While a typhoon largely evaded Taiwan over the weekend, tragedy struck the mainland. Shanghai faced flooding and death while India suffered a landslide in the Himalayas. In a shocking video, one boulder took out a bridge. Several people died.
But, speaking of Taiwan’s tendency to fall out of manure smelling like roses, there’s nothing like persecution to fuel the competition. Taiwan is rolling out its own, homegrown vaccine. Being a world leader in chipmaking, especially D-RAM, and having both avoided and purged COVID outbreak on its own turf, the Taiwan vaccine could become a world leader, along with its cocktail vaccine approach to booster shots. Beijing blocking Taiwan from the Pfizer vaccine could backfire if Taiwan’s vaccine and methods become more credible than Pfizer or Moderna. That has been the history between China and Taiwan, after all. So, it wouldn’t be surprising.
No doubt why China remains a hater where Taiwan is concerned. Biden follows Trump’s popular-in-America strategy of sanctioning Chinese officials. China does the copy-cat game, but avoids those most close to Biden because that wouldn’t seem friendly.
When Olympic network NBC showed the map the rest of the world passively-aggressivly responds that NBC should fix the insulting error—without stating what the supposed error is, and without stating whether China’s presumed fix would insult Taiwanese. But, Taiwanese don’t matter in China’s view. And, that’s why China should be trusted with the Olympics in 2022.
NBC reported news of recent months to counter news of recent weeks. It wouldn’t be the first time NBC had a precarious definition of “news”. Intelligence reports about very specific details of possible uranium production were broken as “news” by NBC. Bloomberg and others reported that NBC reported it. Taipei Times reported that Bloomberg reported that NBC reported it. NBC breaking this “older” news made more news than the outdated “news” itself. The whole claim smells smelly. It’s likely a ruse, but we’ll need about two weeks to know with confidence.
Hong Kongers like to protest so often that they are expected to protest annually. This year, protesters claimed a 50k head turnout; Hong Kong police estimated less than 10k, which would be a record low. Surely neither crowd estimate had any bias or motive to distort the numbers.
Remember, Hong Kong students like to protest more than is deserved. China could do better with counter-PR, but not much can be done when dealing with spoiled students. Don’t be roused into hating China by the dwindling spoiled Hong Kongers. Protests are profitable in Hong Kong because they help sell newspapers in a market saturated with so many newspapers that they throw them at pedestrians on the sidewalks. Hong Kong’s biggest problem is complacent Christians.
A more genuine problem of concern is the attention Chinese manufacturers are drawing from Western press coverage of Taiwan court rulings. Taiwan makes about 60% of the world’s computer components. China wants in on the game and people are being prosecuted in Taiwan for stealing company secrets that would go to China. The biggest element of a case is in place: motive.
Most of the so-called “news” about trade wars are the most obvious. Companies are having problems with trade during a trade war. Really? This is considered news these days. Either that, or it is an obvious attempt to skirt the deeper issues behind the China-US trade war for global economy hopefuls hoping to sway public sentiment by reporting what was all foreseeable.
This was the week of chest-thumping before the election. Mass media make their last-minute poll corrections to make it look “close” so that no matter who wins the media can maintain polling credibility. The FBI has gone Agnostic on Hillary. Comey’s metaphoric beat-up, dead horse resurrected himself to shoot himself in the foot; Comey’s career that he had finished is now finished, finished.
A single mother of six could end up in prison for selling food. How dare she! She put the public at risk, and insulted all the companies that pay big, big money to sell food to three people. It would have been safer to sell State secrets without a license. Hillary’s use of her maid to print classified documents doesn’t speak to her disdain for rules of the “top secret” road as much as it speaks to her attitude of superiority. A maid is “too much beneath” her to matter—you don’t try to keep classified information from your dog. More over, protection of the public good isn’t important either—who cares if the Russians discover secrets of sheep and cattle while the dog was fetching documents for the farm.
As for State secrets and ironies, if the US government really was planning a classified cyberattack against Russia they wouldn’t tell NBC News. Notwithstanding that leaking a story is usually best done with a network that is viewed by the public more than foreign governments, leaking “classified stories of a deterrent in the making” is just another strategy of deterrence. Perhaps such “classified leak story” games confused Hillary. Never believe the TV when it says what one government might be planning against another—especially if they say “might“. That’s just governments using non-diplomatic channels of undiplomatic diplomacy. In the East, they call it “State media control”; in America, Congress publicly called it “Operation Blue Book”. For the record, the story didn’t only air on NBC, it was also picked up by Breitbart, which is banned at Pacific Daily Times for having websites that take too long to load. The Blaze is also banned for this reason.
Note that when NBC and Breitbart break the same story, something is amiss. The actual secret that got out with the “Russia, we’re having our media tell you you’d better not interfere with our election” story is that the US government is very set on making sure that the election happens. We already knew that. Not citing their reason for the extra caution indicates that the problem probably came from within; but, that is historically anecdotal. We don’t know the deep reason the government has been making grunts about ensuring that the election happens two months out. That is the actual secret, proving that classified measures are still functioning. The election will happen. So, most people won’t even notice the efforts to make it happen. They are too busy being obsessed with which candidate they hate.
No one notices the real danger: Paul Ryan, who has managed to go from a failed-attempted second-in-line to a successful third-in-line, all while convincing the public that he opposes the very candidate who will grant his closet Liberal party a super-majority. No one notices, though. The voters are too busy being obsessed with which candidate they hate.
Everything we see in the media looks to be orchestrated. Comey demonstrates the powerful non-decision making of Allen Greenspan. Maybe he wants to be the Chairman of the Fed. WikiLeaks didn’t throw an October Surprise, they threw an October Schedule. The government does interviews in media to help the election succeed? The media finally now reports on Clinton problems that have been known for decades? People need a break from all these scheduled surprises. At this point, it’s best to stop talking about the election, go vote, and then get back to work.
