I’ve been scanning the questions on Quora. They are pretty fucking silly. Seriously, who asks these questions? Retarded morons that live inside the United States or educated American idiots?
We start off this this bit of lunacy…
- Why wasn’t Communist China a developed 1st world country?
- When is China going to grow some balls and invade Taiwan?
- Why does Xi Jinping want Taiwan?
- What chance does Taiwan stand against the Chinese Communist Party when the President of the United States is a Chinese Collaborator?
Yeah. They are all pretty silly. It makes me embarrassed that I hold an American passport.
- Why does the US want stronger relations with Taiwan?
- What will Taiwan lose if it returns to mainland China?
- Will China copy the U.S. policy and start a huge regime of sanctions against Taiwan?
- Why doesn’t Taiwan want to be a part of PR China?
- Why did China sanction Taiwan on natural sand? Is it because it is raw material for chips
- What will happen in Taiwan next?
- Is China trying to isolate Taiwan?
- Assuming that Taiwan is willing and ready to return to Mainland China, will the USA let go of Taiwan, and what will become of its interest in the Island?
Ah. Perhaps a classroom full of six-year olds invaded the Social Media platform. Eh?
Let’s see what is going on with American “news”. Let’s glance at the Drudge Report…
White House summons Chinese ambassador as crisis escalates...
Simulating Attack on Island... 'Sinking American warships'...
Tells USA: Can't 'treat countries like George Floyd'...
Xi Builds Security Fortress...
Does Beijing Have Own Space Plane?
Pentagon chiefs calls go unanswered...
Top Taiwan Missile Official Found Dead in Hotel Room...
Fears Japan on front line...
UN chief warns in Hiroshima...
APPLE Bends Knee on Label Demands...
Pelosi Gambit Reshapes Political Risk in Asia...
Same song and dance.
What a crock shit load of bullshit.
President Biden lied to the face of Xi Peng, he provided a plane and fighter escort to Nancy Polaski and crossed a Chinese RED LINE. What a fucking tool. What a fucking idiot. What a moron.
I think that it’s time enough for some serious food, booze and cavorting with the opposite sex. Don’t you know.
Let’s talk about America…
Florida couple arrested for selling golden tickets to heaven.
America today.
“Snokha-chestvo”
Few centuries ago Russia had a phenomenon of “snokha-chestvo”.
During that times it was common that children were living with their parents in the same house.
It was also common for sons to be married young and go for work for a long time and leave the wife at home.
As a result many fathers at that time were persuing the sons wife (snoha) demanding intimate relationships.
In the Russian Empire, snokhachestvo (Russian: снохачество, lit. 'daughter-in-law privileges') referred to sexual relations between a pater familias (bolshak) of a Russian peasant household (dvor) and his daughter-in-law (snokha) during the minority or absence of his son. With a view to attracting additional workers to the household, marriages in rural Russia were frequently contracted when the groom was six or seven years old. During her husband's minority, the bride often had to tolerate advances of her assertive father-in-law. For example, in the middle of the 19th century in Tambov Governorate 12-13 year old boys were often married to 16-17 year old girls. The boys' fathers used to arrange such marriages to take advantage of their sons' lack of experience. Snokhachestvo entailed conflicts in the family and put moral pressure on the mother-in-law, who usually treated her son's wife as a rival for her own husband's affections. Snokachestvo was considered incestuous by the Russian Orthodox Church and unseemly by the obshchina, the rural community. Legally it was considered a form of rape and was punished with fifteen to twenty lashes. Understandably, cases of snokhachestvo were not publicized and the crime remained latent, making it difficult to assess its true extent in the Russian Empire. One of the first Russian writers to decry snokhachestvo, describing it as a form of "sexual debasement," was Alexander Radishchev, who saw it as an outgrowth of Russian serfdom. In the 19th century, its resurgence was fueled by obligatory conscription and "the seasonal departure of young men for work outside the village."[1] Snokhachestvo remained relatively widespread even after the abolition of serfdom in 1861. The Narodnik writer Gleb Uspensky, while deploring the plight of young peasant women, sympathized with "the emotional and physical needs of the mature peasant man." -Wikipedia
If sons wife denied the requests she would have been issued with hard working conditions at home and beaten.
Some father’s demanded sons to leave the house for work to get closer to their sons wife. Some sons even knew about such relationships.
Many Russian famous writers such as Lermontov, Nabokov and others wrote about this phenomenon.
Russian church opposed such situation as from the religious POV that was incest, yet it was quite common in villages.
China’s Reaction To Pelosi’s Visit Reveals Its Taiwan Conflict Plans
China’s response to Pelosi’s visit of Taiwan continues:
Taipei, Aug. 6 (CNA) Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense (MND) said on Saturday that multiple Chinese military aircraft and vessels had operated near Taiwan in the morning in what it believed to be a simulation of an attack on Taiwan's main island. In a brief press statement, the MND said multiple Chinese military aircraft and vessels conducted activities near Taiwan Saturday morning, with some of them crossing the median line of the Taiwan Strait -- an unofficial buffer zone normally avoided by both Taiwanese and Chinese military aircraft and vessels. The MND added that the Chinese military was likely "simulating an attack on Taiwan's main island."
The median line of the Taiwan Strait was drawn in 1955 by U.S. Airforce General Benjamin Davis. It no longer has any meaning.
Marine traffic around Taiwan continues without much trouble. Taiwan’s harbors are still accessible. Ships avoid the zones China had designated as target areas.
Some people in Taiwan’s news agency CNA now recognize what a real conflict with China would look like (machine translation):
Experts pointed out that China's unprecedented large-scale military exercises around Taiwan now give a glimpse of how the Communist army will block off the island of Taiwan if it launches a war against Taiwan in the future, and also exposes the Chinese military. After Pelosi left Taiwan, the Communist Army issued another navigation warning, and live ammunition [will be] fired in the Yellow Sea for 10 consecutive days ... This is the first time that a Chinese military exercise has come so close to Taiwan, with some drills operating less than 20 kilometers from the coast of Taiwan. Also unprecedented is that the location of the exercise by the communist army includes the sea and airspace east of Taiwan. This is an area of strategic importance for Taiwanese troops to receive supplies and for possible U.S. reinforcements. The outside world has long speculated that one of China's preferred strategies for attacking Taiwan is a blockade. This encirclement action is to prevent any commercial and military ships and aircraft from entering or leaving Taiwan, as well as to prevent the advance of Taiwan by U.S. troops stationed in the region. Song Zhongping, an independent Chinese military analyst, said the Chinese army "obviously has all the military capabilities to enforce such a blockade".
China indeed has the capability to completely blockade Taiwan.
As the whole area is also under cover of China’s land based ballistic missiles and in reach of its airforce a blockade is easy to establish and hard to breach.
China’s military is no longer the unprofessional lightly armed force that some still think it is:
According to Xinhua News Agency, the Chinese military dispatched more than 100 military aircraft and more than 10 frigates and destroyers in the exercise, including the J-20 stealth fighter and the Type 055 destroyer, which are cutting-edge weapons of the Chinese Air Force and Navy, respectively. In addition, through the exercise, the PLA can test and strengthen the coordinated combat capabilities of participating troops of various services and arms, including ground, sea, air and rocket troops, as well as strategic support capabilities in charge of cyber warfare. In addition, the exercise also posed a major test to the Eastern Theater Command established by the Communist Party of China in 2016. This theater is responsible for military operations in China's entire eastern seas, and thus covers Taiwan. John Blaxland, a professor of international security at the Australian National University, told reporters that what China had displayed so far was a "great military." "They can't be dismissed as some sort of less experienced and underpowered army, they're clearly capable of coordinating land and sea operations, and capable of using missile systems and being effective," he said. Braxland said the Chinese military's exercises showed Taiwan, the United States and Japan that China "has the conditions to carry out the actions they have threatened to take."
Barxland is not the only ‘western’ expert who is impressed by this well coordinated show of force.
If one compares a potential war about Taiwan with the current NATO-Russia proxy war in Ukraine on can see the U.S. problems. The U.S. would likely want to avoid a direct conflict over Taiwan with a nuclear armed China, just like it avoids one with Russia in Ukraine. That is why Biden is at odds with lawmakers who want to implement some crazy Taiwan Policy Act that would commit the U.S. to the islands defense.
The U.S. would rather want to help Taiwan by other means. But how?
An air and sea blockade would hit Taiwan hard. Some 40% of its electricity is generated by natural gas all of which it has to import. Another large part is produced with coal which Taiwan also imports. The same goes for petroleum products. Before Pelosi landed in Taipei gas reserves on the island were enough for just 11 days. Coal and oil is easier to store but would still run out before a blockade could be lifted.
Then there is food:
In 2018, Taiwan's food self-sufficiency rate is only 35%. Additionally, the actual production of agricultural land in Taiwan is about 520,000 hectares, which is far from the 740,000 to 810,000 hectares’ target prescribed by the Ministry of Interior. As an island nation, food supply depends on international trade and is regarded as dangerous.
A total blockade of Taiwan would likely bring it to its knees within a few weeks or months. Time that could be used to defeat its air force, air defenses and missiles and prevent attacks from Taiwan on China’s continental assets. China does not have to invade the island. It just has to wait until it is invited to come in.
In a response to a Chinese blockade of Taiwan the U.S. would likely declare a blockade of China from energy imports, i.e. oil and LPG. It could enforce this by hindering Chinese ships from passing through the Malacca Street and other maritime bottlenecks. (The second big gas pipeline that Russia is currently building to China is one of the counter moves to that threat.)
In case of a blockade and counter-blockade the question becomes who could hold out longer. Here China has the advantage of greater reserves. The U.S. would also have only few allies in such a conflict. China would, like Russia is now, still be in good standing with the rest of the world. That would allow it to mitigate most consequences.
Andrei Martyanov seems to think that the technologically superior U.S. submarine fleet could defeat the Chinese navy in the South China Sea. I doubt that it is still the case. It is also totally irrelevant. Submarines can not lift blockades that are enforced by land based missiles and an air force that flies under the protective air defense cover of continental China.
In addition to the maneuvers China has taken political countermeasures against the U.S.:
Chinese Foreign Ministry on Friday announced the following countermeasures in response: 1. Canceling China-U.S. Theater Commanders Talk. 2. Canceling China-U.S. Defense Policy Coordination Talks (DPCT). 3. Canceling China-U.S. Military Maritime Consultative Agreement (MMCA) meetings. 4. Suspending China-U.S. cooperation on the repatriation of illegal immigrants. 5. Suspending China-U.S. cooperation on legal assistance in criminal matters. 6. Suspending China-U.S. cooperation against transnational crimes. 7. Suspending China-U.S. counternarcotics cooperation. 8. Suspending China-U.S. talks on climate change
Calls by the Pentagon chiefs to China now go unanswered.
The U.S. wants to further provoke China with another warship passage through the Taiwan Strait. But China’s legal understanding is that an uninvited military passage through its economic zone is not allowed. The U.S. makes the same claim when it comes to its own economic zone.
As China has broken off all military communication with the U.S. the risk of a passage is now much higher. One should not be astonished when China reacts to it.
Posted by b on August 6, 2022 at 16:37 UTC | Permalink
Florida man arrested for throwing alligator through drive-thru window
SANCOCHO COLOMBIANO | COLOMBIAN SANCOCHO | DE RES
Some fine and delicious Colombian food here guys…
Did USA call China’s bluff?
When Pelosi landed in Taiwan, many people – including many Americans – were disappointed. China had lost face and USA had called its bluff.
This is what I wrote in response:
It is not a bluff, it is a dress rehearsal. China made a decision. It abandoned the policy of peaceful reunification and decided that they must invade Taiwan. From now on China will arrange similar war games every year, each of them larger than the previous one. Some time in the next 3 to 5 years, the exercises will go live and lead to an invasion.
Many observers have now come around to the same conclusion.
– Petri Krohn | Aug 6 2022 16:53 utc
US wants to surround China with missiles – but can’t find Asian country to host them
Who is going to agree to fight for the United States?
Moving around under heavy artillery fire.
Many times and it was always the same mistake that got our people killed:
Moving around under heavy artillery fire.
In Bosnia, we lost at least one or two soldiers every week, simply because they were walking around where they shouldn’t. Often, it was their own decision to do so, but quite a couple of times some lower ranking officers would order a subordinate to “fetch me this” or “go and tell this guy that”.
In Kosovo, we lost a guy, because he went to a well to get some water while the enemy artillery was pounding our village. Another one died, because he didn’t want to drink his tea inside a house and ventured out into the sun.
When the enemy’s artillery attacks, take a break! If you are in safe place, a trench or a bunker, you stay there and don’t move. Many experienced soldiers use this time to sleep. Nothing happens and no enemy infantry or tanks will approach your position until the artillery fire is either over or has moved to another place.
Unfortunately, many soldiers and commanders don’t get it. The shells are hitting closer and closer and they lose their nerves and leave the safety of their positions. If this happens there are almost always casualties.
China’s YMTC Claims 3D NAND Chip Breakthrough
(MENAFN– Asia Times)
A Chinese memory chip maker has put rivals Micron and SK hynix on notice with claims it has self-developed technology that has enhanced its 3D NAND semiconductor’s performance by 50% while cutting power consumption by 25%.
Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC), founded in 2016 and based in Wuhan, on Wednesday announced its fourth-generation NAND chips, known as X3-9070, are the first to feature 232 layers of memory cells, according to Chinese media reports. The claimed performance improvements are over its third-generation chips launched in April 2020.
The announcement said the X3-9070 is the highest bit density flash product in the company’s history, enabling 1 terabyte (TB) storage capacity in an ultra-compact mono-die footprint. The press release did not, however, state exactly how many layers of memory cells the X3-9070 chip has stacked.
Jennifer Caswell
Three years ago, police caught 28-year-old English teacher Jennifer Caswell in a Mississippi hotel room with a 15-year-old male student. She had resigned from her position at Oklahoma’s Hollis Middle School two month earlier amid rumors that she had been having sex with a student, and now police had the evidence.
The pair had reportedly had many sexual encounters in the boy’s home, a classroom, and elsewhere.
But after Caswell followed the boy 650 miles from Oklahoma to Mississippi, she was finally caught in the act.
Now, she has been ordered to pay $1 million dollars to the victim’s family.
A derelict old house
Not MM story, but one that I discovered. -MM
In 2009 I bought a derelict old house! It had not been lived in for 15 years. The roof had been eaten out by termites and had fallen in over part of the property. It was really a knock-down proposition. But I loved the old stone walls and I felt with a lot of effort, I could bring this old lady back to life again!
*
I was coming home one day around lunch time and there was a woman in the street taking photos of the front of our property. I pulled in the driveway, into the garage and got out of the car. The woman with the camera came up the driveway and said to me….
“My name is Elizabeth Tape, my father Ron and mother June built this house in 1952. I spent my first 12 years in this house and they were some of the nicest times of my life. So every time I come back to Mt Barker I come around to have a look at the old house. I have seen a few things changing lately and I thought I would take a few photos to show Dad”!
My first reaction was….”My God, is he still alive?”………She said yes both of them were still alive but, June had dementia and Ron was in very poor health and on oxygen all the time.
I invited Elizabeth in to see the changes we had made to the house. She took lots of photos and said, “Oh I wish Dad could see what you have done here!” I said he was always welcome to visit if he felt up to it.
Three months went by and I never heard anything further and thought the old guy must have passed on! Then, one Sunday morning a couple of cars pulled up out the front, containing the entire family…..they had all come to see the old house. My God, Ron was so frail and weak, but his eyes just beamed as I showed him through the place and what we had done with it.
He told me, the two of them had spent the first 18 months on the grass out the front of the property chipping the stone that would go into the wall construction by hand, with nothing but an old combing hammer. I didn’t want to belittle Ron and June’s work but, there were times when I seriously wondered how big a challenge I had taken on, but I persevered! Now, listening to Ron talk with such passion, I am so glad I did.
At one point where I put in a doorway in the stone wall, I put in a perspex panel to show the way Ron and June had built the house, I wanted it to look like what archaeological restorers do in an ancient dig, and when Ron saw it he started to cry, because I had included behind the perspex the very combing hammer they used all those years ago which had been left on the property.
They built the house like a medieval fort and threw all the stone bits and rubbish in the large perimeter wall cavity.
Ron told me all about his dreams when he built the house and how proud they both were when they could move the family in.
June, as I said, had dementia and had no idea where she was or what they were doing there, it was all just foreign to her until I showed them what I had done with the old sheds up the back of the block. I relocated an old wood stove from what is now our guest cottage (which they lived in while they built the main house) up to my workshop, as I felt it was a bit good to just throw away.
As soon as June saw the stove she went into an uncontrolled state of excitement….pointing to it she kept saying, “That’s my stove, that’s my stove” over and over again! That was the only thing on the property she recognised!
*
We had a lovely couple of hours with Ron and June and the rest of the family and, having them here gave me a renewed feeling of vigor. I wanted to honour what Ron had built and everything I have done here since I have done with Ron at my shoulder, hoping that he approves!
He’s gone……..but neither we or this house will forget him. Thanks Stefan for the question!
“We Can’t Win A War With China” Says Military Expert
Well worth the watch. Please check it out.
Give a guy a chance
The man responded, “ I have a lot of felonies, and nobody wants to hire me because of that. I had to turn to the streets. I had to start stealing and robbing, in order to survive”
I was short staffed that day, so I asked him.. “do you want to work”?
His eyes opened up so wide and a big smile came across his face, and he said yes!! He said I will do anything for some food.
So for two weeks now, he has been on time for his two hour shift.
He helps me with taking out the trash and doing dishes.
I pay him at the end of each shift, and you know what he decides to do? Is to spend it in the restaurant on some nice warm food.
I try to offer it to him for free, but he refuses.. so I discount it all.
He told me today that he enjoys to being able to finally pay for something, that it makes him feel good inside.
The moral of this story, is to do something nice for someone no matter what their situation is. Even if they are asking you for some spare change, because we really don’t know their story, or what they are going through. And everybody deserves a second chance. ❤️”
Florida Man Kidnaps Scientist to Make Dog Immortal
His dog was getting older, and he started to panic that his dog was going to die. He thought Science was the answer.
So he went to the University of South Florida and kidnapped a science professor and held him hostage. Once the professor was released to safety, the dog lover was placed in custody.
The headline read,
“Florida Man Kidnaps Scientist to Make Dog Immortal”
How a missile in Kabul connects to a Speaker in Taipei
Washington’s hard power display of taking out Al-Qaeda’s Al-Zawahiri will not be reciprocated by Beijing over Pelosi’s provocative visit to Taiwan. It does however, definitively bury the decades-long era of cooperative US-Chinese relations.
By Pepe Escobar
This is the way the “Global War on Terror” (GWOT) ends, over and over again: not with a bang, but a whimper.
Two Hellfire R9-X missiles launched from a MQ9 Reaper drone on the balcony of a house in Kabul. The target was Ayman Al-Zawahiri with a $25 million bounty on his head. The once invisible leader of ‘historic’ Al-Qaeda since 2011, is finally terminated.
All of us who spent years of our lives, especially throughout the 2000s, writing about and tracking Al-Zawahiri know how US ‘intel’ played every trick in the book – and outside the book – to find him. Well, he never exposed himself on the balcony of a house, much less in Kabul.
Another disposable asset
Why now? Simple. Not useful anymore – and way past his expiration date. His fate was sealed as a tawdry foreign policy ‘victory’ – the remixed Obama ‘Osama bin Laden moment’ that won’t even register across most of the Global South. After all, a perception reigns that George W. Bush’s GWOT has long metastasized into the “rules-based,” actually “economic sanctions-based” international order.
Cue to 48 hours later, when hundreds of thousands across the west were glued to the screen of flighradar24.com (until the website was hacked), tracking “SPAR19” – the US Air Force jet carrying House Speaker Nancy Pelosi – as it slowly crossed Kalimantan from east to west, the Celebes Sea, went northward parallel to the eastern Philippines, and then made a sharp swing westwards towards Taiwan, in a spectacular waste of jet fuel to evade the South China Sea.
No “Pearl Harbor moment”
Now compare it with hundreds of millions of Chinese who are not on Twitter but on Weibo, and a leadership in Beijing that is impervious to western-manufactured pre-war, post-modern hysteria.
Anyone who understands Chinese culture knew there would never be a “missile on a Kabul balcony” moment over Taiwanese airspace. There would never be a replay of the perennial neocon wet dream: a “Pearl Harbor moment.” That’s simply not the Chinese way.
The day after, as the narcissist Speaker, so proud of accomplishing her stunt, was awarded the Order of Auspicious Clouds for her promotion of bilateral US-Taiwan relations, the Chinese Foreign Minister issued a sobering comment: the reunification of Taiwan with the mainland is a historical inevitability.
That’s how you focus, strategically, in the long game.
What happens next had already been telegraphed, somewhat hidden in a Global Times report. Here are the two key points:
Point 1: “China will see it as a provocative action permitted by the Biden administration rather than a personal decision made by Pelosi.”
That’s exactly what President Xi Jinping had personally told the teleprompt-reading White House tenant during a tense phone call last week. And that concerns the ultimate red line.
Xi is now reaching the exact same conclusion reached by Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this year: the United States is “non-agreement capable,” and there’s no point in expecting it to respect diplomacy and/or rule of law in international relations.
Point 2 concerns the consequences, reflecting a consensus among top Chinese analysts that mirrors the consensus at the Politburo: “The Russia-Ukraine crisis has just let the world see the consequence of pushing a major power into a corner… China will steadily speed up its process of reunification and declare the end of US domination of the world order.”
Chess, not checkers
The Sinophobic matrix predictably dismissed Xi’s reaction to the fact on the ground – and in the skies – in Taiwan, complete with rhetoric exposing the “provocation by American reactionaries” and the “uncivilized campaign of the imperialists.”
This may be seen as Xi playing Chairman Mao. He may have a point, but the rhetoric is pro forma. The crucial fact is that Xi was personally humiliated by Washington and so was the Communist Party of China (CPC), a major loss of face – something that in Chinese culture is unforgivable. And all that compounded with a US tactical victory.
So the response will be inevitable, and it will be classic Sun Tzu: calculated, precise, tough, long-term and strategic – not tactical. That takes time because Beijing is not ready yet in an array of mostly technological domains. Putin had to wait years for Russia to act decisively. China’s time will come.
For now, what’s clear is that as much as with Russia-US relations last February, the Rubicon has been crossed in the US-China sphere.
The price of collateral damage
The Central Bank of Afghanistan bagged a paltry $40 million in cash as ‘humanitarian aid’ soon after that missile on a balcony in Kabul.
So that was the price of the Al-Zawahiri operation, intermediated by the currently US-aligned Pakistani intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). So cheap.
The MQ-9 Reaper drone carrying the two Hellfire R9X that killed Al-Zawahiri had to fly over Pakistani airspace – taking off from a US base in the Persian Gulf, traversing the Arabian Sea, and flying over Balochistan to enter Afghanistan from the south. The Americans may have also got human intelligence as a bonus.
A 2003 deal, according to which Islamabad facilitates air corridors for US military flights, may have expired with the American withdrawal debacle last August, but could always be revived.
No one should expect a deep dive investigation on what exactly the ISI – historically very close to the Taliban – gave to Washington on a silver platter.
Dodgy dealings
Cue to an intriguing phone call last week between the all-powerful Chief of Staff of the Pakistani Army, Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa, and US deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman. Bajwa was lobbying for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to release a crucial loan at the soonest, otherwise Pakistan will default on its foreign debt.
Were deposed former Prime Minister Imran Khan still in power, he would never have allowed that phone call.
The plot thickens, as Al-Zawahiri’s Kabul digs in a posh neighborhood is owned by a close advisor to Sirajuddin Haqqani, head of the “terrorist” (US-defined) Haqqani network and currently Taliban Interior Minister. The Haqqani network, needless to add, was always very cozy with the ISI.
And then, three months ago, we had the head of ISI, Lieutenant General Nadeem Anjum, meeting with Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan in Washington – allegedly to get their former, joint, covert, counter-terrorism machinery back on track.
Once again, the only question revolves around the terms of the “offer you can’t refuse” – and that may be connected to IMF relief. Under these circumstances, Al-Zawahiri was just paltry collateral damage.
Sun Tzu deploys his six blades
Following Speaker Pelosi’s caper in Taiwan, collateral damage is bound to multiply like the blades of a R9-X missile.
The first stage is the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) already having engaged in live fire drills, with massive shelling in the direction of the Taiwan Strait out of Fujian province.
The first sanctions are on too, against two Taiwanese funds. Export of sable to Taiwan is forbidden; sable is an essential commodity for the electronics industry – so that will ratchet up the pain dial in high-tech sectors of the global economy.
Chinese CATL, the world’s largest fuel cell and lithium-ion battery maker, is indefinitely postponing the building of a massive $5 billion, 10,000-employee factory that would manufacture batteries for electric vehicles across North America, supplying Tesla and Ford among others.
So the Sun Tzu maneuvering ahead will essentially concentrate on a progressive economic blockade of Taiwan, the imposition of a partial no-fly zone, severe restrictions of maritime traffic, cyber warfare, and the Big Prize: inflicting pain on the US economy.
The War on Eurasia
For Beijing, playing the long game means the acceleration of the process involving an array of nations across Eurasia and beyond, trading in commodities and manufactured products in their own currencies. They will be progressively testing a new system that will see the advent of a BRICS+/SCO/Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) basket of currencies, and in the near future, a new reserve currency.
The Speaker’s escapade was concomitant to the definitive burial of the “war on terror” cycle and its metastasis into the “war on Eurasia” era.
It may have unwittingly provided the last missing cog to turbo-charge the complex machinery of the Russia-China strategic partnership. That’s all there is to know about the ‘strategic’ capability of the US political ruling class. And this time no missile on a balcony will be able to erase the new era.
ARROZ CON POLLO | How To Make Colombian Arroz Con Pollo (Chicken and Rice) | SyS
A fine delicious rice and chicken dish. Yum!
The Chowchilla kidnapping
On July 15, 1976, Ed Ray was driving a school bus full of 26 children home from a summer field trip to a swimming pool in Chowchilla, California. Suddenly, a van blocked the road ahead of the bus and three men wearing pantyhose on their heads and armed with sawed-off shotguns climbed aboard. They hijacked the bus and drove it to a remote riverbed, transferred the children and Ray into two converted prison vans, and drove them around for 11 hours, finally stopping at a quarry 100 miles away. They then forced everyone into a moving truck — that they’d buried 12 feet underground.
For 16 hours, the kidnappers tried to ransom off the children while Ray and the oldest student, 14-year-old Michael Marshall, attempted to push open the 200-pound metal sheet that had been placed atop the opening in the roof of the moving truck. Finally, they were able to move it just enough for Marshall to squeeze through and start digging. When he eventually reached the surface, the children climbed out and ran for help, ultimately reuniting with their families 36 long hours after they had first been abducted.
See the photos and go inside the horrific story of the Chowchilla kidnapping here: How 26 Schoolchildren Were Kidnapped And Buried Alive — Then Dug Their Way To Freedom
A Roman military tactic
Roman legionaries famously wore ‘Caligae’, open sandals shod with hobnails and fought in close-order formations (called cohorts). When fighting an enemy and winning the entire formation would advance, simultaneously treading down the wounded enemy lying on the ground with their hobnail sandals. Potentially that might mean several dozen men stamping on your face. Pretty brutal.
Tallulah Bankhead
Actress Tallulah Bankhead was infamous for not wearing underwear.
During the filming of——“Lifeboat”/1944—-—the crew complained about her flashing them when she climbed a ladder.
Director Alfred Hitchcock quipped,
"I don’t know if this is a matter for the costume department, make-up or hairdressing.”
It could happen to you
I watched a slim young woman walk directly up to a mob of men armed with machetes and clubs who had promised to kill her.
My then girlfriend and I had our own business. It included a large safari lodge and farm next to a lake and rhino sanctuary close to Harare in Zimbabwe. We leased the properties and were doing well enough to have made an offer to purchase them.
That all came to an end when the “war vets” turned up.
“War vets” were actually nothing of the sort. Originally, veteran guerrilla fighters of the Rhodesian bush war that had run for fifteen years and ended in the 1970s had begun protesting that they had not been properly rewarded for their services.
Initially Robert Mugabe tried to appease them by awarding them all hundreds of millions of dollars. That wasn’t enough.
At the same time as this was going on there was another drama developing. At the end of the war an agreement had been signed between the United Kingdom, the Nationalist organizations including its (para)military wings and the then Rhodesian government.
This agreement, called the Lancaster House Agreement, agreed to majority rule and one-man-one-vote. Amongst other things, the British government promised to fund the purchase of commercial land for redistribution to indigenous farmers.
However, right at the time of the war vets’ demands, Mo Mowlam, the then-UK Minister, decided to announce that in spite have having promised to do so twenty tyears earlier they would not fund the redistribution of land.
The result of this disgraceful decision was that President Robert Mugabe saw a way to solve the problem of appeasing his war vets and also of teaching the British a lesson. He let the war vets and everyone else vaguely associated with them or just wanting a patch of dirt loose on the white Zimbabwean farmers.
At first everyone believed it was just a protest and a political move by the ruling party to appease its supporters.
It wasn’t. It turned extremely nasty. Farms were destroyed, farmers and farm workers started being attacked and even being killed.
There was no way the farmers and their workers could fight back. They were all massively outnumbered and the police and army had been ordered to stay out of it. In fact they were assisting by collecting thugs off the streets and trucking them out to the farms.
We were caught in the middle of this. A crowd of “war vets” turned up.
The lodge was abandoned. We found ourselves suddenly alone. Then some stoned maniac turned up with notes ostensibly written by the workers accusing us of all sorts of nonsense, telling us that they were going to take over and that we would be killed if we tried to leave.
This last, the letters informed us, was because we had to produce “all the money” first. This was extremely serious as there was no way we could make money appear from nowhere and they would get nasty if we didn’t.
We heard singing as they walked out of the lodge. There was a mob at the front gate. It was the only exit.
I don’t like mobs.
I told my girlfriend to stay in the lodge and began to approach them. The closer I got the more aggressively they behaved. They did not enter but if I went up to them I knew they would kill me. They were completely out of control.
We were really trapped and it was only a matter of time before they came inside and began smashing and burning.
We had no options. I was armed. I had a handgun under my shirt and my rifle was on the back seat of my car. The problem was that the gate was at the end of a road. If we made a run for it we would have to knock the gate down and then turn through the crowd. Although I had only seen the machetes, knives and clubs, I was certain there would be guns amongst them as well. If we tried it, it would be easy to kill us.
I thought about farmer Terry Norton who had tried to make a break for it after getting into a shootout with a mob of war vets. He just made it out the gate before being gunned down.
I couldn’t start a shootout if I wasn’t sure it would mean me getting my girlfriend out safely. On the other hand, I might not be given the choice.
I decided to explain to my girlfriend that if they attacked us and we had no choice that she would have to drive while I shot.
I looked around. She was gone.
I ran out of the conference room we had been standing in. She was walking to the gate.
The war vets had gone silent.
I was horrified. I couldn’t approach. If I did they might go mad. I gripped the handgun and waited to start using it.
She calmly and quietly walked up to them and then she began talking to them softly.
Here and there men began to sit down. I had no idea what she was saying but it was doing the impossible.
Eventually nearly everyone was sitting listening to her talk. After a while she stopped and then a discussion began amongst them.
She talked some more with them and then began walking back. I was almost crying with relief.
When she reached me she said, “They said we can go”.
We drove out of the gate and never went back.
Oh and yes, I married her. She’s sitting on the couch next to me as I write this.
Edit:
It is not so important what she said as how she said it. She approached them bravely, calmly, peacefully and without any malice.
When she spoke to them, she talked about us and the hardships we had endured and how everything we had was invested in that place and that I had not inherited a farm or anything else. We understood that it was now all gone. She talked about the friendship that had grown between ourselves and the workers and the mutual respect we had always had for each other.
I handed over my company with cash in the bank to a politician/war vet a few days later who was connected with their leadership. At least that way the workers still had a job. After signing over, the politician informed us that the owner of the property had been aware that the warvets were coming and did not let us know. He did a deal with the same politician to partner with him before we even knew we were in trouble. Two weeks later we arrived in Holland without a cent.
I got the girl though!
Momma’s secret
Not MM's mom. LOL. -MM
At my mother’s funeral, my older half- sister told me something I had certainly not known before.
Before I was born and while she was married to her first husband, she shot a man at point-blank range twice in the chest/ abdomen without warning.
Her first husband had given her a “purse pistol”, a 32 caliber small concealable pistol, my sister said “to protect herself and the kids” before he was sent off to North Africa (where he was killed at Kasserine Pass).
So when she discovered a man breaking into the window above where the kids slept, without saying a word, she shot him TWICE less than two feet away.
He escaped and ran off. The next day, they saw a BIG trail of blood and followed it to a creek where it disappeared. (She never reported it to the police).
Now there is a bit of family history for you!
Alison Botha
The above photo is of Alison Botha. This is her story which, for me, is the scariest thing I have seen in the news and at the same time truly motivational!
One day, she was kidnapped by two men known as “Ripper Rapists.” They raped her. After raping her, they decided to kill her! They tried to kill her by suffocating her, but they just could not stop her breathing! Their failure to kill her this way frustrated them and let them choose a very brutal way to kill her by stabbing her. They stabbed her at least 30 times in her abdomen! After the stabbing, they noticed that her leg twitched. The twitching of her leg made them believe that she was not dead yet. In order to be sure that she is dead, they slit her throat at least 16 times! After this, they finally decided that she is dead and drove away.
What a miracle! The rapists were wrong! She was still breathing after such a brutality! She even wrote the names of the rapists in the dirt and beneath that “I love mom.“ After doing this, she soon realized that she might have a chance to survive! She noticed headlights streaking through the bushes in the distance from where she was in. She thought about trying to get on the road to get help.
When she pulled herself up, her head started to fall backward, as they had slit her neck at least 16 times! In the meantime, she also felt something slimy protruding from her abdomen too! She used one hand to hold her head and another hand to keep her organs from spilling and began to walk towards the road. She lost her consciousness and fell many times during this journey to the road, but ultimately, she managed to reach the road and collapsed along the white line.
After this, fortunately, soon, a young veterinary student named Tiaan Eilerd saw her. He utilized his knowledge that he gained from his veterinary training and tucked her exposed thyroid back inside her body and called the emergency services for help.
She was rushed to the hospital where the doctors were shocked by her horrific wounds. She got good care from the hospital and survived. She remembered everything about the rapists and was soon able to identify them from police pictures while she was still in the hospital and help the police arrest them quickly.
After her full recovery, she began traveling around the world telling her story and inspired other survivors to come forward and tell their stories as well. She has also won many prestigious awards. She has also written two books. Her survival story was portrayed in the movie “Alison” in 2016. Nowadays, she is admired all over the world as the most inspiring motivational speaker.
China’s Taiwan Military Option – How and Why?
This is an outstanding video, and he pours through the American military plans. It’s eye-opening. It’s shows the flawed thinking by the United States towards China.