In Egypt and Tunisia, governments have fallen. In Libya, the dictator has chosen to try and stay atop the tiger through force, slaughtering hundreds of protesters.
In China, the government merely pulls the plug:
Chinese authorities detained dozens of political activists after an anonymous online call for people to start a “Jasmine Revolution” in China by protesting in 13 cities—just a day after President Hu Jintao called for tighter Internet controls to help prevent social unrest.
Only a handful of people appeared to have responded to the call to protest in Beijing, Shanghai and 11 other cities at 2 p.m. Sunday, a call first posted on the U.S.-based Chinese-language news website Boxun.com and circulated mainly on Twitter, which is blocked in China.
But Chinese authorities seemed to take it seriously, deploying extra police to the planned protest sites, deleting almost all online discussion of the appeal, blocking searches for the word “Jasmine” on Twitter-like microblogs and other sites and temporarily disabling mass text-messaging services.
Ahead of the planned protests, more than 100 activists across China were taken away by police, confined to their homes or went missing, according to the Hong Kong-based group Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy.
China wants to rise to regional pre-eminence – an effort closely watched by the US 7th Fleet Commander – but dare not trust its own people to tweet.
We have been instructed on what happens to the man who builds his home atop a foundation of sand.
Er, doesn’t OUR Dear Leader wish to have a government-controlled “Internet Kill Switch”?
Though I am SUUURREE nobody would ever use it for nefarious purposes….
[threadjack]
As an eminent Naval aviator blogger, I thought you might be interested in this. Many of your fellow aviators are rather upset with the Navy’s “politically correct” portrayal of Naval aviation history during it’s 100th birthday.
[/threadjack]
Please feel free to delete ….
Thanks. Glad to see some old school Naval and Marine aviators calling out the B.S. The foundation’s P.R. people responsible for the crap should be fired.
We have been instructed on what happens to the man who builds his home atop a foundation of sand.
So what happens to the country that builds its economy atop a foundation of cell phones?
Something about the reign, pray tell?
It seems that a couple of Libyan AF Colonels bingoed to Malta with their Mirage F1′s after being told to bomb the dissidents (which they didn’t do).
Must be a case of “Not There I Won’t.” Sorry, Lex, your headline is too good.
Nice to see aviators with personal limits when it come to their own countrymen.
Meanwhile, the dictator’s son vows to fight to the last bullet.
I’ll bet that last bullet will have his family name on it.
And when portions of the PLA declare functional independence?…
Just make sure you type in the right URL. Boxun.com is NOT the same as Buxom.com! Yes, VX, I’m looking at you…
Like the old sports saying goes, Padre, “Number 10 in your program but Number One in your hearts..”
Sounds like a case of whitehouse.gov vs whitehouse.com. You don’t want the second url. Trust me.
No I haven’t been there, but a friend was.
Are you familiar with g*atse?
You cannot be a leader if you cannot innovate.
You cannot innovate without freedom.
There’s no such thing as a little bit of freedom.
Until China becomes a free society they will be condemned to playing catch-up.
They are doing fine as it is. It’s physically impossible to grow faster than they have in the last 30 years.
The Chinese are playing catch-up. They’re doing now what the US did 100 years ago, except without the innovators like Edison, Westinghouse, or Carnegie. What they do have that 19th century America lacked is 1 billion poor people and an immenint demographic crisis from a one-child policy. Oh, and nuclear weapons.
And an active industrial espionage program. Not to mention the idiot business men who turn over our technology to be able to do business in China.
If they can steal it, they don’t need to develop it.
They are facing a demographic crisis, though.
“non-violent protest can work against some regimes but not others. Those regimes whose armed supporters are willing to kill peaceful protesters survive this kind of resistance just fine; those without the nerve to kill people wholesale end up retiring to Saudi Arabia, if they’re lucky. That’s why the ChiComs and the mullahs are still in charge, and why we’re not seeing a lot of “people power” in Syria. Now, a regime can continue for a long time after it has lost the will to kill, simply out of inertia — it takes a serious and sustained non-violent challenge to force it to confront the choice between mass slaughter and surrender…This is why Gandhi and Martin Luther King were successful — not because of the power of pacifism as an ideology but because they were dealing with opposition that was simply too civilized to kill on the scale necessary to defeat them, even though such killing would have been quite easy to accomplish. And this is why preaching non-violent resistance to Hitler or Stalin wasn’t just silly, it was immoral…”
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/259969/pacificism-immoral-non-violence-can-work-mark-krikorian
ChiComs are prolly stilling holding onto their little red books. “All power comes from the barrel of a gun.”