The worst has yet to come. US lenders preparing for possible bank runs. A record $165 billion was borrowed from the Fed after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. Only China’s 4 major banks are safe. 最壞的情況還沒有到來。美國銀行為可能發生的銀行擠兌做準備。矽谷銀行倒閉後，從美聯儲借了創紀錄的 1650 億美元。只有中國四大銀行是安全的.

US’s Mafia verses Triads ultimate showdown: US security forces brace for possible Trump ‘arrest’ – media. The former leader could face charges as early as next week, multiple news outlets have reported. 美國黑手黨與三合會的終極對決：美國安全部隊準備迎接可能的特朗普“逮捕” – 媒體。據多家新聞媒體報導，這位前領導人最早可能在下週面臨指控.

Three Kingdoms period, before a major battle, Cao Cao ran short of food, so he order to arrest the general. Before the execution, the general begged it was not my fault. Cao Cao said I know but I must killed you so my army blamed you not me. Biden is using the same tactics to shift blames on the banking crisis. By Johnson Choi 3-18-23 三國時期，一場大戰前，曹操缺糧，下令逮捕將軍。行刑前，將軍懇求這不是我的錯。曹操說我知道，但我必須殺了你，所以我的軍隊責怪你而不是我。拜登正在使用同樣的策略將責任轉移到銀行業危機上.

US is not a State Party of the International Criminal Court (ICC) founded the (ICC) in 2002 as a tool against other nations to “bring to justice the perpetrators of the worst crimes known to humankind (US is immune from any war crimes prosecution)

Fear of TikTok is idiotic. Will they ban chopsticks next? 害怕 TikTok 是愚蠢的。接下來他們會禁止筷子嗎？ By Mark Blacklock Mar 17 2023

In my working life as a journalist I have been routinely searched many times before entering a criminal courtroom to report on a hearing. Once, an over-zealous security guard examined the backpack in which I carried my laptop, camera, digital recorder and sundry other work-related items. After peering into the bag, he reached inside and removed a charger and cable for a mobile phone, telling me that I would get it back only when I left the building. When I asked him why he was confiscating an ordinary electrical plug, he replied: “Because people come here to steal our electricity.”

I had no intention to charge up my mobile phone in any power socket, not least because this was a time when the use of mobile electrical devices – phones especially – was not permitted in courtrooms. However, even though there was no evidence I could, or would, charge my phone, the guard’s mere misguided suspicion was enough for him to act pre-emptively.

Is this, I wonder, how the British government was thinking of TikTok when it took the decision to ban the app from government-owned smartphones and other devices? Not because there was clear evidence of any security threat, but because they have a vague notion that there might be.

TikTok is a massively successful business. It has been downloaded more than 2 billion times globally, yet it is being portrayed as malicious by increasingly hysterical news reports. The truth is that it has a large target on its back simply because it is Chinese-owned. Politicians are muttering increasingly agitated criticisms, even though they probably don’t know their apps from their elbows. In the current tensions existing between China and the West, they can find capital in attacking Beijing. And now both the British and the US governments are limiting the use of the app on the grounds that it might constitute a security risk. The evidence for this seems to be – rather like that of the courtroom security guard – mere suspicion.

What drives this suspicion? Is there real evidence? Will anyone please show me the proof? Or is it – like, unfortunately, so many things these days – enough for it to be Chinese for it to be traduced by politicians in my part of the world, and for this casual, racially-charged slander to be faithfully repeated, often without challenge, in the media. Perhaps there is something to worry about, something that only security services know and which they say they cannot share with ordinary people. However, after the lies told by our governments for example, to justify illegal war in Iraq we can be forgiven for refusing to accept their assertions at face value. Their “word” has been degraded, and xenophobia is not evidence.

Barely a year ago, the British government was launching its own TikTok channel. Now, it is slavishly following America’s ill-informed lead, along with Canada and the European Union, and declaring it a threat. Confusingly, some politicians are suggesting its citizens might want to stop using the app on their phones, while at least one UK government minister says he will continue to create video for the platform on his private devices.

There are contradictory messages from the US too. Some senators are calling for the app to be banned from their country, and dozens of states have introduced TikTok bans on their official devices. Yet when one cautious state, Connecticut, was considering a similar move and asked the FBI for advice the Bureau admitted to having no further evidence to support the claims of security risk.

Despite TikTok’s denials, and the paucity of evidence, and a plethora of international experts highlighting the massive hypocrisy that non-Chinese apps such as Facebook and Google harvest much more data than their Beijing-based rival, and despite there being nothing to prove it is a greater risk than any other social media, this Sinophobic witch-hunt gathers pace. What is driving this suspicion? Evidence? Fear? Or simply the knowledge that TikTok is Chinese?

In this kind of deranged atmosphere, fear will always trump facts, and we should be concerned at where this will lead.

Where will we end up? Perhaps chopsticks will be banned by NATO for fear of being used to tap out encrypted messages by clicking in a secret rhythm on dining tables. Or they will be outlawed as potential weapons, disguised as eating utensils. Perhaps the traditional dancing dragons of Chinese New Year will be exposed as not representations of mythical creatures but rather as a military device inside which the People’s Liberation Army can smuggle its battalions into cities all over the UK and America.

It’s idiotic, yes, and idiocy is not evidence. And neither is xenophobia.

The author is a journalist and lecturer living in Britain. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn

US biggest obstacle to getting the truth about Nord Stream sabotage by Global Times Mar 16 2023

Editor’s Note:

After US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh revealed that the US is the mastermind behind the Nord Stream pipeline explosion, the New York Times (NYT) published an article that pushed a different narrative, claiming that a “pro-Ukrainian group” carried out the attack. Why did the mainstream media in the US largely remain silent on Hersh’s article? Are the NYT revelations credible? Who is the culprit for the Nord Stream pipeline attack? Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern (McGovern) and Aaron Good (Good), a US historian and political scientist who runs the “American Exception” podcast, discussed these issues with the Global Times (GT).

GT: What do you think of the NYT article? Compared to Hersh’s report, which one has more credibility?

McGovern: The NYT article is an attempt to deflect attention from what every sensible human being that concludes it was a US authorship of this sabotage. It makes no sense. It took the intelligence community whispering into the NYT’s ear a whole month to come up with what is a comical effort to blame someone else.

Now, I won’t go into the details, but it’s physically impossible for the incident to have occurred the way CIA and other intelligence officials are telling the NYT. It is what the British call – rubbish. It doesn’t stand close scrutiny.

On the other side of things, you have not only the most authoritative, the most trusted, the most respected journalist in America, Seymour Hersh, who has been very good at telling true stories, however, embarrassing as it may be to our government, and who protects his sources quite well. He says, in a very detailed rendition of what happened, that the US was behind the attack and was helped by Norway.

Besides that, we have the typical indexes that you look for. You’re researching a crime and trying to find out who did it, who had the motive. The motive was clear: The US has been expressing astonishment that the Germans and the Russians would get this close together, and that had to be stopped. US officials said it had to be stopped, and guess what? President Biden, according to Seymour Hersh, approved the stopping of it.

Not only President Biden, but after the pipelines were blown up, all kinds of people couldn’t hold it in, and they were so proud of being able to put an end to the pipelines. Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland bragged: “I am, and I think the administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.” Secretary of State Antony Blinken called it a “tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy.”

So you have ability, you have incentive, you have people pretty [much] admitting what they did, then people rejoicing over it. That’s enough for me.

Good: I do not personally believe it’s likely that a group of Ukrainian freelancers bombed the Nord Stream, since it seems too convenient and hard to imagine that they would have the technical capabilities to independently organize such a difficult operation. I say “difficult” because the Nord Stream pipelines are very sturdy and under the sea. Also recall that Joe Biden said, “If Russia invades [Ukraine] there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it… I promise you, we will be able to do it.”

While I don’t find the NYT story persuasive, it could be a useful lie to help prevent this conflict from spiraling into a nuclear war. Ridiculous as the Ukrainians-did-it story is, maybe it can be part of the way that the US disengages from Ukraine.

I believe that Hersh’s story is much more plausible that US military assets carried out the operation. But, there are other things to keep in mind. Ukrainian citizens’ involvement does not preclude Ukrainian state backing, or even the backing of other states like the UK or the US behind them. I have a hard time believing that high-level US officials would fabricate such a story and leak it to the one reporter with the profile to publish it in a way that couldn’t be ignored. If anyone doubts that Hersh was the best person to leak the story to, consider the way the establishment press in the US ignored Hersh’s story for as long as it could.

We have to consider why anyone would leak this story to Hersh. The obvious motive of the leakers would seem to be a desire to change the narrative of the war as Ukrainian losses create pressure for the US to intervene more directly. Further US involvement would be full of catastrophic potential – up to and including the nuclear destruction of human civilization. Hersh’s story of the US attacking the Russian-German Nord Stream pipeline threatened to destroy the US-German alliance, a major pillar of US hegemony since the end of World War II. This would have meant more than just an end to the NATO coalition behind Ukraine. Apparently, this prospect led to the new story of Ukrainian authorship of the bombing.

Photo: Aaron Good (left) and Ray McGovern (right) Photos: Courtesy of Good and McGovern

GT: The US mainstream media, which initially had vehemently called for an investigation into the sabotage, became largely silent after Hersh released his investigative report. Why did this happen?

McGovern: The Hersh article was too embarrassing [for the US]. It took the NYT one month to figure out how to react. They didn’t mention Hersh’s article till way down the 26th paragraph, if I recall correctly.

So why did everyone keep silent? No.1, because it was a Substack thing, and they could just kind of suppress it. And No.2, it’s too hot to handle. No.3, Hersh has an incredible reputation. They just didn’t know what to do, and so their default reaction is to see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.

Aside from its stupidity and absurdity, the NYT article names the Ukrainian – unofficial Ukrainians. But if this turns out to be official Ukrainians, support for Ukraine is going to dissipate in Europe and elsewhere. So that’s sort of a thing we pay attention to. It’s very unusual that the NYT propounds this kind of thing and blames Ukraine. We’ll see what happens in the coming weeks.

Good: Given the questions of “means, motive, and opportunity,” as well as US officials’ blunt threats about the pipelines before the bombing, the US was already the top suspect in the bombing. Hersh has a long history of cultivating high-level government sources who leak information to him in order to avoid being fired or imprisoned under the extremely repressive and unconstitutional Espionage Act. The media’s silence on this issue points to a repressive and totalizing system of top-down social and political dominance. Media censorship is an important part of this system of top-down governance.

GT: Will the US be the biggest obstacle to investigating the Nord Stream incident?

McGovern: The US already has been. Of course, it will. If you’re the perpetrator of a crime – which I think it’s very clear in this case, the US is – you do your best to deflect attention from it and make sure that it is not investigated properly. That’s just common sense; it’s common usage among criminals.

All the captured weapons in Ukraine, Russia will dismantle it and shared it with the world including the recently downed US drone 烏克蘭繳獲的所有武器，俄羅斯都將拆除並與世界分享，包括最近被擊落的美國無人機

With Xi Jinping’s recent announcement of the “Global Civilization Initiative” (全球文明倡议), there are at least 5 🇨🇳 initiatives aimed towards shaping the international order.

What are they?

How are they interrelated?

What does that mean for Xi Jinping’s third term?

Last week, when asked about 🇨🇳 vision to “improve” global governance, Qin Gang referred to the following initiatives:
1⃣ Community of Shared Future of Mankind
人类命运共同体
2⃣ BRI 一带一路
3⃣ Common values of mankind 全人类共同价值
4⃣ GSI 全球安全倡议
5⃣ GDI 全球发展倡议

1⃣ Community of Shared Future of Mankind (CCD) is framed as the PRC’s proposal for an international order free of the “inherent (Western) biases of the existing international order”.

In 2017/18 the term CCD was incorporated into the preambles of the CPC and PRC constitution.

During his first address to the UN General Assembly (in 2015), Xi introduced the CCD to the global stage

It has 5 (abstract) components:

▪️Equal partnerships
▪️A new security architecture
▪️Common development
▪️Inter-civilization exchanges
▪️Green development

2⃣ Xi announced the BRI in Sep 2013. It developed into the priority of 🇨🇳 foreign policy.

In 2017, pursuing the BRI was written into the CPC constitution.

🇨🇳 leadership has been referring to the BRI as a means “to build a new model of international relations”.

The BRI is Beijing’s vision of global (China-centered) interconnectedness and includes 5 key cooperation areas:

▪️Intergovernmental policy coordination
▪️Reduction of trade barriers
▪️(Infrastructure) connectivity
▪️Financial integration
▪️People-to-people exchanges

In April 2022, Xi proposed the Global Security Initiative (GSI) during the Boao forum.

This February, 🇨🇳 issued the GSI Concept Paper.

The GSI may be viewed as the PRC’s vision of collective security reform.

The GSI highlights 6 aspects:

▪️Common security
▪️Sovereignty and territorial integrity
▪️Focus on the UN Charter
▪️Legitimate security concerns of all countries
▪️Peaceful dispute resolution via dialogue and consultation
▪️Security in traditional & non-traditional domains

Xi announced the Global Development Initiative (GDI) in September 2021 at the UNGA.

With the GDI 🇨🇳 projects its prioritization of development to the UN level, attempting to tie it to the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals

It builds on past efforts to tie the BRI to the SDGs.

The GDI includes 8 priority areas:

▪️Poverty alleviation
▪️Food security
▪️Pandemic response and vaccines
▪️Development finance
▪️Climate change and green development
▪️Industrialization
▪️Digital economy & connectivity in the digital era

The “common values of mankind” concept is central to the 🇨🇳 narrative

“Modernization does not equal Westernization”.

It criticizes Western claims of universality and “biases of the global order”, which “favor the West while discriminating against the developing world.”

On March 15, Xi Jinping announced the Global Civilization Initiative (GCI), which appears to incorporate the “modernization does not equal westernization” narrative into a broader initiative.

It is another outreach effort to the developing world & critique to the “West”.

The GCI includes 4 elements:
▪️Respect for the diversity of world civilizations
▪️Common values of all mankind
▪️Historical and cultural values of all countries
▪️International cultural exchanges & cooperation

If you look at Xi’s 2015 Community of Shared Future of Mankind speech, you see a direct link to the CDI, the GSI, and the GCI.

Notably, this January, the State Council also issued the “China’s Green Development in the New Era” white paper.

At least on paper, we are currently witnessing a new phase to substantiate the concept of Community of Shared Future of Mankind.

At the same time, the BRI is still ongoing & the 3rd BRI Forum will take place later this year.

Despite the increasing 🇺🇸🇨🇳 tensions, the foreign policy priorities/direction of Xi’s 3rd term appear clearer & more concrete:

Reaching out to the global south to shape the international order.

Implementing those initiatives is a different story but the political will is there

Video: Why US Gov’t wanted to ban Tit Tok? 為什麼美國政府想禁止 Tit Tok?
https://rumble.com/v2di0mw-why-us-govt-wanted-to-ban-tit-tok.html
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=911787403377919&id=100036400039778&mibextid=DcJ9fc

Breaking News: First Republic reaches $30 billion rescue deal with other banks! But who is going rescue JP Morgan Chase, BOA and the other 9 banks next weeks?