Bradley C Hughes @AngelsInTheAI

@caitoz We're ruled by psychopaths & globalist puppets on a power trip. Look at the eKaren's pages for the WEF, eSafety, and WeProtect. We don't have an Australian eSafety for Online Safety. We have a WEF puppet and eSurveillance/eControl Commission empowered by the WEF puppet UniParty.

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1984 was a WARNING, NOT an instruction manual.

Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz

5 days ago

I've ratioed the prime minister and the foreign minister repeatedly on here. Now the government is trying to make that illegal. We're ruled by petty, narcissistic emotional infants.

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Honestly, this just shows what a complete idiot Vance is. The notion that it was a mistake to engage China is wrong on every level - morally, factually, economically, diplomatically and politically - and represents the absolute worst kind of American exceptionalism thinking. Morally, it's, of course, an utterly disgusting thing to say: it's basically "we should have kept a fifth of humanity poor because their misery was good for us." It's sociopathic and depraved: the guy loves to virtue signal around his supposed "Christian values" but he obviously didn't even get to the "love thy neighbor" part of the bible... Factually, he acts as if the Chinese had zero agency, as if they'd have just said: "Oh, the US wants us to stay poor? Well, okay then, guess we'll just stay poor 🤷" As if a civilization that's been around for 5,000 years was just sitting around waiting for Washington's permission to develop. Also, he acts as if their development was in fact a consequence of US engagement. If that were the case, why didn't India develop at the same pace, why didn't Indonesia develop, why didn't every single poor country the US engaged with develop? The dirty truth is that most US leaders - for a long time - have thought along similar lines as Vance: the objective obviously never was for China to rise to a level where they'd become a US peer competitor. But, just like the Trump administration (during either terms) didn't succeed in shaping China to US interests - despite all their efforts - neither could any previous administration. The idea that there was some magic policy that would have let America enjoy cheap Chinese labor forever while keeping China permanently subordinate is pure fantasy. Economically, contrary to popular belief, China's rise actually didn't come at America's expense. For proof just check the evolution of the share of global GDP: - For China: in 1980, their share of global GDP was 2%, it rose to 17% by 2024 - For the US: in 1980 their share of global GDP was 25.5% and IT ROSE (!) to 26.3% by 2024 In other words, economically speaking, the US lost nothing: not on an absolute basis and not even on a relative basis. On both levels, it actually gained and conserves an absolutely disproportionate - and frankly unfair - share of global economic output: more than a quarter for just 4% of the global population. Complaining about this, as if America were the victim here, is frankly obscene. Diplomatically, why say this? How does this serve the US in any way whatsoever? Obviously, saying this will antagonize China big time - as it should. But it will also send a message to just about every country out there that wants to develop (that is, basically ALL countries): as far as America is concerned, things are zero-sum, your prosperity is their loss. This objectively makes US foreign policy harder, as it does the job of every American company trying to sell stuff abroad - hard to sell something to a country when your Vice President just said that it makes him "angry" and it's a failure of policy if his customers do well. Lastly, it's also idiotic politically. Sure, I get that America always needs enemies and that scapegoating foreigners is the oldest trick in the book. But there comes a time when it stops being useful and starts being actively harmful - and we're well past that point in the US. Because, what is scapegoating's main function? To redirect the blame onto others for things that you yourself can get fixed. And while the US did manage to - overall - maintain its share of the global economic pie, it failed to distribute it fairly at home: the gains were mostly hoarded by a small elite while ordinary Americans saw little benefit, or even lost out with insane healthcare costs or crumbling infrastructure. You can blame China all you want for this but eventually it comes to bite you in the ass: your people's lives don't get better for it and they'll eventually realize they should stop looking at where the finger is pointing, and start looking at who's doing the pointing. So, yeah, no matter how you look at it, it's completely unredeemable: morally repulsive, factually illiterate, economically wrong, diplomatically self-defeating, and politically stupid. Almost impressive, in a way.

𝘊𝘰𝘳𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘦 @OopsGuess

6 days ago

The funniest part of JD Vance’s speech is the ending: “I am angry about the rise of China… but I am most angry that American leadership let it happen.” Let it happen? As if China’s rise was an American clerical error. As if 1.4 billion people industrialized because Washington

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Prominent US war hawk John Bolton has pled guilty to violating the Espionage Act after previously demanding execution for whistleblowers Edward Snowden & Chelsea Manning and 176 years in prison for publisher Julian Assange. As part of a plea agreement, Bolton admitted to unlawfully retaining sensitive national security information. He now faces up to 5 years in prison, up to 3 years of supervised release, a $2.25 million fine, forfeiture of his pension, and is due to be sentenced on 28 October.

I don't know what broke in the matrix, but watching John Bolton not only plead guilty to a felony but the specific felony he spent decades depicting as the most egregious -- calling for life imprisonment or execution for it -- is a level of karmic justice I didn't know existed.

End Wokeness @EndWokeness

2 weeks ago

Bolton on mishandling classified info: "This is a serious crime. Devastating indictment. End of Trump's career." He just pled guilty to doing exactly that

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John Bolton once called for Edward Snowden's execution. He even fantasized how, saying Snowden "ought to swing from a tall oak tree." Bolton is now a convicted felon for mishandling classified information: not to inform the public but to profit off a book. Get the noose.

CNN Breaking News @cnnbrk

2 weeks ago

Trump foe and former adviser John Bolton pleads guilty to a charge of unlawfully retaining sensitive national security information. cnn.it/4xRK2fx

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I often like Ray Dalio's takes on China but he gets quite a lot demonstrably wrong in this FT article on the "tribute system." China's ancient tribute system - called 朝贡 (cháogòng) in Chinese - is typically very misunderstood in the West: we typically think it involved tributary states paying some form of "tribute" to China in exchange for protection - the way medieval vassals would pay fealty to a lord in Europe. In reality, it had little to do with that. In fact, it was almost the opposite: in the Chaogong system, it was actually China paying the "tributary states." The system was basically a quid-pro-quo where China would get "得名" (dé míng, literally "getting name/prestige") while tributary states would get "得实" (dé shí, literally "getting substance/material benefit") in exchange. It was about China paying huge amounts of money and other material benefits for the recognition of its centrality. That's what makes it so alien to the Western framework, where tributary states are paying UP to the center, and security is enforced through military presence. The Chaogong system was almost exactly the inverse on both counts: China was paying DOWN and regional order was maintained not through the military but through generosity. The core guiding principle of the system was established by the Hongwu emperor, the founding emperor of the Ming dynasty (incidentally one of the most interesting emperors in Chinese history since he is the only founder of a major dynasty who started off in life as a wandering beggar). The principle he set in place was 厚往薄来 (hòu wǎng bó lái) - literally "generous outflow, modest inflow": giving out much more than you take in. This wasn't a byproduct of the system - it WAS the system. The entire architecture of Chaogong was built on this principle of asymmetric generosity. Very concretely the way it worked is that tributary states would pay largely symbolic tribute to China (like local specialties and curiosities, the system codified that tribute should be "easy to obtain and not costly", 必易得而不贵) and they would in exchange receive 3 layers of economic benefits: 1) Immediate payback in the form of money and expensive goods (silk, brocade, porcelain, tea, silver, etc.), which value was typically dozens of times the value of the tribute received by the emperor 2) The right to trade during their tribute visit: the envoys' entourage could trade with specially licensed Chinese merchants at the Huitongguan (the official guesthouse in the capital) 3) Most importantly, and that's where the real money was, they would be granted the right to trade at Chinese ports. Under the Ming maritime prohibition, tributary status was the only legal entry point into the Chinese economy China being China, this gave rise to some pretty funny hustles. The deal was so good that people started inventing entirely fictitious countries just to get in on it. There are several documented cases of people fabricating countries and showing up as "envoys" at the imperial court just to claim the privileges (rujiazg.com/article/19243). Another funny one is that there are several cases of Fujian merchants who would sail to Southeast Asia, get themselves appointed as minor officials by local rulers, then sail right back to China as "foreign envoys" - carrying huge commercial cargoes. In 1438, three members of Java's tribute delegation turned out to be guys from Fujian (zhihu.com/question/63313…). The scam got so widespread that the Ming had to invent a credential system (勘合, kānhé) specifically to verify that tribute envoys were who they claimed to be and that the countries they came from were real. More seriously though, the Chaogong system also led to big domestic tensions in some of China's neighboring countries, notably Japan which was permitted only one tribute mission per decade. The stakes were so high that the 2 most powerful feudal clans at the time (the Ōuchi and the Hosokawa) fought a shadow war over who controlled the trade license. This culminated in the Ningbo Incident of 1523 (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ningbo_in…): two Japanese delegations from both rival clans arrived at the port of Ningbo and got into a dispute over whose credentials were legitimate, which ended up in a pitched battle on Chinese soil. They ended up rampaging through the city, killing Ming military officers, and altogether terrorizing the local population - all over who got to trade with China. The aftermath of the Ningbo Incident led to the total breakdown of Japan-China trade. If that sounds familiar, it should... Which brings back to today and Ray Dalio's description of China's tribute system, as well as his claim that we're facing some sort of modern revival of it in Asia. First of all, some parts of his article are correct: there is indeed a significant power shift happening in Asia, with countries hedging by building closer ties with Beijing, and the US progressively withdrawing and altogether losing ground. He is also completely right that Chinese strategic culture genuinely differs from Western strategic culture: as he writes they indeed play Go (WeiQi) and not chess. He is however wrong to describe the tribute system as one based on pressure and intimidation. As we've just seen, it was pretty much the opposite: the basic idea was to be so generous that everyone wants in (to the extent that countries would literally fight to be tributaries), not so threatening that nobody dares leave. He also - weirdly - seems to conflate the tribute system with the Art of War, treating them as two faces of the same Chinese playbook, when they've got strictly nothing to do with each others. They're not even from the same school of thought: the Chaogong system is fundamentally Confucian (以德服人, "winning people through virtue") whereas Sun Tzu is from an entirely different Chinese intellectual tradition - the Strategist school (兵家) - which is about as far removed from Confucian thinking as Machiavelli is from the Bible. Mashing them together reads like someone who has picked up a handful of Chinese cliché references and treats them as interchangeable ingredients in a single "Chinese strategic culture" soup. All in all, he makes the error WAY too many Western commentators do with Chinese concepts: he uses them as exotic wrapping paper for a fundamentally Western analysis. Strip away the Chinese terminology and his argument is actually pure Western thinking: what he is claiming is that China, as a rising power, is using its growing economic and military weight to reshape the regional order, weaker states are bandwagoning, and the declining hegemon can't stop it. He is essentially taking Graham Allison's "Thucydides Trap," awkwardly draping it in misunderstood Chinese concepts, and presenting it as if it were Chinese thinking. That being said, he is ironically correct - I think - that there is some form of revival of a tribute-like system but not in the way he understands it: China will (and does) use trade - its "generosity" - as a gravitational force to pull countries into its orbit. Not by threatening to cut them off, but by making the relationship too valuable to walk away from. THAT is much closer to how the actual Chaogong system worked. It doesn't mean that the system is purely benevolent. The flipside of generosity is the absence of it: in the original tribute system, you could be cut off the way Japan was after the Ningbo Incident in the 16th century. And it's also what's happening - to some extent - to Japan today: after PM Takaichi declared that Japan would go to war with China over Taiwan, China has systematically restricted trade with Japan. Same story with what happened, for instance, to Australia in 2020 over PM Morrison's declarations on Covid. The pattern is the same: the reward for participation is trade, and the punishment for hostility is its withdrawal. Essentially in the tribute system there is no stick, just a carrot: the stick is taking the carrot away. Which, incidentally, is why you can be extremely confident that China will go to enormous lengths to develop its internal market, and why the current situation where China runs huge trade surpluses is facing mounting pressure to change from within China itself. If countries don't feel they're benefiting enough from trade with China, the entire logic collapses. That's why developing domestic demand isn't some target China sets itself to assuage Western demands, as some claim: it's genuinely a strategic imperative. It's also why it's ironic that the West is so keen on pushing China to boost domestic consumption: in effect, it means we're already in a de-facto Chaogong-like system and they're asking that the carrot be bigger. ----- I also wrote a Substack version of this post, which you can find here: open.substack.com/pub/arnaudbert…

Financial Times @FT

3 weeks ago

China’s tribute system and the new world order ft.trib.al/oY8Evgl

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The US empire is waging a neocolonial assault all across Latin America. The US blatantly meddled in Colombia's election. Trump and Marco Rubio backed the far-right, multimillionaire candidate Abelardo de la Espriella (a defender of fascist paramilitaries), and there are serious irregularities in the results. Colombia's current left-wing President Gustavo Petro has been very pro-Palestine and pro-China. He cut relations with the genocidal Israeli regime and joined China's Belt and Road Initiative. De la Espriella vows to form a close alliance with the US and Israel, and minimize relations with China. Just a few weeks before the elections, he was in Florida, meeting with far-right US politicians who are close allies of Trump and Rubio. The same thing is happening across the continent. The US carried out a blatant electoral coup in Honduras, to put a drug cartel-linked, pro-US, pro-Israel, anti-China puppet in power. The US is currently trying to steal the election in Peru, to put the daughter of the fascist former dictator in power. The US empire already has far-right puppets in power in Argentina, Chile, and Ecuador. The leader of Chile is the Pinochet-defending son of a Nazi war criminal. The dictator of Ecuador is the son of the country's richest billionaire oligarch. Brazil is the next target of the US empire's neocolonial assault, in this year's election. This is the colonial Monroe Doctrine in the neo-fascist era.

Almost one year ago I was detained on arrival in London immediately after landing on a flight from Beirut. I was held for hours, interrogated, had my DNA taken and my electronic devices seized. I was told that I was under investigation for potential terror-related activities, linked to my work as a journalist in countries deemed unpalatable to the British state. Others including @georgegalloway and @richimedhurst have been subjected to similar treatment. One year on and I’m still living in exile from my own country and in reality I am never likely to be able to return with the threat of a prison sentence looming over me. Full solidarity with @loffredojeremy the latest victim of the increasingly authoritarian British state which allows IDF soldiers and those that have fought against Russia in Ukraine to enter freely, while targeting those who stand against imperialist wars and genocide.

Jeremy Loffredo @loffredojeremy

2 weeks ago

Earlier this month, I planned to stop in the UK on my way to report from Lebanon. The British government denied my visa application, claiming that my presence in the country would "not be conducive to the public good."

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Anyone to the left of Paul Mason is now banned from the UK Total occupied territory

Jeremy Loffredo @loffredojeremy

2 weeks ago

Earlier this month, I planned to stop in the UK on my way to report from Lebanon. The British government denied my visa application, claiming that my presence in the country would "not be conducive to the public good."

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🇮🇷 An Aerial Shot of 168 Minab Children's Graves Won Photo of the Year Iranian photographer Morteza Akhundi took first place in photojournalism at the 2026 Golden Shot Awards, beating hundreds of entries worldwide. The image: the funeral for 168 children killed when their school in Minab was bombed on the first day of the war. The world gave it an award. Washington still won't say who dropped the bomb.

Ryan Rozbiani @RyanRozbiani

3 weeks ago

🇺🇸🇮🇷 Bill for the Iran War: Thousands Dead, $132 BILLION Burned The War Israel and the United States started on February 28 KILLED: - 13 U.S. service members - ~3,500 Iranians, including 175 who died when a U.S. strike demolished a school on the first day - ~3,700 in Lebanon

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@james406 Broken Windows Theory: if you leave that long enough, your vehicle will be filled with thousands of useless Windows software licenses. Impossible to clean out the smell afterwards.

Lebanese Socceroos fans with family and friends who call Australia home getting bombed by Israeli supremacists trying to claim their home. The Australian political class had chosen to support the latter.

Rob Shehadie @RShehadie

3 weeks ago

No, it’s not Belmore or Parramatta. It’s downtown Lebanon. 🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺 #socceroos @Socceroos

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Israelis Invaded Lebanon And Then Cried Victim When Their Soldiers Got Killed From all this melodramatic garment-rending and victim-LARPing you’d assume the four Israelis were killed in their beds in Tel Aviv, not traveling by tank through a foreign country they’d invaded. Reading by Tim Foley.

The Greens stood tactically aside here. It ensured a Reform loss, which I’m sure is a favour Burnham will never return. Country over party from the Greens. I hope they take his mayorship & build a northern foothold.

Tory Fibs @ToryFibs

3 weeks ago

Very intelligent analysis from Mothin.

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This AI just exposed the BIGGEST legal insider trading operation in America. A platform called GovGreed built a seven-layer machine learning system that cross-references every stock trade disclosed by every sitting politician against the bills their committees control, the campaign donations they receive, and the companies their votes directly impact. It scored all 540 politicians currently in Congress. And the numbers are crazy: 56% of every stock purchase made by Congress in the last 16 months was on a stock directly affected by a bill the buyer later voted on. That is 6,170 out of 11,016 total purchases. More than HALF of all congressional stock buys are on companies whose fate that same politician is about to decide. 343 of 540 Congress members actively trade stocks while holding access to nonpublic legislative information. That is 63.8% of the entire legislature making market bets with an informational edge that would put any hedge fund manager in prison. The AI identified 752 active "Triple Signals" in the current Congress. A Triple Signal fires when three conditions line up at once: The politician sits on the committee controlling a bill, they traded stock in a company affected by that bill, AND they received campaign contributions from that same industry. Bills carrying these insider indicators pass at 5.4 TIMES the normal rate. Now look at the individual leaderboard: - Nancy Pelosi's estimated portfolio sits at $194 million with a Greediness score of 98.1 out of 100 - Ro Khanna made 13,231 trades across 800+ different tickers - Michael McCaul made 32,302 trades and filed 6,670 of them late - Thomas Suozzi filed 86.4% of his trades late with an average delay of 396 days, meaning his disclosures landed over a YEAR after he made the trade And then there is Lisa McClain, the fourth-ranking Republican in the House. She has made 1,443 trades in three years, more than 98% of all politicians tracked. She violated the STOCK Act twice in a single year, disclosing up to $900,000 in trades months after the legal deadline. Her husband bought up to $250,000 in Elon Musk's xAI, which quietly converted into SpaceX equity before last Friday's $2 trillion IPO. The penalty for all of this? A $200 fine. The number of Congress members ever prosecuted under the STOCK Act since it passed in 2012? Zero. And the cruelest part is this: A bill to ban congressional stock trading was introduced in January 2026. It has bipartisan support. Over 80% of American voters want it passed. But Congress is sitting on it, because the people who would have to vote yes are the same people making millions from the system staying exactly the way it is. They write the insider trading laws, they exempt themselves from enforcement, they trade on the information those laws generate, and when they get caught, they pay a fine that is basically nothing. The AI didn't discover anything Congress was hiding. It just organized what was already public into a pattern so obvious that nobody can pretend it isn't there anymore.

In almost 100 years, no World Cup host has ever forced game breaks just to show commercials, or harassed the very referees & players of the competition because of where they're from. So emblematic of how the US interact with the planet. Capitalism & imperialism on steroids.

"The flim-flam etymology of AUKUS"? Or: as put by veteran AU diplomat John Lander (who testified w. @RobbieBarwick at the Melbourne public inquiry into AUKUS): "@AlboMP and @RichardMarlesMP asserted that the American militarization of Australia protects Australia’s sovereignty. This is just so much flim-flam designed to flummox the masses. It’s done exactly the opposite. It so undermines Australian sovereignty that Australia has no independent agency on any matter of existential consequence." - John Lander, former AU Deputy Ambassador to China 1974-1978 + former 1st AU Ambassador to Islamic Republic of Iran 1985-1988

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Antony (Tony) Walker @tonywalker1

3 weeks ago

Here's the flim flam etymology of Aukus. There you see it, there you don't. Good piece by my friend, the Jesuitical Allan Behm @GuardianAus theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

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Albonese has become subservient to a nation of mass murderers. With Wong ducking and weaving to avoid accountability.

Jackie . @Dempsey57Jackie

a month ago

Amazed the microphone was left on. And he’s still here. For Albo there is no red line is there

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Both One Nation MP Barnaby Joyce and One Nation NSW Senator Sean Bell have stated in separate live interviews that One Nation policy is to force permanent residents and temporary visa holders to sell their houses so Australian citizens can buy them. This is extremely disturbing.