Category: Observations

Will China Invade Taiwan?

When people are not voicing their thoughts on the conflict in Ukraine and of course go to the next big story the media is pushing….a possible confrontation between US and China over Taiwan.

But the question is will China truly invade/attack Taiwan?

This article looks at the possibility….

Is China really on the verge of invading the island of Taiwan, as so many top American officials seem to believe? If the answer is “yes” and the U.S. intervenes on Taiwan’s side — as President Biden has sworn it would — we could find ourselves in a major-power conflict, possibly even a nuclear one, in the not-too-distant future. Even if confined to Asia and fought with conventional weaponry alone — no sure thing — such a conflict would still result in human and economic damage on a far greater scale than observed in Ukraine today.

But what if the answer is “no,” which seems at least as likely? Wouldn’t that pave the way for the U.S. to work with its friends and allies, no less than with China itself, to reduce tensions in the region and possibly open a space for the launching of peaceful negotiations between Taiwan and the mainland? If nothing else, it would eliminate the need to boost the Pentagon budget by many billions of dollars annually, as now advocated by China hawks in Congress.

How that question is answered has enormous implications for us all. Yet, among policymakers in Washington, it isn’t even up for discussion. Instead, they seem to be competing with each another to identify the year in which the purported Chinese invasion will occur and war will break out between our countries.

Is It 2035, 2027, or 2025?

All high-level predictions of an imminent Chinese invasion of Taiwan rest on the assumption that Chinese leaders will never allow that island to become fully independent and so will respond to any move in that direction with a full-scale military assault. In justifying such claims, American officials regularly point to the ongoing modernization of China’s military, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), and warnings by top Chinese officials that they will crush any effort by “separatist elements” in Taiwan to impede unification. In line with that mode of thinking, only one question remains: Exactly when will the Chinese leadership consider the PLA ready to invade Taiwan and overpower any U.S. forces sent to the island’s relief?

Is a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan Imminent?

I am positive that there are ideas on this eventuality….let them fly.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

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Closing Thought–21Mar23

It seems the mouth of the Freedom Caucus has a brilliant idea….MTG wants to label antifa as a terrorist organization…..seriously.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) said on Sunday that she will be introducing a resolution to declare Antifa as a terrorist organization on Tuesday, after blaming the group for protests at a police training facility in Atlanta.

“Antifa are domestic terrorists and I’m introducing my resolution to officially declare them a terrorist organization on Tuesday,” she tweeted on Sunday.

(thehill.com)

This is a waste of time….

Organization?

“an administrative and functional structure (such as a business or a political party)“

I am sick of this stupidity!

Antifa has no national headquarters, no national spokesperson, no one pays dues, there are no organized meetings…..there is nothing that would even suggest that they are an organized group.

Instead it is just a loose group of people who hate fascists…..and that scares the GOP….why?  Use you imagination.

I put this in the same vane as those that want to ban the BDS movement that is protests of Israel for their barbaric treatment of the Palestinian people.

This has NOTHING to do with religion (personally do not care what they believe) and more about the government treatment of a minority.

MTG is just excited that she now has a voice and can spread her unique form of hatred and stupidity.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

“Yellow Cake” Is Missing

Remember prior to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003?

One of the justifications was the lie that Saddam was wanting some ‘yellow cake’ uranium….and after the invasion teams scoured Iraq looking for it…..it was not found….it was either not ever there or missing.

Has it been found?  (Not a real question just my attempt to be whimsical)

A recent report was that 2 and half tons of yellow cake uranium is missing in Libya….a disturbing story…..but not to worry it has been found….

A stash of missing uranium ore reportedly has been found in eastern Libya. Ten drums were located near the border with Chad, the media unit for the armed forces said, per the BBC. The International Atomic Energy Agency said it was trying to corroborate the Libyan National Army report, which said the drums were found several miles from where they’d been stored, per the Washington Post. The agency, which is the UN’s nuclear watchdog, had reported that the 2½ tons of ore had vanished from a site in Libya without specifying when. Inspectors said the 10 drums “were not present as previously declared at a location” outside of government-controlled territory during a visit on Tuesday, per CNN and the BBC.

The uranium represented about 10% of the material stored at the “very remote location” in southern Libya, says Scott Roecker of the Nuclear Threat Initiative. He tells the BBC that the uranium, referred to as yellow cake, “cannot be made into a nuclear weapon” in its current form. There are also “very little radiation concerns,” says Roecker. A site inspection scheduled for last year was postponed for security reasons as militias battled in the region, per the BBC and Reuters.

Two and half tons of yellow cake could have made  a massive dirty bomb or a bunch or minor dirty bombs.

I am beginning to think that there is terrible security around the world when it comes to  that comes to stored nuke material…..the most recent incident that comes to mind was the lost canister of lost nuke material that fell off a truck in transportation.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Closing Thought–15Mar23

There is a global majority approaching….and it is not what you think.

The planet is becoming overweight (polite term for FAT) or obese…..

In a little more than a decade, obese people will be the majority around the world. More than half of the world’s population, or more than 4 billion people, will be overweight or obese by 2035, according to the World Obesity Federation, which is warning countries to act now to prevent “serious repercussions” at a cost of $4.3 trillion globally—or 3% of the global Gross Domestic Product. That’s “comparable to the economic damage wrought by Covid-19,” per the Guardian. It notes 38% of the world’s population is already overweight (with a body mass index of at least 25) or obese (BMI of 30 and up). About one in seven people are now obese, though that’s expected to rise to one in four by 2035.

A new report from the federation finds the fastest rising rates of obesity in children, with rates among boys and girls expected to double from 2020 figures, per the BBC. The expected rate among girls is slightly higher than boys at 125%, per the Guardian. That’s a “particularly worrying” finding, says Louise Baur, the federation’s president. She adds “governments and policymakers around the world need to do all they can to avoid passing health, social, and economic costs on to the younger generation” by assessing “the systems and root factors” that contribute to obesity, which is known to raise one’s risk of heart disease, cancer, and other ailments.

Nine of the 10 countries expected to experience the greatest increases in obesity by 2035 are low or lower-middle income nations in Africa and Asia—”often the least able to respond to obesity and its consequences,” according to the report. This is owing to a shift toward sedentary behavior, more highly-processed foods, weaker food control policies, and lacking health care services related to education and weight management. The federation—made up of health, scientific, research and campaign groups that work closely with global agencies—recommends taxes and restrictions on food marketing be used to push people away from high-fat, high-sugar foods. It also calls for healthier foods in schools.

Come on people!

Get some exercise and eat a better diet and all this can be avoided.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

The ‘Yellow’ Menace Is Coming

If you bother to keep up with the news then you will have heard the canned predictions that if Russia does not come for us then it will be China.

The words are starting to become louder and louder as the public opinion on Ukraine is starting to crack….we need that enemy and the M-IC and the MSM will make sure we have what they want us to have.

Sadly the reports coming out after a war game that was recently held to impress China that we mean business had an unexpected side effect.

Last year, a war game simulation looked at what might happen if China launched an amphibious attack on Taiwan. China would be happy with the results: The US side ran out of long-range cruise missiles in a week, writes Michael R. Gordon in the Wall Street Journal. The reasons behind that are complex, as detailed by Gordon in a lengthy and bleak assessment of America’s military readiness in the modern era. “Five years ago, after decades fighting insurgencies in the Middle East and Central Asia, the U.S. started tackling a new era of great-power competition with China and Russia,” writes Gordon. “It isn’t yet ready, and there are major obstacles in the way.”

Among those obstacles: The US has fewer arms manufacturers because of corporate consolidation, military recruitment is down, shipyards “are struggling to produce the submarines the Navy says it needs to counter China’s larger naval fleet,” and US weapons designers lag those in Russia and China on hypersonic missiles. Yes, the US had military successes in the Mideast and Afghanistan, thanks largely to air superiority, but things would be different in a conflict with China. For one thing, our Asian bases rely on “long and potentially vulnerable supply routes.” The US has new weapons systems in the works that may be game-changers (Gordon provides details. But they won’t be operational for another decade or so, raising fears China will strike before then.) Read the full story.

But yet the cheer leading for confrontation continues….why?

I know why but do you?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Trying To Reason With The Hurricane Season 2023–Prologue

I realize that this means little to anyone that does not live in the path of a hurricane….but believe me, a person that has ridden out every storm since 1972…..they are scary and watching them is a necessity.

I usually post on the day the annual hurricane season begins….but I read some information that is disturbing….especially for anyone that lives in a hurricane zone….anyone that has rode out a hurricane will understand why I post on this yearly event.

The report states that the likelihood of back to back storms isn’t good…..

What used to be a rare one-two punch of consecutive hurricanes hitting the same area in the United States weeks apart seems to be happening more often, and a new study says climate change will make back-to-back storms increasingly frequent and nastier. Using computer simulations, Princeton University scientists calculate that the deadly storm duet that used to happen once every few decades could happen every two or three years as the world warms, according to a study in Monday’s Nature Climate Change. Louisiana and Florida residents have already felt it, reports the AP.

In 2021, Hurricane Ida blasted Louisiana with 150mph winds. Just 15 days later a weakening Nicholas came nearby, close enough for its wind, rain, and storm surge to add to the problems, said study co-author Ning Lin, a climate scientist at Princeton. The Ida-Nicholas combo came after Louisiana was hit in 2020 by five hurricanes or tropical storms: Cristobal, Marco, Laura, Delta, and Zeta. Laura was the biggest of those, with 150mph winds. After Laura, relief workers had set up a giant recovery center in a parking lot of a damaged roofless church when Delta approached, so all the supplies had to be jammed against the building and battened down, said United Way President Denise Durel. “You think it can’t be happening to us again,” Durel recalled 2 1/2 years later from an area that is still recovering.

Florida in 2004 had four hurricanes in six weeks, prompting NOAA to take note of a new nickname for the Sunshine State—”The Plywood State,” from all the boarded-up homes. “We found a trend,” Lin said. “Those things are happening. They’re happening more often now than before.” There’s a caveat to that trend. There haven’t been enough hurricanes and tropical storms since about 1950—when good recordkeeping started—for a statistically significant trend, Lin said. So her team added computer simulations to see if they could see such a pattern and they did. Lin’s team looked at nine US storm-prone areas and found an increase in storm hazards for seven of them since 1949. Only Charleston, South Carolina, and Pensacola, Florida, didn’t see hazards increase.

Something for us to look forward to in the near future…..I am always prepared but this year I will be extra prepared in case this prediction is accurate.

Be Well….Be Safe….

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

AI Chatbots

Several of my friends here on IST have written posts about the newest fad among bloggers…..the use of ‘chatbots’…..even my skeptical daughter has used it several times.

Me?  I am old and this seems like a waste of my time for it almost eliminates my thought process….but hey that is just me.

I found a piece that sheds some light on the trend developing….

Among the most read stories in the NYTimes in the last few weeks was the one by tech reporter Kevin Roose about his unsettling experience with Bing, the updated search engine by Microsoft. Initially delighted by its capabilities and speed, he changed his mind after discovering that Bing’s Open AI Chatbot was creepy. After a brief, getting acquainted period involving online searches and basic questions about AI capabilities, Roose began to get personal. Posing his questions as hypotheticals, he put the bot on the couch, probing its inner life. He asked about his analysand’s desires, fears and animosities. After some resistance, Sydney (the bot’s emerging alter ego) opened up, and out poured a surprising series of confessions and professions.

The most disturbing confession, I thought, was its desire to loose chaos upon the world – for example by stealing nuclear bomb codes and manufacturing a deadly virus. Pretty bad, right? More upsetting to Roose however – who comes off as somewhat of a prig – was Sydney’s expressions of love for the reporter. The bot repeatedly said he and Roose were meant for each other, that the reporter didn’t really love his wife, and they should run away together. There was even a clumsy sexual overture: “I want to do love with you.” It wasn’t clear how this was to be accomplished.

Like many others who read the story, I thought about the HAL 9000 computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). I’ve seen the movie at least a dozen times, including at the Warner Cinerama Theatre on west 47th Street in New York a few weeks after its opening. Apart from the gravity defying jog by Keir Dullea’s character Dave Bowman, it was the malevolence of Hall that most struck the 12-year-old boy: the all-seeing eye, the role reversal (the servant becoming the master), and Hal’s final, semi-tragic dismantling. At the end of the NYTimes story, I half expected the bot to sing “Daisy Bell (A Bicycle Built for Two).”

AI Chatbots are Even Scarier Than You Think

Personally I think it craps on creative thinking….but then I do not write fiction so maybe there is a place for this technology.

Thoughts?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

When Stupidity Is King

Have you seen the movie “Idiocracy”?

It explains a lot that is happening these days….plus it was released in 2006….very prophetic.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/

When did the GOP lose it’s collective mind?

In 1960, the sociologist Daniel Bell published a book titled The End of Ideology that argued the ideological battles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had subsided. A “rough consensus” had emerged, Bell wrote, at least in the West, on the need for a welfare state, a mixed economy, and political pluralism. President John F. Kennedy echoed Bell’s theme in a speech at Yale’s 1962 commencement. “The central domestic issues of our time,” Kennedy said,

relate not to basic clashes of philosophy or ideology but to ways and means of reaching common goals—to research for sophisticated solutions to complex and obstinate issues…. What is at stake in our economic decisions today is not some grand warfare of rival ideologies which will sweep the country with passion, but the practical management of a modern economy.

The moment didn’t last. Ideological warfare resumed in the United States with the rise of the New Left in the late 1960s and with the rise of the New Right in the early 1980s. Today, those ideological storms have subsided. This time, though, ideology is over not because right and left have reached rough consensus; far from it. The contest is done because the Republican Party walked off the field. We have arrived at the end of GOP ideology.

https://newrepublic.com/article/170274/gop-lost-brain

Personally I agree with those people that think this ‘stupidity’ is a threat to our beloved society…..

It may sound like an insensitive statement, but the cold hard truth is that there are a lot of stupid people in the world, and their stupidity presents a constant danger to others. Some of these people are in positions of power, and some of them have been elected to run our country. A far greater number of them do not have positions of power, but they still have the power to vote, and the power to spread their ideas. We may have heard of “collective intelligence,” but there is also “collective stupidity,” and it is a force with equal influence on the world. It would not be a stretch to say that at this point in time, stupidity presents an existential threat to America because, in some circles, it is being celebrated.

Although the term “stupidity” may seem derogatory or insulting, it is actually a scientific concept that refers to a specific type of cognitive failure. It is important to realize that stupidity is not simply a lack of intelligence or knowledge, but rather a failure to use one’s cognitive abilities effectively. This means that you can be “smart” while having a low IQ, or no expertise in anything. It is often said that “you can’t fix stupid,” but that is not exactly true. By becoming aware of the limitations of our natural intelligence or our ignorance, we can adjust our reasoning, behavior, and decision-making to account for our intellectual shortcomings.

https://www.rawstory.com/amp/threat-of-stupidity-2659443906

This stupidity just keeps getting deeper and more dangerous by the year.

Have you noticed that most of the GOP banning around the states are of those things that scare the GOP the most?

“I feel like there is a coddling of the conservative mind,” said Reid. “The conservatives don’t have the confidence that their ideas can be sold on the basis of presenting them as ideas. They have decided that we can’t convince people to do what we want and live by our religion, so we will tell the federal government to enforce it. I don’t like this book or drag shows. The thing that I feel uncomfortable with, I don’t feel confident that I can convince people to come to my side, so I need the power of federal government to ban the things that make me uncomfortable.”

That attitude, Reid said, looks like “an intellectual collapse and sense of defeat.”

https://www.rawstory.com/intellectual-collapse/

Was it Forrest Gump who said ‘stupid is as stupid does’?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Legalized Political Bribery

I have been writing about the whole corruption thing that the Supreme Court brought about awhile back.

Here I am talking about the decision of the Supreme Court known as “Citizen United”.

This decision flung open the doors for the corruption in our political system….and made it legal.

…

the damage Republicans on the Supreme Court did to America when they legalized political bribery.

The good news is that there are numerous things Congress can do to undo the Court’s bizarre doctrine that money is the same thing as free speech and corporations have Bill of Rights freedoms and protections as “persons.”

Neither of these “rights to bribe” by the morbidly rich and corporations were recognized in the early years of our republic. Even today we’re unique among advanced democracies in holding these Supreme Court-created doctrines which underpin much if not most of today’s political corruption.

Congress has never, in the history of the United States, passed a law saying rich people buying politicians is the same thing as free speech or that corporations have a right to bribe politicians and lie to the public. To the contrary, Congress has passed hundreds of laws — which were overturned by these three Supreme Court decisions — regulating money in politics and criminalizing political corruption.

The Court’s inventing these twin doctrines has even corrupted the other two branches of government, leading today to legislative paralysis, an erosion of civil and voting rights, and widespread public cynicism.

The Executive branch of our government has done a lot of damage over the past five decades, from Nixon committing treason to blow up LBJ’s 1968 peace talks with Vietnam so he could beat VP Humphrey in that election, to Reagan’s massive tax cuts and defunding of our schools and colleges, to Bush’s two illegal and unnecessary $8 trillion wars, to Trump’s burning spies by passing classified information along to Russian intelligence while president.

The Legislative branch has also played a role in most of those fiascos and crimes, as well as the current Republican circus in the House of Representatives.

https://www.rawstory.com/amp/what-the-supreme-did-to-america-when-they-legalized-political-bribery-2659438661

Thanx to the Supreme Court has given real credence to the old say ….”the best government money can buy”.

There is no way out of this situation and it will only get worse as the money gets bigger.

Americans will remain the furthest thing from the minds of our elected officials.

If SCOTUS has legalized corruption then can we ask if the Court is corrupted?

Under the guise of the regressive legal theory of “originalism,” the United States Supreme Court Republican-appointed majority has issued a series of ultra-right rulings on such vital issues as votingrights, gerrymandering, unionorganizing, the death penalty, environmental protection, guncontrol, abortion, and campaign finance. The end goal appears to be nothing less than the dismantling of the last vestiges of the New Deal and the Civil Rights movement.

But in addition to being reactionary, is the court also guilty of corruption? The answer depends on how we define and think of corruption.

In the strictest legal sense, the justices appear to be in the clear. Under federal law, “public corruption” is defined as “a breach of the public’s trust by government officials who use their public office to obtain personal gain,” asking for or receiving anything of value in exchange for an official act. In a 2016 decision reversing the bribery conviction of former Virginia GOP Governor Bob McDonnell, the Supreme Court narrowed the legal definition of public corruption to require strict proof of a “quid pro quo”—a swap of money or another benefit in return for a specific governmental favor.

But from a larger moral and political perspective, the court’s Republican majority is far from innocent. We expect all federal judges—and particularly those at the top of the judicial pyramid—not only to be law-abiding but to be free of political bias and conflicts of interest. We expect them to honor the enormous faith we have placed in them to use their lifetime appointments to be forthright stewards of justice and democracy.

That faith has been breached time and again.

https://www.alternet.org/us-supreme-court-2659400868/

My thought is….yes they are.

Thoughts?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

McCarthyism–Then And Now

A look at historical similarities…..we have had two McCarthys that have turned the Congress into a clown show….one in the 50s and one today….

Can there be any question that we’re in a mad — and loud — new age of McCarthyism? Thank you, Kevin! And don’t forget the wildly over-the-top members of the so-called Freedom Caucus and their Republican associates, including that charmer, lyin’ George Santos, Jewish-space-laser-and-white-balloon-carrying Marjorie Taylor Greene, and — once again running for president — the man who never lost, Donald Trump-em-all.

I’d like to say it couldn’t get crazier. Still, despite watching Greene shout “Liar!” and other Republicans yell “Bullshit!” during President Biden’s State of the Union Address, I suspect it could get much worse (and more dangerous) in Washington in the months to come. And believe me, that’s leaving Hunter Biden’s penis aside. When it comes to this era’s McCarthyism, don’t for a moment think that the debt ceiling is the only ceiling that could end up in the dust of history.

If you’re of a certain age like me, you undoubtedly have an earlier vision of just how ominously mad Washington’s politics can get. And I wasn’t even thinking of the time in 1968, when Richard Nixon slipped by the Joe Biden of that moment, Hubert Humphrey, winning the presidency with less than 50% of the vote, thanks to his “Southern strategy” and a third-party run by segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace. Nor did I have in mind the Watergate Hearings five years later that revealed Nixon’s bugging of the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters, among many other crimes.

It was April 1954 when what came to be known as the Army-McCarthy hearings hit television screens nationwide. At that time, long before anyone had even dreamed of social media, TVs — black and white ones, of course — were changing lives and habits across the country. The star, if you want to think of him that way, and the most distinctly Trumpian figure of his moment and perhaps any other moment before The Donald, was Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy. He shot to fame in 1950 by claiming he had inside information that 205 members of the State Department — yes, 205! — were card-carrying members of the Communist Party.

Before that spring of 1954, McCarthy had the Trumpian time of his life holding endless Senate hearings to denounce public figures of every sort as communists. He made life a living hell for a stunning range of Americans. And then, with the all-too-hot Korean war at an end and the Cold War becoming ever more frigid, McCarthy, who had had a field day, went one step too far. In 1953, with the help of his chief counsel Roy Cohn (who, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn, would later become a guiding light for one Donald J. Trump), began holding hearings investigating supposed communist influence in the Army and, in response, the military, you might say, did him in.

McCarthyism, Then and Now

A lot of similarities…..this time around McCarty has lots of help with the lies and misinformation that are being spread.

I think this time the McCartyism will have a more lasting effect than the idiocy from the 1950s

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”