More and more these days I am being inundated with silly fake accounts on social media platforms; they are easy to recognise, especially when the AI messaging begins…
It takes all of a few minutes for the bot to get an attitude; that is just fine… there must be a way of saving those minutes? 🤔
Recognising a Bot account
There are ways of being alert and saving your precious time. A short list of tell tale attributes for bots. Bot accounts usually show a short history of activity, media is often generic and/or showing a person (at the moment it seems to be more commonly a female), food, scenery, and travel locations.
Anyway, just a quick thought as I contine my productive day after swatting a couple of bots… if there is one thing I am sure of, it is humanity will prevail and win the day… Artifical Intelligence is invasive and dangerous; it is stupid to ignore, and moreso to waste one’s precious life on dealing with these nuisances … pests of cyberspace, parasites of time… Robots are blights on humanity.
(CNN Business)The Hong Kong neighborhood of Wan Chai may be home to the most eclectic and densest concentration of US-sanctioned enterprises anywhere on the planet. In less space than a square mile, you’ve got offices tied to: an alleged financier for Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group; an individual accused of helping Iran acquire millions of dollars of military equipment in violation of US sanctions; a man accused of helping Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro plunder his country’s resources; and a company that allegedly opened a bank in North Korea in violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions. As if that wasn’t enough, there’s also an office tied to a powerful Southeast Asian militia and a casino mogul accused of trafficking drugs, wildlife and even humans. Walk these streets on the northern part of Hong Kong Island by day, however, and you’ll likely see well-dressed professionals out to lunch. At night, it’s twenty-somethings getting drunk in rowdy bars — not drug lords slinging kilos of methamphetamine or gun runners trying to sell crates of AK-47s. That’s because all five offices appear to be front companies. Front companies are not inherently illegal. They are legitimate corporations without significant assets or active business operations that can be used to conceal illegal or unsavory transactions, evade taxes and generally avoid scrutiny. Essentially, they are near-empty offices in tall towers seldom, if ever, visited by their owners. But the five companies all appear to exist for one reason: to evade the watchful eye of American law enforcement. Four of the five alleged front companies in Wan Chai have, since 2015, been added to the US Treasury Department’s “Specially Designated Nationals And Blocked Persons List” — a massive document that names all entities sanctioned by the US government. People or companies put on the list are generally barred from doing business with Americans, conducting transactions in US dollars and using the US financial system. Allegations against the fifth company, the one tied to the North Korean bank, were raised in 2017 by a UN panel that monitors the efficacy and enforcement of sanctions on Pyongyang. Why exactly the five are in Wan Chai — and so close together — isn’t clear. It might be as simple as the lure of a good location and cheap rent. But they’re not alone. The Center for Advanced Defense Studies’ sanctions explorer, a tool created by a Washington-based non-governmental organization that scans the Treasury Department’s sanctions list, turns up at least 13 entries in Wan Chai and more than 120 in all of Hong Kong.
They’ve all likely flocked to the city for the same reasons that many legitimate businesses do. Hong Kong is fully integrated into the global financial system. It’s incredibly easy — too easy, some critics argue — to form a company and staff it with well-educated local employees. And, for decades, Hong Kong has wholeheartedly embraced limited economic regulation and corporate oversight. Free market, non-interventionist policies have helped supercharge the city’s economy. But financial crime experts say they have historically allowed shady businesses to pour money into the city, regardless of how it was obtained. Hong Kong’s Companies Registry, which is part of the city’s Financial Services and the Treasury Bureau, told CNN that US sanctions are “unilateral” and have no force in local law. The Companies Registry declined to make the head of the agency, Ada Chung, available for an interview. Hong Kong has passed laws in recent years aimed at curtailing malicious corporate activity, but plugging the systemic gaps that allow illicit front companies to thrive would risk choking Hong Kong’s legitimate economy, angering the city’s powerful tycoons and, in some cases, furthering American geopolitical aims at a time of intense rivalry between Washington and Beijing. It’s a balancing act the city has performed for years.
The foundation of a fortune
It was about 70 years ago when a 27-year-old Wan Chai native named Henry Fok figured out that Hong Kong’s leaders weren’t willing to stifle business to preserve the interests of governments on the other side of the planet. When Mao Zedong and the People’s Republic of China joined the Korean War on behalf of North Korea in 1950, the United States and its allies responded by instituting an economic embargo on Beijing. In May 1951, the United Nations recommended its members enact their own trade restrictions against China. Fok saw opportunity. China would be willing to pay a steeper price for everything from medicine to war materiel. All he had to do was ship the goods to them — a task for which he was well-placed. Though Fok was born poor, he had learned English in the British colony. That meant he could read local gazette auction listings and buy cheap military surplus goods left over from World War II. His first purchase was a tugboat, he told the Wall Street Journal in 1997. He had also helped his mother run a small shipping business, meaning he knew that industry. So, under the cover of night, Fok began shipping everything from asphalt to iron plates, plastic hoses, steel, gasoline and rubber tires to mainland China via Macao, which at the time was not strictly enforcing the embargo. “Whatever the mainland needed we could get it for them,” Fok wrote in his memoir, though he denied the longstanding rumors that he was a gun runner. “It was quite dangerous. But I didn’t care, if there was money to make then it deserved a try.”
Interview with Henry Fok Ying-tung. 10 April 2003 (Photo by Ricky Chung/South China Morning Post via Getty Images)
The Americans were not pleased. Washington accused its ally, Britain, of not enforcing the embargo strictly enough in its colony. The territory’s British rulers maintained they were trying, but argued against pressing too hard because the colony’s economy was built on regional trade, especially with China. Cutting that link could have spelled ruin for Hong Kong, especially given the economic pressures brought by an influx of refugees from mainland China after the Chinese Communist Party took power in 1949. So Fok and a handful of others continued with little resistance from the British, and the war in Korea raged on. The United Nations was not even 10 years old by the time the fighting stopped in 1953. The Korean War had been one of its first opportunities to use economic leverage instead of violence to achieve its ends, and even then there were people like Fok who figured out how to game the system to make money. By the time Fok died in 2006, he was a billionaire tycoon and one of Hong Kong’s most powerful political brokers. He later maintained violating sanctions wasn’t what made him rich. In fact, he said the whole operation was so stressful that by the end of the war he only weighed 103 pounds.But Fok had earned enough capital to invest in other ventures. He would go on to become the first Hong Kong businessman to buy apartment blocks and resell the uncompleted flats individually, a novel idea that made him millions. Apartments in the city are often still sold this way today. Fok also backed casino magnate Stanley Ho’s bid for Macao’s gaming monopoly in the early 1960s, which accounted for most of Fok’s fortune at the time of his death. When Fok tried to cash out of the gambling industry in the early 2000s, he was believed to be seeking between $769 million and $898 million for his shares in Ho’s company, according to Forbes. He was worth about $2 billion in 2001, according to the financial magazine, and died five years later.In the end, the measures meant to sap China’s ability to wage war had inadvertently paved the way for Fok’s fortune. His business empire was built on money made by ignoring and exploiting US and UN attempts to wield tools of economic warfare. Fok also showed that Hong Kong authorities were willing to look the other way when it came to businesses entangled in geopolitical conflicts, as long as it was good for the economy.
John Cowperthwaite’s experiment
The 1950s kicked off a half century of tremendous economic growth in Hong Kong, thanks in large part to those refugees from mainland China. Most arrived with nothing and needed jobs. Many turned out to be entrepreneurs, and the colonial government wanted to help them set up shop, according to Steve Tsang, the director of SOAS University of London’s China Institute. “So they basically introduced the most user-friendly system in the world for companies to [get] registered and just get on with business,” he said. That meant getting rid of red tape so people could easily start their own companies. This “user-friendly” system was just one cog in the colonial government’s unabashedly non-interventionist economic plan. British officials pursued a host of laissez-faire policies and let exchange rates be determined by market forces, at a time when much of the world was tying rates to the US dollar and gold. All that made Hong Kong something of an outlier globally and laid the foundation for the city’s “free market, wheeler-dealer kind of reputation,” said Catherine Schenk, a professor of economics and history at Oxford University. No one embodied this reputation more than John Cowperthwaite, Hong Kong’s Financial Secretary from 1961 to 1971. Cowperthwaite was so opposed to government involvement in the economy that he often refused to collect simple economic statistics, arguing that any data would end up being used as an excuse to intervene.
Sir John Cowperthwaite, the Financial Secretary, speaking at the IPCCIOS III Conference (The Third Triennial International Management Conference of the Indo-Pacific Committee of the International Council for Scientific Management). The theme of the Conference is “Asia – the Challenge to Management”. 27SEP68 (Photo by C. Y. Yu/South China Morning Post via Getty Images)
Famous conservative economists like Milton Friedman, the Nobel laureate and adviser to President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, were fascinated by Cowperthwaite and his experiment in unbridled capitalism. Free marketeers credit Cowperthwaite for the colony’s impressive economic growth in the second half of the 20th century.His tenure coincided with a historic boom in the number of firms operating in the city.In 1960, there were 3,732 companies registered in Hong Kong, according to the Hong Kong Companies Registry. A decade later, there were 15,848. In that time frame, GDP more than tripled.
When mainland China became a hub for manufacturing the early 1980s, Hong Kong became a gateway to that industry, and a financial center. The colony did not require people to be forthright about where their money originated, nor did it tax overseas earnings. And it remained very easy to set up a company. Legitimate business owners, however, weren’t the only ones who took note. So too did the increasingly wealthy and powerful Southeast Asian heroin cartel bosses who needed a place to launder their growing fortunes.
Washing money in Hong Kong
Fok may have pioneered sanctions evasion in Hong Kong. But the modern blueprint for the operations of the five front companies in Wan Chai was written in the 1980s by those heroin dealers, who used the colony’s lax financial system to clean tens of millions of dollars worth of drug money. The sheer amount of greenbacks being moved out of Hong Kong from 1982 to 1984 was massive — hundreds of millions of dollars — and it paralleled the rise in Southeast Asian heroin’s market share in the United States, according to US intelligence. And the money kept pouring in.
In 1991, Hong Kong officially sent nearly $4 billion in cash back to the United States, according Robert Koppe, an official from the US Treasury Department’s Financial Crime Enforcement Network (FinCEN).That number just didn’t make sense, and Koppe told a Senate subcommittee on Asian organized crime in 1992 he couldn’t explain it. Koppe said that FinCEN had a few theories on where the money was coming from; laundered drug money seemed the most likely. Concerns about a similar currency surplus had been raised about eight years earlier by former President Reagan’s Commission on Organized Crime, and it concluded drug trafficking was a logical explanation. There was no way to know for sure. At the time, Hong Kong did not have currency transaction reporting requirements, meaning businesses and individuals didn’t have to explain where large amounts of money were coming from. And nearly $50 billion in US dollars were being exchanged each businesses day in Hong Kong, according to Koppe. That was part of the problem itself, per Koppe. With so much cash unaccounted for in a major financial hub, Hong Kong was, as Koppe put it, “an excellent target area for the laundering of large amounts of US currency. “So law enforcement officials reasoned that if Hong Kong was sending back millions of dollars’ worth of drug money to the United States, it meant that Southeast Asia’s heroin empires were successfully laundering their fortunes through the global financial system via Hong Kong. They often used front companies to do it.
A 1994 report by the US Drug Enforcement Administration explained that traffickers would set up front companies in Hong Kong in order to conceal the movement of funds, or add layers of complexity and anonymity to their schemes. These heroin empires essentially provided a business model for shadowy operations, like the five front companies in Wan Chai. They showed them how to abuse Hong Kong’s lax system to hide money made illegally overseas.
The unassuming offices of Wan Chai
The Panama Papers in 2016 blew the lid off the murky world of international offshore finance — and showed Hong Kong was the most active place on the planet for the creation of shell companies, alongside traditional tax havens such as Switzerland, Cyprus and the US state of Delaware. The 11 million-plus document dump, leaked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), revealed how wealthy and powerful people allegedly employed Mossack Fonseca, a Panamanian law firm and corporate service provider, to set up shell or front companies on their behalf. Mossack Fonseca denied any wrongdoing after the story broke, but the leaks helped explain how the world’s 1% can use front or shell companies to move money internationally. Such firms could conceal the true identity of a company’s owner, mask a business’ assets or monopolistic practices, or even avoid sanctions. Tycoons also use them to obfuscate their business practices.
A 2001 study found that eight major conglomerates controlled a quarter of all corporations in East Asia’s nine most advanced economies at the time, including Hong Kong. The papers caused reputational damage to the city, exposing how open its financial system and corporate services sector are to abuse.
As of the end of June 2020, Hong Kong boasted more than 7,000 licensed trust and corporate service providers. Many bear little resemblance to global firms like Mossack Fonseca. They often operate out of poorly lit offices in unassuming mid-rise buildings. Some have strange names like Cheerful Best Company Services, the business at the office tied to the North Korean bank, or Sky Charm Secretarial Services Limited, one of the three corporate service providers at the address that was supposed to house a front company accused of violating US sanctions on Iran.
“The government’s promise to uphold the principle of ‘keeping intervention into the way in which the market operates to a minimum’ is a classic see-no-evil approach to financial regulation, designed to attract offshore business, dirty and clean, with few questions asked.”
In fact, four of the five front companies that were supposed to be in Wan Chai appeared, at some point, to house corporate service providers, CNN Business found after visiting them. None of those were surprising finds. Corporate service providers are prevalent throughout Hong Kong and most offshore financial centers because they make it easy to set up and maintain a company from abroad. The fifth company, the address tied to the alleged Southeast Asian drug trafficker, was actually home to another company, Shuen Wai holdings, which was sanctioned by the US Treasury Department in 2008 amid allegations that the office was a key part of the financial network used by the a Burmese militia to launder profits from drug sales. The man who answered the door when CNN visited for a different investigation in 2018 said the company was previously involved in the jade trade but now works in funeral services.
Experts say the issue is that company registration and corporate secretarial services lack proper oversight. Fewer regulations has meant more business and a more attractive offshore center, but also more front companies like those in Wan Chai hiding in the shadows. That’s part of the reason why the Tax Justice Network, a non-governmental organization that monitors and studies tax havens around the world, ranks Hong Kong fourth on its Financial Secrecy Index. “The government’s promise to uphold the principle of ‘keeping intervention into the way in which the market operates to a minimum’ is a classic see-no-evil approach to financial regulation, designed to attract offshore business, dirty and clean, with few questions asked,” the index said. The Hong Kong government hasn’t sat idly by. It has tried to find a legislative fix that doesn’t involve onerous regulation, but to date, most of its efforts have focused on the banking sector.
Stringent due diligence and know-your-customer requirements are now the norm at banks because “the cost of not observing the rules and regulations [on] money laundering is very high,” said Simon Lee, the co-director of the International Business and Chinese Enterprise Program at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). In 2018, Hong Kong’s government passed laws aimed at clamping down on illicit company formation. The new legislation requires corporate service providers to be licensed and registered, and all companies and service providers must now keep on hand information regarding beneficial ownership, or the actual people behind any company.However, the efficacy of these new rules remains to be seen. The Financial Action Task Force, a global anti-money laundering watchdog, said in its 2019 evaluation of Hong Kong that the territory had “a strong legal and institutional framework” for combating financial crime, but noted that corporate service providers were not well supervised “until very recently” and more time was needed to gauge just how effective the new laws are.
The future
Today, American sanctions in Hong Kong face a new major test.On August 7, the US Treasury Department sanctioned 11 people — including Carrie Lam, the leader of Hong Kong — for their role in enforcing a new national security law imposed by Beijing which effectively stamps out government dissent and freedom of speech. Supporters of the legislation said it was needed to protect the city after months of political unrest in 2019, which at times turned violent. Critics say the measure is a brazen attempt by China to take greater control of Hong Kong’s affairs. Hong Kong was for years seen as a stable, rules-based business mecca with a world-class judiciary to settle disputes. That veneer of respectability has been tarnished, in large part by the national security law, which gives Beijing far more influence over Hong Kong’s legal system. Washington believes the law was abhorrent enough to warrant putting Lam on an American blacklist alongside North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, whose country is accused of running gulags that house more than 100,000 political prisoners; Min Aung Hlaing, the Burmese general accused of orchestrating a genocide in Myanmar’s Rakhine State; and Syrian President Bashar al Assad, who has allegedly deployed chemical weapons against his own people.
Though Lam called the sanctions “nonsense” in an interview with Chinese state media and joked that the US government got her address wrong, they have left her hamstrung. Lam told the Hong Kong International Business Channel in late November that since they were put in place, she has not been able to use banking services in Hong Kong.”I’m using cash every day,” she said. “I have piles of cash at home. The government is paying me cash for my salary, because I don’t have a bank account.” She clarified in another interview that only part of her salary is being paid in cash — she is leaving the rest in the Hong Kong Treasury.
HONG KONG, CHINA – NOVEMBER 25: Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s chief executive, speaks to the press during a news conference after she delivered the annual policy address at the Legislative Council building on November 25, 2020, in Hong Kong, China. Lam delivers her economic policy address Wednesday after weeks of delay, mass resignation from pro-democracy democrats lawmakers and new steps to boost economic links with China. (Photo by Miguel Candela/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Lam was the target of an American tool of statecraft and an economic pressure campaign. Other governments, however, are not required to follow Washington’s lead on sanctions, even if the measures target apolitical crimes like drug dealing. A spokesperson for Hong Kong’s Companies Registry, which oversees the city’s companies, said as much when asked about the five front companies in Wan Chai. “While we do not comment on individual cases, you will appreciate that unilateral sanctions have no force in international law and do not create any legal obligations for other jurisdictions to follow,” the spokesperson said.The official reaction toward the sanctions against Lam have struck a similar but more combative tone. Hong Kong’s government denounced them as a“deplorable move [that] is no less than state-sanctioned doxxing.” With Hong Kong moving closer into Beijing’s orbit and China’s overall relations with Washington particularly fraught, there isn’t much chance the city will be inclined to help the United States enforce sanctions — especially when Carrie Lam can’t even open a bank account because of them. That is good news for the five Wan Chai front companies, and others like them. As long as Hong Kong’s leader remains sanctioned, it’s unlikely authorities here would be willing to cooperate with Washington to plug the gaps that make it so easy set up a front company in Wan Chai.
The controlled demolition of society, named COVID-19, places us at the gates to hell, somewhere between freedom and slavery, fighting a battle for humanity against a government who have become the occupational hazard of being human.
In little under eight months, those who go under the sobriquet of protector of individual freedom from tyranny, have taken on the mantle of oppressor. Turning on the people of this nation, taking legal control over our lives, removing our personal agency, dictating where we can go and who we can meet. Irrespective of these historic infractions on our freedom, we obediently roll over rather than disturb the hornet’s nest and industriously heed the call of showman politicians who have enlisted us, unaware the culpability has been passed from the overlords to the victims of their tyranny.
‘We are all in this together’ is another blandishment from this Prime Minister. Despite his inner circle ruling this country by ministerial decree since March. Rolling out the most injurious legislation in history, without recourse to scrutiny, debates or votes in Parliament, engagement with civil society, or indeed risk assessment of the impact of these laws, which even the lawmakers do not obey. In the time-honoured tradition of one ruleforthosemakingthe rules, anotherrule for everyoneelse.
Following a handful of idle sessions at the House of Commons, liberties older than Parliament itself have been confiscated on the basis of a disease with an average mortality age of 82. What has been achieved on this basis by the architects of this apocalypse is not only reprehensible, it is ingenious. Uniting millions behind the cult of COVID. Transcending decades of the usual propaganda, behavioural engineering, the manufacturing of consent. Mitigating the expense of war, terrorism, or whatever chicanery has been at the disposal of those in power, grooming us towards a controlled destination. In this particular watershed, a permanent checkpoint of our democracy to issue the terms of our servitude, called the biosecurity state.
The Trojan Horse of COVID
Admittedly, this is not your standard issue-industrialised, globalised takeover of society. Why would it be? Fascism has come a long way since Hitler. Nowadays the general population is too smart, would recognise the face of tyranny and not this garden variety imposter. Or so we think. Besides, ‘without the Allies landing on the beaches of Normandy, how could we be under siege?’ We reassure ourselves before crawling back into captivity in a comforting lockstep with less fortunate nations. Adaptation is a wonderful thing, but maybe not for us. In keeping with the opaque nature of this political confidence trick, this is not your typical dictatorship either. Instead it’s Middle England’s answer to a veritable military junta, carrying the letters of marque from Her Majesty’s Government to legitimize its piracy, courted by the ivory towers of science and medicine, and extolled as a force for good by a population sleepwalking towards the edge of disaster. Meanwhile society burns ritualistically to the ground. But that’s ok, we can build back better from the ashes. Or so we are told.
This journey towards the wrong side of history is made possible by subtle nuances of control, confusion and fear that most fail to comprehend. Triggering the wholesale abandon of logic and reason to a seemingly benevolent cult who offer protections against our day of reckoning. The threat of death strikes an uncomfortable chord and our ability to adapt makes us low-hanging fruit. But who could have predicted fascism would look so ordinary from inside the Panopticon? Once we’re plugged into a shared digital common, a state of emergency can rapidly contaminate consensus, until collectivism flourishes like wildfire. Meanwhile, measured perspective becomes an act of war. Who wants to be on the wrong side of the cult, when those failing to bend a knee to COVID, are, by disassociation, guilty, with blood on their hands? This entire process works because the fertile ground for any dictatorship to prosper is fear. A state of emergency unites us with common purpose. And what could be more compelling than a pandemic? Death, like communism, levels the playing field of all distinctions. Regardless of class, age, gender, or race, death is indiscriminate. Reaffirming the normalcy of our departure from one place of relative safety to another is straightforward enough. Safety is, after all, relative to the setting of the emergency. The higher the alert level, the safer we feel in the herd, regardless of small matters such as the number of prison bars holding us captive. In a strong-enough current people are like driftwood trying to dock in the reeds. Remember the motto of this thing from the outset: ‘The New Normal?’
The pandemic hunkers down on the Blitz Spirit of the British people. Boris plays Churchill, Vallance and Whitty flank the General, and the propagandists ensnare a nation under mass-hypnosis, who muzzle their senses and clap for their captors. Important matters of front-line battle are the prerogative of Johnson et al, who work round the clock to dampen, depress and demoralise the public spirit, criminalising just about every form of human expression conceivable. In this Kafkaesque rendition of reality, an arsenic cough, the assassin’s handshake are the crimes against humanity, while our personal hygiene and voluntary associations stand before the Nuremberg Trials.
COVID is the greatest operation to divide and rule in human history. Factionalising family members, separating each from their powers of reason, and weaponizing society as the Black Death, whose panacea is an unrelenting assault on the basic joys of life and other misguided freedoms, that we are told, are the agents of our suffering.
The cautionary tale from history should teach us that surrendering of our rights out of fear of some existential threat is never a good idea. Typically it’s a threat hatched by a government looking to cross the Rubicon from protector of individual liberty to regulator of the psycho-sociosexual. Dictating who we may and may not procreate with is yet another compulsion of cult ideology. Which should be enough to convince most we are living under tyranny. Or so it would seem.
On the contrary, those with front row tickets, prostrated in self-imposed exile, bribed with government kickbacks, and disguising their own fear of death as compassion for others, would disagree. Claiming (amongst other platitudes), ‘’It’s only for another six months… Even if it means saving just one life… 2020 is the year that was cancelled… You wear a seatbelt but not a face covering…”. This is despite the overwhelming body of evidence that we are not the victims of indiscriminate, extemporaneous encroachments on our liberties, but rather our rights are being permanently dismantled through a carefully planned sequence of events, where the previous imposition makes way for the next tightening of the screw. The volitional guidelines for the hospitality industry to track and trace our movements has predictably been ramped up to mandatory. Anticipating the next iteration in this sequence: gun-to-your-head contact tracing across all interfaces of the economy, our workspaces, public transport, international flights and supermarkets. Or, for those refusing to comply, then it’s ‘no ticket, no laundry.’ And the emergence of COVID-apartheid.
In the end, if you failed to push back against contact tracing, you stand no chance of resisting mandatory vaccinations. Until the megalomaniacs in power, with their ulterior motives and god-complexes, finally claim regulatory control over our bodies. And make no mistake, our minds will be next.
The Vanguards of Public Health
The controlled demolition of our economy was predicated under the banner of protecting our NHS. When paradoxically, our NHS was built to protect us (not the other way around). As a result, thousands of terminally ill patients continue to be denied critical care. Notice the word ‘continue.’ There have been soaring deaths for Alzheimer’s and heart disease. Doctors surgeries remain closed, while off-licenses have been on-call. Comparable to shutting down the military during wartime and plying the soldiers with booze. More recently hospitals are turning away sick children, to make space for potential COVID cases. Notice the word ‘potential.’ Are you beginning to get the picture?
While it may be “no measure of good health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society” the general population continues to pretend everything is unexceptional, instead of confronting the elephant in the room and raising a red flag to the proclivities of this government, as they strip even our senior citizens of their basic rights. Pensioners kept under house arrest, in understaffed and underfunded nursing homes, prohibited from seeing their loved ones for 12-months; as you would expect, many have lost the will to live.
Where is the public outrage?
Remember, we put up the collateral of our freedom to protect our vulnerable ranks. We carried the yoke of self-imposed exile, unemployment, separation from family members, masking up in public, to protect just one demographic: our senior citizens. This government, meanwhile, matched our stake by forcing the elderly out of hospitals and into care homes at the height of this pandemic. If we were indeed a healthy society, then before the ink had dried on the Do Not Resuscitate Orders, the following questions would have been promptly answered by Public Health England.
What social group was more at risk? Who did we spare hospital capacity for? Who do we continue to surrender our freedom for? Has the corpse of Harold Shipman been dug up and placed at the head up the Department of Health? Or has this been about something else all along? (All graphs can be clicked to enlarge.)
Lockdown 2.0
By this government’s own projections, lockdown will eventually kill more healthy people than COVID. The cure is unquestionably worse than the disease:
On 31st October the Prime Minister consulted the augers, adjusted the setting of his wrecking ball to ‘round two’ before unleashing another payload of devastating missiles against the posthumous germ. Using the very same blind sightedness that catastrophically failed the first time around. Indeed, those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat its mistakes.
We must therefore ask: what is driving these devastating policies towards the brink of societal collapse?
With the word ‘overwhelmed’ passed around like a bad penny in the political pulpits, are we seeing an increase in hospital admissions? Not in the slightest. A & E attendances for acute respiratory infection are running at 75% capacity, compared to the baseline, and there were significantly more respiratory-related hospital admissions in Dec 2019, pre-COVID. This fact alone would suggest the government is a prevaricating, deceiving, misleading, fraudulent, tellers of untruths.
Are we seeing a surge in deaths? Certainly not. The second wave is as fashionably late as the Prime Minister’s 4pm press conference on 31st October. And according to ONS data, in week 41 deaths were just 1.5% above the five-year average (in line with population growth). COVID accounted for only 4.4% of all deaths versus influenza and pneumonia at 16.3%. Even more alarming is this paper from the Oxford University Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine (CEBM), which reveals COVID-19 was not the underlying cause of death for 30% of all recent deaths attributed to the disease. 30%. Nevertheless, Johnson has pandered to the opposition (for want of a better word) and delivered another lockdown. Despite forty thousand scientists and medical professionals imploring an end to this institutional madness. Yet, deaf to common reason and without compunction, our political leaders continue to ride roughshod over the democratic principle when there has always been another way. Look at Sweden:
What’s more, when we overlay deaths per million in Sweden with the UK, it is clear the virus follows its own trajectory, regardless of ineffective lockdowns.
Despite this data being readily available to the government and SAGE we continue on this crooked path towards the brink of collapse.
When we examine hospital admissions, COVID deaths, and excess deaths for this time of year, there is nothing exceptional in the data. Therefore, is COVID a moderately bad flu season? Well, according to ONS, up to 23rd October 2020, there were 56,073 excess deaths over 9 months in England and Wales (although only 45,224 of those were Covid deaths). Whereas in the winter of 2017/2018 – over a shorter period of 3 months – there were 50,100 excess deaths. [HD: it should be noted that what ONS means by ‘excess’ in ‘excess winter deaths’ is something quite different to what ‘excess’ means in relation to the general all-cause mortality figures, but it’s a reasonable proxy for it: more here.] 2017-2018 saw the highest excess deaths since winter 1975/1976:
Finally, Rick Hayward, writing for Hector Drummond has extrapolated all-cause winter-spring mortality going back to 1993, and adjusted for population growth, 2019-20 is in fact the eighth worst season of the last twenty-six:
Mandatory Vaccinations
The rules for clinicians on defining COVD cases clearly states the ‘presence of symptoms.’ But contrary to these rules, more than 80% of those tested on the day had no symptoms. So why then is this government counting non-symptomatic cases as cases? Why do they refuse to publish or even acknowledge the impact of false positives? And importantly, why is COVID is the most politicised cause of death in history?
To answer these questions it is important to understand that those driving this controlled demolition forward have skin in the game. Especially Her Majesty’s Government. The UK is the number one investor in immunology amongst all G7 countries. The British Society for Immunology is the largest in Europe. The life sciences industry, of which immunology is an important part was worth £70 billion to the UK economy in 2019. The UK is the biggest country donor to the World Health Organisation. And the UK is the number one funder of the vaccine alliance, GAVI. It is well understood that a global mandatory vaccination program would be one of the world’s most lucrative commodities. Do the math: the average cost of a vaccine x 7.8 billion people x every year of their lives.
Immunisation therefore presents a golden opportunity for Britain to restore its legacy of empire, through a quasi-imperialistic meddling in the affairs of developing nations, with a global mandatory vaccination program that would provide the old empire with significant influence over global health and education policy. Despite the government’s own admission that the UK’s influenza vaccine was just 15% effective for 2017-18. Would you pay the full price for a car that was 15% operational? Or a lunch that was 15% food? No. But if those products were mandatory you would have no choice.
The Great Reset
No indictment of the pandemic response would be complete without a mention of the technocratic takeover of our cultural commons, predicated by unelected decision-makers, through programs like The Great Reset, which the UK has been onboard with since at least 2017, when Matt Hancock was Minister for Digital. In 2019 the British government laid out its roadmap towards the Fourth Industrial Revolution in this white paper. Notice this statement:
It is characterised by a fusion of technologies – such as artificial intelligence, gene editing and advanced robotics – that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital and biological worlds.
Sound familiar?
With a background in digital rather than health it is no coincidence that our masquerading Minister of Health, Matt Hancock, is at the helm of the greatest public health response in history. A role that reprises many of the technologies Hancock was bringing to market during his tenure as Minister for Digital, which COVID provides the necessary bluster to implement, including contact tracing, immunity passports, and other apparatus of digital control and surveillance being rolled out under the Joint Biosecurity Centre, foreshadowing the merger of human, digital and smart grid.
Another stooge doing the unofficial bidding for a global elite towards a Great Reset is our own affable dictator, Johnson. A disciple of the cult of technocracy since his address to the UN in 2019. So committed in fact, he has ruled out, under any circumstances, a return to normal, ever. Regardless of how the pandemic pans out, beyond the vicissitudes of his crystal ball.
According to the vision of the Great Reset, by 2030 ‘we will own nothing; all products will become services.’ By which time we will witness the seismic displacement of billions of workers worldwide, with the overhaul of cheaper artificial intelligence to replace arbitraryand costly human labour. People and communities will be sacrificed at the corporate altar as a corporation’s entitlement to higher margins takes precedence over a person’s right to work and maintain financial independence. Humanity will become auxiliary to the rights of nature, with the alignment of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Climate Change and the SDGs of the UN’s Agenda 2030. A kind of world communism will pervade the social spectrum and turn world citizens into a kind of one size fits all, while those at the top of the pyramid will benefit exclusively from a capitalist system gone rogue. The social credits system, that scores citizens on their ‘behaviour’, is already a dystopian nightmare for millions of Chinese citizens, who are prohibited from travelling on trains and aeroplanes. This apparatus of social control is already being trumpeted in Australia’s political pulpits as the exit plan for COVID, should Australian citizens wish to re-enter the economy themselves in 2021. Ripples of this new world order are fast approaching the shores of mainland Britain, with the Universal Living Wage system under trial runs in British Cities.
As the Jackals Circle
It is therefore no surprise that the Coronavirus Act was renewed on 30th September by the shills at Westminster. Despite the drum-beating of apparently dissenting MPs, in the end all these mutineers (in name only) could muster was a kind of vague gentlemen’s agreement on votes ‘where possible’ on ‘significant measures.’ Whatever that means. Even more disturbing was the idle voter turnout on the day, when only a criminal 54% of MP’s could be bothered to raise their hand to vote – including a flimsy 3% of all Labour MP’s – on what is perhaps the most important piece of legislation in history.
As a result we now stand at a crossroads, in what is destined to become the most important moment in history. Looking out onto a bleak horizon, where human freedom will become a thing of the past, with two possible scenarios to consider going forward. Because we all know what’s coming.
The first scenario involves each dissenter carefully deciding where they want to get trapped. Because in a few months once ‘vaccine-apartheid’ is implemented, those who refuse the jab will have very limited access to the economy and escape through international travel will be impossible.
The second scenario involves humanity resurfacing from behind the sofa. Organizing into a powerful consortium of stakeholders, towards a national opposition movement, with a clear and focussed mandate: to reclaim our citizenry, implement an independent publicly-led inquiry to examine the science vs the risks, bring this government to account for their malfeasance, and change the course of history. Because with the vast majority of career MP’s complicit in this agenda or lacking the vertebrae to oppose it, the burden of responsibility now rests squarely on the shoulders of the people. At this critical juncture, it is our civic duty to push back, resist, dissent, disobey. Let civil disobedience rip through this country, until it is returned to some semblance of normality. While we still have the notion of democracy to defend, we need to stand firm under its basic tenets. We must take off the mask, break the rules, organise and assemble in large groups and importantly, we need to protest and let our voices shudder throughout Westminster. If there is a silver lining to this historic debacle, now that the cannon smoke has settled on the battlefield, we can clearly see the snakes laid bare in the grass.
Reasons why the 2020 Presidential Election is Deeply Puzzling
If only cranks find the tabulations strange, put me down as a crank Patrick Basham
To say out-loud that you find the results of the 2020 presidential election odd is to invite derision. You must be a crank or a conspiracy theorist. Mark me down as a crank, then. I am a pollster and I find this election to be deeply puzzling. I also think that the Trump campaign is still well within its rights to contest the tabulations. Something very strange happened in America’s democracy in the early hours of Wednesday November 4 and the days that followed. It’s reasonable for a lot of Americans to want to find out exactly what.
First, consider some facts. President Trump received more votes than any previous incumbent seeking reelection. He got 11 million more votes than in 2016, the third largest rise in support ever for an incumbent. By way of comparison, President Obama was comfortably reelected in 2012 with 3.5 million fewer votes than he received in 2008.
Trump’s vote increased so much because, according to exit polls, he performed far better with many key demographic groups. Ninety-five percent of Republicans voted for him. He did extraordinarily well with rural male working-class whites.
He earned the highest share of all minority votes for a Republican since 1960. Trump grew his support among black voters by 50 percent over 2016. Nationally, Joe Biden’s black support fell well below 90 percent, the level below which Democratic presidential candidates usually lose.
Trump increased his share of the national Hispanic vote to 35 percent. With 60 percent or less of the national Hispanic vote, it is arithmetically impossible for a Democratic presidential candidate to win Florida, Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico. Bellwether states swung further in Trump’s direction than in 2016. Florida, Ohio and Iowa each defied America’s media polls with huge wins for Trump. Since 1852, only Richard Nixon has lost the electoral college after winning this trio, and that 1960 defeat to John F. Kennedy is still the subject of great suspicion.
Midwestern states Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin always swing in the same direction as Ohio and Iowa, their regional peers. Ohio likewise swings with Florida. Current tallies show that, outside of a few cities, the Rust Belt swung in Trump’s direction. Yet, Biden leads in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin because of an apparent avalanche of black votes in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee. Biden’s ‘winning’ margin was derived almost entirely from such voters in these cities, as coincidentally his black vote spiked only in exactly the locations necessary to secure victory. He did not receive comparable levels of support among comparable demographic groups in comparable states, which is highly unusual for the presidential victor.
We are told that Biden won more votes nationally than any presidential candidate in history. But he won a record low of 17 percent of counties; he only won 524 counties, as opposed to the 873 counties Obama won in 2008. Yet, Biden somehow outdid Obama in total votes.
Victorious presidential candidates, especially challengers, usually have down-ballot coattails; Biden did not. The Republicans held the Senate and enjoyed a ‘red wave’ in the House, where they gained a large number of seats while winning all 27 toss-up contests. Trump’s party did not lose a single state legislature and actually made gains at the state level.
Another anomaly is found in the comparison between the polls and non-polling metrics. The latter include: party registrations trends; the candidates’ respective primary votes; candidate enthusiasm; social media followings; broadcast and digital media ratings; online searches; the number of (especially small) donors; and the number of individuals betting on each candidate.
Despite poor recent performances, media and academic polls have an impressive 80 percent record predicting the winner during the modern era. But, when the polls err, non-polling metrics do not; the latter have a 100 percent record. Every non-polling metric forecast Trump’s reelection. For Trump to lose this election, the mainstream polls needed to be correct, which they were not. Furthermore, for Trump to lose, not only did one or more of these metrics have to be wrong for the first time ever, but every single one had to be wrong, and at the very same time; not an impossible outcome, but extremely unlikely nonetheless.
Atypical voting patterns married with misses by polling and non-polling metrics should give observers pause for thought. Adding to the mystery is a cascade of information about the bizarre manner in which so many ballots were accumulated and counted.
The following peculiarities also lack compelling explanations:
1. Late on election night, with Trump comfortably ahead, many swing states stopped counting ballots. In most cases, observers were removed from the counting facilities. Counting generally continued without the observers
2. Statistically abnormal vote counts were the new normal when counting resumed. They were unusually large in size (hundreds of thousands) and had an unusually high (90 percent and above) Biden-to-Trump ratio
3. Late arriving ballots were counted. In Pennsylvania, 23,000 absentee ballots have impossible postal return dates and another 86,000 have such extraordinary return dates they raise serious questions
4. The failure to match signatures on mail-in ballots. The destruction of mail in ballot envelopes, which must contain signatures
5. Historically low absentee ballot rejection rates despite the massive expansion of mail voting. Such is Biden’s narrow margin that, as political analyst Robert Barnes observes, ‘If the states simply imposed the same absentee ballot rejection rate as recent cycles, then Trump wins the election’
6. Missing votes. In Delaware County, Pennsylvania, 50,000 votes held on 47 USB cards are missing
7. Non-resident voters. Matt Braynard’s Voter Integrity Project estimates that 20,312 people who no longer met residency requirements cast ballots in Georgia. Biden’s margin is 12,670 votes
8. Serious ‘chain of custody’ breakdowns. Invalid residential addresses. Record numbers of dead people voting. Ballots in pristine condition without creases, that is, they had not been mailed in envelopes as required by law
9. Statistical anomalies. In Georgia, Biden overtook Trump with 89 percent of the votes counted. For the next 53 batches of votes counted, Biden led Trump by the same exact 50.05 to 49.95 percent margin in every single batch. It is particularly perplexing that all statistical anomalies and tabulation abnormalities were in Biden’s favor. Whether the cause was simple human error or nefarious activity, or a combination, clearly something peculiar happened.
If you think that only weirdos have legitimate concerns about these findings and claims, maybe the weirdness lies in you.
In the next few weeks, the awful truth about the recent US election and the attempted theft of the Presidency from the People will become impossible to ignore. The Director of NationalIntelligence is tasked with delivering his assessment of the integrity of the election within 45 days — the deadline being December 18th. Other lawsuits and events are progressing in the interim.
We are already witnessing the run-up to the disclosure of fraud and foreign interference prior to the December 14th electoral college vote. Fraud vitiates everything and annuls the Biden candidacy; foreign interference makes this a matter of military law. You are going to see a mass treason event and huge numbers of people brought to justice. This wasn’t really an election; it was a military intelligence sting operation against a corrupt establishment.
There are very objective reasons to believe that this election was NOT won legitimately by Joe Biden:
The candidate: Joe Biden had previously stood for the Presidency, found to be a liar about his past, and self-declared himself unfit for the role on national TV. Uncharismatic, with few notable achievements, and liable to fondle children in public — not qualities that endear you to the masses. Furthermore, he had a miasma of corruption around him linked to both China and Ukraine.
The party: The Democratic party had alienated large swathes of its traditional base through support for violent uprisings in cities it controlled (via BLM and Antifa), conducted with the tacit approval of its leaders. Failed attempts to unseat Donald Trump (“Russian Collusion” damp squib and Impeachment failure) had damaged its reputation for political competence.
The campaign: Donald Trump had repeatedly filled arenas and generated wild enthusiasm from his supporters with his rallies, whereas Joe Biden was notoriously unable to summon crowds. He essentially abandoned campaigning during the last ten days, and demonstrated very low levels of energy, and poor mental focus in his speeches.
The process: The Dominion voting machines were not under the control of Americans, and their own manuals and processes demonstrate extremely poor security and features to manually manipulate votes. The synchronised halting of counting in key states, and sudden “discovery” of huge numbers of Biden votes, is automatically a cause for alarm. More votes were counted than the machines could process in the time available.
The outcome: There are many staggering anomalies in the outcome — from the tiny number of counties won, the weird geographical distribution of cities won, the unprecedented size of the Biden vote (especially compared to Obama), Trump “losing” despite raising his vote, the implausible total support for Biden from military votes, the contradiction of the Presidency (Democratic) with the House vote (Republican seats all held).
The investigation: We are already seeing large numbers of affidavits sworn that testify to fraud, video evidence of ballots being mishandled and destroyed, large irregularities in following the lawful processes of the election, and obvious failures to pass basic statistical tests for legitimacy (like Benford’s Law).
The justice: President Trump has issued a specific executive order in anticipation of this election and the need to expose all the corruption in the civilian justice system, as well as the illegitimacy of many past elections in the USA and worldwide. All the clues are there for those with the eyes to see of a highly managed and planned process. This includes the expanded means for delivering the death penalty for treason.
The unavoidable picture that is emerging is one of a Digital Coup. The rogue intelligence agencies in the US and elsewhere had perfected a toolkit for “colour revolutions”. This included sophisticated election hacking, designed to deliver the desired result in a highly plausible manner. The Dominion voting solution was not for vote counting, but for election fraud — by design.
These tools were deployed against the US population in an illegal act of war. There is evidence of involvement by both China and Iran; other powers may also be exposed, including supposed allies, if the Russiagate precedent tells us anything. The enormous Trump landslide was outside of the range the fraud systems were configured for, which caused a panic insertion of fake paper ballots and extreme and obvious levels of digital “vote switching”.
° ° °
I get to watch various tech industry email discussion lists and WhatsApp groups. These are overwhelmingly dominated by Biden voters. They are currently in a bubble disconnected from the reality of events past and present. This bubble is about to burst. Many of their political idols will be executed for treason, or spend life in prison for sedition. There is wisdom in advice not to worship idols.
For my tech industry associates, you need to understand that the controlled mass media is gaslighting you, and deliberately pushing a desperate false narrative to cover for their own criminality. They say “no evidence of fraud” and “unsubstantiated” allegations, even as that hard evidence mounts up in court filings and open source intelligence analysis. There are districts with more votes than voters, yet you believe self-evident lies from your TV.
You have been hoodwinked by a system of social engineering that was covertly established, mainly after the 1963 de facto coup following the assassination of President Kennedy, and installation of a permanent criminal shadow government.
Today, Biden voters are celebrating his being the media’s “President elect” (hint: the media has no constitutional role in elections); the funding of his transition (hint: another sting operation); and Trump’s imminent departure from the White House (hint: he has planned this operation for decades and isn’t going anywhere). My former tech industry associates are utterly delusional in their beliefs.
There is absolutely no way that the US military would have spent years tangibly preparing us for this watershed event, including bringing Trump into the Presidency, only to allow assets of the Chinese Communist Party to (re)take control over the United States of America. It just isn’t happening. These celebrations will be short lived as the “boomerang” motion of the vast sting operation becomes unmistakable and unavoidable.
° ° °
If you voted for Joe Biden and are trying to make sense of dislocating events unfolding fast, here is where you have gone wrong.
Firstly, you have excluded from your inputs all rival voices and competing sources of information. You have immersed yourself in a narcissistic culture of self-congratulatory presumed superiority based on egotistical intellectual achievement. By the time you read this, you will be witnessing that belief system crashing and burning; pride smashed by the fall. You drove out the diversity that mattered, which was a diversity of opinion and social understanding. You were intolerant of dissent, and tolerant of censorship. This will remain a stain upon your conscience and reputation until you respect those who saw the criminality and spoke out.
Secondly, you have failed to understand the nature of propaganda, and how clever intellectual people are the MOST susceptible, not the LEAST. You NEED propaganda in order to have a socially acceptable position on each issue; nobody has time to become a climate scientist, vaccine safety expert, and forensic accountant and research every controversy. You have treated different media outlets as independent sources when in reality they are all one (false) voice. You are a victim of pervasive propaganda and even mind control.
Thirdly, you have abandoned objective rational empirical inquiry. You have assumed that (local social) consensus is rationality, and deviation from that consensus is madness — a cult even. You have ridiculed and mocked those who chose to look at the data — ALL THE DATA — and then make up their mind ONLY based on where it directed them, and not their preconception of what was thinkable or acceptable. This is the basis of proper science, and requires humility to recognise that progress is made by admitting errors and reversing false beliefs.
° ° °
I looked at ALL the data in this case, and changed my beliefs. You DID NOT, and stayed the same. This is why you have FAILED this test of sanity. Such failure needs to be confronted — because your false beliefs are dangerous to us all, since they perpetuate evil. The “short cut” the media (and academia) offered you was to a labyrinth of lies by assets of a criminal ruling class. You swallowed their lies willingly.
It was previously always easy to find a justification for your beliefs, another propaganda “talking point” to counter any data offered. A sneering and condescending attitude let you easily dismiss legitimate concerns as “extremist” or “conspiracy theories”. By the time you read this, that’s all finished. Gone. Over.
That you have been attacked by a ruthless transnational “supermafia” armed with weaponised psychology and a whole media industry is not your fault. That others had life experiences or innate character that brought them to question the “official narrative” more quickly is also not their personal virtue. You are not my enemy, and I am not yours. Our job is to come together, respectfully and responsibly, so that we may realign and heal.
For those who were deceived by the grand illusions on offer, you will find that those you laughed at will most likely welcome you back with open arms. The precondition is that you respect equality under the rule of law, and cease to put yourself on a pedestal where you are part of a superior social class entitled to judge others and look down upon them. It is time for you to be held to your stated values of kindness, tolerance, and inclusion.
For we all have a real war to fight against a real enemy who can do us real harm. A war of infiltration, founded on treachery, that has corroded and corrupted our society. A war against great deceptions that fuel endless violent conflict.
The Great Exposure has begun. It cannot be stopped by anybody. Lasting peace is our goal and prize.
Please unify with those who are already fighting for truth and justice.
Four geoeconomic summits compressed in one week tell the story of where we stand in these supremely dystopian times…
The (virtual) signing of RCEP in Vietnam was followed by the equally virtual BRICS meeting hosted by Moscow, the APEC meeting hosted by Malaysia, and the G20 this past weekend hosted by Saudi Arabia.
Cynics have not failed to note the spectacular theater of the absurd of having the Top 20 – at least in theory – economies discussing what is arguably the turning point in the world-system linked to a beheading-friendly desert oil hacienda with a 7th century mentality.
The Riyadh declaration did its best to lift the somber planetary mood, vowing to deploy “all available policy tools” (no precise details) to contain Covid-19 and heroically “save” the global economy by “advancing” global pandemic preparedness, vaccine development and distribution – in tandem with debt relief – for the Global South.
Not a peep about The Great Reset – the Brave New World scheme concocted by Herr Schwab of Davos and fully supported by the IMF, Big Tech, transnational Big Capital interests and the oh so benign Prince Charles. Meanwhile, off the record, G20 sherpas moaned about the lack of real global governance and multiple attacks on multilateralism.
And not a peep as well about the real life vaccine war between the expensive Western candidates – Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca – and the much cheaper Russia-China versions – Sputnik V and Sinovac.
What seems to be the case is that any agenda – sinister or otherwise – fits the one-size-fits-all vow by the G20 to provide “opportunities of the 21st century for all by empowering people, safeguarding the planet, and shaping new frontiers.”
The House of Xi
At the G20, President Xi Jinping did not waste the chance – after RCEP, BRICS and APEC – to once again emphasize China’s priorities: multilateralism, support for WTO reform, ample international cooperation on vaccine research and production.
But then, in tandem with reducing tariffs and facilitating the trade of crucial medical supplies, Xi proposed a global health QR code – a sound way to restore global travel and trade: “While containing the virus, we need to restore the secure and smooth operation of global industrial and supply chains.”
Predictably, there were howls about neo-Orwellian intrusion, comparing the QR code with the exceptionally misunderstood Chinese credit system. Herr Schwab’s Great Reset in fact proposes something similar, with even more neo-Orwellian overtones, disguised under an innocent “Covid Pass” app, or highly secure “health passport”.
What Xi has proposed amounts to just a mutual recognition of health certificates, issued by different nations, based on nucleic acid tests. No gene altering vaccines coupled with nanochips. These QR codes, incorporated to health apps, are already used for domestic travel in China.
Chinese officials have made it very clear that Beijing has been working as the representative of the Global South inside the G20. That’s multilateralism in action. And the multilateralist drive extends from RCEP – signed between 15 nations – to the brilliant Sun Tzu maneuver of China now accepting even the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), the successor of the Obama-promoted and Trump-detonated TPP.
This revival – a case of Make TPP Chinese Again – can be envisaged because Beijing not only has mastered how to contain Covid-19 but is also recovering in lightning speed. China will be the only major economy growing in 2020 – de facto leading the world to a tentative post-Covid paradigm.
What the APEC meeting made crystal clear is that with East Asia graphically hitting the economic limelight, as seen with RCEP, much vaunted US “leadership” inevitably diminishes.
APEC promoted a so-called Putrajaya Vision 2040, condensing an “open, dynamic, resilient and peaceful” Asia-Pacific all the way to 2040. That neatly ties in with the three accumulated five-year Chinese plans all the way to 2035, approved last month at the CCP plenum in Beijing.
The emphasis, once again, is on multilateralism and an open global economy.
Few are more capable to capture the moment than Professor Wang Yiwei at the Institute of International Affairs at Renmin University, who wrote the best Chinese book on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Wang stresses how China is in a period of “strategic opportunity” and is now “the most powerful leader of globalization”. China’s emphasis on multilateralism will “activate the connectivity and vitality of a trade platform like RCEP”.
Stranger than fiction
Now compare all of the above with Trump at the G20 tweeting about the election dystopia and privileging golfing instead of discussing Covid-19 containment.
And then there’s The Elements of the China Challenge, the new 74-page delusional epic concocted by the office of secretary Mike “We Lie, We Cheat, We Steal” Pompeo.
Diplomatic howls comparing it with the notorious George Kennan “long telegram” that codified the containment of the USSR in the Cold War are nonsense. Chinese Foreign Ministry reaction was more to the point: this was concocted by some “living fossils of the Cold War” and is doomed to end up “being consigned to the dustbin of history”.
President Xi Jinping, at RCEP, BRICS, APEC and the G20, concisely laid out the Chinese case: multilateralism, international cooperation on multiple fields, an open global economy, due representation of Global South’s interests.
As we wait for a set of imponderables all the way to January 20, 2021, perhaps an angular approach to what may lie ahead for the world economy is best offered by fiction.
Enter Billions, season 5, episode 2, dialogue written by Andrew Ross Sorkin.
Axe: “You know they call us traders ‘gamblers’. The world’s economy is one big casino, fueled by a giant debt bubble and computer driven derivatives. And there’s only one thing better than being a gambler at a casino.”
Wags: “That’s being the house.”
Axe: “That’s right. There’s a systemized machine out there, sucking capital from localities and injecting it into the global markets, where it can be used to speculate and manipulate. And if something goes wrong there are bailouts and bail-ins, federal aid and easing. Where the government doesn’t hunt you down, but instead gives you a nice soft net to land in.”
Wags: “That’s your answer to the fireside chat: You want to become a bank.”
So don’t let spin doctors and fake media tell you lies about the woman who is bringing down the giants in the swamp! And there are a great number of them, more than anyone could have imagined!
Powell stated that the ‘New World Order’ has ‘OVERTHROWN The Republican Party’ and that the Republican Party sold its soul to the “New World Order” in return for large cash payments in the form of “enormous bribes.” Sidney Powell warned the GOP risks being “neutered like a bitch” by “the Great Reset” in 2021 if President Trump’s second term is stolen from him by “children of darkness.”
Thank you to Sidney Powell for exposing corruption on all sides. The Republican Party sold out for some cash and the American People have found out! Now wait and see the real uniting- patriots stand for a nation not a party! RINOS join your minions on…
Sunrise, 5th June 2020, City of Angels, River of Kings
The 5th June 2020 started out just like any other day for me, waking up early, checking the time and taking a shot of the sun rising from my bedroom overlooking the City of Angels and the River of Kings in Bangkok, Thailand.
Then mid-morning, not long after posting a new graphic announcement highlighting Australia‘s top foreign investment partners, my Twitter accounts were simultaneously suspended.
World Map showing Foreign Investment into Australia
One can only guess at the reason … and despite many attempts to login at the time of publishing this article more than six Twitter accounts are suspended. Some were not suspended, however when attempts were made to login, these then became immediately suspended too.
Are these Twitter account suspensions because I had recently launch a new film project?
Are these Twitter account suspensions because the United States is under attack by Antifa, recently designated an international terrorist group?
Are these Twitter account suspensions because of some other reason? Time will likely show…
Who knows? Let’s see when, if ever, I get access to these accounts returned? I am not holding my breathe for these. Social media has become ever more unreliable, manipulated and overrun with junk and misinformation.
As a concerned human being I can only hope that citizens of the world stay connected, wishing that humanity can solve its problems and live in peace and harmony.
jameswith 
