Posts Tagged ‘china’

High Road to China

Posted: August 29, 2020 by datechguy in Uncategorized
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Foreign policy hasn’t attracted much notice this campaign season, which is a shame, considering how interesting international relations have become. Aside from Trump’s truly historic agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, and a potential normalization in Israel and Sudanese relations, developments in south and east Asia promise to convulse international relations for years to come.

China alone has rocked the world with its actions this year. Even worse than its initial blundering in the release of the Wuhan virus, those with eyes note how China shut down domestic flights while allowing international flights, fully aware they were spreading the virus. China’s tyrant Xi purposely spread the virus around the world, in an unparalleled act of what can only be called biological warfare.

Not content with devastating the world economy and the lives of millions, in May China revoked Hong Kong’s civil rights (which, truth be known, Hong Kongers only enjoy due to the residue of British colonialism).

And then in June China provoked a border skirmish with India in the Himalayas.

Meanwhile, and not coincidentally, India and the United States under the Trump administration have never been closer. Just this week an Indian media outlet reported that the U.S. and India were close to signing an agreement to share geospatial intelligence, an unprecedented deepening of defense cooperation between the two nations.

And to demonstrate resolve, in June the U.S. sent a destroyer, the U.S.S. Russell, through the Taiwan Strait. And just this week released a photo of a U.S Air Force KC1-35 tanker refueling a Taiwanese (U.S.-bought) F-16 fighter plane.

In other words, U.S. diplomacy is in overdrive countering the many threats and outright aggression of the Chinese Communists.

It would be interesting to hear what Biden thinks of all these developments, if the media ever gets the chance to ask him anything, and, if they do get that chance, if they would actually dare ask him.

After Anderson Cooper let Biden read his answers to him during a live interview, it’s hard to believe the media would challenge Biden with anything that doesn’t already have a canned response at the ready.

Five One Liners Under Other Bloggers Fedora’s Shot in the Dark, According to Hoyt, Gates of Vienna, Blazing Cat Fur & Don Surber

Posted: August 23, 2020 by datechguy in blogs, crime, culture, economy, media
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Not unlike the Minneapolis city council drones who advocate defunding the police, but are paying thousands of dollars a day for security for themselves, Lightfoot is showing us all whose lives really matter.

From Shot in the Dark

There is no privilege like liberal privilege

A system that punishes people for things they did not do is called INjustice. It has always been so

Via According to Hoyt

If you punished people for what they actually did too many liberals would be in trouble.

If I am in violation of their terms of service today, I was also in violation in 2019, 2018, etc., all the way back to 2006.

Via Gates of Vienna

Nothing says a conservative site is effective more than being banned by PayPal.

“Waste is shameful and thriftiness is honorable,” Xi said, calling for a combination of “legislation, supervision, and long-term measures” to rein in waste under a “Clean Plate Campaign.” 

Via Blazing Cat Fur

I think this is a sign that China is closer to falling than anyone will admit.

Who, what, when, where, why, and how are not that difficult to write.

From Don Surber

Spoken like a Journalist educated before 1980.

Spliternet? Spare me.

Posted: August 8, 2020 by ng36b in economy, News/opinion, Uncomfortable Truths
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No, seriously, its not

There has been plenty of discussion about Microsoft’s attempted acquisition of TikTok and the recent executive order that barred working with TikTok, WeChat and other Chinese social media apps. But amid all of this came an interesting article in the BBC accusing the United States of “splitting the internet.” Yup, really.

“It’s shocking,” says Alan Woodward, a security expert based at the University of Surrey. “This is the Balkanisation of the internet happening in front of our eyes.

“The US government has for a long time criticised other countries for controlling access to the internet… and now we see the Americans doing the same thing.”

Dr. Alan Woodward

The article does backtrack a bit and brings up legitimate security concerns posed by China. It sparked my curiosity in Pompeo’s speech, which hasn’t really made the news. So I found the transcript, and Pompeo had outlined five lines of effort for a Clean Internet:

First, Clean Carrier. We are working to ensure that untrusted Chinese telecom companies don’t provide international telecommunications services between the United States and foreign destinations.

Second, we call Clean Store. We want to see untrusted Chinese apps removed from U.S. app stores.

Third, Clean Apps. We’re working to prevent Huawei and other untrusted vendors from pre-installing or making available for download the most popular U.S. apps. We don’t want companies to be complicit in Huawei’s human rights abuses or the CCP’s surveillance apparatus.

Fourth, Clean Cloud. We’re protecting Americans’ most sensitive personal information and our businesses’ most valuable intellectual property – including COVID vaccine research – from being accessed on cloud-based systems run by companies such as Alibaba, Baidu, China Mobile, China Telecom, and Tencent.

Fifth and finally, Clean Cable. We’re working to ensure that the CCP can’t compromise information carried by the undersea cables that connect our country and others to the global internet.

Mike Pompeo, Secretary of State, in a speech on August 5, 2020.

This list doesn’t resemble censorship. Nowhere in the list does the U.S. censor information from other countries, prevent people from being critical of the United States, or otherwise interfere with other countries operations. It narrowly targets tech Chinese companies with known issues while leaving an open door to every other nation. It highlights some significant problems like stealing of COVID vaccine research that not enough people are tracking.

There is this libertarian view that a free and open internet means government’s should have no role whatsoever in the internet. There are plenty of flaws with this idea. The largest flaw is that this view fails to act when an entity like the Chinese Communist Party seeks to dismantle the Internet and subvert it for its own good. The BBC would perhaps brush this off as “market forces,” and to be sure, the UK has stood on the sidelines while China filters Hong Kong’s internet and even the internet at UK universities.

Perhaps better said in the movie Team America: World Police: “Freedom isn’t free.”

You can, and should, limit government involvement and allow the market to drive innovation, but when an obviously dark force threatens to break the freedom of information on the internet, you must act to stop it.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

DaTechGuy off DaRadio Podcast: Private Islands, October Surprises and Barr 3 PM EST

Posted: July 31, 2020 by datechguy in elections, media, News/opinion, podcast, politics
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Today at 3 PM the DaTechGuy off DaRadio no Frills Livestream Podcast takes up the following subjects.

A Flashback to a tale of Bill Clinton Jeffrey Epstein and Private Islands from 2014 that was not considered newsworthy back then.

My thoughts on a possible unpleasant October Surprise from Red China.

And how the media and Democrats are blind to the trouble Barr hearings and the Lewis funeral are for them.

We’ll discuss this and other things a 3 PM EST I hope you can join us. You can watch the livestream here at that time. (Last week’s podcast is a place holder that will be replaced between 2:50 at 2:55.

Hope you like it.

Oh and if you want to finance the new laptop that I need to buy this weekend, free free to hit DaTipJar so that I’ll be looking at you and the camera rather then the screen I’m using via an HDMI cable.

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