Peter G L

that

[Peter G L @PeteMali]

I'm just going to leave this here for a bit as a reminder to my fellow Africans: hegemony never changes its character, it just picks up new tools of oppression.

[Adémọ́lá. @OgbeniDemola]

Belgium, UK, USA connived and assassinated Lumumba, hacked him into pieces, dissolved his body into acid and took his teeth to Brussels, simply because he was struggling for Congo independence. These are the same people that want to lecture us about human rights and democracy.

[Springboks @Springboks]

Rassie Erasmus on England challenge: "We'll have to work really hard against them at Ellis Park next week if we want to get a win" - more here: https://t.co/wGPEau8pEt 🗣️
#Springboks #ForeverGreenForeverGold

[Kenny Carmody @KennyCarmody]

Almost Five years ago I was a healthy, very active man in the prime of my life.

An artist by heart and soul who had traveled to over 100 countries, maintained peak health and fitness, and ran or hiked miles in nature almost every day. Simple, full, and free.

Then on July 21, 2021, I received the Moderna COVID vaccine.

I felt it the moment it entered my body.

Within days a cytokine storm triggered a rare neuromuscular disease and multi-system damage. I went from the ICU to six brutal weeks in hospital, and nothing has been the same since.

Today I am mostly bedridden, confined to my bedroom. I cannot work. I cannot drive. I cannot grocery shop. I can barely walk more than short distances on my best days. I have not left my house further than a quarter mile in years.

Every single day I endure ischemic stroke-like episodes, a partially paralyzed diaphragm that makes breathing a struggle, severe neuropathic pain, esophagus and larynx spasms, severe swallowing issues that make eating difficult, severe trigeminal and occipital neuralgia, crushing fatigue, dysphagia that turns eating into an hour-long ordeal, neuro degeneration and neuromuscular disease diagnosed as ALS unspecified, and waves of symptoms that force me to be bedridden.

Doctors mostly dismissed me as psychosomatic, anxious, or worse. One diagnosis I had to sue to have removed from my record. I spent over $60,000 chasing every treatment the injured community has tried. Nothing gave lasting relief. I became my own doctor , turning to sunlight, grounding, circadian alignment, nature, and my faith in God, which is what carries me when the body wants to quit.

For three years I have spoken out , documenting my journey, writing on X and Substack, calling for acknowledgment, proper diagnostic codes, real care, and accountability for what was done to us. I stand with every vaccine-injured person who has been denied, dismissed, and abandoned.

Yet suddenly the story has gone silent.

People are no longer talking about the people who became severely disabled after one shot. Support has dwindled. The institutions that told us it was safe have offered no honest accounting. No real acknowledgment. No justice.

The reality is that we did not recover when the headlines ended.

We are still here. I am still here.

Still mostly bedridden.

2026 has been brutal.

Still fighting every single day.

Still waiting for the truth to be told.

Please share this. Not for sympathy, but because thousands of vaccine-injured people deserve to know they have not been forgotten.

My time here in X soon comes to an end and halt, yet I am grateful to have met such wonderful people and the support I have received . I know there is not much you can do for us, but I am very grateful for all the absolutely amazing and wonderful prayers and words I have received. Thank you from my heart.
Prayers is what this worlds needs more than ever.

Please don’t stop believing and dreaming of a better world.

God is not finished with us yet.

May God Bless you and peace be with you.

[PitBackle @PitBackle]

We didn't win against Iran but at least it didn't cost us 300 billion USD. 🤷‍♂️

[Reuters Iran @ReutersIran]

Israel smuggled Starlink systems into Iran, former PM says - https://t.co/DoonBkchNO

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

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 (https://t.co/nlJB8yWblv).

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 (https://t.co/QBES0IVprC).

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 (https://t.co/TgKtlc7zlO): 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: https://t.co/jBUIVbDT9C

[AIPAC Tracker @TrackAIPAC]

It’s been nearly 3 weeks since the Israeli military kidnapped 20-year-old U.S. citizen Sama Safi from her family’s home in the West Bank.

She is being held without charge in Israeli military detention where her family cannot access her or contact her.

[Clandestine @WarClandestine]

I feel like I’m trapped in The Truman Show.

I abandoned my life and spent the last 4+ years reporting on the US-funded biolabs in Ukraine, while the global MSM gaslit the world and called me a Russian propagandist.

And now that I’ve been proven correct, nobody cares. Not one apology. 😂

Everyone is just cheesing and continuing on with their lives, after they were just told that the Biden administration conspired with the MSM/Social Media platforms, to cover up the truth about a man-made pathogen that killed millions, and about the nefarious USAID labs around the globe.

I don’t know what I was expecting to happen, but it’s wild just watching the world pretend all that didn’t just happen, while I sacrificed everything to help bring all this to light.

It’s a tough pill to swallow.

[Sizwe SikaMusi @SizweLo]

This is Ernest Cole, a South African Apartheid-era photographer. His photographs were banned in South Africa. Here’s a thread🧵🧵 of a few of them.

[Valerie Anne Smith @ValerieAnne1970]

Klaus Schwab’s chief WEF advisor, Dr. Yuval Noah Harari: "To DOMINATE humanity on a massive scale, all you need is a coordinated cabal of elites feeding the world the SAME made-up stories — total fictions designed for CONTROL!"

These godless technocrats are rubbing our noses in their evil plan with zero shame, openly boasting they can hack millions of minds with data.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

Eric Schmidt saying the quiet part out loud: "What I don't like about [China's AI] is that it's all open source which means it's largely uncontrolled and not controlled in any way by us."

He adds, "if that makes you feel any better," that only 2 or 3 countries can be independent AI powers.

In other words, it's all about hegemony: the ideal scenario is a world where AI is controlled by the US - and the fewer countries that can resist that, the better.

Src for the video: https://t.co/Gk5iAMtBqa

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

Revolutions are made by people who have done the math and concluded they have nothing left to protect.

The genius of late capitalism is that it never lets the math resolve that cleanly.

You have debt, yes, but you also have a 401k, small, underfunded, but real.

You have a mortgage that owns more of the house than you do, but it's still called "your house."

You have a job that could disappear tomorrow, but hasn't yet.

You have healthcare tied to that job, fragile, contingent, but present.

Every one of these is a small leash.

Not strong enough to make you safe.

Strong enough to make you cautious.

You're not trapped by chains.

You're trapped by a thousand small tethers, each one too minor to revolt over, all of them together heavy enough that you never do.

[Markandey Katju @mkatju]

Lessons for India from Iran
By Justice Katju
The recent MOU ( Memorandum of Understanding ) between USA and Iran, signed digitally by the Presidents of both countries, has important lessons for India.
USA is the most militarily and technologically advanced and powerful country in the world, whereas Iran is a relatively backward country. Yet the latter faced the unprovoked surprise attack on it by the former ( with its ally Israel ), beginning on 28th February,  2026, and fought it to a stalemate, resulting in the MOU.
Many people thought that the war would be over in a few days, with a quick Venezuela type victory for the Americans, and a regime change in Iran, and installation of a pro-US government there. After all, a stronger man is expected to easily overpower a weaker one in a contest, and impose his will.
But what actually happened was very different, and was something akin to what happened to the Americans in Vietnam. Though the Vietnamese could not defeat the Americans, neither could the latter defeat the former. In other words, it was a stalemate, as the American journalist Walter Cronkite described it in his famous telecast on 27.2.1968, and America was bogged in a quagmire
https://t.co/XE1yEnPvDk
Seemingly and overtly, a stalemate is a drawn match. But where a powerful country is compelled to negotiate on equal terms, and enter into an agreement or MOU, with a weaker one, it is the latter's victory, as in Korea, Vietnam, Algeria, and recently in Afghanistan.
So Iran, though by far militarily and economically weaker than America, has in reality won. How could such an unexpected, unforeseen and apparently miraculous phenomenon happen ?
When we examine the reasons, some important lessons for India emerge.
(1) The Iranian people were united. Though there were some dissidents against the Iranian regime earlier, after the war began with the unprovoked sneak attack by the Americans and Israelis on 28th February 2026, all Iranians united thereafter, particularly enraged by the killing of their Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini, his relatives and senior officials, 168 schoolgirls, bombing of hospitals,etc.
The story of the Bundle of Sticks shows that a united people cannot be broken, like the Vietnamese, and now the Iranians.
https://t.co/UdWnxRpkDS
We Indians are today divided on the basis of caste, religion, race, etc. We have huge problems of massive poverty and massive unemployment, appalling level of child malnutrition ( every second child in India is malnourished, according to Global Hunger Index ), skyrocketing prices of essential commodities, almost lack of proper healthcare and good education for our masses, etc.
We will never be able to solve these problems unless we unite, and launch a mighty united and protracted people's struggle ( jan sangharsh ), rising above caste, religion and race, led by genuinely patriotic modern minded leaders, in which tremendous sacrifices will have to be made, culminating in a historical people's revolution ( jan kranti ) which will set up a new political and social order under which there will be rapid industrialization of the country, and steady rise in the standard of living of the people.
(2) The Iranian people have shown that for a nation to defeat a more powerful enemy, its people must be prepared for great sacrifices, even sacrifice of their lives.
The Iranians are mostly Shia Muslims, who are taught since childhood of the tragedy of Karbala, and martyrdom of Imam Husain, who was willing to die rather than to bow his head and accept the suzerainty of the tyrant Yazid. So Iranian culture teaches that one must never surrender to tyranny, even if it costs one his life.
If Indians want to face their great socio-economic and political challenges, and overcome them, they too must imbibe the indomitable spirit of the brave Iranians, about whom I wrote this article :
https://t.co/0LPZvX0NDp
(3) The third lesson for India is that we must use scientific and intelligent methods in our struggle, instead of just emotions, as the Iranians did. The Iranians built several cities deep underground ( like the Cu Chi tunnels in Vietnam ) from where they launched their missiles and drones ( since these could be destroyed by US and Israeli missiles if launched from the surface ), and they inflicted severe economic pain on their enemy by closing the Strait of Hormuz. They also allied themselves to the Chinese and Russians ( as the Vietnamese did ), to get military and technological help from these developed countries.
Although Iran is a much smaller country than India, with a population of only 93 million ( while India's population is 1430 million ), we have to become humble disciples of the brave Iranians, and learn the 3 things abovementioned from them.

[Fiorella Isabel @FiorellaIsabelM]

Here is more theatrics for you… JD Vance “Slamming Netanyahu”.

They’re prepping for the pivot toward Vance—Peter Thiel’s protege and did people forget who Thiel is?

Peter Thiel is a mega billionaire and tech entrepreneur, venture capitalist, who acts as a political kingmaker for the worst politicians we have. He co-founded Palantir tech which has entered into a direct military partnership with the IDF while infesting every facet of the US government.

Please stop with the bs narrative. Don’t fall for it from the same controlled opposition who constantly sell you more lies.

Bookmark this tweet. There’s no such thing as the US putting Israel in its place—they’re closer than ever. You’re being tricked.

[AIPAC Tracker @TrackAIPAC]

Laura Loomer says anyone who reposts us should be banned from Twitter. 😂

[Edward Dowd @DowdEdward]

Let’s get this trending.

[Ikkyu Sojun @ConciousLabRat]

Lamumba is another chapter in the Western empire’s endless resource raid disguised as “civilization.”

His real crime was refusing to let Congo’s wealth flow straight to Brussels, New York, and London.

They dissolved the man but not the pattern.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

Westerners love to whine about how tyrannical and authoritarian Iran's government is, but it's worth noting that the control Tehran exerts within its borders is a major reason US-Israeli efforts to turn the nation into a giant Libya have failed. That control exists to thwart precisely the type of existential foreign threat that Iran just thwarted. Were it not for that existential foreign threat, such control wouldn't be necessary.

The US has openly admitted to deliberately fomenting the domestic unrest we saw in Iran earlier this year, and to attempting to arm insurgent factions. Those foreign threats were put down by precisely the "tyranny" you've seen western liberals and anarkiddies decrying in Iran all year.

The fact that the US-Israeli war failed to achieve the government-toppling goals set out by Washington and Tel Aviv means that Iran was able to inhibit the visibility that US and Israeli intelligence agencies had into the nation, because you only fail to accomplish a military objective you think you can accomplish if your enemy is able to surprise you. Countering US and Israeli intelligence operations, rooting out US and Israeli intelligence assets, blocking US and Israeli propaganda from domestic consumption, and obstructing US and Israeli visibility into Tehran's government and military could only be achieved by a strong government that's willing exert forceful control over what goes on inside its own borders.

Westerners like to point at the "authoritarianism" of the few remaining enemies of the US-centralized empire as though it proves that we're looking at a struggle between a beneficent and virtuous civilization and a bunch of evil tyrants, but really all it proves is that the only nations who are able to resist absorption into the imperial blob are the ones who are willing and able to exert control over what happens inside their borders. If the US and its allies weren't constantly working to subvert and topple all unabsorbed nations, this "authoritarianism" wouldn't be needed to resist it.

[Responsible Statecraft @RStatecraft]

“If you bought a new car and it only worked 25% of the time, you'd go yell at your dealer until they fixed it or covered the cost of a new one; you wouldn't go back and buy another new car.” -- @GabeRMurphy @taxpayers

https://t.co/vYLLua6i8K

[سعید سلطانپورSaead @RahehalTV]

باید شیخ ارتجاعی و ضد ایرانی امارات دستگیر و برای محاکمه به ایران برده شود . حتی اگر لازم باشه یک بار دیگر جنگ بشود . شیوخ عرب باید یاد بگیرند اگر به خاک مقدس ایران تجاوزی انجام دهند ،بهایش را پس میدهند/ تای بلومنتال تحلیلگر نظامی و امنیتی شبکه کان ۱۱ اسراییل:

برای اولین بار فاش می‌کنیم که در آغاز جنگ رمضان علیه ایران در ماه مارس، مقامات ارشد امنیتی امارات متحده به‌صورت محرمانه به اسرا��یل سفر کردند و با مسئولان بلندپایه دستگاه امنیتی اسرائیل دیدار داشتند.

در واقع، اکنون برای نخستین بار گزارش می‌دهیم که در جریان جنگ، مقامات بلندپایه اماراتی به‌صورت فیزیکی وارد اسرائیل شده‌اند.

این دیدارها بر هماهنگی‌های امنیتی میان دو طرف متمرکز بوده است و پس از آن انجام شد که گزارش‌هایی درباره سفرهای محرمانه مقامات اسرائیلی به ابوظبی منتشر شده بود؛ از جمله نتانیاهو و رئیس ستاد کل، ایال زامیر.

برای درک اهمیت این هیئت، نمی‌توانیم جزئیات هویت افراد حاضر را فاش کنیم، اما این مقامات با یک هواپیمای اختصاصی بوئینگ ۷۳۷ VIP وارد شدند؛ هواپیمایی که معمولاً توسط اعضای بلندپایه خاندان سلطنتی امارات مورد استفاده قرار می‌گیرد

[Kate Shemirani @KateShemirani]

This is literally the best account on Twitter. Instead of following and commenting on the same nonsense, follow this and read the facts, read the evidence.

@ArturNadol7566