by Pepe Escobar for the Saker Blog cross-posed with the Asia Times
Let’s start with the “long” 16th Century – which, as with the 21st, also saw a turbulent process of marketization. At that time, the Jesuits and the Counter-Reformation were trying to rebound across Asia – but within a context where the rivalry between the Iberian superpowers of the age, Spain and Portugal, still lingered.
The Reformation first attached itself to the Dutch trade thalassocracy – a seaborne empire, under which commerce was paramount – over strict propaganda of religious dogma. Britain’s maritime realm was still biding its time. The emergence of Protestantism proceeded in parallel to the emergence of neo-Confucianism in East Asia.
Fast forward to our turbulent times. Marketization – renamed as globalization – seems to be in crisis. But not in the Middle Kingdom, which is now investing in globalization 2.0 amid increasing rivalry with the other superpower, the US.
The American thalassocracy is being superseded by the Revenge of the Heartland, in the form of the Russia-China strategic partnership – for whom Eurasian trade integration, as expressed by the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), is paramount over the Make America Great Again (MAGA) dogma.
Meanwhile, the re-emergence of Right populism in the West mirrors the re-emergence of pragmatic neo-Confucianism across Asia.
BRI – the prime vehicle for Eurasia integration – would have never come to light without China’s four decades of breakneck economic development.
My sharpest and most informed geopolitical readers, such as the wonderfully enigmatic Larchmonter, are in synch with my running conversations – for years now – with top analysts in Russia, China, Iran, Turkey and Pakistan; following the Obama administration’s fuzzy “pivot to Asia”, the Trump administration’s response to China’s emergence has been to throw all sorts of spanners in the works.
Thus, the current hysteria over tariffs, the trade offensive, the demonization of BRI, Made in China 2025 and Huawei’s 5G dominance, and all manner of disruptive Hybrid War tactics such as repeatedly claiming “freedom of navigation” in the South China Sea to progressive weaponizing of Taiwan.
All that duly fueled by non-stop hatchet jobs on media outlets, as in branding Huawei as “suspect” or “permanently untrustworthy”.
From the point of view of the hyperpower, there can be only one possible endgame: an amputated, permanently crippled and preferably non-stop aching Chinese economy – with unfavorable demographics to boot.
Where are our jobs?
Pause on the sound and fury for necessary precision. Even if the Trump administration slaps 25% tariffs on all Chinese exports to the US, the IMF has projected that would trim just a meager slither – 0.55% – off China’s GDP. And America is unlikely to profit, because the extra tariffs won’t bring back manufacturing jobs to the US – something that Steve Jobs told Barack Obama eons ago.
What happens is that global supply chains will be redirected to economies that offer comparative advantages in relation to China, such as Vietnam, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Cambodia and Laos. And this redirection is already happening anyway – including by Chinese companies.
BRI represents a massive geopolitical and financial investment by China, as well as its partners; over 130 states and territories have signed on. Beijing is using its immense pool of capital to make its own transition towards a consumer-based economy while advancing the necessary pan-Eurasian infrastructure development – with all those ports, high-speed rail, fiber optics, electrical grids expanding to most Global South latitudes.
The end result, up to 2049 – BRI’s time span – will be the advent of an integrated market of no less than 4.5 billion people, by that time with access to a Chinese supply chain of high-tech exports as well as more prosaic consumer goods.
Anyone who has followed the nuts and bolts of the Chinese miracle launched by Little Helmsman Deng Xiaoping in 1978 knows that Beijing is essentially exporting the mechanism that led China’s own 800 million citizens to, in a flash, become members of a global middle class.
As much as the Trump administration may bet on “maximum pressure” to restrict or even block Chinese access to whole sectors of the US market, what really matters is BRI’s advance will be able to generate multiple, extra US markets over the next two decades.
We don’t do ‘win-win’
There are no illusions in the Zhongnanhai, as there are no illusions in Tehran or in the Kremlin. These three top actors of Eurasian integration have exhaustively studied how Washington, in the 1990s, devastated Russia’s post-USSR economy (until Putin engineered a recovery) and how Washington has been trying to utterly destroy Iran for four decades.
Beijing, as well as Moscow and Tehran, know everything there is to know about Hybrid War, which is an American intel concept. They know the ultimate strategic target of Hybrid War, whatever the tactics, is social chaos and regime change.
The case of Brazil – a BRICS member like China and Russia – was even more sophisticated: a Hybrid War initially crafted by NSA spying evolved into lawfare and regime change via the ballot box. But it ended with mission accomplished – Brazil has been reduced to the lowly status of an American neo-colony.
Let’s remember an ancient mariner, the legendary Chinese Muslim Admiral Zheng He, who for three decades, from 1405 to 1433, led seven expeditions across the seas all the way to Arabia and Eastern Africa, reaching Champa, Borneo, Java, Malacca, Sumatra, Ceylon, Calicut, Hormuz, Aden, Jeddah, Mogadiscio, Mombasa, bringing tons of goods to trade (silk, porcelain, silver, cotton, iron tools, leather utensils).
That was the original Maritime Silk Road, progressing in parallel to Emperor Yong Le establishing a Pax Sinica in Asia – with no need for colonies and religious proselytism. But then the Ming dynasty retreated – and China was back to its agricultural vocation of looking at itself.
They won’t make the same mistake again. Even knowing that the current hegemon does not do “win-win”. Get ready for the real hardcore yet to come.
I think that some key figures in Washington are going to have difficulty eating and sleeping after being spanked by Moscow and Beijing.
Alabama
That “spanking” will be political and commercial. Washington is offering the world color revolutions and regime change. Russia and China are offering fair trade and respect for the sovereign status of nation states. The US is losing popularity rapidly, if it hasn’t already lost it. The unipolar worrld is over. The multipolar world is arriving. Yes, the US will prevent it, and fail.
Great article Pepe!
….your comment…”My sharpest and most informed geopolitical readers, such as the wonderfully enigmatic Larchmonter, are in synch with my running conversations – for years now – with top analysts in Russia, China, Iran, Turkey and Pakistan; following the Obama administration’s fuzzy “pivot to Asia”, the Trump administration’s response to China’s emergence has been to throw all sorts of spanners in the works.”
And of course, the concept of a unified Korea falls into the same pattern of cynical destructive behavior…Washington simply cannot countenance peace and cooperation breaking out on the peninsula and certainly not any sort of mercantile cooperation…this would, in essence, be a strong addition to the BRI network which the Hegemon absolutely wants to destroy.
For this reason, all talks that Washington has with NK to resolve any issues are simply brazenly cynical Kabuki theatre…Washington will always do everything it possibly can to spoil any cooperation between NK and SK…the spanners will be thrown recklessly one after another…the MO is very simple, it is the same old playbook… the three D’s…demonise, destabilize, destroy.
Cheers from the south seas
Col
It is clear, your 3-D strategy is exactly what the maniacs in Washington do, incessantly, but for whose benefit is it done? Not for the American people–although we will be blamed by the world. Our lot has steadily deteriorated over the past 60 years of scorched-earth global imperialism. Not one of the millions of battlefield deaths, submissions to starvation or capitulation to communicable diseases has produced a single new American job outside of the Military Industrial Racket–and there you are really talking about organised crime rather than economics. Surely the top 0.0001% (a clique of deranged multinationals, not just greedy American oligarchs) who long ago owned most of everything cannot possibly utilise any more of the riches pouring into their coffers. I think they are so jaded that sadism has become as fulfilling to them as the mere acquisition of treasure. They live to see most of the world suffer, especially by their design. How dare several billion humans inhabiting most of what we call Eurasia attempt to raise their standard of living above the most primitive subsistence. It’s just not their place and is offensive to these self-styled demi-gods.
Thank you again, Pepe, for a timely, relevant article.
At a high level, we are all witnessing the collapse of an empire.
Ultimately, the reasons behind the collapse are germane to the rise of China, and, albeit less directly, the fall and re-emergence of the Eurasia-straddling giant, Russia.
The fracturing of the empire into factions, most relevantly breaching a socio-economic polarization milestone, which resulted in the business leaders, well inside the socio-economic 1%, outsourcing, to China, manufacturing, in order to make a short-term increased profit margin, has accomplished what it was always going to, the destruction of the domestic markets of Empire leader, the United States of America, and subsequently, its subjugated nations.
What pressures caused this self-inflicted pending suicide, be they the machinations of high finance, central banks, finance gambling centres of New York and London, or other extra-national manipulations, become less and less relevant than the fact that the beast is in its death-throws, and as such, has many systemic breakdowns, including it’s own political processes, and other fundamental institutions, none less relevant than the information agencies (i.e. the MSM).
The cognitive and mass-psychological investitures required to maintain power have compromised the collective cognitive processes of the Empire’s governance structure, such that they are not decision-incapable, thus the cannibalistic blatantly negative sum gain, lose-lose-lose policy decisions of the empire’s policy-making.
The Eurasian axis of resistance, the Russian military capability aligned to the Chinese industrial-economic capability has allied two giants who both share a much longer forward visions, and particularly strategic vision, compared to the compromising myopia of the empire, thus we see the BRI and policies to re-establish hard-anchorage to their national currencies.
To a large degree, these forced longer-term perspectives were driven by the empire.
At the same time the empire has descended into neurotic cognitive decrepitude, ill-advisedly dramatically over-using it limited arsenal of dirty-rotten-manipulative-tricks:
a. information warfare
b. economic warfare
c. proxy warfare
d. raving military threats which it can no longer back up on the ground
So you leave this story off at a bit of a cliff-hanger, the empire, spending more and more on their hopped-up pick-up truck, to make it prettier and prettier, faster and faster, as they head to the edge of the cliff.
What is the next milestone?
General economic collapse across the empire, leading to civil unrest, and re-deployment of military to domestic suppression?
What of the axis of resistance?
China looks to have internal issues which may be greatly exacerbated by general imperial meltdown; how do you see it playing out at the economic shock?
Can we assume that ‘hot’ war will begin with smaller proxy skirmishes, escalating to larger skirmishes and/or direct/overt confrontation?
Despite massive expenditures, the empire seems dramatically unprepared for conventional war, what is the most likely progression to nuclear usage?
Perhaps by a ‘naughty’ proxy?
Who would the empire most likely use? Ukraine?
What role of North Korea?
Thanks again for all of the chuckles.
We know the cause was the pension system, people were paid money long after their service or product(s) lasted the test of time, once again the politician is to blame for not recognizing the need for a truth in design, and simply modeling profits as a means to an end.
The end can go on for a long time, it is seen, or in the form of, human capital, and it is slowly decaying in many forms but cancer is king of the hill at the end of the day, and this is currently wide spread but so slow no one notices, at least no one who is willing to report it.
We have kids now taking the bullets for their fellow students b/c they realize no one is coming to the rescue and so the brave must step up to, so called, “save lives”. And they are now touted as today’s hero’s across the air waves in an attempt to spur on this movement. Long story short, it bad out there, real bad.
What happened with ‘the pension system’ is that the bosses of the businesses underpaid money into it. Which meant it didn’t have enough resources for its obligations. Governments have done the same thing. Of course, since the bosses own the media too, it gets blamed on the workers. But it collapsed because the bosses cheated and didn’t pay what they needed to pay.
It lead to spyriling higher prices when the movement should have been geared toward lower or stable prices.
That was the stated goal of the federal reserve, to keep consumer prices stable when in fact behind the scenes all efforts were made only to stabilizing the banking system by inflating their way out, which lead to a financialization of the economy and the theory of greater fools, the private side of the fed is the last greater fool and they simply cant afford to admit it, its plain and non-linearly simple as that.
It was a disaster just waiting to happen, and now the happening is here, the fed emperor has no cloths and the tide has gone out.
We have kids taking bullets in our schools because they are dumb kids, and kids are highly susceptible to the sort of propaganda that says to throw your life away for a silly cause, idealogy, or belief. Actual combat vets, the ones who don’t die as stupid rookies on the line, learn not to do that.
Hmmm, and funny how these school shootings don’t happen at the city schools in neighborhoods the white-flighters describe as warzones. Maybe its because in those places life is too real to believe the propaganda. Somehow those kids are immune to the school-shooting-virus that seems to effect mostly middle-class kids in rich-kids schools.
You see it in every war. The young kids who believe the propaganda who thing its heroic to die for their whatever-it-is. And they do. The ones who survive are the ones who learn how to duck, and that there’s nothing wrong with ducking and that what’s crazy is the hype that talks about how brave and heroic it is to stand tall and get shot and die in agony.
Big Muddy,
I found your comment to be repugnant. The kid taking the bullet was not thinking about heroic propaganda or any of that crap. He just, in that moment, wanted to stop the shooter, stop the killing, and did what he felt he had to do. He wanted to save his friends, his schoolmates. No one else was going to do it. To call him some kind of stupid tool of propaganda, in my opinion, is arrant bullshit. I call him very human.
I am particularly interested in the supposition that “school shootings don’t happen at the city schools in neighborhoods the white-flighters describe as warzones“, if true.
Could you possibly point me to empirical evidence to support this claim?
Nonetheless, this is an interesting observation, and I think there is merit in it, by my own observations.
…in those places life is too real to believe the propaganda. …
… that sounds something like right, at least.
How is this extrapolated across my supposition that the collapse of the empire is near?
If you care to comment, I’d be interested in what you have to say.
As i said, I believe the collapse could take quite a while, there are many layers of corruption that have to be breached, each layers collapse sends an alarm bell to the next layer so further mechanisms can be used to prevent said collapse of next such layer.
We are stacked to the ceiling with layers all waiting for their particular mechanism to be triggered so that the whole remaining stack lives on.
Everything is already a known, so that’s how I know it could take quite a while to knock the whole stack down.
No , the collapse will not take a long time….both Russia and China know the score , the secret is in the dollar. America is already bankrupt but because of the petrodollar , the SWIFT payment system ( controlled by America ) and America’s ability to keep printing useless and valueless paper notes within the continuing status quo , she’ll continue to remain afloat. China is the world’s largest oil imported and as such can wield a lot of power…power not used yet , same as her holding American bonds…..but she will. use this strength when the time is opportune. Both China and Russia are spearheading the move away from the dollar and as that gains momentum and the sane world realises the advantage of not dollar trading , the real trouble for America begins ….she’s already on the cliff’s edge and can’t reverse !
Plus you are only young once, that doesn’t help any.
“,,,,,,which resulted in the business leaders, well inside the socio-economic 1%, outsourcing, to China, manufacturing, in order to make a short-term increased profit margin, has accomplished what it was always going to, the destruction of the domestic markets of Empire leader…..”
Some of our honest, well-honed economists (Paul Craig Roberts/Others) view what the US corporations/industries started doing in the late 80s, all of the 90s as THE most destructive act by the US 1%ers of all time.
It destroyed several million middle class jobs/people, literally cascading *upward* what we now have: gig economy jobs, low-wage waitress/waiter jobs, ditto in the leisure market. Hundreds of thousands of homeless folks, astronomical health care costs and NO infrastructure $$ left. The 1% took it all.
Thank you for your comment.
What do we do now?
What could be done?
How might it be started?
Well mother nature did throw the knock out blow, the political class was not prepared for her arrival.
The MIC had something to do w/it, to the tune of 2/3 of tax revenues. Not to mention the un-auditable ESF.
“the Chinese miracle launched by Little Helmsman Deng Xiaoping in 1978 knows that Beijing is essentially exporting the mechanism that led China’s own 800 million citizens to, in a flash, become members of a global middle class.”?
The fuel, crews, design, engine and a launch pad Deng needed to launch his ‘miracle’ were provided by the Great Helmsman, of course.
Despite all the failings and setbacks, it is an inescapable historical conclusion that the Maoist era was the time of China’s modern political, agricultural and industrial revolutions. Starting with an industrial base smaller than that of Belgium’s in the 50s, the China that for so long was ridiculed as “the sick man of Asia” emerged at the end of the Mao period as one of the six largest industrial producers in the world.
National income grew five-fold over the 25-year period 1952-78, increasing from 60 billion to over 300 billion yuan, with industry accounting for most of the growth. On a per capita basis, the index of national income (at constant prices) increased from 100 in 1949 (and 160 in 1952) to 217 in 1957 and 440 in 1978.
Over the last two decades of the Maoist era, from 1957 to 1975, China’s national income increased by 63 percent on a per capita basis during this period of rapid population growth, more than doubling overall and the basic foundations for modern industrialism were laid and outpacing every other development takeoff in history.
In Germany the rate of economic growth 1880-1914 was 33 percent per decade.
In Japan from 1874-1929 the rate was 43 percent.
The Soviet Union over the period 1928-58 the rate was 54 percent.
In China over the years 1952-72 the decadal rate was 64 percent.
Bear in mind that, save for limited Soviet aid in the 1950s, repaid in full and with interest by 1966, Mao’s industrialization proceeded without benefit of foreign loans or investments–under punitive embargoes the entire 25 years–yet Mao was unique among developing country leaders in being able to claim an economy burdened by neither foreign debt nor internal inflation.
Without Mao’s industrial revolution, the economic reformers of the post-Mao era would have had little to reform because the higher yields obtained on individual family farms during later years would not have been possible without the vast irrigation and flood-control projects–dams, irrigation works and river dikes–constructed by collectivized peasants in the 1950s and 1960s.
” Without Mao’s industrial revolution, the economic reformers of the post-Mao era would have had little to reform because the higher yields obtained on individual family farms during later years would not have been possible without the vast irrigation and flood-control projects–dams, irrigation works and river dikes–constructed by collectivized peasants in the 1950s and 1960s. ”
Yes. The success of China’s reforms in agriculture could not have materialized without the context set by the earlier 3 decades of Maoist public investments. It was this particular context that allowed the agricultural reforms to conclude in an explosion of productivity that resulted in very large surpluses that finally gave China its initial capital accumulation to industrialize.
These surpluses were initially invested locally (eighties) in township enterprises and the champions among these township enterprises formed the industrial backbone of the industrial restructuring undertaken in the nineties. So in sum the large surpluses that resulted from the agriculture reforms financed China’s first stage of industrialization.
The housing restructuring of the nineties then engaged the 2nd stage of industrialization by distributed 40 years worth of public investments to the individuals in urban areas. And this explains why housing ownership is so high today in China compared with the West (approximately 90 % versus 60% in the US). This newly gained housing wealth then allowing families to purchase cars… and the car market then exploded within a single decade to
become the world’s largest one. This housing reform also explains how the Chinese citizens could possibly be holding such large bank savings (estimated to be in the region of 30 Trillion US $ today). And these bank savings is what ensures that a growing internal consumption is firmly at hand…
The present attempt by the West to contain China is thus too late and it is going to hurt the West very badly in the future:
– for one the present attitude of the West is like begging to be sidelined from future participating in the supply of the very large needs from Chinese consumerism.
– secondly the West offers China a hidden opportunity to practice what is called a “geese flight” model of economic development by de-localizing their low value-added productions to south-Asian, African, and Muslim countries.
– thirdly one and two urges China to engage on an ultra fast scientific and technological lane and the result is precluded by the following factors: –its internal market gives China the benefit of very a large scale economies, — it cuts the West’s advantage in science and tech and directly competes with it, — and finally it catches an expanding market in the countries benefiting from the “geese flight” model of economic development which is what the new silk roads are all about…
Excellent contribution, Godfree. The standard Western ‘fake news’ propaganda narrative concerning Mao, the greatest of the great, in my opinion, of 20th century Earth-shakers, is despicable, but what else can you expect? ‘Red Star over China’ was, with ‘The Grapes of Wrath’, my favourite book as a yoof. And Mao was primus inter pares among a group of scarcely less amazing characters.
The problem the Empire has in places like Brazil is that, yes, they are re-achieved control. They’ve done so by welding a new top onto the steam kettle. And lets also get rid of that pesky pressure release valve that keeps being so annoying by popping off every once in awhile. Meanwhile, they also crack up the heat and exploit people more and more to grab every nickle and dime of money while they’ve got the chance.
Of course, the inevitable result is that the whole things eventually blows. The people of Brazil got just a tiny taste of what it might be like if the government isn’t their enemy. The people of Brazil got a tiny taste of what can happen when the government works for the people instead of for the small elite. It won’t be so easy to make them go back. And when this explodes again like it is sure to do, its going to be a much bigger explosion, and there won’t be so many willing to play nice with only limited changes and elections next time.
They can force the lid of the steam kettle back into place curtailing the freedom of the steam to escape. They can even weld it on more strongly than it was before. But that can never prevent the next explosion, only delay it and make it even bigger when it arrives.
The 2-part article linked below both draws and connects a lot of dots. The picture that emerges is that America is now the focal point in a struggle between two ways of governing the world. In a nutshell, it’s the Traders (and their sea power) vs the Producers (and their land power).
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-05-03/origins-deep-state-north-america-part-1
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-05-10/origins-deep-state-north-america-part-2
A very dense piece of work well worth reading.
The West are not ‘traders’-they are pirates and looters.
Of course, but under the same rubric, land powers were brigands and highwayman.
The great leap forward occurred when a land power became a Producer and put both brigandage and piracy on the sidelines. In doing so it showed the world a 3rd, intoxicatingly attractive way that had to be crushed. So it (largely) was.
That’s what the linked article was all about. It has all-too-obvious resonances today.
But I often wonder, where does this ultimately end?—The big business constantly wants to get as much as possible for as little as possible, thus seeking to place its manufacturing in locations where the workers can be paid the least for the most. Yet the consumer system also depends on workers to have the means and money to buy the manufactured products. If workers’ wages are driven down and down, who will afford to buy anything? Even on credit? And what will then be the point of manufacturing anything for the “market”? As the “market” will be gone?
Anonymous, you’ve just enunciated the central crisis of capitalism in a nutshell. Overproduction. And no, it hasn’t been solved. Capitalism is an autistic machine beholden only to itself. It has no interest in putting food on workers’ tables. That’s sort of a silly byproduct. On the contrary, it employs competition to drive workers’ pay to the subsistence wage where, as you correctly intuited, no discretionary income remains for those workers to purchase the fruits of their own labor.
Fortunately, robotics, trans-humanism and 3D printing are arriving just in time to smash the venerable labor/capital lever and relieve us of our sweat shop stations after which the .1% is looking forward to all 7 billion of us joining them in blissfully idle leisure. Not.
If you think they didn’t like us when we had at least had our backs to throw into their usury pyramids, just wait until we want to sidle up beside them eating dates and raisins in the sun. Can you spell strategies of attrition?
The ‘passing stuff amongst ourselves’ brouhaha better know as trade frictions is a prelude to WW3 which is a prelude to mass attrition. When you think of those bastards, it’s important to think LIKE them. They think backwards. Hot war needs trade war. Hot war must happen.
F.S.D., with computerisation, automation, artificial intelligence and robotisation, the parasites simply don’t need the serfs anymore. The plebs are so impoverished and indebted in the West, the USA in particular, that their consumption is not even required. So, all they represent anymore is a threat, and the parasites do not like feeling insecure. You can see where this is going, I expect.
Pursuant to our conversation yesterday, Anonymous and Mulga, Andrei Fursov (Андрей Фурсов) is out just today with his take on the interminably-forestalled crisis in capitalism. Looks like it’s on for tomorrow. Or else next Thursday. But yes, it is coming and sooner rather than later. One doesn’t have to be a Marxist to grasp that this crisis can only be postponed, never repealed. The system to follow will a hybridization of America’s inverted totalitarianism (see Sheldon Wolin) and the Chinese social-credit-cum-Xinjiang-gulag.
I hate to be grim but it seems a reprise of the post-1989 plunder is planned again for Russia’s resource wealth, but ratcheted ever so murderously forward. To be grimmer still, the people atop the resources are viewed as eminently expendable. This is why nuclear primacy has been the de facto post-MAD doctrine in the US since 2006. My Gd, as I type think I think as well of the Georgian germ/bio warfare labs and the endless Antislavic diatribes from Rachel Maddow et al aimed at normalizing (sui generis verminizing) via Goebbelian repetition. I could have lived without this two and two together.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oq2ud3As4ks
F.S.D., there is NO ‘Xinjiang gulag’. That is a typical Imperial lie, the numbers involved having grown, as these lies always do, from one million, to ‘..nearly two million’ according to an Austfailian racist Sinophobe, to ‘three million’ according to a US presstitute. By next week it will be ten million. And, as Max Keiser observes, you cannot taper a Ponzi scheme.
One tactic (already in play): Growing debt mountain in fiat money. But this is only a Ponzi scheme lacking long term durability.
Better solution: Simpler lifestyle, which has ***enormous*** other benefits as well. But this is beyond the grasp of most politicians and their pet economists.
Brazil: Interesting that I did a workshop recently attended by a couple from Brazil. I won’t say the topic but the future of things is close. She was rather manic collecting as much info as possible. Rather pleasant until I mentioned Lulu etc (obliquely to test the waters) — well, the reaction was immediate and intense. Apparently he was a ‘two faced’ criminal and the current regime simple angels descended from heavenly clouds. Quite at odds from what I read — mainly from Pepe E. I’ve seen that somewhat manic fervor and glazed eyes before and the best recourse (in polite social situations) is to reverse out as fast as possible. But before I did, I gleaned that the “Singularity University” is all over the place in Brazil and swinging big time in the front seats of future directions. I’d bumped into Singularity once before in Switzerland about a decade ago and found the strange intensity and fascination with human-machine convergence somewhat verging on the pathological. But each to their own. My question to the speaker at the end of that session at the time was where is “Love” in their equation. Silence and a freeze out, although I got the free thumb-drive they promised. Just saying; there is something creeping through the human domain like the crown-of-thorns starfish blight on the Great Barrier Reef.
They sound awfully like ‘robopaths’.
The elites are very focused on trans humanism. They really believe that gene-splicing their offspring will lead to the creation of yes, a superior master race that will lord it over the regular humans, and that not many regular humans will be necessary or desirable.
The parasite overlords have long been advocates of eugenics. The technology available today is what they have been waiting for.
Not sure what “the real hardcore” means.
Hardcore conflict?
Hardcore economic integration?
Hardcore “negotiations” with the USA?
Katherine
U.S. losing primacy across all fronts – most recently in its treasured and formerly unrivalled carrier fleet. Interesting. 🇺🇸 🇨🇳
https://militarywatchmagazine.com/article/china-s-85-000-ton-type-002-carrier-will-be-a-high-tech-emals-equipped-peer-to-america-s-gerald-ford-class