Blood & Treasure

collapse of stout Party?

I've got an op-ed up about the various discussions following David Shambaugh's recent prediction of the forthcoming endgame of Communist Party rule in China. Over here:

veterans in politics

The first thing that struck me about the Afzal Amin story last night was that someone who has - apparently - been involved with population centric counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan for much of the last decade came home and allegedly decided to advance his political career by paying and patronising an extremist militia.

And today we find out that counterinsurgency was apparently exactly what Mr Amin had in mind:

Politics requires an amount of bravery and using my experience as a strategist in Afghanistan, negotiating between pro-Taliban militias and the US military, I decided to use the same tactics to improve community relations here in my own country between the EDL and Muslim communities.

unfriendly skies

'As examples of Chinese air rage go, what happened at Okinawa airport on March 9 was no big deal.'

I have something up at the National in which I consider the remarkable amount of air rage in China as an aspect of the mass incident phenomenon.

can Kim Jong-un take a joke?

So if I haven't been doing much writing recently, at least I got to do a bit of commissioning.  On Saturday the folks at NK News. Org  issued a tweet asking for suggestions for the estimable Dr Andrei Lankov's latest column. I tweeted back wondering if the regime knew that the Kim dynasty  were figures of fun and whether they exploited the fact. Dr Lankov liked the idea, and here is the column.