#1
NOKOR is seemingly getting ready to provoke because China is getting ready to provoke, i.e. prepping for the day very soon when it will force its desired "strategic access for the PLA vee the "First Island Chain".
FYI, in response to the US deploying a fourth Submarine for homeport here on Guam, Chinese Perts calling on the CCP to preemptively expand any MilOps agz the intervening USN to the GUAM-CNMI-WESTPAC Region, as opposed to waiting for the USDOD-Navy to arrive in-theater.
ANY SINO-US WAR FOR THE ECS + SCS WILL BE FOUGHT FAR OUT HERE IN WESTPAC, NOT IN THE ECS ANDOR SCS.
Pudgy would be stupid not to take advantage of what may in reality be NOKOR's final or only opportunity to ever reunify wid SOKOR + preclude formal NT Chinese takeover.
#4
Meh.... go ahead. Have a quiet stealth drone missile blow up some important building afterwards and go, "Oh gee. They must have worse engineering skills than we though. Poor little kids. Have a lollipop."
#5
I think we should stir 'em up a bit, exercise the little commie cretins. Maybe a maritime zone penetration or such. This provoke shit works both ways.
#6
It'd be interesting to the see results if NK did provoke.
DefenseNews: SEOUL Two days after North Koreas nuclear test, South Korea signaled Thursday the deployment of a new cruise missile capable of a precision strike on members of Pyongyangs high command.
With this missile, we could hit any facility, equipment or individual target in the North anywhere, at any time of our choosing, army Maj. Gen. Ryu Young-Jeo said of the cruise missile.
[DAWN] THROUGH the thin covering placed in the name of secrecy, this world has been allowed to see it all -- spy wars and celebrated undercover agents stalking places and people for the purported sake of patriotism, nation, race and religion. The objective has been as much intelligence-gathering as it has been to deter and intimidate everyone around. And as conspicuousness goes, the Pak intelligence agencies can doubtless rival the most visible spy networks there have ever been. There is little in the country that cannot be, logically, blamed on these agents, and with time, the substance in allegations of intelligence agencies committing blatant excesses has been increasing.
In recent days, these accusations have related to a young man who went missing in Bahawalnagar last year and the sudden telltale disappearance of an anti-drone activist in Islamabad. On Wednesday, a report submitted in the Supreme Court by the Punjab police hinted at the possible involvement of the ISI in the Bahawalnagar case. In the other case, the anti-drone activist went missing some 10 days ago, just when he was about to take his case, built around the death of his son and brother in a drone strike in 2009, to Europe. Regardless of the impact of the activist's being picked up by mysterious men in the midst of the drive to obtain figures for the number of civilians killed in drone attacks, it is alarming that these disappearances continue. They have been going on despite court interventions and growing protests by lawyers, rights activists and people on the lam. The 'campaign' to rein in the agencies appears to have got stuck.
The government has so far done little to betray that it has the resolve to remove suspicions regarding the state's intelligence agencies including the ISI. A good first step in a necessary clean-up exercise would be for the government to assert some control over these agencies' workings. That has not been attempted in times where a government is ready to delegate its functions to peace committees comprising journalists and other non-official members. Instead, and not unexpectedly, the government has come up with the Protection of Pakistain Ordinance. Mooted in 'extraordinary' circumstances, this law raises genuine fears about its utilisation in legalising some actions purported to be carried out under cover, altogether doing away with the thin veneer beneath which the secret world has so far existed. Having thus stated its intentions, the government has returned to its refrain about the supremacy of democracy and to the vows of resolving all issues -- from the war against militancy to the trouble in Balochistan ...the Pak province bordering Kandahar and Uruzgun provinces in Afghanistan and Sistan Baluchistan in Iran. Its native Baloch propulation is being displaced by Pashtuns and Punjabis and they aren't happy about it... -- amicably. Democracy is certainly not about the elected being content with the illusion of power while the shots are called by the likes of mysterious silhouettes and their modern legalised reincarnations.
Posted by: Fred ||
02/15/2014 00:00 ||
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Background Leb Olympic skiier Jackie Chamoun appeared on a (mildly) risque Austrian calendar three years ago. Seems her bewbs were displayed in some of them, both butt cheeks in at least one. (I only looked for Rantburg, of course. I've got washing my eyes out with soap on my to-do list.) The professionally devout have been having a hissy fit.
[STATEOFMIND13] In certain ways, Faysal Karami is an interesting man. He's the minister of sports and youth in our defunct government. He's a parliament member representing the city of Tripoli. He's also offended by the possible impact of Jackie Chamoun's breasts on the reputation of his country and has asked the Olympic committee to launch an investigation into the incident, which has taken place about three years prior to current events. I'm not too sure about which "reputation" he's referring to. Lebanese women can be pretty snappy, which I guess is a reputation. The country itself is incapable of forming a government, in thrall to Syrians and Persians and such, has its own loose cannon parallel government, and isn't regarded as particularly corruption-free. All of those are "reputations" beside which Ms. Chamouns bosom pales.
Can Mr. Karami be outraged? Well, it's his right I give him that. But Mr. Karami, don't you have other things that require you to be infinitely more outraged about? "Surely you could find something?"
Lebanon's sports have always been our pride and joy. We're a small country with not much to give the world in many of the sectors that count but we did deliver, to the best of our financial capacities, in sports. But let's forget about sports, of which Mr. Karami is technically in charge. Let's not talk about how we've always had a little basketball team that was quite good and which is not allowed to play on an international scale for a while because he let the basketball league get so upheld in politics that it felt like parliament was in session every time two teams met for a game. Let's not talk about how our football team, which beat South Korea, ended up in a mess of scandals that left us out of a World Cup dream. Karami is a Sunni dynastic politician, head of the "Arab Liberation Party," which didn't manage to win any seats at all in the last election. He ran as "unaffiliated." He is a part of the March 8th alliance run by Hezbollah.
Let's talk instead about Tripoli, Mr. Karami's hometown. Has Mr. Karami been offended by the notion that his hometown is being viewed by a lot of Lebanese as a hub for terrorism, a second iteration of Kandahar? Is he affected by the notion that the city of which he is partially in charge is next to dead on every conceivable scale? Is he affected by the idea that the streets he called home have become infested with bearded men whose only purpose in life is to wreck havoc to the people of a city who only want to live? Is Mr. Karami aware that today's Tripoli is also his fault? [Sniff!] "Certainly not! It's Zionists! Everybody knows that!"
Tripoli is a place I used to visit frequently. In all of the times I spent there, stray bullets and sporadic explosions included, I've never heard of Faysal Karami getting upset about the reputation of his hometown and how he got his hometown to end up is reflecting on the precious country whose reputation he holds dear. My personal opinion is that being photographed while pretending to ski near nekkid is a pretty silly thing to do. She probably caught cold, so I hope they paid her a lot of money. Getting all fired up about it and pretending to worry about the shambles that is Leb's "reputation" is even sillier and I hope Karami catches cold sores.
A few years down the road, Faisal Karame's legacy will be that of a man who was more offended by a pair of tits than by the suicidal beards overflowing his town. He'll be known as the man who got an entire country to basically strip its clothes off to defend a woman. Isn't that quite the achievement of a lifetime? Only a relatively small number of people outside Leb had ever heard of Ms. Chamoun until the fuss began. Now she's a world-wide issue. But at least people around the world know how devout Mr. Karami is.
Cyril Raidy started a trend on Twitter yesterday which he called #StripForJackie. Soon enough, people of all forms and genders were bracing the harshness of social media platforms, full of guts, stripping their bodies for everyone to see in order to make a point. Some were enthusiastic about it. Others were not. Some were accepting everyone who had the courage to show themselves while others immediately became a form of body police, missing the point entirely.
Posted by: Fred ||
02/15/2014 00:00 ||
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#1
Review Austrian Ski calendars carefully before ordering.
[National Review Online] Twenty-five years ago today, Ayatollah Khomeini brought his edict down on Salman Rushdie. Iran's revolutionary leader objected to the author's magical-realist novel The Satanic Verses because of its insults to the Mohammedan prophet Muhammad and responded by calling for the execution of Rushdie and "all those involved in the publication who were aware of its contents."
That Rushdie was born in India, lived in Britannia, and had no significant connections to Iran made this an unprecedented act of aggression, one that resounded widely at the time and has subsequently had an enduring impact. Indeed, one could argue that the era of "creeping Shari'a" or "stealth jihad" or "lawful Islamism" began on February 14, 1989, with the issuance of that short edict.
If Rushdie, 66, is alive and well (if not exactly flourishing; his writings deteriorated after The Satanic Verses), many others bit the dust in the disturbances revolving around his book. Worse, the long-term impact of the edict has been to constrain the ability of Westerners freely to discuss Islam and topics related to it, what has come to be known as the Rushdie Rules. Long observation of this topic (including a book written in 1989), leads me to conclude that two processes are underway:
First, that the right of Westerners to discuss, criticize, and even ridicule Islam and Mohammedans has eroded over the years.
Second, that free speech is a minor part of the problem; at stake is something much deeper -- indeed, a defining question of our time: will Westerners maintain their own historic civilization in the face of assault by Islamists, or will they cede to Islamic culture and law and submit to a form of second-class citizenship?
Most analyses of the Rushdie Rules focus exclusively on the growth of Islamism. But two other factors are even more important: Multiculturalism as practiced undercuts the will to sustain Western civilization against Islamist depredations while the Left's making common political cause with Islamists gives the latter an entrée. In other words, the core of the problem lies not in Islam but in the West.
Posted by: Alaska Paul ||
02/15/2014 00:00 ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Review Austrian Ski calendars carefully before ordering. 
