ERIC ZUESSE—On February 1st, the New York Times bannered “U.S. Has Far Higher Covid Death Rate Than Other Wealthy Countries”, and actually called the public’s attention to America’s scandalously bad performance against covid, but America’s declining life-expectancies (average annual longevities) had begun to be reported in the year 2014, which was six years prior to the start of the epidemic, and it has continued to decline every year since then. America’s aristocrats control the privatized American ‘health-care’ (which are actually only sickness-care) industries; and, so, this has long been a major engine of America’s extreme wealth-inequality: profiting from sicknesses and deaths runs counter to ANY democracy’s policies.
CHINA
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Contrasting news coverage of Nathan Chen and Gu Ailing aims to protect Washington’s fragile self-esteem
11 minutes readXIA WENXIN—In fact, the US media coverage of the Winter Olympics has long strayed from the sports event itself. Judging from how they cover Gu’s story, it is evident they question or even deny an individual’s personal choices from a geopolitical perspective. Such a mistaken way of thinking has made US news reports biased.
For some US elites, Gu’s mistake is that she chose China, a country that is nothing but a “parvenu” in their eyes. Therefore, they cannot imagine or understand why people like Gu would “betray” the world’s greatest power.
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The world has seen China’s confidence and development through the Beijing Winter Olympic Games. This puts the West, which is struggling to adapt to China’s constant rise, on tenterhooks. Hence, as always, they are trying to smear China’s overall image by overgeneralizing some minor details. However, more and more people around the world have got to know the real situation within the Olympics bubble and the reality of China’s COVID-19 prevention policies through athletes’ cameras.
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The Year of the Tiger Starts with a Sino-Russian Bang
15 minutes readPEPE ESCOBAR—For the umpteenth time Moscow made it very clear it’s not going to make any concessions on the security demands just because the Empire of Chaos keeps threatening – what else – extra harsh sanctions, the sole imperial “policy” short of outright bombing.
The new sanctions package, anyway, is ready to go for quite a while now, arguably capable of cutting Moscow off from the Western financial system and/or casino, and targeting, among others, Sberbank, VTB, Gazprombank and Alfa-Bank.
And that brings us to what’s Moscow going to do next – considering the predictable “extremely negative attitude” (Lavrov) from NATOstan. Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko had already hinted NATO knows perfectly well what’s coming, even before the non-response “response”:
“NATO knows perfectly well what kind of military-technical measures may follow from Russia. We make no secret of our possibilities and are acting very transparently.”
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FRED REED—Perhaps lots of people. There being many Chinese tourists in Cancun, hotels and restaurants would like to grab business from Chinese who didn’t want to bother with currency conversion. Mexico likely would be happy to have the money come into the country. People in Zimbabwe, whose currency is worthless anywhere else, and who might worry that Harare would start printing money and destroy their savings, would be happy with dijjywan that could be taken out of the country or spent internationally online. Such a nation, if it wanted a stable currency, might make the dijjywan the national currency, or a national currency, as Panama and Ecuador do with the dollar. People without bank accounts, estimated at two billion, would find it useful. The result would be a distributed all-yuan Sinocentric financial ecosystem.