@Rain,
Of course China has camps. What else are you going to do with these people? If you don't de-radicalize them, and get them invested in society, they're going to do the same thing the fundamentalist Muslims have done to peaceful, secular societies all across the Middle East.
You know, a decade before most Americans had ever heard of "Xinjiang" or "Uyghurs", I had a Chinese college roommate for a semester. I forget how it came up, but (this was a few years into America's Middle Eastern wars on Muslims) at some point he mentioned that China had its own Muslim problem. He told me about these people the Uyghurs, who went around China bombing places and killing people.
Well, China had enough of it, so it walled off the Uyghur capital city, a place called Urumqi. The Uyghurs could no longer get out to bomb the rest of China, so they began bombing Urumqi, their own capital city, instead. My friend mentioned that just a few weeks earlier, they'd blown up their city's power plant, and now all the lights were out. We both started laughing, and the only thing I could muster, between peels of laughter, was, "
What the heck is wrong with these people? What are they thinking?"
His response: "I don't know!"
Every subway station in China, which is one of the safest countries on Earth, is guarded by metal detectors. You'd wonder why when visiting, because there is never any violent crime. You can take a nap late at night downtown in any major city and no one will rob you, bother you, or attack you (except the police moving you along; they don't want vagabonds). The reason for the metal detectors is the Uyghurs.
In 2014, a group of 10 Uyghurs attacked a subway station in Kunming (which is not in Xinjiang, the Uyghur province). They'd been trying to leave for jihad abroad, failed, and decided to wage jihad inside China. There, using knives and meat cleavers, they killed 31 innocent people, and injured 143 more. An eye witness said he saw attackers crouched over fallen victims, stabbing them until they died. Among the victims were children as young as five. Inside China, it was dubbed "China's 9/11."
While the Americans were overseas killing millions of Middle Easterners, saying it was a "war on terror", China appealed to America to collaborate on this war on terror. America rebuffed these overtures. Instead, it kept killing Muslims, meanwhile it treated the situation in China as irrelevant.
Then one day America decided the situation in China was actually now completely relevant, and now suddenly every bleeding heart American knows what Xinjiang is and who the Uyghurs are. It's weird for me to see. I used to have these conversations where I'd tell Americans these crazy stories about the Uyghurs and their antics in China. No one had ever heard of these things before. Now they've all heard of them, but with a twist... they've had a totally inverted, topsy-turvy, upside-down version of what's going on implanted in their brains. And man, it is
bizarre.
It is the weirdest thing in the world to me, to see Americans, who for 15 years hated Muslims and supported America blowing up Muslim countries and slaughtering Muslims civilians, now losing their minds about China placing Muslims into de-radicalization camps, teaching Muslims to read and write, giving them jobs training, and turning them into productive, non-blow-uppy citizens (I realize the US press is talking about "organ harvesting" and passing around that ridiculous photo of Chinese doctors in bloody surgical clothes handing an organ cooler in exchange for $1 US. As if organs cost $1 US, or as if shady organ merchants in China would be trading in USD. I can't say anything definitive on that but it all smells super fishy to me).
Regardless, the whole thing really makes you realize the power of the press.
re: China detaining people spreading news of things the government doesn't want spread: yes, of course. Every government does this. It's why Edward Snowden fled to Russia and Bradley Manning went to prison (and came out as Chelsea Manning). If the government doesn't want that news getting out, it is probably going to do something to try to plug the leak.
re: China not wanting talk about its detention camps: again, of course. China doesn't air its dirty laundry out. China's goal is to present an image of itself, both to its people and to the world, as a harmonious country. It does not like information getting out about Uyghur terrorist attacks and it does not like information getting out about how it is dealing with Uyghur terrorist attacks. These things upset the narrative of "harmonious society."
Jack Ma has not disappeared. He is still out golfing and going around places.
He has, however, fallen from grace.
Remember what we talked about earlier in this thread, about how the private banks, run by a small cadre of ultra-wealthy, supremely powerful families, are the ones with their hands on the ultimate levers of power in this international financial empire the US is the core component of?
What was Jack Ma doing when he got dressed down by the Chinese Communist Party and had Alibaba get penalized to the tune of $2.8 billion?
He was attacking China's centrally controlled banking industry and agitating for private control of the banking sector.
Jack Ma was preparing to turn Alibaba into a bank, and he wanted China to hand over control of its banking to him. In other words, he aimed to become the one with his hands on the levers of power in China.
The Chinese Communist Party is not stupid. They know exactly how all this works.
So, they called him in for a very severe dressing down, they massively penalized and heavily regulated his company, and if I had to guess they probably told him he's going to retire from making public appearances and any attempts to influence the public.
That's what Woodrow Wilson should've done with the folks demanding private control of a US central bank in 1913.
But either he lacked the spine, lacked the foresight, or lacked the moral compunction.
Ah, Snopes.
The heavyweight champion of "winning arguments on technicalities."
I didn't say anything about Barack Obama ordering anyone to do anything.
If anything, Obama seems to have tried to hold his administration back. Hillary Clinton claimed she had to badger him endlessly to get him to agree to go after Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. I distinctly recall seeing him give a talk about that right after it happened where he looked like he felt like the biggest failure in the world. I don't think he wanted that to happen. Also, while the buck ultimately stops with him for Libya, to his credit Obama held the dogs back for years from fully attacking Syria or Iran. He also did that last minute Iran deal that incensed so many warmongers throughout the US system (I still do not understand what Trump was thinking with undoing that deal).
There is a lot going on in the US government that falls outside the direct purview of the CiC. The US government consists of 40 million people. There're millions of things happening every day and the President is receiving lengthy intelligence briefings from the alphabet agencies every morning, for 90+ minutes, where these agencies tell the President their take on the state of the world and tell him what he needs to do / go along with. It was an uproar among the political class when Donald Trump dismissed these briefings. The briefings are one of the main vehicles for directing the actions of the President, or otherwise keeping him away from areas he doesn't need to be messing with (in those agencies' eyes). You could see by Obama's third month that the light had gone out of his eyes, his face had started drooping, and his hair had begun to gray, and he went on to do the reverse of almost everything he campaigned on (greater transparency in government? Try a more opaque government than ever before! Close Guantanemo? How about send even more people there! Universal healthcare? How about a Frankenstein public-private fusion that makes things worse for everyone! End to special interests? How about more powerful special interest lobbying than ever! No more Middle Eastern wars? How about two brand spanking new Middle Eastern wars, in Libya and Syria, plus no end to the ones already ongoing! Etc.).
Anyway, there are various reports you can read, which I am not going to dig up to provide a source on now, but some of what I remember:
- The US military was conducting water and food drops on confirmed ISIS outposts
- When the Syrian military had a branch of ISIS completely pinned down and was moving in to destroy it, the US Air Force suddenly conducted a raid on the forward Syrian position, blowing up tanks and forcing a Syrian retreat
- When ISIS accidentally attacked an Israeli position inside Syria, an ISIS commander called a higher up in Israel (I guess that phone number must've just been lying around the ISIS camp!) to apologize. Because obviously the "Islamic State of Iraq and Syria" wouldn't want to ever hurt Israel, because... radical fundamentalist Muslims just love Jews that much?
- During the waning days of US presence in Syria, there were satellite photos of US troop movements that saw them passing through ISIS camps, peacefully, while those camps were full of ISIS jihadis
There's likely more you can dig up.
But it's not really controversial. The US has been training radicals in the Middle East for decades.
Al'Qaeda is a freely admitted US creation. Osama Bin Laden was directly trained by the CIA to fight against the USSR in Afghanistan. ISIS, in turn, is an off-shoot of Al'Qaeda.
The core US objective in the Middle East is the regime change of nations that threaten the status of the petrodollar. Any tool that can help with that is game.
Nobody knows.
I think it's more likely if there's a war the US will go to war with Russia first. Russia is the most imminent threat (as it is pushing the US progressively out of the Middle East... which is a direct threat to the petrodollar, and thus US stability). Russia has been courting China, but it's not guaranteed China would back Russia up if the US attacked Russia (or false flagged Russia).
Russia is not Iraq or Afghanistan. A war between the US and Russia would be serious, and long. That's assuming it didn't quickly go nuclear, of course. If it did... then I have no idea. A conventional war, the US military likely has the capability to win against Russia. But Russia has a history of accepting temporary large losses to draw its enemies in, then trap them deep in its territory and start inflicting punishing losses on the enemy.
I think the most likely scenario for a conventional war would be the US pushing deep into Russia, Russia incurring heavy casualties, then China entering the war on Russia's side. You'd have Europe and parts of the Middle East on the US side, but those militaries are not particularly effective. Australia might join a US war on Russia but I suspect would back out if China joined.
Generally speaking, in long wars, the country with the greatest manufacturing capability tends to win, historically.
China's manufacturing capability is around double what the US's is at present. The loss in manufacturing knowledge that has occurred in the US would mean it would likely take decades for the US to really scale that back up.
Also, so much of the US is now dependent on imports from China that any kind of major disruption to that supply chain would really put the US in a hard spot. So it is kind of difficult to imagine how that might go. The US military might be fine but the US domestically would be dealing with severe shortages and heavy rationing (maybe not of food, because the US has kept its agricultural industry in top shape thanks to heavy subsidies, but probably of just about everything else).
So you would think that, too, would make US elites hesitant about kicking off any real kind of war. There's no guarantee the US would win, and it would suck, hard, for the US while in it. Maybe enough to collapse the system before there was any real outcome from the war.
But again, you have no way of really knowing how these things will go.
You read enough military history, and you see all kinds of wars that look like shoe-ins for one side, and then somehow there's a complete reversal of fortunes and the side that looked sure to be a victor ends up completely crushed.
Well, I'm not the sort to want to "bleed for the bankers!" or endure hardship for the international banks or what have you. So I wouldn't stick around for that.
I am the first guy in line to fight to defend my friends and family. If the US had some kind of leadership I believed in, that I believed was taking it in a noble direction, or defending some noble cause, in wartime I would probably be there supporting it. But there's nothing like that today.
Where I'd head... well, that'd depend on who was fighting
A US-Russia war is going to involve the US, Europe, and Russia, at least. So pretty much all of the US, Europe, and Russia would be out. East Asia works. Australia is too much a risk for potentially joining in. New Zealand is likely safe but I wouldn't want to live in New Zealand. South America is another safe option, because no one cares about South America.
Then if it was a US-China war, I'd expect Russia to join on the Chinese side, which would pull in Europe on the US side, so it's basically the same as the US-Russia scenario, except East Asia is out (Japan/South Korea possibly on the US side... though it's possible they might try to remain neutral. I don't know if either the US or China would let them, though).
Credit runs out when people stop accepting credit from whoever is issuing it. That's the problem with credit.
If I give you an IOU today, and an IOU tomorrow, you might feel like a rich man. But then if I keep giving you IOUs, no matter how much money you THINK I have, at some point as those IOUs pile up in your filing cabinet you are going to start to lose your stomach for more IOUs from me.
A government is a lot bigger than an individual... but it is mostly other governments who are accepting these IOUs.
No system lasts forever. And systems get progressively abused worse and worse as they near their expiration date. The people within them see the end on the horizon, and start looting the system for whatever they can get out of it.
I'd say it looks like we are seeing that with the US system right now (e.g., that is what is happening with all the money printing, which has accelerated the wealth transfer from other nations into the US -- the looting of a "dead man walking" system before the rest of the world fully detaches oil from USD and that scheme is over).
I said nothing about 'all'.
What did those people do once they got inside the Capitol?
If it was an 'insurrection' (like the MSM portrayed it... lol) we would've seen something very different.
I watched that whole thing as it was live streamed. It was the most stupid, pointless thing I have seen. A bunch of people shook some barriers, a few people bullied some police, the police let them in, they marched in slowly and respectfully (ever see a mob or an invading army crash into a place? It's not typically an orderly filing type of deal), went around grinning and happy, taking selfies of themselves, like they were on some kind of class tour. Then when the police told them they needed to leave they filed back out, just as orderly, and they all went home. It was ridiculous.
If that's what an 'American insurrection' looks like, the American elites are not going to have anything to worry about for a
looooong, long time.
Here's a thought experiment:
Imagine you construct a utopia where everyone has plenty. Everyone has all the food he wants, a spacious, beautiful house, infinite toys, total leisure.
Then one day Herbert wakes up and says, "Man, you know, this life is good, and all, but what I REALLY want is power. Wouldn't it be cool to have power? I want to have some power." So he starts making moves to build a following, then acquire power, then, as he gets more powerful, TAKE power. For a long time no one opposes him, because they are so content with their utopias that who cares? By the time people start to realize Herbert might be a threat, he's already built up such a following and has such a significant resource advantage the critical mass is on his side and he's probably going to win and become dictator. Peaceful utopia over.
Or imagine one day a group of people called the Heskers look around themselves and say, "You know what, we're all in this utopia, but it feels like even though everything is great, that other group over there, that Larats, have more of utopia than we do. It's not fair. The Larats have had more than us for as long as we can remember. It's time they gave us some of that." Meanwhile, the Larats in turn feel like the Heskers have been pushing them around, trying to take from them and leech off them, and have come to resent the Heskers. "It's time we get rid of these Heskers," they say. "They are always bothering us, trying to get more of what we have. Don't they have enough yet?"
Even if you could somehow give each man his own private universe, filled with infinite food, gold, entertainment, and billions of women just for him, at some point some guy is going to say, "You know what? One universe is not enough. I want 10 universes. Heck, why stop at 10? Why not 100?"
There is this saying, found throughout human literature and mythology, that "man is born with a hole in his heart."
It's not just man though. It is all life.
Life is an everlasting struggle for survival, dotted with islands of peace.
There can never be true, everlasting peace unless and until you can transcend this existence of limitations of ours.
If you have any kind of spirituality, that is what we are all intended for ultimately.
People without spirituality end up being confined to the material world, and try to create their utopias here.
Unfortunately, utopias have a habit of turning into dystopias, simply due to the nature of our limited, bounded existence.
Even if you could give each man a universe, it would not be enough. And no utopia is anywhere near as limitless as a private universe.
(I realize there are all the different transhumanist and post-singularity alternative futures people prophesize. But these suffer from the same inherent design flaw: that hole in the heart of man that will never be content with simply having what he already has)
Chase
www.theguardian.com
www.snopes.com
