Allon

Poor citizens could of had that money's worth of food. That has been true before NK started the nuclear path. It's unbelievable that a country can completely starve their citizens, force them into literal concentration camps, and feed them verbal garbage for so many years while being so focused on building a huge standing army and developing nuclear weapons. I think we talked about that NK soldier who defected and took some rounds from his own soldiers while doing so. While trying to save his life, SK surgeons found multiple parasitic worms as long as 11 inches. Parasites were common even in SK for years until a 9 year old girl died from them. Doctors found over 1,000 worms in her system. SK launched a program to eradicate them and did so successfully. (Parasites are common in countries where human fertilizer is used in place of costly chemical fertilizers. We had a lot of them in Laos and Cambodia.) The soldier who defected weighed 132 pounds and was 5'5''. The average SK soldier is 5'8'' and weighs 154 pounds. NK soldiers are given more of a food ration than the average population, so imagine what the average population looks like. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/17/world/asia/north-korean-defector-parasitic-worms.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/02/13/north-koreans-lap-reports-soldiers-daring-defection/

With every dump in the water, they learn a little more.

Interesting map aside from the directions on it. Points out a lot of interesting places. Would have been handy in my last trip to China. Would have seen a lot more of it. Nice pictures.....

The nature of the testing has changed since that last "summit." Production has sped up and testing has slowed to test higher trajectories. So NK can be assured of mutual mass destruction in the balance of terror between the US and NK. And we just do a fly by of our B1's, B2's and B-52's over the DMZ to deter the artillery sites. (That really pisses the little boy off.) We are walking the tiger's back again.

We are approaching 10 year and she has language problems. With her age, learning the most complicated language to learn for a non-English speaking person is difficult. It's still baby talk. So we are watching. Good luck.....

Britain had no choice so whether HK was leased or not is of little consequence. If they kept HK without the surrounding area, HK would be untenable and China would just overrun the city eventually, or there would be constant conflict as a result of the drug wars. The Boxer rebellion is still alive, as Randy's articles clearly show, even to T-Square. It made sense to cede the entire area to China after 50 years and be done with them. Instituting democracy in the area was the "gift" Britain made to China. Such a gift sticks in their craw.....

It is not surprising the reaction and feelings of the Chinese people in general. Call them the Bell Curve as if the CCP had any concept of polling the view of its citizens. The wife and I only briefly discussed the issue of Hong Kong. It ended when she likened it to Taiwan. She says, They are Same. You can't argue that only because you can't argue it. Or rather, she won't argue it. One sure thing is the CCP has indoctrinated their citizens well on the subject of Chinese (revisionist) history. The CCP rules the roost in education. In her history class, I asked if there was any vigorous discussion of how Hong Kong got to be British, and how Taiwan got to be Kuomintang. She says, of course. Not that anyone questioned but was anyone allowed to really question what the teacher/professor taught. "Of course, you don't disagree with the teacher. That is why they are the teacher." I see. I know we in the US have gone through tumultuous times. I don't know how we lived through the 60's. Millenials have nothing on those times. I am glad we had them though. It shows we have differences of opinion that can be discussed and from that, a better world view. The Chinese seem to have a chip on their shoulder about how history has treated them. Can't say that I blame them but they are the ones who profited going back to the days of the Silk Road, and that is quite a long time ago. Those were the days of the Khans and feuding among the provinces. China did not form into a "unified" country until the late 1800's (despite all the "dynasties" which really only describes a province or two) and then with the Qing dynasty, began the slide to communist rule. Taiwan had been occupied by the natives there for over a thousand years. Then the Portuguese and Dutch took over until one Chinese emperor occupied Taiwan/Formosa for 212 years. Then until 1945, when the Kuomintang occupied Formosa, it fell into many hands. Mainland China's only involvement was to send Han Chinese from Fuxian and the interior near there, to Formosa as immigrants escaping from Mao's rule. So Hong Kong is not Taiwan. Hong Kong did not become the financial city it is today until the British occupied it after the opium wars. They also established the elements of a democracy despite the charge of being a colonial power. To say that things will never change is to ignore what has happened over many years -- of change. https://www.thoughtco.com/china-lease-hong-kong-to-britain-195153

Well, it's an old argument but bears repeating. Just curious so I looked it up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Taiwan Chronological Prehistory to 1624 Dutch Formosa 1624–1662 Spanish Formosa 1626–1642 Kingdom of Tungning 1662–1683 Qing rule 1683–1895 Republic of Formosa 1895 Japanese rule 1895–1945 Republic of China rule 1945–present China actually occupied Taiwan for 212 years (1683-1895) in the most recent touch of "civilization" beginning in 1645. Before that Austronesian indigenous people lived there, and still do (only about 2% of the population of Taiwan now). They occupied Taiwan for 5,500 years. For China to say Taiwan belongs to China is to say that Massachusetts belongs to the British. Or Cuba belongs to the US.

Investors in foreign countries have been taking over America for a long time and not just Hollywood.You won't find too many American companies that don't have some kind of ownership in other countries. And with all the foreign outsourcing going on, it becomes even more pervasive. You can't help but smile when the subject of who has the most vibrant economy and the usual deciding point is the GDP/GNP. But start ticking off companies owned by foreign entities. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/12/08/10-classic-usa-brands-that-are-foreign-owned/3882739/ 1. Lucky Strike 2. Budweiser3. Vaseline4. Good Humor5. Hellmann's6. Purina7. French's8. Frigidaire9. Popsicle10. 7-Eleven11. DHL...Never mind our own land:https://www.npr.org/2019/05/27/723501793/american-soil-is-increasingly-foreign-owned On the other hand, that may bode well. If "we" fail, everybody else does too. It's when we succeed.....they do too.

They may have been short range but they went high in altitude. They were testing whether they had enough thrust to reach the US. They do. So now they are in production mode rather than testing.

We have all had our moments, some more than others, but only the dog at the end of the dog sled knows what life is really like. It's a whole lot of assholes to look at. Anything we can do, we are here.

19 languages and 54 dialects. The study of language in China is fascinating to me. My first major was philosophy and concentration in language/logic. I still love it. The stuff you posted is not dry at all to me. And many thanks for it. If you have heard Mao speak (Hunan) and know anything of Mandarin as is taught in the north (Beijing, Shenyang), you would cringe at how he sounds. My wife does. But I smile. There are so many nuances to people who speak in China and so many different sounds. I think of how the Silk Road made it all happen. When my wife went to Guangzhou for her interview she could not wait to get out. She felt like an alien to another planet. She is from Liaoning, old Manchuria, and strictly Mandarin.

Nice catch, Randy. Both the movie and the book, Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan is a favorite. Very funny and poignant book. Anyone having a Chinese wife would see themselves in it. France Nuyen was also in that movie.

Come on guys. You did not have to ruin what looks like rosewood paneling. That will make a whole bunch of guitars. Carl would be cringing right now.

If it is any consolation, Colorado has a number of swollen rivers caused by record snowfall. The usual washed out dams and roads are a result and slower traffic. But the good side is a many year drought has been declared over. So Arizona, which gets its water from northern snowfall in Flagstaff and southern Colorado, will be relieved of some of its water shortfall. So will New Mexico which has really been clobbered by drought. But don't say there is any climate change going on. Heresy,

NordVPN is good (I almost went with it) but with the improvements ExpressVPN is making, I will stick to them until there is another reason to go elsewhere like if they raise their price. It's already a little overpriced for what you get. On the cloud issue, I just went to a seminar (actually a fancy dinner) where the discussion was on how companies were doing with their Cloud conversions. The tendency now is take all infrastructure and operations out of the business diagram and move it to the Cloud. I don't really understand why that is so appealing. I guess it's because most companies have no idea of how to manage IT, so they just outsource it all, which is what the Cloud in that instance, really is. We already outsource our DCS and we still need a tech support group to handle the things they simply do not have the expertise to handle. I pointed that out to the group and finally, some others chirped up and said the same thing. For most individual users, the Cloud is convenient and saves a lot of hardware expense. But to a business, I still don't see where it is that convenient, and it still costs extra money. But don't say that to the Jack Welch's of the world. (And how is that Azure project doing? Oh, you went to Amazon? And how much did that conversion cost? LOL)

I had read somewhere that ExpressVPN (probably in their upgrade notices) DNS leakage had been fixed. ExpressVPN does seem a bit more stable after a recent upgrade.

Arizona allows a driving instructor to be the test administrator as well. So I signed her up for driving school. She still does not speak English very well but does understand decently. And she was an office manager for the city garbage and recycling trucks while in China. I have no doubt she drove those trucks while in the motor pool. So she had some driving experience anyway. She is now a damned good driver. A lot of people (immigrants) come to Arizona just for the driving schools. They get the AZ license and transfer it when they get back to their state. Some states allow a direct transfer. Others require a test. Check out dmv.org. There is a manual for every state and an audio one for Michigan, which may help. I did not find one in Mandarin but I did not look too deeply. There is a lot there.

My friend was saying that there are still homeless people from the quake in 2008. Of course, it's China and there have always been homeless, these were displaced by the quake and have yet to recover. Just that possibility, affects everyone. It's the nature of PTSD. Heightened awareness. Calculating contingency. Fluctuating mood. And so many lost their family members, in a country where one child, one family was then in effect.

I talked with a friend in Chengdu last night. She says everyone is traumatized. She had that PTSD look about her. Shaky. Eyes darting. The pararescue in me is having quite an internal battle talking to her and seeing the pictures. That area has had such tragedy.

There are many empress dowager's, especially in the early dynasties and they are especially cutthroat as well. In those times though, the dynasties were separate disparate kingdoms. The life of a concubine is consumed in trickery and cleverness. In many royal households in China, emperor's had thousands of concubines. And many of those thousands lost their lives over simple whim. Madame Mao was a former concubine. Says it all.... http://www.kojewel.com/odd/concubine-to-the-emperor-4-horrific-stories-from-chinese-history.htm

Red Azaleas by Anchee Min. Her first book. Joan Chen helped her immigrate to America. Similar except an earlier setting in Mao's collective camps. True story. She was an actor in the operas Mao's wife put together. Want a really mind blowing movie, see Marco Polo on Netflix now. Now there is the life of a concubine.....portrayed by the same woman (Olivia Cheng) who was in Broken Trail (and others). Being sent down then had different consequences.....

Well, that is really what I am saying as well. China will do ok since they don't (not all of them) use Gmail, but youTube is catching on over there I understand. Elsewhere, weChat (and I know it is Chinese, although in America it is supported in Silicon Valley) will be useless if Gmail is used and it is a lot. I suppose it might be an opportunity for Yahoo. You think? I don't know where they stand here. There are a number of ways to handle jpg. I like Evergreen and One Note. And I have Snagit anyway, another piece of excellent imaging software. For me, Nuance Power PDF works best, even if more expensive. I use it at the office quite a bit -- against office policy but I can since I am an admin there. I do a lot of .docx/.pdf back and forth and it is quite handy doing that. The OCR is not as good as One Note. I have yet to find OCR that is really 100% anyway.

No change in the Chinese market for Android devices but updates will not be allowed to the OS. But to me, the major problem is no access to email or Youtube. That means weChat and other such social media forums that use Google email as an ID to store photos and chat messages, won't work at all. For us anyway, if she goes to China, that is a major disruption. We use WeChat a lot. So does her friends and others in China. WeChat might have to convert some access points and/or ID's -- not exactly easy to do. They will have to go back to saving all that stuff on the local phone. They have done that before and if I recall, it still might be an available option (doubt it) but nonetheless it's a major disruption to users. I note that Google today is acting as go-between for Huawei in some of the negotiations. Very strange but makes sense if Google is in the game for the long haul. They cannot afford not to. I have not seen where China is providing any kind of assurance that Huawei or Qualcomm or any other entity is NOT being set up as a spying device. The problem is simply that there are holes in the software that can be exploited for spying purposes, or really any other malicious use. Just FIX it. My experience with other Chinese software makes me very suspicious as well. I was looking for a replacement to Adobe PDF (I hate Adobe stuff but unfortunately, I have to use some of it) and found 2 other PDF vendors that were Chinese owned. Both were crap, despite all these "recommendations" of how they were such "excellent" PDF makers, and editors. They sucked. I could not even get one licensed and usable. Nor did the company care. I asked for a refund and they gave me back the money, no question. I noticed on the forums, a lot of other people experienced the same install problem I thought I could overcome. No way. (By the way, Nuance is a great replacement.) So I am really interested in how this thing floats out. I think Britain is mistaken that they can keep Huawei's stuff separate from their other networks.

Will be interesting to see if he lasts through the current trade war, and if not, what would happen. The General Secretary of the Party rarely involves himself in economic issues and follows the Premier's counsel, Li Keqian, the titular head of government. China always has a nice story to tell......