China Hong Kong and The Wan Chai connection

The Wan Chai connection: The Washington-accused drug lords, gun runners and dictators’ financiers tied to one Hong Kong district

By Joshua Berlinger, CNN Business, December 11, 2020

(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.

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Reference link: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/12/10/business/hong-kong-front-companies-intl-hnk-dst/index.html

Reasons why the 2020 Presidential Election is Deeply Puzzling

• Published in The Spectator, 27th November 2020
• US election 2020 
• Published again by Patrick Basham, November 30, 2020    

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.

Patrick Basham is director of The Democracy Institute
https://spectator.us/reasons-why-the-2020-presidential-election-is-deeply-puzzling/

Failed Digital Coup leads America to a Great Awakening

Martin Geddes: The Digital Coup and the Great Exposure

Posted on 11/30/2020 by EraOfLight  — Leave a reply

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.

You can sign up for Martin’s newsletter here.

Reference: https://eraoflight.com/2020/11/30/martin-geddes-the-digital-coup-and-the-great-exposure/

China facing full-blown banking crisis, world’s top financial watchdog warns: CORRECTION Look to US, not China for the 2019 financial crisis. Here’s why…

Exactly two years ago to the day new headlines were screaming out words to the effect, for example:  China facing full-blown banking crisis, world’s top financial watchdog warns. China is sinking ever deeper into debt, and risks a major banking crisis. via /r/economy

“China has failed to curb excesses in its credit system and faces mounting risks of a full-blown banking crisis, according to early warning indicators released by the world’s top financial watchdog.

A key gauge of credit vulnerability is now three times over the danger threshold and has continued to deteriorate, despite pledges by Chinese premier Li Keqiang to wean the economy off debt-driven growth before it is too late.

The Bank for International Settlements warned in its quarterly report that China’s “credit to GDP gap” has reached 30.1, the highest to date and in a different league altogether from any other major country tracked by the institution.

It is also significantly higher than the…” etc. That was September 2016!

Fast-forward to September 2019 and … https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/economics/article/2181593/look-us-not-china-2019-financial-crisis-heres-why

“After a panicked end to 2018 in the financial markets, and a jittery start to the new year, an increasing number of investors, analysts and economists are beginning to warn about “the crisis of 2019”, as often as not to be followed by “the recession of 2020”.

Part of the reason is simply the feeling that the world is overdue for another downturn.

A look at the economic history of recent decades shows that major financial crashes tend to come along every five to seven years. So, for example, there were the oil crises of the 1970s, the Latin American debt crisis of 1982, the Black Monday stock market crash of 1987, the Tequila Crisis of 1994, the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, the dotcom bust of 2000 and the worldwide recession that followed, the credit crunch and global financial crisis of 2007-08, and the European debt crisis that peaked in 2012…” And don’t forget about Deutsche Bank

#Bond #Markets: Dealers’ need for #financing to hold their #Treasuries inventory has contributed to the intermittent #spikes in #repo #rates. Guessing #Deutsche #Bank‘s €43.5 trillion notional #derivatives #bonds exposure is becoming a #default #contagion across multiple banks. 

https://twitter.com/JamesWith/status/1174945900071800832?s=20

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mayrarodriguezvalladares/2019/07/08/deutsche-banks-death-by-a-thousand-cuts-is-not-over/#7065579924bd

It really does now look like we are about to see the collapse global banking system as we know it.   

COMPELLING PROOF THAT NO REAL PLANES WERE USED ON 11th September 2001 TERROR ATTACKS IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Reference link: https://911planeshoax.com/2014/01/11/proof-that-no-real-planes-were-used-on-911/

Source: THE PROOF THAT NO REAL PLANES WERE USED ON 9/11

 

An Operatic History of the USA

The original articles of this compilation are sourced from The Saker

“Americans should know by now that their country’s wars are fertile ground for biased, one-sided, xenophobic, fake news and the United States has been in a permanent state of war since 1941.”

Part 1 – American Imperialism Leads the World into Dante’s Vision of Hell

Posted on Apr 24, 2017 by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

 

Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate. (Abandon all hope ye who enter here.)” — Dante, “The Divine Comedy,” Inferno (Part 1), Canto 3, Line 9

Part 2 – How Neocons Push for War by Cooking the Books

Posted on Apr 24, 2017 by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

An 1898 cartoon features newspaper publishers Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst dressed as a cartoon character of the day, a satire of their papers’ role in drumming up U.S. public opinion for war by Leon Barritt (Wikimedia))

Part 3 – How the CIA Created a Fake Western Reality for ‘Unconventional Warfare’

Posted on Apr 26, 2017 by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

“The Evil Spirits of the Modern Day Press”. Puck US magazine 1888 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Puck112188c.jpg ) [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons

Part 4 – The Final Stage of the Machiavellian Elites’ Takeover of America

Posted on Apr 27, 2017 by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

Cover of the 1550 edition of Machiavelli’s Il Principe and La Vita di Castruccio Castracani da Lucca. public domain wiki commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Machiavelli_Principe_Cover_Page.jpg

Collectively republished on 10th May 2017: http://thesaker.is/the-history-of-the-neocon-takeover-of-the-usa-a-4-part-analysis/

Robert Redford on 30 years of the Sundance Film Festival and Independent Film Distribution

Robert Redford reflects on 30 years of Sundance

By Emma Jones
Entertainment reporter, BBC News

Thirty years ago, movie star Robert Redford decided to create a film festival to promote America’s fledgling independent film industry. ” But I didn’t want to do it in New York or LA,” he says. “I said, let’s put it in Utah, let’s make it hard to get to. Let’s make it weird.”

Three decades on, the Sundance Film Festival at Park City in Utah is showing indie movies from 37 different countries and is bringing in about $375m (£228m) to the local economy. But although the event was responsible for “discovering” Oscar nominees such as Beasts of the Southern Wild and Winter’s Bone – which also launched Jennifer Lawrence’s career – Redford admits that, in 2014, independent cinema is, as he puts it, “still at the mercy of the distributors”.

“Hollywood is a business and it’s really good at it,” he says. “But if you’re looking at how films get nominated for Oscars for example, it’s all about the campaign that gets run. A lot of independent films – and I’d include my own latest film, All Is Lost in there – don’t have the funding for that.”

Red carpet style is low key at Sundance with woolly hats and ski jackets often being worn – Chris O’Dowd is at the festival with the film Calvary

Although Academy Award winners have come from the independent sector – including British film The King’s Speech – this year, Gravity and American Hustle, the leading contenders, are both studio films.

Mission statement
With low-budget movies squeezed by shorter theatrical releases and the advent of on demand and streaming services like Netflix, where does Redford see the business heading? “I don’t see Sundance’s business as being business,” Redford replied. “We are nothing to do with the box office, we are a non-profit organisation. We started Sundance as a place to come and develop new artists, with the ambition of creating a community and giving them a platform for their work. I don’t think our mission has changed at all. Thirty years ago, these people had nowhere to go. Now I’m very proud that actually, the directors of Gravity and American Hustle, Alfonso Cuaron and David O Russell, actually came up through Sundance, and now they work in the mainstream. I think independent films are seen by a bigger audience these days, and we do know that changing the platform of distribution is inevitable, and we will ride that wave. But look at something like Kickstarter – that is an innovation which is giving new life to independent cinema.”

Zach Braff’s first film Garden State became a cult hit after it was shown in 2004

One Kickstarter-funded film screening at Sundance is “Wish I Was Here“, the first film Zach Braff has made since 2004’s Garden State. As well as Braff, the festival boasts its usual stellar list of acting talent who brave the snows of Park City, including Kristen Stewart, playing a Guantanamo Bay guard in Camp X-Ray, the debut feature film by graphic designer Peter Sattler.

A better experience
Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon bring comedy with Michael Winterbottom‘s The Trip To Italy, while Keira Knightley has already received rave reviews for her part in Laggies, a coming of age 20-something comedy directed by Lynn Shelton, who set it in her hometown of Seattle. “Doing independent cinema is often a better experience than doing studio films,” explains Knightley. “There are so many retakes, and waiting to set up shots in blockbusters, that you can lose the momentum, particularly if you have to act against a green screen. In a low-budget film, you have to get it right and it’s like being in the theatre – you’ve only got one chance. Also, on Laggies, I got to live on a houseboat in Seattle and learn to skateboard a little, like my character. The only problem was they had no health and safety budget, so they’d hardly let me use it.”

Laggies stars Chloe Grace Moretz (left) alongside Keira Knightley

While the actors’ pay in independent cinema is often so low that only established stars can take the roles, Sundance has, nevertheless, launched new stars every year – from Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone to Felicity Jones in Like Crazy.

Biggest success
However, the festival’s biggest success remains its documentary programme, one of the first to be established at an event like this. Four out of the five Oscar nominees in this year’s documentary category debuted at Sundance in 2013.

This year, the event is screening films on subjects as diverse as former US presidential candidate Mitt Romney, film critic Roger Ebert and Star Trek icon George Takei, as well as real-life thrillers like The Green Prince – the true story of the friendship that formed between a Hamas informer and his Israeli handler. “I think Sundance has been a game-changer for the documentary,” remarks John Battsek, the British producer behind The Green Prince and last year’s Oscar winner, Searching for Sugarman.

John Lithgow and Alfred Molina enjoy the relaxed atmosphere on the red carpet at Sundance – they are at the festival with their film Love Is Strange

“I think it’s helped elevate the documentary to the same status as a feature film, and shown it can perform just as well in cinemas. “Now the challenge is to continue making documentaries that have the same values and standards as a feature.” While 56 films compete across the different categories at Sundance, the reality is that only a handful will receive a theatrical release. Redford is adamant though, that the festival has a winning formula: “We are who we are and we’ll stay who we are,” he says. “And if I had a message for other festivals who want to do the same thing, I guess it would be ‘don’t even try.'”

The Sundance Film Festival runs until January 26, 2014
This article appears here with due respect to the Terms of Use of BBC Online Services

Thailand’s People march closer to ASEAN neighbors and China

Thursday 16th January 2014 – today, whilst working on my current Film Projects I have been compelled to take time out and write my first blog article for 2014 …

Anonymous Motorcycle Driver during “Bangkok Shutdown” march on Sukhumvit Road, Bangkok, Thailand

Yuriko Koike, Japan’s former defense minister and national security adviser, was Chairwoman of Japan’s Liberal Democrat Party and currently is a member of the National Diet. In her article titled “Who Lost Thailand?” published on 15th January 2014, Ms. Yuriko Koike writes “Thailand, Southeast Asia’s most developed and sophisticated economy, is teetering on the edge of the political abyss. Yet most of the rest of Asia appears to be averting its eyes from the country’s ongoing and increasingly anarchic unrest. That indifference is not only foolish; it is dangerous. Asia’s democracies now risk confronting the same harsh question that the United States faced when Mao Zedong marched into Beijing, and again when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ousted the Shah in Iran. Who, they will have to ask, lost Thailand?”

As a long time expatriate resident of Thailand there are quarter tones joined as chords that resonate in unison, 21st century composers in sympathetic dissonance, emanating from the trading partner-ships whistling through troubled waters in the East China Sea, the stage of Japan’s dispute with China to the smaller vessels hauling materials on a variety of other covert Whistle-blowers and covered junks conducting business, whilst traveling up and down the Mekong River, a vital chord flowing with life, connecting China, Burma (Myanmar), Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam. From the river’s banks life is bottled up and exchanged in merchandise that ripples through many states, the birth places of many indigenous peoples from Qinghai, Tibet, Yunnan, Shan, Luang Namtha, Bokeo, Oudomxay, Luang Phrabang, Sayabouly, Vientiane, Vientiane, Bolikhamsai, Khammouane, Savannakhet, Salavan, Champasak until eventually the remaining silt branches out and spills into various points and exits Vietnam somewhere between the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea, where sabre-rattling and posturing continues to spread outwards.

The Mekong Delta (Vietnamese: Đồng bằng Sông Cửu Long or in English often transliterated to mean the “Nine Dragon river delta”) could be accurately described as a rather gradual fertile river delta and unlike Japan it is not close to any submarine abyss. Continuing movement on the subduction zone associated with the Japan Trench is one of the main causes of tsunamis and earthquakes in northern Japan, including the megathrust Tōhoku earthquake and resulting tsunami that occurred on 11 March 2011.

Despite the “Bangkok Shutdown” the Chao Phraya River continues to flow smoothly through Bangkok, known fondly as the “City of Angels” of the Far East and as with all rivers on the planet it too eventually meets a large body of water to empty into… and waterways are the veins of sustenance for life in all forms, and often are diverted, reformed, dammed and flooded, by natural forces as well as by human beings … as the seasons ebb and flow, the climate changes and prevailing winds of change wreak havok on agriculture and commercial business interests alike, there remains a natural inclination for things to remain in balance.

Perhaps, in a wider context the expressed perspective from Ms. Yuriko Koike shows how much Western ideologies have influenced and shaped the Japanese economy and the Japanese people’s opinion since the United States of America decidedly dropped Nuclear weapons of mass destruction on Hiroshima and Nagasaki back in August 1945? On August 15, six days after the bombing of Nagasaki, and seven days after the Soviet Union’s declaration of war, Japan announced its surrender to the Allies, signing the Instrument of Surrender on 2nd September 1945, commonly acknowledged as officially ending World War II. The bombings’ role in Japan’s surrender and their ethical justification are still debated.

Thailand: “Occupy Bangkok” Begins – Published 13th January 2014 is a very interesting and well-balanced account of what’s happened over the last decade to bring about the current protests in Bangkok Thailand being staged against the present Government that was elected by a majority vote supported by a well-financed regime leader living in exile that has used “Thaksinomics” as a political tool to amass a personal fortune; Taksin Shinawatra is himself supported by very strong wealthy global banking powers that want a larger share of the Kingdom’s valuables as well as those of other neighboring countries that have developed more slowly but are also are full of natural resources and deeply fertile environmental jewelry.

In the most recent general election Thailand‘s people voted to put Thaksin Shinawatra‘s sister Yingluck Shinawatra, a member of the Pheu Thai Party, and the 28th and current Prime Minister of Thailand following the 2011 general election into lead a new Government of Thailand. Yingluck is Thailand’s first female Prime Minister and at 45 is the youngest Prime Minister of Thailand in over 60 years.  A Statement delivered by Yingluck Shinawatra, H.E. the Prime Minister of Thailand on the dissolution of the House of Representatives was delivered on 9 December 2013. Many people in Thailand are now protesting against the regime’s manipulation of the country’s legislatures, its infiltration of Government structures and large corporations who have benefited from Thaksinomics.

There is an expressed feeling that the pillars of Government have been abused to such a degree that it has become unacceptable and unconscionable to remain in the shadows. The links in the Thailand: “Occupy Bangkok” Begins – Published 13th January 2014 article also lead to other interesting articles too.

Then on the same day my attention is directed to another article, written by William Pesek, a columnist writing for Bloomberg based in Tokyo, Japan. And this makes me ask the rhetorical question, which more aptly put is an observation: Who Won Japan?

Bloomberg should be ashamed to publish such an article. William Pesek’s views are way too polarized and filled with silly ignorant inaccurate general “sound bite” statements and phrases, such as are contained in “The choice is between Egypt and South Korea. It’s time for Thailand’s 67 million people to decide whether they want to live in a constant state of chaos and socioeconomic stasis (like Egypt), or to move up the economic ladder, Korea-style. The only way democracy works is if a critical mass of the people trust it. In Thailand’s case, that means building credible and independent institutions that provide checks and balances for elected officials. Only strong judiciaries, anti-corruption arms and networks of government watchdog agencies can ensure accountability.” … This, simply put is trashy journalism at its worst and Bloomberg should be careful to call it a “Bloomberg View”.

“Bangkok Needs More Bread, Fewer Circuses” By William Pesek
January 15, 2014 11:26 AM EST – Uploaded by UUID:7953017 at 1/15/2014 11:23 AM

William Pesek is based in Tokyo and writes on economics, markets and politics throughout the Asia–Pacific region. His journalism awards include the 2010 Society of American Business Editors and Writers prize for commentary.

Since joining Bloomberg in 2000, Pesek’s columns have appeared in the International Herald Tribune, the Sydney Morning Herald, the New York Post, the Straits Times, the Japan Times and many other publications around the world. Pesek began his journalism career writing for the American Banker and Bond Buyer newspapers. He also worked for Dow Jones Newswires, where he wrote the daily credit markets column for The Wall Street Journal. Pesek earned a bachelor’s degree in business journalism from Bernard M. Baruch College-City University of New York.
Reference: http://www.bloomberg.com/view/bios/william-pesek/

The future for the peoples living in Thailand, the Governance of Thailand, it’s prosperity and the prosperity of Thailand’s South-East Asian neighbors is all at stake and will be affected by how things are perceived and the reaction of people not only in Thailand but also throughout the world. Why? Because, trading, imports and exports, for Thailand and ASEAN is contingent upon keeping the rivers flowing, water being proportioned in a balanced and respectable way for life to be sustainable and peaceful.

We pray for a process that will be as painless and as death-free as possible … we are living in interesting times… and we have a ways to travel yet… floods, droughts, come rain and shine, survival is a matter of adapting to change.

Thank you for taking the time to read my article, and here’s wishing you a safe, healthy and successful 2014 as we approach the Chinese Year of the Horse.

Blessings,
James With

PS After writing this article, the following articles were brought to my attention:

By Lewis M. Simons “Can Thailand Avoid Another Coup?“published 16th January 2014 formerly as “Thailand’s Grave Future”

By John J. Brandon “Credible Reform, Not Shutdown, Needed to End Thailand’s Political Standoff” – 15th January 2014

By Charlie Campbell @charliecamp6ell “The Nightmare Gets Worse For Embattled Thai PM Yingluck” – 17th January 2014

By Veera Prateepchaikul, Former Editor, Bangkok Post – Opinion “Corruption Award Goes to Rice Scheme”  – 17th January 2014
© Post Publishing PCL. All rights reserved. View Bangkok Post policies at http://goo.gl/9HgTd and http://goo.gl/ou6Ip.

By Voranai Vanijaka in Bangkok Post – Opinion Commentary “With all sides wrong, There can be no right” – 19 January 2014
© Post Publishing PCL. All rights reserved. View Bangkok Post policies at http://goo.gl/9HgTd and http://goo.gl/ou6Ip.

By Thin Lei Win Source: Thomson Reuters Foundation “Shutdown Protests in Bangkok ratchets up risk of violence and coup, ICG warns” on Tuesday, 14 Jan 2014 07:00 AM & “The din of misogyny at Bangkok protests” on Friday, 17 Jan 2014 10:29 AM

Reuters Reporting by Pracha Hariraksapitak; Writing by Alan Raybould “Thai government imposes state of emergency in Bangkok” on Tuesday January 21, 2014 4:47pm IST

By Marc Saxer in Social Europe Journal “How Thailand’s Middle Class Rage Threatens Democracy” on Thursday, 23 January 2014

By William Pesek on Bloomberg Opinion “Thailand Is Only the Tip of Asia’s Iceberg” on Friday, January 24, 2014 5:00 AM GMT+0700

By Pradit Ruangdit in Bangkok Post “Suthep: PDRC is ‘’pro-democracy’’ movement” on Friday, 24 January 2014 at 23.25
© Post Publishing PCL. All rights reserved. View Bangkok Post policies at http://goo.gl/9HgTd and http://goo.gl/ou6Ip.

By The Sunday Nation Newspaper “Suthep will be arrested soon, should surrender to avoid violence: Chalerm” and “Advance voting to go ahead” on Sunday, 26 January 2014 at 01:00

By Suttinee Yuvejwattana and Anuchit Nguyen in Bloomberg News “Yingluck Rejects Proposal to Delay Feb. 2 Thailand Election” on Tuesday, 28th January 2014 7:03 PM GMT+0700 To contact the reporters on this story: Suttinee Yuvejwattana in Bangkok at suttinee1@bloomberg.net; Anuchit Nguyen in Bangkok at anguyen@bloomberg.net

By David Eimer “Thai red shirts leader says ‘It’s time to get rid of the elite’” on 30 January 2014 at 10:42AM GMT and previously “Anti-government protests escalate in Thailand amid calls for a ‘people’s revolution’” on 26 November 2013 at 12:04PM GMT and “I can back down no further, says Thai PM Yingluck Shinawatra” on 10th December 2014 at 9:45PM GMT and  “Thai Prime Minister considers delaying election as anti-government protesters blockade Bangkok” on 13 January 2014 at 12:19PM GMT and “Thai anti-government protesters threaten to kidnap PM” on 14 January 2014 at 3:21PM GMT and

By Tony Cartalucci  in Global Research “Thailand: Government Prepares War of Terror against Thai Population: “I Want There to be Lots of Violence to Put an End to all This”” on 1 February 2014

Sustaining Humanity… Protecting the Future

The Fukishima Nuclear power plant meltdown is a global catastrophe

Radioactive materials spewed out from the crippled Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant and rained down on North America soon after the meltdown and then still more “hot particles” were carried all the way to Europe, according to a simulation by university researchers.

The computer simulation by researchers at Kyushu University and the University of Tokyo, among other institutions, calculated dispersal of radioactive dust from the Fukushima plant beginning at 9 p.m. on March 14, when radiation levels around the plant spiked. An interesting simulation can be played by clicking on this article in the Mainichi Daily News.

And the problem continues … Humanity needs to address this issue from the perspective of maintaining a sustainable existence… Certain “Hot Particles” have extremely long lives… some lasting for more than a billion years!

Our children and future generations will be subjected to problems that have been created by people who have developed the current direction of global power, and those who have done this, have simply been short sighted and ignorant of our Earth’s fragile make up, environmental phenomena and climactic cycles that have been evolving since the beginning of time.

@JamesWith

@JamesWith Twitter Account