Tag: politics

China Lays the Legal Ground

I think it’s safe to expect Chinese corporations to be seizing foreign-owned property in Hong Kong and Taiwan soon, and taking steps to abandon the international arbitration system given these remarks on a new law that strips foreign state immunity by the Foreign Ministry.

Q: The Standing Committee of China’s National People’s Congress reviewed and passed the Law of the People’s Republic of China on Foreign State Immunity at a recent session. The law adjusted China’s previous stance of absolute state immunity and authorized courts in China to hear lawsuits against foreign states. What’s the reason for such an adjustment?

A: Enacting the Law on Foreign State Immunity is a normal legislative activity conducted by the Standing Committee of China’s National People’s Congress. The law stipulates provisions related to foreign state immunity in line with international practices and aims to improve China’s foreign state immunity system. The law stipulates the rules for Chinese courts to handle civil cases involving a foreign State and its property, with a view to protecting the lawful rights and interests of the parties concerned, safeguarding the sovereign equality of States, and promoting friendly exchanges with other countries, which all in turn boost China’s higher-level opening-up.

The Law on Foreign State Immunity affirms the fundamental principle that a foreign State and its property enjoy immunity in China, at the same time stipulates exceptions relating to non-sovereign act of a foreign State, under which Chinese courts can exercise jurisdiction, such as cases involving disputes arising out of a commercial activity, relevant personal injury and property damage. The Law also states that Chinese courts can take compulsory judicial measures against a foreign State’s commercial property under strictly limited circumstances. It fully adheres to international law and it is also consistent with general state practices.

As a responsible major country, China firmly upholds the principle of sovereign equality and will faithfully implement this Law to protect the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese nationals and legal persons and respect the immunities enjoyed by foreign States under international law.

Translation: The USA and other Western governments, including Canada, have increasingly been utilizing their courts to the detriment of Chinese corporations and individuals. China is clearly going to follow their lead by giving its courts the power to exercise jurisdiction over foreign entities and individuals who had previously been considered off-limits on the basis of foreign state immunity.

Given how little foreign investment there is in mainland China, one would tend to expect the primary application of this expanded jurisdiction will be in Hong Kong, and eventually, Taiwan.

I expect Taiwan to peacefully unify with the mainland much sooner than most people are expecting, and I strongly suspect that it will be someone like this man who will make it happen when the time comes. Despite his public statements, I would assume that he is, for all intents and purposes, the CPC’s preferred candidate for the office, because when China eventually makes its move for reunification, it will want to have a pragmatic figure in control of Taiwan’s government in order to avoid violence and bloodshed.

The billionaire founder of tech giant Foxconn, Terry Gou, has announced he will run for president of Taiwan as an independent candidate, pledging to fix cross-strait relations and boost Taiwan’s economy.

At a press conference on Monday, Gou – a well-known and outspoken businessman – announced what he called “the era of entrepreneurs’ rule”. “I have decided to join the 2024 presidential race,” he said, touting his business and finance experience, including dealings with China.

“Give me four years and I promise that I will bring 50 years of peace to the Taiwan Strait and build the deepest foundation for the mutual trust across the strait … Taiwan must not become Ukraine and I will not let Taiwan become the next Ukraine.”

Gou should not be able to come anywhere close to winning in normal political circumstances. He couldn’t even win the Kuomintang nomination. But given the fact that the outcome of the NATO-Russian war should be known by the time the election takes place in 2024, combined with the increased US activity in southeast Asia, the fear of being similarly sacrificed on the altar of US geostrategic interests may be enough to move the Taiwanese electorate away from the separatist parties.

DISCUSS ON SG

Evil AND Necessarily Stupid

“Crooked Joe Biden is not only dumb and incompetent, I believe that he has gone mad – a stark raving lunatic – with his horrible country threatening environmental open borders and DOJ, FBI weaponization policies…He is a mental catastrophe that is leading our country to hell that will end up in World War III because of this man and for no reason whatsoever.”

– President Donald Trump

Bruce Charleton explains the necessity of the mental catastrophes.

Why is mere managerial obedience to the evil agenda no longer sufficient? 

The reason is that – at the highest most-strategic level of the real world-leadership – i.e. the senior demonic – the plan has changed from the imposition of a bureaucratic-totalitarian global System (which reached its peak in the worldwide coup of early 2020); to the current increasingly “Sorathic” agenda of destruction: destruction of people, animals, plants and the planet (justified via the inversion of all true-values). 

This spiteful agenda has been smashing the world economy, finance and trade; it has started and is escalating WWIII; turned environmentalism against itself; exploded the sexual revolution; imposed the birdemic-peck; and is incrementally ratcheting-through the societally fissile effects of the current diversity-woke stuff. 

In other words; the senior real-leaders are making their servants do the opposite of what they were supposed (even just a few years ago) to be aiming-at. 

Given such dissonance; even the most servile managerial drone would, eventually, be able to work-out that he was being used to destroy himself and everything he valued… This is a danger to the fulfilment of the top-level evil strategy for earth. 

A servile managerial drone might work-things-out… Unless, that is, he was so deeply defective in reasoning capacity that he was incapable of noticing that almost everything he did, actually had the inverse outcome from its supposed intention. 

And that is exactly what we now have: a Western leadership class who don’t even notice that what happens as a result of their policies is the opposite of what these policies are supposed to achieve. 

Evil or stupid was always a false dichotomy. Evil AND stupid is now a basic requirement for participation in what passes for public leadership. Everything is not merely fake and gay, it’s also retarded.

DISCUSS ON SG

More Dangerous than China

Martin Armstrong of Armstrong Economics is absolutely correct to spotlight an anti-American enemy far more dangerous to Americans than the Russians or the Chinese:

QUESTION: Do you think the Neocons are more dangerous than Russia or China?

ANSWER: Absolutely. In Chess, you face your adversary. You know your enemy, and you try to unravel his strategy. In geopolitics, the greatest danger is always the enemy within your own ranks. For a handful of silver, it was a Greek who showed the path for the Persians to come behind the Spartans through the hills and annihilate them from behind in the Battle of Thermopylae. Judas also betrayed Jesus for a handful of silver. History has proven countless times that your greatest enemy always emerges from within.

Any politician who now supports Ukraine and spouts out the BS we will be next is unworthy of any public office, including sanitation cleaning toilets. They have NO place in politics and should NEVER be allowed to take the White House, regardless of their party. The Neocons have created endless wars on their own theory that democracy should dominate the world. Their version of democracy is really tyranny, for we have no right to vote on taxes, vaccines, lockdowns, or war. We are drafted with not right to vote and ordered to die on a foreign battlefield because of their theory in which we have no say whatsoever.

He’s correct. The reason the Founding Fathers specified both “enemies foreign and domestic” is because they were well-read in history and they understood that the enemy within is every bit as dangerous, and quite often more so, than the enemy without.

I expect the neocons and their cultural war colleagues will be seen by history as the US equivalent of Rome’s Praetorian Guard, making and unmaking political leaders at will as it profits them to do so. The US is no more capable of surviving its neocons than Rome survived its praetorians.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Mugshot

Is this “the arrest that will shock the world”? Or is it just more groundless posturing? Either way, it doesn’t look like someone who is defeated or is inclined to meekly submit to being ground to pieces by the machine. On the other hand, it is a little ironic to be declaring “never surrender” after literally surrendering yourself to the local police.

UPDATE: A little shot of hopium. We’ll see.

DISCUSS ON SG

US Democracy 2023

Like most Americans, I paid absolutely zero attention to the “Republican debate” because it was certain to provide nothing but additional evidence that the U.S. Constitution has completely failed and is no longer fit for its purpose of safeguarding the unalienable rights of the American Posterity. But it did provide an indelible image of the extent to which US politics have devolved.

This clearly isn’t a situation a nation votes itself out of. And if history is any guide, the partition wars won’t be civil.

DISCUSS ON SG

Republicans for Human Sacrifice

The neoclowns couldn’t care less how many Ukrainians are dying for what they call “democracy”. They need more blood for the Blood God!

Bill Kristol and other prominent neoconservatives are launching a $2 million ad campaign to urge Republicans to continue backing aid for Ukraine.

Defending Democracy Together, led by Kristol and Republican strategist Sarah Longwell, launched Republicans for Ukraine to boost Republican support for Ukraine. The ad campaign precedes what will be a contentious fight over President Joe Biden’s $24 billion request for aid for Ukraine.

The ads will appear online, on billboards, and on television, including the first Republican debate on August 23.

I never imagined that the neoconservatives were actually more evil than the communists they opposed, especially since their opposition to communism was the only reason they were “Republicans” instead of Democrats in the first place.

DISCUSS ON SG

Professionally Anti-Trump

Ben Shapiro’s organization has been paid $110,429 to attack Donald Trump since July 2021.

Did you know @realDailyWire is paid by @RonDeSantis?

In case you were wondering why so much of their content these days is ANTI TRUMP.

DeSantis has paid @benshapiro’s Daily Wire over $110,000!

Wow! That’s a lot of money for a lot of LIES!

How very strange. One would have assumed that The Littlest Chickenhawk would do it for nothing. I’m as skeptical of the 5D Chess narrative as anyone, but there has to be a reason that the neocons, the Republican Establishment, and the Democrats are attacking him so relentlessly.

DISCUSS ON SG

Caesar Didn’t Have That Problem

Back in the day, Gaius Julius Caesar was facing the prospect of being charged for fake crimes by his political enemies. He never had to face them because he crossed the Rubicon with a single legion.

Actions have consequences. But a failure to act has consequences too. And those who don’t act when they have the chance shouldn’t whine about facing the inevitable consequences of their inaction.

DISCUSS ON SG

You Are the Bad Guys

David Brooks attempts to warn his fellow “class” that a reckoning for their irresponsible and self-serving misrule is historically inevitable.

I ask you to try on a vantage point in which we anti-Trumpers are not the eternal good guys. In fact, we’re the bad guys.

This story begins in the 1960s, when high school grads had to go off to fight in Vietnam but the children of the educated class got college deferments. It continues in the 1970s, when the authorities imposed busing on working-class areas in Boston but not on the upscale communities like Wellesley where they themselves lived.

The ideal that we’re all in this together was replaced with the reality that the educated class lives in a world up here and everybody else is forced into a world down there. Members of our class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves.

The most important of those systems is the modern meritocracy. We built an entire social order that sorts and excludes people on the basis of the quality that we possess most: academic achievement. Highly educated parents go to elite schools, marry each other, work at high-paying professional jobs and pour enormous resources into our children, who get into the same elite schools, marry each other and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation.

Daniel Markovits summarized years of research in his book “The Meritocracy Trap”: “Today, middle-class children lose out to the rich children at school, and middle-class adults lose out to elite graduates at work. Meritocracy blocks the middle class from opportunity. Then it blames those who lose a competition for income and status that, even when everyone plays by the rules, only the rich can win.”

The meritocracy isn’t only a system of exclusion; it’s an ethos. During his presidency, Barack Obama used the word “smart” in the context of his policies over 900 times. The implication was that anybody who disagreed with his policies (and perhaps didn’t go to Harvard Law) must be stupid.

Over the last decades, we’ve taken over whole professions and locked everybody else out….

It’s easy to understand why people in less-educated classes would conclude that they are under economic, political, cultural and moral assault — and why they’ve rallied around Trump as their best warrior against the educated class. He understood that it’s not the entrepreneurs who seem most threatening to workers; it’s the professional class. Trump understood that there was great demand for a leader who would stick his thumb in our eyes on a daily basis and reject the whole epistemic regime that we rode in on.

If distrustful populism is your basic worldview, the Trump indictments seem like just another skirmish in the class war between the professionals and the workers, another assault by a bunch of coastal lawyers who want to take down the man who most aggressively stands up to them. Of course, the indictments don’t cause Trump supporters to abandon him. They cause them to become more fiercely loyal. That’s the polling story of the last six months…

But there’s a larger context here. As the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell wrote decades ago, “History is a graveyard of classes which have preferred caste privileges to leadership.” That is the destiny our class is now flirting with.

On Anti-Trumpers and the Modern Meritocracy, David Brooks, 3 August 2023

The “educated class” advantaged by “meritocracy”, as Brooks mendaciously describes his fellow corrupt, ethnocentric nepotists who are neither as educated nor as smart nor as accomplished as they believe themselves to be, is rightly getting worried. Not being aristocrats or empire-builders, they never understood the absolute necessity of noblesse oblige or serving as positive role models for their social inferiors. They were never capable of nor interested in leadership; they lacked any vision beyond pure hedonism supported by slaves. And they failed to comprehend the obvious fact that the flea which outgrows the dog upon which it lives cannot survive.

Their rapacious greed has damned and doomed them. So they had better enjoy their caste privileges while those privileges last, because the reckoning is absolutely inevitable.

DISCUSS ON SG

Banana Republic USA

When the leading opposition candidate is repeatedly charged with made-up crimes, you know a country has neither the rule of law or a legitimate democracy.

Former President Donald Trump’s legal woes deepened after he was hit with federal criminal charges linked to his attempts to cling to power after losing the 2020 election. Trump is facing four counts including conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government and obstruct the electoral count for trying to overturn the 2020 election. The 45-page indictment says he was ‘determined to remain in power’ despite ‘having lost.’

Special Counsel Jack Smith said in a televised public statement following the release of the indictment that the attack on the Capitol was ‘fueled by lies’ made by Trump ‘targeted at obstructing the bedrock function of the U.S. government – the nation’s process of collecting, counting and certifying the results of the presidential election.’ He pledged that his office will conduct a ‘speedy’ trial.

The former president has been summoned to appear before U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan – an Obama appointee – on Thursday in Washington, D.C. There are also six unnamed alleged co-conspirators according to the indictment.

Trump and his co-conspirators ‘used knowingly false claims of election fraud’ to try to ‘subvert the legitimate election results and change electoral votes’ for Joe Biden, according to the indictment.

So, the Establishment committed electoral fraud in order to put a fake President into office, then criminalized anyone pointing out that they did what they observably did.

Sounds legit.

The absurd thing is the fact that the only thing the USA really had going for it vis-a-vis the challenges posed by China and Russia was the perception of it holding the moral high ground with regards to “freedom and democracy”. But the perceived moral high ground has now gone the way of its European majority and its industrial capacity.

Enjoy the show. It’s unusual to have the chance to witness a global empire in the process of collapsing.

DISCUSS ON SG