============= Part 4 =============================================
posted on FB 05-27-2020
The Power of Propaganda
My opinions are based on my independent unfunded research. Please notify me immediately if you find any factual errors.
By Bill Carico
bill.carico@gmail.com
434-426-2287 m
-------------------------
Bio - Since I began my IT career in 1973, I have guided over 1500 clients in making the best choices. The two most frequent users of my investigative research were IBM, who 1992 to 2000 had me speak at over 50 customer and employee gatherings spanning 5 continents, and The Government of Canada including their Public Works, Defense, DOC, Health, and Treasury agencies.
--------------------------
What one person describes as a staunch trading competitor another would describe as our arch enemy. Those sitting on the fence wondering who is right should read "The Hundred-Year Marathon" by Michael Pillsbury, director of the Hudson Institute.
Mr. Pillsbury has been advising every President since Jimmy Carter on foreign policy, and was involved in 1998 when President Bill Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich agreed to give a totalitarian country most favored nation trade status, which opponents viewed as rewarding political repression and tyranny. The prevailing thinking for opening up trade, which Reagan and George HW Bush had agreed with, was that capitalism, combined with exposure to western values, would hasten the decline and eventual demise of its rulers. Instead, over the last 20 years this trading partner has become the world's second largest economy that in the next year or two will likely surpass the U.S.
Mr. Pillsbury discovered a secret 100-year plan, built on a series of strategic deceptions, to supplant the United States as the world’s superpower. After spending a couple of decades watching visiting delegations of academia, businessmen, political dignitaries, and journalists, be persuaded that sanctions weren’t necessary to bring down the totalitarian regime and would only cause innocent people to suffer. They persuaded the delegations that the regime was so weak it would soon topple under capitalism.
After being given a secret assignment to look behind the veil, Mr. Pillsbury finally realized how he and everyone else on these delegations had been persuaded by pure propaganda. Mr. Pillsbury now views this country as a threat to U.S. existence.
“The Hundred-Year Marathon” exposes a " ...Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower.” Chapter 7 is titled “The Assassin’s Mace” which explains the term is composed of the characters for "kill", "hand", and "mace". This term has its roots in ancient folklore, which recounts how a hero wielding such a weapon managed to overcome a far more powerful adversary. "Shashou Jian" was a club with which the "assassin" incapacitated his enemy, suddenly and totally, instead of fighting him according to "the rules." (Wikipedia)
Beware of Pundits
Mr. Pillsbury is a pundit and so am I.
My ties to this country date back a couple of decades. One evening in the fall of 1998 I was dining in Hangzhou, with a group that included another American IT pundit. I had just finished my second day of lecturing for six straight hours trying to condense five days of my technology awareness seminar into a three-day training session. We were both there at IBM's invite, but his ego was bruised that I was asked to present three six-hour sessions while he was only allotted an hour to give his presentation on marketplace trends. His demeanor softened with each cocktail, so I asked him about something in his presentation that didn’t pass my smell test. More specifically, it was the way he glossed over a reference that substantiated one of his key points. Eventually, he not only admitted that he had published it using a fictitious name, he considered his deception brilliant. Consequently, I’ve been practicing professional distancing from the guy ever since.
Shocked? Don’t be. The rapidly moving IT industry has forever been likened to the wild west where a snake oil salesmen could thrive. Some even refer to IT as the misinformation industry. I warned all my clients that “low integrity is at an all time high.” This is also true today in a world where propaganda is so prevalent, and so easily spread. This may be urban legend but apparently during the cold war an athletic competition was held between the USA and Russia. No other countries were present. The USA won decisively, and Pravda, formerly the official newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, reported the event as an international competition where Russia finished second and the USA finished next to last. By the way, Pravda is the Russian word for “truth.”
IT Propaganda Wars
I didn’t become an IT industry pundit by choice, but during the early 1990's I couldn’t keep quiet in the midst of vendor propaganda wars that were hurting companies who "lived on the reading edge" and practiced "management by magazine." I published some of my first-hand research and in 1992 software vendor Boole and Babbage featured me on a 2 week speaking tour across Europe where I gave a five-hour lecture on performance and tuning (in 8 European countries plus two cities in the UK). After interacting with hundreds of IT professionals who attended, I developed even more insights and eventually became emboldened to write a letter to the CEO of IBM (John Akers at that time) suggesting why he should ignore those voices calling on him to break up IBM into multiple technology companies. Long story short, despite a rocky initial meeting at IBM with indignant division heads who resented Mr. Akers meddling by bringing in an outsider, two weeks later I was a guest speaker at IBM customer events in New York, Los Angeles, Portland, and Seattle. Since I was exposing fallacies and making predictions to IT executives from the largest IT organizations in the world, I too had officially become an IT pundit.
Speaking invitations grew and I published articles about technology targeting enterprise executives and ruffling lots of feathers, especially other pundits. Over the next 8 years and I traveled to 5 continents usually as the lone dissenter presenting the "contrarian view." At two different events I politely refuted the claims of the keynote speakers, both well-known authors who regularly appeared on TV and radio. The themes they were promoting were re-engineering and computer downsizing. The other pundits pointed to what they assumed were success stories that turned out to be a house of cards. I explained to my audiences why people promoting downsizing and rightsizing had been fantasizing. I would have been dismissed early but my facts were impossible to refute because I had gathered them first-hand investigating 14 downsizing projects that everyone assumed had been completed successfully. In reality they had failed and over $2.5 billion dollars had been squandered due in large part to vendor's overstating their capabilities. By the way some IT executives gave me information at the risk of being fired, not wanting their stockholders to find out they squandered $400 million dollars.
Customers sincerely appreciated my candor. Many set up internal events for me to speak to their entire IT staff and others put me on retainer. My presence put me at odds with IT staff who believed the other pundits and most refused to admit they had been fooled.
Gov of Canada
I met with IT staff of several governments. I declined an offer from the incoming party in one country to help investigate how their vanquished opponents had pilfered the national treasury.
I was glad I accepted an offer from a sales manager from Hitachi Canada, who heard me speak in Phoenix because it led to some of the most rewarding work of my career. He invited me to speak at a technology conference promoting downsizing hosted by the Gov of Canada. I spoke for 2 solid hours without a break to government IT staff in a packed ball room (standing-room-only), and they too found my research compelling. Consequently, for the next 10 years, agencies in Ottawa sought my advice on a myriad of challenging projects. For example, my colleague John Kirschner and I helped Health Canada transform their IT. After adopting the technology road map and IT governance plans we provided they went from being ranked 34th in the world to #2. We helped Public Works disaster recovery group plan for a nuclear suitcase detonation in Ottawa, and showed another agency how to save $70 million dollars by eliminating a prominent consulting firm that was ripping them off.
In 2005, I was flattered but hesitant when asked to predict what the enterprise technology landscape would look like in 2015, but decided to try. If my predictions weren’t spot on I wouldn’t have mentioned this now. The only downside was they kept bringing me there during winter and I found Ottawa a bit on the chilly side. It's a city where people literally skate to work on a frozen canal that runs through the city. However I can assure you Canadian people are the warmest you can find anywhere.
It was natural that I became an international technology pundit since I interacted directly with so many of the big players. IT is a global marketplace, so geopolitical factors and cyber security considerations are always part of the mix. IBM paid me well to share my research and teach seminars in Ch!na, Russia, Belgium, Germany, Brasil, Mexico, Canada, South Africa and even Slovenia.
For the last 40 years I have had a business partner who is a native of Ta!wan, so I have long been aware of the dispute/conflict between Ta!wan and the mainland. In a nutshell, Ta!wan wants independence while those governing the mainland regards Ta!wan as a breakaway province which it has vowed to retake, by force if necessary. To clarify something in Part 1 of this report, I was not casting dispersion by wondering if Ta!wan might have tried to warn other countries about the January 23 lock down that occurred in the mainland.
How Totalitarians Win Friends and Influence People
For several decades Ch!na has been sharing their wealth and expertise to help hundreds of struggling countries, each of whom have a vote in the United Nations. They have wielded capitalism and technology to strengthen their position worldwide, and at the same time strengthen their totalitarian rule. One of their billionaires has been trying to persuade Nicaragua to create a canal to compete with Panama
The Current Plan is to Open Up
In addition to their secret 100 year plan that began in 1949, the CCP openly publishes public 5 year plans, having started the practice in 1953 after the Korean war.. All such plans can be found online.
(search for "Five year plans ch!na")
Ch!na’s Thirteenth 5-year Plan (2016-2020) included this objective:
“Opening up: Deeper participation in supranational power structures, more international cooperation.”
Ch!na appears to be colonizing hundreds of countries worldwide, especially in Africa, South America, and the Middle East. Where other lenders wouldn't take on the risk, Ch!na has been loaning these countries huge amounts of money at low interest rates to modernize their infrastructures. Consequently, for the last decade they have been building roads, bridges, massive dams (about 300 thus far), railways, hospitals, skyscrapers, etc. They regularly sets up scholarship funds and donates money to key organizations, like the African Union.
It has been a boon for them. In 2009 they passed the US as Africa’s largest trading partner.
Please watch this 10 minute video from Wendover Productions made in July 2018 which reports over 10,000 Ch!nese businesses were already operating in Africa, 90% of which are privately owned, the other 10% state-owned. See
“How Africa is becoming Ch!na’s Ch!na” - on youtube, v=zQV_DKQkT8o (this isn't a link so search for this video ID)
Then watch a pro-Ch!na video, 6 minutes long, suggesting Ch!na is only interested in friendship. see youtube v=hDQ7C5cdzkQ (search for this video ID)
Irony of Ironies
As explained in the Wendover video, involvement with developing countries has greatly expanded China's influence at the United Nations.
May 2020 - In an irony of all ironies, in spite of their history and vast range of proven human rights abuses, while the world is in the middle of a pandemic that many believe they intentionally unleashed on the world, Ch!na was nominated and selected as one of the five-member-state United Nations Human Rights Council (UN HRC) Consultative Group, granting it power to review applications and suggest recommendations to independent UN experts.
Such is the power of propaganda.
---------------------------------
Please contact us to request a copy of the full research report, which is free.
==============================
posted on FB 05-27-2020
The Power of Propaganda
My opinions are based on my independent unfunded research. Please notify me immediately if you find any factual errors.
By Bill Carico
bill.carico@gmail.com
434-426-2287 m
-------------------------
Bio - Since I began my IT career in 1973, I have guided over 1500 clients in making the best choices. The two most frequent users of my investigative research were IBM, who 1992 to 2000 had me speak at over 50 customer and employee gatherings spanning 5 continents, and The Government of Canada including their Public Works, Defense, DOC, Health, and Treasury agencies.
--------------------------
What one person describes as a staunch trading competitor another would describe as our arch enemy. Those sitting on the fence wondering who is right should read "The Hundred-Year Marathon" by Michael Pillsbury, director of the Hudson Institute.
Mr. Pillsbury has been advising every President since Jimmy Carter on foreign policy, and was involved in 1998 when President Bill Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich agreed to give a totalitarian country most favored nation trade status, which opponents viewed as rewarding political repression and tyranny. The prevailing thinking for opening up trade, which Reagan and George HW Bush had agreed with, was that capitalism, combined with exposure to western values, would hasten the decline and eventual demise of its rulers. Instead, over the last 20 years this trading partner has become the world's second largest economy that in the next year or two will likely surpass the U.S.
Mr. Pillsbury discovered a secret 100-year plan, built on a series of strategic deceptions, to supplant the United States as the world’s superpower. After spending a couple of decades watching visiting delegations of academia, businessmen, political dignitaries, and journalists, be persuaded that sanctions weren’t necessary to bring down the totalitarian regime and would only cause innocent people to suffer. They persuaded the delegations that the regime was so weak it would soon topple under capitalism.
After being given a secret assignment to look behind the veil, Mr. Pillsbury finally realized how he and everyone else on these delegations had been persuaded by pure propaganda. Mr. Pillsbury now views this country as a threat to U.S. existence.
“The Hundred-Year Marathon” exposes a " ...Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower.” Chapter 7 is titled “The Assassin’s Mace” which explains the term is composed of the characters for "kill", "hand", and "mace". This term has its roots in ancient folklore, which recounts how a hero wielding such a weapon managed to overcome a far more powerful adversary. "Shashou Jian" was a club with which the "assassin" incapacitated his enemy, suddenly and totally, instead of fighting him according to "the rules." (Wikipedia)
Beware of Pundits
Mr. Pillsbury is a pundit and so am I.
My ties to this country date back a couple of decades. One evening in the fall of 1998 I was dining in Hangzhou, with a group that included another American IT pundit. I had just finished my second day of lecturing for six straight hours trying to condense five days of my technology awareness seminar into a three-day training session. We were both there at IBM's invite, but his ego was bruised that I was asked to present three six-hour sessions while he was only allotted an hour to give his presentation on marketplace trends. His demeanor softened with each cocktail, so I asked him about something in his presentation that didn’t pass my smell test. More specifically, it was the way he glossed over a reference that substantiated one of his key points. Eventually, he not only admitted that he had published it using a fictitious name, he considered his deception brilliant. Consequently, I’ve been practicing professional distancing from the guy ever since.
Shocked? Don’t be. The rapidly moving IT industry has forever been likened to the wild west where a snake oil salesmen could thrive. Some even refer to IT as the misinformation industry. I warned all my clients that “low integrity is at an all time high.” This is also true today in a world where propaganda is so prevalent, and so easily spread. This may be urban legend but apparently during the cold war an athletic competition was held between the USA and Russia. No other countries were present. The USA won decisively, and Pravda, formerly the official newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, reported the event as an international competition where Russia finished second and the USA finished next to last. By the way, Pravda is the Russian word for “truth.”
IT Propaganda Wars
I didn’t become an IT industry pundit by choice, but during the early 1990's I couldn’t keep quiet in the midst of vendor propaganda wars that were hurting companies who "lived on the reading edge" and practiced "management by magazine." I published some of my first-hand research and in 1992 software vendor Boole and Babbage featured me on a 2 week speaking tour across Europe where I gave a five-hour lecture on performance and tuning (in 8 European countries plus two cities in the UK). After interacting with hundreds of IT professionals who attended, I developed even more insights and eventually became emboldened to write a letter to the CEO of IBM (John Akers at that time) suggesting why he should ignore those voices calling on him to break up IBM into multiple technology companies. Long story short, despite a rocky initial meeting at IBM with indignant division heads who resented Mr. Akers meddling by bringing in an outsider, two weeks later I was a guest speaker at IBM customer events in New York, Los Angeles, Portland, and Seattle. Since I was exposing fallacies and making predictions to IT executives from the largest IT organizations in the world, I too had officially become an IT pundit.
Speaking invitations grew and I published articles about technology targeting enterprise executives and ruffling lots of feathers, especially other pundits. Over the next 8 years and I traveled to 5 continents usually as the lone dissenter presenting the "contrarian view." At two different events I politely refuted the claims of the keynote speakers, both well-known authors who regularly appeared on TV and radio. The themes they were promoting were re-engineering and computer downsizing. The other pundits pointed to what they assumed were success stories that turned out to be a house of cards. I explained to my audiences why people promoting downsizing and rightsizing had been fantasizing. I would have been dismissed early but my facts were impossible to refute because I had gathered them first-hand investigating 14 downsizing projects that everyone assumed had been completed successfully. In reality they had failed and over $2.5 billion dollars had been squandered due in large part to vendor's overstating their capabilities. By the way some IT executives gave me information at the risk of being fired, not wanting their stockholders to find out they squandered $400 million dollars.
Customers sincerely appreciated my candor. Many set up internal events for me to speak to their entire IT staff and others put me on retainer. My presence put me at odds with IT staff who believed the other pundits and most refused to admit they had been fooled.
Gov of Canada
I met with IT staff of several governments. I declined an offer from the incoming party in one country to help investigate how their vanquished opponents had pilfered the national treasury.
I was glad I accepted an offer from a sales manager from Hitachi Canada, who heard me speak in Phoenix because it led to some of the most rewarding work of my career. He invited me to speak at a technology conference promoting downsizing hosted by the Gov of Canada. I spoke for 2 solid hours without a break to government IT staff in a packed ball room (standing-room-only), and they too found my research compelling. Consequently, for the next 10 years, agencies in Ottawa sought my advice on a myriad of challenging projects. For example, my colleague John Kirschner and I helped Health Canada transform their IT. After adopting the technology road map and IT governance plans we provided they went from being ranked 34th in the world to #2. We helped Public Works disaster recovery group plan for a nuclear suitcase detonation in Ottawa, and showed another agency how to save $70 million dollars by eliminating a prominent consulting firm that was ripping them off.
In 2005, I was flattered but hesitant when asked to predict what the enterprise technology landscape would look like in 2015, but decided to try. If my predictions weren’t spot on I wouldn’t have mentioned this now. The only downside was they kept bringing me there during winter and I found Ottawa a bit on the chilly side. It's a city where people literally skate to work on a frozen canal that runs through the city. However I can assure you Canadian people are the warmest you can find anywhere.
It was natural that I became an international technology pundit since I interacted directly with so many of the big players. IT is a global marketplace, so geopolitical factors and cyber security considerations are always part of the mix. IBM paid me well to share my research and teach seminars in Ch!na, Russia, Belgium, Germany, Brasil, Mexico, Canada, South Africa and even Slovenia.
For the last 40 years I have had a business partner who is a native of Ta!wan, so I have long been aware of the dispute/conflict between Ta!wan and the mainland. In a nutshell, Ta!wan wants independence while those governing the mainland regards Ta!wan as a breakaway province which it has vowed to retake, by force if necessary. To clarify something in Part 1 of this report, I was not casting dispersion by wondering if Ta!wan might have tried to warn other countries about the January 23 lock down that occurred in the mainland.
How Totalitarians Win Friends and Influence People
For several decades Ch!na has been sharing their wealth and expertise to help hundreds of struggling countries, each of whom have a vote in the United Nations. They have wielded capitalism and technology to strengthen their position worldwide, and at the same time strengthen their totalitarian rule. One of their billionaires has been trying to persuade Nicaragua to create a canal to compete with Panama
The Current Plan is to Open Up
In addition to their secret 100 year plan that began in 1949, the CCP openly publishes public 5 year plans, having started the practice in 1953 after the Korean war.. All such plans can be found online.
(search for "Five year plans ch!na")
Ch!na’s Thirteenth 5-year Plan (2016-2020) included this objective:
“Opening up: Deeper participation in supranational power structures, more international cooperation.”
Ch!na appears to be colonizing hundreds of countries worldwide, especially in Africa, South America, and the Middle East. Where other lenders wouldn't take on the risk, Ch!na has been loaning these countries huge amounts of money at low interest rates to modernize their infrastructures. Consequently, for the last decade they have been building roads, bridges, massive dams (about 300 thus far), railways, hospitals, skyscrapers, etc. They regularly sets up scholarship funds and donates money to key organizations, like the African Union.
It has been a boon for them. In 2009 they passed the US as Africa’s largest trading partner.
Please watch this 10 minute video from Wendover Productions made in July 2018 which reports over 10,000 Ch!nese businesses were already operating in Africa, 90% of which are privately owned, the other 10% state-owned. See
“How Africa is becoming Ch!na’s Ch!na” - on youtube, v=zQV_DKQkT8o (this isn't a link so search for this video ID)
Then watch a pro-Ch!na video, 6 minutes long, suggesting Ch!na is only interested in friendship. see youtube v=hDQ7C5cdzkQ (search for this video ID)
Irony of Ironies
As explained in the Wendover video, involvement with developing countries has greatly expanded China's influence at the United Nations.
May 2020 - In an irony of all ironies, in spite of their history and vast range of proven human rights abuses, while the world is in the middle of a pandemic that many believe they intentionally unleashed on the world, Ch!na was nominated and selected as one of the five-member-state United Nations Human Rights Council (UN HRC) Consultative Group, granting it power to review applications and suggest recommendations to independent UN experts.
Such is the power of propaganda.
---------------------------------
Please contact us to request a copy of the full research report, which is free.
==============================