I apologize, where were my manners. Greetings and salutations, y'all!
Damn Yankees, damn Yankees, damn Yankees (once we are in the spell/witchcraft notion of argument - in order to make a difference you need to say these words in front of the Yankee)
On the subject of US's runaway debt Kanye West style - How not to pay the American national debt fixing to hit $38 trillion while going after constituents with $25 overdue bills.
I know for the fact that some gentlemen have a superior upper body strength and logic attached to it, also wits, charm and intellect. So if for whatever reason some blonde copy paste their style, and they are cool with that. It makes them all mentioned above apriori.
Did we girls beat Victor this time? So there you have it the geopolitical analysis from a woman with angelic name and encyclopedic knowledge. We also need a Frank Sailor and we will hold the grounds.
Thanks for the linguistic lesson from Tiananmen Square. My grandparents are from Asia and my father is a Communist. I am sure your feelings are hurt since you are all cute with Western values and escaped the tyranny but you are also well compensated per word count or a number of posts to make a difference, right?
Winnie the Pooh says "Oh, bother". It is his well-known catchphrase, used when he finds himself in a frustrating or sticky situation, such as getting his head stuck in a honey pot.
Pooh Bear in Chief...aka The Stable Genius, literally got his head stuck in Epstein's-Mossad's Honey Pot. Quick! Look over there! A squirrel. Wars on three continents and the charade of "diplomacy". The high price of distraction.
I agree it is nonsense to make people self identify and show fealty to the party by pretending Qi = Ch. Personally I spell my name Dave but I think I will pronounce it as Bob. No word in the English language that begins with the letter Q is pronounced using the sound Ch. Queen is not Cheen
Hey Bryan, I know you are very proficient at using the "google". May I suggest you try the following prompt:
"how do you pronounce the chinese name qian"
Response:
"To pronounce qian in Mandarin, say "chee-an," with the "q" sounding like a "ch" in "cheese". "
Here is a quick video that teaches Americans how to pronounce the new use of the letters QI = Ch
You know he was. Even from what I can tell from my distant armchair, China and Russia are in a position to dictate terms. You can bet he had it spelled out in crayon and when he looked confused his advisors leaned in and made it even simpler….”Yeah Don, he’s not bluffing”
The US hardly needs crypto to foist its debt onto the rest of the world. That has been the dollar's function since 1972. I was disappointed by reports that China will be relaxing its rare earth licensing restrictions, and I hope that's false. It would be a mighty blow to US imperialism for those restrictions to be enforced, and there's never going to be a better time to do it.
Rare earths on itself are useless, without the rare magnetics you can go nowhere and besides, China’s going alternative nuclear directions, less polluting, less endangering but more peaceful. They just finished their first Thorium reactor, the beginning of the end of uranium and plutonium threats and eternal warfare. Give peace a chance and love your enemies.
"They just finished their first Thorium reactor, the beginning of the end of uranium and plutonium threats and eternal warfare. Give peace a chance and love your enemies."
Give peace a chance, sure, but love your enemies when they stab you in the back, hell no. This isn't about winning a Darwin award, you know.
In the above this is pure nonsense: "the beginning of the end of uranium and plutonium threats and eternal warfare." No, it isn't.
Thorium reactors can't work without fissile plutonium or uranium. Read that sentence twice if you still think thorium reactors are the end of massive amounts of fissile uranium and plutonium piling up around the world. Thorium reactors don't actually run on thorium: they run on fissile plutonium or uranium. The thorium in those reactors is just a material from which fissile uranium can be bred.
The power in a "thorium" reactor comes from the fissioning of plutonium 239, uranium 235 or uranium 233, the three fissile isotopes that have been used for nuclear weapons. Plutonium is universally the overwhelming favorite because of its low critical mass. U235 has a much higher critical mass but for various political and technical reasons it has been used in some nukes (like the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima) and in combination with plutonium.
Uranium 233 has been known to have been used in three nuclear explosions. The critical mass of U233 is about the same as plutonium, so it's a much better material for nukes than U235. The complications of using U233 are about the same as the complications using plutonium: you have to be careful how you cook it so you don't end up with too many undesired contaminants. On the plus side, U233 doesn't have predetonation issues like plutonium so it's a better choice for simple weapons. And, like plutonium, it's far easier to extract from cooked fuel than the insanely expensive and complex hassles involved in enriching natural uranium to weapons grade U235.
So, if "thorium" reactors actually run on plutonium or fissile uranium, why does anybody bother with "thorium" reactors at all?
That's because there is about four times more thorium in deposits worth mining than uranium, and some countries, like India, have vast reserves of it. Although you can't use thorium to power a reactor or a nuclear weapon, if you stick thorium into a reactor that's running on plutonium or uranium, the neutrons from the reactor will transform thorium into uranium 233. You can then use that uranium 233 to power reactors or nuclear weapons.
It's not currently economically feasible to create a "thorium" reactor that produces more U233 than the plutonium or fissile uranium (either U235 or U233) that it consumes, so it's not a positive breeder like uranium/plutonium breeders. But it can produce enough U233 from relatively abundant and cheaper thorium to be worth doing, at least if you have lots of thorium, so you don't need as much uranium.
Thorium fuel cycles have gone nowhere because the use of uranium in reactors is well down the price curve, and you still have to use uranium to run a "thorium" reactor, so for most countries it's not worth the hassle of starting up a quasi-breeder alternative technology. But it could be well worth it for India. I don't know if China has large thorium reserves but if they do it could be worth it for them.
There are some people promoting "thorium" reactors who tell a lie that the breeding of U232 along with U233 will prevent the fissile U233 from being used in weapons. That's a lie that exploits the general, total ignorance of the masses in basic physics.
U232 emits gamma rays, which are powerful and dangerous radiation. But so do many plutonium isotopes that are created when you "cook" inert U238 to make plutonium. That hasn't stopped plutonium from becoming by far the first choice for nuclear weapons. As with "cooking" up plutonium for weapons you just have to run your "thorium" reactor to produce a lower, acceptable percent of U232, resulting in "clean" U233 as the US, Russia, and India used in their nuclear explosions that used U233.
China has been a world power before anyone would even know that one day there will be an USA. China will be a world power the next 5000 years, if the USA makes it another 50 years in their current form remains to be seen.
China, a world power? Let’s be real, even tiny Japan completely squashed China during the 1900s and reduce the population to slavery.
China did become the factory of the world, with no children and an immense young population. Give it 20 years and it will once again be a dying country with crumbling empty skyscrapers and old people everywhere.
Every single year, China will lose 15M working age people, more than the entire work population of Spain !
Just like in Korea or Japan, there will be nobody to help take care of the old people, no one to repair and maintain the infrastructure that have been built those past 40 years.
A country with a continuous history of so many centuries must have had several periods of decay. This happened to China and it did not happen just in the period that you alluded to. By the way, Chinese decadence did not start in 1900 and because of Japanese aggression.
China was already stagnant when the British
defeated them and gave what seemed the coup de grace to the Chinese civilization. The apparent Chinese debacle started with the Opium Wars.
But this is not much relevant to the situation in the world today.
China was wounded but did not die and is quite clearly back and most probably the first power of the future.
Will China become a country of old people, due to the one child policy of the past?
I doubt it. The Chinese will do as the State tells them. When necessary the "Three children policy" will be introduced and the State will make sure that it is followed or else...
The demographic problem is much more acute in the Europe, were there is no social discipline and, bar a revolution, no reversal of the suicidal trend is probable. Now the prospects of some international feats and relevance of Germany, France and the UK with African or Islamic majorities are laughable. If terminal civil wars can be avoided it would be already remarkable.
The US with Trump are now trying to prevent becoming a demographic extension of Latinamerica, which was the trend of the past decades, but, as any one should know, the extreme polarisation in that country means that success is not guaranteed at all.
" ... By 2019 two of the reactors were under construction in the Gobi desert, with completion expected around 2025. China expects to put thorium reactors into commercial use by 2030.[6] The 60 MWt reactor is scheduled to be completed in 2029. Part of the thermal energy, 10 MW will be used to create electrical power; the remainder will be used to evolve hydrogen by splitting water molecules at high temperature.[67]
@ Luis - The West used to say exactly the same about Russians in the 19th century. And here we are.
You can't possibly believe that about China? Working with high technology requires high technological expertise - which leads to their own inventions/improvements. Nobody needs to "invent" from a proverbial "scratch" whoever have the brains analyze what was invented/done before them and make a leap ahead.
My favorite was Trump's "Russia stole our super-duper rocket!" - and what? Was this rocket design on a napkin that Russians eat after "stealing?" Did Russia forbid the US to CONTINUE developing this super-duper rocket - like threatened to sue the US for IP rights?
In my US city, they're building the light rail from the 1960s! It was super-duper technology but from the world exhibition of 1962! Instead of learning what other countries (from rugs to riches, like Taiwan, etc) did about their transportation - Americans used OWN outdated technology from 1960 in 2025, and building this 'light rail" for > 5 years.
Let’s be real, nothing you use every day was invented in China, zero, nothing.
China’s business plan was based on unlimited quantity of cheap labor, stealing all intellectual properties, and manufacturing goods without having to abide to the rules of the west (related to pollution, human right, labor)
Obviously some of the people working in factories will come up with manufacturing improvements, but that’s not quite what I would call « innovation ».
Were the medications you use discovered in a China? Were computers, internet, cell phones etc invented in China? Were airplanes, trains, cars, rockets or satellites created by Chinese engineers and scientist?
China developed high speed train after buying a couple of TGV from France. Everything after that was just a rip off from France and Japan.
China built dozens of nuclear reactors, all of them from stolen technology and savoir faire from the west.
The only innovation that came out of China was … Covid. And even that was leaked from a French built lab.
Ah so now we're qualifying "nothing" to be "nothing you use every day". Why didn't you say that in the first place, And why have you excluded paper and ceramics as pointed out by Feral Finster. I'll tell you why, because like all conspiracy whackjobs you rely on cherry picked, superficial factoids of the kind beloved on facebook, factoids that invariable crumble to dust under due diligence. You need to grow up a little and leave the teenage tropes behind.
In the US, the 1960s, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, TN - invented a type of nuclear reactor that can run on thorium instead of uranium (common, cheaper, no meltdown risk, generating 50x less waste, requires no water). Due to bad politics, the program in 1969 was killed, its developer - fired.
Chinese scientists found the declassified blueprints for this forgotten project in archives in 2011 and ran an experimental project in the Gansu desert for 14 years, and they actually made it work.
Correction: everything is derivative. This principle predates our lame ass species by million of years….but yeah come along and whine like a pauncy hairdresser about everything being stolen. My precious…..
I am not whining, I am just saying China the future superpower is a joke.
When I was a child, everyone was saying Japan was taking over the world. GDP per capita stagnant for 30 years and a fast declining population and economic calamity. Korea is right behind.
China will not survive the demographic issue. In 2015 there were 17 million births and now 7 millions. That’s 7 million birth for a country of 1.5 billion people…. It’s over.
I have to say that you are obviously an idiot. China over 2.5 thousand years made many very important inventions. This only stopped a couple of hundred years ago because of internal problems. These problems have now been resolved, and China is back to cutting edge inventions. Actually, your post stinks of racism.
Another post without a single example of recent innovation. China was successful 1000 years ago without a doubt. China is finished now.
If you all cannot do the basic maths to understand that it will be a demographic catastrophe like the world has never seen before, it’s on you. It’s third grade maths.
The rule of China, Japan and most of Asia has always been based on submission. Submission doesn’t foster innovation.
Go live in Japan and you’ll see how literally no one is optimistic. Young people do not marry, do not have kids, do not innovate or create thriving businesses. It’s a socialist country with
Japan came up with CDs and the Walkman. That was 40 years ago. Since then? Nothing.
Those are facts, not pathetic insults (« racist ») like the woke left and people without arguments love to use.
When people are degraded to the level where they lose their respect for basic math they should be written off as nonfunctional. Around four years ago I spent weeks to calculate the proportion of America’s White population based on existing U.S. Census Bureau data in large part. My conclusion was that Whites were 46-47% of the total. Since then the number went to around 45% but the fact remains that the U.S. Census Bureau data is doctored just like crime stats in most states. So, in reality the US White population might be even below 40%. I did researches concerning commie countries where you had to circumnavigate around ALL gvmnt data as surely doctored. America functions at the exact same level now.
2025 will see about 7 million births and 12 million death. You read that well! Number of birth has halved in 10 years and keeps collapsing. I bet you didn’t know that.
Working population dropping by 10 to 15 million people every single year.
" I have to say that you are obviously an idiot. China over 2.5 thousand years made many very important inventions. "
Thats nice, but modern society is completely based on a Western framework. From economics, education, medicine, rules of war, diplomatic protocols ( all diplomats / politicians wear Western suits for example ) to aircraft, mass media and so forth.
Now, had they finished developing the arc of pig iron as a common currency and Zheng Ho fleets, they would've beat Anglos to the Moon by 250 years.
But, nooo...when the new Emperor came in in 1492, he beheaded the admirals and banned pig iron currency, fearing foreign contamination and the rise of a middle class. Burned the records as every Year Zero emperor in China has done, all the way back to when the Yellow Emperor burned the records of his predecessor, the Red, and then claimed that he invented China.
The ant people don't change. There is a monument in New Mexico dating back some 3000 years - "General Li dedicates this site to Emperor Wang," and the like, so close to modern ideograms that today's Chinese scholars can read it. Every Chinese advance reverts to an eternal stasis.
Today? They may have broken the mold, thanks to us - but we shall see if they get old before they get rich enough to avoid another Warlord Period.
If the warlords don't burn the records, another recurrence of the Black Plague will - theirs is a demographic model built on cycles of population explosion and plague/famine crash.
"China has never, ever invented anything those past 200 years. Asians are good at copying and very bad at innovation."
Abject nonsense. I'll give just one counter example, the phenomenal invention that is DeepSeek, China's answer to ChatGPT. It is a genuinely new invention that enables neural networks and large language models to work over a hundred times more efficiently than the older technology American AI's use.
DeepSeek is another example of optimizing and copying what already exists.
British people come up with industrialization, China now does it best. French people invent efficient high speed trains, now China does it great. Americans come up with smart phones, and now China makes great smart phones too. Americans come up with AI, and then China offers DeepSeek.
You and I could program a decent AI within weeks, but the idea, the concept and the principles were once again designed by people from the west. I didn't come up with it and didn't know it was going to work that well : neither did the Chinese. However, I could easily program one with a bunch of (cheap) studen5ts from a top French engineering school.
Chinese people are very smart. But the culture is to be submissive and to do what you are told. That fosters hard work, not innovation. Japan, Taiwan and Korea are exactly the same. Japan came up with CDs and the Walkman in the 1980s and nothing since then.
" ... By 2019 two of the reactors were under construction in the Gobi desert, with completion expected around 2025. China expects to put thorium reactors into commercial use by 2030.[6] The 60 MWt reactor is scheduled to be completed in 2029. Part of the thermal energy, 10 MW will be used to create electrical power; the remainder will be used to evolve hydrogen by splitting water molecules at high temperature.[67]... "
The beginning of the end of plutonium and uranium threats and eternal warfare. Yes it is, absolutely. No Hiroshima and Nagasaki could have been destroyed on Thorium, this was indeed like you said winning the Darwin Award, Japan would have signed surrender without showing arms, power application at its most useless and ugly. Besides why is China so interested in Thorium when the US found it an investment at a too high price but also having no use in the long run? Get some deeper insight and understanding from the Thorium Energy Alliance, our whole cathedral of energy & powers will be running on empty within 25 or 30 years, when we exhaust the uranium reserves. We cannot deliver the same energy supply not even in combination with solar and alternative resources NOT in the same amount to feed our AI, internet, surveillance, medicine, agriculture, economy or any business or social model, only the elite will survive as pure bloods, mingling among themselves until nature takes them out. Nature doesn’t tolerate perfection nor inbreeding.
"The beginning of the end of plutonium and uranium threats and eternal warfare. Yes it is, absolutely."
Well, rather than say you don't have the slightest idea of what you're talking about, I think it would be both more polite and more productive to ask you show that you do, in fact, know what you're talking about.
Please correct me if I am wrong, but I get the impression that you use the phrase "plutonium and uranium threats" because you (correctly) believe that the presence of mountains of plutonium and uranium that can power nuclear weapons is a threat, right? Please confirm that's what you meant.
I assume you'll confirm that, so in advance I'll say I agree with you. The presence of mountains of plutonium and uranium that can be used to make nuclear weapons is indeed a threat.
So next, please explain why jumping into a thorium fuel cycle, which would generate even *larger* mountains of Uranium 233, a darned near perfect material for making nuclear weapons, even better than plutonium (God's gift to nuclear weaponeers...), would end those threats?
I get the impression that somehow in all of your reading of whatever material the Thorium Energy Alliance pumps out that you have, perhaps, missed the key insight that you can't run reactors on thorium. You have to convert thorium into uranium 233 first, and then you can run reactors on that.
By the way, talking about exhausting uranium reserves in 25 or 30 years is crazy (even if you believe that reserves with enough U235 in them for reactors will be gone in 25 or 30 years), because you can do the same "breeding fuel" trick done with thorium to convert inert uranium, U238, into very active plutonium.
The trick with thorium is to convert inert thorium (inert in terms of being able to power a reactor) into active uranium (U233, even more "active" than U235). The trick with breeder reactors that convert inert uranium (which is over 99% of uranium in the world) into active plutonium is the same thing... conversion of inert material into active material.
In both cases, the inert stuff (thorium or inert uranium) can't power reactors. But in both cases the inert material *can* be converted within a reactor into active stuff that *can* power a reactor. And in both cases, the active stuff you make from inert stuff just happens to be active stuff that also works really, really well for making nuclear weapons.
In fact, it's almost surprising how directly analogous the situation is between plutonium fuel cycles and so-called thorium fuel cycles: the active material in both cases is almost identical in terms of really small critical masses, and in both cases the active material comes with about the same technical nuances in terms of being careful with cook times to avoid unwanted isotopes from being created on the side.
Yet still, earnest eco warriors will flame anybody who talks about plutonium fuel cycles as an energy solution while praising to the skies "thorium" fuel cycles that create mountains of even better stuff for making nuclear weapons, U233.
By the way, calling it a "thorium" reactor is a lie. It's really a "uranium" reactor. It runs on uranium 233 that's made from thorium. It doesn't run on thorium and you have to be a scientific illiterate to think that it does.
"Besides why is China so interested in Thorium when the US found it an investment at a too high price but also having no use in the long run?"
It sounds like most of what I wrote in essay went over your head. China is not the US (read that twice if it seems like a difficult concept to grasp). The US and China have radically different sets of domestic resources available to them. In particular, China has vast thorium resources, enough to power the country for ten thousand years, while the US has basically zero thorium resources. In contrast, the US has large uranium reserves (as does China).
The US has many billions of dollars invested into uranium fuel cycles and it has cheap and reliable supply from many other countries, so much supply that for environmental reasons the US hasn't bothered to mine uranium within the US since the 1980s. In contrast, China likes to be self-sufficient in key resource inputs so it likes the idea of switching to a material that it has lots of and which can be converted into uranium for powering reactors.
Anyway, given that a thorium fuel cycle will produce mountains of uranium for use in nuclear weapons, how exactly, is it that breeding uranium from thorium is "the beginning of the end" of threats from nuclear weapons made from uranium?
You’ve challenged me to torture my brain, I’m very much obliged to you, so thank you. Torture? No its only common use for going beyond thinking and bring in a player always out of context consciousness. One can argue why not asking AI all problems answered, just that I personally believe that the faltering brain in its incompleteness can still bring up a glimp of an Aha moment, what AI will never be able too. The mind and all minds together are only mindful, they gave birth to AI and not the other way.
The first part of your exposé you answered your own question. Uranium indeed poses a threat to destroy all what can be created…and Thorium is no exception! It’s a choice, no more no less but its choice has like it or not more peaceful intentions, and I’m glad to explain why to you. Uranium leads to a dead end. The end is not Hiroshima and Nagasaki, living near Mururoa in the Pacific, all tests affected people in the area, Bikini, Eniwetok, Nevada, and who knows places that came never in the news. Thyroid and other cancers even after many years, also affecting next generations.
God’s gift to nuclear weaponeers and that’s what we’re living for, the Uranium God and it’s Ten Commandments, thou shall love only one God the God that destroys you! Weaponeers we’ve become not pioneers in its positive and creative context. We can’t stop piling up Uranium till we don’t see the Sun any longer. The source of life should be light not darkness and I respect your choice playing games with that item. To go to the essence of my point of view I’m hindered to go further I got interfered by somebody who doesn’t want me to come to the real thing. You can contact me in another note, perhaps I get more space to share my idea.
You know, you're going around in circles agreeing with yourself claiming truth without ever saying why what you claim is truth. For example:
"Thorium is no exception! It’s a choice, no more no less but its choice has like it or not more peaceful intentions, and I’m glad to explain why to you. Uranium leads to a dead end."
Please do explain that, and the slogan "Uranium leads to a dead end" is no explanation.
Why is using thorium to create mountains of material, far larger mountains of dangerous material than ever existed before, material that is even more dangerous than plutonium, a choice that has "peaceful intentions?"
That's like saying building a huge plant to build vaping products with far more carcinogens than leaf tobacco is a "choice that has healthy intentions."
I disagree with you that uranium leads to a dead end. Used intelligently and with reasonable (not even exceptional) skill, over the years it can save many millions of lives by eradicating poverty caused by high energy prices and by eradicating dangerous pollution and other environmental effects caused by burning fossil fuels for energy. Clean, cheap energy from uranium can lift billions of people out of poverty into far better quality lives. That for a variety of political reasons and social reasons many societies do *not* use uranium either intelligently or with reasonable skill is a social and political flaw, not a technical one.
But if you are absolutely certain that uranium leads to a dead end, why do you so enthusiastically praise thorium when the use of thorium is an even greater commitment to that uranium dead end? Transmuting thorium into uranium creates more uranium and a greater commitment to uranium, not less.
Clear your mind of lies and focus on the truth: the only use for thorium in power is to create massive quantities of highly fissile uranium. Uranium creates power, not thorium.
What thorium proponents call a "thorium" reactor is a facile lie to fool the ignorant: it's really a *uranium* reactor, but they don't want to use that word because they're focused on telling you that uranium is bad and thorium is good. If they tell the truth that their plan is to convert mountains of "peaceful" thorium into "evil" uranium so they can run reactors on that uranium, you can see they are really "evil" at heart.
What's especially cynical about their lies is that the mountains of uranium they want to create by transmuting thorium happen to be a form of uranium that is especially useful for creating nuclear weapons. Even worse, it is by far the best and most effective material for creating simple nuclear weapons that even small and poor and technologically backward countries, or even individual bands of terrorists, can use to create nuclear weapons.
That's the exact opposite of "peaceful intentions." Creating ten or a hundred times as much uranium for nuclear weapons as has ever existed, and creating those mountains of uranium in a form that is especially easy to use in nuclear weapons, so easy that any reasonably smart person who is good at cobbling stuff together, who has a basic science education, who can read Internet and has a few tens of thousands of dollars for equipment can build a simple nuclear weapon, is not, repeat NOT, a positive step towards peace.
A minor technical correction regarding: "God’s gift to nuclear weaponeers and that’s what we’re living for, the Uranium God"
I didn't write that uranium is God's gift to nuclear weaponeers. It's plutonium that is God's gift to weaponeers.
And by "weaponeers" I didn't mean a handful of people beavering away in a warehouse in the Syrian desert to create a simple nuke they can use to erase Tel Aviv from the map. I meant elite weaponeers that produce exquisitely efficient product at the height of the art.
For them, plutonium is still the one true ring that rules them all, the magic material that is the primary element in the sacred trinity of plutonium, heavy hydrogen and lithium that is the essence of the finest expression of the art.
Uranium, even wonderfully fissile U233, is base stuff in comparison, not the supernatural substance that is plutonium. If you know what you're doing there's no need for uranium at all in nuclear weapons, not for tamper, not for any of that elementary school stuff. You can do it all and better with the sacred trinity using more skillful approaches such as ripple technology.
But, if you're beavering away in the Syrian desert on a limited budget and you don't care about elegance or the best possible prayer in the true faith of high energy physics, caring only about generating a big enough blast on the cheap to rid the world of your enemies, well, then U233 from transmuted thorium is just the ticket.
U233…U235 and 38 the ultimate weapons of the powers that be, well I have a little surprise. The computer that were working with and not only the screens we both are looking at, and don’t forget to see above Lockheed F35 cannot stay one minute longer in the sky, without Chinese precision Actinides, magnets and magnetics. We can underestimate their importance even ignore it, but 99% is Chinese. The US population of 360 million it took them 250 years to fall short in social welfare and wellbeing, China has succeeded only in 30 years to give 4 times the US population some dignity even if its totalitarian, you cannot provide for 1,4 billion people without a strict system. No ant can survive outside its colony.
I agree but we can't believe what we read from this administration can we. 3 points, one: much like years ago China didn't end up buying the amount of soybeans the US thought they were going to buy, this could be a repeat of that. Two: i too think they should play the ree card more aggressively. And maybe they will since I don't believe what is coming from the Trump camp. If the US can deny chips on national security grounds then China can do the same especially with reels since it surely will be made into weapons to the detriment of China. Finally 3: no way China let's go of tik tok for just money. Notice how the signing date keeps getting pushed back? The only way they part with tt is if they receive something sizable in return, I'm thinking something related to Taiwan. Oh, they never sold the canal either.
>You always try to make a deal - it's better than going straight for the aggressive military or "sanctions" option.
Not if the deal you are proposing means strategic surrender without a fight.
Putin offered/accepted an offer to leave the rest of Kherson and Zaporozhye in Nazi hands if he got Kramatorsk and Slavyansk.
This is high treason on multiple counts and levels
First, it means Putin is giving away to regional capitals of the Russian Federation, which he has absolutely no right to do.
Second, it means he is leaving the rest of Ukraine in Nazi hands, i.e. core historic Rusisan land, to be de-Rusified and completely converted into an anti-Russia
Third, he is abandoning all the goals of the SMO, which can only be achieved by erasing Ukrainian statehood altogether.
And we can add the fourth -- the December 2021 ultimatums also meant nothing.
It costs Russia nothing for Dimitriev to do a tour of US media outlets to counter some of the US's agitprop. It also costs Russia nothing for Dimitriev to propose mutual cooperation and not war. Russia's allies like that, especially China.
There's no inconsistency at all with Dimitriev talking peaceful measures while Russia also insists on its non-negotiable demands. That Russia knows full well any deals will not happen because the US won't do them doesn't matter. The simple proposing of such deals to have the US reject them demonstrates to Russia's partners and the rest of the world where the problem lies, with the US.
Yes, it costs an enormous amount to Russia -- it means Russia has obvious traitors making existential decisions, demolishes its international standing, and destroys morale internally
Dimitriev's background:
-- BA in economics from Stanford
-- MBA from Harvard
-- Started at McKinsey
-- Worked at Goldman Sachs
-- Worked for a private equity fund
-- Selected as a Young Global Leader by the WEF
With such "credentials" the last time Russia was in an existential war against the very same people it is in an existential war against right now, which also happen to be the very same people that educated, employed and selected Dimitriev as a Young Global Leader, he would have received an immediate ticket to a shallow unmarked grave in some forest around Moscow.
He should be receiving the same treatment today, but instead he is the chief negotiator with the enemy.
And we know he is not negotiating with Russia's best interests in mind, because he is on social media 24/7 and tells us that directly with every single post of his.
What do you think the "Global South" that Putin is somehow supposed to be the leader of is thinking watching that while also remembering that Putin never acknowledged the genocide in Gaza, betrayed Syria, and did nothing to help Iran?
And what do you think people inside Russia are thinking. who remember Gorbachev, Yakovlev, Yeltsin, Kozyrev and all the other traitors, and now see the same slimebags in power again?
You could be right. I just hate to see our hard-earned reputation as pariah being disregarded so flagrantly. When will the world finally give us the disrespect we have worked so hard to gain?
Why is a Russian businessman ,who is the CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), in the US negotiating on Russia's behalf about the war in Ukraine ? Why isn't Lavrov , or other, more appropriate people ? Is it because hes of a certain tribe ?
Indeed. However, America is still hugely wealthy, and wealth brings with it power and influence. So until the US loses substantially more wealth (and that day will surely come in the years ahead), countries will still try to negotiate favourable terms, both geopolitically and economically, even if they know that the US can not be trusted.
Given that the jews completely control US policy - Trump's is a dual-citizen regime almost entirely - the jewish policy is that anything they say can be overturned and completely reversed by saying the Kol Nidre prayer once per year.
No farmer needs to keep his word to his livestock - and livestock is what Gentiles are to jews.
The USSR no longer exists precisely because it started talking with the enemy.
You're dealing with the devil here, and the devil has countless ways to trick you, so you are best advised to just cut off all interaction with him and fight him to the death.
The USSR wasn't brought down by talk, but by economic and societal failure.
RT now talks every day to the west, and shows that talk can be very productive; it has a very high approval rate in the US and Europe generally - thus the reason why it had to be blocked.
The pen - and the word - are both very powerful weapons, when truth is on your side.
The will to fight your enemy to the death, if necessary, is definitely required, as it is the foundation of independence.
But this does not mean cutting all interaction.
Talking is however just a part of fighting, and refusing to talk, is doing your enemy a favor.
Devil has tricks. US is no devil, just a very powerful country, just like Britain was 150 years ago. And today, US does not have the power to defeat and subjugate Russia. And no existential interest to fight Russia in Ukraine.
US is in a situation that strategic plan of attacking Russia, extending Russia through proxy war has fallen apart, crumbled,
It is not "America" that is hugely wealthy. It is the vampire masters, and they are not American, but nationless. America as such, by which you actually mean only the USA, is falling into economic ruin and poverty. Restaurants go bankrupt en masse, because people have stopped eating out. The CEO of Kraft-Heinz, one of the huge food conglomerates, has stated that even sales of everyday groceries are collapsing, that people are turning to basic staples. On a countrywide scale. Young adults, 90% of them, can not afford to own housing, even by resigning themselves to decades of debt. Hugely wealthy my arse. And even the threadbare illusion of wealth that is there, the American fever dream, is floating on a thin crust on an ocean of debt.
'Young adults, 90% of them, can not afford to own housing, even by resigning themselves to decades of debt.'
I see rather few arguments about the giant lands owned by the US gvmnt in the Western states. The population was trying to multiply but space was denied.
I think rare earth will keep flowing toward the West ONLY for substantial concession, published or not. I simply cannot visualize a scenario where China will secure the buildup of US military industry without guarantees that the monkey business around Taiwan is over. Of course the US might be playing for five or ten years until (they hope) they will secure their own production and supply chain.
I think that’s just what they’re doing, playing for time till they get a supply chain or alternative materials/techs. I have no idea when they could do that, but in the meanwhile they’re building weapons that are creating a lot of mischief right now. And how could China ever trust a promise to stop messing with Taiwan? They know they can’t.
You think the US is deliberately driving the whole planet toward chaos with its own untrustworthiness? I could believe that - it has certainly been the elites’ strategy towards national politics, but it’s a sharp sword considering no one knows who will be holding it.
The jews control the US lock stock and barrel, and they have an eschatological belief in the return of their "messiah" once the whole world is in that chaotic state.
They even have a name for it - Tikkun Olam.
They see the return of this antichrist as the beginning of a new world which they will fully control.
Australia can supply raw material, however it does not have any processing facilities. Plus with its current fake Green fervor even trying to build them would be very problematic.
Albo or whoever occupies the office can grandstand, but can't back it up; the west lacks the investment capability as it is 100 percent focused on bubbles and has left the real work to Asian economies. Besides China has a lock on the equipment and IP for processing.
There is no alternative supply to China, not for years and years and not on any scale for years on that. It is another bluff on the markets, that is all. If there were such a supply from the US supplicants, the US would have locked it in already and there would not be this terrifying issue Trump keeps trying to cover up.
It’s like the two campers who were being chased by a bear, and one of them paused to put on his shoes. “You’re never going to outrun the bear even with shoes!” the other guy says, and the first says “I only have to outrun YOU.”
The time Trump may be playing for on rees may be the end of his term. But it may also be that there could be alternative materials or technologies which don’t require rare earth magnets.
Yeah, Elena, Ukraine thinks like that, that some new wonder weapon is just round the corner. Well, its something to tell your people. Chin up, the cavalry's coming.
This argument about leaving China's most valuable resources behind, has the feel of cold fusion to it!
Interesting you should mention cold fusion and miracle weapons. I think the new nuclear reactors Russia is using for their fancy new weapons are ten, or a hundred? times as powerful as the standard nuclear reactors did they say? Miracles do happen sometimes.
They’ll find something to neutralize the need for China’s rees eventually. It always happens, but of course it could take a long time.
"But it may also be that there could be alternative materials or technologies which don’t require rare earth magnets."
Respectfully, no, not likely, at least not for very many years, in the many decades range. In your other posts you mention miracles. Well, compared to what went before the extensive physics and engineering that have gone into technologies that depend on rare earth elements are indeed miracles. Those miracles didn't happen overnight but took around sixty or seventy years for all of the many issues involved to be resolved. If an alternative miracle happens that too will likely require a similar amount of time before the many, many complexities involved in replacing rare earth elements in a worldwide, intricate set of logistics chains involving millions of products are resolved.
The people chasing the many billions in industries that use rare earth elements aren't idiots, you know. They've spent vast sums on finding alternatives that would be cheaper and, well, less rare, and they've been doing that for over 30 years. So far, no go. What's also an issue is that the people who are now most bent on seeking alternatives are the least well equipped to find them: Americans have much poorer performance in STEM skills, there are fewer of them, and they have a smaller real economy than China.
"Americans have much poorer performance in STEM skills, there are fewer of them, and they have a smaller real economy than China."
True enough John but no on...NO ONE... produces baristas and social workers like American universities. Besides, those STEM eggheads could never get a date or catch a football. We also have world class alchemists who've gone beyond converting lead to gold (Darn!) and have had some success in turning billionaires/president pedophiles into solid, god-fearing Christians. The alchemy of turning Charlie Kirk into the "new jebus" complete with merch and fireworks. P.T. Barnum is alive and well.
Thanks again President Putin for NOT blowing up the planet.
At some point, I expected China to lift restrictions, to crush competing REE supply lines for civilian products. The Western supply lines would be subsidised to supply the MIC. I agree it happened must faster than I expected.
China sanctioned the US MIC a long time ago. That hasn't changed. Also the 8 rare and strategic minerals they closed off earlier in the year (or was it last year?) are still blocked. Gallium, germanium, antimony the rest I forget.
The US MIC has been banned from getting Chinese REE since April under sanctions imposed for supplying arms to Taiwan. The Oct export controls was for commercial use and stop any grey/black market transshipment to US MIC. This has been delayed conditionally for a year. Ban on US MIC is not affected and holds.
At least the Chinese did impose restrictions on REE exports.
This is much more than Russia has done, which is four years into an existential war and is still supplying the very countries that have vowed to destroy Russia with everything. That everything then comes back in the form of shells, drones and missiles raining on the Russian army, and now increasingly Russian cities too.
And it isn't even just the West that Russia supplies -- the AFU has had absolutely no problems with fuel for four years now, and guess where that fuel comes from? Lukoil, of course. That sort of thing...
Putin's explanation? "We get money for it".
You just can't make that up...
Imagine Stalin supplying the Wehrmacht with fuel, food and various minerals? Well, he did, but the last train crossed the border in a Western direction on the evening of June 21st 1941. No trains did it after that, and it ended in Berlin.
Putin's Russia? What are some 150,000 dead Russian soldiers, tens of thousands of civilians and all the physical damage when it comes to the improving relationships between us and our partners...
And Putin has officially declared he has no intention of getting even to Kiev. Not even Poltava and Chernigov either...
But it all comes down to the problem of ideology. Russia has none other than making money, and the Chinese are only marginally better at the moment, they are just much more competent. Also, they have not been tested directly yet in terms of what they will do when the dear partners start lobbing missiles into their territory, which makes it easy for them to appear to be "resisting".
Let's look at this line from the original post:
>This is because the US political class has no answers at all for its own failing economy, and thus must rely exclusively on the strategy of hamstringing its competitors
Now what is the internal US problem? The FIRE sector and Silicon Valley have been staging another Gilded Age for the last several decades, i.e. obscene and growing wealth inequality based on the parasitic structure of the economy. How do you solve that problem? Well, as a short-term palliative measure, you destroy the FIRE sector and Silicon Valley, redistribute wealth, etc. But that only works in the short term, then it will be reversed (which is what happened with FDR's reforms in the 1930s and the subsequent neoliberal revolution in the 1970s/1980s). So long-term you have do away with capitalism altogether and to make it a crime punishable by death for anyone to be speaking of profits and interest, or you will be returning to that same crisis again and again, if you can ever get out of it in the first place. Good luck with that.
But at least the short-term palliative measures could be taken. Which Xi in fact did a little bit of internally in China the last few years, to his great credit, but is absolutely unthinkable in the US. So the US is looking to export its internal problems to the rest of the world by raping and pillaging it in order to throw some crumbs to its own masses while allowing wealth inequality to continue growing inside the US. Or maybe not even throw any crumbs, even that has largely ended at this point.
And what do Russia and China say and do in response? Pretty much nothing. Putin throws some memorable lines about "vampire ball" being over and other such sound bites that the cargo cult members in the "alternative" media love to slobber over, but has he ever attacked the bankers and the FIRE directly and ideologically? Of course not, and how could he, he is surrounded by bankers and fully controlled by them?
Xi doesn't even have the memorable sound bites.
Now compare and contrast to Stalin and Mao. In the 1930s Stalin gave a number of interviews with Western journalists and intellectuals, and it is very instructive to read those from the archives. The clarity of thought you see there is remarkable, e.g. they ask him about "freedom" and he directly tells them that if you have nominal political freedom but have no roof over your head, no healthcare, and no certainty there will be anything to eat tomorrow, then you have no actual freedom at all, and that the USSR had to make some sacrifices on that front to provide for the greater good. Clear and unambiguous. Later Mao was absolutely ruthless when exposing the nature of Western imperialism, no holds barred. Now take any of Putin's interviews, listen to them carefully, and just weep.
With such "resistance", what hope is there for the world?
Also, regarding crypto and debt -- the situation with the US debt is the exact same one from the old saying that if you owe the bank $100K, you have a problem, but if you owe it $100B, the bank has a problem.
With an added military-technical twist.
The West has been putting Third World countries in debt slavery for more than a century now. What is that debt backed by? Partly by the natural resources of those countries, but when we get to the bottom of it, it comes down to the might of the Pentagon (and the Royal Navy previously). If you don't serve the debt, or, god forbid, decide to default, you get bombed into submission.
The stability of the US's own debt towards non-Third World countries is also backed by the Pentagon. You want to get your money back? Well, you will have to bomb the US into submission. Good luck with that with the current "resistance".
At the end of the day what counts is who has the most military-technical capabilities multiplied by the willingness to use them.
And when you have the US bombing deep inside Russia every night, with zero response from the Kremlin, well, then we have military-technical capabilities multiplied by zero on the other side, and that is an easy win by default.
Which is why Kiril Dimitriev is the chief Russian negotiator, rather than hypersonic missiles hitting Wall Street skyscrapers doing the talking, and he was in DC a few days ago again...
But but Russia has fancy new weapons. You don’t seem to be taking that into account. Of course western politicians don’t seem to pay it much attention either considering was it Lithuania’s defense minister? today, his comment about how NATO should ignore all Russian red lines because Putin never enforces them.
I personally think there’s going to be hell to pay, I’m just still not sure who’s going to pay it except, of course, the working class.
I don't really think the Russians really know where the real Red Line is except of course for an actual nuclear attack, but it is there some place. The US Deep State is used to people and nations where everything and everybody can be compromised, bought and dissolved. They do not understand their own limitations and this makes them more dangerous.
Russia would prefer to hit Euro targets, as there is less likelihood that US nuclear responses would be triggered - the US controls the British submarine missiles, so they wouldn't put themselves at risk for retaliation by allowing them to be launched against Russia.
So Belgorod and Kursk is not Russian territory inhabited by Russian people who deserve the same level of protection as those in Moscow, and Crimea, Donetsk and Lugansk are just sacrifice zones altogether?
That is what immediately follows from your argument here.
GM, you’re advocating for the return of communism. I’m in agreement. All this is whitewashing and competition between capitalists to see who’s the one last standing. The ones in Russia have clocked that the country’s resources combined with the USA’s exhaustion have all of a sudden put them at a comparative advantage for the first time in their history. But beyond the last accessible cubic metre of natural gas THERE IS NO PLAN.
Kursk was an obvious trap that the imbecile British Generals walked right into. 60-70k front line soldier and hundreds of units of armour and high tech weapons eliminated. If you haven't figured out Russia is fighting an attrition war by know you might as well go back to listening to Gen Hodges on CNN.
The fact he was allowed to say something that stupid without universal scorn and condemnation is a powerful statement about the current intellectual capacity of the west.
The problem with fancy weapons is Ohio class submarines off the coast can do the same thing, and you have to use the fancy weapons for them to be a deterrent. Take tactical nukes for example. There is a taboo on their use in Ukraine although they have been used about a dozen times in the past. (Veteran's Today, Gordon Duff: Nuclear Education). The majority were US / Israeli, except for a Russian response to a NATO detonation to say "we are in," thus establishing deterrence and a tit for tat balance on their use. I'm not sure if this still exists for EMPs as they don't kill anyone (give you a long term headache?) but take out electronic and electrical devices. Most are nuclear, and Russia wants to draw the line there, but now there are non-nuclear EMPs (Larry Johnson) which at least Russia, China, and probably Iran have. The problem is that the West is more inclined to use tactical nukes and tactical nuke EMPs in response even though Russia, much less densely populated, would recover faster. Russia is trying to use these fancy weapon threats as a negotiating tool, but if they are not played and or categorized as a threat they have no value. What would really be shocking is an EMP over London taking out the Rothschild's computers, markets, and currency. I feel like I have tried all sorts of military and negotiating alternatives, and all of them lead to war, as that is Trump's purpose - The Dept. of War. The problem with Ukraine is the enemy is not in Ukraine, and the enemy doesn't care how many Ukrainians die.
All Russia is saying is that if Aegis Ashore is considered by NATO to potentially be capable of eliminating any missiles Russia launches, then there are these new weapon systems which can never be so countered.
Russia of course is crucially dependent on its oil and gas exports for financial security, so it cannot cut the supply to whomsoever wants to buy these things.
What it does instead is to first sell the products, and then destroy them when they return to Ukraine.
Alternatively, it destroys the power plants which either burn gas or oil, as it has been concentrating on recently.
If I recall correctly, Russia petrol industry amounts to 15% of total revenue from the economy: here you have it from the gas station masquerading as a country.
Imagine Stalin being able of protecting his own life and not being killed, leading to Banderite-lenient Khrushchev taking over and starting releasing Banderites from gulags.
How much explosives do 50 Tomahawks carry? Well, 50 * 500 kg = 25,000 kg.
"Ukraine", that is NATO, is now sending drones with 50-100 kg warheads very deep into Russia and in the low hundreds every night.
To be charitable, we pick the low end and what do we get -- 150 * 50 = 7,500 kg.
So 50 Tomahawks are the equivalent of what Russia is now receiving every three days via drones.
All the talk about Tomahawks is just another tactic in the overall strategy of boiling the frog. Let's have the Russian idiots fixated on the possibly never real threat of Tomahawks, then we don't actually deliver them, and they will think everything is good, meanwhile the light cruise missile (a.k.a. "drone debris") strikes ramp up massively, but because there are no Tomahawks, they will just accept it. Which is precisely what is happening.
And it is not as if everything is shot down -- today we have four drones hitting the CHP in Oryol and the 750-kV substation in Vladimir being attacked too.
Read that very carefully:
1) Look at the map to see where Vladimir is
2) Yes, you read that right -- 750 kV substation. The central nodes in the grid that are still off limits in Ukraine itself
3) Plus the CHP in Oryol.
Now Russia is a very, very long way off from having issues with electricity due to such strikes, the grid will be easily rebalanced, but Russian cities are not heated by electricity, it is primarily central cogeneration by CHPs. Which also mostly run on gas these days. So there is a clear plan here, and it was widely discussed on Telegram channels several weeks ago, to hit the CHPs and the gas transit network leaving the central Russian regions in the cold in the middle of winter. Now you see it implemented.
That faithful moment the first crude drones flew into Crimea in the summer of 2022 and then the Tu-141s were launched towards Engles in December 2022 should have been the moment the hammer dropped, i.e. war is declared and Ukrainian leadership is exterminated, and nuclear strikes are carried out on Poland and Romania if they refuse to seal the borders.
That wasn't done then, nor at any moment between then and now, and where are we today?
I think part of the strategy is to deliver and use the Tomahawks. We'll see about "devastating" response. There hasn't been one yet, and the geniuses in DC don't think there ever will be one if the salami is sliced thinly enough.
Interesting thoughts… each country works in it’s own interests. Russia isn’t communist anymore. Who would enjoy living under Mao or Stalin, instead if being under the rule of Putin. War is a messy business; the usual fuckers always profit: before, between and after the wars they diligently plan. Only the ordinary people are the loosers as always. As for Russia’s security inside it’s borders, I don’t have the same reading as you. Russians is the largest territory to defend, Ukraine’s attempts to cripple (amounting to media win narrative) have not caused any blow to the economy of Russia. Poor Ukrainians, run to the slaughter by genocidal cock comedian president. Why hasn’t he negotiated yet? Ukraine war is already lost. Why is Zelensky is still letting that continue? Is his N Nazis friends holding a bayonnet under is _Ewish ass. No , it must be his _Ewish Oligarch handlers that want to maintain the profit going in their pockets….
I tell you, War is a messy business. I got a solution, exterminate the International bankers hold on the financial system. Each country emits his own currency, backed by Gold. Put the Corporates at their place (change the laws). When they play bad, put them in prison and for good masure, a nice fine so they don’t forget. It’s time that puppets become Statesmen again. « Hey man, I have the right to dream ain’t I?! »
Here you are making a fundamental mistake -- countries are not run in their interests, they are in most cases run in the interests of their elites. A huge difference, because the interests of the elites can be, and often are misaligned with or even directly opposed to those of the general population.
>Who would enjoy living under Mao or Stalin, instead if being under the rule of Putin. War
Apples and oranges -- obviously we are not in the 1930s anymore, the world is much more advanced so life is better across the board.
But consider where Russia was in 1922 -- backwards agrarian country -- and where it was in 1953 (industrial superpower with nukes and a space program, and that after suffering the most devastation anyone ever has in a war). Even the Chinese did not make progress at such a rate. Putin has been living off the Soviet legacy with very little new development, he just stopped the destruction.
Now imagine Stalin (not him personally, of course, but someone like him) had been in power in Russia in the last 70 years and maintained the same rates of development -- where would the country be today?
>As for Russia’s security inside it’s borders, I don’t have the same reading as you.
Well, was anything flying every day deep inside Russia four years ago, or even in 2022? No
Is it now? Yes.
That is a dramatic development.
And the immediate border areas are now worse off than Donetsk was in the DNR days. In fact Donetsk right now is probably more secure than Belgorod because it is further away from the line of contact
That too is a dramatic change.
You "don't get the same reading" because are you are safely away from it all and do not follow closely what is happening on the ground.
True, I’m living far from Russia. But I listen to commentators, that went there not long ago. Know a Russian ex-pat who goes there each year: conclusion taken from that. Don’t forget Russians has 11 time zone, fuckin difficult to defend. Since Putin is in power, he has uplifted the economy that was eviscerated by oligarchs, built the armed forces (all of them) to an unsurpass power edge technologically. The Russians have an economy that is growing, people are not waiting in line as in the Soviet time. Putin’s ratings is always over 80%, what about in the West. If you ask me who I find to be a real statesman: I will say: VVPutin. The problem we have today, that they are all corrupted and not intelligent. Putin, Xi at least thay are intelligent, seems to reflect in growth of their country, people…
>Don’t forget Russians has 11 time zone, fuckin difficult to defend.
Yes, of course, it is technically impossible
But this is why you have to defend the country through imposing deterrence. Which Putin has catastrophically failed at.
>Since Putin is in power
Putin will be judged by history by whether he managed to preserve the country. Building a consumerist society tends to weaken, not strengthen countries. The much more relevant to the country's survival facts are that:
-- The military is a pale shadow of what it was in Soviet times, due to chronic underfunding. Look at the military budgets since 2014. There was bump in 2015-16, but that was because of Syria, then it went down again, even though everyone knew a big war was coming with Ukraine. Don't get distracted by the doomsdat weapons (which are far behind schedule anyway) -- the relevance of those is the product of their power, effectiveness and willingness to use them, ans is thus zero because clearly so is the last factor.
-- Geopolitically the situation was worsened dramatically, not improved. For which Putin shares a lot of the blame. When he first got in power, Ukraine was a mostly friendly to Russia, non-Banderized country. Whose job was it to prevent the current situation from arising in the first place?
-- But it isn't just Ukraine. In a couple days the leaders of the five Central Asian *stans will be going to DC. Already you have Kazakhstan launching drones against the Russian soft underbelly, and signing a military cooperation agreement with the UK earlier this year. You see where things are going?
-- There are historically three strongly pro-Russian countries -- Serbia, Bulgaria (even though it was on Germany's side in both wars) and Armenia, which is because those owe their very existence in the modern world to Russia, plus they are Orthodox Christian (with a twist in Armenia's case, but still), etc. Armenia is about to exit the CSTO and is looking to join the EU and potentially even NATO, Bulgaria is in NATO and its weapons factories are working 24/7 to supply Ukraine, Serbia is not in NATO, but its weapons factories are also supplying Ukraine.
All of that transformation happened under Putin, who did absolutely nothing to prevent it.
>eviscerated by oligarchs
It still is, that hasn't ended, contrary to popular belief.
1) Putin does not have the power to remove Nabiulina, i.e. the bankers own Russia
2) Putin himself agrees with those policies.
I leave it to you to decide which one is worse.
It is also the Russian oligarchy that is actively sabotaging the war -- the reason there has been no mobilization is that there is a firm veto on that imposed by the Russian oligarchy. For a variety of reasons.
And again, Putin either agrees with them or does not have the power to overrule them.
Imo Tim, the largesse in giving a "Year" is the equivalent of giving enough rope with which to hang themselves. It also makes Xi appear reasonable and measured in the eyes of his neighbours who are also US vassals: SK, Japan etc.
Of course that’s not false. What’s China gonna do? There is 0 innovation coming out of Asia, population is aging rapidly and declining in Japan already.
China will be like Taiwan in 30 years : a place that used to make everything for everyone and now a worthless land.
I don’t need to travel : I lived and worked in Japan and Honk Kong. Japanese taxi drivers were already 80+ year old back in 2008 when I lived in Tokyo.
Japan, Korea & China are finished. No country can survive the demographic catastrophe that is coming.
Every single year, China will lose 15 million workers and gain ten million old people. Soon the entire population will decline and collapse, just like in Japan or Korea.
It’s easy to « grow » when no one has kids, everyone working age. It’s much harder to survive as a country when everyone is 70+ year old and cannot contribute to the economy…
Again, if China registers the most patents per year, by far, and patents are about inventions, then China invents the most things. So spare me repetitive crap about old inventions.
Also from your writing, it seems that you lived in Asia cca 20 years ago. I am living in China now.
Yes, China has demographic problems, like all developed countries (China is about to break into HDI 80). They are quite serious, sure.
However, even in France (the stellar developed country re fertility rates), what are fertility rates for aborigines? It seem the overall fertility rate is 1.85 for this year. How much do immigrants contribute to this? Already told you China still holds this immigration card, if they choose so. For example, my Pakistani colleague with three kids is applying for the green card now. China has all the cards regarding the immigration part of the population growth equation.
Same for your adopted country - America, what is the fertility rate without immigration? Decently below 2.1 for sure.
Moreover, it would be interesting to see if introducing maternal support similar to French, for example, would improve (and to what extent) the fertility rates. There is room for China to mimic European Social Security systems regarding pro-natalist approaches. Time will tell.
Demographic changes are a hard nut to crack, as governments all over the world are finding out.
That statement alone tells me that you are totally disconnected from the reality on the ground in China. And yes, I've been there, a bit more recently than you.
Yawn, your stupid racist spam is getting boring. During the last 200 years, the west stole, robbed, looted. genocided all around the globe. And nowadays, China files more patents and scientific publications than any other nation. The US trail Russia in engineers, China has 15times the number of MINT degrees of the US, 8 out of 10 leading universities are in China.
And that is only half of the story. Students not good enough for Chinese standards but with wealthy parents go to western countries, and still are the most diligent and successful students and postgrads. If you brows MINT research papers especially in the US and Australia, you find more Chinese and indian names than anglo and european among the authors.
The west had a habit of stealing from China, silk, porcelain, even steel came to the mideast from China where the west stole the technology. And they all stole from one another. After they got their bloodstained hegemony, they invented "intellectual property" to secure the bounty.
In the US, increasingly, the debt buyer is the Fed itself, so that is simply dilution of the currency on steroids. I guess the EU doesn’t yet allow that, but they will.
We’re getting there. The difference between a Deutsche mark in 1919 and 1921 was profound. Foreign holders of dollars have faced a very interesting challenge for the past twenty years, and that challenge grows every day: how to get out without triggering a run that destroys whatever you couldn’t get out in time.
China will use the next year to develop the administrative capacity to actually enforce its rare earth export controls in an effective and targeted manner. It doesn't have that capacity right now, so the only export restriction approach it could take right now would be meat axe, which would alienate a lot of countries China doesn't want to alienate. I expect China will make sure that the US and its allies are not able to stockpile rare earth products while the restrictions are "suspended."
I am not trying to mock any country. Just trying to balance the point of view of Simplicius regarding imminent collapse of the US.
In 30 years, the US will still be the world super power, wealthy, advanced and innovative.
At that time, China Korean and most of Asia will be a complete disaster. Population will have collapsed by 30-40%, economies will be destroyed by the lack of young man power, old people will rot and wait for death in derelict skyscrapers, built for a 1.5B population with 0 thoughts about the future.
I can't tell whether you're being racist or just ultra-nationalist, but I don't suppose such labels matter much anyway. On the other hand, claims that China has never innovated are ridiculous and unworthy of a more formal rebuttal. I'm more interested in two things you say, though: that in 30 years the US will still be "the" world super power, etc., and that Asian populations will have collapsed resulting in complete disaster.
About the US, I'm not sure where you live. Where I live, however, there are a lot of essentially poor people, the roads are a travesty, there's no significant mass transit, healthcare is optional and mostly unavailable, and people are struggling to maintain any lifestyle at all. The statistics show that this is not out of the ordinary, so if that's the life of a superpower, I'd say not many of us have much desire to maintain that state of affairs.
I do know something about money, though, and the US dollar is entering a death spiral. That isn't just name calling, it's what most people recognize the phenomenon as being. Specifically, the number of external buyers of dollars is not keeping up with government debt, and the Fed itself is buying increasing numbers of bonds, a simple dilution of currency. This will lead to hyperinflation, and given the size of the debt that's baked in the cake. I'm thinking that's not going to be good for our superpower status such as it is.
China could have problems. It's funny the way you put it, though, housing built for a 1.5 billion population with no thought for the future. If you've got 1.5 billion people you need to house them, and China has done that, along with elevating the lifestyles of about a billion people, while the US has seen a steady decline in national lifestyle, including a shrinking middle class, declining real wages, a skyrocketing food-insecure population and homelessness epidemic, the world's largest prison population, and a declining life span. Not to mention the intangibles, of which there are too many to mention. I'd bet my life that the Chinese leadership has put ten times as much thought into its future housing needs as any American leadership, or all of it, has, although what they'll do about it I don't know. I'm sure they see the problem coming, though, as well as I do.
I have mixed feelings about increasing Chinese power, not that my feelings on the subject make any difference, but I tell you this to say I am not "pro-Chinese" or anything like that. I don't like the amount of power the state has vis a vis individual liberties, for example, but I no longer think the US is better in that regard.
I have long since given over the fantastical notion that "western spirits" give us any degree of advantage in innovation. I think education is important, and the Chinese are far more invested in that. I'm sure you know the statistics.
The US has its problems and is not an ideal place, by far.
The USD will inflate a 2-3% per year, but like the EUR, the JPY, GBP and most currencies including Asian ones.
How is China going to pay for maintenance, pensions, healthcare and benefits when 60% of the population is 65 year old?
China will have 6M birth next year and 18M death, it’s insane!
It’s way to grow when suddenly 80% of the population is working age, with no children and no old people to talk care of. You just copy, steal intellectual properties and produce without any care for rules and regulations from the west.
The US will be inflating at far higher rates. It would have been doing that long before now if it weren’t for the Chinese, who have provided extremely low-cost manufactured goods that it exported to the US as much lower prices than the US could have produced them for. Compare the dollar’s value against a non-fiat form of money, gold. In 1972 it was $32/ounce; now it’s roughly a hundred times the price despite the fact that the movers and shakers have done their best to hold its price down. The other fiat currencies will also be inflated, but that’s not the same as the dollar NOT inflating. You could also look at the prices of cars, houses, diamonds, fine art… all have skyrocketed in dollar terms. That’s inflation, and it is far above 2% now, and will be much, much higher as the death spiral gets deeper.
I railed against Chinese laws regarding tech transfer of companies doing business in China. Do you know that some European countries are now imposing similar rules on Chinese companies? The center of innovation has shifted to the east just as the center of financial and real power have.
It will be interesting to see how China handles its age problems. I actually flinch at the thought, but not for the Chinese. They will import youth from other countries, of course, among other things. In Japan one solution has been robotic companions and helpers - I doubt China will need to do that.
I never thought the U.S. could successfully take on Russia, China, and India simultaneously with his various sanctions, when the top 5 countries by PPP adjusted GDP are China, U.S., India, Russia, and Japan in that order.
I found this amazing sentence when reading up on Chipotacalypse
> Boatwright said Chipotle is "doubling down on restaurant execution," increasing marketing spend, plans to create more digital experiences, and introduce more innovation.
Utterly creatively bankrupt, and 100% indicative of corporate America. It's Mexican food, should be cheap and delicious, the opposite of Chipotle. Not really that complicated.
Well said. These fast food restaurants CEOs are morons. They jacked up the price and expect us to keep shelling out the same way. Why pay 15 dollars for fast food? Just order a plate from a real restaurant. I never eat fast food anymore, because that’s what it costs. I’d rather have the real burger from Chili’s. Costs the same.
I live in the UK. I hadn’t been inside a McDonald’s for thirty years. But I fancied something trashy and different the other day and was curious too. I stood in the queue, looked at the prices on the screen and couldn’t believe my eyes. The price were no different to any other food stall in the local market, which quality and variety wise run rings around MD. I couldn’t believe that why drove me out of a MD’s was the price!
heh. The orchestration of getting Americans to vote for Trump was to produce the 'antidote' to a senile, corrupt and if you go by his daughters' diary, incestuous and unelected president, and a howling, cackling, slept her way to opportunities, out of her depth candidate, whos party apparatus short circuited the Democrat primaries nominee process. Talk about a Banana Republic.
There are still people thinking this is 5D chess - that Trump is playing the long game to expose the Deep State and all the parasites that profit from it. Yes, we can see that there are these elements now in plain sight. The American people and observers reel from the knowledge that their govt has been hollowed out from within just as much from external actors. The Swamp is real. But what's being done about it? What mass arrests have we seen? What corrections have been made to introduce real reforms to remove parasitic interests?
Trump is accelerating the merging of the state and corporations (Mussolini's definition of fascism) into what looks to be a Zionist based control grid technocracy, using Oracle, Amazon (AWS), Microsoft, Alphabet (Google/Youtube), META and Palantir etc to implement their digital surveillance panopticon - which won't benefit the masses. EU and UK and the collective West are collapsing their 'democracies' into the umbrella of this surveillance state.
Trump could have been the greatest politician of all time. He was given the mandate for change by a huge demographic that wanted him to save America from its intended fate. He sold out for shekels and ego.
You can't be a politician unless you have big donors - and Trump's $100 M donor is Miriam Adelson, who is completely committed not to the US, as she admitted recently, ( or rather, she wouldn't say whether she put the US or Israel first - which tells you exactly who she puts first ) so her poodle Donnie is not going to bite the hand that feeds either him, or his grotesque ego.
So the mandate he works according to is not given by the US citizen, but by the jewish bankster.
Thus the zero arrests you refer to; and the reframing of the problem away from the jews, where it ought to be focussed, and towards the illegals.
That was hilarious when Trump outed her. It really put her in the public spotlight. Of course she's Zionist first. He outed himself of course but Trump knew what he was doing. He was doing a little trolling which really is an expression of his vanity.
The thing is, Trump is not some kept boy like most politicians---he is a billionaire in his own right, and the $100M should be irrelevant to him. So I think it is a different kind of pressure that keeps him obedient, not the carrot but the stick.
It's certainly not, with eighty year old grandmothers and war vets being arrested, and jailed, for holding up a sign, or simply walking down the road, or for calling someone a "Muppet". Meanwhile, serial rapists and criminals get probation..
Yep. I constantly hear Republicans and MAGA folks talking about how Soros et al are behind the riots and demos. Yet where are the indictments? It's all fake and gay.
There seems to be a tremendous confabulation of the different assets lumped into the word 'crypto'. One is bitcoin, a deflationary currency and store of wealth that has diminishing new supply backed by energy; two is stablecoins, digital currencies pegged to the dollar and backed by a basket of assets including US Treasuries; and three crypto currencies, a variety of projects ranging from ponzi schemes and rug pulls, to blockchains for tokenization of assets.
The scheme the Russian minister was referring to involved stablecoins. The scheme would be to promote these stablecoins as digital dollars, have them purchased all over the world, and the holders would therefore be propping up the US bond market unknowingly, and then when these stablecoins inevitably de-peg from the dollar, the whole world will share in having their wealth devalued overnight.
Thanks for the explanation. I only have a very basic understanding but you have just made everything clear. Because of the very nature of using "celebrities" or Trump to push this, many Americans will just take the loss before they admit they fell for another "scam"
"One is bitcoin, a deflationary currency and store of wealth ..."
How anyone thinks that digits on a computer are a store of wealth is beyond my comprehension. Gold, silver, lead, food, water, and energy. Better have those... Chip
You are right. However, almost all currency now is digits on computers.
The recent takeoff of gold prices happened at the same time as the US floated the trial balloon of revaluing its gold holdings, which in theory also props up the dollar and allows them to borrow (print) more. As with bitcoin, mania (or mass psychosis) does most of the work for them.
What are the options for us little people? Ride the wave while simultaneously keeping an eye out for a better wave and the storm clouds on the horizon.
A substantial chuck of my "currency" is in my hands and not digits on a computer. Cash, gold, silver in the safe (well to be honest, I lost it all in a boating accident)...
In short, sale or issuance of stable-coin indirectly create artificial demand for issuance of new treasures or or other dollar assets.
The issuance or sale of stablecoins indirectly creates artificial demand for the issuance of new US Treasuries or other dollar-based assets backing those stablecoins. Because stablecoins must be fully backed by highly liquid assets like short-term US Treasury bills or cash equivalents, when new stablecoins are issued, issuers need to acquire these assets to back them 1:1. This increases demand for Treasuries, especially short-dated ones, supporting the US debt market and helping finance government borrowing needs at potentially lower costs temporarily.
However, this demand effect could partly offset demand elsewhere, such as from banks, and thus the net impact depends on shifts in asset holdings across the financial system. But overall, stablecoin growth represents a fresh source of demand for Treasury debt that did not exist before the rise of stablecoins.
Stablecoin issuance effectively locks investor funds into Treasury-backed digital assets, boosting Treasury demand by requiring more collateral acquisition as stablecoins grow in supply.
The key point you are missing is, not the WHOLE world. Russia, China, and likely India are aware of the trap, and will stand clear. So it is only their own vassals that the vampire masters will ruin. This is very much unlike the previous similar scheme which made the dollar the reserve currency, but the Cabal banksters fail to see, or deliberately close their eyes to, that crucial difference.
Bitcoin is what is called in Banking Circles, "Ledger Money". When you "own" bitcoin you own a ledger entry. It's no secret that the US is trying to copt crypto - including BTC as a leg supporting continued FIAT debt issuance. It's interesting to look at heat maps of where BTC mining is becoming concentrated. That activity seems to be moving to Europe and North America while declining in China and Asia.
Whats unknown about BitCoin is how vulnerable they are to a concerted, state supported action aimed at disrupting/destroying the ledger. To hack BTC with the intention of stealing some of the supposed value in the Ledger, one must preserve the appearence of the integrity of the ledger. That makes the problem very hard. But what if your plan is to simply break the ledger and you are a state actor with money, compute resources and access to talent ?
StableCoins are clearly a effort to support USD debt issuance and secretly monetize part of the debt. I pay 1 dollar to purchase a SC. The SC issuer, gives my dollar to Treasury to purchase debt. The SC issuer collects the interest from the debt. Treasury spends my dollar and I inturn find that I can spend my SC as if it were an additional dollar. Thus 1 new SC effectively becomes 2 USD - we have monetized a portion of our debt.
Trumps tariffs, threats and tantrums killed EU carmakers when they tricked Nerherland to overtake the Chinese company Nexperia. China promptly stopped the supply of microprocessors causing Auto-makers to halt production because Nexperia is the biggest supplier of semi-conductors in EU.
Trump is effectively making Europe weaker and weaker.
After a lengthy stick and carrot game this whole chapter was closed before Trump made it to South Korea. It has been already decided that Russia, China and India will stand their course and it is very unlikely that any one of them will submit to American pressure. Concessions, diplomatic discussions tariff games and niceties yes, blind submission no. Trust based relations were completely eliminated some years ago after in 2010 three American nuclear subs surfaced around China in a coordinated manner with around 460 Tomahawk missiles at the ready. America did achieve something there, China took off with the fastest armament program what have been seen in human history. It was like an elephant walked into a porcelain store, not really knowing what is going to break there. What the Soviet Union and the Cold War was unable to achieve, what was the nightmare of a British geologist Sir Halford John Mackinder in 1904, was finally realized in the last three decades as America has walked into the ‘Heartland’. Mackinder has written The Geographical Pivot of History, describing a geopolitical possibility that is being realized today, a political unification of a major Eurasian territory (The Heartland) that can possibly rule the planet. He was thinking in terms of Northern Siberia and Eastern Europe at the time. The fact is that most of Siberia is barely populated still today. On the other hand, India, China and Russia represent a major part of the global population with matching industrial and military strength. This is a devastating, irreversible geopolitical loss that has been triggered in 1991 when the new Russian Federation was denied a proper status in the Western World. This was not a ‘mistake’ or an ‘oversight’. This was a CONSPIRACY against the Western World by the Neanderthals.
Russia (in the past) and China in the present are "commies", you know, the ones you call "bastards" in the previous commentary. and according to scientific expert opinion of yours it is only because of the West that Russia did stand for the first year of war. At that time China suffered unimaginable losses from occupational force - that would be Japan.
And in the summer of 1945 there was a rather special military operation with T-34/85, men who supposed to come home to enjoy family life were re-directed to the Eastern Front, they fought for 4 years and that was the last time they did. Or at least everybody thought that might be the last time.
If you look at the DNA analysis of Europeans some of that comes from the Neanderthals.
it is never about DNA. Also, are you for real, we are about to be called out as antisemitic and then you have it - a tomahawk in your backyard.
It is about accountability, responsibility, all these things men consider apply to their families. It also applies to the states, how sustainable they are, if there was any artificial construct applied to them out of rapture of WWII or the collapse of the Soviet Union - one thing is not without the other.
You may not have realised it, and you probably never will, but it is all about DNA.
Genesis 3, 15 speaks about the "Two Seeds" that are permanently in conflict, and the New Testament reaffirms this basic truth, when it refers to the wheat and the tares.
The two seeds are the descendants of Adam, and the descendants of Lucifer, as a result of the Original Sin everybody has heard about, but nobody can define - ie the intercourse which occurred between Eve and Lucifer in the Garden of Eden.
And thus, the murder of righteous Abel by the unrighteous Cain.
Murder which continues undiminished even to the present day.
Let's chill a bit with the condescending tone of yours. I am highly suspicious of preachers (long story). Eastern Orthodox Russian who looks at icons every day and knows the basics. And as a good Christian I do feel the pain, in fact all of that.
Don't be like that. It is not on me, but it is there. The guilt, the shame, and the ceasefire. Something they are cooking for my people.
My mom, God rest her soul, was involved in gens engineering back in the days. It is a thing. Russians for once are actively working on treatment from cancer based on genetics algorithms. This fall are the trials. They are not all that murderous after all. I mean, if they have mucho success in rocket science, why not to achieve something humanity really needs - a cure from that plague angeldust scientists thought is overrated due to the fact that hospitals in USA are adding the cancer wings and the budgets as we speak and the healthcare let's be honest and direct is not ideal.
And these days with all kinds of testing it is easy to establish traces of the bloodline if you like. As long as you are comfortable with this, I was not. I do have a strong sense of identity as it is, even if I have a pen name here. Whatever floats your boat.
DNA is definitely a code-bearing polymer, but whether it is entirely responsible for our health or sickness is another thing altogether.
The reason for this is that if you remove a nucleus from a cancerous cell, and inject it into another cell which is healthy, but which has had the nucleus removed, the cell reverts back to its normal phenotype.
The smart money, then, is on the mitochondria as being the true culprits in cancer aetiology; if they fail, then the energy charge of the cell declines, and with it, its ability to maintainm normal cellular processes.
Cancer then is seen as a survival mechanism in which anaerobic respiration is reverted to as a last-ditch effort by the cell to increase its metabolic potential, but it has to do this by uncontrolled cell division, ie by triggering cancer.
From RT Beijing has agreed to ease rare earth export controls in exchange for lowered tariffs and restrictions from Washington. China bent the knee again it's right there on RT Beijing gave in Donald Ducky won you can talk all types of story's the USA still Rules China agreed they backed down
I said you can talk all types of story's the USA still Rules China agreed to ease the earth restrictions it's even on your favorite RT go look China bent it's knee
The reprieve, if confirmed by the Chinese, is for measures yet to be implemented. The previous rounds of restrictions have not been removed. The Chinese showed the US the whip and they had no option but to fall into line.
Which little Chinese? The little Chinese that are saying the restrictions imposed in April are still in place. The Chinese showed the US the rare earth nuclear option and they bowed to the new Emperor, Xi. It seems the Chinese have the US by the balls and it's affecting them, and you, pretty badly.
China didn't relax the rare earth restrictions. They are still in place. What they did was agree to postpone their new rare earth measures which would have been the trade war nuclear option.
This. The media is once again just trusting Taco's assertions and not fact-checking.
The April 4th restrictions are still in place; only the Oct. 9th threat to go even further has (perhaps) been delayed for a year. And even that story never got confirmed by the Chinese government.
I believe graphite is on the list and 100% controlled by the Chinese. Everyone knew this in 2012 when the Chinese played the RE card with the Japanese. Nobody did anything about it and now the Chinese have the ability to shutdown most if not all high tech production outside of China.
Go read what I said you can talk all types of story's the USA still Rules China agreed and they bent there knee it's right there on RT News the thing is little Donny Duck threatened and China buckled that's it I hate the USA can't stand them but it's all there on RT News China agreed to ease rare earth export controls go look
Reminds me of the Neo robot that's been making the rounds this week. Oh wow it'll do the laundry and wash the dishes! But then you read the fine print and it can't do anything on its own, it's all remote controlled by some poor wage slave 😩
Our defense industry died in Busan and nobody noticed. We still cannot buy Scandium, Samarium, Gadolinium, Lutetium, Yttrium, Dysprosium, or Terbium. Nor Gallium, Germanium, Antimony, Graphite, REE Processing Tech and IP, or REE machinery and equipment.
Recall Dr. Hudson's dicta: "Debts that can't be repaid won't be repaid." And "Most 'wealth' is 'debt'" So, when the debt evaporates--defaults--the wealth follows it--poof! The postage stamp example: When I was born in 1955 a regular 1st Class letter cost 3 cents and a postcard 2 cents, while today it's 78 cents and 61 cents, respectively, More:
"$1 in 1955 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $12.09 today, an increase of $11.09 over 70 years. The dollar had an average inflation rate of 3.62% per year between 1955 and today, producing a cumulative price increase of 1,108.87%.
"This means that today's prices are 12.09 times as high as average prices since 1955, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics consumer price index. A dollar today only buys 8.271% of what it could buy back then." https://www.officialdata.org/us/inflation/1955?amount=1
And of course, we know how accurate the government's rate of inflation report is. The postal measure says costs are 30X higher today than in 1955. Your basic new Ford car cost $1600 in 1955 while today the average new car price in Outlaw US Empire is $49,000. Service industry jobs can't afford modern things or new houses or gentrified apartments. The lamentation Billy Joel voiced in "Allentown" has escalated. Just as Herbert Hoover had no cure at the Great Depression's outset, Trump has no solution for the accelerating decline of the Outlaw US Empire that he'd be allowed to implement if he were so inclined, which he isn't.
The last two words of your sentence are redundant.
The real moral: Modern money is meant to be spent not saved. The modern economy is an endless recycling of dollars (euros, pounds, etc.). The faster they are recycled, the stronger the economy.
Want to retain as much of the value of your money as possible. Spend it on items that do not depreciate.
The solution always begins with a restructuring of the economy, such that no dollars are printed unless they match hard reserves of some item like gold, or as Hitler showed, work.
Immediate and massive prosperity results, followed by a world war triggered by jewish banksters, whose entire modus operandi is parasitism.
The downfall of the US began in earnest at Christmas 1913, when the jewish money interests managed to set up the Fed, and its ugly twin sister, the IRS.
Some still around some are not. A few made a lifelong effort to pursue the issue with good reason. Willis A Carto was writing and dreaming about declaring the whole gang a group of criminal conspirators.
😘
Victor is hospitalized or sth?
I apologize, where were my manners. Greetings and salutations, y'all!
Damn Yankees, damn Yankees, damn Yankees (once we are in the spell/witchcraft notion of argument - in order to make a difference you need to say these words in front of the Yankee)
On the subject of US's runaway debt Kanye West style - How not to pay the American national debt fixing to hit $38 trillion while going after constituents with $25 overdue bills.
Government shutdown and a trolls life.
It was tempting, I admit. But I decided to give someone else a chance. Happy the girls won.
I know for the fact that some gentlemen have a superior upper body strength and logic attached to it, also wits, charm and intellect. So if for whatever reason some blonde copy paste their style, and they are cool with that. It makes them all mentioned above apriori.
I am happy that you are safe. ;)
President Xi looks like he had enough. Beyond pretense.
Did we girls beat Victor this time? So there you have it the geopolitical analysis from a woman with angelic name and encyclopedic knowledge. We also need a Frank Sailor and we will hold the grounds.
Yes beat Victor!!!! I still think Xi looks like Pooh Bear.
Also did you know that if your from China and escaped communism you use the last name CHEN. But if you came more recently they use the spelling Qian.
English has no example of Qian = Chen
Qi is not the Ch sound like Church or Chuck.
Thanks for the linguistic lesson from Tiananmen Square. My grandparents are from Asia and my father is a Communist. I am sure your feelings are hurt since you are all cute with Western values and escaped the tyranny but you are also well compensated per word count or a number of posts to make a difference, right?
No hurt feelings. Just making fun of the CCP making sure their people self identify by using Qi = Ch
I like the idea of getting compensated, unfortunately I would not be able to write what I wanted which takes all the fun out of it.
<<Xi looks like Pooh Bear.>>
Winnie the Pooh says "Oh, bother". It is his well-known catchphrase, used when he finds himself in a frustrating or sticky situation, such as getting his head stuck in a honey pot.
Pooh Bear in Chief...aka The Stable Genius, literally got his head stuck in Epstein's-Mossad's Honey Pot. Quick! Look over there! A squirrel. Wars on three continents and the charade of "diplomacy". The high price of distraction.
Are you actually able to speak Chinese because I have never heard of such nonsense
I agree it is nonsense to make people self identify and show fealty to the party by pretending Qi = Ch. Personally I spell my name Dave but I think I will pronounce it as Bob. No word in the English language that begins with the letter Q is pronounced using the sound Ch. Queen is not Cheen
Hey Bryan, I know you are very proficient at using the "google". May I suggest you try the following prompt:
"how do you pronounce the chinese name qian"
Response:
"To pronounce qian in Mandarin, say "chee-an," with the "q" sounding like a "ch" in "cheese". "
Here is a quick video that teaches Americans how to pronounce the new use of the letters QI = Ch
https://youtu.be/x7pxURI_4cc?si=kRg-tOABdQwzpDOD
He's not the only one who's had enough.
Kinda funny how big, ol’ Don: The “master dealmaker” folded like a cheap suit. China got pretty much everything they wanted, lol!
The chinks should have squeezed for a lot more. Example: Phase out Taiwan military aid.
But who knows? Maybe Trump was savagely roughed up behind the scenes.
You know he was. Even from what I can tell from my distant armchair, China and Russia are in a position to dictate terms. You can bet he had it spelled out in crayon and when he looked confused his advisors leaned in and made it even simpler….”Yeah Don, he’s not bluffing”
The US hardly needs crypto to foist its debt onto the rest of the world. That has been the dollar's function since 1972. I was disappointed by reports that China will be relaxing its rare earth licensing restrictions, and I hope that's false. It would be a mighty blow to US imperialism for those restrictions to be enforced, and there's never going to be a better time to do it.
Rare earths on itself are useless, without the rare magnetics you can go nowhere and besides, China’s going alternative nuclear directions, less polluting, less endangering but more peaceful. They just finished their first Thorium reactor, the beginning of the end of uranium and plutonium threats and eternal warfare. Give peace a chance and love your enemies.
@Givenroom
Sorry, couldn't quite make that out over the sound of all those monkeys flying out of your butt.
"They just finished their first Thorium reactor, the beginning of the end of uranium and plutonium threats and eternal warfare. Give peace a chance and love your enemies."
Give peace a chance, sure, but love your enemies when they stab you in the back, hell no. This isn't about winning a Darwin award, you know.
In the above this is pure nonsense: "the beginning of the end of uranium and plutonium threats and eternal warfare." No, it isn't.
Thorium reactors can't work without fissile plutonium or uranium. Read that sentence twice if you still think thorium reactors are the end of massive amounts of fissile uranium and plutonium piling up around the world. Thorium reactors don't actually run on thorium: they run on fissile plutonium or uranium. The thorium in those reactors is just a material from which fissile uranium can be bred.
The power in a "thorium" reactor comes from the fissioning of plutonium 239, uranium 235 or uranium 233, the three fissile isotopes that have been used for nuclear weapons. Plutonium is universally the overwhelming favorite because of its low critical mass. U235 has a much higher critical mass but for various political and technical reasons it has been used in some nukes (like the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima) and in combination with plutonium.
Uranium 233 has been known to have been used in three nuclear explosions. The critical mass of U233 is about the same as plutonium, so it's a much better material for nukes than U235. The complications of using U233 are about the same as the complications using plutonium: you have to be careful how you cook it so you don't end up with too many undesired contaminants. On the plus side, U233 doesn't have predetonation issues like plutonium so it's a better choice for simple weapons. And, like plutonium, it's far easier to extract from cooked fuel than the insanely expensive and complex hassles involved in enriching natural uranium to weapons grade U235.
So, if "thorium" reactors actually run on plutonium or fissile uranium, why does anybody bother with "thorium" reactors at all?
That's because there is about four times more thorium in deposits worth mining than uranium, and some countries, like India, have vast reserves of it. Although you can't use thorium to power a reactor or a nuclear weapon, if you stick thorium into a reactor that's running on plutonium or uranium, the neutrons from the reactor will transform thorium into uranium 233. You can then use that uranium 233 to power reactors or nuclear weapons.
It's not currently economically feasible to create a "thorium" reactor that produces more U233 than the plutonium or fissile uranium (either U235 or U233) that it consumes, so it's not a positive breeder like uranium/plutonium breeders. But it can produce enough U233 from relatively abundant and cheaper thorium to be worth doing, at least if you have lots of thorium, so you don't need as much uranium.
Thorium fuel cycles have gone nowhere because the use of uranium in reactors is well down the price curve, and you still have to use uranium to run a "thorium" reactor, so for most countries it's not worth the hassle of starting up a quasi-breeder alternative technology. But it could be well worth it for India. I don't know if China has large thorium reserves but if they do it could be worth it for them.
There are some people promoting "thorium" reactors who tell a lie that the breeding of U232 along with U233 will prevent the fissile U233 from being used in weapons. That's a lie that exploits the general, total ignorance of the masses in basic physics.
U232 emits gamma rays, which are powerful and dangerous radiation. But so do many plutonium isotopes that are created when you "cook" inert U238 to make plutonium. That hasn't stopped plutonium from becoming by far the first choice for nuclear weapons. As with "cooking" up plutonium for weapons you just have to run your "thorium" reactor to produce a lower, acceptable percent of U232, resulting in "clean" U233 as the US, Russia, and India used in their nuclear explosions that used U233.
China has never, ever invented anything those past 200 years. Asians are good at copying and very bad at innovation.
They aren’t mysteriously coming up with new nuclear reactor: they would rather copy what France or the US has given them.
Fast train, nuclear reactor, hydroelectric, etc
Everything was stolen.
Good for them! Payback for what we did to them. And it's working.
Who cares. It works.
The copium displayed when people pick at scabs about how the Chinese know nothing is disingenuous as hell.
Beyond even members of the last ranked team in the NFL bitching that they deserved the superbowl ring.
China's stuff is built to work. US crap is just a way of laundering money.
China has been a world power before anyone would even know that one day there will be an USA. China will be a world power the next 5000 years, if the USA makes it another 50 years in their current form remains to be seen.
China, a world power? Let’s be real, even tiny Japan completely squashed China during the 1900s and reduce the population to slavery.
China did become the factory of the world, with no children and an immense young population. Give it 20 years and it will once again be a dying country with crumbling empty skyscrapers and old people everywhere.
Every single year, China will lose 15M working age people, more than the entire work population of Spain !
Just like in Korea or Japan, there will be nobody to help take care of the old people, no one to repair and maintain the infrastructure that have been built those past 40 years.
Good luck, it’s over.
Visiting western industrialists recently came back from China with ashen faces.
Their humanoid robotics programme can easily be used to perform basic nursing functions for an aging population.
The number of these machines is at least two or three orders of magnitude ahead of anything we have in the west.
A country with a continuous history of so many centuries must have had several periods of decay. This happened to China and it did not happen just in the period that you alluded to. By the way, Chinese decadence did not start in 1900 and because of Japanese aggression.
China was already stagnant when the British
defeated them and gave what seemed the coup de grace to the Chinese civilization. The apparent Chinese debacle started with the Opium Wars.
But this is not much relevant to the situation in the world today.
China was wounded but did not die and is quite clearly back and most probably the first power of the future.
Will China become a country of old people, due to the one child policy of the past?
I doubt it. The Chinese will do as the State tells them. When necessary the "Three children policy" will be introduced and the State will make sure that it is followed or else...
The demographic problem is much more acute in the Europe, were there is no social discipline and, bar a revolution, no reversal of the suicidal trend is probable. Now the prospects of some international feats and relevance of Germany, France and the UK with African or Islamic majorities are laughable. If terminal civil wars can be avoided it would be already remarkable.
The US with Trump are now trying to prevent becoming a demographic extension of Latinamerica, which was the trend of the past decades, but, as any one should know, the extreme polarisation in that country means that success is not guaranteed at all.
You must be American. Only an American would produce such garbage.
More Peter Zeihan dire demographic predictions that China is going to collapse in 6 months. He's been making a living on that for over 10 years now.
While the US birthrate is slightly higher than China, I'm pretty sure China will take care of its old people before the US does.
In any case, China will be rich enough to import what ever human labor is needed for that role if it can't be furnished by Chinese robots.
China was a regional power, never a world power.
So....???
Whatever, China "wins"
Au contraire.
from WP,
" ... By 2019 two of the reactors were under construction in the Gobi desert, with completion expected around 2025. China expects to put thorium reactors into commercial use by 2030.[6] The 60 MWt reactor is scheduled to be completed in 2029. Part of the thermal energy, 10 MW will be used to create electrical power; the remainder will be used to evolve hydrogen by splitting water molecules at high temperature.[67]
@ Luis - The West used to say exactly the same about Russians in the 19th century. And here we are.
You can't possibly believe that about China? Working with high technology requires high technological expertise - which leads to their own inventions/improvements. Nobody needs to "invent" from a proverbial "scratch" whoever have the brains analyze what was invented/done before them and make a leap ahead.
My favorite was Trump's "Russia stole our super-duper rocket!" - and what? Was this rocket design on a napkin that Russians eat after "stealing?" Did Russia forbid the US to CONTINUE developing this super-duper rocket - like threatened to sue the US for IP rights?
In my US city, they're building the light rail from the 1960s! It was super-duper technology but from the world exhibition of 1962! Instead of learning what other countries (from rugs to riches, like Taiwan, etc) did about their transportation - Americans used OWN outdated technology from 1960 in 2025, and building this 'light rail" for > 5 years.
Oddly enough for people who "never invented anything in the past 200 years", more patents are issued in China than the rest of the world combined.
https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/china-is-the-largest-contributor-to-global-patent-applications-substantially-ahead-of-other-countries
Let’s be real, nothing you use every day was invented in China, zero, nothing.
China’s business plan was based on unlimited quantity of cheap labor, stealing all intellectual properties, and manufacturing goods without having to abide to the rules of the west (related to pollution, human right, labor)
Obviously some of the people working in factories will come up with manufacturing improvements, but that’s not quite what I would call « innovation ».
Were the medications you use discovered in a China? Were computers, internet, cell phones etc invented in China? Were airplanes, trains, cars, rockets or satellites created by Chinese engineers and scientist?
China developed high speed train after buying a couple of TGV from France. Everything after that was just a rip off from France and Japan.
China built dozens of nuclear reactors, all of them from stolen technology and savoir faire from the west.
The only innovation that came out of China was … Covid. And even that was leaked from a French built lab.
I never use paper. Ceramics. Nope.
Ah so now we're qualifying "nothing" to be "nothing you use every day". Why didn't you say that in the first place, And why have you excluded paper and ceramics as pointed out by Feral Finster. I'll tell you why, because like all conspiracy whackjobs you rely on cherry picked, superficial factoids of the kind beloved on facebook, factoids that invariable crumble to dust under due diligence. You need to grow up a little and leave the teenage tropes behind.
@Axel - "Let’s be real, nothing you use every day was invented in China, zero, nothing" REALLY?! Ever used porcelain, silk, etc.
In the US, the 1960s, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, TN - invented a type of nuclear reactor that can run on thorium instead of uranium (common, cheaper, no meltdown risk, generating 50x less waste, requires no water). Due to bad politics, the program in 1969 was killed, its developer - fired.
Chinese scientists found the declassified blueprints for this forgotten project in archives in 2011 and ran an experimental project in the Gansu desert for 14 years, and they actually made it work.
So... who is to blame?
"Asians are good at copying and very bad at innovation." Take your filthy casual racism and shove it where the sun don't shine.
Any counter example? Or you prefer to simply scream "racism" when you are obviously wrong, like the radical left?
What next? Africa is a leading continent in innovation, culture and intellect?
Correction: everything is derivative. This principle predates our lame ass species by million of years….but yeah come along and whine like a pauncy hairdresser about everything being stolen. My precious…..
I am not whining, I am just saying China the future superpower is a joke.
When I was a child, everyone was saying Japan was taking over the world. GDP per capita stagnant for 30 years and a fast declining population and economic calamity. Korea is right behind.
China will not survive the demographic issue. In 2015 there were 17 million births and now 7 millions. That’s 7 million birth for a country of 1.5 billion people…. It’s over.
I have to say that you are obviously an idiot. China over 2.5 thousand years made many very important inventions. This only stopped a couple of hundred years ago because of internal problems. These problems have now been resolved, and China is back to cutting edge inventions. Actually, your post stinks of racism.
Another post without a single example of recent innovation. China was successful 1000 years ago without a doubt. China is finished now.
If you all cannot do the basic maths to understand that it will be a demographic catastrophe like the world has never seen before, it’s on you. It’s third grade maths.
The rule of China, Japan and most of Asia has always been based on submission. Submission doesn’t foster innovation.
Go live in Japan and you’ll see how literally no one is optimistic. Young people do not marry, do not have kids, do not innovate or create thriving businesses. It’s a socialist country with
Japan came up with CDs and the Walkman. That was 40 years ago. Since then? Nothing.
Those are facts, not pathetic insults (« racist ») like the woke left and people without arguments love to use.
When people are degraded to the level where they lose their respect for basic math they should be written off as nonfunctional. Around four years ago I spent weeks to calculate the proportion of America’s White population based on existing U.S. Census Bureau data in large part. My conclusion was that Whites were 46-47% of the total. Since then the number went to around 45% but the fact remains that the U.S. Census Bureau data is doctored just like crime stats in most states. So, in reality the US White population might be even below 40%. I did researches concerning commie countries where you had to circumnavigate around ALL gvmnt data as surely doctored. America functions at the exact same level now.
China’s problems have been resolved?
2025 will see about 7 million births and 12 million death. You read that well! Number of birth has halved in 10 years and keeps collapsing. I bet you didn’t know that.
Working population dropping by 10 to 15 million people every single year.
Those issues are irreversible.
To be fair White nations have greater demographic problems and will be overrun before China ever is.
Simplicius, I’ll give you $200 if you ban Axel to keep him from ruining your comments section.
" I have to say that you are obviously an idiot. China over 2.5 thousand years made many very important inventions. "
Thats nice, but modern society is completely based on a Western framework. From economics, education, medicine, rules of war, diplomatic protocols ( all diplomats / politicians wear Western suits for example ) to aircraft, mass media and so forth.
They stopped at about the 2nd Century AD.
Now, had they finished developing the arc of pig iron as a common currency and Zheng Ho fleets, they would've beat Anglos to the Moon by 250 years.
But, nooo...when the new Emperor came in in 1492, he beheaded the admirals and banned pig iron currency, fearing foreign contamination and the rise of a middle class. Burned the records as every Year Zero emperor in China has done, all the way back to when the Yellow Emperor burned the records of his predecessor, the Red, and then claimed that he invented China.
The ant people don't change. There is a monument in New Mexico dating back some 3000 years - "General Li dedicates this site to Emperor Wang," and the like, so close to modern ideograms that today's Chinese scholars can read it. Every Chinese advance reverts to an eternal stasis.
Today? They may have broken the mold, thanks to us - but we shall see if they get old before they get rich enough to avoid another Warlord Period.
If the warlords don't burn the records, another recurrence of the Black Plague will - theirs is a demographic model built on cycles of population explosion and plague/famine crash.
"China has never, ever invented anything those past 200 years. Asians are good at copying and very bad at innovation."
Abject nonsense. I'll give just one counter example, the phenomenal invention that is DeepSeek, China's answer to ChatGPT. It is a genuinely new invention that enables neural networks and large language models to work over a hundred times more efficiently than the older technology American AI's use.
DeepSeek is another example of optimizing and copying what already exists.
British people come up with industrialization, China now does it best. French people invent efficient high speed trains, now China does it great. Americans come up with smart phones, and now China makes great smart phones too. Americans come up with AI, and then China offers DeepSeek.
You and I could program a decent AI within weeks, but the idea, the concept and the principles were once again designed by people from the west. I didn't come up with it and didn't know it was going to work that well : neither did the Chinese. However, I could easily program one with a bunch of (cheap) studen5ts from a top French engineering school.
Chinese people are very smart. But the culture is to be submissive and to do what you are told. That fosters hard work, not innovation. Japan, Taiwan and Korea are exactly the same. Japan came up with CDs and the Walkman in the 1980s and nothing since then.
China is currently registering the most patents per year. Now what is a patent?
'A patent is an exclusive right granted for an INVENTION.''
https://www.wipo.int/en/web/patents
I do not want to be rude, but can you grasp how retarded posts like these are?
I posted elsewhere how semi literate America is and how half of the stuff that 'USA' does is made by foreigners. Not so much in China.
China may be registering patents all day, but you cannot name a single useful one, just like all the other people commenting.
Answers like « porcelain » or « tea » are absolutely ridiculous.
Here’s my guess: you know absolutely nothing about Asia, have never been, never lived & never worked there and you have the audacity to call me names.
Let’s hope they finally have « eating with proper utensils» and « using a real alphabet » in your list of patents, but I doubt it.
I am also guessing by your comment that you know NOTHING about the USA either.
Let me guess: another German dude who thinks solar panels and recycling bins will save the world?
Excellent information.
More here:
https://ieer.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/thorium2009factsheet.pdf
"There is just no way to avoid proliferation problems associated with thorium fuel cycles that involve reprocessing."
A 2009 paper that doesn't even mention China.
All the different U2** weights, interesting.
I guess the Thorium proponents work for Trump, blowing smoke. ;-)
From WP,
" ... By 2019 two of the reactors were under construction in the Gobi desert, with completion expected around 2025. China expects to put thorium reactors into commercial use by 2030.[6] The 60 MWt reactor is scheduled to be completed in 2029. Part of the thermal energy, 10 MW will be used to create electrical power; the remainder will be used to evolve hydrogen by splitting water molecules at high temperature.[67]... "
Thanks for this information.
The beginning of the end of plutonium and uranium threats and eternal warfare. Yes it is, absolutely. No Hiroshima and Nagasaki could have been destroyed on Thorium, this was indeed like you said winning the Darwin Award, Japan would have signed surrender without showing arms, power application at its most useless and ugly. Besides why is China so interested in Thorium when the US found it an investment at a too high price but also having no use in the long run? Get some deeper insight and understanding from the Thorium Energy Alliance, our whole cathedral of energy & powers will be running on empty within 25 or 30 years, when we exhaust the uranium reserves. We cannot deliver the same energy supply not even in combination with solar and alternative resources NOT in the same amount to feed our AI, internet, surveillance, medicine, agriculture, economy or any business or social model, only the elite will survive as pure bloods, mingling among themselves until nature takes them out. Nature doesn’t tolerate perfection nor inbreeding.
"The beginning of the end of plutonium and uranium threats and eternal warfare. Yes it is, absolutely."
Well, rather than say you don't have the slightest idea of what you're talking about, I think it would be both more polite and more productive to ask you show that you do, in fact, know what you're talking about.
Please correct me if I am wrong, but I get the impression that you use the phrase "plutonium and uranium threats" because you (correctly) believe that the presence of mountains of plutonium and uranium that can power nuclear weapons is a threat, right? Please confirm that's what you meant.
I assume you'll confirm that, so in advance I'll say I agree with you. The presence of mountains of plutonium and uranium that can be used to make nuclear weapons is indeed a threat.
So next, please explain why jumping into a thorium fuel cycle, which would generate even *larger* mountains of Uranium 233, a darned near perfect material for making nuclear weapons, even better than plutonium (God's gift to nuclear weaponeers...), would end those threats?
I get the impression that somehow in all of your reading of whatever material the Thorium Energy Alliance pumps out that you have, perhaps, missed the key insight that you can't run reactors on thorium. You have to convert thorium into uranium 233 first, and then you can run reactors on that.
By the way, talking about exhausting uranium reserves in 25 or 30 years is crazy (even if you believe that reserves with enough U235 in them for reactors will be gone in 25 or 30 years), because you can do the same "breeding fuel" trick done with thorium to convert inert uranium, U238, into very active plutonium.
The trick with thorium is to convert inert thorium (inert in terms of being able to power a reactor) into active uranium (U233, even more "active" than U235). The trick with breeder reactors that convert inert uranium (which is over 99% of uranium in the world) into active plutonium is the same thing... conversion of inert material into active material.
In both cases, the inert stuff (thorium or inert uranium) can't power reactors. But in both cases the inert material *can* be converted within a reactor into active stuff that *can* power a reactor. And in both cases, the active stuff you make from inert stuff just happens to be active stuff that also works really, really well for making nuclear weapons.
In fact, it's almost surprising how directly analogous the situation is between plutonium fuel cycles and so-called thorium fuel cycles: the active material in both cases is almost identical in terms of really small critical masses, and in both cases the active material comes with about the same technical nuances in terms of being careful with cook times to avoid unwanted isotopes from being created on the side.
Yet still, earnest eco warriors will flame anybody who talks about plutonium fuel cycles as an energy solution while praising to the skies "thorium" fuel cycles that create mountains of even better stuff for making nuclear weapons, U233.
By the way, calling it a "thorium" reactor is a lie. It's really a "uranium" reactor. It runs on uranium 233 that's made from thorium. It doesn't run on thorium and you have to be a scientific illiterate to think that it does.
"Besides why is China so interested in Thorium when the US found it an investment at a too high price but also having no use in the long run?"
It sounds like most of what I wrote in essay went over your head. China is not the US (read that twice if it seems like a difficult concept to grasp). The US and China have radically different sets of domestic resources available to them. In particular, China has vast thorium resources, enough to power the country for ten thousand years, while the US has basically zero thorium resources. In contrast, the US has large uranium reserves (as does China).
The US has many billions of dollars invested into uranium fuel cycles and it has cheap and reliable supply from many other countries, so much supply that for environmental reasons the US hasn't bothered to mine uranium within the US since the 1980s. In contrast, China likes to be self-sufficient in key resource inputs so it likes the idea of switching to a material that it has lots of and which can be converted into uranium for powering reactors.
Anyway, given that a thorium fuel cycle will produce mountains of uranium for use in nuclear weapons, how exactly, is it that breeding uranium from thorium is "the beginning of the end" of threats from nuclear weapons made from uranium?
You’ve challenged me to torture my brain, I’m very much obliged to you, so thank you. Torture? No its only common use for going beyond thinking and bring in a player always out of context consciousness. One can argue why not asking AI all problems answered, just that I personally believe that the faltering brain in its incompleteness can still bring up a glimp of an Aha moment, what AI will never be able too. The mind and all minds together are only mindful, they gave birth to AI and not the other way.
The first part of your exposé you answered your own question. Uranium indeed poses a threat to destroy all what can be created…and Thorium is no exception! It’s a choice, no more no less but its choice has like it or not more peaceful intentions, and I’m glad to explain why to you. Uranium leads to a dead end. The end is not Hiroshima and Nagasaki, living near Mururoa in the Pacific, all tests affected people in the area, Bikini, Eniwetok, Nevada, and who knows places that came never in the news. Thyroid and other cancers even after many years, also affecting next generations.
God’s gift to nuclear weaponeers and that’s what we’re living for, the Uranium God and it’s Ten Commandments, thou shall love only one God the God that destroys you! Weaponeers we’ve become not pioneers in its positive and creative context. We can’t stop piling up Uranium till we don’t see the Sun any longer. The source of life should be light not darkness and I respect your choice playing games with that item. To go to the essence of my point of view I’m hindered to go further I got interfered by somebody who doesn’t want me to come to the real thing. You can contact me in another note, perhaps I get more space to share my idea.
You know, you're going around in circles agreeing with yourself claiming truth without ever saying why what you claim is truth. For example:
"Thorium is no exception! It’s a choice, no more no less but its choice has like it or not more peaceful intentions, and I’m glad to explain why to you. Uranium leads to a dead end."
Please do explain that, and the slogan "Uranium leads to a dead end" is no explanation.
Why is using thorium to create mountains of material, far larger mountains of dangerous material than ever existed before, material that is even more dangerous than plutonium, a choice that has "peaceful intentions?"
That's like saying building a huge plant to build vaping products with far more carcinogens than leaf tobacco is a "choice that has healthy intentions."
I disagree with you that uranium leads to a dead end. Used intelligently and with reasonable (not even exceptional) skill, over the years it can save many millions of lives by eradicating poverty caused by high energy prices and by eradicating dangerous pollution and other environmental effects caused by burning fossil fuels for energy. Clean, cheap energy from uranium can lift billions of people out of poverty into far better quality lives. That for a variety of political reasons and social reasons many societies do *not* use uranium either intelligently or with reasonable skill is a social and political flaw, not a technical one.
But if you are absolutely certain that uranium leads to a dead end, why do you so enthusiastically praise thorium when the use of thorium is an even greater commitment to that uranium dead end? Transmuting thorium into uranium creates more uranium and a greater commitment to uranium, not less.
Clear your mind of lies and focus on the truth: the only use for thorium in power is to create massive quantities of highly fissile uranium. Uranium creates power, not thorium.
What thorium proponents call a "thorium" reactor is a facile lie to fool the ignorant: it's really a *uranium* reactor, but they don't want to use that word because they're focused on telling you that uranium is bad and thorium is good. If they tell the truth that their plan is to convert mountains of "peaceful" thorium into "evil" uranium so they can run reactors on that uranium, you can see they are really "evil" at heart.
What's especially cynical about their lies is that the mountains of uranium they want to create by transmuting thorium happen to be a form of uranium that is especially useful for creating nuclear weapons. Even worse, it is by far the best and most effective material for creating simple nuclear weapons that even small and poor and technologically backward countries, or even individual bands of terrorists, can use to create nuclear weapons.
That's the exact opposite of "peaceful intentions." Creating ten or a hundred times as much uranium for nuclear weapons as has ever existed, and creating those mountains of uranium in a form that is especially easy to use in nuclear weapons, so easy that any reasonably smart person who is good at cobbling stuff together, who has a basic science education, who can read Internet and has a few tens of thousands of dollars for equipment can build a simple nuclear weapon, is not, repeat NOT, a positive step towards peace.
A minor technical correction regarding: "God’s gift to nuclear weaponeers and that’s what we’re living for, the Uranium God"
I didn't write that uranium is God's gift to nuclear weaponeers. It's plutonium that is God's gift to weaponeers.
And by "weaponeers" I didn't mean a handful of people beavering away in a warehouse in the Syrian desert to create a simple nuke they can use to erase Tel Aviv from the map. I meant elite weaponeers that produce exquisitely efficient product at the height of the art.
For them, plutonium is still the one true ring that rules them all, the magic material that is the primary element in the sacred trinity of plutonium, heavy hydrogen and lithium that is the essence of the finest expression of the art.
Uranium, even wonderfully fissile U233, is base stuff in comparison, not the supernatural substance that is plutonium. If you know what you're doing there's no need for uranium at all in nuclear weapons, not for tamper, not for any of that elementary school stuff. You can do it all and better with the sacred trinity using more skillful approaches such as ripple technology.
But, if you're beavering away in the Syrian desert on a limited budget and you don't care about elegance or the best possible prayer in the true faith of high energy physics, caring only about generating a big enough blast on the cheap to rid the world of your enemies, well, then U233 from transmuted thorium is just the ticket.
U233…U235 and 38 the ultimate weapons of the powers that be, well I have a little surprise. The computer that were working with and not only the screens we both are looking at, and don’t forget to see above Lockheed F35 cannot stay one minute longer in the sky, without Chinese precision Actinides, magnets and magnetics. We can underestimate their importance even ignore it, but 99% is Chinese. The US population of 360 million it took them 250 years to fall short in social welfare and wellbeing, China has succeeded only in 30 years to give 4 times the US population some dignity even if its totalitarian, you cannot provide for 1,4 billion people without a strict system. No ant can survive outside its colony.
I agree but we can't believe what we read from this administration can we. 3 points, one: much like years ago China didn't end up buying the amount of soybeans the US thought they were going to buy, this could be a repeat of that. Two: i too think they should play the ree card more aggressively. And maybe they will since I don't believe what is coming from the Trump camp. If the US can deny chips on national security grounds then China can do the same especially with reels since it surely will be made into weapons to the detriment of China. Finally 3: no way China let's go of tik tok for just money. Notice how the signing date keeps getting pushed back? The only way they part with tt is if they receive something sizable in return, I'm thinking something related to Taiwan. Oh, they never sold the canal either.
Hard to believe anybody would make a deal with the US anymore. Or even talk to them, frankly. A waste of time.
Kiril Dimitriev was in DC a few days ago.
So it does look like some peolpe are still trying to make a deal...
Mind boggling. Strange policy by the Russians.
You always try to make a deal - it's better than going straight for the aggressive military or "sanctions" option.
But guaranteed, inside the velvet glove is an adamantine resolve to ensure Russia's rights are fully protected.
Russia’s rights are not being fully protected. The US is currently waging an undeclared, and unreciprocated, war against it.
>You always try to make a deal - it's better than going straight for the aggressive military or "sanctions" option.
Not if the deal you are proposing means strategic surrender without a fight.
Putin offered/accepted an offer to leave the rest of Kherson and Zaporozhye in Nazi hands if he got Kramatorsk and Slavyansk.
This is high treason on multiple counts and levels
First, it means Putin is giving away to regional capitals of the Russian Federation, which he has absolutely no right to do.
Second, it means he is leaving the rest of Ukraine in Nazi hands, i.e. core historic Rusisan land, to be de-Rusified and completely converted into an anti-Russia
Third, he is abandoning all the goals of the SMO, which can only be achieved by erasing Ukrainian statehood altogether.
And we can add the fourth -- the December 2021 ultimatums also meant nothing.
How about just completely ignoring the US ? No need for violence.
"Mind boggling. Strange policy by the Russians."
It costs Russia nothing for Dimitriev to do a tour of US media outlets to counter some of the US's agitprop. It also costs Russia nothing for Dimitriev to propose mutual cooperation and not war. Russia's allies like that, especially China.
There's no inconsistency at all with Dimitriev talking peaceful measures while Russia also insists on its non-negotiable demands. That Russia knows full well any deals will not happen because the US won't do them doesn't matter. The simple proposing of such deals to have the US reject them demonstrates to Russia's partners and the rest of the world where the problem lies, with the US.
It costs Russia nothing for Dimitriev [...]
Yes, it costs an enormous amount to Russia -- it means Russia has obvious traitors making existential decisions, demolishes its international standing, and destroys morale internally
Dimitriev's background:
-- BA in economics from Stanford
-- MBA from Harvard
-- Started at McKinsey
-- Worked at Goldman Sachs
-- Worked for a private equity fund
-- Selected as a Young Global Leader by the WEF
With such "credentials" the last time Russia was in an existential war against the very same people it is in an existential war against right now, which also happen to be the very same people that educated, employed and selected Dimitriev as a Young Global Leader, he would have received an immediate ticket to a shallow unmarked grave in some forest around Moscow.
He should be receiving the same treatment today, but instead he is the chief negotiator with the enemy.
And we know he is not negotiating with Russia's best interests in mind, because he is on social media 24/7 and tells us that directly with every single post of his.
What do you think the "Global South" that Putin is somehow supposed to be the leader of is thinking watching that while also remembering that Putin never acknowledged the genocide in Gaza, betrayed Syria, and did nothing to help Iran?
And what do you think people inside Russia are thinking. who remember Gorbachev, Yakovlev, Yeltsin, Kozyrev and all the other traitors, and now see the same slimebags in power again?
You could be right. I just hate to see our hard-earned reputation as pariah being disregarded so flagrantly. When will the world finally give us the disrespect we have worked so hard to gain?
Why is a Russian businessman ,who is the CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), in the US negotiating on Russia's behalf about the war in Ukraine ? Why isn't Lavrov , or other, more appropriate people ? Is it because hes of a certain tribe ?
Indeed. However, America is still hugely wealthy, and wealth brings with it power and influence. So until the US loses substantially more wealth (and that day will surely come in the years ahead), countries will still try to negotiate favourable terms, both geopolitically and economically, even if they know that the US can not be trusted.
And it’s very dangerous, to friend and foe alike. More to friends than foes, in many cases.
Yes. Just ask Europe about that.
There is no harm in talking, the harm comes in thinking the USA will keep its word.
I don't think either the Russians or Chinese believe the USA is remotely trustworthy.
If they did, I would be worried though.
Given that the jews completely control US policy - Trump's is a dual-citizen regime almost entirely - the jewish policy is that anything they say can be overturned and completely reversed by saying the Kol Nidre prayer once per year.
No farmer needs to keep his word to his livestock - and livestock is what Gentiles are to jews.
They even have a word for us, "goyim."
>Given that the jews completely control US policy
Yes, they do.
But take a look at the landscape in Moscow, what do you see?
>There is no harm in talking
Yes, there is.
The USSR no longer exists precisely because it started talking with the enemy.
You're dealing with the devil here, and the devil has countless ways to trick you, so you are best advised to just cut off all interaction with him and fight him to the death.
The USSR wasn't brought down by talk, but by economic and societal failure.
RT now talks every day to the west, and shows that talk can be very productive; it has a very high approval rate in the US and Europe generally - thus the reason why it had to be blocked.
The pen - and the word - are both very powerful weapons, when truth is on your side.
GM
this is exactly the wrong thing to do.
The will to fight your enemy to the death, if necessary, is definitely required, as it is the foundation of independence.
But this does not mean cutting all interaction.
Talking is however just a part of fighting, and refusing to talk, is doing your enemy a favor.
Devil has tricks. US is no devil, just a very powerful country, just like Britain was 150 years ago. And today, US does not have the power to defeat and subjugate Russia. And no existential interest to fight Russia in Ukraine.
US is in a situation that strategic plan of attacking Russia, extending Russia through proxy war has fallen apart, crumbled,
and the loss will be rather big.
It is not "America" that is hugely wealthy. It is the vampire masters, and they are not American, but nationless. America as such, by which you actually mean only the USA, is falling into economic ruin and poverty. Restaurants go bankrupt en masse, because people have stopped eating out. The CEO of Kraft-Heinz, one of the huge food conglomerates, has stated that even sales of everyday groceries are collapsing, that people are turning to basic staples. On a countrywide scale. Young adults, 90% of them, can not afford to own housing, even by resigning themselves to decades of debt. Hugely wealthy my arse. And even the threadbare illusion of wealth that is there, the American fever dream, is floating on a thin crust on an ocean of debt.
'Young adults, 90% of them, can not afford to own housing, even by resigning themselves to decades of debt.'
I see rather few arguments about the giant lands owned by the US gvmnt in the Western states. The population was trying to multiply but space was denied.
The Chinese are not really talking to the US - they are just starting to control it.
US leadership is exceptionally childish in the way it behaves, and China knows all about how to control children.
Yes, make them study for standardized exams in their every waking hour for weeks, months, years.
I think rare earth will keep flowing toward the West ONLY for substantial concession, published or not. I simply cannot visualize a scenario where China will secure the buildup of US military industry without guarantees that the monkey business around Taiwan is over. Of course the US might be playing for five or ten years until (they hope) they will secure their own production and supply chain.
I think that’s just what they’re doing, playing for time till they get a supply chain or alternative materials/techs. I have no idea when they could do that, but in the meanwhile they’re building weapons that are creating a lot of mischief right now. And how could China ever trust a promise to stop messing with Taiwan? They know they can’t.
That is precisely the point, complete lock of trust takes the whole planet toward chaos.
You think the US is deliberately driving the whole planet toward chaos with its own untrustworthiness? I could believe that - it has certainly been the elites’ strategy towards national politics, but it’s a sharp sword considering no one knows who will be holding it.
I think they are driving to depopulate the planet and if we do not get it together they will finish the job before the century is over.
I think we’re on a much faster schedule than that for whatever they plan.
Bill Gates (of serious eugenist inclination) recently backpedalling on climate change, calls for "...climate fight to shift focus from curbing emissions to reducing human suffering..." - https://apnews.com/article/bill-gates-climate-change-united-nations-4108f76e746d1e3e13845f33b8ae7007
"reducing human suffering", riiiiiiiiight....
why not just re-install a proper ceasefire in Gaza.
The jews control the US lock stock and barrel, and they have an eschatological belief in the return of their "messiah" once the whole world is in that chaotic state.
They even have a name for it - Tikkun Olam.
They see the return of this antichrist as the beginning of a new world which they will fully control.
Tim, but you're saying they already control THIS world?
Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose?
Trump has just made a deal with Australia for at least some of these minerals.
As to building weapons, they have shown that nothing they make works, or is affordable.
Contrast that with Russia's Oreshnik, Poseidon, and Burevestnik systems.
I’m sure Australia could supply all our needs sometime within the next hundred years. Trump is such a bumbling fool.
True, of course.
The US is sloply waking up to the realization that it is no longer the behemoth that it once was.
Power has changed its centre.
Humble pie is the new dish on the menu.
Australia can supply raw material, however it does not have any processing facilities. Plus with its current fake Green fervor even trying to build them would be very problematic.
Albo or whoever occupies the office can grandstand, but can't back it up; the west lacks the investment capability as it is 100 percent focused on bubbles and has left the real work to Asian economies. Besides China has a lock on the equipment and IP for processing.
and labour.
Plus Kinzhal, up to Mach 10, somewhat faster than the Trabant I drove once in Europe.
Affectionately known as a 'Trabbi'.
I have seen some innocent people dead inside the pressed cardboard body elements of this brilliantly East German engineered 'car'.
There is no alternative supply to China, not for years and years and not on any scale for years on that. It is another bluff on the markets, that is all. If there were such a supply from the US supplicants, the US would have locked it in already and there would not be this terrifying issue Trump keeps trying to cover up.
You are forgetting about the washing machines and refrigerators that can be ransacked for their chips.
It’s like the two campers who were being chased by a bear, and one of them paused to put on his shoes. “You’re never going to outrun the bear even with shoes!” the other guy says, and the first says “I only have to outrun YOU.”
The time Trump may be playing for on rees may be the end of his term. But it may also be that there could be alternative materials or technologies which don’t require rare earth magnets.
Yeah, Elena, Ukraine thinks like that, that some new wonder weapon is just round the corner. Well, its something to tell your people. Chin up, the cavalry's coming.
This argument about leaving China's most valuable resources behind, has the feel of cold fusion to it!
Interesting you should mention cold fusion and miracle weapons. I think the new nuclear reactors Russia is using for their fancy new weapons are ten, or a hundred? times as powerful as the standard nuclear reactors did they say? Miracles do happen sometimes.
They’ll find something to neutralize the need for China’s rees eventually. It always happens, but of course it could take a long time.
"But it may also be that there could be alternative materials or technologies which don’t require rare earth magnets."
Respectfully, no, not likely, at least not for very many years, in the many decades range. In your other posts you mention miracles. Well, compared to what went before the extensive physics and engineering that have gone into technologies that depend on rare earth elements are indeed miracles. Those miracles didn't happen overnight but took around sixty or seventy years for all of the many issues involved to be resolved. If an alternative miracle happens that too will likely require a similar amount of time before the many, many complexities involved in replacing rare earth elements in a worldwide, intricate set of logistics chains involving millions of products are resolved.
The people chasing the many billions in industries that use rare earth elements aren't idiots, you know. They've spent vast sums on finding alternatives that would be cheaper and, well, less rare, and they've been doing that for over 30 years. So far, no go. What's also an issue is that the people who are now most bent on seeking alternatives are the least well equipped to find them: Americans have much poorer performance in STEM skills, there are fewer of them, and they have a smaller real economy than China.
"Americans have much poorer performance in STEM skills, there are fewer of them, and they have a smaller real economy than China."
True enough John but no on...NO ONE... produces baristas and social workers like American universities. Besides, those STEM eggheads could never get a date or catch a football. We also have world class alchemists who've gone beyond converting lead to gold (Darn!) and have had some success in turning billionaires/president pedophiles into solid, god-fearing Christians. The alchemy of turning Charlie Kirk into the "new jebus" complete with merch and fireworks. P.T. Barnum is alive and well.
Thanks again President Putin for NOT blowing up the planet.
At some point, I expected China to lift restrictions, to crush competing REE supply lines for civilian products. The Western supply lines would be subsidised to supply the MIC. I agree it happened must faster than I expected.
China sanctioned the US MIC a long time ago. That hasn't changed. Also the 8 rare and strategic minerals they closed off earlier in the year (or was it last year?) are still blocked. Gallium, germanium, antimony the rest I forget.
The US MIC has been banned from getting Chinese REE since April under sanctions imposed for supplying arms to Taiwan. The Oct export controls was for commercial use and stop any grey/black market transshipment to US MIC. This has been delayed conditionally for a year. Ban on US MIC is not affected and holds.
At least the Chinese did impose restrictions on REE exports.
This is much more than Russia has done, which is four years into an existential war and is still supplying the very countries that have vowed to destroy Russia with everything. That everything then comes back in the form of shells, drones and missiles raining on the Russian army, and now increasingly Russian cities too.
And it isn't even just the West that Russia supplies -- the AFU has had absolutely no problems with fuel for four years now, and guess where that fuel comes from? Lukoil, of course. That sort of thing...
Putin's explanation? "We get money for it".
You just can't make that up...
Imagine Stalin supplying the Wehrmacht with fuel, food and various minerals? Well, he did, but the last train crossed the border in a Western direction on the evening of June 21st 1941. No trains did it after that, and it ended in Berlin.
Putin's Russia? What are some 150,000 dead Russian soldiers, tens of thousands of civilians and all the physical damage when it comes to the improving relationships between us and our partners...
And Putin has officially declared he has no intention of getting even to Kiev. Not even Poltava and Chernigov either...
But it all comes down to the problem of ideology. Russia has none other than making money, and the Chinese are only marginally better at the moment, they are just much more competent. Also, they have not been tested directly yet in terms of what they will do when the dear partners start lobbing missiles into their territory, which makes it easy for them to appear to be "resisting".
Let's look at this line from the original post:
>This is because the US political class has no answers at all for its own failing economy, and thus must rely exclusively on the strategy of hamstringing its competitors
Now what is the internal US problem? The FIRE sector and Silicon Valley have been staging another Gilded Age for the last several decades, i.e. obscene and growing wealth inequality based on the parasitic structure of the economy. How do you solve that problem? Well, as a short-term palliative measure, you destroy the FIRE sector and Silicon Valley, redistribute wealth, etc. But that only works in the short term, then it will be reversed (which is what happened with FDR's reforms in the 1930s and the subsequent neoliberal revolution in the 1970s/1980s). So long-term you have do away with capitalism altogether and to make it a crime punishable by death for anyone to be speaking of profits and interest, or you will be returning to that same crisis again and again, if you can ever get out of it in the first place. Good luck with that.
But at least the short-term palliative measures could be taken. Which Xi in fact did a little bit of internally in China the last few years, to his great credit, but is absolutely unthinkable in the US. So the US is looking to export its internal problems to the rest of the world by raping and pillaging it in order to throw some crumbs to its own masses while allowing wealth inequality to continue growing inside the US. Or maybe not even throw any crumbs, even that has largely ended at this point.
And what do Russia and China say and do in response? Pretty much nothing. Putin throws some memorable lines about "vampire ball" being over and other such sound bites that the cargo cult members in the "alternative" media love to slobber over, but has he ever attacked the bankers and the FIRE directly and ideologically? Of course not, and how could he, he is surrounded by bankers and fully controlled by them?
Xi doesn't even have the memorable sound bites.
Now compare and contrast to Stalin and Mao. In the 1930s Stalin gave a number of interviews with Western journalists and intellectuals, and it is very instructive to read those from the archives. The clarity of thought you see there is remarkable, e.g. they ask him about "freedom" and he directly tells them that if you have nominal political freedom but have no roof over your head, no healthcare, and no certainty there will be anything to eat tomorrow, then you have no actual freedom at all, and that the USSR had to make some sacrifices on that front to provide for the greater good. Clear and unambiguous. Later Mao was absolutely ruthless when exposing the nature of Western imperialism, no holds barred. Now take any of Putin's interviews, listen to them carefully, and just weep.
With such "resistance", what hope is there for the world?
Also, regarding crypto and debt -- the situation with the US debt is the exact same one from the old saying that if you owe the bank $100K, you have a problem, but if you owe it $100B, the bank has a problem.
With an added military-technical twist.
The West has been putting Third World countries in debt slavery for more than a century now. What is that debt backed by? Partly by the natural resources of those countries, but when we get to the bottom of it, it comes down to the might of the Pentagon (and the Royal Navy previously). If you don't serve the debt, or, god forbid, decide to default, you get bombed into submission.
The stability of the US's own debt towards non-Third World countries is also backed by the Pentagon. You want to get your money back? Well, you will have to bomb the US into submission. Good luck with that with the current "resistance".
At the end of the day what counts is who has the most military-technical capabilities multiplied by the willingness to use them.
And when you have the US bombing deep inside Russia every night, with zero response from the Kremlin, well, then we have military-technical capabilities multiplied by zero on the other side, and that is an easy win by default.
Which is why Kiril Dimitriev is the chief Russian negotiator, rather than hypersonic missiles hitting Wall Street skyscrapers doing the talking, and he was in DC a few days ago again...
But but Russia has fancy new weapons. You don’t seem to be taking that into account. Of course western politicians don’t seem to pay it much attention either considering was it Lithuania’s defense minister? today, his comment about how NATO should ignore all Russian red lines because Putin never enforces them.
I personally think there’s going to be hell to pay, I’m just still not sure who’s going to pay it except, of course, the working class.
I don't really think the Russians really know where the real Red Line is except of course for an actual nuclear attack, but it is there some place. The US Deep State is used to people and nations where everything and everybody can be compromised, bought and dissolved. They do not understand their own limitations and this makes them more dangerous.
Right. I’m sure there’s an actual red line, but the US is being trained to ignore that fact, and it’s what they want to do anyway. Very dangerous.
If Tomahawks start to arrive in Moscow, then Oreshniks will start to arrive in various Euro locations.
You think targets in the US will be off-limits?
I’m not so sure.
All these things are incrementally triggered.
Russia would prefer to hit Euro targets, as there is less likelihood that US nuclear responses would be triggered - the US controls the British submarine missiles, so they wouldn't put themselves at risk for retaliation by allowing them to be launched against Russia.
So Belgorod and Kursk is not Russian territory inhabited by Russian people who deserve the same level of protection as those in Moscow, and Crimea, Donetsk and Lugansk are just sacrifice zones altogether?
That is what immediately follows from your argument here.
GM, you’re advocating for the return of communism. I’m in agreement. All this is whitewashing and competition between capitalists to see who’s the one last standing. The ones in Russia have clocked that the country’s resources combined with the USA’s exhaustion have all of a sudden put them at a comparative advantage for the first time in their history. But beyond the last accessible cubic metre of natural gas THERE IS NO PLAN.
Kursk was an obvious trap that the imbecile British Generals walked right into. 60-70k front line soldier and hundreds of units of armour and high tech weapons eliminated. If you haven't figured out Russia is fighting an attrition war by know you might as well go back to listening to Gen Hodges on CNN.
What makes you so sure that this time it really will be different?
Then there's the Belgian guy, threatening to wipe Moscow off the map.
The fact he was allowed to say something that stupid without universal scorn and condemnation is a powerful statement about the current intellectual capacity of the west.
The problem with fancy weapons is Ohio class submarines off the coast can do the same thing, and you have to use the fancy weapons for them to be a deterrent. Take tactical nukes for example. There is a taboo on their use in Ukraine although they have been used about a dozen times in the past. (Veteran's Today, Gordon Duff: Nuclear Education). The majority were US / Israeli, except for a Russian response to a NATO detonation to say "we are in," thus establishing deterrence and a tit for tat balance on their use. I'm not sure if this still exists for EMPs as they don't kill anyone (give you a long term headache?) but take out electronic and electrical devices. Most are nuclear, and Russia wants to draw the line there, but now there are non-nuclear EMPs (Larry Johnson) which at least Russia, China, and probably Iran have. The problem is that the West is more inclined to use tactical nukes and tactical nuke EMPs in response even though Russia, much less densely populated, would recover faster. Russia is trying to use these fancy weapon threats as a negotiating tool, but if they are not played and or categorized as a threat they have no value. What would really be shocking is an EMP over London taking out the Rothschild's computers, markets, and currency. I feel like I have tried all sorts of military and negotiating alternatives, and all of them lead to war, as that is Trump's purpose - The Dept. of War. The problem with Ukraine is the enemy is not in Ukraine, and the enemy doesn't care how many Ukrainians die.
All Russia is saying is that if Aegis Ashore is considered by NATO to potentially be capable of eliminating any missiles Russia launches, then there are these new weapon systems which can never be so countered.
Russia of course is crucially dependent on its oil and gas exports for financial security, so it cannot cut the supply to whomsoever wants to buy these things.
What it does instead is to first sell the products, and then destroy them when they return to Ukraine.
Alternatively, it destroys the power plants which either burn gas or oil, as it has been concentrating on recently.
If I recall correctly, Russia petrol industry amounts to 15% of total revenue from the economy: here you have it from the gas station masquerading as a country.
Imagine Stalin being able of protecting his own life and not being killed, leading to Banderite-lenient Khrushchev taking over and starting releasing Banderites from gulags.
Imagine further no Khrushchev Mao feud.
It's very Russian to honour contracts if at all possible.
I hate myself for asking GM, but any thoughts on recent events on the front lines in Ukraine?
Is it spiralling out of control for Ukraine on a scale that a few Tomahawks won't fix?
A few THs may get through, but not many, and they won't inflict a strategic defeat on Russia.
The response to them though, as Putin has openly stated, would be devastating.
There will be no response.
How much explosives do 50 Tomahawks carry? Well, 50 * 500 kg = 25,000 kg.
"Ukraine", that is NATO, is now sending drones with 50-100 kg warheads very deep into Russia and in the low hundreds every night.
To be charitable, we pick the low end and what do we get -- 150 * 50 = 7,500 kg.
So 50 Tomahawks are the equivalent of what Russia is now receiving every three days via drones.
All the talk about Tomahawks is just another tactic in the overall strategy of boiling the frog. Let's have the Russian idiots fixated on the possibly never real threat of Tomahawks, then we don't actually deliver them, and they will think everything is good, meanwhile the light cruise missile (a.k.a. "drone debris") strikes ramp up massively, but because there are no Tomahawks, they will just accept it. Which is precisely what is happening.
And it is not as if everything is shot down -- today we have four drones hitting the CHP in Oryol and the 750-kV substation in Vladimir being attacked too.
Read that very carefully:
1) Look at the map to see where Vladimir is
2) Yes, you read that right -- 750 kV substation. The central nodes in the grid that are still off limits in Ukraine itself
3) Plus the CHP in Oryol.
Now Russia is a very, very long way off from having issues with electricity due to such strikes, the grid will be easily rebalanced, but Russian cities are not heated by electricity, it is primarily central cogeneration by CHPs. Which also mostly run on gas these days. So there is a clear plan here, and it was widely discussed on Telegram channels several weeks ago, to hit the CHPs and the gas transit network leaving the central Russian regions in the cold in the middle of winter. Now you see it implemented.
That faithful moment the first crude drones flew into Crimea in the summer of 2022 and then the Tu-141s were launched towards Engles in December 2022 should have been the moment the hammer dropped, i.e. war is declared and Ukrainian leadership is exterminated, and nuclear strikes are carried out on Poland and Romania if they refuse to seal the borders.
That wasn't done then, nor at any moment between then and now, and where are we today?
I think part of the strategy is to deliver and use the Tomahawks. We'll see about "devastating" response. There hasn't been one yet, and the geniuses in DC don't think there ever will be one if the salami is sliced thinly enough.
В ближайшее время будут дальнобойные удары по РФ. Цели уже определены, — Зеленский
t.me/belarusian_silovik/63091
Er, non-irradiated?
This had nothing to do with Putin , yet you obsessively focus on him.
Freud would have something to say on the matter.
Is it the pics of him bare chested on the horse perhaps?
He’s obsessed. Some people have TDS, others like GM has Putin Derangement Syndrome.
Putin is winning the war. And you know what, US isn’t bonging anything in Russia, ever.
Interesting thoughts… each country works in it’s own interests. Russia isn’t communist anymore. Who would enjoy living under Mao or Stalin, instead if being under the rule of Putin. War is a messy business; the usual fuckers always profit: before, between and after the wars they diligently plan. Only the ordinary people are the loosers as always. As for Russia’s security inside it’s borders, I don’t have the same reading as you. Russians is the largest territory to defend, Ukraine’s attempts to cripple (amounting to media win narrative) have not caused any blow to the economy of Russia. Poor Ukrainians, run to the slaughter by genocidal cock comedian president. Why hasn’t he negotiated yet? Ukraine war is already lost. Why is Zelensky is still letting that continue? Is his N Nazis friends holding a bayonnet under is _Ewish ass. No , it must be his _Ewish Oligarch handlers that want to maintain the profit going in their pockets….
I tell you, War is a messy business. I got a solution, exterminate the International bankers hold on the financial system. Each country emits his own currency, backed by Gold. Put the Corporates at their place (change the laws). When they play bad, put them in prison and for good masure, a nice fine so they don’t forget. It’s time that puppets become Statesmen again. « Hey man, I have the right to dream ain’t I?! »
>each country works in it’s own interests.
Here you are making a fundamental mistake -- countries are not run in their interests, they are in most cases run in the interests of their elites. A huge difference, because the interests of the elites can be, and often are misaligned with or even directly opposed to those of the general population.
>Who would enjoy living under Mao or Stalin, instead if being under the rule of Putin. War
Apples and oranges -- obviously we are not in the 1930s anymore, the world is much more advanced so life is better across the board.
But consider where Russia was in 1922 -- backwards agrarian country -- and where it was in 1953 (industrial superpower with nukes and a space program, and that after suffering the most devastation anyone ever has in a war). Even the Chinese did not make progress at such a rate. Putin has been living off the Soviet legacy with very little new development, he just stopped the destruction.
Now imagine Stalin (not him personally, of course, but someone like him) had been in power in Russia in the last 70 years and maintained the same rates of development -- where would the country be today?
>As for Russia’s security inside it’s borders, I don’t have the same reading as you.
Well, was anything flying every day deep inside Russia four years ago, or even in 2022? No
Is it now? Yes.
That is a dramatic development.
And the immediate border areas are now worse off than Donetsk was in the DNR days. In fact Donetsk right now is probably more secure than Belgorod because it is further away from the line of contact
That too is a dramatic change.
You "don't get the same reading" because are you are safely away from it all and do not follow closely what is happening on the ground.
True, I’m living far from Russia. But I listen to commentators, that went there not long ago. Know a Russian ex-pat who goes there each year: conclusion taken from that. Don’t forget Russians has 11 time zone, fuckin difficult to defend. Since Putin is in power, he has uplifted the economy that was eviscerated by oligarchs, built the armed forces (all of them) to an unsurpass power edge technologically. The Russians have an economy that is growing, people are not waiting in line as in the Soviet time. Putin’s ratings is always over 80%, what about in the West. If you ask me who I find to be a real statesman: I will say: VVPutin. The problem we have today, that they are all corrupted and not intelligent. Putin, Xi at least thay are intelligent, seems to reflect in growth of their country, people…
>Don’t forget Russians has 11 time zone, fuckin difficult to defend.
Yes, of course, it is technically impossible
But this is why you have to defend the country through imposing deterrence. Which Putin has catastrophically failed at.
>Since Putin is in power
Putin will be judged by history by whether he managed to preserve the country. Building a consumerist society tends to weaken, not strengthen countries. The much more relevant to the country's survival facts are that:
-- The military is a pale shadow of what it was in Soviet times, due to chronic underfunding. Look at the military budgets since 2014. There was bump in 2015-16, but that was because of Syria, then it went down again, even though everyone knew a big war was coming with Ukraine. Don't get distracted by the doomsdat weapons (which are far behind schedule anyway) -- the relevance of those is the product of their power, effectiveness and willingness to use them, ans is thus zero because clearly so is the last factor.
-- Geopolitically the situation was worsened dramatically, not improved. For which Putin shares a lot of the blame. When he first got in power, Ukraine was a mostly friendly to Russia, non-Banderized country. Whose job was it to prevent the current situation from arising in the first place?
-- But it isn't just Ukraine. In a couple days the leaders of the five Central Asian *stans will be going to DC. Already you have Kazakhstan launching drones against the Russian soft underbelly, and signing a military cooperation agreement with the UK earlier this year. You see where things are going?
-- There are historically three strongly pro-Russian countries -- Serbia, Bulgaria (even though it was on Germany's side in both wars) and Armenia, which is because those owe their very existence in the modern world to Russia, plus they are Orthodox Christian (with a twist in Armenia's case, but still), etc. Armenia is about to exit the CSTO and is looking to join the EU and potentially even NATO, Bulgaria is in NATO and its weapons factories are working 24/7 to supply Ukraine, Serbia is not in NATO, but its weapons factories are also supplying Ukraine.
All of that transformation happened under Putin, who did absolutely nothing to prevent it.
>eviscerated by oligarchs
It still is, that hasn't ended, contrary to popular belief.
Read this carefully for a recent example:
https://johnhelmer.net/no-gdp-growth-no-inflation-no-war-by-2028-central-bank-governor-nabiullina-follows-us-nato-imf/
We have only two options here:
1) Putin does not have the power to remove Nabiulina, i.e. the bankers own Russia
2) Putin himself agrees with those policies.
I leave it to you to decide which one is worse.
It is also the Russian oligarchy that is actively sabotaging the war -- the reason there has been no mobilization is that there is a firm veto on that imposed by the Russian oligarchy. For a variety of reasons.
And again, Putin either agrees with them or does not have the power to overrule them.
Xi said the relaxation was only for a year in the first instance.
It's like taming a bull - you have to apply the pressure fairly gently at first; what might be described as a shot across the bows.
The US will have to be deflated gently but firmly, otherwise it will start to launch nuclear missiles at China, which is all it has left, really.
Soon it will be a docile and housetrained puppy dog.
Xi knows all about LaoTsu's "Art of War."
Imo Tim, the largesse in giving a "Year" is the equivalent of giving enough rope with which to hang themselves. It also makes Xi appear reasonable and measured in the eyes of his neighbours who are also US vassals: SK, Japan etc.
Agreed.
I don't think Xi wants to hang anybody though.
Instead of hanging the US, he wants to halter them.
Same rope - different strategy.
Sun Tzu wrote the Art of War I think. Lao Tsu wrote the Dao De Ching among other classics.
correct: The Art of War, an ancient Chinese military treatise dating from ~ 5th century BC, is attributed to the ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu - https://ia600502.us.archive.org/12/items/TheArtOfWarBySunTzu/ArtOfWar.pdf
Little known is the fact that Lao told his kid brother Sun everything he knew about war, but Sun got all the credit.
Lao never forgave him for making him lose face.
Of course that’s not false. What’s China gonna do? There is 0 innovation coming out of Asia, population is aging rapidly and declining in Japan already.
China will be like Taiwan in 30 years : a place that used to make everything for everyone and now a worthless land.
please do some serious traveling through Asia and have a good look around: vibrant, local initiatives, no trust in dollars yet growing prosperity.
I don’t need to travel : I lived and worked in Japan and Honk Kong. Japanese taxi drivers were already 80+ year old back in 2008 when I lived in Tokyo.
Japan, Korea & China are finished. No country can survive the demographic catastrophe that is coming.
Every single year, China will lose 15 million workers and gain ten million old people. Soon the entire population will decline and collapse, just like in Japan or Korea.
It’s easy to « grow » when no one has kids, everyone working age. It’s much harder to survive as a country when everyone is 70+ year old and cannot contribute to the economy…
OK, thanks. worked in SE Asia untill 2010, slightly different experiences perhaps.
peace out.
Growing prosperity because of the immense young population and the theft of technology, medicine, patents an intellectual property from the west.
China has been playing the « third world country » game while ripping off Europe and the US for decades.
Fast trains, nuclear power plant ? All from France.
Computers, internet, AI, etc. All thanks to the USA
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/patents-by-country
Out of four top countries, four are Asian. Nothing comes from Asia.
Go figure
Everything you use, depend on or value was invented in Europe or the USA.
Electricity, running water, hot water, ACs, phones, trains, planes, smart phones, movies, the television, computers, washing machines, appliances, etc.
what did China bring to the table? What mystery patents from Asia have changed the world?
When China goes back into oblivion, from the obvious demographic catastrophe ( 6M birth and 18M death next year) your life will be unchanged.
Again, if China registers the most patents per year, by far, and patents are about inventions, then China invents the most things. So spare me repetitive crap about old inventions.
Also from your writing, it seems that you lived in Asia cca 20 years ago. I am living in China now.
Yes, China has demographic problems, like all developed countries (China is about to break into HDI 80). They are quite serious, sure.
However, even in France (the stellar developed country re fertility rates), what are fertility rates for aborigines? It seem the overall fertility rate is 1.85 for this year. How much do immigrants contribute to this? Already told you China still holds this immigration card, if they choose so. For example, my Pakistani colleague with three kids is applying for the green card now. China has all the cards regarding the immigration part of the population growth equation.
Same for your adopted country - America, what is the fertility rate without immigration? Decently below 2.1 for sure.
Moreover, it would be interesting to see if introducing maternal support similar to French, for example, would improve (and to what extent) the fertility rates. There is room for China to mimic European Social Security systems regarding pro-natalist approaches. Time will tell.
Demographic changes are a hard nut to crack, as governments all over the world are finding out.
China births:
17 millions birth in 2015
7 millions in 2025
Death: almost 12 millions in 2025
Yeah…. Houston we got a problem.
@Axel
"There is 0 innovation coming out of Asia,"
----------
That statement alone tells me that you are totally disconnected from the reality on the ground in China. And yes, I've been there, a bit more recently than you.
Yawn, your stupid racist spam is getting boring. During the last 200 years, the west stole, robbed, looted. genocided all around the globe. And nowadays, China files more patents and scientific publications than any other nation. The US trail Russia in engineers, China has 15times the number of MINT degrees of the US, 8 out of 10 leading universities are in China.
And that is only half of the story. Students not good enough for Chinese standards but with wealthy parents go to western countries, and still are the most diligent and successful students and postgrads. If you brows MINT research papers especially in the US and Australia, you find more Chinese and indian names than anglo and european among the authors.
The west had a habit of stealing from China, silk, porcelain, even steel came to the mideast from China where the west stole the technology. And they all stole from one another. After they got their bloodstained hegemony, they invented "intellectual property" to secure the bounty.
Nowaday, they lost the race. China surpassed the US in GDP (PPP, not the fake "nominal" one), and that is not all of the story: https://asiatimes.com/2024/06/whats-the-real-size-of-chinas-economy/
As the Duran boys point out, the rare earths relaxation is probationary. If Trump effs around (when) again with China, the ban comes back in force.
" I was disappointed by reports that China will be relaxing its rare earth licensing restrictions"
#Me too
I hope that the reports are bogus or that the Chinese don't want the trouble of picking up the pieces of the slow-motion US economic implosion.
China is flexible. Sometimes too flexible.
Exactly. What alt-media types forget is that every dollar of debt issued has a willing buyer.
Agreed concerning rare earths. China folded.
In the US, increasingly, the debt buyer is the Fed itself, so that is simply dilution of the currency on steroids. I guess the EU doesn’t yet allow that, but they will.
I think the idea is to “foist harder” and then clean it up in a big messy (barely) controlled demolition …kinda like…..?
It’s currently a controlled default (i.e., inflation is creating the default), but a hard default would create massive issues for the empire.
Presumably the game of Musical Chairs/Hot Potato has to face the music?
We’re getting there. The difference between a Deutsche mark in 1919 and 1921 was profound. Foreign holders of dollars have faced a very interesting challenge for the past twenty years, and that challenge grows every day: how to get out without triggering a run that destroys whatever you couldn’t get out in time.
I really want to create a graphic image/animation that depict what you described….
What’s that game where you pull out little sticks while hoping the structure stays up?
China will use the next year to develop the administrative capacity to actually enforce its rare earth export controls in an effective and targeted manner. It doesn't have that capacity right now, so the only export restriction approach it could take right now would be meat axe, which would alienate a lot of countries China doesn't want to alienate. I expect China will make sure that the US and its allies are not able to stockpile rare earth products while the restrictions are "suspended."
I am not trying to mock any country. Just trying to balance the point of view of Simplicius regarding imminent collapse of the US.
In 30 years, the US will still be the world super power, wealthy, advanced and innovative.
At that time, China Korean and most of Asia will be a complete disaster. Population will have collapsed by 30-40%, economies will be destroyed by the lack of young man power, old people will rot and wait for death in derelict skyscrapers, built for a 1.5B population with 0 thoughts about the future.
I can't tell whether you're being racist or just ultra-nationalist, but I don't suppose such labels matter much anyway. On the other hand, claims that China has never innovated are ridiculous and unworthy of a more formal rebuttal. I'm more interested in two things you say, though: that in 30 years the US will still be "the" world super power, etc., and that Asian populations will have collapsed resulting in complete disaster.
About the US, I'm not sure where you live. Where I live, however, there are a lot of essentially poor people, the roads are a travesty, there's no significant mass transit, healthcare is optional and mostly unavailable, and people are struggling to maintain any lifestyle at all. The statistics show that this is not out of the ordinary, so if that's the life of a superpower, I'd say not many of us have much desire to maintain that state of affairs.
I do know something about money, though, and the US dollar is entering a death spiral. That isn't just name calling, it's what most people recognize the phenomenon as being. Specifically, the number of external buyers of dollars is not keeping up with government debt, and the Fed itself is buying increasing numbers of bonds, a simple dilution of currency. This will lead to hyperinflation, and given the size of the debt that's baked in the cake. I'm thinking that's not going to be good for our superpower status such as it is.
China could have problems. It's funny the way you put it, though, housing built for a 1.5 billion population with no thought for the future. If you've got 1.5 billion people you need to house them, and China has done that, along with elevating the lifestyles of about a billion people, while the US has seen a steady decline in national lifestyle, including a shrinking middle class, declining real wages, a skyrocketing food-insecure population and homelessness epidemic, the world's largest prison population, and a declining life span. Not to mention the intangibles, of which there are too many to mention. I'd bet my life that the Chinese leadership has put ten times as much thought into its future housing needs as any American leadership, or all of it, has, although what they'll do about it I don't know. I'm sure they see the problem coming, though, as well as I do.
I have mixed feelings about increasing Chinese power, not that my feelings on the subject make any difference, but I tell you this to say I am not "pro-Chinese" or anything like that. I don't like the amount of power the state has vis a vis individual liberties, for example, but I no longer think the US is better in that regard.
I have long since given over the fantastical notion that "western spirits" give us any degree of advantage in innovation. I think education is important, and the Chinese are far more invested in that. I'm sure you know the statistics.
Agree totally with you.
The US has its problems and is not an ideal place, by far.
The USD will inflate a 2-3% per year, but like the EUR, the JPY, GBP and most currencies including Asian ones.
How is China going to pay for maintenance, pensions, healthcare and benefits when 60% of the population is 65 year old?
China will have 6M birth next year and 18M death, it’s insane!
It’s way to grow when suddenly 80% of the population is working age, with no children and no old people to talk care of. You just copy, steal intellectual properties and produce without any care for rules and regulations from the west.
The US will be inflating at far higher rates. It would have been doing that long before now if it weren’t for the Chinese, who have provided extremely low-cost manufactured goods that it exported to the US as much lower prices than the US could have produced them for. Compare the dollar’s value against a non-fiat form of money, gold. In 1972 it was $32/ounce; now it’s roughly a hundred times the price despite the fact that the movers and shakers have done their best to hold its price down. The other fiat currencies will also be inflated, but that’s not the same as the dollar NOT inflating. You could also look at the prices of cars, houses, diamonds, fine art… all have skyrocketed in dollar terms. That’s inflation, and it is far above 2% now, and will be much, much higher as the death spiral gets deeper.
I railed against Chinese laws regarding tech transfer of companies doing business in China. Do you know that some European countries are now imposing similar rules on Chinese companies? The center of innovation has shifted to the east just as the center of financial and real power have.
It will be interesting to see how China handles its age problems. I actually flinch at the thought, but not for the Chinese. They will import youth from other countries, of course, among other things. In Japan one solution has been robotic companions and helpers - I doubt China will need to do that.
I never thought the U.S. could successfully take on Russia, China, and India simultaneously with his various sanctions, when the top 5 countries by PPP adjusted GDP are China, U.S., India, Russia, and Japan in that order.
I found this amazing sentence when reading up on Chipotacalypse
> Boatwright said Chipotle is "doubling down on restaurant execution," increasing marketing spend, plans to create more digital experiences, and introduce more innovation.
Utterly creatively bankrupt, and 100% indicative of corporate America. It's Mexican food, should be cheap and delicious, the opposite of Chipotle. Not really that complicated.
Well said. These fast food restaurants CEOs are morons. They jacked up the price and expect us to keep shelling out the same way. Why pay 15 dollars for fast food? Just order a plate from a real restaurant. I never eat fast food anymore, because that’s what it costs. I’d rather have the real burger from Chili’s. Costs the same.
Same with Las Vegas. They jacked up the prices massively and now no-one goes there.
I live in the UK. I hadn’t been inside a McDonald’s for thirty years. But I fancied something trashy and different the other day and was curious too. I stood in the queue, looked at the prices on the screen and couldn’t believe my eyes. The price were no different to any other food stall in the local market, which quality and variety wise run rings around MD. I couldn’t believe that why drove me out of a MD’s was the price!
Johnny Carino's, a small chain of Italian restaurants, sells a plate of spaghetti for $25. When we were there Sunday night the place was nearly empty.
I looked them up and my fears were confirmed. They use cream in their alfredo sauce 🤮
At Texas Roadhouse, they have plates with a steak and potato for $15. And the food is actually good. Consequentially, Texas Roadhouse is always full.
It’s astonishing that the US economy hasn’t had a collapse yet between Covid and Biden it’s nothing short of dark magic keeping the economy together.
It’s funny I was at Costco two days ago and I did in fact choose to skip over ketchup to save money. So this article hits home.
Shuffle the numbers in the balance sheets, and maybe squeeze a few more months out?
heh. The orchestration of getting Americans to vote for Trump was to produce the 'antidote' to a senile, corrupt and if you go by his daughters' diary, incestuous and unelected president, and a howling, cackling, slept her way to opportunities, out of her depth candidate, whos party apparatus short circuited the Democrat primaries nominee process. Talk about a Banana Republic.
There are still people thinking this is 5D chess - that Trump is playing the long game to expose the Deep State and all the parasites that profit from it. Yes, we can see that there are these elements now in plain sight. The American people and observers reel from the knowledge that their govt has been hollowed out from within just as much from external actors. The Swamp is real. But what's being done about it? What mass arrests have we seen? What corrections have been made to introduce real reforms to remove parasitic interests?
Trump is accelerating the merging of the state and corporations (Mussolini's definition of fascism) into what looks to be a Zionist based control grid technocracy, using Oracle, Amazon (AWS), Microsoft, Alphabet (Google/Youtube), META and Palantir etc to implement their digital surveillance panopticon - which won't benefit the masses. EU and UK and the collective West are collapsing their 'democracies' into the umbrella of this surveillance state.
Trump could have been the greatest politician of all time. He was given the mandate for change by a huge demographic that wanted him to save America from its intended fate. He sold out for shekels and ego.
You can't be a politician unless you have big donors - and Trump's $100 M donor is Miriam Adelson, who is completely committed not to the US, as she admitted recently, ( or rather, she wouldn't say whether she put the US or Israel first - which tells you exactly who she puts first ) so her poodle Donnie is not going to bite the hand that feeds either him, or his grotesque ego.
So the mandate he works according to is not given by the US citizen, but by the jewish bankster.
Thus the zero arrests you refer to; and the reframing of the problem away from the jews, where it ought to be focussed, and towards the illegals.
That was hilarious when Trump outed her. It really put her in the public spotlight. Of course she's Zionist first. He outed himself of course but Trump knew what he was doing. He was doing a little trolling which really is an expression of his vanity.
Donnie is jew-first too - and in front of the Knesset, he can admit what he is much more than he could in front of the Senate.
So they both had a little laugh at the US.
The thing is, Trump is not some kept boy like most politicians---he is a billionaire in his own right, and the $100M should be irrelevant to him. So I think it is a different kind of pressure that keeps him obedient, not the carrot but the stick.
American politics is completely in thrall to donors, and much of that money is recycled aid lavished on Israel.
Until political donations are restricted, you're a Plutocracy not a democracy. Shame on your greedy politicians!
But for the donors it's a great racket - Spend millions to make billions.
I wish UK was better, but I doubt it is.
The UK is the worst place on earth lately.
Gaza says"hello".
Trump was a chance to avoid the donor dependance, he sold out to Israel, didn't have to
I find that comment utterly bizarre.
What in DJT's character made you think he wouldn't act solely in his own interest? How was it not clear He was in it 100% for himself.
He never said he liked "ordinary Americans" .
All he ever said was that he hated the people that you hate.
I understand people seeing him as the least worst option, but seeing him as a "champion of the common man" is incredible.
It's certainly not, with eighty year old grandmothers and war vets being arrested, and jailed, for holding up a sign, or simply walking down the road, or for calling someone a "Muppet". Meanwhile, serial rapists and criminals get probation..
He’s not perfect but he’s definitely the most impressive politician of those past 40 years….
He is an idiots and a fool and the best politician in the last 40 years. No true statesmen for a long time...
Yep. I constantly hear Republicans and MAGA folks talking about how Soros et al are behind the riots and demos. Yet where are the indictments? It's all fake and gay.
Indictments aren’t a reflection of reality: you cannot indict Soros for financing left-wing extremist organizations.
When Soros gives money to Black Lives Matter, he is indirectly causing riots and chaos in cities. But it’s not a crime.
First you have to proscribe organizations like BLM - then you can indict who ever is financially supporting them.
Well said
Basically this. Trump is weak, stupid and easily manipulated. I had the man figured out about a week into his first term.
He is also greedy and lazy.
Trump's shallowness is surreal.
Ashamed to say I was totally apolitical @ Trump's 1st term. Frankly, I felt much better vs. now, after taking a hard look at all the mess.
There seems to be a tremendous confabulation of the different assets lumped into the word 'crypto'. One is bitcoin, a deflationary currency and store of wealth that has diminishing new supply backed by energy; two is stablecoins, digital currencies pegged to the dollar and backed by a basket of assets including US Treasuries; and three crypto currencies, a variety of projects ranging from ponzi schemes and rug pulls, to blockchains for tokenization of assets.
The scheme the Russian minister was referring to involved stablecoins. The scheme would be to promote these stablecoins as digital dollars, have them purchased all over the world, and the holders would therefore be propping up the US bond market unknowingly, and then when these stablecoins inevitably de-peg from the dollar, the whole world will share in having their wealth devalued overnight.
"inevitably depeg" 🤡
Mr.Natural. Thank you.
I still don't understand it, but your summary was extremely helpful. 👍
Thanks for the explanation. I only have a very basic understanding but you have just made everything clear. Because of the very nature of using "celebrities" or Trump to push this, many Americans will just take the loss before they admit they fell for another "scam"
I remember Mr. Natural when it was going around back in the early 70s as blotter
You are referring to LSD, I assume.
"One is bitcoin, a deflationary currency and store of wealth ..."
How anyone thinks that digits on a computer are a store of wealth is beyond my comprehension. Gold, silver, lead, food, water, and energy. Better have those... Chip
You are right. However, almost all currency now is digits on computers.
The recent takeoff of gold prices happened at the same time as the US floated the trial balloon of revaluing its gold holdings, which in theory also props up the dollar and allows them to borrow (print) more. As with bitcoin, mania (or mass psychosis) does most of the work for them.
What are the options for us little people? Ride the wave while simultaneously keeping an eye out for a better wave and the storm clouds on the horizon.
A substantial chuck of my "currency" is in my hands and not digits on a computer. Cash, gold, silver in the safe (well to be honest, I lost it all in a boating accident)...
Chip
In short, sale or issuance of stable-coin indirectly create artificial demand for issuance of new treasures or or other dollar assets.
The issuance or sale of stablecoins indirectly creates artificial demand for the issuance of new US Treasuries or other dollar-based assets backing those stablecoins. Because stablecoins must be fully backed by highly liquid assets like short-term US Treasury bills or cash equivalents, when new stablecoins are issued, issuers need to acquire these assets to back them 1:1. This increases demand for Treasuries, especially short-dated ones, supporting the US debt market and helping finance government borrowing needs at potentially lower costs temporarily.
However, this demand effect could partly offset demand elsewhere, such as from banks, and thus the net impact depends on shifts in asset holdings across the financial system. But overall, stablecoin growth represents a fresh source of demand for Treasury debt that did not exist before the rise of stablecoins.
Stablecoin issuance effectively locks investor funds into Treasury-backed digital assets, boosting Treasury demand by requiring more collateral acquisition as stablecoins grow in supply.
"the whole world will share. . ."
The key point you are missing is, not the WHOLE world. Russia, China, and likely India are aware of the trap, and will stand clear. So it is only their own vassals that the vampire masters will ruin. This is very much unlike the previous similar scheme which made the dollar the reserve currency, but the Cabal banksters fail to see, or deliberately close their eyes to, that crucial difference.
Bitcoin is what is called in Banking Circles, "Ledger Money". When you "own" bitcoin you own a ledger entry. It's no secret that the US is trying to copt crypto - including BTC as a leg supporting continued FIAT debt issuance. It's interesting to look at heat maps of where BTC mining is becoming concentrated. That activity seems to be moving to Europe and North America while declining in China and Asia.
Whats unknown about BitCoin is how vulnerable they are to a concerted, state supported action aimed at disrupting/destroying the ledger. To hack BTC with the intention of stealing some of the supposed value in the Ledger, one must preserve the appearence of the integrity of the ledger. That makes the problem very hard. But what if your plan is to simply break the ledger and you are a state actor with money, compute resources and access to talent ?
StableCoins are clearly a effort to support USD debt issuance and secretly monetize part of the debt. I pay 1 dollar to purchase a SC. The SC issuer, gives my dollar to Treasury to purchase debt. The SC issuer collects the interest from the debt. Treasury spends my dollar and I inturn find that I can spend my SC as if it were an additional dollar. Thus 1 new SC effectively becomes 2 USD - we have monetized a portion of our debt.
Will the scheme work ?
Trumps tariffs, threats and tantrums killed EU carmakers when they tricked Nerherland to overtake the Chinese company Nexperia. China promptly stopped the supply of microprocessors causing Auto-makers to halt production because Nexperia is the biggest supplier of semi-conductors in EU.
Trump is effectively making Europe weaker and weaker.
So - there's method in his madness.
He is reconstituting the feudal system of old - odd for a man in charge of a nation which hated the feudalism the British wanted to rule the US by.
While the likes of Merz, Micron and Fond of Lying scream more, more, more
It's not a Trump thing. It's been US policy for at least a decade. Do a Euro vs USD chart since 2000.
Europe is making Europe weaker and weaker
Nobody "tricked" the Dutch. Their crazed leaders willingly agreed to go along with the theft.
Probably…weed is not good for healthy brain.
After a lengthy stick and carrot game this whole chapter was closed before Trump made it to South Korea. It has been already decided that Russia, China and India will stand their course and it is very unlikely that any one of them will submit to American pressure. Concessions, diplomatic discussions tariff games and niceties yes, blind submission no. Trust based relations were completely eliminated some years ago after in 2010 three American nuclear subs surfaced around China in a coordinated manner with around 460 Tomahawk missiles at the ready. America did achieve something there, China took off with the fastest armament program what have been seen in human history. It was like an elephant walked into a porcelain store, not really knowing what is going to break there. What the Soviet Union and the Cold War was unable to achieve, what was the nightmare of a British geologist Sir Halford John Mackinder in 1904, was finally realized in the last three decades as America has walked into the ‘Heartland’. Mackinder has written The Geographical Pivot of History, describing a geopolitical possibility that is being realized today, a political unification of a major Eurasian territory (The Heartland) that can possibly rule the planet. He was thinking in terms of Northern Siberia and Eastern Europe at the time. The fact is that most of Siberia is barely populated still today. On the other hand, India, China and Russia represent a major part of the global population with matching industrial and military strength. This is a devastating, irreversible geopolitical loss that has been triggered in 1991 when the new Russian Federation was denied a proper status in the Western World. This was not a ‘mistake’ or an ‘oversight’. This was a CONSPIRACY against the Western World by the Neanderthals.
Russia (in the past) and China in the present are "commies", you know, the ones you call "bastards" in the previous commentary. and according to scientific expert opinion of yours it is only because of the West that Russia did stand for the first year of war. At that time China suffered unimaginable losses from occupational force - that would be Japan.
And in the summer of 1945 there was a rather special military operation with T-34/85, men who supposed to come home to enjoy family life were re-directed to the Eastern Front, they fought for 4 years and that was the last time they did. Or at least everybody thought that might be the last time.
If you look at the DNA analysis of Europeans some of that comes from the Neanderthals.
In fact, the DNA that controls the entire west is jewish.
Europeans have been subjugated by it, and its strangulating force of usury.
it is never about DNA. Also, are you for real, we are about to be called out as antisemitic and then you have it - a tomahawk in your backyard.
It is about accountability, responsibility, all these things men consider apply to their families. It also applies to the states, how sustainable they are, if there was any artificial construct applied to them out of rapture of WWII or the collapse of the Soviet Union - one thing is not without the other.
You may not have realised it, and you probably never will, but it is all about DNA.
Genesis 3, 15 speaks about the "Two Seeds" that are permanently in conflict, and the New Testament reaffirms this basic truth, when it refers to the wheat and the tares.
The two seeds are the descendants of Adam, and the descendants of Lucifer, as a result of the Original Sin everybody has heard about, but nobody can define - ie the intercourse which occurred between Eve and Lucifer in the Garden of Eden.
And thus, the murder of righteous Abel by the unrighteous Cain.
Murder which continues undiminished even to the present day.
Let's chill a bit with the condescending tone of yours. I am highly suspicious of preachers (long story). Eastern Orthodox Russian who looks at icons every day and knows the basics. And as a good Christian I do feel the pain, in fact all of that.
Don't be like that. It is not on me, but it is there. The guilt, the shame, and the ceasefire. Something they are cooking for my people.
Be as suspicious of preachers as you like - but don't be suspicious of what the Bible has been saying for 3500 years.
Better to shelve the icons than the scriptures.
'it is never about DNA.'
:))))
Always need to put your two irrelevant cents into the discussion that you know you can never win?
it's still not certain whether there is such a thing as DNA, or just sophisticated angeldust published by biased scientists.
My mom, God rest her soul, was involved in gens engineering back in the days. It is a thing. Russians for once are actively working on treatment from cancer based on genetics algorithms. This fall are the trials. They are not all that murderous after all. I mean, if they have mucho success in rocket science, why not to achieve something humanity really needs - a cure from that plague angeldust scientists thought is overrated due to the fact that hospitals in USA are adding the cancer wings and the budgets as we speak and the healthcare let's be honest and direct is not ideal.
And these days with all kinds of testing it is easy to establish traces of the bloodline if you like. As long as you are comfortable with this, I was not. I do have a strong sense of identity as it is, even if I have a pen name here. Whatever floats your boat.
DNA is definitely a code-bearing polymer, but whether it is entirely responsible for our health or sickness is another thing altogether.
The reason for this is that if you remove a nucleus from a cancerous cell, and inject it into another cell which is healthy, but which has had the nucleus removed, the cell reverts back to its normal phenotype.
The smart money, then, is on the mitochondria as being the true culprits in cancer aetiology; if they fail, then the energy charge of the cell declines, and with it, its ability to maintainm normal cellular processes.
Cancer then is seen as a survival mechanism in which anaerobic respiration is reverted to as a last-ditch effort by the cell to increase its metabolic potential, but it has to do this by uncontrolled cell division, ie by triggering cancer.
So what you're saying is that Oceania is at war with Eastasia and Eurasia.
But I though Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia and Eurasia?
Only since The Great Controversy, ie the dispute over what 2 + 2 adds up to.
Paragraphs please 🙏
A couple of US fighter jets went down in the South China Sea earlier in the week. Perhaps China was testing some new EMP tech.
Actually, a fighter jet and a helicopter.
US "experts" are trying to suggest it was bad fuel - well, they would do that, wouldn't they?
Better than admitting that both were shot down within the space of half an hour by Chinese air defences.
From RT Beijing has agreed to ease rare earth export controls in exchange for lowered tariffs and restrictions from Washington. China bent the knee again it's right there on RT Beijing gave in Donald Ducky won you can talk all types of story's the USA still Rules China agreed they backed down
Whatbis this about?
🇺🇸The U.S. Senate voted to repeal President Donald Trump's sweeping global tariffs, with a vote of 51 in favor of repealing the tariffs and 47 against
However, U.S. House of Representatives Speaker James Michael Johnson stated that such a bill is doomed to fail in the House of Representatives.
@ukraine_watch
https://t.me/ukraine_watch/50083
You can see from the body language that it was the blowhard Trump who bent the knee, not Xi.
Guaranteed that if anything positive for the US had happened, Donniw would have told us all about it immediately.
Instead, he slunk off back to AF1.
All that happened was an opening move in what will prove to be a decadal battle.
China only relaxed the rare earth restrictions for a single year.
I said you can talk all types of story's the USA still Rules China agreed to ease the earth restrictions it's even on your favorite RT go look China bent it's knee
The body language and precipitate escape on AF1 without a press conference tells a very different story.
China caved in with their best card. Rare earths. That's why Xi looked pissed off.
He just looked like Xi always does.
Inscrutable.
The readers of these comments are lucky to have a body language expert on hand to help us understand what’s really going on. Thank you
🤣
The reprieve, if confirmed by the Chinese, is for measures yet to be implemented. The previous rounds of restrictions have not been removed. The Chinese showed the US the whip and they had no option but to fall into line.
Oh my God go read Your favorite RT News even the Russian's are spelling out what the little Chinese are saying go look at RT News it's right there
Which little Chinese? The little Chinese that are saying the restrictions imposed in April are still in place. The Chinese showed the US the rare earth nuclear option and they bowed to the new Emperor, Xi. It seems the Chinese have the US by the balls and it's affecting them, and you, pretty badly.
My God man go read your favorite RT News it's right there on RT
@george: "little"? Xi seems at least as tall as Trump.
China didn't relax the rare earth restrictions. They are still in place. What they did was agree to postpone their new rare earth measures which would have been the trade war nuclear option.
This. The media is once again just trusting Taco's assertions and not fact-checking.
The April 4th restrictions are still in place; only the Oct. 9th threat to go even further has (perhaps) been delayed for a year. And even that story never got confirmed by the Chinese government.
.......and not all earth minerals!
I believe graphite is on the list and 100% controlled by the Chinese. Everyone knew this in 2012 when the Chinese played the RE card with the Japanese. Nobody did anything about it and now the Chinese have the ability to shutdown most if not all high tech production outside of China.
Graphite is universally available - it's just modified carbon.
Dr Jim Tour has patented a method of extracting it from all sorts of common materials.
Yes, I think currently it's a byproduct of coal mining. Funny how the Chinese have a 100% market share of industrial graphite though .
Only a few 'rare earth minerals' not all!
Go read what I said you can talk all types of story's the USA still Rules China agreed and they bent there knee it's right there on RT News the thing is little Donny Duck threatened and China buckled that's it I hate the USA can't stand them but it's all there on RT News China agreed to ease rare earth export controls go look
Only for a year though.
As I already said, if there was even a sniff of a US victory in S Korea, Donnie would have let everyone know all about it straight away.
Instead, he just slunk back to AF1 and flew off with his tail between his legs.
A four-hour meeting was originally planned, but all the Chinese gave was 1.5 hours.
Ther was nothing substantive to discuss.
Reminds me of the Neo robot that's been making the rounds this week. Oh wow it'll do the laundry and wash the dishes! But then you read the fine print and it can't do anything on its own, it's all remote controlled by some poor wage slave 😩
Our defense industry died in Busan and nobody noticed. We still cannot buy Scandium, Samarium, Gadolinium, Lutetium, Yttrium, Dysprosium, or Terbium. Nor Gallium, Germanium, Antimony, Graphite, REE Processing Tech and IP, or REE machinery and equipment.
It died way before yesterday.
'Trump–Xi Summit 2025: What One Hour in Busan Revealed' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yi_hYRgERzM
A different take: 'China Just REJECTED Trump’s ‘Surrender Plan’ ' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeYRx8GvNJ0
Recall Dr. Hudson's dicta: "Debts that can't be repaid won't be repaid." And "Most 'wealth' is 'debt'" So, when the debt evaporates--defaults--the wealth follows it--poof! The postage stamp example: When I was born in 1955 a regular 1st Class letter cost 3 cents and a postcard 2 cents, while today it's 78 cents and 61 cents, respectively, More:
"$1 in 1955 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $12.09 today, an increase of $11.09 over 70 years. The dollar had an average inflation rate of 3.62% per year between 1955 and today, producing a cumulative price increase of 1,108.87%.
"This means that today's prices are 12.09 times as high as average prices since 1955, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics consumer price index. A dollar today only buys 8.271% of what it could buy back then." https://www.officialdata.org/us/inflation/1955?amount=1
And of course, we know how accurate the government's rate of inflation report is. The postal measure says costs are 30X higher today than in 1955. Your basic new Ford car cost $1600 in 1955 while today the average new car price in Outlaw US Empire is $49,000. Service industry jobs can't afford modern things or new houses or gentrified apartments. The lamentation Billy Joel voiced in "Allentown" has escalated. Just as Herbert Hoover had no cure at the Great Depression's outset, Trump has no solution for the accelerating decline of the Outlaw US Empire that he'd be allowed to implement if he were so inclined, which he isn't.
Moral of the story: Governments cannot be trusted with money.
The last two words of your sentence are redundant.
The real moral: Modern money is meant to be spent not saved. The modern economy is an endless recycling of dollars (euros, pounds, etc.). The faster they are recycled, the stronger the economy.
Want to retain as much of the value of your money as possible. Spend it on items that do not depreciate.
The solution always begins with a restructuring of the economy, such that no dollars are printed unless they match hard reserves of some item like gold, or as Hitler showed, work.
Immediate and massive prosperity results, followed by a world war triggered by jewish banksters, whose entire modus operandi is parasitism.
The downfall of the US began in earnest at Christmas 1913, when the jewish money interests managed to set up the Fed, and its ugly twin sister, the IRS.
I knew some men who developed a strong desire to reverse these acts.
Where are they? The longer we wait the more brown the country becomes, and those browns are being programmed to hate Whites.
Once your police force and military are majority brown the Whites are done.
Some still around some are not. A few made a lifelong effort to pursue the issue with good reason. Willis A Carto was writing and dreaming about declaring the whole gang a group of criminal conspirators.