Drawing Lines in the Sand

Xi makes it abundantly clear that China stands with Palestine.

Chinese President Xi Jinping expressed dissatisfaction Friday with the injustices suffered by Palestinians and affirmed China’s support for an independent Palestinian state. “It is not possible to continue the historical injustice suffered by the Palestinians,” the Chinese president said at the opening of the Riyadh-Gulf-Chinese Summit for Cooperation and Development in Saudi Arabia.

Xi emphasized the necessity for granting Palestine “full membership in the United Nations” and said Beijing “supports the two-state solution and the establishment of a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital.”

He said he considered the Chinese-Arab summit a “defining event in the history of Chinese-Arab relations.”

Relations between the two “are based on mutual interest in peace and harmony,” he said. “The Chinese and Arab sides should strengthen solidarity and cooperation and build a community for a closer future,” he said as he welcomed Arab participation in the global security initiative.

If Israel is the USA’s “greatest ally’, then it stands to reason that China, which has been engaged in unrestricted warfare against the United States for two decades, would eventually find common cause with that greatest ally’s greatest enemy.

It also explains why Soros and the other architects of Clown World fear Xi even more than they do Putin.

The intriguing question is when the Israelis will abandon the USA and the imperialist neocons in an attempt to appease the Chinese. Because that is probably the right strategic move in the long term; the Israelis are obviously aware that the Diaspora won’t hesitate to sell them out if necessary. And it’s not going to be possible to be the financial masters of both sides of The Great Bifurcation.

Beijing will work to make energy purchases in yuan instead of US dollar signalling another step towards shifting further away from the greenback, China’s President Xi Jinping told Gulf Arab leaders as cited by Reuters.

China’s leader highlighted the necessity of the move while speaking at a Chinese-Arab summit that was hosted by Saudi Arabia earlier this week. Xi had held separate talks with the heads of the Persian Gulf states at the summit that reportedly brought together 30 leaders from across the region.

The world’s biggest crude importer, China in November ramped up purchases of oil by 12% year-on-year, marking the 10-month high despite the severe pandemic-related restrictions.

As the world’s biggest buyer, China now has the ability to dictate how it pays for oil. And it has already begun paying for Arab goods in its own currency, as evidenced by this interview with a spokeswoman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry:

The Paper: We noted that the first RMB cross-border payment transaction between Saudi Arabia and China’s Yiwu city, known as “the world’s supermarket”, was completed ahead of the first China-Arab States Summit. Do you have any comment?

Mao Ning: I also noted this good news. The cross-border RMB payment has played an important role in boosting trade between China and Arab states. This is also a telling snapshot of trade and investment facilitation between both sides. Over the past decade, China-Arab states economic and trade cooperation has scaled new heights. China is Arab states’ biggest trading partner. In 2021, China’s FDI stock in Arab states hit $23 billion, a 2.6 times increase over 10 years. The trade volume topped $330.3 billion, 1.5 times more than 10 years ago. In the first three quarters of 2022, China-Arab states trade reached $319.295 billion, up 35.28 percent year on year and close to the total of the whole year of 2021.

This is precisely what the US invaded Iraq and Libya to prevent. But it’s not going to invade Saudi Arabia and it can’t invade China. It is safe to expect that other countries, particularly Russia and Venezuala, will follow suit in short order.

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Free Trade is Dead

In amidst the economic pain and disruption incumbent in the fall of Clown World, there are some significant silver linings:

The founder of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, Morris Chang, says geopolitics is having profound effects on the semiconductor industry.

Speaking at an event in Phoenix Arizona, where his firm was debuting an ambitious $40 billion upgrade and expansion of its new manufacturing facility in the state, he explained the new constraints being placed on the sector by the changing geopolitical scene.

Speaking of the new facility, which is TSMC’s first advanced chip plant built in the United States in over two decades, Chang said there remained a lot of hard work ahead, if it was to be a success.

The upgrades for the facility will enable the phoenix plant to manufacture the chips for Apple’s iPhone, which can perform almost 17 trillion specialized calculations per second. TMSC is planning an even newer facility in the state which will house even more advanced production technology, capable of producing the microchips for future smartphones, computers, and other smart electronics.

In an interview with Nikkei Asia at the event, Chang likened the plant to the first plant TSMC ever built in the US, in 1995 in Carnas, Washington.

Chang said, “Twenty-seven years have passed and [the semiconductor industry] witnessed a big change in the world, a big geopolitical situation change in the world. Globalization is almost dead and free trade is almost dead. A lot of people still wish they would come back, but I don’t think they will be back.”

The death of globalization and free trade is not only a good thing, it is absolutely necessary if Mankind is going to survive, and eventually, thrive. We’ve seen the best that globalism has to offer, and it is nothing more than idiocracy, debt slavery, and a relentlessly ugly monoculture.

It only took 30 years for 300 years of economic theory to be conclusively disproven by reality. But it was always false and totally incompatible with the existence of nations, as my critique of free trade on mathematical grounds demonstrated.

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Twitter Confessions

Elon Musk admits what we’ve known since 2017:

True, some accounts on the right were suspended even when Twitter internally acknowledged that no rules were broken

@elonmusk, 9 Dec 2022

Yes, I know. I never broke any of the Twitter rules. And yet, I’m still permanently suspended, without ever having a single violation of the rules cited.

Lesson: never trust a self-appointed Devil’s Champion.

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Death at the World Cup

We don’t know it was the vaxx… but it was the vaxx. Grant Wahl, the dean of American soccer journalism, is dead at 48.

Grant Wahl, a former Sports Illustrated senior writer, died Friday in Qatar while covering the 2022 World Cup. He was 48. Wahl is survived by his wife, Dr. Céline Gounder, and two dogs, Zizou (named after French soccer legend Zinedine Zidane) and Coco, who readers came to know over the years through Wahl’s coverage of the sport.

In a joint statement, SI’s co-editors in chief, Ryan Hunt and Stephen Cannella, said: “We’re shocked and devastated at the news of Grant’s passing. We were proud to call him a colleague and friend for two decades—no writer in the history of SI has been more passionate about the sport he loved and the stories he wanted to tell. Our hearts go out to Céline and his family, as well as everyone who loved his work. He will always be part of the SI family.”

Wahl spent 24 years at SI, joining in November 1996. Two years in, as a budding reporter, he volunteered to cover a growing game that few around SI’s offices cared about: soccer. He covered the World Cup in France that summer and quickly worked his way up to a senior writer for the publication in 2000. Eventually he would become one of the most respected soccer authorities in the world.

He was an excellent sportswriter, and he died with his boots on:

American sports journalist Grant Wahl, who died unexpected while covering the World Cup in Qatar, was in good spirits and joking with colleagues just minutes before his sudden death, an eyewitness said. Wahl, 48, died after he “fell ill” at the Lusail Stadium in the final minutes of the FIFA World Cup quarterfinal game between the Netherlands and Argentina Friday, a Qatari spokesperson said.

His SI colleague John Wertheim remembers him. RIP.

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Goodbye Brazil

And this is why no Brazilian has ever considered Neymar to be anywhere near Pele’s level despite setting the all-time scoring record for the Selecao. Nice goal in extra time, to be sure, but scoring just one goal in 120 minutes is a very bad idea against a team as good at taking penalties as Croatia.

FIFA’s dream final of Portugal (Ronaldo) vs Argentine (Messi) is still possible.

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10,000 Dead Canadians

Canada is literally massacring what once passed for its native population.

Last year, more than 10,000 people in Canada – astonishingly that’s over three percent of all deaths there – ended their lives via euthanasia, an increase of a third on the previous year. And it’s likely to keep rising: next year, Canada is set to allow people to die exclusively for mental health reasons.

To put things in context, that’s the equivalent of 186,000 US citizens being “assisted” last year. And if you put the trends together – depopulation, vaccination, and euthanization – Occam’s Razor suggest that the mass euthanization of the vaccinated may be the long-term result.

Today’s HYPERGAMOUSE provides an amusing take on a very dark matter.

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Avalon Poll

We have finished with CHUCK DIXON’S AVALON Issues 1-12. We’re now in the process of printing the two omnibuses, 1-6 and 7-12. However, it was suggested that having one big omnibus that collects Issues 1-12 would be preferable since we managed to complete the whole thing before getting the first half out.

I inquired of The Legend and he said he would prefer “one big doorstopper of a book.”

However, this is something that needs to be left up to the backers. It makes virtually no difference to us, as very few backers only backed the first omnibus and we’ll just send them the whole thing. So, if you are an Avalon backer, please let us know if you prefer two separate omnibuses or one big one.

UPDATE: It belatedly occurs to me that if we do one big omnibus, we MIGHT be able to eventually do some leather editions – not Smyth-sewn, unfortunately – but by using the paperback covers as the endpapers. Apparently this is the technique Easton has used to do their Marvel leatherbound editions and it’s the approach we will likely take with Midnight’s War.

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