A big Chinese delegation unnerves U.S. diplomats in Davos

[Geee]

Politico

DAVOS, Switzerland — U.S. diplomats have been so worried about the size and intent of a Chinese delegation in Switzerland this week that they’re trying to arrange a meeting between Secretary of State Antony Blinken with a Swiss official while he’s in the country for the World Economic Forum.

The discussion about adjusting Blinken’s schedule was laid out in a State Department document obtained by POLITICO.

 

The suggestion appears to be an effort to ensure that famously neutral Switzerland doesn’t feel jaded by Washington amid potential wooing by Beijing. It comes as U.S.-Chinese tensions are rising once more over the fate of Taiwan, which drew Beijing’s ire over the weekend by electing a president whose party has called for independence from China.

 

The Chinese delegation is expected to spend time in the Swiss capital, Bern, and Davos, the scene of this week’s forum. Blinken will be in Davos on Tuesday and Wednesday, holding an array of meetings and delivering at least one public speech to the crowd, which is heavy on business leaders.

Chinese Premier Li Qiang, often described as the No. 2 to paramount leader Xi Jinping, is leading the delegation from Beijing.

Beijing “will have 10 state ministers in attendance,” according to the State Department document, which is dated Jan. 12. “Their #2 will have a meeting with Swiss leaders. Amb. Miller characterized it as a ‘pseudo state visit.’” (That appears to be a reference to Scott Miller, the U.S. ambassador to Switzerland.)

[Geee]

Gates Foundation Announces Plan For Record-Breaking Donations This Year At Davos

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has a history of providing financial support to left-wing groups, announced on Monday that it would spend billions of dollars in 2024.

The Gates Foundation’s board of trustees has approved a record $8.6 billion budget for 2024, up from $8.3 billion in 2023 and $7 billion in 2022, the charity announced from Davos, Switzerland, where the World Economic Forum is hosting its annual meeting. Over the years, the charity has poured tens of millions of dollars into pro-abortion groups, Democrat-aligned nonprofits and Chinese government organizations, among other causes.

[Geee]

The Humiliation of Davos Man

Davos, Switzerland

It’s that time of year. Corporate chieftains, policymakers, NGO warriors, journalists and intellectuals are heading to the Swiss Alps for the 54th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum. If the delegates are serious about this year’s theme, “Rebuilding Trust,” some hard conversations lie ahead.

On both the far left and the far right, conspiracy theorists see the WEF and its allies as an all-powerful network successfully imposing a nefarious agenda on the rest of the world. This reading gets Davos exactly wrong.

The real scandal of Davos isn’t that it’s taking over the world. It’s that it’s failing. The Davos agenda—a global security order, an integrated world economy and progress toward objectives including decarbonization, gender equality and the abolition of dire poverty—is controversial in some quarters and on some points but is neither secret nor particularly nefarious. But far from imposing this agenda on a captive world, the Davos elites are wringing their hands as the dream slowly dies.

[Valin]

54 minutes ago, Geee said:

The Humiliation of Davos Man

The real scandal of Davos isn’t that it’s taking over the world. It’s that it’s failing. The Davos agenda—a global security order, an integrated world economy and progress toward objectives including decarbonization, gender equality and the abolition of dire poverty—is controversial in some quarters and on some points but is neither secret nor particularly nefarious. But far from imposing this agenda on a captive world, the Davos elites are wringing their hands as the dream slowly dies.

decarbonization

[url=https://www.independent.org/events/transcript.asp?id=111#2]An Evening with Michael Crichton[/url]
November 15, 2005
 

According to Jesse Ausubel of the Rockefeller Institute, the industrialized nations have been decarbonizing their energy sources for 150 years, meaning that we are moving away from carbon toward hydrogen. In other words, the ratio of carbon to hydrogen decreases as you go from wood and hay, which is one to one, to coal, to oil, and finally to natural gas, where it’s one to four.

Here’s an illustration from one of Ausubel’s articles. The blue atoms are hydrogen and the dirty brown ones are carbon.

And you can see as we go from coal to oil to gas, natural gas, if there’s still any for sale, we are increasing the proportion of hydrogen to carbon. Ausubel expects this trend will continue through this century as we move toward what he imagines as a pure hydrogen energy system, without the assistance of lawyers and activists. Obviously, if a trend has been continuously operating since the days of Lincoln and Queen Victoria, it probably does not need the assistance of organizations like the Sierra Club and the NRDC, which are showing up about a hundred years too late.

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a global security order

The world is in a better state than we think
July 4, 2018 / Mike Killen    

But the only real negativity is that which is spread by ourselves across our social channels. The truth is that we live in the single most peaceful time in human history https://www.wsj.com/…/SB100014240531119041067045765832035894…