Knowledgeable teams, including two members of Congress, use wargaming methods to deduce what might happen if China attacked Taiwan. They conclude that China would preemptively strike U.S. bases in Japan and Guam, eventually attack Hawaii and possibly San Diego, and the conflict would quickly escalat[...]
Archive for the ‘Foreign Affairs’ Category
May 18th, 2022 - 1:17 pm § in Biden, Business, Donald Trump, Economics, Foreign Affairs, Politics, Russia
$10 gas coming to Washington state? Not so fast.
The Daily Mail, a U.K.-based tabloid with a rightwing slant that I sometimes use as a story source (because they publish suspects’ names and publish photos of the bodies when other media won’t) posted the following headline on Wednesday, May 18, 2022 (here): Gas stations in Washington re[...]
Covid-19 sweeps across North Korea
We’re about to find out what happens when the Omicron variant gets loose in a country where nobody is vaccinated, there’s no testing, no treatment drugs, and very few critical care hospital beds. Read story here. But North Korea’s famines kill millions, so what’s a few hundre[...]
May 13th, 2022 - 2:44 am § in Foreign Affairs, Health
North Korea: No vax, no masks, no safe haven
As Covid-19 spread around the world, North Korea tried to seal itself off, but it didn’t work. You couldn’t expect it to, in a country where no one is vaccinated, nobody wears masks, and attending huge military parades is mandatory. Its April 25, 2022, “Founder’s Day” m[...]
What’s the U.S. strategy in Ukraine?
I’d say we don’t have one, for the simple reason we aren’t at war. It’s not a U.S. or NATO “proxy war,” either. We’re not at war with Russia, period. So supplying Ukraine with weapons isn’t what I’d call a military strategy. It’s military a[...]
Request to GOP: Can we have some leaders?
Karl Marx famously said, “the masses are asses,” to justify what he called a “dictatorship of the proletariat” that turned out to be just another plain old dictatorship. The idea of representative democracy is to entrust ultimate authority for decision-making to the collectiv[...]
Why Trump’s “America first” policy is a dead end
America’s isolationist movement before World War 2 that failed to preserve the peace or keep the United States out of the war. Trump is the most significant recent proponent of isolationism. If elected to a second term, he would have pulled the U.S. out of NATO, let Russia walk over Ukraine, a[...]
How do you clean a bear’s cage?
Very carefully. Especially when dealing with a Russian bear. To that end, “The US has been careful not to take steps or make statements that could unnecessarily escalate the tensions between Washington and Moscow,” CNN says (here). “On Friday, the US canceled a test of the Minutema[...]
Trumpers can’t get Ukraine right
Russia’s vicious, unprovoked invasion of Ukraine is dividing Trump’s fan base. I’ll get to that in a moment. But first, Ukraine, a peaceful country, was attacked because Putin doesn’t like its democracy and wants to grab its territory. He’s bombing apartment buildings, [...]
Still looking for Hunter’s laptop
He’s back. Or rather, it’s back. Hunter Biden’s laptop is in the news again. (See story here.) Given its dodgy provenance (see Wikipedia comments here), it’s far from a sure bet that the water-soaked laptop allegedly dropped off, and then abandoned, at a rabid (and legally bl[...]