Bloody Shovel 4

So it seems that hostility to China is now official American policy. Redgov, i.e. the Military Industrial Complex has been pushing it for quite a while, and for good reason: they want war, or at least a plausible threat of war so they can get bigger budgets and waste more money so they can embezzle their cut and invest it in things like Theranos. That's their job. And it happens that the narrow pecuniary interests of the Military Industrial Complex now fit very well with the electoral interests ...

Myanmar opened up to the West, agreed to "democratize", and release Aung San Suu Kyi, in 2011. I blogged about it back then. The rationale between the military junta dissolving itself was that China was eating up the whole economy. 100,000 Chinese have basically colonized downtown Mandalay, so the idea was to play USG against China. Which is a pretty good idea. Kim Jong Un is playing the very same game right now. Duterte in the Philippines kinda is too. This will be basically geopolitics 101 in ...

https://youtu.be/rHjlCmdyesY?t=8m58s

I don't know if Duterte is serious; but if he does push away every single US military facility from the Philippines, that's basically giving China the South China sea. All of it. Who would've thought that, 5 years ago?

Next step is finding some South Korean Duterte who expels all US troops from the Asian mainland. That should happen in less than 10 years, if China has any power at all. Japan would be trickier, but Okinawa is not that much of a threat. At any ra...

Liu Xiaobo is dead. Who the hell is Liu Xiaobo?

A pyschopathic status maximizer from Northeast China. Or may I say a high-IQ status-greedy sociopath. Or a shameless self-promoter taking money from USG to undermine his own nation?

Or in one word: an activist. Liu Xiaobo was a student activist from the 1980s. The 1980s were a very delicate time in China. Mao was dead. Deng Xiaoping had opened up the country. The old order was shattered; and when a country is in disorder, the status-hunters smell wea...

WRM cheers on the newly found intimacy between USG and Japan. Kerry and Hagel, State and the Pentagon are both now in Japan, where they have signed... something. WRM sees this as proof that USG is putting its weight behind Japan, joining forces against China. And that's a good thing. Say what you will about WRM, he knows what he likes, he makes it clear, and he says it all over again as many times as he can find excuses for. Pension reform, automation, fuck China, defend Israel, he's not a singl...

The Cathedral is at least trying:

(H/T Voxday)

Since the Gmail privacy brouhaha earlier this month I've started to think a bit about my digital footprint, and with shit like this, damn it's hard not to get paranoid.

Anomaly UK had this post talking about how to do dissenting blogging if the shit gets serious and the government starts to crack down. See how in the comments Jim, who seems to know what he's talking about,  makes some suggestions. I also recall how zhainan made that great post about

Its not often that you see news that both make you laugh out loud, and make you think about deep cultural anthropology issues. This is one of them: Saudi Arabian court dictates that police may force a women to hide her eyes if they are deemed to be too sexy. (H/T Bivouac-Id). Well the news is quite absurd, they already wear the burka down there, if they have to hide their eyes, how can they even walk down the street? There's the option of staying in the kitchen, if you ask me. Anyway, rather tha...