While the end of the world approaches, it’s time for all of us to be the best Rufus possible

I remember when I was a little child. Would you believe that I would climb out of my crib and stand on the edge, and then stand there for a moment or two before I fell and landed on my head?

Yeah. Good times.

I was normal. Not an exception.

In this post we will continue with the onslaught of major global changes that are all in full swing RIGHT here and RIGHT now. Whoa! Things are moving hot heavy.

China to restrict visas for US officials

The tit-for-tat move comes after Washington placed similar restrictions on the Chinese, citing “human rights abuses”

China has decided to restrict visas for a number of US officials in response to similar measures introduced by Washington earlier this month over alleged human rights abuses.

"The Chinese side decided to impose retaliatory visa restrictions on certain US officials who spread lies on the issue of human rights, imposed sanctions against China and harmed China's interests," stated Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin on Thursday. Wang said the move was made "to protect the sovereignty, security and development interests of the PRC.

The spokesperson claims that the US used, what he called, the false pretext of human rights issues to [1] interfere in the internal affairs of China, [2] discredit Beijing, and [3] put pressure on Chinese officials. Wang stated that such actions are a serious violation of the basic principles of international law and international relations.

China’s foreign ministry has so far not confirmed which exact officials will fall under these new restrictions, but the spokesperson said that those who invented the “lies” surrounding the issue of human rights and harmed China’s national interests already know who they are themselves.

The announcement comes after The US State Department imposed visa restrictions on Chinese officials who Washington claims are responsible for the intimidation and harassment of human rights activists and dissidents in China and around the world.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken cited the alleged “genocide” of Uighur muslims and repression of dissidents in Hong Kong and Tibet, saying the US

“rejects efforts by [People’s Republic of China] officials to harass, intimidate, surveil and abduct members of ethnic and religious minority groups, including those who seek safety abroad, and US citizens, who speak out on behalf of these vulnerable populations."

The US urged China to…

end its ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang, repressive policies in Tibet, crackdown on fundamental freedoms in Kong Kong,” and other abuses elsewhere.

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Tit 4 Tat

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A Rufus takes responsibility

Do you take ownership, and responsibility for your community? Or, are you going to stand by and do nothing? The future belongs to the unselfish, the members of a community that participate. video 3MB

Singapore appears to embrace the West

Remark by a Singapore friend :
Lee Hsien Loong is that piece of shit who betrayed his father and his siblings by colluding with the enemy — racist UMNO — which gleefully kicked Singapore (the little red dot on the map) out of the Malaysian Federation and caused LKY so much tears and grief!
When LKY was Singapore’s PM, he made it clear to Washington that US troops will never be allowed to make use of Singapore as a military base or a staging post in the event of a war between America and China.
Yet, the spineless HS Loong is now running head over heels to lick Yankee Joe Biden’s boots before the world press! How low and despicable can anybody get?
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Poland wants to cut-up Ukraine and sever ties with Russia

Medvedev for more than the past week has leveled consistent criticism that Washington is a “puppeteer” behind modern Poland.

Earlier in the month The Washington Examiner related Medvedev’s words as posted in an essay to social media channels as follows:

The essay, posted on Medvedev's Telegram channel, claimed that Poland and Russia have a long and "common history" that destines them to work together but that the Poles had been led astray by the U.S., "their puppeteers from across the ocean with clear signs of senile insanity."

This had been followed by Russian Ambassador to Poland Sergei Andreev just days ago saying it’s a possibility that Moscow might be forced to shutter its embassy in Warsaw in response to Polish authorities moving to expel 45 Russian diplomats who stand accused of spying, or are at least under suspicion, with the Ukraine war ongoing.

In particular Medvedev’s newest comments take aim at Poland’s reneging on crucial gas contracts…

“In 2020, Warsaw imported up to 10 billion cubic meters of Russian gas, but now it intends to abandon previous contracts. The volume of gas supplies from Russia to Poland this year has already decreased by 13% compared to last year,” Medvedev  explained. “Reverse supplies of the same Russian gas have been proposed as a replacement from Germany, as well as imports of LNG from Qatar, Norway and the United States. Economic benefits have fallen victim to bad political decisions.”

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Wants a war!

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Trump: The U.S. Is Now “Like A Third World Country” As The Supply Chain Crisis Gets Even WORSE

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A message by an American for Americans…

They keep promising us that things will start getting better.  When will that actually happen?  Once winter was over, the supply chain crisis was supposed to be on the way out.  Instead, as you will see below, even CNN is being forced to admit that it is getting even worse.  The war in Ukraine and a new wave of COVID lockdowns in China are being blamed, but those are only two pieces of the puzzle.  The truth is that we are now in the third year of this epic supply chain crisis, and there is no end in sight.

On Tuesday, Donald Trump told an interviewer that he is greatly disturbed by what he is currently witnessing

‘You go to a store, you don’t have bread. We’re like a third world country. They don’t have things. You go to buy something at Tiffany, you go to buy something at a hardware store — high, low — they don’t have product.’

Of course Trump is 100 percent correct.

Throughout our entire economy, there are shortages, delays and backlogs.

Trump himself has been personally affected by this.  In fact, in the interview he appeared to refer to a wait of “nine months” for something that he had ordered…

‘They say — even me, when I order things, like for furnishings, for a building or something — they say it’s going to take nine months to get it,’ Trump said. ‘Used to be like, same day service.’

Prior to 2020, most Americans never would have imagined that this sort of supply chain crisis could be possible.

But here we are.

And according to CNN, experts are openly admitting that our supply chain problems are now “getting worse”…

Problems with global supply chains were supposed to be getting better by now. Instead, experts say they are getting worse.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which cut off exports from Ukraine and put Russian businesses under sanction, has set off a series of new supply-chain bottlenecks. So has a surge in Covid cases in China, which has led to temporary lockdowns in parts of the country.

So when will things finally start getting better?

When the war in Ukraine ends?

I wouldn’t hold my breath on that one.

When the COVID pandemic is over?

If you are waiting for that to happen, you are going to be waiting for an awfully long time.

And what is going to happen if another major “black swan event” comes along?

We are so vulnerable right now, and we should have never allowed ourselves to become so deeply dependent on other nations.

For example, once upon a time the U.S. had a dominant position in global computer chip manufacturing.  But now the vast majority of our chips come from overseas, and the war in Ukraine is threatening to take the chip shortage to an entirely new level

Ukraine and Russia don’t produce computer chips used by global automakers. But Ukraine is the world’s leading source of neon, a gas needed for the lasers used in the chip-making process. While some chipmakers have stockpiled neon ahead of the fighting, there are concerns about the long-term availability of the gas.

“People expected the semiconductor shortage to continue. But nobody predicted Ukraine,” said Bernard Swiecki, director of research at the Center for Automotive Research, a Michigan think tank.

The chip shortage is already affecting almost every industry in America to at least a certain degree, and now we are being told that it could get a lot worse in the months ahead.

That is really bad news.

As shortages intensify, that is going to make our raging inflation crisis even more severe as well.  There is way too much money chasing way too few goods and services, and that will remain the case for the foreseeable future.

What this means is the standard of living for most Americans is going to continue to go down.  According to two prominent economists, “the average American should budget an extra $5,200 this year for higher prices”

Meanwhile, economists with Bloomberg are warning that the average American should budget an extra $5,200 this year for higher prices – or an extra $433 every month.

Economists Andrew Husby and Anna Wong write that households can expect to pay thousands more in 2022 for the same basket of goods and services they used last year.

Needless to say, this is just the beginning.

This inflationary spiral is going to continue to escalate until we have a full-blown nightmare on our hands.

And with each passing month, money will just get tighter and tighter for hard working American families.  In fact, one survey has found that 20 percent of all U.S. workers are now completely running out of money between paychecks…

Now, workers are running out of money faster, Salary Finance found.

Roughly 20% of employees regularly run out of money between paychecks, up from 15% last year, according to the survey of more than 3,000 working adults in February.

Making ends meet is going to become increasingly painful, and the shortages and the price hikes are just going to intensify in the months ahead.

Some of the things that we will soon see will be absolutely unprecedented.  For example, one of Steve Quayle’s readers says that the price of eggs is about to double at her local store…

I know I sent an email out to you both in regard to the warnings I was given by several different store managers. Well I have another one. Yesterday the store manager at Price Less Foods told me that the price of eggs will be doubling and there will be a massive shortage of eggs. I am lucky to live in an area where I can purchase fresh eggs from several different people who have chickens, not everyone can.

The reason why the price of eggs is going to rise so dramatically is because of the new bird flu pandemic that has already killed more than 14 million chickens and turkeys.

We are being hit by so many things at once, and the American people are becoming quite restless.

Just this week, a new survey found that just 33 percent of Americans approve of Biden’s handling of the economy.

In April 2021, 52 percent of Americans approved of his handling of the economy.

So much has changed over the past year, and a lot of people out there think that things can’t possibly get any worse than they are right now.

But they will, because the truth is that we are only in the very early chapters of this nightmare.

Vicki says…

The shooting war has been won by Russia.

The economic war is reaching the same ending, at a bit slower pace.

Not that any of this is apparent in the US news reporting.

China in Africa

Business, factories, labor and economy are far better than selling F-35 fighter jets and bombs to African dictators. Don’t you think? video 81MB

Sanctionistas go shopping for rubles

2022-03-26

As the situation stands today:

1. Russia has announced that since the US and the EU have defaulted on their US dollar and euro obligations, respectively, by freezing Russian reserves, Russia will now only sell natural gas for rubles.

2. There is no other source of sufficient quantities of natural gas available; thus, the EU has no choice but to continue importing natural gas from Russia.

3. The EU has to keep the gas flowing or it will be unable to make it through next winter without shutting down all industrial production or letting the housing stock go unheated.

How will the EU get the required quantities of rubles? Good question!

The following comprehensive analysis (credit: “adventurist”) answers it pretty well.

Oil for rubles

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Grandmother Rufus

So cute, but true. Show some appreciation for all sides and help others as only you know how. Let others laugh and make fun. You are unique. Be the best that you can be and always be the Rufus. video 8MB

The Western World Has Had Its Run

Gold ruble, Ukraine military collapse
• March 29, 2022

Lots of startling changes yesterday. Russia announced, apparently, a gold-backed or gold-related ruble. I haven’t had time to think about all the implications. Information is hard to come by, because the US blocks Russian news in order to control the Ukraine narrative and war propaganda. The Bretton Woods system collapsed when the West seized Russian central bank reserves, and it seems that the gold ruble adds to the end of the US dollar as world reserve currency under Bretton Woods. The implications could be vast, and the Washington idiots might very well wish they had left the Russians alone. I told them over and over that Russia had had enough of them, but the arrogant idiots didn’t listen. The sanctions, it seems, have brought about regime change in the West, reducing its power and influence.

Another big development is that apparently Ukraine has agreed to be a neutral country, no NATO, no foreign bases, no nuclear weapons, and accepts eastern Ukraine gong its own way. We will see if US puppet Zelensky is permitted to sign what Ukraine has agreed. Meanwhile, Russia has stopped its assault on Kiev, and is focused on clearing the remaining Nazi militias out of the Donbass region. I think the low-intelligence governments in Poland and Romania will get the message, and the US missile bases in those countries will be closed before too long.

These are major developments with many large implications. The World Economic Forum’s “reset” has likely been replaced by a Russian-Chinese reset.

The US ran on arrogance for so long that it has hollowed itself out. The Western world’s fate is unclear. It seems no one in intellectual, business, or political leadership positions believes in freedom and civil liberty. The US certainly is busy at work cancelling itself:

Here.

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Present generations of Americans will not recognize their country. Rivers, mountains, streets, schools, public spaces, even towns are losing their names and acquiring new politically correct names. Normally, this is what outside conquerors do to a country, but we are doing it to ourselves. A country that destroys its own monuments and history is lost.

My conclusion is that the days of the West are over. The West is drowning in accumulated mistakes and degeneracy. The moral fiber in the leadership ranks is gone

MM describes a local BBQ / Seafood place

Good place for some cheap food. You can eat your fill for under $15 USD. I go though the show and tell here. Enjoy video 110MB

Ukraine: US Biowarfare Labs Developed Disease Delivering Drones (DDD?)

It’s not just used in China, apparently.

Documents and other evidence from US funded laboratories in Ukraine suggest that Kiev was planning to use drones to deploy pathogens against the Donbass as well as Russia, the Russian Defense Ministry said on Wednesday.

Moscow has also identified specific US officials involved in the development of bioweapons in Ukraine.

Vector Drone – Very interesting BioLab Thread ty @GPlayer5150 https://t.co/OrYXszje52

— Kuts1 (@Kuts110) March 8, 2022

Of particular interest to Russian investigators are “documents testifying to the plans of the Kiev regime to use unmanned aerial vehicles capable of carrying and spraying deadly substances,” military spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov said during a briefing.

#disinformation #agitprop#SouthOssetia KGB accuses #Georgia of spreading diseases via UAV's and drones, linked with US and #Lugar Biolab Tbilisi. https://t.co/JajVHeRpLX
— Jelger Groeneveld (@jelger_) June 7, 2020

Facts in the possession of the Russian military “prove that the Kiev regime was seriously considering the possibility of using biological weapons against the population of the Donbass and the Russian Federation,” Konashenkov added.

Russia has also identified “specific officials who took part in the creation of components of biological weapons,” the general added. He did not name any of them, however, saying only they were “the heads of divisions and employees of the US Department of Defense, as well as its main contractors.”

Een US biolab met een vreemde verzameling, Rusisch DNA.
Drones om muggen die besmet zijn los te laten.https://t.co/iEcQu7TrhG
— Petr@ (@Nomediocre_P) March 1, 2022

These campaigns were “directly related to the son of the current US president, Hunter Biden,” Konashenkov added, citing investigations in the Western media. Last week, the Daily Mail published emails showing Biden’s ties to the Pentagon contractor Metabiota, which specialized in researching pandemic causing pathogens that could be used as bioweapons.

Among other things, 🧵reports Ukraine documents on drones transporting biolab substances:

"Regarding biological weapons laboratories, the documents that reveal the plans of the Ukrainian regime 🇺🇦 to use drones to transport and disperse substances are particularly interesting."

— Pipers Creek (@piperscreekway) March 30, 2022

Hunter Biden’s involvement in the US funding of Ukrainian biolabs was brought up by Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, commander of the Russian Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Protection Forces, in a briefing last Thursday.

The results of the further analysis of documents and other evidence obtained from Ukrainian biolabs will be shared in more detail “in the near future at a special briefing,” Konashenkov promised.

More...
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Nice Chinese Girl

video. She’s on her porch. 4MB

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Highly Pathogenic Avian Flu Detected In Five More US States

An outbreak of the deadly strain of bird flu is quickly spreading across the U.S. The risk to humans is low, but bird flu could wreak havoc in the nation’s poultry industry ahead of Easter.

The United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) announced on Wednesday that highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) was detected in five new states.

  • A non-commercial, mixed-species backyard flock (non-poultry) in Berkshire County, Massachusetts;
  • A non-commercial, mixed-species backyard flock (non-poultry) in Johnson County, Wyoming;
  • commercial poultry flock in Johnston County, North Carolina;
  • A non-commercial, backyard chicken flock (non-poultry) in Franklin County, Ohio;
  • And a backyard chicken flock (poultry) in Kidder County, North Dakota.

According to Bloomberg, USDA data shows the bird flu has been found in 23 states in flocks totaling about 17 million birds up and down Mid-Atlantic and Northeast and across the Midwest.

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More...

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Poll: 83% of Russians support Putin.

Russia’s independent sociological research organization Levada Center’s poll conducted between March 24-30 showed that Russian public’s support for the actions of their president rose by more than 10% compared to the figures in January or February. It was 69% in January and 71% in February. Poll details

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Discarded hopes and dreams.

Poor guy.

2022 04 01 10 12
She said no.

Don’t worry dude.

It happened to me also. But I did elict a ton load of sympathy from all the attractive chicks in the jewlery store when I returned the ring. Don’t you know.

Regime-ology

Regime-ology is a new field of study so the practitioners are still working out the tools and methods for interpreting regime activity. Unlike Kremlinology, on which regime-ology is modeled, the focus is not on a hierarchical structure. The Soviet empire was run by a vertical organization that operated like a corporation. The American empire is a horizontal organization modeled on the Mafia. It is a collection of elite gangster organizations jostling for power within the elite.

With Kremlinology, events could be interpreted as either a signal from the party elite or representing internal party changes. If someone disappeared from the public eye, it meant he had fallen out of favor with the party leaders. If party media reported something hanky about a party member, it was assumed to have been done with the permission of the party leaders to prepare the public for a change. The target was being shaped as a scoundrel so he could be denounced.

Regime-ology is a bit more complicated. If someone disappears for a while, it could mean nothing more than he is having a blood transfusion at one of Google’s secret rejuvenation centers. On the other hand, disparaging information about an oligarch in regime media could simply mean that one mob family is unhappy with another mob family and this is how they are communicating it. Using the media promotes the interests of the gangster class and delivers the message.

That is probably how to interpret the sudden interest by regime media in the famous Hunter Biden laptop from two years ago. For those not interested, this was the laptop that President Biden’s drug-addled son abandoned at a Delaware computer shop, which contained a trove of embarrassing information about the family. In addition to thousands of naked selfies and pics of Hunter smoking crack and meth with prostitutes, it had details of the Biden family criminal dealings.

Regime media dutifully covered this up by declaring it Russian propaganda and going as far as to imply it was a Trump campaign dirty trick. The New York Post, which was the first to report the laptop story, came under withering assault from the Silicon Valley crime families until they dropped the story. Facebook started banning people from their site for mentioning the story. Like the people air brushed from official photos in the Soviet Union, this story was erased from public view.

This is nothing new. The power of regime media is in what they can make the public ignore and this was a typical example. They do this by framing the issue as good guys versus bad guys, which is catnip for the American moralizer. Then they declare the thing to be ignored as the black hat and let the moralizers do the rest. Anyone mentioning the laptop on-line or even in private conversation was declared a crazy QAnon conspiracy theorist by others in their circle.

For no reason at all, the laptop story is back. First the intel community told the New York Times to admit they lied two years ago about it being fake. They did not mention that it was the intel community that lied, of course. Then the Washington Post was told to write about the Biden family’s criminal dealings that were on the laptop. The Post is the official organ of the intelligence community. You will recall that the Post was instrumental in the Russian collusion hoax in 2016.

Even more interesting, the scandal ridden outlet CNN has been given the green light to unleash their nutters on the story. This is a story posted by Dean Obeidallah, a former circus clown and far-left conspiracy theorist. In addition to being a conspiracy hub, CNN is also a popular landing spot for disgraced members of the intel community. Andrew McCabe and Josh Campbell landed there after being forced out of their jobs. The FBI uses CNN to control the Antifa/BLM community.

Taken together, this new interest in the Hunter Biden laptop story suggests the intel community is unhappy with the Biden crime family. It could be a warning shot about the recent rantings by Biden in Poland. This has created huge problems for the foreign policy gangsters running the war with Russia. They have been forced to spend their time telling European leaders that Biden should be ignored. This is not a good look for the Global American Empire in the middle of a crisis.

One way to look at this is that they are preparing the way for Biden to be removed from office this year. The plan was for him to pretend to be in charge through the midterm then hand things off to strong diverse female. Team Biden has been making plans for him to run again in 2024, while he is clearly in rapid decline. The Hunter Biden story could be the leverage to force Team Biden to stick to the deal. He takes the blame for the midterms, retires for health reasons and the laptop disappears.

On the other hand, this could be the start of a plot to hang the Ukraine debacle on Biden and his crooked son. The regime media is being told to sell the Ukraine war as a smashing success, but that can only go on for another month. Reality in the ground says the Russians are slowly grinding up the Ukrainian army. In a month, there will be little of it left in the east. Whether it is by force or by negotiations, the Russians will get the terms they laid out last month.

Then there are the economic sanctions. This is proving to be a disaster for the Global American Empire. The Germans just cut a deal with the Russians to buy gas in rubles, even through both sides are pretending otherwise. The Germans will buy the gas in Euros from Gazprom, which will then convert them immediately into rubles at the agreed upon exchange rate. This is de facto acceptance by Germany that they will buy gas from Russia in rubles. The rest of Europe will now follow.

What we could be seeing here is Afghanistan 2.0. The military industrial complex, the intel community and the foreign policy establishment opposed the withdraw from Afghanistan, but team Biden insisted on it. They let Afghanistan collapse and then let Team Biden take the blame for it. Notice that no one actually responsible in the military, intelligence of foreign policy realm was fired. We could be seeing the same thing afoot with the looming Ukraine disaster.

Again, regime-ology is a new field. We do not know what we do not know, so we are left to our imaginations. Maybe Hunter Biden is so mobbed up that even the thoroughly corrupt FBI has to acknowledge it. Maybe this is a feint to distract from something much worse that is in the wind. All we can know is that Hunter Biden will never be charged and we will never know the truth about the Biden family corruption. In a gangster state like America, those things are handled internally.

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Rufus delivery boy

He does it for country and family. Wow! video 4MB

Nice Chinese Girl

video. This girl reminds me of my sister-in-law. She’s short, thin and busty. Yeah. This is what China is like. 4MB

US Dollar Hegemony Ended Abruptly Last Wednesday

Interview with Margaret Flowers, Clearing the Fog

Margaret Flowers: You’re listening to Clearing the FOG, speaking truth to expose the forces of greed, with Margaret Flowers. And now I turn to my guest, Michael Hudson. Michael is the president of the Institute for the Study of Long-term, Economic Trends, ISLET. He’s a Wall Street financial analyst and a distinguished research professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, in Kansas City. He’s also the author of numerous books and recently updated his book, “Super Imperialism: The economic strategy of American Empire.” Thank you for taking time to speak with me today, Michael.

Michael Hudson: Well, thanks for having me on Margaret.

MF: You’ve talked a lot and written a lot about dollar hegemony and what’s happening now with de-dollarization. Can you start out by explaining to my listeners what dollar hegemony is and how it has benefited the wealthy class in the United States?

MH: Dollar hegemony seems to be the position that has just ended as of this week very abruptly. Dollar hegemony was when America’s war in Vietnam and the military spending of the 1960s and 70s drove the United States off gold. The entire US balance of payments deficit was military spending, and it began to run down the gold supply. So, in 1971, President Nixon took the dollar off gold. Well, everybody thought America has been controlling the world economy since World War I by having most of the gold and by being the creditor to the world. And they thought what is going to happen now that the United States is running a deficit, instead of being a creditor.

Well, what happened was that, as I’ve described in Super Imperialism, when the United States went off gold, foreign central banks didn’t have anything to buy with their dollars that were flowing into their countries – again, mainly from the US military deficit but also from the investment takeovers. And they found that these dollars came in, the only thing they could do would be to recycle them to the United States. And what do central banks hold? They don’t buy property, usually, back then they didn’t. They buy Treasury bonds. And so, the United States would be spending dollars abroad and foreign central banks didn’t really have anything to do but send it right back to buy treasury bonds to finance not only the balance of payments deficit, but also the budget deficit that was largely military in character. So, dollar hegemony was the system where foreign central banks keep their monetary and international savings reserves in dollars and the dollars are used to finance the military bases around the world, almost eight hundred military bases surrounding them. So, basically central banks have to keep their savings by weaponizing them, by militarizing them, by lending them to the United States, to keep spending abroad.

This gave America a free ride. Imagine if you went to the grocery store and you just paid by giving them an IOU. And then the next week you want to buy more groceries and you give them another IOU. And they say, wait a minute, you have an IOU before and you say, well just use the IOU to pay the milk company that delivers, or the farmers that deliver. You can use this as your money and just you’ll as a customer, keep writing IOU’s and you never have to pay anything because your IOU is other people’s money. Well, that’s what dollar hegemony was, and it was a free ride. And it all ended last Wednesday when the United States grabbed Russia’s reserves having grabbed Afghanistan’s foreign reserves and Venezuela’s foreign reserves and those of other countries.

And all of a sudden, this means that other countries can no longer safely hold their reserves by sending their money back, depositing them in US banks or buying US Treasury Securities, or having other US investments because they could simply be grabbed as happened to Russia. So, all of a sudden this last week, you’re seeing the world economy fracture into two parts, a dollarized part and other countries that do not follow the neoliberal policies that the United States insists that its allies follow. We’re seeing the birth of a new dual World economy.

MF: Wow, there’s a lot to unpack there. So, are we seeing then other countries starting to disinvest in US dollars? You’ve written about how the treasury bonds that these central banks buy up have been basically funding our domestic economy. Are they starting to shed those bonds or what’s happening?

MH: No, they haven’t been funding our domestic economy because the Federal Reserve can create its own money to fund the domestic economy. We don’t need to borrow from foreign countries to fund our economy. We can print it ourselves. What the dollar hegemony does is fund the balance of payments deficit. It funds our spending in other economies, our spending abroad. It doesn’t help our economy, but it does help us get a free ride from other countries. The more dollars we spend in making a military base, all these military expenditures get turned over to the local Central Bank that turns and sends them back to the Federal Reserve or deposits them in US bank accounts. So, it’s the international free ride we get, not a domestic free ride.

MF: Okay. So are we seeing countries now, since this past week, starting to move their assets back to repatriate them because I know for Afghanistan, a big problem is that most of the government’s money was outside of the country and that has been used as a weapon against Afghanistan by seizing those assets and not allowing the Central Bank of Afghanistan to have them. Are we starting to see other countries repatriating their money and gold?

MH: Well, figures are only available at the end of each month, reported at the end of each month and then there’s a two-month delay, so we don’t have any idea what’s happening. But I’ve been talking to people all over the world in the last few days and the consensus is that everybody is now deciding the only place, certainly if you’re China or Russia or Kazakhstan or you’re in the Eurasian orbit, South Asia, East Asia, you realize, wait a minute, if all we have to do is something like Allende did in Chile or all we have to do is refuse to sell off our industry to American investors and they can treat us like they’ve treated Venezuela. So you can imagine that everybody’s watching this and there’s an expectation that as a result of the war in Ukraine, that’s really America’s NATO war, that this is going to create a balance-of-payments crisis throughout the whole Global South as their energy prices go up, oil prices soar, food prices are going to soar and this is going to make it impossible for them to pay their foreign debts unless they go without food and energy. Obviously, this is a political crisis. That is, the only result can be to split the world in two.

MF: You’ve been writing about this happening. You’ve written that the de-dollarization has been happening relatively quickly in recent years. So, are we now we’re now just seeing the end result of that? I mean, people said it could happen quickly. Is that exactly what we’re seeing right now?

MH: Yes, and nobody expected that it would happen this quickly. Nobody expected that it would be the United States itself that ends de-dollarization. People thought that, well, most of the sales of my book describing this super imperialism were bought by the Defense Department and they looked at it as a how -to-do-it book. And I was brought down to the White House and the Defense Department to explain to them how imperialism works.

I had expected that maybe China, Russia, and other countries would say, “We don’t want to give America free rides.” And yet it was the United States itself that broke all of this, by grabbing Russia’s reserves right after it grabbed Afghanistan’s and Venezuela’s reserves.

Nothing like this has happened in modern history, even in the 19th century wars. In the Crimean War in the mid-19th century, Russia, England and Germany, everybody kept paying the debts to the countries they were fighting against because the idea is that debts were sacrosanct. And now, all of a sudden, not only are debts are not sacrosanct, but countries can just grab foreign savings. I guess the problem began after the Shah of Iran fell and the United States grabbed Iran’s money and refused to let it pay its bond holders and started the whole war against Iran for trying to take control of its own oil resources. So, all of a sudden, the United States grabbing this has ended what everybody thought was an immutable morality.

MF: So that was in 1979 that the Shah fell in Iran and, and over the last number of decades, the United States has been increasingly using economic warfare against countries through what people call sanctions, but they’re actually, illegal unilateral coercive measures, has that been kind of driving and setting the stage for what is happening today?

MH: Yes, the International Monetary Fund has operated, basically, as an arm of the Defense Department. It’s been bailing out dictatorships, bailing out Ukraine, lending money to countries whose client oligarchies America wants to support, and not lending any money to countries that America doesn’t want to support, like Venezuela. So, its job is basically to promote neoliberal policies, and to insist that other countries balance their payments by undergoing a class war against labor.

The conditionality that the IMF insists upon for foreign borrowing is that countries devalue their currency and lower their wage rates and pass anti-labor legislation. Well, when you lower the currency’s exchange rate, what do you really lower? Food prices are set in dollars internationally, raw materials prices are, and prices for machinery and many goods. The only economic variable devalued is domestic labor (and domestic rents). The IMF has been using this kind of junk-economic free-trade policy as a means of keeping the wage rates in the Global South down. You could say it’s a financialization of an ultimately military conflict to promote neoliberal ideology.

MF: And you mentioned the lowering wages and things like that. And this is actually done because it’s favorable to US investors and US business, right? I mean, the World Bank actually has an index, the cost of doing business index, that helps inform large corporations about laws that countries pass that make them more favorable to businesses to come in.

MH: It’s even worse than that. The central aim of the World Bank is to prevent other countries from growing their own food. That is the prime directive. It will only make loans for countries to earn foreign currency and it has insisted ever since about 1950 that countries that borrow from it must shift their agriculture to plantation export crops to grow tropical crops that cannot be grown in the United States for environmental and weather reasons. And the countries must not grow their own food and must not undertake Land Reform or small family-based farming. So, it insisted on foreign-owned agribusiness in large plantation agriculture. And what that means is that countries that have borrowed for agricultural loans have not been loans to produce their own food. It’s been to compete with each other producing tropical export crops while being increasingly dependent on the United States for their food supplies, and for their grain. And that’s part of the corner they painted them into that is going to be creating such a world famine this summer.

MF: I definitely want to get into that as well as the energy situation and the climate crisis, but before we do that, I just want you to comment quickly on how this has also been driving countries to seek alternatives. The United States removed Russia from the SWIFT system, which is the international mechanism for doing trading and finance. It threatened China if they didn’t denounce what was happening with Russia and Ukraine to kick them out of the SWIFT system. So, this hubris of the United States is also kind of driving countries away to seek other alternatives, right?

MH: That’s the whole point. Well, fortunately they’ve been threatening to kick Russia out of SWIFT for the last two years. And so, Russia and China have been putting in place an alternative system. So, they almost pretty smoothly are shifting over to using their own currency with each other instead of using the dollar. And that’s part of what has ended the dollar standard and ended dollar hegemony.

If the way you have dollar hegemony is to have other countries deposit your money in your banks and handle their oil trade with each other by financing it in dollars, but all of a sudden you grab all their dollars and you don’t let them use US banks to pay for their oil and their trade with each other, then they’re going to shift to a different system. And that’s exactly what has ended the dollar hegemony, as you just pointed out.

MF: So, let’s get a little bit into where things are headed with this new situation, a rapidly changing situation. It may be hard to say what’s happening, but you talked about a food crisis this summer. Can you talk a little bit about more about that and does the conflict in Ukraine feed into that?

MH: Well, as President Putin and Lavrov have said, the fighting in Ukraine isn’t really over Ukraine at all. It’s a fight over what shape the world will take and whether the world will be unipolar or, as it now appears, multipolar. The US, for the last year before it began to escalate attacks on the Russian-speaking Ukraine, was trying to block Europe from, and especially Germany, from buying Russia gas and oil.

There are three pillars of American foreign policy that base American power. The first pillar is the oil industry. That’s the most powerful industry next to banking in the United States. And United States throughout the 20th century, along with Britain and France, have controlled the world oil trade.

That has benefited the United States in two ways. Number one, we are a major oil exporter because we have a big oil and gas industry. But, number two, our US companies control the foreign oil trade. So that if some country, say Chile or Venezuela, does something that the United States doesn’t like, like growing their own food or pursuing a socialist policy, the United States can simply cut off their oil and sanction them. Without oil, they don’t have energy to drive the cars or power their factories or drive their GDP.

So, the American war in Ukraine is really a war against Germany. Russia is not the enemy. Germany and Europe are the enemy and the United States made it very clear. This is a war to lock in our allies so they cannot trade with Russia. They cannot buy Russian oil. They must be dependent on American oil for which they will have to pay three or four times as much. They will have to be dependent on American liquefied natural gas for fertilizer. If they don’t buy American gas for fertilizer, and we don’t let them buy from Russia, then they cannot put fertilizer on the land and the crop yield will fall by about 50% without fertilizer.

So, the, the war in Ukraine was to make Russia look so bad by defending itself against the attacks by the Ukrainian right wing in the Russian-speaking areas that the US has said, look at how bad Russia is. You’ve got to forego buying oil and gas or grain or titanium or palladium or anything else from Russia.

And so, the effect of this war has been to lock the NATO countries into dependency on the United States because the great fear of the United States in the last few years is that as America is de-industrializing, these countries are looking to the part of the world that’s growing, China, Central Asia, Russia, South Asia. And the United States feared losing control of its satellites mainly in NATO, but also in South America. So, it sanctioned and blocked their ability to buy non-US energy. They’re blocking their ability to buy non-US food, blocking their ability to invest in or use their surplus to get prosperous by investing in China, Russia, or Eurasia.

So, this is basically a war of America to lock in its allies. Well, the result is that oil prices, now that you can’t get Russian oil, are going to go way, way up, and that is going to create a crisis for many of the Global South countries that are oil deficit countries. The fertilizer companies in Germany have already been closing down because they say, without Russian gas, we make our fertilizer out of gas, and if we can’t get Russian gas, we can’t produce the fertilizer that. So, world fertilizer prices are going way up.

Russia is the largest grain exporter. And now that grain exports are being blocked by the sanctions, the question is, what are North Africa and the Near East going to do that have been depending very largely on Russian grain exports? Their food prices are going to go way up.

You can imagine just from seeing what’s happening in the United States when gas prices go up here, food prices go up here, not only does it put a squeeze on individual family budgets, but throughout the world, it puts the squeeze on the balance of payments of other countries. And so, they’re desperate. How are they going to pay the higher prices unless they borrow even more money from US banks? And of course, that’s another arm of US policy. The US banks hope to make a killing in making loans at rising interest rates to third world countries.

And of course, arms exports. NATO in the last few days has agreed to make American arms exports to increase their purchase of arms. So, the stock market has been soaring in the last few days. They say this, the world famine, the world crisis is a bonanza for Wall Street. The oil company stocks are going way up, the military, industrial stocks, Boeing Raytheon way up, the bank stocks. This is America’s great power grab, and it realizes, when it can create a crisis and tell the Global South or poor countries your money or your life. This is how most of the great property grabs and conquests have been made throughout history.

MF: And just this week at the NATO meetings, President Biden basically said food prices are going to go up in the United States and Europe as a result of what’s happening. And that’s just the price we have to pay.

MH: Well, what he should have said, this is the price they have to pay us. That’s how the stock market took it. When he said this is the price we have to pay, this is the price consumers have to pay to the American oil companies, to the American Agricultural food distribution companies. It’s the price other countries have to pay to the United States.

This is to say to the rest of the world, you know, we’ve got you completely, I don’t know how to put it, what phrase to use, but you don’t have any choice, your money or your life. We’ve got you trapped. And he’s crowing over the fact that this resulting inflation is exactly what was intended by the war in Ukraine that has led to the isolation of Russia and other countries following a non-US policy.

MF: But more and more countries in Latin America, in Africa, are turning to countries like China for partnerships, for investment. Do you see a point coming where there is just this real shunning of the United States and turning to these alternatives?

MH: That is exactly what’s going to happen. What’s going to happen is, China’s investment is very different from US investment. US and European investment will give financial investments to countries at interest that the whole country is liable for to repay. China’s investment is taking place by means of the Belt and Road Initiative and direct capital investment in developing ports, infrastructure and railways. And instead of having a general financial claim against these countries, China has an equity claim, a property claim backed by the physical means of production that it puts in place.

Well, this summer, when countries say they cannot afford to pay their foreign debts, the United States has as a backup plan, okay, let’s write down everybody’s debts, government debts, to each other so that governments can pay the private bond holders and the banks. And they’re going to try to, essentially the US will forgive its debts so that Latin America can pay Chase Manhattan Bank and Citibank and the bondholders. And China is going to say, wait a minute, we don’t have any financial claim against these countries. We didn’t lend them dollars. We didn’t lend them our foreign currency at all. We built assets there and the assets are still in place. There’s no problem there.

So, the question is, whose debts are going to be written down to whom? And all of this is going to lead to, as you can imagine, destabilization. The United States is probably going to try to push regime change on countries that try to trade with China as it’s already threatened China with. And the more sanctions the United States imposes on Latin America, Africa and the Near East and South Asia, they will be creating a crisis, but the crisis will lead the rest of the world to treat the United States in the same way that Russia and China are treating the United States as just the enemy threatening the entire world with their neoliberal power grab. So, the United States in a way is isolating itself from the rest of the world by declaring war on it.

MF: And I think that’s not going to be good for us here at home in the United States. You’ve talked about the way that the current economy has been structured. You’ve also raised a lot of concern about the climate crisis. And of course, we have the recent IPCC report basically saying that we’re way behind in taking action to even adapt to the climate crisis or the warming that we’re going to be experiencing. So now in this new situation, how do you see that impacting the climate crisis?

MH: Here’s what Biden said, in effect: “We’re way behind in the pace of global warming.” American policy is based on increasing and accelerating global warming. That has been a central point of US policy ever since I joined the Hudson Institute in the 1970s. The United States is opposing any attempt at trying to prevent global warming because you can imagine what would happen if other countries go to solar energy and renewable energy. That will reduce their dependency on the US oil industry. If you look at American policy, it is being run basically by the oil industry to establish dependence of other countries on oil. Then obviously the last thing the United States is ever going to do is prevent global warming. So, if we’re behind in global warming, it’s that the sea level is not rising fast enough. The world is not getting hot fast enough not to lock in foreign reliance on America’s oil.

And I think you’ve seen what in the last few weeks, what President Biden has said, the fuel of the future is coal and oil. Right now, he’s in Poland. I think he’s suggesting that Polish coal, which is one of its major products, should be used in Europe instead of Russian gas. So, American foreign policy is based on the accelerated use of coal and oil, not renewable energy.

Now, that’s why I think the environmental movement should become an anti-war movement and the movement against this neoliberal dollar hegemony. You’re not going to avoid global warming unless you stop the dominance of American foreign policy by the oil industry.

MF: I think we’ve been seeing that shift over the last few years where the climate movement is starting to understand we can’t address this crisis without addressing the US military. So just in the last minutes that I have with you, what do you have to say to the listeners about where this is going for us materially as people living in the United States, a country that has been showing itself to be a failing state? The Covid-19 pandemic, I think, has really exposed that in so many ways, the financial insecurity that people are facing, housing, education, health care, all of the failures of the government to meet the basic needs of the people. How do you think that’s going to change with this new situation?

MH: Well, the United States has been getting a free ride internationally. So, much of the prosperity here has been the result of our not having to pay for our own military spending, not having to pay for many of the foreign investments that we’ve got that supply the US with low priced foreign raw materials. All that is being ended by President Biden’s policy, which, of course, the Republicans support just as much as the Democrats.

So, there’s really a political movement that is ending up impoverishing, I’d say, 99% of Americans. While the Federal Reserve saves the stock and bond market for the 1%, there’s going to be a huge squeeze that’s going to force, I think, most American families into debt leading to probably a close down of a lot of businesses just as you had the Covid crisis closing down a lot of businesses. You’re going to have the rising fuel prices, the rising food prices utterly force families into default and an inability to be self-supporting without either running into debt or selling their homes and becoming renters.

MF: And that’s a whole other problem with the buying up of the housing in the United States by these investment corporations so that they can then control those rent prices. It sounds like difficult days are ahead.

MH: Yes. Well, and nobody can really ,it’s really Uncharted Territory because nobody thought there was an alternative. The economic view was as Margaret Thatcher said, “There is no alternative.” Well, now, America’s forced the world to find its own alternative.

MF: Well, thank you for sharing that wisdom with me. I encourage people to continue to follow you and read your books and follow your writing. Where’s the best place to find you?

MH: I have a website: Michael-Hudson.com. And I’m on Patreon. I post my articles on the website and on Patreon.

MF: Well, thank you so much for taking time to speak with me today, and for the important work that you’re doing.

MH: Well, I’m awfully glad we had to talk about this, Margaret.

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Crushed ideas and hopes

It happens to the best made plans of mice and men.

2022 04 01 10 e12
It is not going to happen.

The ISS Space Station

A highly anticipated change of command ceremony between the United States and Russia has taken place on the International Space Station.
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Despite mounting tensions between the two countries, NASA has repeatedly reaffirmed that it continues to work closely with Russian space agency Roscosmos.
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Eyes have been on the ISS since war broke out in Ukraine but tensions on the earth did not reach into space.
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Russian cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov in his handover address affirmed those on the space station were “one crew”.
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“I think ISS is like (a) symbol of the friendship and cooperations and like symbol of future of exploration of space,” he said.

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More...

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The Media Is The Number One Cause Of War Since 1898

In 1895, a 32-year old entrepreneur in New York City bought a failing newspaper and hatched a bold plan to turn it around.

The newspaper industry was cutthroat, especially in New York. There were at least 16 other daily newspapers in circulation, and there was fierce competition for readers’ attention.

But the young entrepreneur had an idea: thrill readers with tales of death, destruction, and brutality in the Cuban War for Independence against Spain.

Cuba was a Spanish colony at the time, but revolutionary forces had been fighting for independence for several years. Few people in the US really cared about Cuba. But the new publisher vowed to make them care.

His name was William Randolph Hearst. And his paper, the New York Morning Journal, constantly thrust Cuba in his readers’ faces.

Their stories were full-blown sensationalism. By early 1898, Hearst’s Journal was printing outright fabrications of atrocities committed by Spanish troops in Cuba, in an effort to whip up public support for the United States to join the war.

The government played along. While ‘war crimes’ did not yet exist, US President William McKinley escalated tensions by accusing Spain of atrocities, saying in a speech that “the civilized code of warfare has been disregarded.”

Then, on February 15, 1898, a US naval vessel known as the Maine exploded and sank in Havana Harbor off the coast of Cuba. 268 sailors died.

Several investigations were conducted, and to this day there is still nothing conclusive explaining how the explosion took place. It’s entirely possible that the explosion was caused by the Maine’s on-board fuel.

But Hearst (along with many other papers) jumped to publish stories claiming the Maine was sunk by a Spanish torpedo, and they continued agitating for the US to join the war.

Thanks to the effective media propaganda, most Americans were in favor of war. The newspapers had cast Spain as the evil aggressor, and its commanding general, Valeriano Weyler, was routinely called a “butcher”.

The newspapers told Americans that the fight against Spain was a necessary one… that it was a matter of moral righteousness— a crusade of good against evil.

They finally got their wish in April 1898 when the Spanish-American War broke out.

There are a lot of similarities with the media today.

The level of trust in the media is already laughably low. There was the obvious Hunter Biden laptop coverup, which most mainstream media refused to even mention during the US Presidential election in 2020.

Then there were the outright lies in the Russia collusion hoax, for which the New York Times was even awarded the ‘esteemed’ Pulitzer Prize.

(Coincidentally, the Pulitzer is named after Joseph Pulitzer, a newspaper publisher who also fabricated lies in the late 1800s and agitated for war against Spain.)

Then there’s the case of Biden appointee Tracy Stone-Manning, who was nominated last year to head up the federal government’s Bureau of Land Management.

Stone-Manning is a former eco-terrorist who participated in violent campaigns against forestry workers in her youth.

This isn’t some wild conspiracy theory; Stone-Manning has admitted to wrongdoing, including sending violent threats to the US federal Forestry Service. She ultimately avoided prosecution and saved herself by ratting out her associates.

But a recent Freedom of Information Act request revealed that NBC News colluded with the Biden Administration to go easy on Tracy Stone-Manning during her confirmation hearing, and whitewash over her terrorist history.

This is pretty incredible…

Think about the media circus a few years ago when US Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was accused of sexually assaulting someone when he was a teenager.

There was no promise from NBC News (and other mainstream propagandists) to go easy on the allegations against Justice Kavanaugh that went back 30+ years.

Instead, they smeared his name and deemed him guilty.

It’s also noteworthy that, during Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing, several protestors stormed the Capital and physically accosted United States Senators in order to prevent the Constitutional voting process from occurring.

Yet NBC News declined to label those protestors ‘domestic terrorists’, or to claim that democracy was ‘under attack’ because they had criminally trespassed into the Capitol.

This is the same media which acted as the government mouthpiece during COVID, justifying  the public health dictatorship that took over the world.

This is the same media which watched cities burn in 2020 and said the protests were “mostly peaceful”.

And, yes, this is the same media that has routinely pushed America into war. It wasn’t just Spain in 1898.

The United States joined the Vietnam War based on a Gulf of Tonkin skirmish with the North Vietnamese which never actually occurred. But the Johnson administration and intelligence sources said it happened, so the media reported it as fact.

Then there were those supposed Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, which the media dutifully reported without question and helped push the US into war back in 2003.

Today many in the media are calling for an escalation against Russia. They want a no-fly zone. They cheer the President’s dementia-ridden foreign policy and praise him for impromptu comments that only escalate tensions.

Most of all, they force feed the war in Ukraine, 24/7, as if that’s supposed to be our #1 priority.

Forget about the economy, rising prices, and supply chain dysfunction… and forget about conflict anywhere else in the world. We’re only allowed to care about Ukraine and Putin.

Historically speaking, it is not far-fetched to think the media could help push the world into a major war… and one with potential nuclear ramifications.

It’s not inevitable, but we are closer today than any other time since at least 1962— and certainly closer than even a week ago.

That’s why it is more important than ever to be prepared for whatever the world has in store for us.

And that means crafting a rock solid Plan B to make sure you can respond from a position of strength, whatever crisis comes next.

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Simon Black

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Nice Chinese Girl

video. She’s a personal favorite. I love that dress, by the way. Who would figure that mustard would be a good color? 4MB

US accuses China of ‘choking’ Taiwan

Washington’s top diplomat in Taipei attacks Beijing for “destabilizing” the region and threatening “all democracies”

The head of the de facto US embassy in Taiwan has accused China of “provocative” military moves near the island. Sandra Oudkirk claimed that Beijing has undermined regional peace while vowing to “strengthen” security ties with Taipei.

Oudkirk – who directs the American Institute in Taiwan, the unofficial US embassy – castigated Beijing during a speech at the local American Chamber of Commerce, on Wednesday, singling out its policies toward Taipei.

“The [People’s Republic of China’s] increasingly aggressive behavior is nowhere more evident than in relation to Taiwan, where the PRC has continued to exert military, diplomatic, and economic pressure,” she said, adding that “provocative military activities” near Taiwan are “destabilizing, risk miscalculation, and undermine regional peace and stability.”

Continued efforts by Beijing to choke Taiwan’s international space, pressure its friends, and interfere in Taiwan’s democratic system represent a threat to all democracies.

With Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen in attendance at the event, Oudkirk went on to voice “deep concerns” over “China’s alignment with Russia” following Moscow’s attack on Ukraine, appearing to draw parallels between the conflict in Eastern Europe and tensions between Taiwan and the mainland.

“China is already on the wrong side of history when it comes to Ukraine and the aggression being committed by Russia,” she said, echoing previous comments from Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

Though US officials have pressured Beijing to sever its ties with Russia and join a punitive sanctions campaign, China has so far refused to budge, maintaining a neutral stance toward the conflict while urging for diplomacy and an end to the fighting.

Oudkirk said Washington would continue to “strengthen Taiwan’s role as a regional security partner” – part of the Joe Biden administration’s increased outreach to the island. Late last year, the president declared that the US is “committed” to defending Taiwan from any potential Chinese attack, in what appeared to be a break with a long-standing policy of ‘strategic ambiguity.’ White House officials soon walked back his comments, however.

The United States has also approved a number of arms sales to Taiwan in recent months, and continues to sail warships through the contested Taiwan Strait on a near-monthly basis despite repeated warnings from Beijing to stay out of its “internal affairs.” China considers Taiwan to be its sovereign territory, though the island has long been self-governed and refers to itself as the Republic of China.

Founded as a non-profit corporation, the American Institute in Taiwan now serves as the informal US embassy and has received most of its funding from the State Department since the United States ended diplomatic recognition of Taipei with the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979. Currently, only a handful of nations recognize Taiwan as a sovereign country, among them Guatemala, Honduras, Haiti and the Vatican City.

How America is viewed by the rest of the world

pay attention. This is what the next 100 years will be like… video 6MB

TRAPPED!!! AMERICAN AND UK MILITARY “ADVISORS”, PLUS FRANCE INTEL OPERATIVES WITH AZOV NAZIS IN MARIUPOL – NOW TRAPPED BY RUSSIAN FORCES

At present, whatever remains of Ukrainian Army AZOV Regiment (the Actual NAZI Regiment) is holed-up inside the vast Azovstal Industrial Area  in Mariupol, Ukraine. The group totaling 20 — of US and UK military advisors as well as several Ukrainian SBU (secret police) advisors—is holed up, together with Azov fighters.

Despite being offered several prior chances to evacuate Mariupol, they chose to stay.  Now, they are too late to evacuate as Russian forces pummel that area to De-Nazify it.

Overnight, Ukraine sent two military helicopters to Mariupol to try to rescue the trapped US, UK, and Ukrainian Secret Police persons.   Both those helicopters landed without incident, but when they took off, both were SHOT DOWN.

One of those helicopters had 17 aboard, 15 of whom died when the chopper was hit and crashed into the earth.  The two survivors have been taken prisoner by Russian forces.

The second helicopter was hit several kilometers off the coast of Mariupol, and fell into the Sea of Azov.  Rescue craft were sent, but no word yet on finding anything or anyone in the water.

One of the Mi-8 helicopters was shot down by . . . . . . . An American STINGER anti-aircraft, man-launched missile, supplied to Ukraine by the United States and later captured from the Ukrainian forces by Russian forces.

MORE!

From the helicopter that crashed into the earth, COVERT INTEL SOURCES now tell me,  the bodies of two French Intelligence operatives, allegedly with DGSE credentials, were also said to have been recovered.

If true, this would explain French President Macron’s desperate attempts to have a French-led evacuation out of Mariupol last week!  Macron’s requests to Putin were declined.  If French Intelligence Agents were embedded with AZOV NAZI troops, then this is a massive PR problem for both France and for NATO.

HAL TURNER EDITORIAL OPINION

At some point, the presence of foreign military “Advisors” and foreign Intelligence “operatives” is going to transform this from a Ukraine-Russia conflict, to a NATO-Russia conflict.  Once that threshold is officially crossed (and it is solely up to Russia to decide) then war is upon us all.

A bunch of US and British military men being present right on the front line would confirm not only how intricately involved with Azov the NATO countries are, but the fact that Ukraine is a US puppet state being used to wage a proxy war on Russia.

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Grandma’s Favorite Cabbage Rolls

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Cabbage Rolls

No one knows good old-fashioned home cooking like Grandma, which is why this recipe for cabbage rolls is one of the best there is, period. Made with ground beef, onion, white rice and seasonings, Grandma’s Favorite Cabbage Rolls are sure to make your mouth water.

Top ’em off with a homemade sauce of tomato, brown sugar, lemon juice and Worcestershire sauce and you’ll have yourself a winning dinner the whole family will love.

Even the pickiest of eaters will gobble up these delicious old fashioned cabbage rolls! Plus, this recipe is a favorite of Grandma’s because it only costs a few dollars to make. It’s one of our favorite budget-friendly recipes, and we think it will be one of yours, too.

INGREDIENTS

2 cups white rice, cooked
1 12 lbs raw ground sirloin or 1 1/2 lbs ground round
1 onion, diced
2 garlic cloves, minced
2 raw eggs
1 (15 ounce) can tomato sauce
Sauce to pour over rolls
4 (15 ounce) cans tomato sauce tomatoes, diced
2 tablespoons brown sugar 
 tomato juice (optional)
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  • Core head of cabbage by cutting around the core and removing as much as possible. Boil large pot of water (fill pot only 1/4 or 1/2 full — when boiling put cabbage into water and cover with top. Leave cabbage in water and every so often as leaves loosen up remove leaves and place in collander in sink to cool — when all leaves are removed turn off water and throw away — (if you have any little pieces of cabbage left at end of core, you can save them to place on top of leaves if you would like.
  • In a large bowl mix cooked rice, ground meat, onion, garlic, raw eggs 1/2 can tomato sauce and oregano and a little pinch of kosher salt. Mix well with your hands –.
  • Spray 9 X 13 inch pans with Pam. Take cabbage leaves and fill with 1/4 to 1/2 cup meat mixture (depending on how big hour leaves are). Place with seam side down in pans — Turn oven on 350 degrees. Make up sauce (depending on how many rolls you get from your cabbage and how much sauce you want,you can use between 4 to 6 cans of diced or stewed tomatoes for your sauce), if you like cabbage rolls to have more sauce, you can add a little tomato juice to your sauce. Pour sauce over top of rolls. Sprinkle with kosher salt over top of rolls.
  • Bake uncovered to 2 1/2 hours or until browned on top, you may need to add a tomato juice to them once in a while so they do not dry out –.
  • Freezes well.

Vaccine Schedule for the United States

Interesting.

Covid Vaccine schedule for children kids
Covid Vaccine schedule for American children

Fine Chinese Girl

Here’s yet another fine Chinese woman. They are all over China, don’t you know. Of course, if you believe the Western narrative, China has no girls or women. They have been all killed as the result of the one-baby policy. LOL. Only an idiot would believe that bullshit. What bullshit are you believing out of the American / UK “news” today? Eh? Video 2MB

China warns of ‘worst consequences’ over Taiwan

Beijing says nothing will stand in the way of “national reunification” with Taipei

China has warned that no foreign powers or militaries will succeed in interfering with Taiwan, cautioning that any country attempting to offer military support to Taipei will face “consequences.”

“The Taiwan question is a purely internal affair of China,” Defense Ministry spokesman Senior Colonel Tan Kefei told reporters on Friday.

“No one and no force can stop” Beijing from a “complete national reunification” with Taiwan, Tan said, adding that anyone who tries to do so, “will suffer the worst consequences in the end.” 

Tan said the Chinese military stood ready to thwart any outside interference on the matter. His statement came days after Australia’s defense minister, Peter Dutton, argued that it would be “inconceivable” for Canberra not to join with the US should Washington decide to defend Taiwan.

Kiev claims NATO will defend arms convoys to Ukraine against Russia

Dutton later softened his language, saying on Sunday that the Australian response would be based on “our country’s best interests.”

Last month, Australia accused a Chinese warship of pointing a laser at one of its surveillance planes. Beijing said the allegation was “false.” 

While the government in Beijing insists Taiwan is part of China’s territory, the US has typically taken a non-committal position, unofficially supporting Taiwanese independence and supplying weapons to Taipei, while at the same time acknowledging China’s claim to the island.

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Fair Warning

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The Bodyguard of Lies

Here’s the official U.S. narrative as echoed by the mainstream media: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was unprovoked, Putin’s three-day blitzkrieg of Kyiv has failed, Russian forces are bogged down and valiant Ukrainian troops are putting up a powerful defense and regaining lost ground with the help of weapons from NATO.

In this version, President Zelenskyy is the new Churchill rallying patriots against an evil dictator. All of that is either entirely or mostly false.

Here’s the real story: Russia’s invasion is the end result of 14 years of provocation by the West, including repeated declarations that Ukraine will join NATO and a U.S.-backed coup d’état in 2014 that displaced a pro-Russian president.

Russia never planned a blitzkrieg on Kyiv. That’s a Western invention intended to make Putin look like a failure. In fact, Russia is slowly and methodically taking territory in the south and east of Ukraine in order to control the seacoasts, eliminate pro-fascist elements in Mariupol and establish pro-Russian autonomous zones in Donbas.

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Full Article

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Rufus kitty cat

This cat knows what family and community are. Do you? video 1MB

Ukraine Military Update

here is a breakdown of what is going on according to Scott Ritter:

1/ Big Arrow War—a primer. For all those scratching their heads in confusion, or dusting off their dress uniforms for the Ukrainian victory parade in Kiev, over the news about Russia’s “strategic shift”, you might want to re-familiarize yourself with basic military concepts.

2/ Maneuver warfare is a good place to start. Understand Russia started its “special military operation” with a severe manpower deficit—200,000 attackers to some 600,000 defenders (or more). Classic attritional conflict was never an option. Russian victory required maneuver.

3/ Maneuver war is more psychological than physical and focuses more on the operational than on the tactical level. Maneuver is relational movement—how you deploy and move your forces in relation to your opponent. Russian maneuver in the first phase of its operation support this.

4/ The Russians needed to shape the battlefield to their advantage. In order to do this, they needed to control how Ukraine employed it’s numerically superior forces, while distributing their own smaller combat power to best accomplish this objective.

5/ Land Bridge. Strategically, to facilitate the ability to maneuver between the southern, central, and northern fronts, Russia needed to secure a land bridge between Crimea and Russia. The seizure of the coastal city of Mariupol was critical to this effort. Russia has accomplished this task.

6/ Control. While this complex operation unfolded, Russia needed to keep Ukraine from maneuvering its numerically superior forces in a manner that disrupted the Mariupol operation. This entailed the use of several strategic supporting operations—feints, fixing operations, and deep attack.

7/ Feint warfare. The concept of a feint is simple—a military force either is seen as preparing to attack a given location, or actually conducts an attack, for the purpose of deceiving an opponent into committing resources in response to the perceived or actual actions.

8/ Example of use. The use of the feint played a major role in Desert Storm, where Marine Amphibious forces threatened the Kuwaiti coast, forcing Iraq to defend against an attack that never came, and where the 1st Cavalry Division actually attacked Wadi Al Batin to pin down the Republican Guard.

9/ Ukraine use of a feint. The Russians made extensive use of the feint in Ukraine, with Amphibious forces off Odessa freezing Ukrainian forces there, and a major feint attack toward Kiev compelling Ukraine to reinforce their forces there. Ukraine was never able to reinforce their forces in the east.

10/ Fixing operations were also critical. Ukraine had assembled some 60,000-100,000 troops in the east, opposite Donbas. Russia carried out a broad fixing attack designed to keep these forces fully engaged and unable to maneuver in respect to other Russian operations.

11/ History. During Desert Storm, two Marine Divisions were ordered to carry out similar fixing attacks against Iraqi forces deployed along the Kuwaiti-Saudi border, tying down significant numbers of men and material that could not be used to counter the main US attack out west.

12/ Pinned Down. The Russian fixing attack pinned the main Ukrainian concentration of forces in the east, and drove them away from Mariupol, which was invested and reduced. Supporting operations out of Crimea against Kherson expanded the Russian land bridge. This phase is now complete.

13/ Strategic Deep Attacks. Russia also engaged in a campaign of strategic deep attack designed to disrupt and destroy Ukrainian logistics, command & control, and air power and long-range fire support. Ukraine is running out of fuel and ammo, cannot coordinate maneuver, and has no meaningful Air Force.

14/ Redeployments. Russia is redeploying some of its premier units from where they had been engaged in feint operations in northern Kiev to where they can support the next phase of the operation, namely the liberation of the Donbas and the destruction of the main Ukrainian force in the east.

15/ This is classic maneuver warfare. Russia will now hold Ukraine in the north and south while its main forces, reinforced by the northern units, Marines, and forces freed up by the capture of Mariupol, seek to envelope and destroy 60,000 Ukrainian forces in the east.

16/ This is Big Arrow War at its finest, something Americans used to know but forgot in the deserts and mountains of Afghanistan and Iraq. It also explains how 200,000 Russians have been able to defeat 600,000 Ukrainians. Thus ends the primer on maneuver warfare, Russian style.

Rufus Kind action

When the time comes, what are you going to do? Be a spectator, or take action. Your actions determine your sentience. Service-to-yourself, or service-for-others. And please don’t be a NPC service-to-another.  Your actions, in this life, are a reflection of who you are. It’s binary. White or black. There is no gray area. video 3MB

Chinese community in action

This would never happen in the United States. In the USA, most people whould be inside their cars watching on as spectators. Maybe taking videos. With some slamming on their horns making noises. video 3MB

Rufus Immediate action

You don’t know when there will be a calling, but it will happen. Are your ready for it? Or will you pretend that nothing is going on? Will you sit by passively and allow others to become service-to-others sentience, while you are firmly and affixed as a service-to-self selfish, alone, greedy and “independent” asshole? video 9MB

How a Rufus Community Operates

Everyone in the community works together as one organism. If they “feel” something is wrong, they talk to others, they investigate, and they get help. In this case, we have gas station attendents, bus drivers, and construction workers working with the polcie to prevent a child abduction. video 14MB

Rufus reminder

When the world is treating others unkindly, it is YOUR RESPONSIBILITY to reset things. Do not wait for others to take action. Do not wait for the police, fire or medical care to come. Do not wait for others, or watch while doing nothing. You were not born to be a spectator. You were born to be a participant. So act the part. God damn it! video 13MB

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Scene From By Dawns Early Light – HBO – Nuclear War – World War 3 Movie

An end of the world movie that involves nuclear launches. This is a 30-minute segment, and it is chilling how much it matches what is going on RIGHT NOW.

Do you want more?

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

New Beginnings 3

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A glimpse at the post-American world

You know, all these actions by the United States against China, and Against Russia remind me of this following meme…

Here is a reprint of a translated Russian article regarding the collapse of the United States, and the dragging of it’s client “Western nations” into the black hole with it.

And the USA is actually collapsing.

Actually.

In fact, it has collapsed quite a bit, but it still has a long way to go yet. It will not be over until a new nation rises like a phoenix from the ashes of the former.

It’s a good read, though I had to conduct some serious editing to make it readable for English native readers.

I do hope that you enjoy it.

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

Post-American world

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Rostislav Ishchenko develops his theme first posted here: Russian World as a global project into global multipolarity and covers why and how the West ran into a dead end, and where the multipolar situation may lead.

Please note it is a machine translation with some human assistance, and it is not a perfect document.  It however makes his points clear enough, for the discussion on this massive global change.

Today we are in a unique situation – for the first time in the history of mankind, a global empire is breaking up.

Humanity is constantly living in an era of decay. At the same time, humanity is constantly living in an era of centralization.

The dialectic of history works simply: the centers of disintegration and centralization are constantly changing places both horizontally (some states are weakening, others are strengthening) and vertically (against the background of a weakening center, power in the shires is always strengthening, and the weakness of the regions leads to the strengthening of the center).

The art of leading a state is to correctly determine its internal and external state.

Accordingly, you need to move the control center of gravity from the regional level to the central level and back.

In the field of foreign policy, in an era of weakness, try not to be too active in order to suffer as few losses as possible (and it is better not to lose anything at all), while at the time of strength, try to carefully acquire additional resources.

Depending on the era, this resource can be nominated in terms of land, people, industrial power, market access, ideological leadership, information superiority, and other resources.

As a rule, several interrelated factors from among the above play an important role.

The Empire of the Collective West

Today we are in a unique situation. This has never happened before in the history of mankind.

For the first time, a global empire is breaking up.

We used to call it the American world, because after the collapse of the USSR, the United States remained the only superpower for twenty or twenty – five years (who thinks so) and became a symbol of Western dominance.

But in reality, it was the empire of the collective West.

The United States did not share the profits made by robbing the rest of humanity with Canada and Australia, New Zealand and South Korea, Japan and the EU out of a love of art or an innate desire for charity. It’s just that without the support of these vassal regimes, Washington was unable to manage the globalized world.

And, as has been known since classical feudalism, the vassal owes the master exactly the same amount as the master owes the vassal.

If a prince or duke does not dress his retinue luxuriously, does not provide it with expensive horses and weapons, does not feed it to the brim and does not drink it to the point of drunkenness, then the retinue has every right to abandon such a leader and look for a new master (the right to leave).

In politics, these relations are expressed in a change of allies.

For example, when the USSR could no longer provide Eastern Europe with an influx of additional resources (at the expense of its own population) The ATS and COMECON instantly disappeared in time and space, and their yesterday’s members lined up in NATO and the EU.

Next in line were the Union republics, which fled the Union in full confidence that they were feeding Russia and would live better on their own.

At the same time, the republics did not really think about any independence either. They took the queue “to the West” for Eastern Europeans, fully confident that they only need to join the EU and NATO and everything will be like in the USSR, only even more satisfying and better.

Some managed to join, some did not, but everyone was disappointed.

And not at all because, as some think, the West did not want to feed freeloaders.

The EU and the US were well aware of their responsibilities to their vassal countries, and they also understood that spending on their “weapons, horses, clothing, food and drink” would pay off by strengthening Western dominance around the world.

The annexation of Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet states (except for Russia and the Asian republics) was supposed to significantly improve the geopolitical position of the West, strengthen its military capabilities and make its political and economic dictates insurmountable.

When the West overestimated its strength

At first, it worked that way.

The costs of maintaining Poland and demonstrating the success of the Baltic Tigers were more than repaid by predatory exploitation of Russia.

 (in the 1990s, the West established direct or indirect control over most of Russia’s resources through local oligarchs) and outright piracy in the rest of the world (Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, and after it Serbia).

Economically booming, China was unable to stand up to the collective West militarily. Russia seemed completely destroyed and only temporarily preserved the appearance of unity. At this point, the West overestimated its strength.

In any society, there are always different groups that see the purpose and meaning of existence and the direction of development of the corresponding society in different ways. And as long as there is an obvious external danger, these groups reject internal contradictions, rallying against the external enemy. If, for some reason, the authorities lose the ability to reconcile and balance internal contradictions, a catastrophe of the 1917 model occurs.

In the 1990s, the collective West believed in the “end of history”, that the world is forever Westernized, that the roles of governors and governed are assigned to different countries forever.

Being in a state of euphoria, the Western left liberals launched an ideological offensive not only on the external front, but also on the internal one, trying to make their “tolerant new world” mandatory for everyone, not only in the conquered countries, but also among those who, in their opinion, “won the Third world war (cold war).”

As long as the leftists did not dig in, the resistance to their expansion in Western society was provided by certain marginal groups of conservatives, who were branded fascists by the” new left”.

Broad strata of Western society were virtually untouched by the confrontation between these groups until the mid-noughties of the third millennium.

Moreover, the main ideological expansion of the West was aimed at the development of “conquered territories”.

It was there that the most “advanced” “public organizations” were created, spreading the propaganda of equality of norm and perversion to Western grants, even the advantages of perversion over the norm, because it “suffered for a long time”.

There, on the” new lands”, the” Soros funds ” and their many similarities worked. And left-liberal ideas, having fallen into the post-communist ideological void accustomed to the presence of a” leading and guiding ” people, were in the greatest demand. The additional appeal of these ideas was given by the fact that their local adherents, due to the support of Western funds, instantly became super-successful people against the background of the rapidly impoverished (in the 1990s) post-Soviet society.

It is difficult to say how all this would have ended if the West had had the wit and patience to wait, not to immediately cut the post-Soviet “chicken”, but to give the liberals the opportunity to demonstrate at least some success.

Then it was inexpensive.

But, having invested in a thin layer of people temporarily in power, the West decided that all the problems were solved.

The elites will cope with educating the masses.

And it was seriously mistaken.

Split in the Western family

I don’t know if Russia and China would have had a chance to stand up to the united West, which by the end of the 1990s was totally superior to them in all indicators, except for Chinese industrial growth (but it is not enough to grow quickly, you need to have time to grow), if the expansion of Western neolithic ideas would have remained exclusively external.

But the left-wing liberals, sensing that they had significantly strengthened their positions due to external expansion, launched an offensive against conservatives inside the West.

This was the beginning of the end, for” Every kingdom divided against itself will become desolate; and every city or house divided against itself will not stand ” (Matthew 12: 25).

The West faced several divisions at once. First, there were divisions between conservatives and liberals within each individual country. Second, there is a split between conservative Eastern Europe and liberal Western Europe within the EU. Third, a split has emerged between the European bureaucracy and national Governments.

Moreover, since the European bureaucracy came out from radical left-liberal positions, in the fight against it, even liberal national governments were forced to seek the support of conservatives, which weakened the position of liberals in each individual country.

An increasing amount of Western resources began to be directed not to maintain the hegemony of the West, but to the internal struggle of liberals for an ideological monopoly.

The West has lost the ability to control planetary processes, but, being in euphoria, on the wave of success, it did not immediately notice this.

When it noticed, it was too late.

The divided Western society could no longer unite and was increasingly slipping into a state of cold, and then almost hot, civil war.

The struggle between liberals and conservatives, like any struggle of roughly equal forces, began to devour almost all available resources, and the West began to feel resource hunger.

Since the opportunity to pay off the resource shortage at the expense of Russia and/or China was lost (the West thought it was temporary, but in fact it turned out to be forever), cannibalism had to be engaged: the stronger countries of the West began to redirect resources that had previously been used to support weaker and poorer countries in their favor.

Immediately, the internal split deepened.

In Europe, in addition to the division into West and East, there was a problem of “rich North” and “poor South”. These two parts of the EU had different views not only on the prospects of economic and financial policy of the European Union, but also set different foreign policy goals for themselves.

Divisions between the US and the EU, the US and Israel, the US and Turkey, Turkey and Israel, Israel and the EU, and the EU and Turkey have emerged and begun to deepen.

Washington’s position began to weaken even in the traditionally loyal monarchies of the Arabian Peninsula.

Political laws are inexorable

The West is still trying to present a united front.

In particular, the United States is forming an all-Western coalition against China and is trying to bind Russia’s forces in the European direction by forming a single pan-European anti-Russian front.

In the statements of government officials, on the paper of signed agreements and according to the estimates of expert offices funded from Western budgets, it seems to work, but not so much in terms of the self-perception of the population of Western countries, which the press is increasingly forced to reflect with minimal objectivity.

The collective West still retains a sense of civilizational unity, but in the face of growing resource scarcity, this cannot help it in any way.

Still, the strong, in order to survive, is forced to withdraw resources from the weak.

At the same time, even if the weak does not rebel, but allows themselves to be robbed to the end, the weakening of the West will progress at an increasing pace.

On the example of Ukraine, Moldova, Bulgaria, and the former “Baltic tigers”, we see that sooner or later there comes a time when the robbed statehood loses the ability to support itself.

Starting from this period, it is necessary either to pump additional resources into it just for the sake of preserving it, or to accept that it will de facto disappear, first as an economic unit, and then as a political one, which will reduce the amount of available resources, respectively aggravating the problem.

Today, the West is already clearly divided into three clusters: the American one (the main one, torn apart in the United States by the struggle of right-wing conservative Trumpists and left-wing radical Bidenites); the European one (whose economic interests require cooperation with Russia, but the ruling elites of most countries are afraid that they will not be able to retain power if they leave the American umbrella); and the Asia-Pacific one (which has already fallen into the sphere of Chinese economic influence, but does not want to admit it for the same reason that modern Europe does not want to break with America).

Historical experience shows that political laws are inexorable.

If you try to slow down the development of natural processes, then the longer you delay, the more terrible the final catastrophe will be.

In the 1990s, the West could still win, in the noughties conclude a compromise peace, being in a favorable position, in the tenth it was still possible to talk about a compromise, but the main bonuses were already received by Russia and China.

At this stage, the West can only count on a complete and unconditional surrender. Further delay will lead to the fact that there will be no one to capitulate. People, houses and cities will remain, but the western system will disappear.

Yet the United States is trying to continue playing the game of victory, and its allies have no strength to step out of the American shadow.

Further decisions should be made in the next three to five years. Either the United States will risk starting a war against China (then it should be started as early as possible, since it may be too late), or they will have to admit defeat in the global confrontation.

For the collective West, this will be a greater shock than the one that shook the Soviet sphere of influence during the collapse of the USSR.

The wreckage of the collective West in the form of junior partners of the United States will start looking for new patrons even more frantically than the post-socialist countries did in the 1990s.

At this point, the question will arise: where is the new assemblage point, around whom will the new centralization take place?

The square trinomial and its political roots

So far, we believe that such an assemblage point can be the Russian-Chinese Eurasia based on the SCO, the EAEU, the CSTO and other structures created and being created by Russia and China.

However, China, which is trying to protect itself against a sudden (but more than likely) collapse of Western markets, has recently taken several cautious steps to establish its own control over the Trans-Eurasian trade routes under Russian control.

A possible clash of interests is in Africa and Latin America, where both powers are actively increasing their economic expansion.

Finally, while not yet obvious, but in the long run, the most dangerous contradiction is that the fragments of the collective West that fall into the Chinese sphere of influence (the Republic of Korea, Australia, and New Zealand), along with the Southeast Asian states already located there, have interests diametrically opposed to the interests of Europe that potentially falls into the Russian sphere of influence.

Plus, India and Japan are too big a prize for Beijing and Moscow to allow each other’s sole influence there.

These contradictions are objective, and whether they can be overcome depends on the collective will of Russia and China.

Today, we cannot say unequivocally that this will be achieved, if only because we do not know in what geopolitical conditions we will have to move on to building a “beautiful new world”.

One thing is clear: Washington’s belated recognition of multipolarity in the form of a statement that there are three centers of power in today’s world (Russia, the United States, and China), although formally true, cannot satisfy anyone, because the dynamics of global processes are negative for the United States, and they will still try to change it, which means that the three-member structure will not be stable due to American opportunism.

In general, [1] today the crisis is developing, [2] the catastrophe of the collective West seems inevitable, but [3] the subsequent catharsis does not promise peace.

Conclusions

What may come, may come. But don’t lose sleep over it. If you can still enjoy a fine pizza, then do so. If you can still go out and watch a funny movie then go do so. If you can go outside and play with your critters, please do so. And remember… Always be the Rufus. video. 130MB

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Sitrep China at the starting gate

Ah. I do love a good meal. I consider steak, done medium rare to be a fine delicious meal. Don’t you? Oh, and do not forget the dipping sauce or gravy. Don’t you know. It’s all around a taste treat.

A delicious steak. I like mine medium rare.

Especially with some alcohol. Most especially some fine tasty Shiraz. I like shiraz. It’s fruity, sweet, easy to drink and goes great with everything from peanuts to lasagna.

Wine. Nicely decanted. Served with fresh baked Italian or French bread.

You guys know that I have never ate so well as I am doing inside of China. This place is great. But judging from some of the comments when I post on LinkedIN, the rest of the world instead believe the hate-China fantasy.

Such as this guy…

China is short on energy, food supply and raw materials. It's fixed capital need overseas markets to break even. By geography, it is hemmed on all sides. It will suffer incredible loss of wealth and the regime will lose any credibility it may have left. 

-London Desa

He’s clueless.

Just absolutely clueless.

One of the things that is going on with myself (MM for you readers) is that my meals have taken a decidedly up-tick swing in food quality.

A few “affirmation campaigns” ago, I had an affirmation that went like this…

I eat healthy, delicious and tasty foods daily.

Well, without my knowledge, my wife has this great idea to take 10,000 RMB and get a VIP account in a local high-class vegetarian restaurant. Her idea was to feed our two year old with a selection of healthy food, prepared with cleanliness, and with an eye of being tasty. This all was the direct result of a rash that broke out on my daughter after we ate some Sichuan food a few weeks ago. (All is well, by the way.)

So now, I am eating healthy, delicious and tasty food daily.

What do you know…

Ah, it’s funny how those affirmation campaigns work. Now, I long to eat some meat. You know, I am a guy. A steak lover. A carnivore. But anyways, I am fine, the kid is finally eating, and I am actually feeling much healthier than before. You would be amazed how you feel once you change your diet.

Ma Po Dou Fu

Like the one follower (Alice) who wanted youthful skin like when she was young, and ended up having zits and acne breakout. Ask her about it some time.

LOL.

Anyways, life is what you make it. If you are thinking one thing… “China is bad, people are starving, child labor”… so on and so forth it will start to manifest in your life. Well, goodness! Don’t allow that.

Think good stuff.

Here’s a cute kitten. She’s napping. Shucch!

Life is hard, then you nap.

Think good stuff.

Here’s a classic car. I always wanted one of these beasts once I watched the 1980’s comedy Adventures in Babysitting. I remember watching it while I was in training at China Lake. Did you know that it snowed that year? Yes. One inch of dusty snow on the evaporate cooler in the middle of the High Desert. Who would figure?

Think good stuff.

1950 Cadillac Series 62.

Think good stuff.

Here’s a craftsman home. It’s one of my favorite designs. I really love the nice interiors. It’s sort of a post-modern art-deco version of a “Hobbit hole”.

Laurelhurst 1912 Craftsman living room

Christmas is coming. Well, after Thanksgiving, that is. Are you ready for it? I am. MM has his tree up and little mm has her presents all wrapped up and hidden awaiting the “big day”. Though Ms. Mm can’t help herself and unwraps one every few days or so. Sigh.

Think good thoughts.

Goldie Hawn & Kurt Russell
The Christmas Chronicles 2.

Think good thoughts.

Oh, maybe I didn’t make myself clear. I really think, and believe that what you think about affects the life that you live. And thus to that end, you all need to…

…think good thoughts.

Bread done right.

This post is all about China, and it is a situation report or “sitrep” for short. Since the entire Western “news” is simply the propaganda outlet for the Washington DC monied interests, we have to perform our own investigations and sleuthing.

Not that it matters though. Our non-compliance with the approved media narratives tend to get our works banned, shadow banned, or completely cut off. But not here in MM land.

The following comes from The Saker, and it was edited for the tender sensibilities of the MM readership. As well as my “superior” editing ability. LOL. All credit to the author, the source, and the venue. I hope you all like it and appreciate it.

 

Here Comes China: Xi Jinping’s speech, Major geo-political events, Joint naval patrol, Shangri-La was a novel

by Amarynth for the Saker Blog

There has been a slight pause in these sitreps. This writing became overshadowed with current events, fully covered in the Saker Blog by other writers.  Because of the length, we will upgrade this one today from sitrep to guest analysis.

A shortlisting of four major events since the Sitrep paused:

1

Meng Wanzhou’s triumphant return to China and a win against the Long Arm of the Law.  Meng is back at work this morning.  https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202110/1237211.shtml

2

The failed visit (yes another failed diplomatic visit) which resulted in this comical and humorous tweet from Escobar

@RealPepeEscobar

US-CHINA IN 30 SECONDS

Jake Sullivan – “We wanna talk about Uyghurs, Hong Kong, Taiwan, human rights.”
Yang Jiechi – “No.”
Jake Sullivan – “Climate change.”
Yang Jiechi – “No.” “Maybe. If you listen.”
Jake Sullivan – “So we’re coming after you big time.”
Yang Jiechi – “Bring it on.”

Uhm, how did that climate change maybe thing work out?

Well it turns out not so well. Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are among several world leaders who will not be attending the big climate summit COP26 scheduled to begin this week in Britain. The two leaders will not even give it a pretense of legitimacy.

Now, that is how to give a perfect diplomatic snub!  Or is it only a diplomatic snub? 

I think both China and Russia are expressing that any attempt to do productive work with a naked insane emperor is now futile. 

We will probably see light speed changes from now on into multipolarity to hopefully gain a world that is now insisting on decent human values and most of all, peaceful resolution of differences.     

3

 

The other big event was the forming of Aukus, obviously in an attempt to create a mini-NATO against first China and Russia.

AUSTRALIAN SUBMARINES are indicative of the way our wonderful country is being governed. 

CANBERRA is dysfunctional with the state governments nationally and that is just a start.

Department of Defence (DoD) is clearly not thinking with logic but rather with the influence of the government of the day.

DoD appears to be doing national defence planning with votes in mind and not our national security.

From the very beginning, our submarines are a dud resource.

We were going to spend $220,000,000,000.00--- YES $220 BILLION on 12 submarines that were designed to be nuclear and we insisted they be designed backwards to be diesel.
That was bad enough.

Then we discover that of the 4 submarines we have now we only have CREW for 2 in 2021???

If we can only get crew for 2 now, why are we buying 12 and who will crew them in 20 years time when they are built?

NOW
We have nuclear subs from the US and UK at an undisclosed price, no plans and no idea when we will see them.

FRANCE needs CHINA a lot more than FRANCE needs AUSTRALIA so I am not surprised by France sidling up to China.

France and China have a number of daily trains from stations in France to Stations in China.

Last year there were 11,000 trains between the EU and China. That is one every 45 minutes.

That daily business is a lot more important to a nation in a pandemic than some subs half-built in Australia and half-built in France in 20 years time.

Back to the DoD in Australia.
They need an UPPERCUT for the pathetic way they are showing themselves to the world via CANBERRA.

They "appear" like they could not organise a sausage sizzle at Bunnings

What do you think of this mess?

How could it have been handled better?

Will submarines be relevant in 20 years time especially with NO CREWS?

-Peter Fennel

4

At the height of all of these were and are still the Taiwan issues and we will take a look at Xi Jinping’s speech a little later in this writing.

One soon finds that it becomes almost impossible to approach China from a generalist perspective. But, we have help.

On the economics side, we have Michael Hudson.

On the historical side, we have writers such as Godfree Roberts, Jeff J Browne and many others.

On the anti-China propaganda side, we have me and a number of reliable commentators on the Saker Blog and on the social, community.

On the humanity side, we have a host of excellent bloggers, documentary makers, and distributors of information as if one is walking in the streets and in the countryside with your own feet.

And of course, China is now taking its rightful place in the world as a leader and has improved markedly in information dissemination; they are taking their place on the world stage as wolf warriors, (Uhm, no, I did not mean to write that, of course, I meant to write ..) diplomats.

Sidebar:

China is a massive country and in landmass second only to Russia. But even in this simple measurement, the West tries its quibbling (and belittling) techniques. 

Read it and weep.

China is only second but Canada is bigger if we measure waterways. And really, China is really smaller than the US. Take a look at the quibble: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/largest-countries-in-the-world

A little story

This is from Jim Nelson that I found in my LinkedIN feed…

It was really a precious time in China in 1991. I taught English in Bengbu, Anhui for two years before deciding teaching English was not my career. Just the same, I treasure that time. 

The picture below is for the first party that the students had. They invited me and my teaching partner. They were freshman who had just finished newly instituted military training.  

Coming from America, I had some preconceived notions of what a college party could be like. The event I arrived at was beyond my imagination.

They had pushed desks to the side of the room to make space in the center. There were no decorations at all. They had no alcohol. If you look closely at the picture, we had one bottle of Huang Shan Cola each and a handful of pumpkin seeds. That is the whole story on the food and drink.

Who can remember Huang Shan Cola (translated that would be Yellow Mountain Cola.) It was a local Anhui Cola, and I do not know if it could ever be found outside of Anhui. Within 4 years, this cola could no longer be found as had been bought out by Coca Cola. It was a good soda. I would never have asked for Coca Cola.

The pumpkin seeds. Oh my, I was not even a sun flower seed eater in the US, so had no idea what to do with the pumpkin seeds. I saw the students open them and eat the seed inside. I awkwardly did the same. They were completely forgettable. I have never since tried to eat pumpkin seeds.
The planned activity was 3-step ballroom dancing with old style Western classical 3-step dancing music.  

The girls were glad to teach me how. Once I got the basic hang of it, one girl I danced with said I danced like a soldier, 1,2,3 1,2,3 by the numbers. She was completely right. It was a sweet and innocent event so different than the US that I can never forget it.

Man. China has really changed since that date.

100 Year Anniversary

In this year, the year of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, we experience an almost complete restatement and refinement of China’s goals in our world.

We see internal nomenclature such as…

  • “national rejuvenation”,
  • “a modern socialist country”, and
  • “continual reformation with comprehensive plans and strategy”,
  • and a “peaceful and united domestic environment”.

Toward the world, we see phrases such as…

  • “maintaining a revolutionary spirit”,
  • “the courage to carry out a great struggle with contemporary features”,
  • “courage, and skill”,
  • “safeguard sovereignty”, and
  • “protect security and development interests”.

We hear that China intends to assume a greater role in and for the world. 

Aggression and hegemony are not in the blood of the Chinese people and they will strive for a human community with a shared future. There are specific goals set out.

China will:

  • endeavor to improve the global governance system
  • engender peace, development, fairness, justice, democracy and freedom
  • work to strengthen solidarity of people of all other countries
  • engage in all efforts to oppose hegemony and power politics

What is the difference between Putin’s Optimistic Reasonable Conservatism and Xi’s Human Community with a Shared Future and moderately prosperous society

I cannot see too big of a difference. As the qualitative values expressed are similar although the civilizational socialization is different. 

As Putin expressed his non-acceptance of woke ‘values’ in his Valdai speech, so China in the last few months took real action

  • China threw the feminine men out of their television programs. 
The feminine men is an inheritance from Japan to a lesser degree and Korea, to a larger degree.  
  • China does not want girly men to become role models for their children.   
  • They pulled the rug out from underneath expensive additional schools, acting as funnels to expensive university programs, and tutoring that basically burdened the Chinese children. 
  • They have strengthened the Chinese schools to offer all additional education necessary, in order to have consistent educational standards. 
  • They simply stopped computer games for younger children and limited this to no more than 3 hours per week. 
  • They increased physical programs and education to get the kids out and about with healthy activities. 
  • And in stark contrast to the western sphere who wants to control the kids, China just put the responsibility by law, properly and correctly in the parents’ hands. 
“On Saturday, the National People’s Congress Standing Committee adopted a new law stating that China’s parents are responsible for family education.”

Taiwan

On Taiwan, we see Xi Jinping expressing the following:

“The Taiwan question arose from weakness and chaos and will be resolved with national reunification, the one-China principle, and 1992 resolution”.

Regarding military action; we see even Putin expressing that Xi Jinping does not need to take military action.  The verbose threats come from the US and Australia.

There are three aspects that Putin and Xi Jinping express as in one voice.

  • We are in a time of momentous changes in the world.
  • Both Russia and China are prepared and can ride the waves of change in a manner that is helpful, peaceful, and supportive in and for the world. 
  • The UN (and it has been said a number of times that it needs to be updated) is still the only venue where world problems can be discussed.  From Russia, our Law is the UN Charter and this is expressed by China as well.  The rules-based concept does not feature whatsoever.

These concepts are fully supported by Putin’s speech at Valdai, and Xi Jinping’s speech at the occasion of the 50th anniversary of China’s formal joining of the United Nations.

During the years since the cold war, another momentous alliance grew almost from a grassroots level.

This is the Russia / China treaty of Good Neighborliness.

Here, with subtitles is what the Chinese office of foreign affairs thinks of this treaty at its 20th anniversary.

China and Russia are not allies, but far, far closer than allies ever could be:

'China and Russia are not allies but closer than allies' 
– Spokesperson on Putin's remarks pic.twitter.com/uePzp2epIf


— Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil (@ivan_8848) October 22, 2021

50th Anniversary of China’s seat in the UN

In this atmosphere of global chaos, Xi Jinping delivered a speech this morning at the occasion of the 50th anniversary of restoration of People’s Republic of China’s lawful seat in the UN:

(Translation)

Speech by H.E. Xi Jinping

President of the People’s Republic of China

At the Conference Marking the 50th Anniversary of the Restoration Of the Lawful Seat of the People’s Republic of China

In the United Nations

25 October 2021

Your Excellency Secretary-General António Guterres,

Your Excellencies Diplomatic Envoys and Representatives of International Organizations,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Friends,

Comrades,

Fifty years ago today, the 26th Session of the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted, with an overwhelming majority, Resolution 2758, and the decision was made to restore all rights of the People’s Republic of China in the United Nations and to recognize the representatives of the Government of the People’s Republic of China as the only legitimate representatives of China to the United Nations. It was a victory for the Chinese people and a victory for people of the world.

Today, on this special date, we are here to review the past history and look to the future, and that makes our gathering all the more significant.

The restoration of New China’s lawful seat in the United Nations was a momentous event for the world and the United Nations. It came as the result of joint efforts of all peace-loving countries that stood up for justice in the world. It marked the return of the Chinese people, or one-fourth of the world’s population, back to the UN stage. The importance was significant and far-reaching for both China and the wider world.

On this occasion, I wish to express, on behalf of the Chinese government and the Chinese people, heartfelt gratitude to all countries that co-sponsored and supported UN General Assembly Resolution 2758, and to pay high tribute to all countries and people that stand on the side of justice.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Friends,

Comrades,

The past five decades since New China restored its lawful seat in the United Nations have witnessed China’s peaceful development and its commitment and dedication to the welfare of all humanity.

For these 50 years, the Chinese people have demonstrated an untiring spirit and kept to the right direction of China’s development amidst changing circumstances, thus writing an epic chapter in the development of China and humanity. Building on achievements in national construction and development since the founding of New China, the Chinese people have started the new historical era of reform and opening-up, and successfully initiated and developed socialism with Chinese characteristics. We have continued to unleash and develop productivity and raise living standards, and achieved a historic breakthrough of leaping from a country with relatively low productivity to the second largest economy in the world. Through much hard work, the Chinese people have attained the goal of fully building a moderately prosperous society on the vast land of China, and won the battle against poverty, thus securing a historic success in eradicating absolute poverty. We have now embarked on a new journey toward fully building a modern socialist country and opened up bright prospects for the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.

For these 50 years, the Chinese people have stood in solidarity and cooperation with people around the world and upheld international equity and justice, contributing significantly to world peace and development. The Chinese people are peace-loving people and know well the value of peace and stability. We have unswervingly followed an independent foreign policy of peace, stood firm for fairness and justice, and resolutely opposed hegemony and power politics. The Chinese people are a strong supporter of other developing countries in their just struggle to safeguard sovereignty, security and development interests. The Chinese people are committed to achieving common development. From the Tazara Railway to the Belt and Road Initiative, we have done what we could to help other developing countries, and have offered the world new opportunities through our own development. During the trying times of the COVID-19 pandemic, China has been active in sharing COVID response experience with the world, and has sent large quantities of supplies, vaccines and medicines to other countries, and deeply engaged in science-based cooperation on COVID-19 origins tracing, all in a sincere and proactive effort to contribute to humanity’s final victory over the pandemic.

For these 50 years, the Chinese people have upheld the authority and sanctity of the United Nations and practiced multilateralism, and China’s cooperation with the United Nations has deepened steadily. China has faithfully fulfilled its responsibility and mission as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, stayed true to the purposes and principles of the UN Charter, and upheld the central role of the United Nations in international affairs. China has stood actively for political settlement of disputes through peaceful means. It has sent over 50,000 peacekeepers to UN peacekeeping operations, and is now the second largest financial contributor to both the United Nations and UN peacekeeping operations. China has been among the first of countries to meet the UN Millennium Development Goals. It has taken the lead in implementing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, accounting for over 70 percent of global poverty reduction. China has acted by the spirit of the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and earnestly applied the universality of human rights in the Chinese context. It has blazed a path of human rights development that is consistent with the trend of the times and carries distinct Chinese features, thus making major contribution to human rights progress in China and the international human rights cause.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Friends,

Comrades,

The trend of the world, vast and mighty, prospers those who follow it and perishes those who go against it. Over the last 50 years, for all the vicissitudes in the international landscape, the world has remained stable as a whole, thanks to the concerted efforts of people of all countries. The world economy has grown rapidly, and innovation in science and technology has kept breaking new ground. A large number of developing countries have grown stronger, over a billion people have walked out of poverty, and a population of several billion are moving toward modernization.

In the world today, changes unseen in a century are accelerating, and the force for peace, development and progress has continued to grow. It falls upon us to follow the prevailing trend of history, and choose cooperation over confrontation, openness over seclusion, and mutual benefit over zero-sum games. We shall be firm in opposing all forms of hegemony and power politics, as well as all forms of unilateralism and protectionism.

We should vigorously advocate peace, development, equity, justice, democracy and freedom, which are the common values of humanity, and work together to provide the right guiding philosophy for building a better world. Peace and development are our common cause, equity and justice our common aspiration, and democracy and freedom our common pursuit. The world we live in is diverse and colorful. Diversity makes human civilization what it is, and provides a constant source of vitality and driving force for world development. As a Chinese saying goes, “Without achieving the good of one hundred various schools, the uniqueness of one individual cannot be achieved.” No civilization in the world is superior to others; every civilization is special and unique to its own region. Civilizations can achieve harmony only through communication, and can make progress only through harmonization. Whether a country’s path of development works is judged, first and foremost, by whether it fits the country’s conditions; whether it follows the development trend of the times; whether it brings about economic growth, social advancement, better livelihoods and social stability; whether it has the people’s endorsement and support; and whether it contributes to the progressive cause of humanity.

We should jointly promote the building of a community with a shared future for mankind, and work together to build an open, inclusive, clean and beautiful world that enjoys lasting peace, universal security and common prosperity. The human race is an integral community and Earth is our common homeland. No person or country can thrive in isolation. Humanity should overcome difficulties in solidarity and pursue common development in harmony. We should keep moving toward a community with a shared future for mankind, and jointly create a better future. To build a community with a shared future for mankind is not to replace one system or civilization with another. Instead, it is about countries with different social systems, ideologies, histories, cultures and levels of development coming together for shared interests, shared rights and shared responsibilities in global affairs, and creating the greatest synergy for building a better world.

We should stay committed to mutual benefit and win-win results, and work together to promote economic and social development for the greater benefit of our people. As ancient Chinese observed, “The essence of governance is livelihood; and the essence of livelihood is adequacy. Development and happy lives are the common aspirations of people in all countries. Development is meaningful only when it is for the people’s interest, and can sustain only when it is motivated by the people. Countries should put their people front and center, and strive to realize development with a higher level of quality, efficiency, equity, sustainability and security. It is important to resolve the problem of unbalanced and inadequate development, and make development more balanced, coordinated and inclusive. It is also important to strengthen the peoples capacity for development, foster a development environment where everyone takes part and has a share, and create a development paradigm where its outcome benefits every person in every country more directly and fairly. Not long ago, at the 76th Session of the UN General Assembly, I proposed a Global Development Initiative with the hope that countries will work together to overcome impacts of COVID-19 on global development, accelerate implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and build a global community of development with a shared future.

We should step up cooperation, and work together to address the various challenges and global issues facing humanity. The international community is confronted by regional disputes as well as global issues such as terrorism, climate change, cybersecurity and biosecurity. Only with more inclusive global governance, more effective multilateral mechanisms and more active regional cooperation, can these issues be addressed effectively. Climate change is Natures alarm bell to humanity. Countries need to take concrete actions to protect Mother Nature. We need to encourage green recovery, green production and green consumption, promote a civilized and healthy lifestyle, foster harmony between man and Nature, and let a sound ecology and environment be the inexhaustible source of sustainable development.

We should resolutely uphold the authority and standing of the United Nations, and work together to practice true multilateralism. Building a community with a shared future for mankind requires a strong United Nations and reform and development of the global governance system. Countries should uphold the international system with the United Nations at its core, the international order underpinned by international law and the basic norms of international relations based on the purposes and principles of the UN Charter. International rules can only be made by the 193 UN Member States together, and not decided by individual countries or blocs of countries. International rules should be observed by the 193 UN Member States, and there is and should be no exception. Countries should respect the United Nations, take good care of the UN family, refrain from exploiting the Organization, still less abandoning it at one’s will, and make sure that the United Nations plays an even more positive role in advancing humanitys noble cause of peace and development. China will be happy to work with all countries under the principle of extensive consultation, joint contribution and shared benefits to explore new ideas and new models of cooperation and keep enriching the practice of multilateralism under new circumstances.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Friends,

Comrades,

A review of the past can light the way forward. Standing at a new historical starting point, China will stay committed to the path of peaceful development and always be a builder of world peace. China will stay committed to the path of reform and opening-up and always be a contributor to global development. China will stay committed to the path of multilateralism and always be a defender of the international order.

As an ancient Chinese poem reads, Green hills immerse in the same cloud and rain. The same moon lights up towns however far away. Let us join hands, stand on the right side of history and the side of human progress, and work tirelessly for the lasting and peaceful development of the world and for building a community with a shared future for mankind!

Thank you.

http://www.news.cn/english/2021-10/25/c_1310267311.htm

China, Russia and Japan…

To my great surprise, Xi Jinping did not say one word about Taiwan, but sketched out the past as a harbinger of the future while cementing the legal status of China, which is not the legal status of Taiwan. 

I guess he feels that the contretemps with Taiwan is not important enough.

On the speeches, we may say that those are lofty ideals. But we also see practical and real interaction between China and Russia.

The two countries just completed a first joint naval patrol in waters of the West Pacific,  between October 17th to the 23rd, according to the Chinese Ministry of Defense. The patrol was held right after China and Russia wrapped up a joint naval exercise in the Sea of Japan from October 14th to 17th.

5 Chinese vessels and 5 Russian destroyers and frigates accompanied by six carrier-based helicopters made passage through the Tsugaru Strait (which caused Japan to run for the Prozac).

Yet this Strait is not territorial waters, and warships from any country have the right to transit, which means the transit of the Chinese and Russian vessels was in line with international law.

The Tsugaru Strait is narrow, only 12 miles wide at its narrowest point from the Sea of Japan to the Pacific Ocean.  This RT link has the photography and videos:  https://www.rt.com/news/538265-russia-china-pacific-patrol/

What is also very interesting is that it is said that the sea lane between these two islands is specifically maintained for quick access of US submarines to the Pacific Ocean. 

A Chinese expert opined as follows:

Encircling Japan, particularly sailing to the east side of Japan, is of significance because many key military installations are located on that side, including the US Navy base in Yokosuka, a Chinese military expert who requested anonymity told the Global Times.

Many US military provocations on China in places like the Taiwan Straits and the South China Sea were launched from these bases, the expert said, noting that the joint patrol by Chinese and Russian vessels could be seen as a warning to the US and Japan, which have been rallying up to confront China and Russia, serves the goals of US hegemony, and undermines regional peace and stability.

“The joint maritime patrol is aimed at further developing the China-Russia comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination for the new era, elevating the joint action capabilities of both nations and jointly maintaining international and regional strategic stability. It’s a part of the annual cooperation plan between the two nations …”

In bold are the most important words, and this is not a lofty ideal, but a very hard challenge to the western powers and of course Japan.

Also, if one looks at that area with a strategic eye, it breaks up the supposed ‘ring of fire’ to keep China contained.

American war-mongering neocon “wet dream” plan on “containing” China.

In addition, it is also a warning for Japan, which has been dragging its feet to come to an agreement with Russia on islands further North in the island chain.

So, we have to ask, was this a threat?

No, not at all on the surface of it, but it was a stark reminder that the so-called freedom of navigation game that has been constant in the South China Sea and the Straight of Taiwan can be played by more than one player. Not just the United States. It’s a new world and everyone must play by the same rules.

It is also notable that from 2019, air forces from China and Russia have conducted annual joint strategic air patrols over the East China Sea and Sea of Japan.

We are now seeing very visibly one of the aspects of the development of the China-Russia comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination for the new era.

Did you see that coming?

Did you see the evolution of the Russia / China treaty of Good Neighborliness to the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership?

Chinese GDP expansion

As is usual, we look at a few of the China data points and I want to remind that you the Chinese governance is always refining, always testing, and prototyping new methods and systems across the spectrum of modern life, and always this is done on a grassroots level.

"China is in trouble, clapped-out economically, and is going to bring the west down with it."

This is the message that we see with monotonous regularity. 

The reality is different.  

Chinese GDP expanded a whopping 9.8% in the first three quarters of 2021, and major indicators are within a reasonable range.

Evergrande

Evergrande – caused by poor management and that is all and the Chinese government will both let them burn, and also make them take responsibility to Chinese people first. 

There will be no monopolies or other behemoth-type business structures in China that can challenge the state. 

The Chinese people come first.  

(Evergrande has no option but to resume work and they did so today on 10 projects.  There is no quick bankruptcy for them, and certainly no bail-out).

China’s Strong Economy

Chinese banks have foreign-currency deposits of $1 trillion for the first time, an opportunity for Beijing to liberalize the country’s capital account.

A resilient economy and strengthening currency have attracted record foreign purchases of bonds and stocks while surging demand for goods meant exporters brought back more dollars.

The pace of the influx has tested the authorities’ tolerance for a strengthening yuan, with the currency now near a five-year high against a basket of its peers.

China’s exports grew 20%!

Exports grew 20% in September, up from 15.7% in August. September’s gain was higher than the median estimate of 13.3% in a Bloomberg survey of economists. Growth in imports slowed to 11% in September from 23.1% in the previous month.

Korean IC Chip Manufacturers building factories in China

China-Korea semiconductor industrial complex starts construction amid Beijing’s push for tech self-reliance. The municipal government of Wuxi and memory chip giant SK Hynix have teamed up to develop the China-Korea Integrated Circuit Industrial Park. 

The city is expected to become home to 19 new semiconductor-related projects with a combined investment of US$4.7 billion.

A Herbal solution for Coronavirus

A Chinese herbal formula for coronavirus patients is undergoing clinical trials in the US for possible approval for people with mild-to-moderate symptoms of the disease. Qingfei Paidu, most commonly called QFPD, is a 21-herb formula whose name literally means lung cleansing and detoxification.

Zero-tolerance to COVID remains in place

China, which pioneered controlling Covid-19 with lockdown orders and tight border rules, will  “wait and see” about adjusting its zero-tolerance policy.

“We are discussing about the new strategy in China … everything is dynamic. We are ready for any possible reassessment”.  

(Please do not consider this comment and the previous as an open sesame to start discussing Covid on the Saker Blog.  You all know the blog policy).

Chinese getting taller

Between 1985 – 2019, the average height of a 19-year-old Chinese increased 3.5 inches, or 9 cm, supporting President Xi Jinping’s declaration in July that the country had achieved its goal of establishing a “moderately prosperous society” in time for the Party’s centenary.  This is a result of a relentless project to bring the Chinese people out of abject poverty.

Vehicular KTV

An important question in auto showrooms: Can I sing karaoke in this car? The only acceptable answer is yes, as Nio and XPeng know well. Western rivals are scrambling, “We’ve identified this as a challenge,” said BMW’s Christoph Grote, “Chinese consumers are the most demanding when it comes to digital technology in the car.”

Social Credit System

The dreaded Social Credit System which is abhorred in the West by most that do not have an idea what it is about.

China’s social credit system is more of a bureaucratic interface for existing legal and regulatory systems.

It is not the widespread Western perception of a dystopian algorithm that uses “big-data collection and analysis to monitor, shape, and rate individual’s behavior”.

Social credit includes new enforcement mechanisms.

However, it is but an extension of the law rather than an independent rule-making authority, and all data collection and penalties require a legal basis.

USA Universities moving to China

This was mentioned before but as a reminder.

When the Chinese students started being hunted and haunted specifically in the US, all the major universities opened campuses in China (they could not afford to lose the Chinese money).

For Harvard, it did not take too long to become part of the propaganda war on China and they are moving their Chinese language program from Beijing to National Taiwan University, replacing a partnership with Beijing Language and Culture University.

Harvard’s Jennifer Liu said the decision was made because of a perceived lack of friendliness from the host institution, Beijing Language and Culture University (BLCU).

Just a taste

This gives a taste of what is happening in China and now we need to give the regular shout-out to Godfree Roberts’ Here Comes China newsletter that supplies these data points. Subscribe here – it is worth it!: https://www.herecomeschina.com/#subscribe

In the next few China Sitreps, I will post a selection of documentaries and information on those aspects of China’s history that remain western talking points, whether correct or not.

This is Tibet, Tiananmen, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and the border skirmishes with India as a shortlist. Today we start with Tibet.

Tibet

Tibet – if you have the romantic western mindset about Tibet, let’s revise that. Your knowledge most certainly comes from a book, movies, and a whole Shangri-La industry spawned in the wake.

.

Tibet was a dramatically brutal theocratic serfdom and never-ending debt peonage. Under the Dalai Lama in Tibet before China’s takeover:

  • 98% of the population were serfs or slaves or kept in debt peonage.
  • Disobedient serfs endured torture
  • The 14th Dalai Lama’s family owned 6,000 serfs
  • 95% of the population were illiterate
  • In 2015: 0.52% were illiterate
  • And in 2020: extreme poverty was eliminated in Tibet

From this documentary, you will learn that Tibetan Buddhism was not the sweet, and romantic Buddhist religion based on peace and high ideals and spinning colorful prayer wheels and praying in monasteries.

It was based on the Indian Caste System where an extreme minority controlled the vast majority and kept them in abject poverty.

You will also learn why, on the death of a Dalai Lama (meaning God on earth), the successor, the soul boy was always found and appointed from a very poor family, in order to avoid any power struggles between the very few rich families. 

The connection with the Roman Catholic Pope will astound you.

And then you will see brutal sights of religious and shamanic powers whipped into inhumane forces.

You will learn that Dalai Lamas regularly fled Tibet, sometimes to flee British Forces.

Tibet was the first lever that was used by at that time British forces, and this lever was seamlessly taken over by the rest of the west, to break up China, even after some territory had to be given to Japan and some even to Korea.

You will learn how the Brits just simply carved out pieces of Chinese land from the Indian side.

This effort to break up China is still in full swing today, by the current hegemon in its frenzied dying attempts to own the whole world using weapons, war, lawfare, internal destabilization, the appointment of external presidents, propaganda, kidnapping of high officials, outright assassinations, drugs, biological substances, and poison.

Of course from the 1950s, CIA involvement around Tibet is well documented even to training ethnic Tibetans in Colorado for a planned Tibetan revolution.

You will also see one of the reasons why China will not let itself be hegemonized today, specifically with its history of never fighting a war of conquest in its 4,000 years of existence.

The population stands firm and resolute.

Never aired footage in the west will have you take part in the joy when religions serfdom and debt peonage was abolished in 1959 and the Tibetan Religious Serfs could burn their debt peonage documents.

If your stance in life is ‘Free Tibet’, which mine was, once upon a time before I did my homework, consider if you were romanticized by the CIA and a novel called Lost Horizon (1933) by English writer James Hilton.

Two movies followed (Frank Capra directing one), a Broadway play, and the world’s first mass-produced paperback, all called Lost Horizon, set in a fictional utopian lamasery called Shangri-La, high in the mountains of Tibet.

‘Free Tibet’ for you may just as wll be based on the fiction of Shangri-La.

Conclusion

Think good thoughts. Here’s a video 31MB

Be the Rufus

Be the Rufus. Get the most out of your life. video.

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Why are Chinese skies so pristine blue all the time? What happened to all the air pollution?

When I first came to China back in the 1980’s, China was a poor land. The roads were dirt, and the cities looked very disorganized, dirty, and poor. it was very primitive. Public restrooms were horrible, the people were rural, even in the cities, and the police looked like some cross between Mad Max and a Mongolian mountain guide. And as I traveled back and forth from the USA to China and back, I saw first hand how it developed, changed and improved. It has been amazing.

Today China is simply amazing. It really is. This is true on oh, so many levels. And today we are going to talk about one of those things that no one ever addresses in a visceral way; the deep blue skies of China.

What? You might ask.

According to all the “experts”, China is a polluted wasteland of child workers, trash, poor unsanitary facilities, and gloom. Well it is not. It’s a merit-driven nation of hard workers, a harmonious culture, and society, and an enormous land with a deep and impressive culture and history.

But that doesn’t stop the Western media from continuing to bash it so relentlessly.

Do a Google search on China pollution, and you get millions of articles (all out of America and the UK) about how terrible and polluted China is. So, judging from the great magnitude of articles, it must be true. Right?

Image search “skies of China”.

CNN takes a picture of a dust storm in Beijing and claims that it’s pollution. FOX takes a picture of China in the early 1990’s and provides the impression that it is contemporaneous. Yahoo “news” bans any comments out of China to their China-hate articles. The BBC takes clips from an expat blog, uses photoshop to colorize it into greys and dark hues to give the illusion of a dirty, oily, filthy place.

And the articles. Jeeze!

And then they make all these graphs, and maps to show pollution quality. Giving the reader the perspective that the air must just be fucking awful.

China air pollution from the American company “Listverse”.

Western “news” is simply manipulated propaganda for the domestic audience. Those of us who know better shouldn’t read it. It provides zero benefit to us.

Today, we are going to compare apples with other apples. We are going to compare orange with other oranges. And we are going to compare pizza with other pizza. These days of deception, half truths and manipulation are OVER.

Well, here we are going to chat about something that had to be pointed out to me. I have grown so accustomed to the blue skies here, that I take them for granted, when I shouldn’t.  And with that as an introductory lead in, I will [1] address the fact that Chinese skies tend to be pristine, and then [2] how this all came about.

China has tamed air pollution in all of it’s forms, and China today has absolutely stunning skies.

Background

It all began when I posted this article HERE about a factory business trip that I took.I went to an industrial area, and visited some hard manufacturing factories.

People couldn’t get over how pristine blue the sky was, as that was not at all the impression that they had of China. They asked “where’s all the pollution”, “where’s the smog”, the “plumes of industrial clouds, and the forever white eye-burning skies? They asked where are the vapor plumes of the airline flights that create a network of white lines in the skies?

And that got me thinking.

As many times that I have mentioned over and over, and over that China has “cracked down” severely on pollution and enforces it with a very special of police known as the “corruption police”, people don’t get it. They don’t understand.

There are results as a consequence of these actions.

China does things, and then there are measurable and visceral results.

So when I take a drive up to visit a factory, I am used to the pristine blue skies, the brilliant and fresh green trees, the clear colors and razor sharp images. But others, who do not live inside of China aren’t.

What started this discussion

Here’s the videos and images that started this entire discussion…

In the following videos, please check out these embedded videos or their associated links to get the “full” experience. It’s almost as good as sitting in the car with MM getting there. video 46MB

All of rural China looks like this. It’s an entire nation of skyscrapers. This, believe it or not, is just a tiny, tiny village. video. 69 MB.

And this is what it is like. The factory sits on the edge of the tiny village, and so we just pulled in and went up to the front gate. Video. 32MB

But you know, it’s not just a trip to a factory. It’s not confined to the rural sections of China. It’s everywhere.

And I do live in Zhuhai

I know it is nice here. But I am not talking about only my city. I am talking about all of China. Video of Zhuhai. 1MB

But Zhuhai isn’t unusual. We are right outside of Hong Kong. Shenzhen is right across the bay. Combined, over 20 million people live within ten miles of my house. Which is a lot. New York City is only 6 million people! Yet, look at the skies here….

Near my house. Video 2MB

Downtown Gongbei Zhuhai at sunset. Video 2MB

Video Again. 2MB

But then again, let’s be real.

There’s rain, cloudy days, snow, squalls, fog, dust storms and other weather events that will turn the sky different than the pristine blue skies that I seem to encounter most of the time. video 16.7MB

Shanghai, and Hong Kong see a lot of fog. Overcast skies and fog seem to be the norm there. Shenzhen gets a lot of the overcast from the geographical wedging from the fog of Hong Kong and the mountains inland.

Beijing deals with dust storms.

And so on and so forth.

Some examples

Examples of blue skies, free of smog, pollution or aircraft vapor trails are everywhere. Just go onto the Chinese social media and watch the videos. Blue skies are everywhere. Seriously.

  • It’s like those High Speed Trains. They are common and everyday events. No one notices them.
  • It’s like those police drones in the sky, they are everywhere and no one notices them.
  • It’s like those thermal scans at all the entrance ways. No one cares or gives them any notice any longer.
  • It’s like paying using WeChat. It’s common and no one thinks about it at all.

But you know, we do need to take notice, and pay attention. The rest of the world do not have these kind of skies. Their cities have a dome of haze. Their suburbs are criss-crossed by airplane vapor trails. Their industrial areas have eye stinging smog and glare.

And I, for one, am going to point it out and celebrate it.

Here’s someone else driving in Hunan, China. video. 2MB

Here’s my ride in the DD. video

Here’s a cute BABY girl in the front of her house. Video 6MB

Here’s a ride taken yesterday from my house. I just filmed the ride as we pulled out of the building complex. video. 53MB

Here’s a nice girl being filmed at dusk video. 3MB

This looks like the mountains near Longgong, North of Shenzhen, China. video 4MB

Here’s a nice video showing the first graders getting their red scarves as part of the Pioneers. Everyone in China gets mandatory military trainings, and it all starts in first grade. video. 5MB

Here’s the Hong Kong, Macao and Zhuhai bridge. Video. 4MB

This girl is posing all over the city. I love these compilations with a pretty girl showing what China is like. Video. 10MB

Here’s another nice girl. Notice the sky and clarity of the air all around her. video. 4MB

Here’s a movie taken in front of my office. Video 14MB

Here’s another nice girl. video. 6MB

I took this video as I walked to my office in the morning. video 10MB

And another nice woman outside. video 3MB

Here’s the park outside the bridge near my house. video. 7MB

And, yet another girl. video. 4MB

The Chinese are so patriotic too. All of them trust their government, and the government really has earned their respect. Here’s a Pioneer. You can tell with the red scarve. video. 2MB

 

Let’s be real

Video 6MB

Yeah, it’s a non-stop hate fest against China, and while China changes, cleans up and moves forward the lies just keep a running. And the West, already ignorant, is really completely uneducated on the true and real state of things.

The crack down on pollution

China has made enormous strides in cracking down on pollution. Though you would NEVER read about that in the Western “news”. It’s all the continuing non-stop fantasy of China being the world’s polluter. If so, then why are Chinese skies so blue? Eh?

Here’s some articles about the Chinese efforts to stop, contain and eliminate pollution of all types.

Yeah, you probably saw these articles, but didn’t think too much about them. Maybe you should have read them, eh?

Yeah.

Pay some attention to the world around you and note who is doing all the complaining, and who is actually physically doing things; taking corrective measures, and actually making the world a better place. Eh?

When China says that it is going to do something, well you should take note. They actually do things. And when they say they are going to clean up China, and make it a healthy and clean place they do so.

China is very beautiful

YaoYao showing how beautiful Hunan, China is. Video 3MB

Video taken at a busy intersection waiting on our DD. Video. 12MB

Chinese first graders going through their military training exam. Everyone in China MUST take military training through their entire education system. It starts at first grade. Here’ is the first “final exam” where they are rate in their ability to compete an obstacle course. These kids are 6 years old. video. 9MB

Here’s a nice girl walking in one of the many, many parks here in China. She is wearing black. video. 3MB

 

Airplane vapor trails

Air Pollution Control Air pollution is arguably the most egregious environmental problem plaguing China. The central government has placed improving air quality as a priority on its agenda for the next several years, with China’s Premier Xi Peng pledging in March 2017 tobring back blue skies” and work faster to address air pollution. 

- China - Environmental Technology

But why no vapor trails in the sky above? Well it appears that the Chinese government has placed pollution controls on all the domestic airlines, and this has really caused a great deal of consternation on the international airlines that want to operate inside of China domestically.

It costs too much money, they say, and they can’t earn the kinds of profits that they need to please their shareholders. They argue that they MUST make a profit because they must answer to their owners who demand profits.

Meanwhile, China reports that the role of the government is to provide affordable, food, clothing, shelter transportation and a comfortable standard of living to it’s people. The government should not be a for-profit enterprise.

Because the foreign airlines cannot meet the tough environmental, and pricing requirements that China provides for it’s citizenry, the airlines had a fit. They then worked with the United States to “crowbar” and “strong arm” China to change it’s polices so that foreign companies can profit off the Chinese citizenry inside of China.

Blue skies everywhere

This girl is skateboarding near my house. The building in the background is the Zhuhai Opera House. Video. 10MB

You can actually see the Opera House from my living room. Here’s a video that I took not too long ago. Video. 26MB

Here’s one of our photoshoots. This one took place at around 5:00 in one of the parks down the street. Video. 21MB

 

Conclusions

96 percent of Chinese people owned their own residence. More than 50 percent of the Chinese people grow their own food and produce. They do not need to pay any property tax and any insurance. 

They do not need a car in their lives. They do not pay homeowners' association fees, the fire department fees, the police protections and so on and on. Of the fifty percent of the Chinese rural population, they do not use cash that much.

Three of my sisters in China have been laid off workers of state owned enterprises for the last thirty years. Their income is only a couple thousand yuan from the state pensions every. But they all have their own houses, and have savings over one million Chinese yuan.

They eat better than I do in the USA as a professor struggling to pay for my mortgage. I have to pay out of my pocket medical care, dental insurance, home insurance, property taxes, home owners association fees, all of which the Chinese do not have.

My sisters all grow their own vegetables in their own yard. I have to buy everything from the supermarkets.

There are too much loose holes in the calculation of GDP, which is simply meaningless.

When I was growing up during the Mao era, we grew everything we ate organically, and everything was fresh. We did not have much cash income, but we had everything we needed. By comparison, how many people in the world could have organically grown fresh produce everyday in the world free of all kinds pollutants.

The Chinese people's per capita income was very low during the Mao era, about a hundred dolar a year. But Chinese people life expectancy grew from 32 years in 1949 to 69 years in 1976, more than doubled in less than thirty years.

GDP as a measurement of well being is simply a trick created by the capitalist west to cover up their management failure, with a high GDP but many homeless and hungry people.

-Dongpin

After all this, it should be clear that China is really doing things and making things happen. There’s so much bullshit and lies about China, but I will tell you what, if you come to China, you WILL SEE the blues skies. You will see the HIGH TECHNOLOGY. You will see the flower and the trees, and the relaxed pace of life. And you will see that it’s because it is a nation government by merit and people who care.

China treats those who want to change things for “democracy”, and “rule by the wealthy”, and the greedy as evil and dangerous people. They are locked up and kept away from the levers of power.

China is doing things RIGHT.

A billion Chinese have applied for membership in the Communist Party of China since 2001. 907 million of them were rejected, mostly on moral grounds. It seems that most Chinese adults would take the Party oath, to endure the people’s ordeals first and enjoy their fruits last, subject themselves to constant scrutiny, and be held to higher ethical and legal standards than non-members. Adultery is cause for dismissal. Rape is cause for execution. Nonetheless, ninety-four million members are honoring their oath pretty well. 

-UNZ

China is a nation of Rufus’s…

We don’t want even one politically unqualified person sneaking into the Party, fishing for personal gain. 

-Xi Jinping.

And here’s a great image of a roadside rest area. Check it out.

A highway rest area. This one is in Inner Mongolia, Northern China. 41.5MB Video

Other possible reasons

There are a host of other possible contributors for the blue skies. May I suggest that other things can add to the overall effect experienced within China today…

  • A decline in domestic air flights because of the enormous network of high speed trains.
  • A decline in international air flights to and from China.
  • A severe curtailing of all factories that do not have, or plan to add, air scrubbing pollution control equipment.
  • A movement of the simple, labor intensive, and crude manufacturing out of China to South East Asia.
  • Intentional power rationing to selected geographical regions and specific targeted regions.

All in all, while China has indeed set forth impressive air pollution standards, and have implemented such, a number of other effects contributed synergistically to make the air of China noteworthy and pristine.

Oh, and a note to all the people who just stumble on MM and this article and want to shit on it…

Yes. And I do actually mean “to shit” on it.

Keep in mind that this information is going to go against your Western media brainwashing. It’s comfortable to believe the lies that face the TRUTH.

So don’t give me the normal bullshit, I delete those comments. If I wanted to read a regurgitation of FOX “news”, or the BBC, I’d read them directly myself. Though I do keep a few prize examples of stupidity for use in other articles.

Like these two comments (that I deleted from other articles that made China look better than the non-stop hate-China narrative spewing forth from the media megaphones)…

...the lies and propaganda concocted by CCP. For example, the title claims China has democracy at bottom, which is fabricated by CCP to fool people. In fact, CCP uses all of its power to crush any thing associated with democracy as it cruelly did in Hong Kong last year. CCP made it very clear that it will destroy any buds of democracy movement in China mercilessly as it did 32 year ago in Tiananmen massacre in which thousands of pro-democracy students and Beijing residents were killed by machine gun fires and crushed by army's main battle tanks. 

And…

This is essentially a person staying up all night, and fantasizing about how China might be if all the consultative channels that China has erected were ACTUALLY HOW CHINA WAS GOVERNED. But they are not. Modest consultative measures might indeed help an authoritarian regime operate better, and that it probably part of China's success. But that doesn't mean, as the author seems to think, that a group of ordinary citizens makes the final decision about China's laws. It's laughable. Don't waste you time on this, and ask yourself why it is being heavily promoted. 

I’m telling you what it is like.

You can absorb it in, or you can believe the nonsense being spewed at you by billions of dollars in manipulation and funding. Your choice.

But here, is the REAL deal. It’s what is going on right now. Soak it in.

And finally…

Be the Rufus

Are you making the place a little bit nicer when you leave it? Do you pick up after yourself? Do you make people smile when you are in public? Do free-ranging dogs and cats welcome you?

Are those around you comfortable that you are nearby in case anything goes wrong?

Do not be ashamed of who you are, or what you do. You are NOT your job. You are NOT what others say you are. You are unique and very, very special. Stand up for who you are and serve justice, and help those in your society. It’s your highest calling. video. 2MB

Please, be the Rufus. Not for personal profit. Not for fame, or glory. Just do it because you are a decent person and you want to make your tiny part of the world a better place to live in.

Video 2MB

And after the explosion, the Rufus runs back into the flames to rescue others trapped inside. Video. 2MB

The world is not a bad terrible place. Spread the love around. Be a Rufus. Just be nice, give things away for free just to make people feel happy, wanted and included. It won’t cost you that much, and you will really help make the world a much better place. Be the Rufus. Like this guy does… video 5MB

Or this. Use your talents and make the world a better place. Video. 6MB

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I have more posts like this in my China index here…

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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.

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MM factory trip into the heartland of China November 2021 (Real deal reporting)

According to all the “experts”, China is a polluted wasteland of child workers, trash, poor unsanitary facilities, and gloom. Well it is not. I had to take a business trip into a heavily industrial zone in the Guangzhou industrial corridor, and here’s my story and pictures. So this is just going to be another quick article on MM life, banging around some factories on a day trip. I think you all might find it interesting.

About the “Nay Sayers”

About two weeks ago, we had a jerk-off place a comment here confirming / stating the nonsense that China is ugly, filthy and corrupt. He provided his “expert” status by prefacing his comment that he taught in medical universities for ten years, twenty years ago.

Ah, that standard boiler plate; “being an “expert” because he was teaching in China for ten years”.

He’s not the first, and won’t be the last. You can make good money having a small “cottage industry” churning out hate-China articles. They pay $1000 per article as of this year. Just follow the template. But you know, I saw through all that.It’s “easy pleasy, lemon squeezy”. So simple a child could do it.

Three reasons…

  • Six month changes. Anyone who has lived in China KNOWS that it changes every six months. I mean it. It changes so friggin’ fast here it is amazing. If you are gone for ten years, then you are clueless about  what it is now today. Heck, ten years ago people still used paper money. There weren’t any drone police, robot scanning didn’t exist, no one knew what a QR access was, and no one conducted thermal scans!!!!!
If we compare China’s 31 provinces with the 214 sovereign states that compose the “international community”, every Chinese region has experienced the fastest economic growth rates in the world. -UNZ
  • Talking Points. Don’t give me all the hate-China talking points. The comment read like something from the “National Review”. Mix it up some. Don’t regurgitate talking points. After all I am HERE, inside of China reading you trying to convince me of things that I can verify by sticking my head out the window.
  • Lonely guy. Anyone who has lived in China for ten years and didn’t find a partner and get married is a truly miserable person indeed. It’s not impossible, just highly unlikely. Which says something about your personality, personal body care,  hygiene, and social skills. If you cannot build a relationship in China, after one year, you have a problem. At ten years; you just have to be one Hell of a seriously disgusting person. Especially when you are SURROUNDED by attractive marriage age university women.

The trip overview

I had to visit the factory as it is a “new” factory that replaces our normal factory for a New Zealand customer. This factory needed to be instructed on what quality points and checks needed to take place to make the part.A day trip was in order. Drive up, visit the factory and have lunch, drive back. The distance was roughly comparable to driving from Boston to Albany, New York. Not close, but not too far either. The factory was near Shaoguan. You can see it at the top of the map below…

Factory location.

The ride up to the factory

"You must live on the coast, the inland is terribly polluted."

The trip itself was pretty uneventual. We traveled for about four hours. We rode up major highways, crossed massive bridges and went through long tunnels to reach our destination. In all cases, please check out these embedded videos or their associated links to get the “full” experience. It’s almost as good as sitting in the car with MM getting there. video 46MB

Arrival into the tiny village

All of rural China looks like this. It’s an entire nation of skyscrapers. This, believe it or not, is just a tiny, tiny village. video. 69 MB.

Arrival at the factory

And this is what it is like. The factory sits on the edge of the tiny village, and so we just pulled in and went up to the front gate. Video. 32MB

What the factory does

The factory is a casting and machining operation. They cast the part out of stainless steel, then they machine it, and finally check for quality and box and ship. Casting operations are typically dirty everywhere. It doesn’t matter where you are; the United States, China, Afghanistan… a casting factory is hot, dusty, dirty and greasy. Here’s an American casting factory in Cincinnati, Ohio…

American casting factory in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Machining operations are better, but not by much. Usually they include polishing operations and the like that typically result in dust and grime everywhere. These are hard core, basic operations, that made cities like Pittsburgh and Detroit famous. But we are not in America. We are in China. And, you know, things are different here.

Out of the car and into the factory

So we parked outside the gate, and met the factory boss at the gate who did the mandatory Coronavirus QR scans, the GPS positioning history, the temperature checks, and supplied us with fresh face masks and we went inside. video

Frenzied pace at the factory

" China employs slave labor, child labor, and indentured poverty stricken people who are yearning for freedom and democracy to unchain them from their shackles..."

Here’s a video that I took from outside the QC building. Sorry it’s kind of boring, but it illustrates the pace of life here. It shows that people are not upset, worried or working a frenzied pace. They are not afraid of losing their jobs on a layoff on Friday, or having to scramble to make ends meet. The factory, by law, must provide them with three free meals a day, free housing, free wifi and television access, and free transportation to and from town. Do they look like they are all yearning for American “freedom and democracy”? video. 14MB

This and that

While my engineer took care of the details, I hung out in the office, drinking tea and smoking cigarettes. We had a nice lunch, and then continued on our work. We ended up inspecting all of the parts, and then then left satisfied for lunch.

Dimensional fit checks.

Of course, I would check in with him from time to time.

All parts must meet the specifications on the drawing, but not all the customer requirements are listed in the specifications.

Lunch

"...starvation and famine are rampant inside of China. It's just that the evil CCP regime won't allow people to see the truth."

We broke for lunch. As always, the factory hosted us and we ate in a private room (which is normal in China). I had a few beers. They wanted to give me a bottle of red wine or 52° white wine for myself, but I declined. Ugh! Then about half way though the meal, I remembered to take some pictures. Because, after all, I did want to record this visit for MM. So I took pictures of the food mid-meal. We ate well…

Shellfish.
Local steamed fish in a nice peanut / ginger sauce. It’s eyes are covered by the garnish.
Greens.
Pigeon. Tasty little buggers, but hardly any meat.
Shrimp and snow peas with sweet cashews and sesame. A real favorite of mine. The white leafy things are lotus, not onion.

Inspections

"Child and slave labor is rampant all over China."

We spent the rest of the day inspecting the product. As you can see the factory workers were inspecting and packaging the product for shipment.

Rework and inspection.
Rejected parts.

Final packaging

"China only makes cheap Wal-mart junk. We don't need their bullshit."

The approved parts were recorded, marked and packaged by the ladies int he factory. Everything was 100% inspected to print from the customer. Here’s what that looked like…

Finishing up.
Packing the parts.

Conclusions

After all this, we hopped into the car and drove home. I arrived home, and immediately found my home to be in the kind of chaotic shambles that only a two-year old can accomplish. So I helped feed her, clean up, bathe her and put her to bed, then I churned out a post on Affirmation Campaigns. And this was my day. When I woke up, I opened up my normal news feeds to discover that Yahoo! would not longer be accessible inside of China, but used my indexes to see what articles they were pushing. And low and behold it was non-stop hate-China fest. I guess they wanted a piece of that 300 million dollars from the United States federal budget to push that narrative. Whores for money. Sheech! But you know, there are better things in this world. Like this Rufus doggie that saves his master… video 4MB

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