matter. Some probability of Russia and the United States actually fighting each other certainly exists.
It is not very high, I think, but it does exist.
We all have to do our utmost to prevent this scenario becoming a reality.
Paradoxically, Russia’s very real military strength today is a guarantor or, at least, a robust deterrent against such a nightmarish scenario.
As I said, the US military does understand the implications, even when American politicians don’t.
I always repeat that I feel much better when Gerasimov and Milley talk to each other than when Lavrov is forced to explain basic things to Pompeo.
Mike Pompeo.
Yvonne Lorenzo: Hypersonic weapons, impressive as they are, rely on Newtonian physics. There was—to me—a term that you would call “Runglish”, Russian-English, discussing “New physical principles” which I finally understood to mean “new principles of physics” relating to the new Peresvet laser, which I think you’ve speculated on its purpose but is highly secret.
Peresvet laser complex.
However, all this technology is used for military purposes; what I find it sad about deteriorating relations with Russia because the best of the West and Russia could accomplish a great deal sharing and developing non-military technology.
I’m
reminded of this wonderful video of a Russia cosmonaut’s interactions
with an American astronaut and seeing the world below they have disdain
for politicians.
I Need More Space: Russian Cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin’s long road to the stars
What are your thoughts and how can Russians and American in this environment of “Russophobia” which is a polite, diplomatic word for hatred of Russians, cooperate as we two are doing now for peaceful and good purposes?
I worry both your doors and mine, for simply communicating with one another, will be kicked in one day by someone from the government, as happened with Max Blumenthal.
Andrei Martyanov: As I stated repeatedly, the combined West committed cultural suicide in Russia.
Yes, Russians are open to mutually beneficial cooperation, with space being one of those exhibit A cases where international cooperation manifests itself in the most profound and positive way.
Primary military targets that would be obliterated by first nuclear strikes.
Sadly, with the current US political “elites” who are Russophobic in the extreme, any prospects of serious Russian-American cooperation look very grim.
The world is in the process of unprecedented geopolitical realignment which increasingly degrades the position of the United States and Russia is at the center of this process.
The Obama Administration destroyed Russian-American relations totally and I don’t see any improvement, bar some symbolic gestures, such as, I hope, President Trump visiting Moscow on May 9th next year, because the American political class’s Russophobia is systemic and was nurtured for generations.
Plus, the United States is not an agreement-capable entity because it is ungovernable, as the last three years so dramatically demonstrated.
The first thirty cities to be attacked with nuclear weapons during a Russia or China first-strike event. Say, if America puts troops in the Ukraine, or conducts Naval operations near the Chinese coast.
Russia is aware of that—no agreement signed with the United States is worth the paper it is written on.
"... no agreement signed with the United States is worth the paper it is written on." I think that China would agree.
We can only hope that things will change for the better in the future but this change may come only through the United States reassessing its role in history and the world…
…a process which may take decades, serious tribulations and, hopefully, emergence of new American elites that would be able to formulate real American national interests.
Nuclear Targets Map in the United States.
***
After
I asked Andrei my last question, this Russian video posted on YouTube:
so much for future cooperation between America and Russia in space,
because of sanctions Americans cannot be carried to the space station by
Russians any longer:
US Will Be Stranded On Earth! Baikonur Cosmodrome Sends Very Last American Into Space!
I’d
like to thank Andrei for his kind answers to my questions and highly
recommend his books and his writings on his blog and on Unz.com for
those who wish to escape the Matrix and find a knowledgeable Russian
perspective on events and military matters; Martyanov is the antidote to
Tom Clancy disease.
Radioactive fallout map of America. Assuming a minor nuclear exchange using small, but accurate nuclear warheads.
I want to close by noting Andrei Martynov’s recent blog post “Ishenko Delivers” that referenced an article by Rostislav Ishenko entitled “In Bulgaria, a Russian Soldier” the title itself a reference to the song “Alyosha,” which I am familiar with from the album Wait for Me by the late exceptional baritone Dimitri Hvorsostovky. The below passage Ishenko wrote is moving, as is the song.
It was 1970. I was five years old.
I came to visit my grandmother. To the White Church. Near Kiev.
My grandmother is from the Urals.
My grandfather (on my father’s side) started the war near Stalingrad, and ended on the Dnieper (six wounds, four of them heavy, two shell shocks, medals “For Military Merit” and “For Courage,” the Order of the “Red Star” and “World War II” degrees).
The commander of a machine gun company. He fought for an incomplete year. From October 1943 he was no longer sent to the front (and his division arrived near Stalingrad in November 1942).
He died (in 1956) at 36 years old, from the consequences of a concussion (as a young major, in a colonel’s position).
In 1970, I was five years old (to be exact, then four and a half).
Grandmother was a teacher of French. At the same time and a class teacher. I came to visit her. Contrary to usual, I didn’t go straight home, but (for some reason unknown to me) I went to the school where she taught.
I think that she needed to complete the work with the class, and the school was five to seven minutes’ walk from home.
Here I am, as a future student, and they brought me to see how the children learn.
For about fifteen minutes I studied desks in an empty classroom (which at that time did not differ from the gymnasium at the beginning of the century) and read what was written on the board.
And then she went with her grandmother to the porch of the school, where her class (and other classes) performed.
Now I don’t remember what the holiday was, but I suspect it is May 9th. Because I went out onto the porch (they rather took me out, I was too small to go out myself), just as the girls from my grandmother’s class (8–10, already without pioneer ties and, as for me, adult aunts) sang “Alyosha.”
I haven’t heard the song so often since then, but I remember it well, because, in the words, “He doesn’t give flowers to girls, they give him flowers,” the entire female team of the school, which was standing next to me, wept.
It was the 70th year.
My grandmother was 48 years old.
Exactly at that age (in 2014) I left Kiev.
The city where four generations of my ancestors lived, in which my mother survived the occupation (and met the Red Army at the age of three), became not just a stranger, but a hostile one.
I can be forced to return there, but I cannot be persuaded or persuaded to do so voluntarily.
It’s like in a war.
All who survived and won are proud of the Victory, and while their fellow soldiers were alive, they met and remembered the days of old.
But they themselves did not dream of returning to the dugout under shelling, nor did they want to experience the “pleasure” of the attack (to their full height on the prepared defense) for their children.
Russians have in their collective memory the trauma of a war that killed millions, a subject Martyanov has discussed in depth especially in his first book;
…in that respect, they are different from Americans and I question the sanity of the rulers…
…especially the feckless political class…
…of the West who make the Russians foes.
Launch of American ICBM’s from the underground silos.
Perhaps only the people of the two nations—if they are enough in number in America—can prevent war from coming, because I am uncertain if the American military can reign in the powers that control them.
Or perhaps it is the fate for Russia to humble America, the way she did Nazi Germany, not necessarily by military might—at least I pray.
I suspect the process has started already.
Sadly, we know which side is most at fault for this deterioration of relations between our nations.
Reminders… China.
China and Russia will mutually work together militarily to counter American aggression.
As a history buff I must point out that ALL Major Wars started from misconceptions (they enemy is weak, cannot hit the broad side of the barn etc) AND starred new disruptive weapons (the Machine Gun in WW1 vs Calvary/Infantry charges, Aircraft carrier in WW2 vs the MIGHTY Battleship).
Will WW3 find the USA under EMP? Will Russian and Chinese high tech ECM systems shut off our High Tech Weapons? Ask the commanders of the two recent US Navy collisions if they think ECM jammed their Command and Control Systems. Both of the Ships were very high tech Aegis Warships, yet were rammed by slow moving clumsy Cargo Ships.
Will we get our heads handed to us like the Germans?
You know that in both world wars the Germans did not expect to lose you know.
Prepare for bad times my friends the petrodollar is almost done. The cost of everything is about to rise quickly.
-NH Michael
Chinese President Xi Jinping has urged Russia to strengthen bilateral comprehensive cooperation and mutual political support during a meeting with President Vladimir Putin at the G20 Summit in Hangzhou. This action has prompted political analyst Rostislav Ishchenko to assert that both countries are moving towards a political and military alliance.
"De facto a political and military alliance between Russia and China has existed for a long time and it is not a secret to anyone. Rumors have repeatedly surfaced that it could be formalized. But at the recent G20 summit the Chinese leader has for the first time mentioned the need to 'formalize relations' as openly as Chinese political and diplomatic traditions permit."
- Ishchenko, head of the Center for Systems Analysis and Forecasting, wrote for RIA Novosti.
Xi Jinping said that both countries should support each other in their efforts to protect national sovereignty and security. The Chinese president added that both nations should step up cooperation in such areas as infrastructure development, energy, aviation, aerospace and cutting-edge technology.
In addition, Russia and China should foster bilateral military exchanges and security cooperation.
Reminders… American Mainstream media
The US is likely to provoke a major war, partly in an attempt to unite a culturally divided country. But not just a sport war such as we’ve had in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. Probably with China, possibly Russia or Iran. Perhaps with all three. The US won’t do well, since it will find that its aircraft carriers, F-35s, and the like are equivalent to cavalry before WW1 and battleships before WW2.
- Doug Casey’s Top 7 Predictions for the 2020s
Americans, all jazzed up with the mainstream media news, and the mainstream pro-military movies, and a neocon government, is all but “chomping at the bit” to fight and (of course) win a war with either, Russia or China or both…
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