Sometimes you need to change course. Zag when you have previously ziged. And so it goes that Kom Jong Un and North Korea have splintered the UN. It is clear that economic sanctions are not effective against North Korea. The current sanctions, imposed in 2006 have been an abysmal failure, as North Korea displays its nuclear ambitions.
As the US and Trump shout ever louder, North Korea launches yet another test, making the US and the UN look like fools. After using one strategy one needs to reassess its effectiveness. It has been very clear that a pivot is required. The 11 year strategy of economic sanctions have not worked. The UN is no further ahead in convincing North Korea to stop their nuclear program.
Zoomed map of Handan, Changzhi, Licheng and Dongyangguan, overlayed with a topographical map. From Google Maps and topographic-map
Air pollution in China is at an all time high. Specific to China’s terrible air in general is Xingtai 邢台, a prefecture-level city of Hebei 河北, the most polluted province in China. The article calls out the county-level city of Shahe 沙河, on the southern outskirts of Xingtai. In looking at pollution in the area, I wondered how this would affect the people in the general vicinity, specifically in the nearby Taihang Mountain 太行山 range in Shanxi Province, such as Changzhi 长治, Licheng 黎城 and Dongyangguan 东阳关. Here are some Google maps of the area, overlayed with topographical maps to show how air pollution might affect the area. Here are the current Air Quality ratings for Changzhi
As Trump is mysteriously quiet about Russia, Trudeau is silent on China. It is very curious why the two of North America’s leaders are so silent. Is there no leader with the balls to speak about the blatantness of China? China’s increasingly aggressive behaviour includes:
Forced technological transfer to Chinese companies, if you wish to sell product in China
Claiming the South China Sea and all islands as Chinese, with historical reasoning.
blatant human rights abuses against not only their own citizens, but also those of Taiwan and Hong Kong
Tolerance of an increasingly nuclear North Korea
At least the US has representatives, though not Trump, that somewhat says censures China’s aggressive attitude to internationalization.
It is no big news that for the majority of the 99% of regular people the last 10 years in North America has been economically tough. Our young have a difficult time finding stable employment. In fact finding stable work has been a challenge for quite a long time. Products from China undercut our domestic manufacturers who have largely gone out of business. Our kids will not have a better life than us. It is clear that larger forces than the Canadian environment are at play here.
This time instead of trying SCIM or Ibus I just went for FCITX. After the initial install of Debian 8 Jessie’s fcitx-sunpinyin package, I had to do only a couple of command line statements, and it configured properly. This gave me a crude but working simplified Chinese input and display. Though it looks out of place with the slickness of Enlightenment E17, I am fine with it.
Puppy Linux Tahr 5.0.6 fits into 1G of disk space and runs well on only 500mb of RAM on an old XP box.
Previously I installed Puppy Linux Slako 5.7.1 with SCIM Chinese. Since I regularly use Ubuntu I thought it best to install Puppy Linux Tahr 5.0.6, commonly called “tahrpup” instead. I tried to install SCIM Chinese teh same way as on the Slacko version, and it failed. Eventually I did get the FCITX Chinese to install. It works very well, but was somewhat difficult to find out what works.
RCA fridge RFR322 died after only 5 months of use. What a waste of money and natural resources. Photo 1 by Don Tai
We humans need to do much better than this. My neighbour bought an RCA RFR322 student fridge, 3.2 cubic foot, Made in China, from Walmart. After a mere 5 months is stopped working. The manufacture of appliances such as a fridge takes a lot of natural resources, and if the appliance dies shortly after not only is it a waste of money but also of natural resources. We, as a species, need to stop making these mistakes.
Adidas Evolution EVN 791001 in white, tonguectomy and repair of leather split near the little toe. Toronto, Canada. Photo 1 by Don Tai
She has a pair of Adidas Evolution EVN 791001 leather running shoes, but the tongue was too thick and there was a cut in the leather on the toe cap, left foot and near the baby toe, D5. Here is how I repaired it. These shoes are made in China but are solidly built. Unfortunately there was some quality control issues with the split leather.
Henan police Academy 河南公安学院, Zhengzhou, China, left me some comment spam today.
Today the Henan Police Academy 河南公安学院 from Zhengzhou, Henan, visited my site and left comment spam. I thought it very odd, because Chinese government organizations, including Chinese police, are usually quite discreet and don’t present themselves in such an open way.
183.169.128.30 Henan Police Academy Henan Gongan Xueyuan 河南公安学院 HNGAZK-CN at http://hnp.edu.cn/. Their IP range is 183.169.128.0 – 183.169.159.255. There are a couple of abuse postings from them such as 1, 2
Here are your tax payer dollars at work. The Canadian government spends $2M CAD on trinkets for Canada Day 2017, our 150th anniversary. $600k of this is purchased from Canadian companies. $1.15M is purchased from China. How revolting. We celebrate Canada Day by making celebratory purchases from another country? This money could have easily benefited fellow Canadians who are looking for work.
