Tag Archives: China

Multipolar Chaos, by Robert Gore

Posted on April 24, 2022 | 11 comments

chaos-engineering

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

The Russian Central Bank recently announced that until the end of June, it stands ready to buy gold for rubles at the exchange rate of 5000 rubles per gram of gold. The move has been hailed as revolutionary, heralding a regime change from fiat currencies. If only that were true.

It would be revolutionary if the Russian Central Bank made a two-way market in rubles and gold. Sellers of gold to the central bank will get back rubles, but no one can exchange rubles for gold. The ruble will still be a fiat currency. A central bank or government that sold gold for its own currency at a fixed rate would be returning to the gold-exchange standard, which prevailed in many nations during much of the 1800s and early 1900s. Right now, such a move would be so revolutionary it would upend the global financial order.

A reminder: Government and Central Bank-Led Revolutions is a book whose thickness is measured in nanometers. Traditionally, revolutions are directed against them. Under a gold-exchange standard, you don’t need a central bank, which is why monetary bureaucrats hate it. You need a gold repository and someone to print the gold-backed currency. Politicians hate it because they can’t spend currency they and their central-bank flunkies have wished into existence. If they had to spend real money—gold or silver—it would be bye-bye welfare and warfare states, and they would be the inconsequential hacks they’re supposed to be.

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Since the end of the gold-exchange standard, during the reign of central banks and bankers, we’ve had two world wars (and the third may have begun), a massive transfer of resources from the productive to the unproductive, and a proliferation of government promises that will never be kept. Cheap credit has promoted private indebtedness, kept zombies companies alive, blown up asset bubbles, and diverted economic activity from production to finance.

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Posted in Collapse, Crime, Currencies, Debt, Economics, Economy, Energy, Eurasian Axis, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Money, Morality, Politics, Propaganda, Psychology, Science, Technology, Trade, War

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Communist China Has Thrown Out the Old Rules of War, by Robert Spalding

Posted on April 23, 2022 | Leave a comment

China is in it for the long-term and they’re in it to win it. From Robert Spalding at realclearbooks.com:

An Excerpt from Retired Air Force Brigadier General Robert Spalding’s “War Without Rules: Inside China’s Playbook for Global Domination”

When I first read the Chinese war manual “Unrestricted Warfare” in 1999, I thought it was wacky. I was flying B-2 Stealth bombers out of Whiteman Air Force Base in western Missouri and reading a lot about war. As an Air Force officer, I thought it was part of my day job to understand the bigger picture – even though the prevailing attitude in the military was “Just fly the planes.” “Unrestricted Warfare” was one of those books that caused a stir among some military folks because it had recently been translated into English. It had that insider whiff of mystery and secrets, a peek into the mind of the Chinese Communist Party.

Despite that mystique, not a lot of people were finishing the book. For one thing, regardless of its title, no one thought we were ever going to be fighting a war with China, so it seemed like a lot of work for very little payoff. For another, the book itself is not a light read. It is a dense compendium of strategy, economics, social theory, and futuristic thoughts about technology. It imparts centuries of military history, particularly as it relates to the United States, but I already knew a lot of that. It seemed vague and also a little sci-fi, not relevant to a U.S. bomber pilot – even one with a fascination for military history. My mistake.

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Science, Technology, Trade, War

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America in the 2020s: Its Most Dangerous Decade, by Donald W. Miller, Jr., MD

Posted on April 21, 2022 | Leave a comment

The U.S. has enough unaddressed problems of its own, particularly monetary inflation, that it should stay out of the Ukraine-Russian war. From Donald W. Miller, Jr., MD, at lewrockwell.com:

We face turbulent times. The 2021-2030 decade is stacking up to be the most dangerous one in America’s 32-decade history.

The United States of America emerged from World War II a manufacturing colossus. During the war it built 141 aircraft carriers (all types), 203 submarines, 62,000 bombers (12,700 of them B-17s), 88,000 tanks—and 4 atom bombs. One atom bomb that used uranium was dropped on Hiroshima, August 6, 1945; a second plutonium one was dropped on Nagasaki, August 9. Two more plutonium bombs had been built but not used, when on August 15 Japan surrendered.

The U.S. dollar replaced the British pound sterling as the world’s reserve currency and became a “petrodollar” when the Saudis and other Arab oil nations agreed to accept only U.S. dollars for their oil. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 the USA became the world’s sole super-power. America now, however, must share that status with China and Russia. Over the last thirty years Russia, shorn of its Soviet Socialist Republics, and China both also have become super-powers, militarily and technologically.

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Posted in Banking, Business, Civil Liberties, Collapse, Economics, Economy, Energy, Governments, History, Military, Politics, Propaganda, War

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The End of Western Domination, by Thierry Meyssan

Posted on April 20, 2022 | Leave a comment

The United States is not isolating Russia so much as it is isolating the West. From Thierry Meyssan at lewrockwell.com:

The Western sanctions against Russia, decided unilaterally by Washington, are presented as a just punishment for the aggression against Ukraine. But, without mentioning their illegality under international law, everyone can see that they do not reach their target. In practice, the United States is isolating the West in the hope of maintaining its hegemony over its allies.

The United States, which was a late participant in the World Wars and suffered no losses on its territory, emerged victorious from the world conflicts. Inheriting the European empires, it developed a system of domination that made it the “world’s policeman. However, their hegemony was fragile and could not resist the development of large nations. As early as 2012, political scientists began to describe the “Thucydides trap” by analogy with the Greek strategist’s explanation of the wars between Sparta and Athens. According to them, China’s rise to power also made a confrontation with the United States inevitable. Noting that, if China had become the first world economic power, Russia had become the first military power, Washington decided to fight them one after the other.

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Biden’s Middle East: Saudi Arabia Embraces China; Will They Topple the Dollar? By Judith Bergman

Posted on April 20, 2022 | Leave a comment

The Middle East is playing the U.S. off against China and the dollar against the yuan. From Judith Bergman at gatestoneinstitute.org:

  • If Saudi Arabia were to break the tradition of pricing its oil in US dollars, as it is contemplating doing, others could well start to price oil in Chinese yuan or other currencies — negatively affecting the US dollar’s status and potentially the entire US economy.
  • “China must brace for a full-blown escalation of the struggle with the United States and prepare to gradually decouple the Chinese yuan from the US dollar.” — Zhou Li, former deputy director of the Communist Party’s International Liaison Department, South China Morning Post, July 5, 2020.
  • That Saudi Arabia now seems to be seriously considering selling its oil in yuan signifies the extent to which the Biden administration’s Middle East policies have left countries such as Saudi Arabia hedging their bets on China, as the ascendant power in the Middle East. China, on the other hand, is simply taking advantage of the current US administration’s deprioritization of the region and its alienation of strategic US allies such as Saudi Arabia.

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Beijing’s “Elite Capture” Strategy Was A Success: Peter Schweizer, by Masooma Haq and Roman Balmakov

Posted on April 19, 2022 | Leave a comment

There are an awful lot of Americans in positions of importance who are in China’s pocket. From Masooma Haq and Roman Balmakov at The Epoch Times via zerohedge.com:

Peter Schweizer, author of the book “Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China,” said the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) entry into the WTO changed the global economic structure in large part because it unleashed the regime’s strategy of gaining control of America’s elite class so they would do Beijing’s bidding.

Peter Schweizer is interviewed by NTD in a still from video published on March 26, 2022. (NTD)

Schweizer calls this strategy “elite capture,” and the CCP’s plan was to target the top levels of big tech, entertainment, education, Wall Street, as well as politics.

“It’s going to give [the CCP] leverage over them [the elites] because once [the CCP has] sort of touched them and made them rich, or as some CCP officials have said, they’ve tasted the honey that they’ve been offered, they will not want to give it back, they will not want to give it up,” said Schweizer.

“So that gives enormous leverage to Beijing over elements of our leadership class.”

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The Ukraine Conflict Is Just a Sideshow, and We Are the Real Targets, by Brandon Smith

Posted on April 19, 2022 | Leave a comment

Is the Ukraine-Russia war the next step in the globalist plot to run the world? From Brandon Smith at birchgold.com:

The Ukraine Conflict Is Just a Sideshow, and We Are the Real Targets

Photo by Killian Cartignies

Way back in 2014 I wrote an article titled False East/West Paradigm Hides the Rise of Global Currency. I was inspired to cover the issue due to three specific trends which at the time were concerning.

The first trend was the increased mention within globalist circles of something called the “Great Reset.” Christine Lagarde who, as the head of the IMF at the time, was suddenly throwing the phrase around in press interviews and in Q&A events at the World Economic Forum. This appeared to me to be a rebranding of the “New World Order” agenda which establishment elites had been known to mutter about in moments of rare honesty. It indicated a concerted push towards global centralization in the face of economic and social decline within nations.

The second trend which I noted was the shift of Eastern nations into a more open partnership with global banks, including the IMF’s inclusion of China in the Special Drawing Rights basket system, and in the case of Russia, Goldman Sachs becoming deeply entrenched as an “economic adviser” to the Kremlin.

The third trend was the inexplicable rush by both Chinese and Russian central banks to buy up as much physical gold as possible. To my mind, the only reason for China and Russia to buy up precious metals was as a hedge against inflation and currency collapse; specifically, as a hedge against the collapse of the U.S. dollar as the world reserve currency. This could be precipitated by the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) nations and others dropping the dollar in global trade, or by an economic war in which using the dollar became untenable for eastern countries.

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Posted in Banking, Business, Collapse, Debt, Economics, Economy, Eurasian Axis, Geopolitics, Governments, Military, Politics, Propaganda, Trade, War

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What’s Keeping China From Buying More Russian Crude? By Tsvetana Paraskova

Posted on April 15, 2022 | Leave a comment

The logistics problems getting Russian oil to China are monumental. From Tsvetana Paraskova at oilprice.com:

  • Russia is offering deep discounts for its crude following a wave of sanctions on its energy industry.
  • While China and India are still buying some discounted oil, logistical hurdles are becoming increasingly difficult to navigate.
  • Contractual obligations and shipping constraints are posing major problems for would-be-buyers of Russian oil.

Outbound shipments of Russian oil have yet to show signs of a major decline, as many analysts feared last month. In fact, Russia’s shipments of crude oil rebounded in the first full week of April to the highest level so far this year, Bloomberg News’ tracker of crude leaving Russian ports showed on Monday.    Yet, a “buyers’ strike” in Europe with many majors refusing to deal with Russian spot cargoes is forcing Russian crude to make much longer and complicated voyages to reach willing buyers in Asia. While China and India are not shying away from Russian crude—which sells at hefty discounts attracting price-sensitive buyers—the logistics of shipping oil from Russia’s Black Sea and Baltic ports to Asia and the scarce tanker availability, bank guarantees, and insurance for Russian cargoes would limit the amount of oil that Asia could take and compensate for lost barrels that are no longer going to Europe, analysts say.

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Michael Senger’s Snake Oil: A Review, by eugyppius

Posted on April 14, 2022 | Leave a comment

The point of the Chinese response to Covid-19 wasn’t the virus, it was the lockdowns. From eugyppius at eugyppius.com:

Michael P. Senger, Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World (2021). 220pp. ISBN: 978-1957083780. $10.99.

I will never tire of typing that the whole question, of how lockdowns became the default response to Corona, is very hard. Some points are nevertheless clear: There was, without a doubt and in the earliest stages, a kind of lockdown cabal, a small group of people in different countries who worked to bring some simulacrum of the Hubei response first to Italy and then to most of the globe. An insidious, coordinated information campaign accompanied their efforts, and this should warn us against easy assumptions that they had good intentions.

On social media, a swarm of manipulative pro-lockdown accounts promoted containment and attacked any prominent politician who tried to steer a moderate course. Michael Senger was among the first to point out that this campaign was operated, in part, out of China. His crucial September 2020 article on the Chinese promotion of lockdowns on social media for Tablet Magazine won him wide renown. He had over 100,000 followers on Twitter before the platform banned him; he now writes The New Normal on Substack, and you should all subscribe to him.

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Shanghai under lockdown: witness the horrors of push-button digital tyranny, by Jordan Schactel

Posted on April 10, 2022 | Leave a comment

When the Chinese put a city under complete lockdown, it’s total totalitarianism. From Jordan Schactel at dossier.substack.com:

Detention camps, separating families, and the culling of domestic animals.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has complete control over every aspect of life in China, and some two years of COVID Mania conditioning has only enhanced its grip over the nation.

As the continuing Shanghai lockdown has proven, the government has improved upon a push-button hard lockdown system, first applied in Wuhan in early 2020, that can shut down entire cities in a matter of hours.

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Chinese authorities on Tuesday extended a lockdown in Shanghai to cover all of its 26 million people, despite growing anger over quarantine rules in the city, where latest results show only 268 symptomatic daily COVID-19 cases. | via Reuters READ: news.tv5.com.ph/breaking/read/…
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Since late March, over 25 million citizens of the Shanghai metro area have been trapped in their homes in the name of fighting a virus.

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