Either metalhead is knowingly passing on propaganda, or it’s the usual cherry-picking of information done by “guys on the internet”. America did this to Africa and South America, building infrastructure that they knew wouldn’t last, but the banks kept collecting interest. You might remember Bono advocating for forgiving that debt. It still goes on, but not on that scale.
It’s funny how other countries watch what we do and copy it. Sometimes it’s for good, like in European countries that some like to label as “socialist”. Sometimes, not so good.
Of course leaving out the part about getting africa to privatise their public sector and opening up their markets to US companies.
But of course , that is your game
You play a hell of a Whack-a-mole game.
Do you really believe China is morally superior to capitalist “pigs”?
China’s Debt Diplomacy
How Belt and Road threatens countries’ ability to achieve self-reliance.
By Mark Green, the president and CEO of the Wilson Center.
APRIL 25, 2019, 5:06 PM
This week, leaders from around the world are descending on Beijing for China’s second Belt and Road Forum, a conference to showcase China’s signature diplomatic initiative. But these leaders should be clear-eyed that China’s efforts to use its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to broaden its geopolitical and economic clout risk saddling developing countries with unsustainable debt while increasing their dependency on China.
The fact that poorer countries struggle with debt is nothing new, but after years of successful efforts to reduce their debt burden—including through the largest debt forgiveness program in history, started under U.S. President Bill Clinton and advanced by the George W. Bush Administration and the international community—they are once again going into the red. Unlike before, developing countries’ strategic assets, such as their resources, mineral deposits, port access rights, and the like, are now targeted by creditors as collateral in many of these predatory deals.
In many vulnerable countries, much of the burdensome debt is owed to a single source: China. According to a study by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), from 2013 to 2016, China’s contribution to the public debt of heavily indebted poor countries nearly doubled from 6.2 percent to 11.6 percent. China’s lending is expanding even more through BRI. Noting a lack of economic feasibility of some BRI projects, many observers suspect that the initiative is partly motivated by China’s desire to stimulate its own economy …
China’s government sees human rights as an existential threat. Its reaction could pose an existential threat to the rights of people worldwide.
At home, the Chinese Communist Party, worried that permitting political freedom would jeopardize its grasp on power, has constructed an Orwellian high-tech surveillance state and a sophisticated internet censorship system to monitor and suppress public criticism. Abroad, it uses its growing economic clout to silence critics and to carry out the most intense attack on the global system for enforcing human rights since that system began to emerge in the mid-20th century.
Beijing was long focused on building a “Great Firewall” to prevent the people of China from being exposed to any criticism of the government from abroad. Now the government is increasingly attacking the critics themselves, whether they represent a foreign government, are part of an overseas company or university, or join real or virtual avenues of public protest.
No other government is simultaneously detaining a million members of an ethnic minority for forced indoctrination and attacking anyone who dares to challenge its repression. And while other governments commit serious human rights violations, no other government flexes its political muscles with such vigor and determination to undermine the international human rights standards and institutions that could hold it to account.
If not challenged, Beijing’s actions portend a dystopian future in which no one is beyond the reach of Chinese censors, …
Oh and incidentally, please notice the honorable way to present what someone else has written. Put it in quotes and attribute the sources. Way classier than sneaking in a few paragraphs (unattributed and without quotation marks) as if you wrote them yourself.
In a nutshell Jim Steele proposes that landscapes and natural cycles are more powerful drivers of global warming than the atmosphere that lies between Earth and frigid outer space.
His scientific underpinning is a self-certain, as yet unexamined, rejection of ‘CO2 science’ - maintaining it’s a hoax with political underpinnings.
Jim’s speciality is learning about wildlife studies with an eye towards errors in those studies. Where it gets ugly is that though he’s learned about these errors and failings from wildlife scientists who were directly involved. Scientists who were aware of issues and problems and working hard to resolve them. Scientists who willingly shared their experiences, challenges and learning curve.
When it comes to Serious Constructive Debates - that is, dialogues that respect the confines of truth and honestly representing others and the evidence - these showmen are nowhere to be found.
Metalhead my question is why does your own self-evaluation depend on trying to make me out to be a clueless fool? Why not just deal with me, a guy who’s been around 67 years of living an attentive life ( you know it does add up). Even failing if done in the spirit of living, winds up being winnings in the long run, if one stays true. Especially when one’s fears and warnings turned out to quite prescient time after time. Living life really is interesting, if a difficult challenge, gotta be open to pain along the way, oh baby let me tell you, all of that makes the highlight who so much better.
Like we are all human and at least in our day to days, ought to get our joy from helping others, being a constructive part of living.
Never perfect, never free of drama, just free of the melodrama that you seem to thrive on.
I’m wondering,
Why are you so disinterested in participating in a civil dialogue.
Metalhead, your dialogue is all about poking your finger - my visual is the angry guy, keeping it outwardly cool at the cocktail party, but constantly poking your finger into the chest, making your point with drama, and not the least bit interested is what your listener is thinking, or even if they understand what you are thinking.
It happens, but we also need to settle down and try different approaches - if pissy is you got, if you can’t ever settle down to a real conversation, you’ll lose out on what you are trying to achieve. . . .
As for this latest jazz of your’s, what is that but cut’n paste?
Seriously what do you know about it and what can you hope form any of us to know about foreign affairs. Ten minutes, or a hour or two, or a day or two surfing the net, can offer some outlines, but spoon feed by this person and that, all of us with our agendas and leanings. That’s human life. We do the best we can.
How about discussing your own attitude towards your own day to day, what about your own personal moral challenges - the stuff that’s a part of the fabric of your life - you gotta admit no one, any where, gives a damn about our convictions regarding China, or Africa, or whatever, we are among the impotent masses.
It’s yourself and how you inter-act with others that matters. gotta run
No hablas inglés. Entonces, ¿por qué deberíamos explicar en español? (You don’t speak English. So, why should we explain in Spanish?) You aren’t even answering his question. You don’t answer anyone’s questions, much less have an actual conversation with people.
Metalhead, what is it that you Kapeesh about these complex, historic matters?
You’ve never explained any aspect, but you’re good at point at things.
You do melodrama and make yourself look ridiculous.
China
Middle East
Peace Deal
Which Peace Deal, in my years I’ve heard so many “Peace Deals” made, only to watch them turn to dust?
Middle East has been nothing but one ugly disaster after another - and today it’s a living dystopian nightmare, with all sides bearing the responsibility and chock full of bad-faith dealings.
China, well, they are not the nice people you think, know any history?
And now building destructive and doomed MegaProjects, because like America with our various out-reach projects, we helped them to help ourselves, while never giving “them” a chance to explain or design what “they” wanted and needed.
Okay, you caught me a little flat footed, too distracted with other happening this past week to really give this my full attention. So Saudi Arabia and China are the nice guy now? Is that what we got here? Well, guess we’ll have to see how that plays out in the long run.
March 10, 2023, 7:47 AM EST / Updated March 10, 2023, 9:32 AM EST
By Henry Austin
Archrivals Iran and Saudi Arabia agreed Friday to restore diplomatic relations, a dramatic breakthrough brokered by China after years of soaring tensions between the Middle Eastern powerhouses.
It added that the foreign ministers from both countries would “meet to implement this, arrange for the return of their ambassadors, and discuss means of enhancing bilateral relations.” …
After the agreement was announced, a White House National Security Council spokesperson told NBC News that the U.S. welcomed “any efforts to help end the war in Yemen and de-escalate tensions in the Middle East region.”
“De-escalation and diplomacy together with deterrence are key pillars of the policy President Biden outlined during his visit to the region last year,” the spokesperson said.
Initial reaction from Israel was not positive. …
No surprise there.
If we can believe the press releases, sure it’s splendid. Do you trust the judgement of the Saudi dictators, and the Chinese dictators? I don’t. I suspect it’s more deluded geopolitical games. Big promising headlines, followed by backsliding and dirty dealing. So now we wait to see how it plays out in the long run.
You know why it doesn’t rate in my book, I no longer believe in politicians’ intelligence, they are too self-absorbed with their own self-interests, to notice what’s actually happening in the real world out there.
I do believe in climate science, and the drum beat is becoming deafening, while China and Saudi Arabia and apparently most of the rest of world’s leaders dream of nothing but ever more mega mega projects to line their pockets with. It’s shear insanity.
Of course, we can’t turn a supertanker on a dime, but pretending what’s happening isn’t happening ain’t going to be doing any of us any good, since we can never outrun physical reality.
Oh and Metalhead, please notice how we bracket the quotes of others, so that it’s easy to see what are my own words and what I’ve copied pasted. I know you have such an issue with cut and paste, is that why you just as soon not acknowledge it, when you’re doing it. That’s not playing fair.
What is so easily overlooked is that China may just buy all of Saudi’s oil, that now fills about 11% of world’s production of oil and 5% of US oil imports.
This link gives a comprehensive picture of the worlds energy distribution.
Any special arrangements that favor a huge country like China is bound to have an impact on gobal energy distribution.
In any case this only a temporary situation as the world’s oil supply from fossil fuels will run out in about 40 years, about 1/2 a single lifetime.
Then green energy will replace oil and become the dominant energy source.
China is making enormous investments in green energy production and hopes to capture all oil before it runs out and then corner the green energy market and become the primary source for the world’s energy supply and will have economic control of the world.
I’m no expert. Plus, I’ll admit the global economy’s resilience has surprised me more than once, yet Earth’s physical processes are being upended at an incredible rate, with tundra melting out from under people’s homes and poised to unleash further destructive cascading consequences. Oceans are changing in alarming aspects. Have you heard what’s happening with the Atlantic Ocean Sargassum belt (although that one is only tangentially related to warming, more an excess of civilization’s nutrient dumps into the oceans)? Oceanic anoxic dead zones are flourishing. Ocean acidification may not get much coverage, but it continues, as does general oceanic warming with various circulation patterns and food chains being increasingly disrupted, with terrifying down stream consequences coming at us.
California’s agricultural land will in all probability never be the same after this winter’s Atmospheric rivers are finished, and we must expect more of the same, at intensified scales in the next years, with the upward trend continuing for decades, and centuries.
This is just a tiny sampling of the tip of the iceberg we’ve created. Trust me, I’d love to be wrong about all of it, and see my nice little life continue skirting the impacts while still finding plenty of food at the market, and gas for my pickup, but the facts I’m read about, and Earth’s history, tells me a very different story.
Who is talking about climate science here Mr ? The fact this makes it more likely than not for peace to breakout across the middle east is good news that is clearly beyond your comprehension
