War and disease breaking out all over (not)

is war coming? Probably not. Just the usual local outbreaks of violence and small gangs of insurgents killing people.

StrategyPage cuts through the propaganda and analyzes what's up.



Lots of stuff about Iran, and no they don't expect war there either.

One reason I trust the site: They get things right about countries where I have first hand knowledge.

For example, they are one of the few sites that notice how corruption, not just ideology, is behind a lot of the news stories. 

The MSM ignores the corrution angle, and one problem in the Middle East is that the US thought throwing money at their problems would solve stuff: it didn't. It just made corruption worse and inspired ordinary folks to get angry at the US.

Even the radical Islamicists causing trouble all over (and in the recent past, the radical communist types who still are active in the Philippines and India) got local support due to corruption of the government.

Philippine president Magsaysay wrote the classic book about the causes and cures of such insurgencies: get rid of corruption in the government/police/ military, get land reform, and have the military reach out to locals to help them solve problems.


and here is SP/s analysis of last year's news :

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and here is their summary (from last year) of various problems here in the Philippines:



here, the big news is the volcano, which is still active but has calmed down (?calm before the storm?)



There is also a bit of a kerfuffle about China exporting their gangsters here: a Chinese girl was almost kidnapped for ransom, so this is about the return of the kidnap gangs, but also the drug smugglers, the food smugglers, the bribery, the manufacture of counterfeit products, legal casinos that won't hire locals (they import the personnel to do things locals could do), illegal gambling, on line pornography, etc etc which is blamed on these "visitors" or illegal immigrants.

the Chinese community is only partly assimilated so tends to keep the crime news among themselves, so the cops are developing a bureau of culturally sensitive cops to handle the increased Chinese on Chinese crime.

Filipinos tend to distrust the Chinese, and a lot of this is just politics, a way by the opposition parties to decrease the popularity of Duterte who is busy cleaning up corruption (a lot of his "critics" are the most corrupt and worried they'll be next on his cleanup list).

that part about smuggling food is important: It was suspected that someone smuggled in pork from sick pigs from China, and spread here because the meat contains active virus and the local pigs are fed discarded food.

That is how we now have a small epidemic of African swine flu in some areas, which means these farmers will have to kill all the pigs in contact with cases.

To make things worse: now we have a child who tested positive for that new Chinese coronavirus. and a few Chinese tourists in Boracay have flu like symptoms.

there is a lot of rumors saying that China is covering up the number of cases: and now there is a report that the disease is able to spread person to person.



this could be a disaster worse than SARS...

 Already the Philippines has a Dengue epidemic, and random cases of measles and diphtheria and polio partly due to people not getting their kids vaccinated thanks to the Dengue vaccine scandal.

Sigh.

the good news? 

now that they are looking for stuff from the sky, we are reading more about meteors going past the earth, or coming down as fireballs. None so far causing damage.

More good (or bad news, depending on your viewpoint): The impeachment fizzling and should disappear, because the dirty little secret is that Biden's son wasn't the only one getting rich on daddy's/mom's or a sibling's influence. 

Maybe only one who has experience with such things in the third world would notice that they aren't impeaching Trump for being corrupt (despite lots of charges and failed investigations of this) but because he dared to investigate corruption in another politician..

But as I noted above, the corruption factors are ignored by the MSM/cable TV news, so all those good honest people who trust the news don't know such things occur in Washington. 

As for Trump: he's worked with corruption in NYC for years so knows all the tricks.



Finally: the big gun rights march in Virginia didn't devolve into violence as the press hinted was going to happen hoped would happen despite rumors that trained antifa provocateurs who infiltrated it were supposed to guarantee would happen. 

Rumors on right wing sites say that the cops were in the crowd and hiding nearby in case of trouble, but the demonstration was peaceful, had "people of color" among the crowd, and like most right wing demonstrations cleaned up their own garbage.

Not my agenda: I support gun control, and refused to carry a gun when I was in the National Guard... but you know, if confronted with a bad guy, a person well trained to shoot can be life saving. 

and that, not guns per se, is the problem:

The real danger is people with a little training who think a gun will protect them. It won't: and the gun in the house is a danger for accidental discharge if you have children, and suicide if you have an unstable depressed family member.

ironically, suicide is highest in white males and especially in the elderly, whereas black on black homicide by gang members using handguns remains a problem in some parts of the inner city community. 

As for mass shootings: alas, like suicides, many are copy cat crimes, where an unstable person sees a crime and thinks: Hey what a great idea. 

Or, in the case of suicide, sees the press sympathetically covering a case of suicide as if it was a logical thing to do. Thirteen reasons why is an example of selling suicide to teenagers, who think: When I'm dead they'll be sorry, but they don't really recognize that first part, i.e. that they'll be dead.

Sigh.

Speaking of suicide: StrategyPage has a long analysis of the problem in the military and veterans but notes it is a problem among the general population.


Sigh.