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Posted by admin in China, CHINA -PAKISTAN FRIENDSHIP, CHINA PAKISTAN CORRIDOR-CPEC, CHINA SHINING, CPEC:Pakistan's Strategic Program & First Priority on February 5th, 2021
KARACHI — China is set to lay the final stretch of a cross-border fiber optic cable in Pakistan that will create the Digital Silk Road, serving the geostrategic interests of both countries. It will connect to a submarine cable in the Arabian Sea to service countries participating in China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and Europe.
Observers see this as a strategic move to circumvent international telecommunication consortiums dominated by Western and Indian companies.
Some BRI projects have been negatively affected by the coronavirus pandemic and debt crises in partner countries, including a $6.8 billion railway project in Pakistan. Part of Beijing’s response has been to step up digital projects and development of communications infrastructure.
The Hengtong Group, one of China’s leading fiber optic and power cable makers, is heading a consortium of telecom companies from Africa, Pakistan and Hong Kong to install the Pakistan East Africa Connecting Europe (PEACE) cable in the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean.
The laying of sea cable in Pakistan’s territorial waters will begin in March following government approval this month for Cybernet, a local internet service provider, to construct an Arabian Sea landing station in Karachi, Nikkei Asia has learned.
The Mediterranean section of the cable is already being laid from Egypt to France, and the 15,000 km long cable is expected to go into service later this year.
The PEACE cable will provide the shortest direct internet route between participating countries and drastically reduce the time taken to transfer internet data.
Meanwhile, the Special Communications Organization (SCO) — the telecommunications branch of the Pakistan Army — is about to lay a fiber optic cable between Rawalpindi and the port cities of Karachi and Gwadar. The $240 million project is in partnership with China’s Huawei Technologies, and was approved by the government on Jan 21. It will also connect with the PEACE cable in the Arabian Sea.
The 850 km northern section has been operational since 2018. The fiber optic cable links the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in southwest China to Rawalpindi, where the Pakistan Army is headquartered. The $37 million link provides secure communications between China and Pakistan, which have deepened economic and strategic ties in recent years with the $50 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a flagship BRI alliance.
The project will provide Gwadar with fiber optic connectivity for the first time. The deep seaport was built by China, which also runs it. Observers believe Gwadar’s limited communications infrastructure contributed to its failure to take off as a regional transit hub.
In recent months, the CPEC Authority — the supranational body that oversees BRI projects in Pakistan — has accelerated efforts to improve Gwadar’s connectivity with major road and rail upgrades. According to Maroof Ali Shahani, chief operating officer of Cybernet, fiber optic cables will be laid alongside these new links to major national transport routes, connecting the port to the Pakistan’s national fiber optic backbone for the first time.
Pakistan is also looking for an alternate link to the internet through China. At present, most Europe-bound internet traffic from China feeds through terrestrial cables traversing Mongolia, Russia and Kazakhstan.
In 2017, Major Gen. Amir Azeem Bajwa, the then director general of SCO, told a parliamentary committee on information technology that much of Pakistan’s internet traffic was routed through India. This raised fears that sensitive data was vulnerable to hacking. According to local reports, that was when Bajwa sought approval for an alternative network to service Gwadar that avoided India.
“Heavy investment was required but Pakistan did not have the money to have a dedicated channel,” said Shahani, describing how China moved in to provide soft loans, equipment and engineering services.
Pakistan is served by seven submarine cables at present, four of which come out of India, according to Telegeography, a Washington-based telecommunications market research company. These cable networks have been developed by consortiums that include telecom companies from India, Egypt and Pakistan.
The PEACE cable is expected to help reduce Pakistan’s exposure to internet outages from damaged submarine cables by providing an additional route for internet connectivity.
Eyck Freymann, author of One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World, told Nikkei that the BRI is evolving to place less emphasis on traditional heavy infrastructure, and more on high-tech cooperation and digital services.
“Beijing wants to dominate the physical infrastructure underlying global communications, particularly the internet,” he said. “This will give it an advantage in internationalizing its tech sector and pursuing future tech-related deals with partner countries.”
“It is a way for Chinese firms to gain greater access to certain foreign markets, at a time when they are increasingly being shut out of building infrastructure like fiber optic cables and 5G technology in North America and parts of Europe,” Joshua Kurlantzick, a senior fellow for Southeast Asia at the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations, told Nikkei.
Kurlantzick said the pandemic and ensuing debt crisis has contributed to the shift in focus from traditional infrastructure projects. “The Digital Silk Road, including this project, is a way of China continuing to show that the BRI will be a major initiative,” he said.
For China, building a quick and safe route for internet traffic to Europe through a dedicated cable managed and supervised exclusively by the Chinese is vital.
Posted by admin in GLOBAL COVID -19 PANDEMIC on February 5th, 2021
Western countries succumbed to panic in the face of the Covid-19 epidemic. Turning irrational, they committed two strategic errors: confining their healthy population at the risk of destroying their economy, and betting everything on MRA vaccines to the detriment of health care, or even at the risk of causing particular disorders due to this new vaccine technique.
Covid-19 is a viral disease causing the death, in the worst case, of 0.001% of the population. The average age of death from Covid-19 in developed states is about 80 years, with a median age of about 83 years.
In comparison, countries at war experience an additional mortality, due to war, that is 5 to 8 times higher, but mainly affects males aged 18 to 30. To this must be added emigration of up to 50.00% of the population.
The Covid epidemic and war are therefore two situations that are out of all proportion, despite the apocalyptic rhetoric that confuses them [1]. Moreover, the response of those who have ventured to make this dramatic comparison has not borrowed anything, in terms of mobilisation, from those of war situations. At most, a mobile military hospital was required to take a few photos of uniforms in action. Its only real effect was to panic the population and thus deprive it of its critical spirit.
This comparison was made on the basis of erroneous information. A British statistician, whose mathematical models had been used to justify the European hospital reduction policy, Neil Ferguson, had indeed predicted more than half a million deaths in his own country and as many in France.
This scientist was unaware that a virus is a living being that does not seek to kill its hosts, but to inhabit them like a parasite. If it kills the man it has infected, it dies with him. This is why all viral epidemics are at first very deadly, and then less and less so as the virus varies and adapts to humans. It is therefore completely ridiculous to extrapolate its lethality from the devastation it causes in the first weeks of the epidemic.
Political leaders are not connoisseurs of everything. They must have a general culture that enables them to distinguish the quality of their experts in different fields. Neil Ferguson is one of those scientists who demonstrate what is asked of them, not those who seek to understand unexplained phenomena. His curriculum vitœ is just a long succession of errors commissioned by politicians and denied by the facts [2]. He was eventually dismissed from the British Cobra Council (Cabinet Office Briefing Rooms), but one of his disciples, Simon Cauchemez of the Pasteur Institute, still sits on the French Scientific Council.
Faced with the scourge of Covid, developed States have reacted by enacting border closures, curfews, administrative closures of companies, and even generalized lockdown of the population.
This was a first in history: never before had generalised lockdown – i.e. confinement of healthy populations – been used to combat an epidemic. This political measure is very costly from an educational, psychological, medical, social and economic point of view. Its effectiveness is limited to interrupting the spread of the disease in healthy families during containment at the cost of its dissemination in families where a person is already infected. When the confinement is lifted, the spread of the virus immediately resumes in healthy families.
As all developed States have progressively reduced their hospital capacities since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, most governments have adopted containment measures, not to control disease – which they cannot – but to prevent overcrowding in their hospitals. In other words, in order to continue their system of managing public health services, governments consider containment as the only possible adjustment variable. Yet the price of these confinements is much higher than more expensive hospital management. Above all, the ageing of the population in developed States makes it foreseeable that the same crisis of hospital congestion will occur every three to four years, the usual cycle of epidemics of all kinds. In practice, the use of containment condemns the countries concerned to resort to it more and more often, during epidemics of Covid, influenza or many other deadly diseases.
A comparative study by Stanford University, published on January 12, 2021, shows that countries that have practised widespread plant closures, curfews and containment have not ultimately influenced the spread of the disease, which they have only delayed, compared to countries that have respected the freedom of their citizens [3].
Contrary to popular belief, the choice was not between hospital overcrowding or containment, but between mobilizing or even requisitioning private clinics and containment. All developed countries have a private health care system that is largely capable of dealing with the overflow of patients.
The source behind the lockdown is CEPI (Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations). This association was created in Davos on the occasion of the 2015 World Economic Forum. It is headed by Dr Richard J. Hatchett. You will not find his biography on Wikipedia or even on the CEPI website. He had it removed.
This man was the designer of the Healthy Person Containment for the US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld [4]. In 2005, this member of President George W. Bush’s National Security Council was tasked with adapting US military procedures to the civilian population as part of a plan to militarise US society. Since IMs stationed abroad were instructed to confine themselves to their bases in the event of a biological terrorist attack against them, he advocated confining the entire civilian population to their homes in the event of a biological attack on US soil. This military plan was unanimously rejected by US doctors, led by Professor Donald Henderson of Johns Hopkins University. They stressed that doctors had never confined healthy populations before.
Professor Richard J. Hatchett was the first to draw a comparison between the Covid-19 epidemic and a war, in an interview on Channel 4 a few days before President Macron. His first CEPI donation, of course, was to Imperial College London. The director of this venerable institution is not British, but American, Alice Gast. In addition to being a director of the transnational oil company Chevron, she worked with Dr Richard J. Hatchett in the United States to mobilise scientists against terrorism. She supported propaganda work to discredit what I had written about the September 11th attacks. In addition, one of the most famous professors at Imperial College is Neil Ferguson, the author of the fairy-tale curves projecting the spread of the epidemic.
Faced with this new epidemic, doctors found themselves without treatment. Western governments immediately directed medical research towards the discovery of appropriate vaccines.
In view of the sums involved, they directed all budgets towards genetic vaccines and closed research into pathology and care.
The use of the RNA-based vaccine technique, chosen by Moderna/NIAID, Pfizer/BioNTech/FosunPharma and CureVac, is not expected to involve classical side effects, but it is not without danger. Until now, this technique has been considered with great caution because it affects the genetic make-up of patients. This is why, in the absence of sufficient studies, these companies have demanded that their state clients relieve them of any legal liability.
Doctors who try to practise their art by treating their patients according to the Hippocratic oath have been prosecuted by their disciplinary bodies. The treatments they have implemented have been ridiculed, even banned, instead of being evaluated.
This is the second strategic error.
Western doctors, who, with rare exceptions, have never been confronted with the demands of war and disaster medicine, sometimes panicked. At the beginning of the epidemic, some did nothing at the first symptoms, waiting for the appearance of a cytokinic storm, of a brutal inflammation, to plunge their patients into an artificial coma. As a result, it was more often inappropriate care than the disease that killed the first patients. The disastrous results of some hospitals compared to others in the same region bear witness to this, despite the fraternal ban on criticism of incompetent doctors.
The gigantic budgets allocated to vaccines make it necessary not to discover a treatment without risking the bankruptcy of multinational pharmaceutical companies.
This is why all research in this field has been subjected to strict censorship. Yet a cocktail of blood-liquefying, immune-stimulating, antiviral and anti-inflammatory drugs is being tested in Asia, which treats almost all patients if administered at the first sign of symptoms. Similarly, in Venezuela, the medical and pharmacological authority has approved a drug, Carvativir, which, according to the authority, treats almost all patients if administered at the first sign of symptoms [5].
As I am not competent in this area, I will not comment on these treatments, but it is frightening that Western doctors are not informed about them and have not had the opportunity to evaluate them.
The Pasteur Institute of Lille and the company APTEEUS, for their part, in September 2020, identified a drug that had fallen into disuse as preventing the replication of the virus. They were careful not to advertise it so as not to have to face the rivalry of the vaccine industry. Their experiments are now coming to an end. The manufacture of this drug, originally a suppository for children, has resumed in France so that it could be advertised soon [6].
Moreover, censorship of non-Western medicines is not only unacceptable because it is detrimental to human health, but also because it is carried out by unelected powers (Google, Facebook, Twitter etc.). The problem here is not whether these treatments are effective or not, but to free up research so that it can study these molecules in order to reject, approve or improve them.
Incidentally, let us observe that there is a strategic contradiction between slowing down contamination through the practice of confining healthy people and accelerating it through the generalisation of live or inactivated vaccines. However, this remark is not valid in the case of RNA vaccines, which are destined to become predominant in the West.
The second strategic error is the result of group thinking. Politicians imagine that only technical progress will provide solutions to problems that cannot be solved. Thus, if vaccines can be discovered using a new technique based not on viruses but on “messenger RNA”, the epidemic should be defeated. It no longer occurs to anyone that we can treat the Covid and do without heavy investment.
This is the ideology of the World Economic Forum in Davos and the CEPI. It is therefore in the order of things that governments do not react when transnationals censor the work of Asian or Venezuelan doctors, blocking the freedom of scientific research.
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Posted by admin in Money Laundering & Tax Evasion, OPINION LEADER on February 3rd, 2021
When the good times are rolling very few have the foresight of seeing the storm around the corner. Whilst it takes time to accumulate gains, reckoning is usually a quick phenomenon when it suddenly strikes…
As I have noted, the elite of Pakistan have enjoyed a very good run, especially since 1992 i.e., after the enactment of the Protection of Economic Reforms Act and some other near criminal acts against our nation. It became extremely easy to create tax-free wealth and stash it abroad, and our gluttonous elite availed every opportunity to indulge in it. I have discussed this in detail in my books and articles. Successive governments have tried to bring back this wealth, however as a seasoned financial advisor I know for certain that once money leaves the shores it is very difficult to bring it back; those who say otherwise are trying to fool people. So the party continues… for now.
However, post-2020 we do not live in the same world, the developed countries, where the wealth of our nation is mostly stashed are under a severe strain and three prominent themes are originating from the Covid pandemic:
Who do you think will this impact the most? I feel this will be the elite of developing countries who have stashed their wealth in these western “safe havens”. Yet the day when these havens will be the least safe for our elite is soon approaching. Laws, unthinkable only until a few years, are firmly in place, an example of which is the Unexplained Wealth Order (UWO) of 2018, in the UK (one of the most popular destinations for foreign capital) where the onus is on the person to prove the source of his or her wealth.
Most of the wealth of our elite is undeclared, it is not necessarily always income from corruption or other illegal activities, it could be legitimate income from a legal business that was simply not declared or taxed. However, in the eyes of many jurisdictions, undeclared income due to any reason is fair-game and can be subjected to confiscation. Many might not know this but confiscations under the UWO have picked up pace recently.
Laws like this are only the beginning, confiscations of undeclared wealth solves a lot of problems that I have noted above for these developed countries and trust me no one in the developing or developed world will shed a tear when we see mass confiscations for such elite.
If you do not want to bring it back at least declare it here, so that you have some protection against foreign authorities although full protection is still not guaranteed.
Operating in the developed countries is completely different from operating in Pakistan; there your connections or “nepotism” cannot save you and, there are no easy “settlements” for small sums. The advisors that you might have for these matters are either outright scamsters, incompetent lackeys or at best lower tier professionals – top grade professionals in developed countries will not do business with undeclared/risky clients.
I have given up hope in appealing to the patriotism and honour of our people because this approach has failed miserably. What has driven me to sheer despair is the prospect that it would be the most horrible fate for the wealth of our nation to be confiscated in foreign lands to finance their deficits, whilst our country is ravaged by poverty and is perpetually holding the begging bowl.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2021
Posted by admin in CURRENT EVENTS on February 3rd, 2021
A new exclusive from The Daily Beast titled “White House Reporters: Biden Team Wanted Our Questions in Advance” reports that the White House press corps is being pressured to provide briefing questions ahead of time in a way that makes even mainstream media journalists uncomfortable.
“While it’s a relief to see briefings return, particularly with a commitment to factual information, the press can’t really do its job in the briefing room if the White House is picking and choosing the questions they want,” one White House correspondent told The Daily Beast. “That’s not really a free press at all.”
“It pissed off enough reporters for people to flag it for the [White House Correspondents Association] for them to deal with it,” another source reportedly said.
While Obama’s deputy press secretary Eric Schultz calls the move “textbook communications work” designed to ensure that Biden’s press secretary has answers ready instead of having to “repeatedly punt questions”, clearly the reporters on the job feel differently.
“The requests prompted concerns among the White House press corps, whose members, like many reporters, are sensitive to the perception that they are coordinating with political communications staffers,” writes the Beast.
Having questions in advance would indeed be a good way to help insulate press secretary Jen Psaki (for whom liberals are already developing an unwholes
So this is just one more item on the steadily growing pile of fake things about this administration. Everything about it is phony. This is the Astroturf Administration.
Biden and his cohorts point-blank lied about sending out $2000 checks.
Deportations are continuing unimpeded despite all the campaign pledges to the contrary.
The kids in cages that made Rachel Maddow cry on air during the Trump administration are still in their cages and will remain there for the foreseeable future.
The pro-environment candidate has authorized dozens of new oil drilling permits within days of taking office.
Re-entering the Iran nuclear deal seems as far off as ever, with the administration continuing
Biden still hasn’t taken any solid steps to end the horrific war on Yemen, or even to end US facilitation of the slaughter as he promised on the campaign trail (he could have taken major steps toward doing this the day he took office and chose not to).
While this president hides from the press due to his rapidly deteriorating ability to answer questions in complete sentences, the mass media churn out think pieces about how taking himself out of the spotlight is actually a brilliant political move.
As Our Hidden History recently put it, “We got sold a sack of political oregano.”
And that’s all the US empire ever is, really: a murderous, tyrannical planetary oppressor covered up by varying degrees of dishonesty. During the Trump administration the depravity was a little more honest about itself, now during the Biden administration it’s a little more dishonest. The only major change is the thickness with which the makeup is slathered over the skull.
Everything about life in our current world order is dominated by phoniness. Our culture is manufactured by Hollywood. Our dominating political structure is manufactured by think tanks. Our perceptions of what’s going on in the world are manufactured in Langley and Arlington. The whole thing is so fake and stupid. We’ve got to figure out a way to snap out of these artificial boxes they are placing over our minds and these perceptual filters they are placing over our eyes, and birth something real and authentic into our world.
Caitlin’s articles are entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking her on Facebook, following her antics on Twitter, checking out her podcast, throwing some money into her hat on Patreon or Paypal, or buying her book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. https://
Posted by admin in CURRENT EVENTS, Decline of Empires, THE MAD DUDE, Trump, Trump-The Global Nightmare, US FOREIGN POLICY & INTERNATIONAL LAW, USA, World Affairs & US on February 3rd, 2021
America is entrenched in deep political crises of multiple dimensions. The working of political institutions, politicians, human character, morals and responsibility signal rituals of evil eye paradigms and a future of miseries of innumerable multitudes. The snapshot of American democracy and a rethinking moment in time appears shrouded by unknown purpose of catastrophic political consequences. Aftermath of the presidential election and an opportunity for great transformation to a peaceful change looks unpredictable between the end of the old delusional concept of power and the beginning of the new. Tonight (January 3, 2021), the CNN is playing an hour long audio tape of President Trump’s conversation with Brad Farrensperger (Georgia Secretary of State) asking: “ I just want 11,780 votes …one more vote” to victory and “find” votes to “tilt the 2020 election” and you can “recalculate” the election. Carl Bernstein and other US media analysts demand immediate resignation of Trump and interpret it as a political conspiracy to invalidate the Joe Biden presidential election. Others call it a “bomb shell” and a crime against American democracy just as it was the “Watergate” planned by Nixon. President Trump claims victory in other states and again calls it a “stolen election” from his candidacy – a highly contentious image of political time left at the White House. It seems that love of power is at the heart of incomprehensible claims of dreadful mystery. This formidable evidence could prolong the systematic and peaceful transfer of power as a destabilization factor in American modern history. In an endless self-repeating false rhetoric, the refutation of Biden presidential confirmation at the Senate on January 6, could lead to widespread public outrage and unrest in time and space unheard of in contemporary American politics.
Brad Farrensperger sounds unwilling in audio to accord any substance to Trump and his illogical demand. He tries to clarify the election authentication process and its legitimate outcome in favor of Joe Biden- the President Elect. The 2020 American Presidential election should have been a springboard for planned peaceful transfer of power and political change for future-making. Despite legal authentication of the election outcomes and declaration of Joe-Biden, the President Elect, Mr. Trump continues to search for morally and intellectually forbidden vicious tactics to undermine the US systems of democratic norms. The road to egoistic political hell is paved with good intentions without any reality. Assumingly, no American court or tribunal could prosecute political wickedness and obsessed crimes against democracy. If all goes to favor the poisonous politics of the few and 140 coerced GOP Republicans by Donald Trump will challenge the public verdict to oppose the Biden -President Elect confirmation on January 6 at the US Senate confirmation. It could be interpreted as a hybrid political culture of cataclysmic end in modern history.
The world will watch with alarmed curiosity – how America and its acclaimed liberal democracy are vulnerable to unthinkable change and unpredictability for the future generations. It would affirm that US textbooks on a working democracy are incomprehensible to the “Common Sense” and rational understanding. There appears to be “No Goodwill” active political bridge builders in current extreme American emotional and intellectual decadent upsurge. Those invested with public trust are far from any logical pursuit to speak out truthfully any bipartisan political language of the time. Joe Biden and the Democratic Party appear mature, resilient, intellectual and morally conscience and self-disciplined without erratic behavior to ensure that American systems of political governance should work for the good of WE, the People of America. It could be a political crime to dislodge Joe Biden from assuming the presidency on January 20th, 2021. The Republican leadership under Trump appears delusional and intellectual exhausted and making conflicting statements to assert their own verdict of “fraudulent election” when all the 50 states and territories have confirmed the winner – Joe Biden as President Elect. President Trump failure is more of a blindfolded person leading the blinds as there is always inconsistency in politically delusional adventures.
America is in desperate need of moral and intellectual leadership. In situations of adversity and crises, leaders represent self-confidence and optimism for change, not egoistic agenda and belligerent outbursts as the nuisance of individualistic political indoctrination. President Trump is pursuing an unsurpassably intense political conspiracy to degenerate the present and future of American political governance. Trump is a warrior without any characteristics of true wisdom and political vision.
Comforting the major paradoxes of history as Arnold Toynbee (A Study of History) described warrior as dreamers devoid of moral and intellectual imagination when they come close to stagnation they jump to irrational outbursts and conclusions about the facts of life. Wrong people, glued to wrong thinking, do the wrong things without any rational sense of time, people’s interest and history. Trump failed to see the interests of the America people and global community to a peaceful approach to conflict management through dialogue and non-rhetoric belligerent statements. Naïve egoism and one-sided complacency to individualistic interest cannot further the cause of peace within America.
Biden and his team would urgently need rethinking and men of ideas and creative strategies to undo the harm and distrust that fractured the American political stability. The new administration if installed on January 20th, should articulate a Plan enriched with wisdom, vision and forbearance to pursue political, moral and intellectual pursuits for change. Would Biden and his team give priorities to dogmatic concepts of power and exploitation of truth or the forgotten – We, the People? In a recent article: “America at Crossroads: Presidential Election and the Clash of Democracy” (Uncommon Thought Journal, USA: 12.14.2020), this author envisaged the following agenda for Biden and team to take urgent action: https://www.uncommonthought.com/mtblog/archives/2020/12/14/america-at-the-crossroads-the-presidential-election-and-the-clash-of-democracy.php
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