Tag: china

Israel launches violent raids on southern Lebanon as China urges nationals to leave

Israeli forces intensified their cross-border attacks on Lebanon overnight Wednesday-Thursday with a series of 10 raids across eight different southern areas within 45 minutes, Lebanese media reported on Thursday.

The attacks took place around 1am local time, according to security sources, adding that the strikes targeted and destroyed several buildings in the Khiam, Kfarchouba, Mhaybib, Aita al-Chaab, Ghazziye, Ramiye, and Kaouthraiyet al-Sayyed, villages that lie about 30 kilometres (18.6 miles) past the Blue Line. No casualties were reported.

The Israeli military said that its air forces had hit more than 10 “Hezbollah targets” in different areas in southern Lebanon.

The army claimed on X that “among the targets attacked were weapons depots, military buildings, and a launcher used by Hezbollah to carry out operations against Israel”.

Meanwhile, Hezbollah announced it had targeted Israeli army barracks in northern Israel.

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How Taiwan Became an Issue

Given that official Washington seems increasingly determined to fight Beijing over Taiwan, concerned Americans are right to wonder: how did the question of Taiwan come to be of such purported importance to these global powers?

While several closer islands, such as the Penghu (or the Pescadores as they are now known), were incorporated into the Chinese polity during the period of Ming blue water exploration in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Formosa (or Taiwan as it came to be known) never was.

After shuttering its large scale naval activities in the mid-fifteenth century, the Ming were thereafter largely content to let the rival trading companies of the Portuguese and Dutch quarrel for influence on Formosa, where trade revolved around tea and camphor.

In an odd bit of history repeating itself, the island first became a central focus of a ruling mainland Chinese regime as a result of a civil war that needed concluding: displaced by the invading Manchurian forces (the eventual Qing), in 1661 what remained of the Han, Ming ruling clique retreated to Formosa. It was following their ultimate defeat in 1683 that Formosa started to become ethically and administratively integrated into China (a process completed around a century later).

Despite its import as a trading hub in the centuries thereafter, when the Japanese took possession of Formosa at the end of the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-95), per the terms of the Treaty Shimonoseki (1885), the island’s new rulers found a society, economy, and polity virtually untouched by modernity.

And while initially brutal, putting down an anti-Japanese insurgency of emigre Han Chinese and native Taiwanese, the Japanese colonial administration of the island, which lasted until the end of World War II, would see the island transformed into an educated, urbanized, and rationalized society with living standards far higher than on the mainland.

Despite the increasing gap, most Taiwanese, whose cultural links with the mainland were still strong, were open to rejoining mainland China when the war finally ended—although it is worth noting that this willingness proved short-lived, the Kuomintang (KMT) regime needing to viciously suppress a mass uprising against its terrible misrule in 1947.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, at whose feet a great deal of blame for a whole host of problems may be laid, also laid the foundation stone for misadventure in dealing with China, including Taiwan.

Indeed, while there was a reasonable possibility that Taiwan could have been its own independent country at the end of the Second World War, it was FDR and his successor, Harry Truman, who ensured this would not happen.

Ignoring the wisdom of multiple of his predecessors, who had refused to get involved either in internal Chinese squabbles or its feuds with neighboring Japan, FDR began supporting the KMT regime of Chiang Kai-Shek.

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Why The U.S. Faces Chinese Dominance For Critical Energy Minerals

More than three years ago, in May 2021, I wrote a piece here detailing the importance of a relatively obscure mineral, antimony, to the ultimate success of alternative energy sources like wind and solar and electric vehicles, and thus to the progress of the energy transition itself.

Even more pressing is the fact that antimony is critical to the needs of major weapon systems used by the U.S. military. The piece also discussed the urgent need for policymakers to find ways to speed up the permitting processes for mining of this and an array of other critical energy minerals if the United States were to avoid becoming almost wholly dependent on China for its future energy needs.

The story was focused on the struggles of Perpetua Resources, a mining company that had at the time struggled for over a decade to obtain the needed local, state, and federal permits to mine a long-known major resource of antimony at the Stibnite mine in Idaho. Stibnite is a long-ago abandoned gold mining operation that Perpetua says it could quickly place into antimony production once all the needed permits are secured.

Since that time, West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin and fellow sponsors have tried to move federal permitting reform bills in both 2022, and again this year. The 2022 bill failed in the face of bipartisan opposition, and this year’s effort currently seems doomed to the same fate. It must seem to Sen. Manchin that no one in Washington, D.C., other than himself and a handful of fellow members of congress, is serious about getting anything real done on this pressing issue that is essential to the entire energy transition effort.

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China’s Restrictions on Antimony Exports Could Cripple US Military-Industrial Complex: Here’s Why

China has slapped export controls on antimony metals, ores and oxides effective September 15. Companies seeking to export these materials will have to apply for export licenses for dual-use products. That’s bad news for resource import-dependent American arms manufacturers.

In its explanation of last Thursday’s decision to introduce export controls on antimony, China’s Commerce Ministry said the measure was not aimed against any country, but at assuring China’s national security and fulfilling the PRC’s “non-proliferation obligations.” But with China accounting for nearly half of global antimony ore production in 2023, and the US a top buyer, it’s not hard to discern who the restrictions may hit the hardest.

The US International Trade Commission considers antimony “critical to economic and national security – similar to rare earth elements, plus cobalt and uranium.” US business media have described it as “the most important mineral you never heard of.”

That’s because in addition to a long list of civilian uses ranging from flame retardants, lead-acid batteries, and plastics, to ceramics, consumer electronics and safety clothing, antimony has a dizzying array of military applications, from armor-piercing bullets and tracer ammo to night vision goggles, laser sights, communications equipment and even components in nuclear weapons.

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US Army Soldier Pleads Guilty After Selling Military Secrets to China

A U.S. Army intelligence analyst has pleaded guilty to charges accusing him of selling military secrets to China for a total of $42,000, according to the Department of Justice.

Sgt. Korbein Schultz was an army intelligence analyst with the First Battalion of the 506th Infantry Regiment at Fort Campbell, an army installation on the Kentucky-Tennessee border. He was arrested at the military base in March following an indictment by a federal grand jury.

On Aug. 13, Schultz pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information, exporting technical data related to defense articles without a license, conspiracy to export defense articles without a license, and bribery of a public official, the Justice Department said in a press release.

“The defendant abused his access to restricted government systems to sell sensitive military information to a person he knew to be a foreign national,” said Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen of the Justice Department’s National Security Division in a statement.

“By conspiring to transmit national defense information to a person living outside the United States, this defendant callously put our national security at risk to cash in on the trust our military placed in him.”

Schultz held a Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) security clearance in the Army.

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‘Realists’ Think We Need To Prepare for a Draft So We Can Win a War With China

Doubling down on their recent war-game exercises and report on the (un)readiness of the U.S. to activate a military draft, Taren Sylvester and Katherine Kuzminski of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) have a new article in War on the Rocks, “Preparing for the Possibility of a Draft Without Panic,” laying out why they think the U.S. needs to prepare for a draft in order to be able to win an all-out war with China over Taiwan.

CNAS and War on the Rocks like to describe themselves as “realists”. But their arguments for stepped-up planning and preparation for a draft are strikingly unrealistic, in at least four respects.

First, Sylvester and Kuzminski – like the Selective Service System and the Department of Justice – entirely ignore whether, much less how or at what cost, a draft could be enforced.

The practical difficulty of enforcing a draft in the face of widespread evasion and resistance was the Achilles heel of the last U.S. draft, and has to be central to any realistic plan for a future draft.

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US Continues To Prep For War On China

We’ve been focused lately very much on Russia, Iran, and the Middle East. But the current state of war is very much a global one. Yes, China is at the center of Anglo-Zionist war plans, but the position of China geostrategically inevitably draws in all of SE and South Asia. So let’s look at that region briefly, because there are important events taking place.

The US has been openly “predicting” (promising?) that it will attack China by 2025. Yes, I did carefully consider what I just wrote. China has no intention of attacking the US, so if a war breaks out it will only have been instigated by the US. Now, this doesn’t mean that war will begin with a massive missile attack. It is more likely to begin as an economic war or, more specifically, an energy war. That is the type of war the US has been preparing for years—via regime change/color revolutions in all countries that are located along China’s trade routes—Pakistan, Bangla Desh, Myanmar, Thailand—to insure that they will participate in a blockade of China.

This is also more or less the template that the US has been following in our war on Russia and Iran. Yes, we are in a hot war with Russia, but not a full out war as regards our own military. The same could occur in the Far East—if we could find a proxy like Ukraine that would be willing to accept national destruction. I continue to believe that the Chinese on Taiwan are smarter than that.

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Is the stupidity of Australians terminal?

On 15 September 2021, Australia’s Anthony Albanese Labor Government agreed with America’s Biden and UK’s Sunak to form together against China in the Southern Hemisphere a Pacific Ocean mutual-‘defense’ Treaty like America’s 1949 original one for the Northern Hemisphere and the Atlantic Ocean (NATO), to be called AUKUS, for U.S., UK, and Australia, thus jointly committing themselves to wage a war against China, which is Australia’s main trading-partner. For Australians, it’s insanity.

Ever since 2022, Australia’s Lowy Institute polling organization has polled Australians about this, and has been finding that, pretty consistently, half of Australians think that AUKUS “will make Australia/our region more safe”; only 8% say “less safe”.

On 14 June 2023, Australia’s Financial Review headlined “Labor’s internal dissent over AUKUS is building”, and reported that behind the scenes, “criticism of AUKUS that has been levelled by Labor elders Paul Keating and Gareth Evans, as well as” others, was growing in the Labor Party.

Finally, on 8 August 2024, Britain’s Guardian bannered “Aukus pact will turn Australia into ‘51st state’ of the US, Paul Keating says: Former prime minister argues Australia has made itself a target by aligning with American ‘aggression’ towards China”. It reported that on that night, Australia’s former Prime Minister, Keating, was interviewed at length about AUKUS, and,

Australia had no quarrel with China, Keating said, and concerns about China’s designs on Taiwan were not justified because the island was “Chinese real estate”.

“Taiwan is not a vital Australian interest,” he said, adding that the American attitude to Taiwan was like China deciding that Tasmania needed help to secede from Australia.

“What Aukus is about in the American mind is turning Australia into suckers, locking us up for 40 years with American bases all around … not Australian bases,” he said.

“So Aukus is really about, in American terms, the military control of Australia. I mean, what’s happened … is likely to turn Australia into the 51st state of the United States.”

Keating told the show’s presenter, Sarah Ferguson: “We’re now defending the fact that we’re in Aukus.

“If we weren’t in Aukus, we wouldn’t need to defend it. If we didn’t have an aggressive ally like the United States – aggressive to others in the region – there’d be nobody attacking Australia. We are better left alone than we are being ‘protected’ by an aggressive power like the United States. …

Keating, a longstanding opponent of Labor’s support for the pact, said Australia had not been threatened by China, whose expanding military presence, he said, was in line with its position as the world’s second superpower.

“What do they expect [the Chinese] to do?” he said. “To move around in row boats? Canoes, maybe?

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Farming To Feed Eight Billion Is A Business, Not A Hobby

We live in a world where oligarchs accumulate land, use their media assets to denigrate natural foods, and invest in fake alternatives. On the other ‘side’, wealthy professionals calling themselves freedom-fighters travel the world and the internet insisting we should eat organic and local. Meanwhile, the food security of many of the eight billion plus of us remains at the mercy of the weather, diseases and insects. Neither side offers a viable solution, or much benefit for many beyond themselves..

An increasing realization of the corruption and greed that drives much of our New Normal is motivating a growing movement for self-sufficiency. Local sourcing of natural-grown foods is coupled with denigration of big agribusiness and industrialized food production. Incoherently, it is also often coupled with claims that those backing the big agribusiness enemy are aiming for depopulation, while the way in which small-scale agriculture will feed the world’s growing population is left unexplained.

From the comfort of big jet planes made in huge factories, it is now possible to gain likes by posting photos of the organic and rather cute livestock we left back home. These can be supplemented with pictures of the Thai rice, Costa Rican coffee and Mexican avocados from our favorite brunch spot. This approach to food and agriculture is a hobby, and a good one. But the world cannot support eight billion such hobbies.

The other side of the Agriculture coin has also been doing us harm; an obese population in rich countries with declining life expectancy, fat on industrial corn syrup, seed oils and other unnatural metabolism adulterators, coupled with declining physical activity. Nor are we gaining by unevidenced claims that diets including meat or raw milk will somehow restart an age of plagues. Or that humans should transform themselves into insectivores.

Regulating independent family farmers out of business, with their generations of knowledge, is not a step forward either but a decimation of rural society and human dignity – of the reason for living in the first place. Replacing them with centralized fake food factories funded by wealthy investors and their pet celebrities will concentrate wealth rather than food security. To survive and thrive – all of us – we need to face the realities of growing and delivering huge quantities of healthy, human food.

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Congressional Report Comes to Shocking Conclusion About a Fight Between US and China

It appears American leaders may finally be realizing the existential threat posed by Asia’s ascendant superpower.

The understanding comes after lawmakers on the Commission on the National Defense Strategy worked for over a year studying current U.S. defense spending, implementation and strategy.

The findings were released in a 132-page report on Monday that speculates America could soon find itself facing an unprecedented defeat at the hands of another world power.

“The Commission finds that, in many ways, China is outpacing the United States and has largely negated the U.S. military advantage in the Western Pacific through two decades of focused military investment,” the report said.

China is able to get the most “bang” for its buck as it only has one theater of war to think about — the Pacific.

While the United States has vested interests and treaty-bound defensive obligations worldwide, China’s primary area of operation is the Chinese mainland and the waters surrounding it.

The People’s Liberation Army and Navy have already secured shoals and islands in the South China Sea, an international waterway that Beijing has largely claimed. These fortified specks of land are now host to ship-killing missiles that would make any hostile U.S. incursion near Chinese shores an incredibly risky gamble.

Lawmakers made the gravity of the situation completely clear in the report.

“The U.S. public are largely unaware of the dangers the United States faces or the costs (financial and otherwise) required to adequately prepare,” the report read. “They do not appreciate the strength of China and its partnerships or the ramifications to daily life if a conflict were to erupt.

“They are not anticipating disruptions to their power, water, or access to all the goods on which they rely. They have not internalized the costs of the United States losing its position as a world superpower.”

The commission says in any conflict against Beijing, the “support and resolve” of the American people will be a make-or-break factor in our nation’s survival.

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