#Chinese Expansion

[saxafimedianetwork]

US Foreign Policy Blindspot: Ignoring Somaliland and South Yemen’s Case for Independence

@mrubin1971: Shouldn't the #USA reevaluate its #ForeignPolicy stance on #Somaliland & #SouthYemen's bid for #Independence? Ignoring their desire for self-governance may undermine US #NationalSecurity interests & #freedom. #USForeignPolicy

Continue reading US Foreign Policy Blindspot: Ignoring Somaliland and South Yemen’s Case for Independence

[liberty1776]

From the Tom Woods Letter: I didn’t watch the State of the Union last night. I knew it would be lies and impossible promises from start to finish. However, our friend Col. Douglas Macgregor did. Col. Macgregor has been a guest on the Tom Woods Show, and of course was senior adviser to the Secretary of Defense under Donald Trump. I will note, first of all, that at the link above I asked Col. Macgregor about Trump’s weird deviations from his own stated foreign-policy principles, and Macgregor replied, as politely as possible, that he respects him but that Trump is unfortunately being influenced by bad … Continue reading →

[internetgiraffekid1673]

Miraculous Ladybug, Marinette Dupain-Cheng Drawings

I drew a lot of Marinette Dupain-Cheng from Miraculous Ladybug. I have the same love hate relationship with this show that most of the active fandom has. I may repurpose the time lapse from this drawing to use as visual while I rant about it and turn that into a YouTube video.

This is technically a redesign of Marinette, except I mostly like her canon design, so it’s actually just putting her in a bunch of different outfits to fit the occasion.

I started by tracing a picture of her and starting to adapt it to my style, thence freeform drawing her canon design in my style, then went from there.

Imagined context for each one:

Canonette Trace: Marinette at a regular school day.

Canonette Freeform: Marinette attempting to greet Adrien like a normal human being and mostly succeeding.

Girlboss Marinette: She had a big presentation that she wanted to look professional for.

Bakinette: It’s 2 a.m. and she’s making brownies for some reason.

Dancinette: She’s ballet dancing alone in her room, cuz she’s not confident enough to dance in any public capacity.

Grouchinette: She hasn’t slept in 3 days and someone just asked her a really dumb question.

Fashionette: Showcasing her newest design

Pridenette: It’s a pride parade and she’s having a little too much fun.

[waitineedaname]

sometimes i get worried im not in the right academic field and then i think about another form of discourse analysis to dig into and i get all excited again

[babyspacebatclone]

So! Anyone interested in the “Frog Spitting Water” tea pet!

I gots science for you!

This is a variation on one of the most common Chachong, which I am not naming for I wish you to make that discovery on your own. 😊

The principle is that the Chachong is hollow, allowing it to be filled with water, while also only allowing a single small opening.

Before preparing the tea, the chachong is immersed in cold water and allowed to fill halfway.

When the chachong has hot water poured on it, the cooled air inside of it warms up and expands. Because of the tiny opening, however, the air cannot escape until it pushes out the water that is in the way.

Resulting in the fun stream of cool water. 😊

Read up on chachong/tea pets, it’s delightful!

Edit:

The color change chachongs are all modern with thermochromic glazes (that is, they change color when heated).

Traditional chachong were specifically unglazed so they would absorb the tea poured on them. This allows the tea pet to develop the fragrance of the tea over use.

You can see what I believe is an unglazed chachong with two colors of clay in the first orange section.

茶宠chachong/tea pet (clay handicrafts for chinese tea culture)

[icy-book]

I'm making Terry Jr in the Sims 3, and the hairstyle options are all so white. They're forcing me to massacre my boy ;-;

[head-post]

NATO chief warns of consequences if China continues to support Russia in its war against Ukraine

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg warned China over its continued support for Russia, emphasising that “there will and must be some consequences.”

It’s not sustainable and viable that China continues to fuel the biggest security threat challenge for NATO allies, especially in Europe, by propping up the Russian war economy.

Stoltenberg spoke to reporters in Ottawa, where he arrived to meet with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The alliance chief also welcomed Canada’s status as a NATO ally.

Asked about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to North Korea, Stoltenberg noted the importance of unity among NATO allies.

It’s extremely important that we [NATO], in light of the alignment between Russia, China and North Korea, are also working more closely with our partners in the Asia Pacific, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, and Australia.

Stoltenberg continued by warning China over its behaviour in support for Russia, underscoring that “there will and must be some consequences.”

Asked about Canada’s plans to meet the alliance’s goal of having members spend at least 2 percent of their gross domestic product (GDP) on defence, Stoltenberg urged allies to meet the target. He also stressed the importance of NATO investing in its defence and preventing war.

The best way to ensure that we preserve peace is to stand together as NATO and invest as we have agreed. We have agreed in NATO to invest at least 2%.

Ahead of the press conference, Stoltenberg was presented with the Louis St. Laurent Award of Excellence for his “outstanding service to peace and security” during an event hosted by the NATO Association of Canada and the Canadian NATO Parliamentary Association.

Read more HERE

[aidanchaser]

when i'm comparing 5 different 16th century maps and reading about in depth histories detailing reconstruction during different eras of the louvre palace all for 1 detail in chapter thirty fucking six of this fic, it's time to evaluate if i'm really interested in figuring out the exact configuration of gardens to ballroom or if I'm just trying to avoid actually writing

[knowchinese]

Come and learn Chinese words!!(1)

[reasonsforhope]

"China’s carbon emissions have flatlined over the past six months and there’s now an opportunity for substantial declines over the next decade, analysts say.

The rapid growth in clean energy generation has been sufficient to offset a recent surge in power demand caused by higher air conditioning use amid late-summer heatwaves, and the government’s manufacturing push, according to an analysis by Lauri Myllyvirta of the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA).

China’s carbon emissions fell by 1% in the second quarter of 2024 and were flat in the third quarter, providing another indication that emissions may have already peaked.

This is largely because solar power output was up 44% in the three months to end-September, compared to a year before, while wind power generation grew 24%. In the first nine months of 2024, China installed 161GW of new solar capacity and 39GW of wind, per CREA data.

For emissions to post a decline in 2024 as a whole, there will need to be a 2% reduction in the fourth quarter, Myllyvirta’s calculations show. That’s probable if power demand growth cools as expected and hydro plants perform in line with historical averages, he wrote in a post on X, adding that over the entire summer period, clean energy expansion covered all electricity demand growth.

“If the current downturn in China’s emissions is sustained — with emissions falling in the second quarter and stable in the third quarter — that would open the door to the country beginning to reduce emissions much faster than its current commitments require.

“This would have enormous significance for the global effort to avoid catastrophic climate change, as China’s emissions growth has been the dominant factor pushing global emissions up for the past eight years since the signing of the Paris climate agreement.”

Based on current trends and targets, CREA expects China’s emissions will decline 30% by 2035. The International Energy Agency says emissions will fall 24% by then based only on stated policies, but that could be raised to 45% if the country follows a pathway that’s consistent with its long-term carbon neutrality target.

For the time being, Chinese policymakers are setting relatively unambitious targets, and “it’s vital that future targets reflect ongoing clean energy trends to avoid locking in lower ambitions,” Myllyvirta said."

-via The Progress Playbook, October 29, 2024

[fatehbaz]

was thinking about this

To be in "public", you must be a consumer. Or a laborer.

About control of peoples' movement in space/place. Since the beginning.

"Vagrancy" of 1830s-onward Britain, people criminalized for being outside without being a laborer.

Breaking laws resulted in being sentenced to coerced debtor/convict labor. Coinciding with the 1830-ish climax of the Industrial Revolution and the land enclosure acts, the "Workhouse Act" aka "Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834" forced poor people to work for a minimum number of hours every day. The major expansion of the "Vagrancy Act" of 1838 made "joblessness" a crime and enhanced its punishment. (Coincidentally, the law's date of royal assent was 27 July 1838, just 5 days before the British government was scheduled to allow fuller emancipation of its technical legal abolition of slavery in the British Caribbean on 1 August 1838.)

---

"Vagrancy" of 1860s-onward United States, people criminalized for being outside while Black.

Widespread emancipation after slavery abolition in 1865 rapidly followed by the outlawing of loitering which de facto outlawed existing as Black in public. Inability to afford fines results in being sentenced to forced labor by working on chain gangs or prisons farms, some built atop plantations.

---

"Vagrancy" of 1870s-onward across empires, people criminalized for being outside while being "foreign" and also being poor generally.

Especially from 1880-ish to 1918-ish, this was an age of widespread mass movement of peoples due to mass poverty and famine induced by global colonial extraction and "market expansion", as agricultural "revolutions" of monoculture/cash crop extraction resulted in ecological degradation. This coincides with and is facilitated by new railroads and telegraphs, leading to imperial implementation or expansion of identity documents, strict work contracts, passports, immigration surveillance, and border checkpoints.

All of this in just a few short years: In 1877, British administrators in India develop what would become the Henry Classification System of taking and keeping fingerprints for use in binding colonial Indians to legal contracts. That same year during the 1877 Great Railroad Strike, and in response to white anxiety about Black residents coming to the city during Great Migration, Chicago's policing institutions exponentially expand surveillance and pioneer "intelligence card" registers for tracking labor union organizing and Black movement, as Chicago's experiments become adopted by US military and expanded nationwide, later used by US forces monitoring dissent in colonial Philippines and Cuba. Japan based its 1880 Penal Code anti-vagrancy statutes on French models, and introduced "koseki" register to track poor/vagrant domestic citizens as Tokyo's Governor Matsuda segregates classes, and the nation introduces "modern police forces". In 1882, the United States passes the Chinese Exclusion Act. In 1884, the Ottoman government enacts major "Passport Nizamnamesi" legislation requiring passports. In 1885, during the "Tacoma riot" or "expulsion", a mob of hundreds of white residents rounded up all of the city's Chinese residents, marched them to the train station, kicked them out of the city, and burned down the Chinese neighborhood, introducing what is called "the Tacoma method".

Punished for being Chinese in San Francisco. Punished for being Korean in Japan. Punished for crossing Ottoman borders without correct paperwork. Arrested for whatever, then sent to do convict labor. A poor person in the Punjab, starving during a catastrophic famine, might be coerced into a work contract by British authorities. They will have to travel, shipped off to build a railroad in British Kenya. But now they have to work. Now they are bound. They will be punished for being Punjabi and trying to walk away from Britain's tea plantations in Assam or Britain's rubber plantations in Malaya.

---

"Vagrancy" amidst all of this, people also criminalized for being outside while "unsightly" and merely even superficially appearing to be poor. San Francisco introduced the notorious "ugly law" in 1867, making it illegal for "any person, who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or deformed in any way, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object, to expose himself or herself to public view". Today, if you walk into a building looking a little "weird" (poor, Black, ill, disabled, etc.) or carrying a small backpack, you are given seething spiteful glares and asked to leave.

"Vagrancy" everywhere in the United States, a combination of all of the above. De facto criminalized for simply going for a stroll without downloading the coffee shop's exclusive menu app. "Vagrancy", since at least early nineteenth century Europe. About the control of movement through and access to space/place. Concretizing and weaponizing caste, corralling people, anchoring them in place (de facto confinement), extracting their wealth/labor.

You are permitted to exist only as a paying customer or an employee.

[niveditaabaidya]

Chinese embassy in Japan Opposes To NATO's Expansion In Asia Pacific. #c...

[arachnofiend]

Pathfinder's doing another Tian Xia book and this time they're getting writers from all over Asia to write fantasy versions of their own cultures so that's cool

I am by no means one of those people who are overly cautious about cultural sensitivity, and who does or does not have the right to write what, but boy howdy does pretty much every role-playing game seem to love presenting a weirdly-fetishized version of any non-European culture discussed. And/or basing fantasy cultures on aforementioned fetishized versions of non-European cultures.

Like, it is entirely possible to depict a people who live in harmony with nature without also being a thinly veiled noble savage trope.

[headspace-hotel]

What i've been learning thru my research is that Lawn Culture and laws against "weeds" in America are deeply connected to anxieties about "undesirable" people.

I read this essay called "Controlling the Weed Nuisance in Turn-of-the-century American Cities" by Zachary J. S. Falck and it discusses how the late 1800's and early 1900's created ideal habitats for weeds with urban expansion, railroads, the colonization of more territory, and the like.

Around this time, laws requiring the destruction of "weeds" were passed in many American cities. These weedy plants were viewed as "filth" and literally disease-causing—in the 1880's in St. Louis, a newspaper reported that weeds infected school children with typhoid, diphtheria, and scarlet fever.

Weeds were also seen as "conducive to immorality" by promoting the presence of "tramps and idlers." People thought wild growing plants would "shelter" threatening criminals. Weeds were heavily associated with poverty and immortality. Panic about them spiked strongly after malaria and typhoid outbreaks.

To make things even wilder, one of the main weeds the legal turmoil and public anxiety centered upon was actually the sunflower. Milkweed was also a major "undesirable" weed and a major target of laws mandating the destruction of weeds.

The major explosion in weed-control law being put forth and enforced happened around 1905-1910. And I formed a hypothesis—I had this abrupt remembrance of something I studied in a history class in college. I thought to myself, I bet this coincides with a major wave of immigration to the USA.

Bingo. 1907 was the peak of European immigration. We must keep in mind that these people were not "white" in the exact way that is recognized today. From what I remember from my history classes, Eastern European people were very much feared as criminals and potential communists. Wikipedia elaborates that the Immigration Act of 1924 was meant to restrict Jewish, Slavic, and Italian people from entering the country, and that the major wave of immigration among them began in the 1890s. Almost perfectly coinciding with the "weed nuisance" panic. (The Immigration Act of 1917 also banned intellectually disabled people, gay people, anarchists, and people from Asia, except for Chinese people...who were only excluded because they were already banned since 1880.)

From this evidence, I would guess that our aesthetics and views about "weeds" emerged from the convergence of two things:

First, we were obliterating native ecosystems by colonizing them and violently displacing their caretakers, then running roughshod over them with poorly informed agricultural and horticultural techniques, as well as constructing lots of cities and railroads, creating the ideal circumstances for weeds.

Second, lots of immigrants were entering the country, and xenophobia and racism lent itself to fears of "criminals" "tramps" and other "undesirable" people, leading to a desire to forcefully impose order and push out the "Other." I am not inventing a connection—undesirable people and undesirable weeds were frequently compared in these times.

And this was at the very beginnings of the eugenics movement, wherein supposedly "inferior" and poor or racialized people were described in a manner much the same as "weeds," particularly supposedly "breeding" much faster than other people.

There is another connection that the essay doesn't bring up, but that is very clear to me. Weeds are in fact plants of the poor and of immigrants, because they are often medicinal and food plants for people on the margins, hanging out around human habitation like semi-domesticated cats around granaries in the ancient Near East.

My Appalachian ancestors ate pokeweed, Phytolacca americana. The plant is toxic, but poor people in the South would gather the plant's young leaves and boil them three times to get the poison out, then eat them as "poke salad." Pokeweed is a weed that grows readily on roadsides and in vacant lots.

In some parts of the world, it is grown as an ornamental plant for its huge, tropical-looking leaves and magenta stems. But my mom hates the stuff. "Cut that down," she says, "it makes us look like rednecks."

[blacktabbygames]

We're thrilled to announce that we've wrapped principal development work on Slay the Princess — The Pristine Cut. We'll be releasing it this Fall (date TBD) so we can simultaneous ship the update with both the game's console release (surprise!) as well as official subtitling support for 11 new languages, all with the help of our wonderful new partners at Serenity Forge (who you might know from their publishing work on Doki Doki Literature Club Plus!)

There's a lot for us to share about The Pristine Cut, but before we get into the details, please check out our new trailer!

Here's what we've got coming for you: Content

For those of you who are just now hearing about The Pristine Cut, it's an entirely free director's cut of the game that adds about 35% more content on top of the initial release.

This includes massive expansions to The Den, The Apotheosis, and The Fury routes, each of which is over three times bigger than their release versions, with tons of variations to discover across multiple playthroughs.

On top of this, we're adding three brand new chapter three routes that will add even more depth to your stories with The Damsel, The Prisoner, and The Spectre.

And we're adding a new ending.

All in all, these additions come to over 2,500 new voice lines, over 1,200 new hand-drawn illustrations, and over 15 new tracks of music.

We're also adding an extensive CG gallery with over 400 unlocks to help all you completionists track your progress, complete with cryptic hints to help you discover some of the game's more obscure and buried interactions.

Languages

And all of this is coming with a giant wave of localization support, covering the following languages: Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Korean, Japanese, French, German, Russian, Spanish (Latin American), Brazilian Portuguese, Italian, and Polish. These localizations are just going to cover subtitles, so we can be as thorough as possible about maintaining the quality of Jonny and Nichole's performances.

Consoles, Physical Release and New Merch

With the help of Serenity Forge, we’re bringing Slay the Princess — The Pristine Cut to every major current console — Nintendo Switch, PS4 + 5, and Xbox.

And these won’t just be available as digital downloads. You’ll also be able to pick up a physical edition for the Switch and PS5, with an exclusive sticker sheet and a download code for the game’s soundtrack.

And if that’s not enough we’re also doing a Collector’s Edition, complete with a 7 inch statue of the Princess, a mirror with a lenticular lens, an acrylic standee, and more.

And finally (for now), we’re launching the first wave of new line of sticker sheets, featuring chibi art of the Princesses as seen in The Pristine Cut’s new gallery. Pre-order them now at Topatoco!

Alongside these developments, we've also launched a new website for the game: check out slaytheprincess.com where you can order the physical editions, check out merch, and more!

Thank you so much for your patience while we've worked to make The Pristine Cut the definitive version of Slay the Princess. We can't wait to share all of the game's new stories with you this Fall.

Until then, we're back to working full-time on the next Episode of Scarlet Hollow (and have been for about a few weeks now!)

Best, Abby and Tony

[head-post]

Russia, China to establish all-year shipping via Northern Sea Route

Russia is working with China to advance a project to enable year-round container shipping on the Northern Sea Route (NSR), according to Splash 247.

Rosatom, the Russian company overseeing the NSR, and China’s NewNew Shipping are forming a joint venture. They plan to create a fleet of five ice-class container ships operating all year round. According to reports, NewNew has already made a number of Arctic transits over the past couple of years.

Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin has been calling for a significant increase in traffic along the Northern Sea Route for several years. Since the outbreak of war in Ukraine in February 2022, the project gained more momentum, as the focus of exports shifted towards Asian consumers.

The standard Suez Canal route between Europe and Asia is 21,000 kilometres, whereas the NSR stretches over 13,000 kilometres. This could potentially cut delivery times by more than half.

Moreover, with no risk of conflict as in the Black Sea, shorter travel time than through the Suez, and no fear of pirate activity as at Bab el-Mandeb, it is clear why Russia wants to develop the NSR.

However, as early as last October, NATO expressed concern about the Chinese presence on Russia’s Northern Sea Route and the possibility of an alleged increase in Chinese military presence in the Arctic.

Close ties between Russia and China, including energy and transport co-operation, have resulted in a sharp increase in Russian oil shipments to China via Arctic waters.

Read more HERE