The man accused of opening fire at a church in California is a Chinese immigrant who was allegedly motivated by hate for Taiwanese people.
The 68-year-old man is accused of killing one and injuring five others before members of the Taiwanese congregation disarmed him and hog-tied him using extension cords.
The Orange County Sheriff’s Department said in a statement that they recovered two firearms at the scene and that the suspect was not believed to live in the area.
The US Department of Commerce seldom grabs headlines or congressional scrutiny. It does not become “weaponized” against political opponents of the incumbent party. After the 2016 election, an article on Vox about incoming power-players of the Trump administration dismissed the department as a “hodgepodge of agencies,” and a “Cabinet backwater.”
… The arrest of a prominent Cardinal by the Chinese government raises some uncomfortable and delicate questions about the cozy relationship that Pope Francis’s Vatican has fostered with Beijing. In addition, one has to wonder if Zen’s own strained relationship with the pope—due in part to that close Rome/Beijing relationship—will result in a muted response from the Vatican about this outrageous act by the Chinese government.
Many Canadians acquiesced to soft totalitarianism when they accepted vaccine passports from September 2021 to early 2022 with little outcry or protest. A government with the power to exclude you from society over your refusal to get injected with a new substance which lacks long-term safety data can also make you a second-class citizen based on other private and personal decisions that the government deems to be unacceptable.
Over the past five years, most Americans have become familiar with what leading journalists and academics have termed, the new era of “Great Power Competition”: a reference to the increasingly complex and worrisome armed stand-off between the United States (and its allies), and China and Russia—the two leading authoritarian powers. The alarming genocidal war launched in February 2022 by Russia against Ukraine has awakened us to the reality that our expectations at the end of the Cold War in 1991 were delusional and foolish. It is not apparent that the universal appeal of the democratic idea will not spontaneously enable a benign New World Order to take shape.
When the Pentagon assessed China’s nuclear arsenal in its annual report to Congress on China’s military power in November 2020, it projected that China’s nuclear warhead stockpile, which the Pentagon then estimated to be in the low 200s, would “at least double in size” over the next decade. The Pentagon also estimated that China was “pursuing” a “nuclear triad”, meaning a combination of land-, sea- and air-based nuclear capabilities.
On May 1, on Russian TV, the media executive often called “Putin’s mouthpiece” urged the Russian president to launch a Poseidon underwater drone with a “warhead of up to 100 megatons.” The detonation, said Dmitry Kiselyov, would create a 1,640-foot tidal wave that would “plunge Britain to the depths of the ocean.” The wave would reach halfway up England’s tallest peak, Scafell Pike.
“This tidal wave is also a carrier of extremely high doses of radiation,” Kiselyov pointed out. “Surging over Britain, it will turn whatever is left of them into radioactive desert, unusable for anything. How do you like this prospect?”
“A single launch, Boris, and there is no England anymore,” said Kiselyov, addressing the British prime minister.
Fifty years of encouraging closer economic links with Beijing has proved misguided
At the start of the Winter Olympics in Beijing in early February, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin stood shoulder to shoulder to declare the two countries’ “friendship without limits”. In a 5,000-word statement meant to highlight their unbreakable bond, the pair sought to exploit what they believed to be the terminal decline of the West. Their intent was to make the world safe for autocracy.
Since then, world affairs have not evolved as the pair expected, to say the least. Europe, the US and their allies around the world have come together in support of Ukraine. The old global system the two autocrats had been so dismissive of is fighting back. Putin’s Russia has become a pariah in the global system, and Xi’s China will have to bear the consequences of committing to support it.
A nationalistic reliance on duff remedies has led to Covid incarcerations
The first country to experience Covid-19, and the one that invented the defence strategy known as lockdown, is the only country still practising it. But the Chinese form is so much harsher than the British version, it is almost misleading to use the same term. In Shanghai, the biggest city now enduring the experience, millions have been physically barricaded into their homes, some crying out that they are starving. Those reporting infections are forced into vast quarantine camps. Vital office workers have been confined to their skyscrapers, sleeping at their desks for over a month now.
All the conditions for history’s next great war are in place. Jim Holmes, the Wiley Professor at the Naval War College, actually talks about this period as being 1937.
1937 was the year in which if you were in Europe or America, you could sense the trouble. If you were in Asia in 1937, you would be even more worried, because that year saw Japan’s second invasion of China that decade.
No matter where you lived, however, you could not be sure that the worst would happen, that great armies and navies around the world would clash. There was still hope that the situation could be managed. As we now know, the worst did happen. In fact, what happened was worse than what anyone thought at the time.
We are now, thanks to China, back to 1937.
China’s Ukraine Catastrophe, the Rise of Trans-Atlantis, and a New Age of Power
Act I: Catastrophe
“The art of war is of vital importance to the State. It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin. Hence it is a subject of inquiry which can on no account be neglected.” – The first two lines of Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War”
The Dream
What did Vladimir Putin tell Xi Jinping when they met in the cold, blustery first days of February in Beijing? In a ceremony afterwards the two leaders signed a joint-statement condemning the geopolitical audacity of the United States and NATO while declaring the China-Russia relationship to have “no limits.” This was also at this moment when, at least according to American intelligence, Putin promised Xi he would refrain from military action against Ukraine until the end of the 2022 Beijing Olympic Games, which were then about to commence. Whether this is true or not it is impossible to say, though Russia’s tanks did roll across the border into Ukraine just four days after the games concluded. But in either case the question remains: on the eve of war, what did Putin say was actually about to go down?
A much-anticipated EU-China Summit, the first since 2020, has ended as both a failure and a success: a failure because the two sides were unable to agree on anything of bilateral importance; a success because after years of kowtowing to China, European officials finally stood their ground. EU-China relations are now on a new footing: Beijing no longer calls the shots.
EU-China relations have long been on a downward trajectory due to a panoply of disputes, including the worsening human rights situation in China, Beijing’s spreading of disinformation to cover up the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, China’s unfair trade practices, and its economic bullying of EU member states.
China’s ministry of foreign affairs has accused Nato of messing up Europe and stirring up conflicts in the Asia-Pacific region, after the UK’s foreign secretary told China it should “play by the rules”.
In a speech at Mansion House in London on Wednesday, Liz Truss renewed calls to boost Nato in the wake of the Ukraine war, and said the coordinated moves to isolate Russia from the world economy proved that market access to democratic countries was no longer a given. Truss also delivered a direct warning to China.
“Countries must play by the rules. And that includes China,” she said.
I spent my career as a pediatric cardiothoracic surgeon, involved for almost all of it in transplantation. Medicine should be a caring profession, seeking the best for patients, doing no harm, and dealing in truth as the basis of trust. Transplantation might be the apotheosis of human generosity, since one human consents to donate an organ to preserve the life of another, usually unknown to them. Sadly, in some settings this ethical basis has been ignored and organs have been removed forcibly and without consent from prisoners of conscience, many times resulting in their death. Clinicians acting on behalf of the state are often involved, and thus complicit in the crime.
