Wednesday, January 16, 2019

Fwd: China weapons tech

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: utahtrout

An unclassified report by the Defense Intelligence Agency says Beijing has made enormous military strides in recent years, thanks partly to domestic laws forcing foreign partners to divulge technical secrets in exchange for access to China's vast market.

As a result of "acquiring technology by any means available," China now is at the leading edge on a range of technologies, including with its naval designs, with medium- and intermediate-range missiles, and with hypersonic weapons -- where missiles can fly at many times the speed of sound and dodge missile-defense systems.

"The result of this multifaceted approach to technology acquisition is a PLA (People's Liberation Army) on the verge of fielding some of the most modern weapon systems in the world," states the report, entitled "China Military Power."

"In some areas, it already leads the world."

Beijing has said it will not hesitate to use force if Taipei formally declares independence, or in the case of external intervention -- including by the United States, the island's most powerful unofficial ally.

"The biggest concern is that as a lot of these technologies mature... (China) will reach a point where internally within their decision-making they will decide that using military force for a regional conflict is something that is more imminent," the official said on condition of anonymity.


https://www-ndtv-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.ndtv.com/world-news/pentagon-says-china-takes-lead-in-hypersonic-weapons-and-missiles-technology-1978282?amp_js_v=a2&amp_gsa=1&amp=1&akamai-rum=off&usqp=mq331AQCCAE%3D#aoh=15476505540429&csi=1&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&amp_tf=From%20%251%24s&ampshare=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ndtv.com%2Fworld-news%2Fpentagon-says-china-takes-lead-in-hypersonic-weapons-and-missiles-technology-1978282


Tuesday, January 15, 2019

We Believe: The Best Men Can Be | Gillette (Short Film)



The new Gillette ad is an attack on toxic masculinity.  

Oh man, the backlash has been enormous.  Nobody likes bullying.  Nobody thinks that people should be bullies.  Do we want to stand up against things that are wrong?  Sure, but Gillette is insulting their customers by saying that being male somehow makes you a bully and/or a sexist.  Like it is in our nature because we have too much testosterone.  They are painting with too broad of a brush.  

Implying that people are a certain way because of their gender is also sexism.

I've met women who were bullies.  I've met women who were mean to other women, and women who were mean to men.  This is not necessarily a male female issue.  It is about people having decency toward other people.

New Amsterdam/New York



Friday, January 4, 2019

Rashida Tlaib's profanity-laced declaration about Trump impeachment

"And when your son looks at you and says, 'Mama, look. You won. Bullies don't win.'

"And I said, 'Baby, they don't,' because we're gonna go in there and we're gonna impeach the motherf----

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/01/04/hours-after-making-history-rep-rashida-tlaib-profanely-promises-impeach-trump/?fbclid=IwAR2VQuiFArpaRigZtjueOXhsoPUf14_IpEWm33PMSb0E8NAXqg9WdQhirz4&utm_term=.96277c7fb3b1

End of the world 1948 made

From: utahtrout 

1948 saw the creation of Israel; the promulgation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Genocide Convention; the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade; the Berlin airlift and the desegregation of the U.S. military.

Taken together, these decisions  of 1948 yielded the building blocks of an international order arranged, on the Western side of the Iron Curtain and that bloc's allies, by nation-states organized along the lines of national, ethnic and religious identities, where goods trade freely across borders, basic norms safeguard the well-being of minority groups, and of individuals, irrespective of their group identity or whether they belonged to any group at all. While not every state adhered to this model, those that did were committed to enforcing it; when necessary by force.

That, in outline, is the essential worldview emerging from the anniversaries of 1948 and the argument for that vision's preservation. This is what we mean when we talk about the liberal international order now so desperately under siege


The whole article is a must read for everyone. But i have come to many of its conclusions over the years...

But we also need to ask something else, and ask it hard: What is it that we failed to understand, what are the realities to which we blinded ourselves? It's a question that will take decades to answer but I think we can point to several sets of errors. This list is not exhaustive, but you have to start somewhere.

First, we assumed that people all over the world want the same things; that mix of individual, civil and political freedom plus regulated free market capitalism characteristic of America and the states of Western Europe. Relatedly, we believed that when pressed to choose between prosperity and freedom, people everywhere would choose freedom. Moreover, we thought that one couldn't go without the other, an error that China is proving more and more wrong with each passing day.

Second, we thought human rights and nationalism were antithetical and that promoting the former meant pushing back on the latter. The architects of the world of 1948 understood better. As historian James Loeffler has shown in his remarkable new book, Rooted Cosmopolitans, so many key figures in the human rights revolution of midcentury were not only Jews but Zionists. For them, an international regime of protecting individual human rights as well as nation-states for persecuted minorities were both necessary to overcome the Holocaust's ghastly trauma of statelessness. The deep structural suspicion of the idea of state sovereignty woven into the human rights framework, it seems, has unwittingly fostered the legalistic abstraction and airy disregard for political realities that has made that framework such a supple tool in the hands of dictators who couldn't care less.

Third, we assumed that with proper incentives greed and competition could be channeled towards the common good. Not that human nature could be changed, as Marx thought, but that human nature's darker sides could themselves serve society, per the ideas of Adam Smith. The exuberant celebrants of free market capitalism conveniently forgot Smith's addendum that the invisible hand of capitalism will run amok without the equally invisible but no less important heart of beneficence and justice. The darker angels of our nature are real and need to be reckoned with.