FOREST COMMENT

This is how China picks its top leaders - it is a genuine meritocracy. Most British politicians wouldn't even begin to qualify. There is a long tradition of advance by education in China going back thousands of years - and the vast majority of people accept it.  'The Greatest Talent Sieve on Earth Next week China’s smartest 3.4 million university graduates, average IQ 114, will take the three-day  guokao,  the   national civil service exam, competing for 39,700 jobs. Their IQ puts them in the top 15–20 % of the entire population and among them 40,000 have genius level IQs above 140. At the extreme right end of the curve, 650 of them will have super-genius 160 IQs, compared to just 220 such age mates in the US and EU combined. A Permanent Elite Drawn from the Extreme Right Tail The 39,700 who pass do not simply get a job; they enter a decades-long performance tournament. Their careers are tracked, the best are relentlessly promoted, the rest are sidelined. By their fo...

Asa Winstanley (of the Electronic Intifada) outlines the context for the 'Palestine Action' Judical Review. Replace one 'independent' judge with three who apperar to have pro-Israel sympathies...our judicial system leans over backwards to accommodate Israel. As 'Defend our Juries' says.. “The judiciary is meant to be independent of political influence. Yet with no transparency around this decision,” they said, “public confidence is being seriously undermined. That two of the replacement judges have links which at least raise the appearance of a conflict of interest only deepens these concerns. This includes Dame Sharp’s family connections to Boris Johnson, to prominent pro-Israel lobbyist and major Labour Party donor Trevor Chinn.”

  Warwick Powell outlines what is happening with production in China... 'Equipment manufacturing forms the backbone of China’s ability to  reproduce and expand  its productive system. Its strengthening signals an expansion of the country’s autonomous capacity to generate and deploy new techniques. It also contributes progressively to greater internal coherence of the production system, reducing dependence on external technological inputs. Lastly, it points to a structural tendency toward increasing returns, because machinery production is subject to learning-by-doing, scale effects and cumulative technological improvement... China’s dominant sectors are shifting from heavy industry and construction to high-tech and equipment production, which inherently possess higher productivity potential and greater scope for cumulative learning. There’s still some way to go for these transformations to stabilise, in part because some of the key technological and scientific foundations...

In this excellent article Alfred McCoy outlines how critical ENERGY is in world history and how China is racing ahead. With AI on the horizon the USA simply won't be able to generate enough power from its carbon based sources to fuel demand. Its infrastructure is inadequate. This will drastically limit its capacity to compete - and so these pressures COULD make it more bellicose than it is already.   'Under its economic plan, China has already come to dominate the world’s solar power industry. In 2024, it cut the wholesale price of its solar panel exports in half and nearly  doubled its exports  of panel components. To replace its old export “trio” of clothing, furniture, and appliances, Beijing has mandated a “new trio” of solar panels, lithium batteries, and electric cars. And to put what’s happening in perspective, imagine that, in just the month of May, China  installed  enough wind and solar energy to power a country as big as Poland, reaching an impressive...

Warwick Powell opines on the future of the Ukraine conflict - and I agree. The initiative by Trump to come forward with a peace plan is just theatre. It weakens Ukraine considerably but is not decisive. Eliminating the Ukrainian military and neutering European interference will be the key deciders. Only those who are unaware of history and have a touching confidence in Trump could possibly think the conflict in Ukraine is 'over'. Don't expect a settlement soon.... The USA is NOT a neutral 'honest' arbiter. The USA engineered this conflict and urged Ukraine to fight Russia rather than agree a political settlement through the Minsk process. Now it wants to retreat - but it will be happy to see the conflict continue and Russia 'tied down' (extended) in Ukraine.  It will probably continue to provide 'intelligence' but eventually Ukraine will be defeated. A military solution also suits Russia. The main thing, from Russia's point of view, is that its a...

  Warwick Powell sees energy generation and storage as being key for future development, and outlines the shift from lithium battery storage to sodium batteries...the future is SALT. In short: lithium batteries made renewables viable; sodium-ion makes them inevitable.... Lower embodied energy, longer lifespan and material abundance combine to deliver vastly better net-energy returns. The model’s order-of-magnitude advantage is robust to conservative stress-testing. The transition to a low-carbon or a post-carbon economy hinges not just on generating clean energy but on the net energy surplus those systems deliver after accounting for their own material and energetic costs. For two decades, lithium-ion has carried that burden, helping renewables reach grid parity but at the cost of supply bottlenecks and modest net-energy yields. Sodium-ion breaks that constraint. It closes the economic gap between aspiration and inevitability. Once storage is effectively free in both financial and ...

  This is a superb article by Jonathan Cook who has written about Palestine for years.....and how he had to 'de-programme' himself...(you will be guided to the comments section of the article and will need to scroll back to the top to read it from the beginning). '....... journalists and editors have historically been afraid of being accused of antisemitism by Israel. It is tempting to overestimate this pressure. I suspect it is better viewed as a cover story, rationalising the failure of journalists to do their job properly – as illustrated by their reluctance to identify the Gaza genocide as a genocide. But beyond these practical pressures, there is a deeper reason for why the western media avoid serious criticism of Israel. Israel is integral to a continuing western colonial system of power projection into the oil-rich Middle East. Israel is the West’s ultimate client state. Western establishments need Israel protected. None of this would be so significant, of course, if...

  Felix Abt in Forum Geopolitica remembers Pol Pot and the hideous killing fields in Cambodia in the late 1970's - he calls the Vietnamese intervention 'heroic', and it surely was. This is what is needed to stop the slaughter in Palestine - but it won't happen. The USA and Israel are too strong and the surrounding Arab states too weak and spineless. 'In Cambodia, beauty and intellect became crimes: the beautiful were forced to marry the ugly, the educated to wed the illiterate. Cities, hospitals, and schools were erased. Millions were slaughtered on an industrial scale to forge a Khmer “master race.” This was a 20th-century fascist Holocaust—not in Germany or elsewhere in Europe, but in Asia—largely forgotten outside its borders (Chandler, 1999; Kiernan, 2008). Vietnam was the lone nation to confront and defeat this nightmare, while the United States, other Western powers, and China either stood by or even defended it. Only Vietnamese resistance ended the horror (Ro...

Another excellent analysis of how the 'crisis' in Chinese house building did not lead to economic collapse as it did in the west with the 2008 banking crisis which was sparked by mortgage defaults which then threratened the viability of lenders. Essentially, the key thing is the fact that the buildings have been built and remain in China. The financial speculation that surrounds them may move offshore - but if it goes tits-up, it doesn't mean the houses disappear. Not in a sensibly planned economy..... The Material Foundations of Value A  thermodynamics-centred framework  reminds us that an economy is anchored in material reproduction, in which it is “use values” that are ultimately determinant of system viability. At its core, economic life depends on the physical capacity to produce and reproduce goods necessary for subsistence and accumulation. Surplus emerges not from speculative promises but from the actual excess of goods over the means of production consumed, or put ...

This is an important post from Regis Tremblay - an American living in Crimea, Russia. I'm afraid everything he says is correct. US (and UK) policy is run by the CIA/MI6 and Anglo-American big business. As the US/UK lose in Ukraine they will escalate. I'm afraid 2026 looks very, very bleak. Regis says that nuclear conflict is more likely now than at the time of Cuba. I agree. The situation is much more complex now than then. More can go wrong.

This is a useful article whiuch explains how the financialisation of the economy has actually undermined production....'Financialisation' is just another form of theft. 'The material age that had built bridges, ships, and power stations entered the twentieth century with unshaken faith in its own momentum. Yet beneath the surface, the structure of enterprise was already changing. The tools of finance—credit, capital markets, and accounting—were invented to fund production, but they began to evolve faster than the production they were meant to serve. In the early industrial order, money and goods moved together. The banker was the steward of accumulated savings, and the stock exchange was a meeting place between the thrifty and the enterprising. Investment was a form of partnership between labor, invention, and capital. But as the century advanced, finance detached itself from its material foundations. Paper claims multiplied far beyond the stock of tangible goods. The abstr...

  This is a great article by Scott Ritter on the Russian monuments for the war dead.

Caitlin Johnstone outlines the difference between the Vritish and American Empires...  ' The US-centralized empire is held in place by plenty of brute force as well, but its primary weapon is psychological manipulation. It has  the most sophisticated propaganda machine  that has ever existed, which trains the minds of its subjects to support all its various agendas of capitalism, militarism, imperialism and global domination under the guise of news media, Hollywood productions, and Silicon Valley tech services. Disobedient nations find their information ecosystems awash with National Endowment for Democracy reeducation media informing them why their current government doesn’t serve their interests, and if that doesn’t work there will be a “revolution” which decades later the CIA will admit to having fomented and armed. The US empire is a larger, stronger, sneakier, bitchier, less honest, more manipulative version of what the British Empire was. The British Empire told its...

 Thomas Karat looks at how terrorism and acts of violence are used by the extreme right to aid fascism and how the USA is, at the molment, particularly dangerous.... 'Looking across these cases – from Cold War Italy’s secret terror schemes to the instant misinformation after the Kirk shooting – a clear throughline emerges.  The “strategy of tension” mindset, once hidden in the conspiratorial depths of spycraft, has seeped into overt politics.  Its core tenet is  attribution inversion : when violence occurs,  blame the enemy within . If no convenient enemy is present,  invent one  or steer the narrative toward one. In Italy and Belgium, this was done covertly (planting bombs and framing leftists); in Sweden and Germany, it took the form of investigative bias (chasing phantom communists or mafia while ignoring real culprits). In today’s United States, the process is both more transparent and more rapid. The moment a bullet is fired or a bomb goes off,...