It’s hard to describe just how far out in front of us is China 2026. Luckily record numbers are checking out for themselves. Increasingly visa-free travel makes it easier than it’s ever been.
I’ve just been on a “High-speed train” which description fails to do justice. It travels like the wind. If you closed your eyes you wouldn’t know you were moving. China has 50,000 miles of it. It links cities so far better than ours it brings me to tears. Clean. Crime free.
The cops don’t carry guns and their cars don’t have sirens, only flashing lights.
Prices are so cheap I’m scared to tell you. A slap up lunch £2.50. Shirts £12. Deluxe taxis (BMW electric) £4. And this in a Tier 1 City (Beijing Shanghai Guangzhou Shenzen). It’s cheaper elsewhere! The shops are tumbling with goods from the west (at Chinese prices - western goods are of course mainly made in China) from the east often Russia and from a home manufacturing base easily the biggest in the whole world.
Nobody litters or jaywalks, nobody lays in shop doorways, nobody begs. Vertiginous towers of bewildering variety arise everywhere. At night these cities don’t even look real. I have a young wife. When she was born Shenzen was a one-horse town nobody outside had ever heard of. Today it is a Wonder of the World. One of dozens. If you deny it, you’re a fool.
George Galloway
@ExplosiveMediaa@HussainShafiei Please make a video of all the heroes speaking the truth but never invited to the mainstream media. Judge Napolitano channel was the first time I saw them all.
@SuzieWo20886208 In winter: no gloves, no hats and hunching over in thin t-shirts with trousers low down. as if its a good look. wearing a cotton hoodie instead of hat and scarf. My teens cannot be convinced as they think they will be laughed at. Then we have whole population sickly from colds!
I received several reactions to the discussion I hosted about how nuclear weapons may be used against Europe to restore deterrence. To be clear, this is not a normative argument about what I think should happen or what I think is just. My argument is what I think will happen. European leaders have become so deeply involved in the attacks on Russia that the Kremlin is under great pressure to restore its deterrence.
Once Russia retaliates with conventional weapons against European targets (weapons facilities, logistics centres), the Europeans will more forcefully attack Russia. At this point, I believe that it is more likely than not that Russia could launch a limited nuclear strike (with tactical nuclear weapons, not strategic). This should not be a controversial prediction. NATO countries are doing the war planning; their intelligence agencies are doing the targeting; their contractors are pulling the trigger; they are supplying the long-range weapons; and they are also using NATO territory to strike Russia. This will only escalate as the Europeans are talking about mass-producing long-range weapons for "Ukraine" to strike deeper and deeper inside Russia, and are setting dates for when Europe will directly attack.
Our political leaders are obsessed with defeating the world's largest nuclear power, which considers itself to be fighting in a war for its existence. It should worry us that our political leaders did not define what a NATO victory looks like in this scenario, and we should also be worried that our political leaders have incrementally become so directly involved in attacks on Russia and still pretend it is merely a war between Russia and Ukraine. Our political leaders sabotaged both the Minsk peace agreement and the Istanbul agreement, and then shut down all diplomacy for more than 4 years while declaring that "weapons are the path to peace". It is obligatory in Europe to pretend this is about "helping Ukraine", but this is dangerous self-delusion.
Where exactly did we think this was heading? Is nuclear war not the obvious end? Can anyone imagine it ending in any different ways if we had done this during the Cold War or if Russia were now similarly attacking the US through a proxy? Biden once said that sending F-16s meant World War 3, yet now it has become controversial to point out that NATO clearly crossing the line between proxy war and direct war will trigger a nuclear war. I see no morality in such self-delusion. NATO escalations are now out of control, we are heading to war, and that war will not be limited to conventional weapons. The fact that this is dismissed as a "pro-Russian" argument demonstrates how completely lost we have become in mindless war propaganda.
https://t.co/6q1ZzNOkkp
@MrImranPk absolutely true. You are a courageous nation & hope you prosper. Wish I was an Iranian by birth after seeing your country doing what every moral nation on earth should have done. Indian government has shamed itself.
Iran – by refusing to submit to US and Israeli aggression, and in realising its power to throttle global oil supplies – has shown that US "full-spectrum global dominance" was never as complete as the “masters of the universe” assumed. It has an Achilles’ heel, after all.
The truth is we should all have been terrified by the idea that our leaders might assume and behave as if history had, as Francis Fukuyama proclaimed, come to an end.
In practice, it could mean only an end to constraints on capitalism – an end to any humanising limits on its reach, on its ambitions, on its cruelty.
Like King Midas, the Epstein class expected to monetise everything it touched. And like King Midas, hubris will be its downfall.
There are constraints, both immediate and long term, that even the billionaires cannot overcome.
A finite planet, with finite resources, cannot be plundered indefinitely. A delicately balanced biosphere, which evolved over billions of years to the point where it became compatible with higher life forms, cannot be abused, filled with our toxic detritus, forever.
Similarly, countries and peoples cannot be humiliated, turned into objects ripe for exploitation and humiliation, year after year, decade after decade, without a reckoning eventually.
The “end of history”, as Fukuyama should have foreseen, could lead to only one destination: enslavement. The end of struggle, the end of freedom. Only the colonial arrogance of the West could imagine that others would submit to such a fate.
In Gaza, in Lebanon, in Iran, we see peoples refusing – however imperfectly, however violently – to submit to their enslavement. In the West, with our colonial arrogance undimmed, we call it “terrorism”. We call any solidarity with it “hate”. We send our own truth-tellers to prison as criminals.
The genocidal abuse of peoples in Gaza and Lebanon – the chief victims of the “end of history” – serves as a reminder to westerners of what the system that triumphed nearly half a century ago is really about. What it requires. Where it is heading.
But more dangerously for the billionaires, the resistance to that abuse, the struggle against subjugation, against being disappeared, reminds western publics that enslavement is not inevitable, that dignity might still be possible, that another way can, at the very least, be imagined.
Struggle must continue because submission is death.
That is the message from Gaza and Lebanon. It is the reason our rulers are so desperate to crush any sense of hope. They need us to believe that history came to an end in 1991. Because otherwise, their days are numbered.
This is an extract from my latest article. Find a link to the rest in the reply post ⬇️
One of the main problems Americans face as the Empire declines is that we are ruled by grifters and idiots. When the British Empire fell, it slowly disengaged with its more imperialist impulses. The American Empire, on the other hand, has both of its political parties ramping up the nation's militarism, and as a result is inflicting massive suffering on the global populace as it falls.
@ggreenwald I heard both her & Kushner regarding this island purchase. well suited selfish, shallow couple. absolutely no role models for anyone & have no shame to spout this nonsense.
@SuzieWo20886208 so correct! they all just talk to get the votes and then its all the same. so frustrating & pointless. why do we even vote anymore?
@JamesMelville British people follow the rules religiously. Hence, they rarely protest &acquiesce everytime. They would also go for 'looks &wit' rather than see through the superficial nonsense. I wasn't born in UK but have lived here for> 25 years and this is my observation.
@s_m_marandi Well done to Iran and their astute leadership. You suffered a lot of setbacks & lost your leaders and children for an unnecessary war. Hope you grow from strength to strength.