Lies about Mao

 https://mronline.org/2011/06/26/revisiting-alleged-30-million-famine-deaths-during-chinas-great-leap/

Thirty years ago, a highly successful vilification campaign was launched against Mao Zedong, saying that a massive famine in which 27 to 30 million people died in China took place during the Great Leap period, 1958 to 1961, which marked the formation of the people’s communes under his leadership.  The main basis of this assertion was, first, the population deficit in China during 1958 to 1961 and, second, the work of two North American demographers, A J Coale (Rapid Population Change in China 1952-1982, 1982) and Judith Banister (China’s Changing Population, 1987).  No one bothered to look at the highly dubious method through which these demographers had arrived at their apocalyptic figures.

The ‘estimate’ was later widely publicised by Amartya K Sen, who built an entire theory saying that democratic freedom, especially press freedom, in India meant that famine was avoided while its absence in China explains why the world did not know that such a massive famine had taken place until as much as a quarter century later when the North American demographers painstakingly uncovered it.

The capitalist press was happy to reciprocate the compliment by repeatedly writing of “30 million famine deaths,” to the extent that a fiction was established as historical fact in readers’ minds.  The London Economist had a special issue on China some years ago, which repeated the allegation of 30 million deaths in three separate articles and refused to publish the Letter to the Editor this author sent contradicting the claim.  More recently, in his Introduction to the book Mao Zedong on Practice and Contradiction, which he edited and published in 2006, Slavoj Zizek also mentioned the figure of 30 millions as though it were a given fact.  Well-known intellectuals have to be taken seriously and the claim examined.

There are two routes through which very large ‘famine deaths’ have been claimed — firstly, population deficit and, secondly, imputing births and deaths which did not actually take place.  Looking at China’s official population data from its 1953 and 1964 censuses, we see that if the rate of population increase up to 1958 had been maintained, the population should have been 27 million higher over the period of 1959-1961 than it actually was.  This population deficit is also discussed by the demographers Pravin Visaria and Leela Visaria.  The population deficit was widely equated with ‘famine deaths.’  But 18 million of the people alleged to have died in a famine were not born in the first place.  The decline in the birth rate from 29 in 1958 to 18 in 1961 is being counted as famine deaths.  The Chinese are a highly talented people, but they have not learnt the art of dying without being born.

There is a basic responsibility that everyone, and more particularly academics, has to be clear and precise about.  To say or write that “27 million people died in the famine in China” conveys to the reader that people who were actually present and alive starved to death.  But this did not actually happen and the statement that it did is false.

https://web.archive.org/web/20140715080652/https://mzd.szhgh.com/maoshidai/2014-07-11/56759.html

famine

@pawelwargan

The famines that occurred early on in revolutionary societies were in fact the last famines of the capitalist-feudal order that came before. Socialism solved the problem of hunger, which had tormented the peasantry for centuries.

Historical records from pre-revolutionary China cite 1,828 catastrophic famines over about 2,000 years, or roughly one per year. These would routinely claim millions of lives. What stopped them? The revolution, with its land reforms and Communist Party forces tasked with serving the people.

That process did not happen with the snap of the fingers, but required seismic social transformations — a long struggle of shedding the old and building the new. That is why the last famine occurred after the revolution.

We also know what happens when the capitalist dictatorship is restored in a formerly socialist country. After the defeat of the USSR, hunger returned to Russia at levels unseen since the immediate post-war period, when the country was still reeling from the effects of Germany’s war of extermination.

The levels of hunger and death imposed by global capital on the people of the Eastern Bloc in the 1990s were historically unprecedented in peacetime.

China's hydraulic culture

China has suffered massively from floods, famine and civil war for thousands of years.

Their flooding problem is unique on the planet and a destructive force like no other.

Imagine a Mississippi river that overflows every couple of years, moves hundreds of miles every few decades and never stops.

The book series "3 Body problem" is a metaphor for China's floods. Chinese know their geography requires a hydraulic culture to survive, it's just a question of having a competent one.

The CCP has brought sovereignty, peace, and prosperity to 1.4 billion Chinese.

https://x.com/i/status/2109633225819816217

"the 1855 avulsion moved the Yellow River’s outlet from south of the Shandong Peninsula (Yellow Sea) to the Bohai Gulf about 300 miles north, and compares that single event to the Mississippi somehow relocating from New Orleans across the American South to reach the Atlantic at St. Augustine, Florida (~600 miles).

The Yellow River is famous for this because of its enormous sediment load from the Loess Plateau (historically ~1–1.6 billion tons per year, far higher than the Mississippi’s ~0.2–0.3 billion tons). On the flat North China Plain the sediment settles, raising the bed until the river becomes an “above-ground” (suspended) river, often higher than the surrounding land. When levees fail, the water seeks a lower path and can abandon its channel.

~1,593 levee breaches/floods.

26 major course changes (some counts of ~6 especially large ones).

Outlets shifted between the Bohai Sea (north of Shandong) and the Yellow Sea/Huai system (south), distances of hundreds of miles/kilometers.

Chinese saying: it “breaches its banks twice in three years and changes course once in a century.”

In the last millennium one analysis found lower-course shifts roughly every ~25 years and breaches about once a year on average (higher in chaotic periods).

Delta/terminal channels were even more mobile: dozens of shifts (reports of >50 since 1855; roughly every decade in some modern periods before heavy engineering)."

https://x.com/yishan/status/1977273380374986952

People talk about how Northern European cultures were forced to develop long-term planning because of seasonal cycles: they couldn't just assume food would grow all the time, so they had to farm and harvest and save during the summer so as to have food during the winter. Chinese culture developed in even more extreme ways: not only did seasons force that kind of long-term planning, but periodic disasters would wipe you out unless many many communities banded together to execute megaprojects necessary to defend against those disasters. It wasn't just about sustained effort over months, it was sustained effort over years. The alternative was starvation, and the cultures that survived knew the value of collective long-term plans under practical leaders. Natural disasters befell other cultures too, but the difference here is critical: some disasters are irresistible acts of God. Other disasters are difficult but not impossible - and periodic floods and changing rivers fall in that category: if you are good enough, smart enough, and work hard all together, you can beat the floods.

China's rare earth elements plan

A continuing series of well thought out 5 year plans gave China their rare earth elements empire while the West was sleeping.

https://archive.ph/dTVFT

China’s centrality in rare earths didn’t happen by accident. It is the result of decades of planning and domestic and overseas investment, often directed from the highest levels of the party and the Chinese government.

A Five-Year Plan drafted by Mr. Deng and Mr. Fang, covering 1981 to 1985, ordered that China “increase the production of rare-earth metals.”

Today, China is working to cement its lead in rare earths by churning out more trained technicians and researchers than any other country. Programs in rare earths are offered by 39 universities.

The United States and Europe have no such programs — not even at Iowa State University, an institution that once trained generations of American engineers in rare earths. Iowa State has not offered a course in rare earths for the last several years and has one graduate student doing independent study in the field. It plans to offer a course next year.

China has hundreds of scientists exploring rare-earth technologies. Technicians at a refinery in Wuxi, a city near Shanghai, spent seven years doing experiments to refine dysprosium, a rare earth, to extraordinary purity. The refinery is now the world’s sole source of that rare earth, which is used in capacitors — tiny devices to control electricity — found in Nvidia’s Blackwell artificial intelligence chips.

Cornell rape accusations

 https://x.com/wokal_distance/status/2105704280217055649

(she expected them to) reward her by making sure she gets to be "one of the guys" - a sort of friend of the frat who gets special privileges. After the night of sex when the men told others what happened and then uninvited her from their party, she felt like they did not hold up their end of the implicit bargain. in her head, she played the role of the cool girl for them, and then they threw her away. She went from feeling like "the cool chick," to feeling like a dupe who got used and tossed aside.

She sees her consent as contingent on their silence and a place in their group; "I never would have agreed to do those things had I known you would destroy my reputation, and kick me out of the group." In her head, since consent was contingent on being given a place in their group and their social protection, when they broke their end of the agreement her consent was (in her mind) contingent upon, her consent no longer holds.

False rape accusations

Duke (2006)

Crystal Mangum accused three Duke lacrosse players of gang rape. Charges were dropped; the players were declared innocent by the North Carolina Attorney General. Mangum later admitted the story was fabricated.

Hofstra (2009)

An 18-year-old student accused five men of gang rape in a campus bathroom. She recanted within days after a cell-phone video showed consensual sex. She was charged with filing a false report.

Xavier (2012)

Basketball player Dez Wells was expelled after a fellow student accused him of sexual assault. Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters investigated, a grand jury declined to indict, and Deters publicly called Xavier’s process “fundamentally unfair.” Wells transferred to Maryland and later settled a lawsuit with Xavier.

UC Boulder (2013)

A student (Sarah Gilchriese) reported an alleged assault months after it supposedly occurred. Prosecutors declined to charge. The university’s handling of the case and related Title IX complaints drew federal scrutiny and later lawsuits from accused students claiming biased investigations.

UVA / Rolling Stone (2014)

Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s article “A Rape on Campus” described a brutal fraternity gang rape of a student identified as “Jackie.” Police found no evidence; Rolling Stone fully retracted the story. The account collapsed under basic fact-checking.

Mattress Girl / Columbia (2014)

Emma Sulkowicz accused fellow student Paul Nungesser of rape and carried a mattress around campus as a protest art project. Columbia’s process found Nungesser not responsible. He later sued; the university settled.

Clemson (2015)

Andrew Pampu was found responsible by the university after Erin Wingo claimed she was too intoxicated to consent. A friend later texted Pampu admitting they had lied. A jury awarded Pampu $5.3 million in a defamation/conspiracy case (later partially reversed on appeal).

Sacred Heart (2016)

Nikki Yovino accused two football players of rape at an off-campus party. She later admitted the sex was consensual and that she had lied to preserve a romantic relationship. She pleaded guilty to false reporting and served prison time. The players sued her and the university.

These cases share several features: rapid institutional action under Title IX pressure, limited due-process protections for the accused, heavy media or campus-activist coverage before facts were established, and eventual recantation, prosecutorial refusal to charge, or civil findings that the original claims were false or coordinated.

Why are students allowed to run wild in public schools?

The Obama administration’s January 8, 2014 Dear Colleague letter on the “Nondiscriminatory Administration of School Discipline,” essentially instituted racial quotas on any attempts to control student behavior.

Using Civil Rights Data Collection figures showing large racial gaps in exclusionary discipline:

• Black students were about 15% of enrollment but accounted for 35% of students suspended once, 44% of those suspended more than once, and 36% of those expelled.
• Black students without disabilities were more than three times as likely as White peers to be suspended or expelled.
• Over half of school-related arrests and law-enforcement referrals involved Black or Hispanic students. 

The letter argued these gaps were not explained by differences in the frequency or seriousness of misbehavior. It applied a disparate-impact standard under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act: a race-neutral policy could still violate federal law if it produced a “disproportionate and unjustified effect” on students of a particular race. Schools that failed to address such disparities risked federal investigations and loss of funding. It also promoted alternatives to suspension and expulsion (restorative practices, counseling, positive behavioral interventions) and warned against over-reliance on school resource officers.

Tiananmen

 

https://ashesofpompeii.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-the-tiananmen-square

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https://fridayeveryday.com/new-docs-reveal-what-really-happened-in-beijing-1989/

How did violence break out? Kong’s answer to that question was cryptic.  “When we were little, we watched movies like Guerrillas Sweep The Plain,” he said.

That answer would have meant nothing to a western audience—but it was clear to many Chinese. This was a reference to a classic 1955 Chinese movie in which there are tensions between two groups. They have disagreements but don’t fight. Suddenly, a hidden third body, the Eighth Army, opens fire at both sides and then quickly hides, triggering bloodshed.

https://gwydionwilliams.com/42-china/communist-chinas-survival-after-the-tiananmen-crackdown/

China tourism

Shanghai (short)
https://youtu.be/Xq8ABGnBsdY

Shanghai (long)
https://youtu.be/CWge41JUXGY

Beijing
https://youtu.be/zITd3zDcl3Q

Shenzhen
https://youtu.be/tDKOimyHbMY

Guangzhou (Canton)
https://youtu.be/MfVAPOJ3KMk

Taiwan (short)
https://youtu.be/Y05_R_QNi88

Seoul
https://youtu.be/ah1yXG3idws

Japan (short)
https://youtu.be/juZtB9W7GO0

saboteurs of China

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_Tibetan_program

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-sep-15-mn-22993-story.html

--

https://x.com/NuryVittachi/status/2063034533285654787

The Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China demonizes the Chinese, day in and day out, with members preferring not to mention the group’s origins and funding.

Why? Because IPAC was birthed by the National Endowment for Democracy, which took over the “soft power” side of the CIA’s regime change operations from its launch in 1983.

It specifically works worldwide to demonize the Chinese to advance US interests.

The initial focus was to beef up the Uyghur genocide hoax, for which the groundwork had already been laid.

When that flopped badly (the Uyghur minority grew more rapidly than other ethnic groups), this was switched to the Uyghur slave labor hoax. This broadened to general demonization of the Chinese using all the Washington narratives -- they wrecked Xinjiang, they wrecked Hong Kong, they're trying to take over the world.

many people now know about the NED and what it does.

Also problematic is the fact that hundreds of thousands of people have visited China, including Xinjiang and Hong Kong, and seen the truth for themselves. These are not smoldering ruins but thriving, safe communities. Western countries can learn from them.

Learning from history or not

 Angelica Oung

As we go through a tumultuous time in the world, there is no better time to learn about Chinese history. You see, China was unified more than 2,000 years ago, and since then it's been its own unipolar world with some messy interstitials. While Great Powers competition happens in overlapping parallels in the rest of the world, Chinese history unfolds as a series of dynasties. 

Every new dynasty that holds the baton of legitimacy is painfully aware of all the other dynasties that has gone before, and as a result, is determined not to make the same mistakes. The first task of the new dynasty is to write the official history of the old dynasty it replaced. 

In the west in contrast, the failure of a rival was rarely internalized as an existential warning. Instead there's what I call a "Lol Those Fools Lost" mentality. The assumption is when two rivals clash, the one with the superior system would naturally prevail. Failure is externalized as something done to you by somebody else instead of something you become through internal imbalances that build up inexorably over time. Dynastic cycles? Wasn't that something that happened to the Romans? 

Well...it's happening to us now. I believe my late-onset interest in Chinese history is not just because China became so strong, but also because the vocabulary of Chinese history suddenly became startlingly legible and relevant.

"elite overproduction" "loss of legitimacy" "center-periphery breakdown" "peasant immiseration" "fiscal exhaustion" "military overextension" "bureaucratic sclerosis" "monstrous courtiers" "inability to reform due to entrenched interests"

My model of the world has changed from "in the end there can be only one system (liberal democracy)" to "in any system success itself generates the conditions of decay." There is no escape from history. We are trapped in dharma. 

In the end, dynastic cycle theory isn't really about China at all. It's about becoming historically self-aware through feeling connected to the past. A unipolar civilization system like dynastic China could not help but confront themselves over and over again. In a multipolar system, we can still do it, but only as a choice.

Rob Rook: UAE dollar swap

 

The fact Trump has stated he is thinking about giving the UAE a currency swap signals a lot of things, but part of why they make it a currency swap is not many people understand what that actually means. The truth is it is a loan without technically giving a loan.

The petrodollar system works, because the UAE constantly has a large amount of oil that leaves their country, exchanged for US dollars, and those US dollars buy things like food and western goods, and then the remaining dollars go into their eight sovereign funds which then pump trillions of dollars into the US economy.

Trump isn't necessarily being altruistic here. What a currency swap would do is allow for the petrodollar system to still work even without the inflows of US dollars that used to come in naturally through the sale of oil. Keep in mind, 90% of the food the residents of the UAE eat has primarily been flowing from China and Iran ever since this war began. That continues as the US has clarified they won't stop this food from entering even with a blockade, but that food can't be bought with US dollars even if we don't stop it because Iran is stopping any shipments that would have been bought in USD. In other words, US dollars are abnormally worth less than normal in the country, because they don't buy as much anymore, but Chinese Yuan are abnormally valuable, because they do buy things that can't be imported otherwise.

The fact they are asking for a bailout is a signal they want to stay with the petrodollar system for now rather than jump ship to China. The way it would work is the US would take UAE dirham (their version of a dollar). This is a bit of a formality, because we won't use any of that currency. It is strengthening the value of that currency despite the fact it is pegged to US dollars. They then get US dollars that they will use. At some unspecified time in the future, the US can ask for any number of US dollars the two think is fair in exchange for the UAE dirham we've been keeping in a vault. Normally this would work like a loan with more US dollars required compared to the number of dollars the US previously provided factoring in a calculated interest rate, but if this is a long conflict that might turn out to be impossible if we want their oil industry to return to full strength as fast as possible. It is possible we give their currency back for a very small amount of dollars in return turning this whole exercise into a gift.

But hidden within this exchange is the thing I see being missed by most of the Republicans that focus heavily on where Iran will be in the future. In reality, Iran is pretty inconsequential to the future of the US. It is near guaranteed at this point they will have a nuclear weapon, and it is highly likely that they won't use that weapon on the US as they couldn't reach the US even if they wanted to. If they are rational, they won't use any nuclear weapons at all, because the US may respond with its own nuclear weapons, and Iran cannot directly counter-attack the US. Iran using a nuclear weapon likely would lead to an Iran far more devastated by nuclear warfare than the devastation they do on others.

As far as oil, we haven't used their oil nearly at all since 2018. In fact, the sanctions shrunk their oil from 85% of their economy to 10%. The global oil supply is not reliant on anything going on with Iran at all. Iran is irrelevant. The UAE on the other hand is highly relevant. The reason why even Trump that gripes about NATO freeloading is talking about bailing them out is the people around him know how important the UAE is to US dominance.

If you have been reading what I've written for a while, you will know the world order that created a US system of dominance was established with the Bretton Woods Agreements after WW2. I won't go into too much detail other than the fact it allows us to run higher deficits with lower inflation and there is a periodic natural transfer of wealth into the US year-over-year through hidden mechanisms built into how the global trade system functions. The US position since 1979 has been that this global system of trade that rigs the system in the favor of the US is far more valuable than anything we might want out of Iran. This is the real reason no one has done what Trump has done in Iran. This war risked that system that provides US dominance with very little possible gain in return for the risk.

The key issue here is that currency swap they are asking for is a band-aid. It is only the first of many dollar infusions it is going to take to keep the petrodollar system working, and there are more countries than the UAE that we have to support to keep this system going. The underlying issue is with or without our blockade, the only way they can buy food right now is to lean primarily on China. Eventually, we have to either give up on the system that matters more for the US than Iran, the petrodollar system, and just let China take over, or we are just going to have to keep shouldering the cost of keeping multiple countries afloat on the Persian Gulf even as they produce only a fraction of the oil they used to.

I get the naive view is these countries own their own oil, and they trade it to countries that aren't the US, and we have our own oil. I get some may not want to take the time to understand why the Gulf States ever mattered to the US, but even if you don't want to learn why they matter, their importance should still be evident if you think about the actions of Bush Sr. and Trump. Bush invaded Iraq over Kuwait, because of this system. We were not the primary customer of Kuwait. Trump is sitting here openly voicing his desire to help UAE out even though we are not the primary customer of the UAE.

We care, because this is our system, and the number one issue is do we maintain the Gulf States or not. Do we get them back up to producing or not. Don't focus on whether Iran is facing shut-in wells. Focus on whether the UAE is facing shut-in wells. It's flashier to talk about Iran where our bombs are being dropped, but the truth is the real issue here is what happens to countries like the UAE. If you are an American that cares about American interests, then you have to realize that historians will measure whether we won or lost this war based on what happened to countries like the UAE, not based on what happened to Iran.

 

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Currency Swaps Explained Currency swaps involve central banks exchanging currencies at spot rates, with an agreement to reverse at predetermined future rates, providing temporary liquidity without being loans or gifts. The US Fed would lend USD to the UAE Central Bank against dirhams (held but unused), reversed later at the same rate—no interest or unequal exchange as claimed. This maintains the dirham peg (3.6725 AED per USD since 1997) amid war-disrupted oil dollar inflows, signaling UAE commitment to dollar stability over yuan shifts.

The Shah of Iran

Normanfrankelestian

Operation Ajax

In 1953, Britain and America ran a joint operation called Operation Ajax. The mission was simple. Remove Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh. 

Not because he was a threat to his people. 

But because he had the audacity to nationalise Iran’s oil and take it back from British control.

So they did what they always do. They destabilised the country from the inside.

Here’s exactly how the playbook worked:

1. They overthrew a leader the people actually chose.

The Iranian people voted for Mosaddegh. He was their democratic choice. And two Western governments sat in a room, drew up a plan, and said “we don’t care what your people want.” They funded fake protests. 

They bought off politicians and military generals. They planted stories in newspapers to turn public opinion. 

And when the dust settled, Mosaddegh was gone.

The same America that lectures the entire world about democracy, freedom, and the will of the people literally overthrew a democratically elected leader because he didn’t serve their interests.

That is not democracy. That is colonialism dressed up in a suit and tie. 

2. They then installed a puppet ruler and backed his brutal regime for 26 years.

Once Mosaddegh was removed, the Shah was placed on the throne with Western hands pulling every string. 

And for the next 26 years, from 1953 to 1979, the 

United States openly supported his authoritarian rule.

But it wasn’t just political support. They helped him build SAVAK, one of the most feared secret police forces in modern history. 

The United States played a fundamental role in transforming Iran

The United States played a fundamental role in transforming Iran from its trajectory in the 1960s and 70s into the adversarial Islamic Republic it is today.

This transformation was primarily driven by two key phases of U.S. intervention:

1. The 1953 Coup (The Foundation)

The turning point began earlier than the 60s. In 1953, the CIA and British intelligence orchestrated a coup (Operation Ajax) to overthrow Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, who had nationalized the country's oil industry.

Result: The U.S. reinstated the Shah (Mohammad Reza Pahlavi) as an absolute monarch.

Impact: This intervention destroyed Iran’s secular democratic prospects and planted deep anti-American sentiment, as Iranians viewed the Shah as a puppet of the West.

2. Unconditional Support in the 1960s & 1970s

During these decades, the U.S. cemented the Shah's power, viewing him as a vital Cold War ally and "policeman of the Gulf."

Military Buildup: In the 1970s, especially under President Nixon, the U.S. sold the Shah virtually any non-nuclear weapon he wanted, including advanced F-14 fighter jets. Iran became the largest purchaser of U.S. arms, fueled by the 1973 oil boom.

Authoritarian Backing: The U.S. helped train the Shah’s secret police, SAVAK, which became notorious for torturing and imprisoning dissidents. The U.S. largely overlooked these human rights abuses to maintain regional stability.

Nuclear Program: Ironically, the U.S. also launched Iran's nuclear program in the 1950s and 60s under the "Atoms for Peace" initiative, providing the country with its first nuclear reactor.

The Turning Point: The 1979 Revolution

The specific "turn" to what Iran is today occurred in 1979. The Iranian people, enraged by the Shah’s corruption, Westernization campaigns, and brutal repression (all seen as U.S.-backed), rose up in the Islamic Revolution.

The Shift: The revolution replaced the pro-American monarchy with a theocratic, anti-American Islamic Republic led by Ayatollah Khomeini.

Hostage Crisis: The admission of the exiled Shah into the U.S. for medical treatment triggered the storming of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and the taking of American hostages, permanently severing relations.

Summary

The U.S. turned Iran into "what it is today" by suppressing democratic nationalism in 1953 and then fueling an autocratic monarchy for 25 years. This created a radical backlash that birthed the current anti-Western theocracy, setting the stage for the decades of sanctions, proxy conflicts, and nuclear tensions that define the relationship now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat

smuggled nematode worms

 

https://www.michiganpublic.org/criminal-justice-legal-system/2025-09-11/judge-says-3-months-in-jail-are-enough-for-chinese-scientist-in-us-smuggling-case

Han was also accused of sending petri dishes that contained nematode worms, known as C. Elegans. Authorities said the packages were not properly labeled and that Han didn't have approval to ship them.

"C. Elegans is easy to obtain, easy to study, nonharmful," defense attorney Sara Garber said.

She said Han's research focuses on how organisms detect light, touch and temperature.

"This is not a case of smuggling in some sort of virus or a crop-destroying something or other," U.S. District Judge Matthew Leitman said. "From what I can tell, this material was not a threat at all."

An attempted color revolution in Hong Kong

by Philip Bowring, a British journalist and long-time Hong Kong resident

A NEW ASSISTANT

As a South China Morning Post reporter in 1991, I noted the rise of a new political group called the United Democrats, who had an “executive assistant” who was always seen at the right hand of the leaders.

His name was Tom Boasberg. So, not Chinese, but American. He was hyper-political, and his previous employer was the United States government. 

Many businesses in Hong Kong employed Americans, sure. We all liked Americans. But this wasn’t a business – it was supposedly a "grassroots" political party—and I thought it odd to have a foreigner at the top end of the noisiest political organization in the city. 

And when Boasberg moved on in 1992, I noticed that he was replaced by another executive assistant, a woman named Minky Worden. She too was American, she too was hyper-political, and she too was previously employed by the United States government: a coincidence.

When Ms Worden left that role in 1998, the group took another person in her place: a woman named Emily Bork.  She too was American, she too was hyper-political, and she too previously worked for the United States government. A series of coincidences? 

(Ms Worden went on to become an enthusiastic player in the Uyghur genocide hoax. Her journalist husband Gordon Crovitz, with whom I worked directly, later went on to sign a contract to work on media monitoring with the Pentagon.)

.

FACTIONS

For some of this period, I was a Legislative Council columnist for the South China Morning Post.

I lived next door to Yeung Sam, a leading member of the so-called “pro-democracy” party, and soon learned there were factions within it. Everyone’s favorite (including mine) was a rough diamond called Szeto Wah who was noisily patriotic about China while believing that western democracy would be good for Hong Kong. (Yeung himself was unpopular within the organization.) 

But many of the other “pro-democracy” politicians, unfortunately, became closely tied in with anti-China groups funded by the US National Endowment for Democracy, which had taken over the CIA's “soft power” covert regime change duties. 

The NED had quietly started funding political organizations in Hong Kong in 1990, but kept under the radar, using multiple other identities. Cash arrived in Hong Kong listed as “donations” from a non-existent body called the American Institute for Free Labor Development (set up by the CIA for money transfers).

.

EXTREMELY DANGEROUS

The NED were and are extremely bad people. Working worldwide, they used the “pro-democracy” label as a cover to poison the public against local candidates who failed to be pro-Washington in any country. 

The NED successfully manipulated elections in Nicaragua in 1990 and Mongolia in 1996 and helped to overthrow democratically elected governments in Bulgaria in 1990 and Albania in 1991 and 1992, as intelligence historians noted.

And they would eventually cause chaos in my peaceful, gentle Hong Kong. 

The NED did this by using their bottomless funds to blend Hong Kong’s “pro-democracy” politicians with two groups they funded to poison Hong Kong people against mainland China. One was called the Human Rights Monitor and the other was the Confederation of Trade Unions (not to be confused with the HK Federation of Trade Unions, which was a genuine trade union organizing group).

.

DESTRUCTION OF LEGCO

The "pan-democrats" quickly lost the goodwill of the Hong Kong people by automatically vetoing every act the government did, causing massive delays in a city used to efficiency. Legco became dysfunctional, sometimes grinding to a halt.

The physical violence seen in the Taiwan parliament was transferred to Hong Kong, with people such as Ted Hui throwing fists and foul matter into the parliamentary chamber (and becoming hated by the building's cleaners).

By 2012, this pro-US movement was working with the Oslo Freedom Foundation (which, despite the name, is based in the US), in a multi-year operation to organize massive demonstrations in Hong Kong with the aim of destabilizing the city.

The US plan was to present these anti-China protests as home-grown “pro-democracy” protests, trusting in the western mainstream media to excuse the horrific violence and hide the US funding. (Which they did.)  

A major aim was fearmongering. By forcing Beijing to send the tanks into Hong Kong, Taiwan would abandon its growing friendship with the mainland, and became once again a dependable part of the Pentagon's First Island Chain.

.

A FAILED OPERATION

The rest is history. The Chinese refused to send in the tanks. The PLA stayed at home. The Hong Kong police managed to quell the riots without killing a single person (unlike police or soldiers in the six other uprisings in the world that same year, all of which led to multiple deaths). The US operation against Hong Kong failed.

By 2021, many people in Hong Kong knew about the foreign forces involvement and were disgusted with the pan-democrats. My friends and I, almost all of whom had been big fans for many years, became totally disillusioned with western-style democracy as a whole. 

The western mainstream press rigidly turned their faces away and refused to see any of this.

And today, the China-hostile media, from Reuters’ James Pomfret to the BBC’s Danny Vincent, continue to fail to report the real story. Whether they are hiding it or are genuinely unaware of what is going -- that's not for me to say.

But I will say that the catastrophic loss of trust in the western mainstream media is well deserved.

the Nanjing Massacre

 A professor from Nanjing on why the Nanjing Massacre can never be forgiven:

"What we remember is not hatred, but the absence of civilization — an absence that shows us how we must safeguard peace, protect life, and uphold justice…

As long as civilization survives, we can neither forgive nor forget."

"Why do we reopen this wound and remember the Nanjing Massacre, again and again? Not because I am from Nanjing, or China. It is because I am a human being."

"I have sat with dozens of survivors of the Nanjing Massacre. In their telling, I have never once heard a word of willingness to forgive.

Because those were their own mothers, fathers, siblings… We have no right to forgive on their behalf. Neither do any generations to come. Our only duty is to remember—for them."

"We remember because Japan chooses to forget. We remember because an official apology remains absent. We remember because war criminals are glorified at Yasukuni. We remember because the truth is still obscured in their textbooks. To forget would be to betray history itself."

https://fb.watch/E2Qr8sQYmf/

Who was Samuel Slater?

https://pooley.com/was-americas-industrial-revolution-based-on-trade-secret-theft/

By 1774, fifteen years before Slater slipped out of the country, England had criminalized both the export of textile machinery and the emigration of textile mechanics. Slater, because he had been trained in the craft, committed a criminal act just by leaving the country.

Samuel Slater is remembered well but variously. In the United States, Andrew Jackson dubbed him the “Father of American Manufactures.” In his hometown of Belper in Derbyshire, he is less fondly known as “Slater the Traitor.” (It also bears mention that Slater’s wife, Hannah Wilkinson Slater, became the first woman in America to receive a U.S. patent, covering her invention of cotton sewing thread.)

Is it reasonable to say that the U.S. got an unfair head start on the Industrial Revolution by stealing secrets from Britain? I don’t think so. Industrial espionage had been practiced in Europe throughout the 18th Century, with the British and French particularly active, even using diplomats to get access to valuable commercial information. 

Moreover, Britain, like some other European countries, frequently granted “patents of importation,” which didn’t require the applicant to be an inventor, if the invention was new within the country’s borders. In this way, governments regularly encouraged people to “steal” ideas from abroad and bring them home.

But there may be a broader lesson to be drawn from the Slater story, one that resonates in the modern, information-based economy. Some scholars think that Massachusetts, near where Slater’s mills were established, lost the march to Silicon Valley because non-competition agreements were regularly enforced against employees there and in other Eastern states. 

Many of those employees decamped to California, where the law prohibits such restrictions. Undoubtedly some confidential information has been lost along the way. But consider the results. Perhaps we should look to Slater as demonstrating the universal economic value of labor mobility.

Deng Xiaoping

 https://www.quora.com/How-did-China-surpass-South-Korea-and-Japanese-firms-to-become-the-leader-in-display-panel-manufacturing-industry/answer/Kanthaswamy-Balasubramaniam

In 1983, China had picture tubes made locally and also picture tubes imported from Japan for their State manufactured TV brands

The Japanese imports were top class and the Chinese Picture Tubes were low low quality

Chinese families would save longer to buy Japanese and scoff at the Chinese product

So the Chinese Party members advised to close down the Chinese factory making picture tubes and negotiate with Japan on reducing prices of imports

Deng Xiaoping said they had to better the production of Picture Tubes and match Japanese Quality and beat it

The Chinese party members reacted like how most Indians like Balaji Viswanathan and friends would react

They said:

We have to be Practical

We are an Agrarian Country

We have so many poor people

We can't compare ourselves with Japan

Luckily Deng had power and commanded what he wanted and weeded out most people and retained only those he felt could carry out his vision.

government lies

 

https://www.hoover.org/research/californias-high-speed-rail-was-fantasy-its-inception

California’s HSR is perhaps the greatest infrastructure failure in the history of the country. And the reason it failed is because of a gross failure of state governance, one on such a grand scale that it is nothing short of a betrayal of Californians.

The betrayal dates back to the project’s inception. A report by the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) found that the program’s 2008 business plan—which had been legally required to be submitted to the state legislature on September 1, 2008 but was not released until after the bond issue was voted—was deficient. The plan did not present statistics on train capacity, forecasts of segment service levels, how funds would be secured, how costs would be distributed by system segment, an operating break-even point, what analytical methods were used to forecast ridership, expected completion dates for environmental review and construction, and how risks would be mitigated.

Imagine a business plan without discussion of future funding, project capacity, demand at the product (segment) level, how costs would be allocated, or how risks would be mitigated. The 2008 business plan was anything but a business plan. Voters approved $9.95 billion in bond financing for a dream, not a vetted project. And like most dreams, California high-speed rail has turned out to be a fantasy.

If the plan had been submitted by the required date—more than two months before the election—then these deficiencies would have come to light. Instead, voters trusted those whom they elected and voted to tax themselves to fund a project that was never going to be feasible. They trusted that California’s state government was capable of spending their tax dollars effectively. At one time, California governance was among the best in the country. Our state government created and built capital projects efficiently and quickly. In the 1960s, such trust was warranted. It no longer is.

reflections on the need to use physical violence as an African American woman

https://repository.upenn.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/6907f0b8-fd01-4525-9bbe-20f6cfc7cd7f/content

Andrea, 25, was harassed by another female student since her freshmen year in college because of her relationship with a male classmate. By Andrea’s junior year she had endured multiple episodes of relational aggression and two verbal altercations with the female student.

While the situation was the typical girlfriend/boyfriend drama, Andrea did not want to fight the female student but got tired of the harassment and decided to fight as she felt she had no other choice. Because the incident was premeditated, the consequence Andrea received was expulsion from the university. Here is a segment of the events that led to the altercation:

…So this was September of my junior year, it was around my birthday weekend, it was my birthday weekend. I had friends come up from Delaware, around this time at the school, it wasn’t a pep rally we had some type of function. I can’t remember exactly what it was but a lot of people were there so you could have your off campus people come in or whatever the case may be. 

As I’m walking, after the party is over, as I’m walking back to one of my friends’ dorm rooms, she’s walking behind me like, swinging behind my head as if she’s going to hit me. What she didn’t know was I had two of my friends behind her, and they didn’t say anything because they wanted to see what exactly it was she was going to do. 

So that was my breaking point at that time because now, I don’t know what you’re thinking and in my mind I’m thinking eventually you’re going to get me, so before you get me, now I’m saying to myself I have to get you first. So we actually were on our way to get something to eat and one of her friends said oh is the party going to be in room 207, so I said okay great, I think that’s where she lives at. 

Mind you by this point in time, I’m not living on campus I’m commuting back and forth between Lincoln University and Delaware. So I said when we come back, I got something for her. We came back from getting something to eat, changed my clothes and everything and this was where I got myself in trouble because by this time everything that I’m doing is premeditated, changed my clothes and everything. 

I say I’m going to go to room 207 and I’m going to see if she’s there, knock on the door, she opened it, my friend hit her first, and we just started fighting and that’s how the fight happened…With that I ended up getting assault charges, battery charges, so I ended up with one count of misdemeanor for assault, they tried to add on some robbing, some robbing, I had to ask my friends, did y’all steal something? 

Because I didn’t understand you see, that’s the thing, not being knowledgeable I didn’t know that it was going to be to that magnitude of us getting in trouble, but because we entered into their room they automatically put that down…

…I actually did talk to one of the administrative officers, somebody that my mom knew and he told me Andrea, he was like, I wish you would have come to me at the beginning when this first was an issue so then that way we could have been able to resolve [this]. Because now you are telling me all these things she’s done to you from your freshmen year until now, it’s not going to matter because you look like the bad guy because you approached her. 

You went to her dorm room…and it didn’t help that all my friends were there, not to jump her, they were there to celebrate my birthday but because they were there, it looked like I called them up to say hey listen, we need to go jump this girl and it wasn’t worth it, I ended up getting kicked out of school…