...here I am in the absurd position of having to actually say that maybe, just maybe, government death squads are a bad idea. Just ask the people of the Philippines.
The North Korean nuclear dance has sometimes been perceived as a type of harmless parochial hoedown.... But with every new spin around the floor, the dance gets more serious.
Indeed, North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un has been photographed posing with what appears to be a genuine miniaturized nuclear warhead for ballistic missiles.
As it turns out, the armada was 3,500 miles away from Korea and heading in the exact opposite direction when the MSM started flipping its lid...
So have India and Pakistan turned a corner? Has China and its SCO partners found a way to bring these bitter enemies together in peace and harmony? Well, let's not get carried away here.
The question is, what is the answer? Is the US ever going to be comfy with a nuclear North? Nope. Yet they too know that if we go in, it’s going to be uglier than most imagine.
... the writing is on the wall: The neocons in charge of the American war machine have chosen India to be their next best hope for a potential roadblock to Chinese dominance in Asia, and they're re-naming the entire region just to prove it.
Given Washington’s permanent war policy, its long history of breaching agreements reached, its hostility toward all sovereign independent countries, it takes a giant leap of faith to believe it’ll turn a page on North Korea for peace on the peninsula.
The Japanese government is too busy buying US missile defense systems and building their own cruise missiles to worry about whether or not they get their way on the constitutional debate.
A real, workable, viable peace treaty isn’t even on the table. And, sadly, given the repeated signs that the US is not negotiating in good faith, it seems exceedingly unlikely that we’ll see such a deal any time soon.
So now we have a perfect mess in Kashmir. It contains territories administered by three nuclear powers, all of whom have been to war in the region within living memory...
The hope for many is that this coming period will be one of renewal for the Japanese, economically, politically and otherwise...
Out of all this mess, one thing is for certain: Whatever comes of these moves by India, the Kashmirs themselves will be the first to face the consequences of those actions and the last to reap any dividends.
One thing is for certain: the fight for the future of Hong Kong is raging as we speak. But the real question is: who is fighting that fight? The people of Hong Kong, or Beijing and Washington?
Long live the King! And long live all the royal superhumans remaining on this planet who are so evidently better than us mere commoners!
And while no one of these stories itself amounts to an End of the Empire moment, taken together they point definitively to the tectonic change that is coming.