This meme went over like a lead balloon at the other instance 🤷

• Optics Valley Suspended Monorail
• Wuhan Metro

Links up Musk’s DOGE malarkey with Curtis Yarvin’s playbook.

IN THIS HOUSE, WE BELIEVE
IN LISTENING TO UYGHUR ACTIVIST VOICES
NAMED MITOCHONDRIA

Large crowds gathered outside the proposed site of a new Chinese “mega-embassy” in London on Saturday, as politicians and protesters expressed concerns it could be used to “control” dissidents.

Tai, 50, a carer, said: “We come from Hong Kong. We are afraid that China will use this place to look over us, against us. In Hong Kong, we have many experience of China, the CPP, controlling the freedom and democracy and against the Hong Kong people. We all face this.”

Another protester, who gave her name as Mitochondria, 20, expressed similar concerns. “It’s very possible that this building could be used for holding Chinese dissidents who are on British soil to be arrested in a non-legal way,” she said. “A mega-embassy would enable that to happen.”

She held a blue and white Uyghur flag. “The Chinese government has imperialist interest where they occupy the land of East Turkestan,” she said.

“There’s a genocide ongoing of the Uyghur people, the Muslim people in East Turkestan. They shouldn’t be oppressed. This is why I am holding the flag because we are in the same fight against the same authoritarian government.”

Fred, 29, an engineer, expressed concerns the building could be used “to catch people inside the embassy and do espionage”.

“We are the beacon of freedom in the world. It’s a shame to see this beautiful compound, our legacy, our pride, fall into a dictator’s hands.”

Because of Trump’s funding freeze, the extent of that shadow media structure has newly come to light. According to Reporters Without Borders, USAID is the “the primary donor” for the nine out of 10 Ukrainian media outlets that rely on foreign funding. The head of one such outlet, Detector Media, told the Washington Post that “more than 50 percent” of the media organizations that receive foreign money are “dependent on American assistance.”

The Post headlined its story “Independent media in Russia, Ukraine lose their funding with USAID freeze.” According to the Post’s editorial standards, a foreign media outlet can presumably remain “independent” even while funded by the most powerful state in the world. To shore up its narrative, the Post argued that these US-funded outlets have “produced work often critical of their governments,” including the US client in Kyiv. Yet these same outlets have often promoted the US government’s agenda in Ukraine at the country’s expense.

One illustrative case came in March 2020, when Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky took a major step towards implementing the Minsk accords, the February 2015 pact that sought to end Ukraine’s post-2014 civil war. In a landmark move, Zelensky agreed to hold direct talks with representatives of the breakaway Donbas republics – a major step towards Minsk’s implementation.

In a statement at the time, dozens of Ukrainian NGOs, political figures, and media outlets denounced Zelensky’s decision on the grounds that it would recognize the breakaway republics as equal partners, and play into the Russian narrative that Ukraine was facing an as an “internal conflict,” rather than “armed aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine.” According to Ukrainian scholar Ivan Katchanovski, the vast majority of Ukrainian groups that signed the list were funded by Western governments and foundations. These include the media outlets and organizations Detector Media, the Institute of Mass Information, and Internews-Ukraine, all of which are supported by USAID.

US-funded opponents of diplomacy are not just targeted at Ukrainian audiences. As journalist Lee Fang reports, USAID “has financed a network of groups in Ukraine that have spread unsubstantiated claims that American voices in favor of peace negotiations with Russia are agents of the Kremlin.”

US media outlets often interview these same groups and present them as independent voices without acknowledging their US state funding. To show how pervasive this is, even the stalwart progressive news show Democracy Now!, which has long challenged government propaganda, has been susceptible. Last month, DN! interviewed Ukrainian human rights lawyer Oleksandra Matviichuk, who argued against diplomacy with Russia and advocated the “Reagan principle” of “peace through strength.” DN! failed to inform its audience that Matviichuk’s group, the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties, is funded by USAID, and that she is also on the Steering Committee of the “World Movement for Democracy,” a project of the National Endowment for Democracy. Reagan, whose administration founded the NED to advance the foreign policy objectives that DN! was founded to expose, would have approved.

A banger of an interview. Get your lib friends to listen.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave an interview with Megyn Kelly on 30 January 2025 which could signal the beginning of the end of America’s hegemonic security strategy. Rubio recognised that unipolarity, having one centre of power in the world, was a temporary phenomenon that has now passed:

“it’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power. That was not – that was an anomaly. It was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet”.

Rubio suggested that the hegemonic position of the US resulted in a weakening of the Westphalian system based on sovereign states, and replaced it with a globalist system where the US claimed the role of a world policeman:

“And I think that was lost at the end of the Cold War, because we were the only power in the world, and so we assumed this responsibility of sort of becoming the global government in many cases, trying to solve every problem”.

Rubio is referring to the end of the unipolar world order that emerged after the Cold War, and the need for the US to adjust to multipolar realities.

Arguably it was G. H. W. Bush who declared the start of the “new world order,” after the fall of the Soviet Union.

R.I.P. End of History, 1990–2015

A lot of people view this rise of fascism as a some as a sort of fundamental opposition or reaction to the liberal or neoliberal order under which we're living. You know, it's like do you want fascist Trump or neoliberal Kamala? That sort of thinking […] seems to me to be both individualizing—like making fascism into something fascist ideologues do rather than like a constellation of features which make up a fascist society—but also kind of undermines the various continuities between neoliberal societies (and liberal ones) and fascist ones. And it's in this context that Clara Mattei offers a really important intervention which clarifies these important continuities.

Specifically, Mattei highlights how austerity as a form of authoritarian state practice functions to rebalance the capital relation in favour of capital, and in doing so paves the way to Fascism in the early 20th century.

The book: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo181707138.html

Calls are growing for President Biden to posthumously exonerate Ethel Rosenberg following newly publicized documents proving that the FBI knew of her innocence long before she was prosecuted by the federal government more than 60 years ago. Rosenberg and her husband Julius were charged with sharing nuclear secrets with the Soviet Union and executed on June 19, 1953. A federal pardon or exoneration would be “the right thing to do,” says Massachusetts Congressmember Jim McGovern, who is part of an effort led by the Rosenbergs’ son Robert Meeropol “to get history right.” Ethel Rosenberg “was framed,” says Meeropol. “She was not a spy.”

In recent months, a remarkable development in the Empire’s decline has gone almost entirely unnoticed. The National Endowment for Democracy’s grant database has been removed from the web.

Of course, despite NED brazenly purging evidence of its vast operations from the web, that conniving continues apace regardless, covertly. One might even argue the Endowment’s chicanery is all the more dangerous now, given individuals and organizations can conceal their funding sources. But the move amply shows NED today cannot withstand the slightest public scrutiny, which its existence was intended to exemplify. It also demonstrates that “overt operations” with open US funding are now the very “kiss of death” the Endowment was meant to replace. The Empire is on the run.

My comment from a related post: The United States launched a wave of airstrikes against ISIS in Syria

The US is trying to degrade the chaos monkey of its own device, now that it has wrought the desired power vacuum?