Daniel Dumbrill
@DanielDumbrill • 99,071 subscribers
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This month I helped harvest over 100 tons of cotton in Manas County of Xinjiang. I oversaw the whole process, from making sure the cotton was ready to harvest, to booking the John Deer harvester, arranging the the transport of the cotton bales and much more. Full vid coming soon!
Daniel Dumbrill98,890 görüntüleme • 9 gün önce
I just stopped in at the Urumqi Airport Starbucks in Xinjiang to try a few of the localized snacks. It is nowhere near as impressive as the Grand Bazaar store, but it is still caught up in the same Western China-watcher meltdown. The snacks were fine but overpriced, which is about what you would expect. The place was packed, and a lot of the Xinjiang-themed merch was already sold out. Starbucks has been opening intangible-cultural-heritage shops across China for years. Doing it here, with local snacks and a Uyghur Muqam performance at the Grand Bazaar location, looks like a business decision that is working. A lot of China "experts" will still tell you, with no evidence, that it is a CCP/government conspiracy. Meanwhile, the shop at the end of this video is the norm. Local restaurants and even barber shops around here are decked out with far more Uyghur design than this Starbucks, and they were around long before it showed up.
Daniel Dumbrill38,427 görüntüleme • 20 gün önce
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Michael Parenti on the Dalai Lama & Tibet, featured on Pen & Teller's show "Bullshit!" in 2005.
Daniel Dumbrill1,160,851 görüntüleme • 3 yıl önce
This is neat. Busses in Chongqing started rolling out displays that link up with the traffic lights. If you're stuck behind one, you'll know how long until the light turns green. If there's separate left/right turn lights, it'll show up as additional indicators on the sides.
Daniel Dumbrill561,499 görüntüleme • 1 yıl önce
In August, I delivered a speech in Xinjiang to a group of international delegates. I hadn’t planned on sharing it here, but the part about the BBC piece is particularly relevant now given the meltdown over Starbucks’ Xinjiang locations and their opening party, which included traditional dance. When the BBC shows overseas Uyghurs dancing, it is treated as a wonderful display of culture supposedly being erased in China. But as soon as people see Uyghurs dancing their traditional dance in China, overseas China “experts” collectively lose their minds and try to spin it into a CCP conspiracy narrative in an attempt to reconcile the disconnect between their propaganda and what you can observe with your own eyes. The speech was supposed to be 16 minutes, but I was the last speaker in this panel and we were over-time so it was a bit rushed, but still hit some important context behind where Western propaganda comes from.
Daniel Dumbrill20,043 görüntüleme • 15 gün önce
Okay, the Huawei Mate 90 with camera module actually looks pretty awesome. This is the first phone camera accessory in a long time that actually brings something new to the table. Most of the add-on lenses from other manufacturers sit over the phone’s existing camera and magnify whatever that little sensor can already see. Useful, but you are still stuck with the phone’s telephoto. This one does not work that way. The module has its own 1-inch sensor built into it, larger than either of the big cameras already in the phone, and the phone’s lenses are not in the path at all. When it locks on, the phone is the mount, the battery, the screen, and the computer. You control the zoom, the focus, and the aperture from the phone, or from a ring on the lens itself. It does not even carry its own battery. The phone feeds power straight through the contacts, including the motors that drive the zoom. It is a REAL optical zoom, 24 mm to 240 mm on a 35 mm scale, continuous, on that same 1-inch sensor the whole way. Not a jump from a wide camera to a tiny periscope. Ten times, in one lens, with the aperture running from f/2.0 at the wide end to f/4.5 at the long end. For a portrait that is the difference between a normal lens and a short telephoto you would actually pack, and then on out to a reach you normally only get by cropping hard or carrying a separate body. Sony tried something like this years ago with the lens cameras that clamped onto a phone and communicated over Wi-Fi. Those had the right instinct and a miserable experience with terrible latency. This is wired in. The phone drives it. I have been looking for a compact system to carry for interviews when I am traveling. Right now that usually means three Micro Four Thirds bodies for my three required shots (one on me, one on the guest, and a wide shot with both of us). I keep picturing a couple of these in a carry-on instead. Same idea, a lot less bulk, and the phone I am already holding becomes the recorder and the monitor. I'm starting to see a bunch of photos and videos coming out on these and it looks really impressive.
Daniel Dumbrill26,410 görüntüleme • 25 gün önce
It's even funnier that in many countries, 'democracy' means a popularity contest in which you pick the candidate with the biggest marketing budget and catchiest (usually broken) promises. While in modern China, democracy means responding to the people's actual needs & demands.
Daniel Dumbrill159,758 görüntüleme • 7 ay önce
After Tangbula we started heading home. We’d planned to take the Duku Highway — one of the most beautiful roads in China, and our most direct route back — but it was closed because of rain. That pushed us through Kuitun, where we only stopped because it was on the way. We ended up liking the town so much we stayed three nights. The street food market was great, there was a water park the kids loved, and a massive underground mall with tunnels stretching as far as you could see, branching off in every direction. It was bizarre. I’ve never seen anything like it. The whole city felt alive. I also met a few locals who had studied in Canada or the US and come back home to open businesses.
Daniel Dumbrill39,327 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
Jimmy Lai was found guilty simply for engaging in journalism. Oh yeah, and lobbying the US for sanctions on China/HK, fueling xenophobia by branding mainlanders "locusts" in his paper, and colluding with foreign powers for hostile measures, even floating ideas like nuking China.
Daniel Dumbrill126,346 görüntüleme • 10 ay önce
A Canadian walks into a barbershop in Urumqi and meets a Tibetan and a Uyghur. That’s not the start of a joke. That’s how I made two great new friends. On the way back to Chongqing we stopped in Urumqi again, and I found a little shop called 25HBarber shop, way up in a high-rise looking over the city. There’s a bar in the shop. They pour you free whisky while you get your hair cut. The owner is Tibetan, originally from Gansu. One of the main barbers is a local Uyghur guy who’s been with him since they opened 5 years ago. Both of them were great to talk to. We covered a lot of ground. What I didn’t tell them was what I actually make content about online. When I’m in Xinjiang, I rarely mention that I make videos about China, and often about Xinjiang. Too many people have used Uyghurs and other locals as props for a story they already decided on. I push back on that. But it still feels strange talking about people who are just living and enjoying their lives. And because my videos get clipped and reposted in China without any of the nuance, I also worry locals will think I’m skipping the hard years — the unrest, the tension, the scrutiny. If I were them, I might think, “Who is this outsider to narrate our lives?” So I left it there. That night, back at the hotel, my barber (Ibrahim) messaged me. He’d looked up my videos. He thanked me for telling Xinjiang’s story. Then he asked if I wanted to go around the old Uyghur neighborhoods and get a drink. The next day I went back near the end of his shift. His boss was there too. We had a few drinks in the shop, then went bar-hopping — more whisky, hookah, a long night. We really hit it off. I’m heading back to Urumqi next week with a nice bottle of 15-year old whisky packed in my suitcase for them. We’re already planning the next night out. Cool shop with a unique man-cave vibe. Even cooler guys. I've made two great new lifelong friends here.
Daniel Dumbrill29,196 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
One of the victims of these sexual harassment incidents within the US government-funded Uyghur groups was Julie Millsap. Julie worked directly with Rushan Abbas, the Uyghur “human rights” activist who also helped the US military interrogate Uyghur prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. I interviewed Rushan and exposed a number of her lies, including how she downplayed how long she had been involved with the NED. Julie came out attacking me right after that interview. You’d think this would win her enough favor with Rushan for her to come out in full support of Julie and loudly condemn the sexual harassment happening in the organizations she worked with. Especially since Rushan and the community she works with constantly invent stories about vulnerable women in China while pretending to care about them. Instead, Rushan remained quiet when the kind of thing she had been pretending to care about happened right under her own nose. Do you remember when Israel intercepted a humanitarian flotilla on its way to Gaza, detained roughly 180 people, and put them in humiliating conditions? There were two Uyghurs onboard who were also detained. Rushan didn’t speak up then either, nor did the other dedicated US-funded Uyghur organizations. Rushan’s own organization says they are about supporting “human rights and democratic freedoms for Uyghurs.” The World Uyghur Congress states that they “represent the collective interest of the Uyghur people both in East Turkistan and abroad.” Well apparently not when the US government doesn’t want them to. The truth is, these people and organizations invent imaginary tales about China on issues they don’t even actually care about. They are funded for one purpose and one purpose only: to push US government atrocity propaganda against their geopolitical targets. Watch the full geopolitical livestream with Carl Zha here:
Daniel Dumbrill52,995 görüntüleme • 5 ay önce
Follow Nury for the best reporting on Jimmy Lai. Jimmy lobbied the US for sanctions on China/HK, fueled xenophobia and local violence by branding mainlanders "locusts" in his paper, and colluded with foreign powers for hostile measures, even floating ideas like nuking China. The US wouldn't tolerate even a fraction of this behavior for one second, but they expect China to.
Daniel Dumbrill48,616 görüntüleme • 5 ay önce
Chicken blood-drinking military-aged 5 year olds are currently invading America.
Daniel Dumbrill205,121 görüntüleme • 3 yıl önce