International Politics / Current Events Thread

[fcgamer | 4,725]

Just now, arch_8ngel said:

Century eggs are pretty awful by themselves -- I can't imagine that they are improved by adding them to a pizza.

 

Century eggs can be nice in the right way. A local noodle shop mixes them, cucumber, and white tofu together, it tastes great, definitely a situation where the whole tastes better than the individual parts.

[arch_8ngel | 1,597]

Just now, fcgamer said:

Century eggs can be nice in the right way. A local noodle shop mixes them, cucumber, and white tofu together, it tastes great, definitely a situation where the whole tastes better than the individual parts.

I mean, i don't want to delve into your particular palate on this front, too deep -- but if you like the taste of urine / ammonia, I'm sure century eggs "can be nice in the right way"...

But that isn't really my fetish, so i can't say that I care for them, or could really imagine any way of meaningfully improving their taste.

[avatar! | 1,812]

https://media.defense.gov/2021/Jul/19/2002805003/-1/-1/1/CSA_CHINESE_STATE-SPONSORED_CYBER_TTPS.PDF

 

 

"Countries around the world are making it clear that concerns regarding the PRC’s malicious cyber activity is bringing them together to call out those activities, promote network defense and cybersecurity, and act to disrupt threats to our economies and national security," the official said.

China doing what China does best...

Edited July 19, 2021 by avatar!

[fcgamer | 4,725]

https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4268697

It's nice to see Indonesia decided to stop administrating virginity tests for potential female cadets.

[OptOut | 8,884]

Nice work America, that was 20 years, hundreds of thousands of lives and a Trillion Dollars well spent! 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/16/taliban-declares-war-is-over-in-afghanistan-as-us-led-forces-exit-kabul

I guess that's another imperial power Afghanistan can carve into the bedpost then...

British Empire

Soviet Union

United States

[MagusSmurf | 577]

https://www.longwarjournal.org/mapping-taliban-control-in-afghanistan

Spoiler

Most interesting speedrub of 2021 imo

 

[G-type | 2,482]

On 8/16/2021 at 1:24 AM, OptOut said:

Nice work America, that was 20 years, hundreds of thousands of lives and a Trillion Dollars well spent! 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/16/taliban-declares-war-is-over-in-afghanistan-as-us-led-forces-exit-kabul

I guess that's another imperial power Afghanistan can carve into the bedpost then...

British Empire

Soviet Union

United States

Wasn't the plot of Rambo 3 about the futility of an imperialist project in Afghanistan?

[Hammerfestus | 3,847]

 

[avatar! | 1,812]

I probably shouldn't laugh... but this made me laugh!

The party fears such a radical shift would emasculate China's young men. A government regulator said that broadcasters are required to "resolutely put an end to sissy men and other abnormal esthetics," according to the Associated Press.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/chinese-communist-party-bans-sissy-men-to-save-revolutionary-culture/ar-AAO1Ocm?li=BBnbcA1

Edited September 4, 2021 by avatar!

[Californication | 1,477]

On 8/15/2021 at 10:24 PM, OptOut said:

Nice work America, that was 20 years, hundreds of thousands of lives and a Trillion Dollars well spent! 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/16/taliban-declares-war-is-over-in-afghanistan-as-us-led-forces-exit-kabul

I guess that's another imperial power Afghanistan can carve into the bedpost then...

British Empire

Soviet Union

United States

2 Trillion.

[MagusSmurf | 577]

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/the-other-afghan-women

Really long but really good article about support for the Taliban in Afghanistan's countryside.

Some of the "best" bits in spoiler.

Spoiler

But now, with Dado back in charge—rescued from exile by the Americans—life regressed to the days of civil war.

Nearly every person Shakira knew had a story about Dado. Once, his fighters demanded that two young men either pay a tax or join his private militia, which he maintained despite holding his official post. When they refused, his fighters beat them to death, stringing their bodies up from a tree. A villager recalled, “We went to cut them down, and they had been sliced open, their stomachs coming out.” In another village, Dado’s forces went from house to house, executing people suspected of being Taliban; an elderly scholar who’d never belonged to the movement was shot dead.

Shakira was bewildered by the Americans’ choice of allies. “Was this their plan?” she asked me. “Did they come to bring peace, or did they have other aims?” She insisted that her husband stop taking resin to the Sangin market, so he shifted his trade south, to Gereshk. But he returned one afternoon with the news that this, too, had become impossible. Astonishingly, the United States had resuscitated the Ninety-third Division—and made it its closest partner in the province. The Division’s gunmen again began stopping travellers on the bridge and plundering what they could. Now, however, their most profitable endeavor was collecting bounties offered by the U.S.; according to Mike Martin, a former British officer who wrote a history of Helmand, they earned up to two thousand dollars per Taliban commander captured.

This posed a challenge, though, because there were hardly any active Taliban to catch. “We knew who were the Taliban in our village,” Shakira said, and they weren’t engaged in guerrilla warfare: “They were all sitting at home, doing nothing.” A lieutenant colonel with U.S. Special Forces, Stuart Farris, who was deployed to the area at that time, told a U.S. Army historian, “There was virtually no resistance on this rotation.” So militias like the Ninety-third Division began accusing innocent people. In February, 2003, they branded Hajji Bismillah—the Karzai government’s transportation director for Gereshk, responsible for collecting tolls in the city—a terrorist, prompting the Americans to ship him to Guantánamo. With Bismillah eliminated, the Ninety-third Division monopolized the toll revenue.

Dado went even further. In March, 2003, U.S. soldiers visited Sangin’s governor—Dado’s brother—to discuss refurbishing a school and a health clinic. Upon leaving, their convoy came under fire, and Staff Sergeant Jacob Frazier and Sergeant Orlando Morales became the first American combat fatalities in Helmand. U.S. personnel suspected that the culprit was not the Taliban but Dado—a suspicion confirmed to me by one of the warlord’s former commanders, who said that his boss had engineered the attack to keep the Americans reliant on him. Nonetheless, when Dado’s forces claimed to have nabbed the true assassin—an ex-Taliban conscript named Mullah Jalil—the Americans dispatched Jalil to Guantánamo. Unaccountably, this happened despite the fact that, according to Jalil’s classified Guantánamo file, U.S. officials knew that Jalil had been fingered merely to “cover for” the fact that Dado’s forces had been “involved with the ambush.”

The incident didn’t affect Dado’s relationship with U.S. Special Forces, who deemed him too valuable in serving up “terrorists.”

...

A Karzai government official named Ehsanullah visited an American base to inform on two Taliban members; no translator was present, and, in the confusion, he was arrested himself and shipped to Guantánamo.

...

Messaging by the U.S.-led coalition tended to portray the growing rebellion as a matter of extremists battling freedom, but nato documents I obtained conceded that Ishaqzais had “no good reason” to trust the coalition forces, having suffered “oppression at the hands of Dad Mohammad Khan,” or Amir Dado. In Pan Killay, elders encouraged their sons to take up arms to protect the village, and some reached out to former Taliban members. Shakira wished that her husband would do something—help guard the village, or move them to Pakistan—but he demurred. In a nearby village, when U.S. forces raided the home of a beloved tribal elder, killing him and leaving his son with paraplegia, women shouted at their menfolk, “You people have big turbans on your heads, but what have you done? You can’t even protect us. You call yourselves men?”

...

Sometimes, even fleeing did not guarantee safety. During one battle, Abdul Salam, an uncle of Shakira’s husband, took refuge in a friend’s home. After the fighting ended, he visited a mosque to offer prayers. A few Taliban were there, too. A coalition air strike killed almost everyone inside. The next day, mourners gathered for funerals; a second strike killed a dozen more people. Among the bodies returned to Pan Killay were those of Abdul Salam, his cousin, and his three nephews, aged six to fifteen.

...

In a war waged in mud-walled warrens teeming with life, however, nowhere was truly safe, and an extraordinary number of civilians died. Sometimes, such casualties sparked widespread condemnation, as when a nato rocket struck a crowd of villagers in Sangin in 2010, killing fifty-two. But the vast majority of incidents involved one or two deaths—anonymous lives that were never reported on, never recorded by official organizations, and therefore never counted as part of the war’s civilian toll.

...

Entire branches of Shakira’s family tree, from the uncles who used to tell her stories to the cousins who played with her in the caves, vanished. In all, she lost sixteen family members. I wondered if it was the same for other families in Pan Killay. I sampled a dozen households at random in the village, and made similar inquiries in other villages, to insure that Pan Killay was no outlier. For each family, I documented the names of the dead, cross-checking cases with death certificates and eyewitness testimony. On average, I found, each family lost ten to twelve civilians in what locals call the American War.

This scale of suffering was unknown in a bustling metropolis like Kabul, where citizens enjoyed relative security. But in countryside enclaves like Sangin the ceaseless killings of civilians led many Afghans to gravitate toward the Taliban. By 2010, many households in Ishaqzai villages had sons in the Taliban, most of whom had joined simply to protect themselves or to take revenge; the movement was more thoroughly integrated into Sangin life than it had been in the nineties. Now, when Shakira and her friends discussed the Taliban, they were discussing their own friends, neighbors, and loved ones.

...

With the hearts-and-minds approach floundering, some nato officials tried to persuade Taliban commanders to flip. In 2010, a group of Sangin Taliban commanders, liaising with the British, promised to switch sides in return for assistance to local communities. But, when the Taliban leaders met to hammer out their end of the deal, U.S. Special Operations Forces—acting independently—bombed the gathering, killing the top Taliban figure behind the peace overture.

...

Reconstruction will be a challenge, but a bigger trial will be to exorcise memories of the past two decades. “My daughter wakes up screaming that the Americans are coming,” Pazaro said. “We have to keep talking to her softly, and tell her, ‘No, no, they won’t come back.’ ”

...

The day before the massacre at the Yakh Chal outpost, CNN aired an interview with General Sadat. “Helmand is beautiful—if it’s peaceful, tourism can come,” he said. His soldiers had high morale, he explained, and were confident of defeating the Taliban. The anchor appeared relieved. “You seem very optimistic,” she said. “That’s reassuring to hear.”

I showed the interview to Mohammed Wali, a pushcart vender in a village near Lashkar Gah. A few days after the Yakh Chal massacre, government militias in his area surrendered to the Taliban. General Sadat’s Blackhawks began attacking houses, seemingly at random. They fired on Wali’s house, and his daughter was struck in the head by shrapnel and died. His brother rushed into the yard, holding the girl’s limp body up at the helicopters, shouting, “We’re civilians!” The choppers killed him and Wali’s son. His wife lost her leg, and another daughter is in a coma. As Wali watched the CNN clip, he sobbed. “Why are they doing this?” he asked. “Are they mocking us?”

...

Travelling through Helmand, I could hardly see any signs of the Taliban as a state. Unlike other rebel movements, the Taliban had provided practically no reconstruction, no social services beyond its harsh tribunals. It brooks no opposition: in Pan Killay, the Taliban executed a villager named Shaista Gul after learning that he’d offered bread to members of the Afghan Army. Nevertheless, many Helmandis seemed to prefer Taliban rule—including the women I interviewed. It was as if the movement had won only by default, through the abject failures of its opponents. To locals, life under the coalition forces and their Afghan allies was pure hazard; even drinking tea in a sunlit field, or driving to your sister’s wedding, was a potentially deadly gamble. What the Taliban offered over their rivals was a simple bargain: Obey us, and we will not kill you.

...

The Taliban takeover has restored order to the conservative countryside while plunging the comparatively liberal streets of Kabul into fear and hopelessness. This reversal of fates brings to light the unspoken premise of the past two decades: if U.S. troops kept battling the Taliban in the countryside, then life in the cities could blossom. This may have been a sustainable project—the Taliban were unable to capture cities in the face of U.S. airpower. But was it just? Can the rights of one community depend, in perpetuity, on the deprivation of rights in another? In Sangin, whenever I brought up the question of gender, village women reacted with derision. “They are giving rights to Kabul women, and they are killing women here,” Pazaro said. “Is this justice?” Marzia, from Pan Killay, told me, “This is not ‘women’s rights’ when you are killing us, killing our brothers, killing our fathers.” Khalida, from a nearby village, said, “The Americans did not bring us any rights. They just came, fought, killed, and left.”

[avatar! | 1,812]

1 hour ago, MagusSmurf said:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/the-other-afghan-women

Really long but really good article about support for the Taliban in Afghanistan's countryside.

Some of the "best" bits in spoiler.

  Hide contents

But now, with Dado back in charge—rescued from exile by the Americans—life regressed to the days of civil war.

Nearly every person Shakira knew had a story about Dado. Once, his fighters demanded that two young men either pay a tax or join his private militia, which he maintained despite holding his official post. When they refused, his fighters beat them to death, stringing their bodies up from a tree. A villager recalled, “We went to cut them down, and they had been sliced open, their stomachs coming out.” In another village, Dado’s forces went from house to house, executing people suspected of being Taliban; an elderly scholar who’d never belonged to the movement was shot dead.

Shakira was bewildered by the Americans’ choice of allies. “Was this their plan?” she asked me. “Did they come to bring peace, or did they have other aims?” She insisted that her husband stop taking resin to the Sangin market, so he shifted his trade south, to Gereshk. But he returned one afternoon with the news that this, too, had become impossible. Astonishingly, the United States had resuscitated the Ninety-third Division—and made it its closest partner in the province. The Division’s gunmen again began stopping travellers on the bridge and plundering what they could. Now, however, their most profitable endeavor was collecting bounties offered by the U.S.; according to Mike Martin, a former British officer who wrote a history of Helmand, they earned up to two thousand dollars per Taliban commander captured.

This posed a challenge, though, because there were hardly any active Taliban to catch. “We knew who were the Taliban in our village,” Shakira said, and they weren’t engaged in guerrilla warfare: “They were all sitting at home, doing nothing.” A lieutenant colonel with U.S. Special Forces, Stuart Farris, who was deployed to the area at that time, told a U.S. Army historian, “There was virtually no resistance on this rotation.” So militias like the Ninety-third Division began accusing innocent people. In February, 2003, they branded Hajji Bismillah—the Karzai government’s transportation director for Gereshk, responsible for collecting tolls in the city—a terrorist, prompting the Americans to ship him to Guantánamo. With Bismillah eliminated, the Ninety-third Division monopolized the toll revenue.

Dado went even further. In March, 2003, U.S. soldiers visited Sangin’s governor—Dado’s brother—to discuss refurbishing a school and a health clinic. Upon leaving, their convoy came under fire, and Staff Sergeant Jacob Frazier and Sergeant Orlando Morales became the first American combat fatalities in Helmand. U.S. personnel suspected that the culprit was not the Taliban but Dado—a suspicion confirmed to me by one of the warlord’s former commanders, who said that his boss had engineered the attack to keep the Americans reliant on him. Nonetheless, when Dado’s forces claimed to have nabbed the true assassin—an ex-Taliban conscript named Mullah Jalil—the Americans dispatched Jalil to Guantánamo. Unaccountably, this happened despite the fact that, according to Jalil’s classified Guantánamo file, U.S. officials knew that Jalil had been fingered merely to “cover for” the fact that Dado’s forces had been “involved with the ambush.”

The incident didn’t affect Dado’s relationship with U.S. Special Forces, who deemed him too valuable in serving up “terrorists.”

...

A Karzai government official named Ehsanullah visited an American base to inform on two Taliban members; no translator was present, and, in the confusion, he was arrested himself and shipped to Guantánamo.

...

Messaging by the U.S.-led coalition tended to portray the growing rebellion as a matter of extremists battling freedom, but nato documents I obtained conceded that Ishaqzais had “no good reason” to trust the coalition forces, having suffered “oppression at the hands of Dad Mohammad Khan,” or Amir Dado. In Pan Killay, elders encouraged their sons to take up arms to protect the village, and some reached out to former Taliban members. Shakira wished that her husband would do something—help guard the village, or move them to Pakistan—but he demurred. In a nearby village, when U.S. forces raided the home of a beloved tribal elder, killing him and leaving his son with paraplegia, women shouted at their menfolk, “You people have big turbans on your heads, but what have you done? You can’t even protect us. You call yourselves men?”

...

Sometimes, even fleeing did not guarantee safety. During one battle, Abdul Salam, an uncle of Shakira’s husband, took refuge in a friend’s home. After the fighting ended, he visited a mosque to offer prayers. A few Taliban were there, too. A coalition air strike killed almost everyone inside. The next day, mourners gathered for funerals; a second strike killed a dozen more people. Among the bodies returned to Pan Killay were those of Abdul Salam, his cousin, and his three nephews, aged six to fifteen.

...

In a war waged in mud-walled warrens teeming with life, however, nowhere was truly safe, and an extraordinary number of civilians died. Sometimes, such casualties sparked widespread condemnation, as when a nato rocket struck a crowd of villagers in Sangin in 2010, killing fifty-two. But the vast majority of incidents involved one or two deaths—anonymous lives that were never reported on, never recorded by official organizations, and therefore never counted as part of the war’s civilian toll.

...

Entire branches of Shakira’s family tree, from the uncles who used to tell her stories to the cousins who played with her in the caves, vanished. In all, she lost sixteen family members. I wondered if it was the same for other families in Pan Killay. I sampled a dozen households at random in the village, and made similar inquiries in other villages, to insure that Pan Killay was no outlier. For each family, I documented the names of the dead, cross-checking cases with death certificates and eyewitness testimony. On average, I found, each family lost ten to twelve civilians in what locals call the American War.

This scale of suffering was unknown in a bustling metropolis like Kabul, where citizens enjoyed relative security. But in countryside enclaves like Sangin the ceaseless killings of civilians led many Afghans to gravitate toward the Taliban. By 2010, many households in Ishaqzai villages had sons in the Taliban, most of whom had joined simply to protect themselves or to take revenge; the movement was more thoroughly integrated into Sangin life than it had been in the nineties. Now, when Shakira and her friends discussed the Taliban, they were discussing their own friends, neighbors, and loved ones.

...

With the hearts-and-minds approach floundering, some nato officials tried to persuade Taliban commanders to flip. In 2010, a group of Sangin Taliban commanders, liaising with the British, promised to switch sides in return for assistance to local communities. But, when the Taliban leaders met to hammer out their end of the deal, U.S. Special Operations Forces—acting independently—bombed the gathering, killing the top Taliban figure behind the peace overture.

...

Reconstruction will be a challenge, but a bigger trial will be to exorcise memories of the past two decades. “My daughter wakes up screaming that the Americans are coming,” Pazaro said. “We have to keep talking to her softly, and tell her, ‘No, no, they won’t come back.’ ”

...

The day before the massacre at the Yakh Chal outpost, CNN aired an interview with General Sadat. “Helmand is beautiful—if it’s peaceful, tourism can come,” he said. His soldiers had high morale, he explained, and were confident of defeating the Taliban. The anchor appeared relieved. “You seem very optimistic,” she said. “That’s reassuring to hear.”

I showed the interview to Mohammed Wali, a pushcart vender in a village near Lashkar Gah. A few days after the Yakh Chal massacre, government militias in his area surrendered to the Taliban. General Sadat’s Blackhawks began attacking houses, seemingly at random. They fired on Wali’s house, and his daughter was struck in the head by shrapnel and died. His brother rushed into the yard, holding the girl’s limp body up at the helicopters, shouting, “We’re civilians!” The choppers killed him and Wali’s son. His wife lost her leg, and another daughter is in a coma. As Wali watched the CNN clip, he sobbed. “Why are they doing this?” he asked. “Are they mocking us?”

...

Travelling through Helmand, I could hardly see any signs of the Taliban as a state. Unlike other rebel movements, the Taliban had provided practically no reconstruction, no social services beyond its harsh tribunals. It brooks no opposition: in Pan Killay, the Taliban executed a villager named Shaista Gul after learning that he’d offered bread to members of the Afghan Army. Nevertheless, many Helmandis seemed to prefer Taliban rule—including the women I interviewed. It was as if the movement had won only by default, through the abject failures of its opponents. To locals, life under the coalition forces and their Afghan allies was pure hazard; even drinking tea in a sunlit field, or driving to your sister’s wedding, was a potentially deadly gamble. What the Taliban offered over their rivals was a simple bargain: Obey us, and we will not kill you.

...

The Taliban takeover has restored order to the conservative countryside while plunging the comparatively liberal streets of Kabul into fear and hopelessness. This reversal of fates brings to light the unspoken premise of the past two decades: if U.S. troops kept battling the Taliban in the countryside, then life in the cities could blossom. This may have been a sustainable project—the Taliban were unable to capture cities in the face of U.S. airpower. But was it just? Can the rights of one community depend, in perpetuity, on the deprivation of rights in another? In Sangin, whenever I brought up the question of gender, village women reacted with derision. “They are giving rights to Kabul women, and they are killing women here,” Pazaro said. “Is this justice?” Marzia, from Pan Killay, told me, “This is not ‘women’s rights’ when you are killing us, killing our brothers, killing our fathers.” Khalida, from a nearby village, said, “The Americans did not bring us any rights. They just came, fought, killed, and left.”

It was a very good article.

I know many military strategists said there was basically 0% chance the USA would be able to prop-up a stable government and it was only a matter of time before Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, although that timescale was apparently much faster than most anticipated.

One can never trust murderers, even if they claim they're "reformed"...

“There were many mistakes we made in the nineties. Back then, we didn’t know about human rights, education, politics—we just took everything by power. But now we understand.” In the scholar’s rosy scenario, the Taliban will share ministries with former enemies, girls will attend school, and women will work “shoulder to shoulder” with men.

Edited September 10, 2021 by avatar!

[avatar! | 1,812]

Academics can be scum just like anyone...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/09/10/revealed-scientists-dismissed-wuhan-lab-theory-linked-chinese/

The influential journal published a letter on March 7 last year from 27 scientists in which they stated that they “strongly condemned conspiracy theories” surrounding Covid-19...The Telegraph can disclose that 26 of the 27 scientists listed in the letter had connections to the Chinese lab, through researchers and funders closely linked to Wuhan...Prof Bernard Roizman has gone the furthest of all, telling the Wall Street Journal in May that he is now convinced the virus was accidentally released by a “sloppy” scientist.

[Brickman | 3,987]

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-09-18/france-withdraws-ambassadors-over-submarines-deal/100473106
 

Just have to vent here about France (and apologies to anyone French) but shut up and stop your whining. Absolute babies. 

Their submarines are shit and they were milking us on a project that still isn’t complete 5 years later and cost an extra $40b. Now they complain Australia and the US “back stabbed”them? You were taking us for a ride we should be the ones upset.

I’m not a fan of having nuclear subs but the fact is China is doing a stealth takeover of PNG and they don’t even see it because China is flashing all this month in their face. We need some defensive subs to protect us if China do start a war.

[avatar! | 1,812]

21 hours ago, Shmup said:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-09-18/france-withdraws-ambassadors-over-submarines-deal/100473106
 

Just have to vent here about France (and apologies to anyone French) but shut up and stop your whining. Absolute babies. 

Their submarines are shit and they were milking us on a project that still isn’t complete 5 years later and cost an extra $40b. Now they complain Australia and the US “back stabbed”them? You were taking us for a ride we should be the ones upset.

I’m not a fan of having nuclear subs but the fact is China is doing a stealth takeover of PNG and they don’t even see it because China is flashing all this month in their face. We need some defensive subs to protect us if China do start a war.

For sure this move is made to counter China. Also, definitely can't blame anyone for preferring a state-of-the-art nuclear powered submarine as opposed to a conventional submarine - seriously! I think the French anger will quiet down after a short little burst

[avatar! | 1,812]

"I'm shocked that China is not abiding by the agreement it made" - said absolutely no one on this planet!

U.S. says Chinese government blocking Boeing airplane purchases

https://www.npr.org/2021/09/28/1041082882/china-u-s-trade-gina-raimondo-commerce-secretary

"They [China] are not respecting intellectual property and stealing IP of American companies. They're putting up all kinds of different barriers for American companies to do business in China."

China has been stealing IP for decades now. I'm glad at least some Western countries are (partially) responding.

[avatar! | 1,812]

https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/14/were-now-very-much-at-war-with-china-argues-a-provocative-new-book/

Helberg lays out how China’s “techno-totalitarian” regime may be first impacting the Chinese people (its “first victims,” he says), but why its efforts to increasingly control the software and the hardware of the internet are a real and present and fast-escalating danger to the U.S. and democracies everywhere.

[avatar! | 1,812]

How Russia Botched Its COVID Response in Every Possible Way

If you think Washington’s response to the pandemic has been fractious, uneven, and inadequate, consider that Moscow has consistently done pretty much everything wrong. And now everyday Russians are suffering... “The long-term destruction of basic citizenship structures that occurs when trust is destroyed is very damaging for any society,” Ruth Groenhout, a professor of health-care ethics at the University of North Carolina, told The Daily Beast.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-russia-botched-its-covid-19-response-in-every-possible-way

[avatar! | 1,812]

North Korea is breeding black swans for people to eat, as the reclusive nation faces a crippling food shortage

https://www.businessinsider.com/north-korea-breeding-black-swans-people-eat-dire-food-crisis-2021-10

In June, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un declared a "tense" food crisis and, in September, urged North Koreans to come up with solutions to the "food problem," NK News said.

I wonder how much longer this corrupt totalitarian government will last? Of course, it would have collapsed long ago if not for good ol' China... yup. And it's not like China likes NK, rather they hate the USA even more. Hopefully the whole thing blows up in their face.

[avatar! | 1,812]

Third night of rioting over Dutch COVID-19 rules

https://www.yahoo.com/news/third-night-rioting-over-dutch-052055141.html

Unrest began earlier in the weekend in Rotterdam to protest government plans to create a national corona pass for people who’ve either been vaccinated or recovered from COVID-19...The country reimposed lockdown measures last weekend in an effort to slow a resurgence of the virus. Daily infections remain at their highest levels since the start of the pandemic. Some protesters were also angered by a firework ban on New Year’s Eve to avoid added pressure on hospitals already forced to scale back care due to a surge in COVID patients.

[avatar! | 1,812]

“From the point of view of the balance of benefits and losses, neither side is interested in a real war,” Ivan Timofeyev, an analyst close to Russia’s foreign ministry, wrote in an article this week. He added, "Therefore, it is hardly worth considering the war scenario as a likely one. However, history knows many examples when rational calculations have failed to put an end to escalation. There is only the hope that this isn’t the case here."

Does Putin remind people of another dictator who played similar games in the 1930s?

[avatar! | 1,812]

MI6 chief says British intelligence now considers China, Iran and Russia the top security threats

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/mi6-chief-says-british-intelligence-now-considers-china-iran-and-russia-the-top-security-threats-01638312786

Calling China “an authoritarian state with different values than ours,” he said Beijing conducts “large-scale espionage operations” against the U.K. and its allies, tries to “distort public discourse and political decision-making” and exports technology that enables a “web of authoritarian control” around the world. “Beijing’s growing military strength and the [Chinese Communist] party’s desire to resolve the Taiwan issue, by force if necessary, also pose a serious challenge to global stability and peace,” Moore said...“Beijing believes its own propaganda about Western frailties and under-estimates Washington’s resolve,” Moore added. “The risk of Chinese miscalculation through overconfidence is real.”

Yup.

 

[avatar! | 1,812]

Wow! I imagine this is what it may have been like when Vesuvius erupted in 79

 

[avatar! | 1,812]

https://apnews.com/article/business-europe-russia-japan-constitutions-0e89fcb0163b044fc71bc4ae7d87f674

“Japan faces different risks coming from multiple fronts,” said defense expert Heigo Sato, a professor at the Institute of World Studies at Takushoku University in Tokyo. Among those risks are North Korea’s increased willingness to test high-powered missiles and other weapons, provocations by armed Chinese fishing boats and coast guard ships, and Russia’s deployment of missiles and naval forces.

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Russia WILL invade the Ukraine

How should the U.S. respond to the coming Russian invasion of Ukraine?

Since we're making predictions, I'll propose my own: If Alperovitch is right and Putin launches an invasion of Ukraine, the United States and NATO will raise rhetorical hell about it from Washington and Brussels, but they will do nothing to stop it militarily. And that, as Alperovitch points out, "would put a permanent end to all talk of Ukraine, Georgia, Belarus, or any Central Asian states of ever joining NATO."