Geo Political Articles
Geo Political Articles
The Chinese Dragon is Starting to Roar
Over the last year or so I have become very concerned with the behaviour of China, after reading and watching what they, led by Xi Jinping and the CCP (China Communist Party) are doing around the world.
This is all part of their plan to spread Chinese Communism and power.
The list of misdemeanours is very long indeed.
We all know about the Corona Virus, and the fact that they withheld knowledge of it to the WHO. Many doctors who tried to alert the world have died or “disappeared”
China is exerting “soft power” throughout the world by investing in various countries via its Belt & Road policy, which aims to complete a road, rail and sea network around the world to transport goods and resources. It also offers cheap loans to poor countries and then builds these facilities with its own labour and engineers and then often ends up owning them after the country (eg Sri Lanka) cannot pay the loans back. (China even owns the port of Darwin!)
China influences countries throughout the world with its Confucius Institutes which are set up in universities around the world to promote Chinese Culture and the produce a wave of pro Chinese students into the workforce.
China also finances (bribes) many politicians and political parties (even National here in NZ and Labour in Victoria, Australia) so that they follow pro Chinese policies.
China has benefited unfairly through currency manipulation, theft of western intellectual property, its continued membership of the WTO as a “developing nation”, and cheap postage (via the UPU)
And now we are seeing China taking over Hongkong, bullying countries such as Taiwan, India in the Himalayas, Vietnam and The Philippines in the South East Asian Sea. (It has territorial disputes with 21 countries!*)
We all know that the CCP is a brutal regime and is very oppressive on its own people, The Uiighurs and Tibetans, Falun Gong and political dissidents, internet censorship, no property rights. It hides information eg that there have been huge floods with thousands killed, and that many dams are at risk.
The rest of the world is starting to wake up and is pushing back, and the Chinese regime now feels threatened. How will they react? Will China fall apart? Will they start a full-blown war, or just invade Taiwan?
The United States and Australia are starting to push back, the least we can do is defund China by leaving their Huawei phones and Haier appliances in the stores to rust.
*Source WionNews
This article was submitted by one of our Members - JulieBabe
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JEDI Warfare
The world's richest man Jeff Bezos takes on the world's most powerful man Donald Trump in a virtual battlefield.
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away (actually it's this one, circa 2018), the JEDI was created. No, not the ancient quasi-militaristic organization tasked by the Galactic Republic to be the guardians of peace and order in the Star Wars galaxy, nor the popular religion devised to make a mockery of the national census, but the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure project. I can see you already starting to fall asleep but bear with me.
This is the project to put the US Department of Defense complete military intelligence IT operations into The Cloud. It allows US warfighters to "remain the most lethal force in the world, while safeguarding taxpayer dollars" - yikes! Several companies were interested in hosting all this information as you can imagine and the selection process came down to the final two. Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform and Amazon's AWS platform.
That's right. One of the bidders was Amazon, the company that wants to own the world's e-Commerce industry. The same Amazon Group that owns the Washington Post news empire. The Amazon run by Jeff Bezos, uber-one-percenter and outspoken Trump critic.
I think you can see where this is going. Amazon were the leading applicant helped in no small way by having an employee doing Digital Defense Service at the DoD, and having major input into the AWS application on his return to Amazon. When this was pointed out by Oracle, the selection process was interrupted. Trump also asked for an investigation and ultimately Microsoft was awarded the contract. Amazon went on the offensive, going to court for an injunction which has prevented the contract going into action.
Amazon alleges Trump interference - well duh! After the abomination of the Steele Dossier which lead to misleading the FISA court into granting warrants which allowed spying on the Trump election campaign, information which was passed directly from the Intelligence Community to the news media, it would be surprising if the President didn't have an opinion on military intelligence sitting on the same server the WaPo journalists use.
Imagine also, if a liberal South Pacific country with a left-of-centre government led by a female socialist, chose Amazon AWS as the place to store it's nation's Covid-19 app data. That sort of endorsement might really upset The Don.
Moving all the political hyperbole to one side, it seems unlikely a cloud computing platform which is part of a group including a prominent newspaper and a prominent e-Commerce site was ever going to avoid the appearance of conflict-of-interest, real or imagined. But the level of bitterness over this decision from Amazon is such that it really is hard to separate it from the other petty political debates in daily American life at the moment. It's a comment section flamewar, with an unlimited legal and PR budget on both sides.
The sort of intergalactic battle of good vs evil George Lucas would be proud of.
This article was submitted by one of our Members - Carkitter
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We will have lots of polls there - we aim to have more Polls than they do in Poland