Jerm, I have been folowing you sice the plandemic, 69 years old , and I am still gobsmacked how easily people become sheep! Proudly anti vaxxer and unfortunately the bullies in washington haven't noticed yet that China is lightyears ahead of them! So glad you got to see Pepe, all the best and enjoy your visit!
O, dear - I'm going to pop in and keep an eye on your comment sections, because you are most definitely going to have the woke comments from people who just love to knee jerk uninformed opinions and aren't really interested in learning something new, or challenging their belief systems.
People love outsourcing their thinking and opinions about subjecst to their favourite talking head, be it MSM or now the alt media talking heads, that you can see if you have done your due diligence on a subject, that many of these alt media celebrities these days, are actually just as bad as the MSM, if not worse.
"One of the saddest lessons in history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back." - Carl Sagan
"If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we are up for grabs fro the next charlatan - political or religious - who comes ambling along" - Carl Sagan.
You do know, Carl Sagan himself was a bamboozler? Being in the priesthood of Scientism's new cosmology of ball-earth dogma, he kept the "enlightenment" of 16th c propaganda going.
THANK YOU FOR HAVING THE GUTS TO DO THIS! It's long been time for the citizens of the West to realize that the same people who lied about Iraq, Afghanistan, 9/11, Ukraine, Covid, hell even margarine, sugar, pharmaceutical drugs, etc- these same people are the ones saying "China bad". Thank you SO much for going against the grain. And remember, a decent portion of the negativity is likely coming from trolls. They always appear when you're on target and their purpose is to demoralize you, discourage you, make you doubt your reasoning. Pay them no nevermind!
My friend who lived there almost 20 years until covid loved the people but said they are unaware of how controlled they are compared to western nations currently. The internet is not live, it is like cached with many sites blocked or edited and for example NYT articles rewritten or blanked out. She could not purchase anything online that was outside of China and her digital salary only worked within China. Her phone was like a wallet and for a long time she thought it was her own lack of tech savvy why it wouldnt work certain places or calling certain numbers or letting her in places, but it was programmed limitations. So she and all her foreign colleagues had set up bank accounts in places they traveled to for vacation like Thailand. Family or friends would wire them money there. Books were confiscated from care packages. She gave up renting foreign (like American or French) movies or buying dvds because they were always altered and edited - censored - and she couldnt even always figure out what was so objectionable - not political just cultural. She was not able to speak freely with her Chinese students on many topics they asked about without being harassed by interrogations and minders starting to follow her everywhere (despite the complete camera coverage). So until you try to live there as a "free" westerner the way you are used to you wont see the control.
Those differing opinions must be valid then. No reason to pretend its all hunky dory to a westerner whose trip was coordinated and funded by an organization with, no doubt, altruistic motives. Seriously. But we'll wait to hear what you have to say. Cheers!
Interesting how different perspectives can emerge even from siblings living in the same family. Good for you for going over there to find out for yourself.
You must be another zombie funded by the 1.8 billion fund yearly to discredit China. Nobody will fall into your stupid narrative anymore except frogs in the well who know nothing, refused to see the outside world and listening only to the wall of the well
Jerm I listened to your conversation with Pepe while running. I have found Pepe so objective since I came across his journalism and work. Likewise your entrance to the stage during Covid on your podcast then TNT now Uk Column has been one of the fresh critical thinking. Your voice resonates asking the question why? Or what if? I wish more would listen to or even entertain maybe shattering the glass so to speak on what they were taught (indoctrinated) at school or university. But it’s only because you make hard choices that we now have a place to seek hear truth in the fog of war. Thank you.
One of my nephews moved to Beijing about 10 years ago to become an actor. He said the Los Angeles is so locked in the best way for him to start his career was to go where the action is. He took language lessons, taught English and worked as a chiropractor. He was hired to play western villains for a while and secured a major role in “The Tears of Nanking” about the 1937 horror done be the Japanese army in the City of Nanking.
Did they treat you like a born and bred Chinaman or a foreigner? Do you think your experience was anything similar to locals? Is it possible your experience and what you witnessed was carefully managed because you were a foreigner?
Whom or what would treat him differently. Jerm would be an object of curiosity for many local because foreigners are still relatively scarce. Local treat each other with great humility, internal tourism is a very big thing in China. In recent Oct 10 day national holiday, 800 million internal Chinese tourist visiting every corner of China.
I recently discovered Chinese costume dramas on YouTube— filmed in Communist China mainland. I was blown away by the redemptive themes I saw in them.
I’ve been working on trying to detox my brain from the indoctrination of systems of theology I was raised in to find the image of God in all cultures. It’s there when you look for it.
I know a bit about China because I have very close friend who lives in US but is from Shanghai. My friend would say China is very safe and advanced, but also very surveilled, but it has worked favorably, at least for now. (We are also heavily surveilled in US, maybe more.) I would say, as a US citizen, that there are countries and cultures, and there are governments. You cannot judge the people by their governments because they don’t have much control over them are not privy to what their governments are actually involved in, including abroad. If a government has a lot to lose, it will do what is needed to protect it, not necessarily the people, but the government, the bureaucracy. In that way, China is not likely that different than other powerful governments. They do seem to be expanding soft power/influence around the world, because they need resources. Everyone does. And US/Western soft powers are receding, it appears, but the government complex isn’t going to give in easily. 😵💫
"For example, discuss why the COVID jab is bad news, and you’ll get many nodding in agreement. It starts to feel like we’re part of a real social movement for change, with “our side” flipping the bird and pushing back." Except for Noam Chomsky.
Yes, indeed: Chomsky is exactly the kind of controlled opposition he feigns to warn us about. He completely discredited himself with his brazen dismissal of both the JFK and 9/11 conspiracies.
The problem with Chomsky saying them is the fact he has such standing in the academic community. As a consequence, he's effectively leading a potentially very powerful and disruptive cohort of fellow academics up the garden path, which makes him especially pernicious, in my view.
Barrie Zwicker has covered this thoroughly, in Towers of Deception.
Moreover, anyone who attends to the mainstream narrative with a critical eye soon works out such things for themselves anyway.
What you're doing is wokeness. The quote is good and it is what I used. I don't care about anything else. Pretend he didn't say it, then, if it triggers you so much.
Chomsky may say: “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views.” but he is himself a licensed dissident doing exactly the same thing when he says that. Lol. No one speaks "truth to power" for over 60 years at MIT and really challenges the system he purports to criticize.
So... first time reader here. Looking forward to your stories.
I am sorta put off by your swagger... you don't get to know the truth in three weeks.
The best you can do for us is to say, this is what I saw, and this is what I think about what I saw. And invite other perspectives on that.
I grew up under communism, and know first hand how naive and easily duped westerners are regarding other regimes, particularly regimes hell-bent on hiding the truth. So hey, bring it on! :-)
-Additionally, I gathered a lot of information surrounding social credit scoring, digital ID, surveillance, censorship, Uyghur genocide, and more, all of which I’m going to write about here in the coming weeks...but seriously, we're all wrong about China...🙄
I copied and pasted the author's own words...I myself don't have the evidence, other than pointing out the author's own blatant bias of China as a successful society..
I have a lifetime fondness for all things Chinese. No amount of propaganda can convince me to be wary of them. I am really looking forward to your forthcoming reports. xx
I agree with all points. I just watched the documentary "Total Trust." It's a primer on Social Credit Scores, the Chinese justice system, and attorney imprisonment. Well done. There is a shot of protestors who have had their bank accounts frozen in Henang province. They didn't say why the accounts were frozen. [I thought a biomentric ID was in place everywhere in China, but according to The Agenda, some provinces are freezing the people's bank accounts to force the biometric ID on them (like Vietnam, Thailand, etc.]
Way back, someone I knew bicycled across China and parts of the circumference. I asked him what his overall impression was and all he said was, "There are so many people."
A couple of months ago, I watched an episode from China Spotlight:
“Where Is Everyone?” — China’s Cities Are Empty, Funerals Outnumber Weddings 17 to 1
It has that famous night time clip of the people in the highrises begging to be let out during the Covid lockdowns.
The US military is planning to move carrier groups to the South China Sea in 18 months. The personnel think it is to sabre rattle over Taiwan, but with China providing 91% of the USA's rare earth metal / element products... it won't amount to much, unless the US military/Trump's handlers complete their "Fast 41" critical mineral regulatory waiver program (mining can commence in 30 days regardless of what the public says or the state regulations say) and no longer need China for sensitive technology that require those rare earth metals / elements.
[We know the US military wants those minerals badly, or they would not have killed 10,000 Americans a year ago in the Appalachian Smoky Mtns of Western North Carolina in one morning with a water structured hurricane Helene - and then lie about the fatality count. Illegal mining on public park land commenced near Canton, NC. Local witnesses estimate 5-10 thousand dump trucks leaving the area with armed escorts and if anyone ventured close to look at the operation, they were threatened with a $5,000 fine (for "looking at Blue Ridge Parkway reconstruction projects"). State political offices say nothing - cowards to a man or woman].
China is a BIG country... so there have to be people who are managing to live in relative peace. But I don't watch Chinese films anymore. "XiuXiu: The Sent Down Girl" was absolutely flattening.
I'm really looking forward to your real nfo on China. :)))
Three hours. That movie is three hours long. And then I watched a historical one (4 hours too!) about the son of a prostitute who became one of the highly trained stage actor. To get him into acting school at age 6 or 7, she had to cut off the 6th finger on his hand in a marketplace with a butcher knife and no anesthetic. After that, I swore off Chinese movies - especially the historical ones.
For more of an uplift there's a documentary about a girl who's Dad is a champion Eagle trainer. She learns to be the first girl to do it in the village.
The Eagle Huntress (2016) – The Eagle Huntress follows the story of Aisholpan, a 13-year-old Kazakh girl from Mongolia, as she attempts to become the first female eagle hunter to compete in the Eagle Festival at Ulgii, Mongolia, established in 1999. She belongs to a family of Eagle trainers. The director Bell, and the entire production crew, are "embedded" in Ulgii and the surrounding parts of western Mongolia, with seemingly unrestricted access to Aisholpan and her family. What we get is a heart-warming documentary.
And the book "Daughter of the Yellow River" is good. Very happy ending for her. I never knew people all over the world are learning English using the captioned TV programs.
Oh, and "Green Gold" about the restoration of the land around the headwaters of the Yellow River. That documentary was the most inspiring environmental documentary I have ever seen.
It’s worth visiting Taiwan as a cultural comparison to China. Lived in Taiwan, China and Korea. There’s a great deal of nuance about which is a better place to live and why. Nowhere is perfect, but most have their good and bad points.
Jerm, I have been folowing you sice the plandemic, 69 years old , and I am still gobsmacked how easily people become sheep! Proudly anti vaxxer and unfortunately the bullies in washington haven't noticed yet that China is lightyears ahead of them! So glad you got to see Pepe, all the best and enjoy your visit!
O, dear - I'm going to pop in and keep an eye on your comment sections, because you are most definitely going to have the woke comments from people who just love to knee jerk uninformed opinions and aren't really interested in learning something new, or challenging their belief systems.
People love outsourcing their thinking and opinions about subjecst to their favourite talking head, be it MSM or now the alt media talking heads, that you can see if you have done your due diligence on a subject, that many of these alt media celebrities these days, are actually just as bad as the MSM, if not worse.
"One of the saddest lessons in history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back." - Carl Sagan
"If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we are up for grabs fro the next charlatan - political or religious - who comes ambling along" - Carl Sagan.
You do know, Carl Sagan himself was a bamboozler? Being in the priesthood of Scientism's new cosmology of ball-earth dogma, he kept the "enlightenment" of 16th c propaganda going.
Everyone and everything is controlled opposition! The CIA told me so!
lol
THANK YOU FOR HAVING THE GUTS TO DO THIS! It's long been time for the citizens of the West to realize that the same people who lied about Iraq, Afghanistan, 9/11, Ukraine, Covid, hell even margarine, sugar, pharmaceutical drugs, etc- these same people are the ones saying "China bad". Thank you SO much for going against the grain. And remember, a decent portion of the negativity is likely coming from trolls. They always appear when you're on target and their purpose is to demoralize you, discourage you, make you doubt your reasoning. Pay them no nevermind!
My friend who lived there almost 20 years until covid loved the people but said they are unaware of how controlled they are compared to western nations currently. The internet is not live, it is like cached with many sites blocked or edited and for example NYT articles rewritten or blanked out. She could not purchase anything online that was outside of China and her digital salary only worked within China. Her phone was like a wallet and for a long time she thought it was her own lack of tech savvy why it wouldnt work certain places or calling certain numbers or letting her in places, but it was programmed limitations. So she and all her foreign colleagues had set up bank accounts in places they traveled to for vacation like Thailand. Family or friends would wire them money there. Books were confiscated from care packages. She gave up renting foreign (like American or French) movies or buying dvds because they were always altered and edited - censored - and she couldnt even always figure out what was so objectionable - not political just cultural. She was not able to speak freely with her Chinese students on many topics they asked about without being harassed by interrogations and minders starting to follow her everywhere (despite the complete camera coverage). So until you try to live there as a "free" westerner the way you are used to you wont see the control.
And yet, people I spoke to, who live there, have a different opinion.
Those differing opinions must be valid then. No reason to pretend its all hunky dory to a westerner whose trip was coordinated and funded by an organization with, no doubt, altruistic motives. Seriously. But we'll wait to hear what you have to say. Cheers!
No reason to think it's all a dystopian hellhole either. That is the point I am making.
Agree
Interesting how different perspectives can emerge even from siblings living in the same family. Good for you for going over there to find out for yourself.
Exactly. I've been here (in China) for seven years now. That is a good summation by your friend. I got here a year before COVID in 2019.
Sounds more like USA or UK or Germany.
You must be another zombie funded by the 1.8 billion fund yearly to discredit China. Nobody will fall into your stupid narrative anymore except frogs in the well who know nothing, refused to see the outside world and listening only to the wall of the well
Agree
Jerm I listened to your conversation with Pepe while running. I have found Pepe so objective since I came across his journalism and work. Likewise your entrance to the stage during Covid on your podcast then TNT now Uk Column has been one of the fresh critical thinking. Your voice resonates asking the question why? Or what if? I wish more would listen to or even entertain maybe shattering the glass so to speak on what they were taught (indoctrinated) at school or university. But it’s only because you make hard choices that we now have a place to seek hear truth in the fog of war. Thank you.
One of my nephews moved to Beijing about 10 years ago to become an actor. He said the Los Angeles is so locked in the best way for him to start his career was to go where the action is. He took language lessons, taught English and worked as a chiropractor. He was hired to play western villains for a while and secured a major role in “The Tears of Nanking” about the 1937 horror done be the Japanese army in the City of Nanking.
Did they treat you like a born and bred Chinaman or a foreigner? Do you think your experience was anything similar to locals? Is it possible your experience and what you witnessed was carefully managed because you were a foreigner?
Whom or what would treat him differently. Jerm would be an object of curiosity for many local because foreigners are still relatively scarce. Local treat each other with great humility, internal tourism is a very big thing in China. In recent Oct 10 day national holiday, 800 million internal Chinese tourist visiting every corner of China.
Definitely would be in North Korea.
no not.
I will follow with interest!
I recently discovered Chinese costume dramas on YouTube— filmed in Communist China mainland. I was blown away by the redemptive themes I saw in them.
I’ve been working on trying to detox my brain from the indoctrination of systems of theology I was raised in to find the image of God in all cultures. It’s there when you look for it.
You don’t need to call it “communist China,” the country is called China. It’s as simple as that.
I know a bit about China because I have very close friend who lives in US but is from Shanghai. My friend would say China is very safe and advanced, but also very surveilled, but it has worked favorably, at least for now. (We are also heavily surveilled in US, maybe more.) I would say, as a US citizen, that there are countries and cultures, and there are governments. You cannot judge the people by their governments because they don’t have much control over them are not privy to what their governments are actually involved in, including abroad. If a government has a lot to lose, it will do what is needed to protect it, not necessarily the people, but the government, the bureaucracy. In that way, China is not likely that different than other powerful governments. They do seem to be expanding soft power/influence around the world, because they need resources. Everyone does. And US/Western soft powers are receding, it appears, but the government complex isn’t going to give in easily. 😵💫
Very well put. The people are different than their government....everywhere.
"For example, discuss why the COVID jab is bad news, and you’ll get many nodding in agreement. It starts to feel like we’re part of a real social movement for change, with “our side” flipping the bird and pushing back." Except for Noam Chomsky.
Yes, indeed: Chomsky is exactly the kind of controlled opposition he feigns to warn us about. He completely discredited himself with his brazen dismissal of both the JFK and 9/11 conspiracies.
You have to ask: who's he protecting?
But his quote is still very relevant.
Hi Jerm,
Yes, but it's somewhat diluted by the broader context of the man himself. I prefer those who actually walk the walk.
I prefer ideas. I like his quote.
Many others have said similar things.
The problem with Chomsky saying them is the fact he has such standing in the academic community. As a consequence, he's effectively leading a potentially very powerful and disruptive cohort of fellow academics up the garden path, which makes him especially pernicious, in my view.
Barrie Zwicker has covered this thoroughly, in Towers of Deception.
Moreover, anyone who attends to the mainstream narrative with a critical eye soon works out such things for themselves anyway.
What you're doing is wokeness. The quote is good and it is what I used. I don't care about anything else. Pretend he didn't say it, then, if it triggers you so much.
His reward? A nursing home with a DNR message. The crocodile is waiting .
Chomsky may say: “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views.” but he is himself a licensed dissident doing exactly the same thing when he says that. Lol. No one speaks "truth to power" for over 60 years at MIT and really challenges the system he purports to criticize.
So... first time reader here. Looking forward to your stories.
I am sorta put off by your swagger... you don't get to know the truth in three weeks.
The best you can do for us is to say, this is what I saw, and this is what I think about what I saw. And invite other perspectives on that.
I grew up under communism, and know first hand how naive and easily duped westerners are regarding other regimes, particularly regimes hell-bent on hiding the truth. So hey, bring it on! :-)
-Additionally, I gathered a lot of information surrounding social credit scoring, digital ID, surveillance, censorship, Uyghur genocide, and more, all of which I’m going to write about here in the coming weeks...but seriously, we're all wrong about China...🙄
Maybe you aren't. It depends what you think you know.
I copied and pasted the author's own words...I myself don't have the evidence, other than pointing out the author's own blatant bias of China as a successful society..
You must be talking about capitalism then...because, if you're not...you're talking out of your a**
I have a lifetime fondness for all things Chinese. No amount of propaganda can convince me to be wary of them. I am really looking forward to your forthcoming reports. xx
I agree with all points. I just watched the documentary "Total Trust." It's a primer on Social Credit Scores, the Chinese justice system, and attorney imprisonment. Well done. There is a shot of protestors who have had their bank accounts frozen in Henang province. They didn't say why the accounts were frozen. [I thought a biomentric ID was in place everywhere in China, but according to The Agenda, some provinces are freezing the people's bank accounts to force the biometric ID on them (like Vietnam, Thailand, etc.]
Way back, someone I knew bicycled across China and parts of the circumference. I asked him what his overall impression was and all he said was, "There are so many people."
A couple of months ago, I watched an episode from China Spotlight:
“Where Is Everyone?” — China’s Cities Are Empty, Funerals Outnumber Weddings 17 to 1
https://rumble.com/v6szc2j-china-where-is-everyone-ghost-villages-empty-cities-fake-births.html?e9s=src_v1_s%2Csrc_v1_s_m
https://rumble.com/v6szc2j-china-where-is-everyone-ghost-villages-empty-cities-fake-births.html
It has that famous night time clip of the people in the highrises begging to be let out during the Covid lockdowns.
The US military is planning to move carrier groups to the South China Sea in 18 months. The personnel think it is to sabre rattle over Taiwan, but with China providing 91% of the USA's rare earth metal / element products... it won't amount to much, unless the US military/Trump's handlers complete their "Fast 41" critical mineral regulatory waiver program (mining can commence in 30 days regardless of what the public says or the state regulations say) and no longer need China for sensitive technology that require those rare earth metals / elements.
[We know the US military wants those minerals badly, or they would not have killed 10,000 Americans a year ago in the Appalachian Smoky Mtns of Western North Carolina in one morning with a water structured hurricane Helene - and then lie about the fatality count. Illegal mining on public park land commenced near Canton, NC. Local witnesses estimate 5-10 thousand dump trucks leaving the area with armed escorts and if anyone ventured close to look at the operation, they were threatened with a $5,000 fine (for "looking at Blue Ridge Parkway reconstruction projects"). State political offices say nothing - cowards to a man or woman].
China is a BIG country... so there have to be people who are managing to live in relative peace. But I don't watch Chinese films anymore. "XiuXiu: The Sent Down Girl" was absolutely flattening.
I'm really looking forward to your real nfo on China. :)))
Wow! I just read the Wikipedia summary of "XiuXiu: The Sent Down Girl"! What horrors. And it's flattering? Yikes!
Three hours. That movie is three hours long. And then I watched a historical one (4 hours too!) about the son of a prostitute who became one of the highly trained stage actor. To get him into acting school at age 6 or 7, she had to cut off the 6th finger on his hand in a marketplace with a butcher knife and no anesthetic. After that, I swore off Chinese movies - especially the historical ones.
For more of an uplift there's a documentary about a girl who's Dad is a champion Eagle trainer. She learns to be the first girl to do it in the village.
The Eagle Huntress (2016) – The Eagle Huntress follows the story of Aisholpan, a 13-year-old Kazakh girl from Mongolia, as she attempts to become the first female eagle hunter to compete in the Eagle Festival at Ulgii, Mongolia, established in 1999. She belongs to a family of Eagle trainers. The director Bell, and the entire production crew, are "embedded" in Ulgii and the surrounding parts of western Mongolia, with seemingly unrestricted access to Aisholpan and her family. What we get is a heart-warming documentary.
And the book "Daughter of the Yellow River" is good. Very happy ending for her. I never knew people all over the world are learning English using the captioned TV programs.
Oh, and "Green Gold" about the restoration of the land around the headwaters of the Yellow River. That documentary was the most inspiring environmental documentary I have ever seen.
It’s worth visiting Taiwan as a cultural comparison to China. Lived in Taiwan, China and Korea. There’s a great deal of nuance about which is a better place to live and why. Nowhere is perfect, but most have their good and bad points.