They warned me that an illegitimate puppet regime colluding with Russia would mow down the resistance and take CNN off the air, and they were righthttps://t.co/xn0iacdQI1
The anti Maduros are taking the cautious offensive and marched on the presidential palace. This kind of defiance is contagious because it clearly shows Maduro is not in control. To win a rebellion doesn't have to rule, simply negate the strongman 's writ.
Dictatorships are brittle things. Unlike democracies where a certain insubordination to the persons of state is possible in a dictatorship obedience is not optional. Once it becomes optional the strongman is finished.
The hackers, who belonged to the Ministry of State Security, cleared out an astonishing amount of defense information such as “secret plans to develop a supersonic anti-ship missile for use on U.S. submarines by 2020” according to the Post, as well as “614 gigabytes of material relating to a closely held project known as Sea Dragon, as well as signals and sensor data, submarine radio room information relating to cryptographic systems, and the Navy submarine development unit’s electronic warfare library.” Since one gigabyte is equivalent to about a thousand good-sized books, roughly a half-million pages of text, this was an astonishingly large [data] compromise.
I understand that Mr. Trudeau used to work as a small theater actor, but maybe G7 meetings aren't the best time to pinch pennies with bargain-basement spirit gum.
The greatest tragedy here is that I can't find Norm Macdonald's SNL performance as Burt Reynolds, where his fake mustache starts falling off & Norm blows at it to keep the thing off his lip.
MERKEL: When I say "tariffs are bad" and press down on your foot, you smile and nod. TRUMP: Check! MERKEL: (Stepping on Trump's foot) Tariffs are a tax on consumers, and will hurt all economies. TRUMP: (Stares blankly, then turns and whispers to Abe) I think she's talking to you. pic.twitter.com/z6l1phwYa2
Canada is trying to destroy our country with its tariffs on dairy. And it’s working. The only thing left is for us to surrender unconditionally and beg for mercy. Does anyone speak Canadian?
In a 2009 blog post, MSNBC’s Joy Reid endorsed a plan from Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to forcibly relocate all Jews from Israel to Europe. https://t.co/pMuddd9KP8
Rule #1: The inventor of the Islamic religion is universally-recognized as the final messenger of the One True God™, and must therefore always be referred to as the Prophet Mohammed.
(That's prophet, with a capital "P"!)
Rule #2: Doubt must always be cast upon the possibility that a member of the Religion Of Peace™ can ever engage in terrorism.
A Muslim slays two policewomen by slashing them across their throats, then shooting them in the head with their own guns? He then slays a civilian man passing by with said guns, drenching the victim's own mother with her son's blood? And all the while crying, "Allahu Ackbar"?
GEORGE LUCAS (1980): If I had to describe Lando, I'd say he's this very charismatic smooth-talking con man. He's a flatterer skilled in using the spoken word to disarm people to get what he wants. Absolutely irresistable to the ladies.
His weakness is that sometimes he takes it too far, and provokes suspicion.
WHITE SLAVER DISNEY CORP (2018): Sure, Pando Calrissian likes the ladies, but he also likes to charm Han Solo into giving him blowjobs in the cantina toilets. LOL!
UPDATE (May 29, 2018): Forgot I had a copy of Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays at home. Lando's original character description among the script writers (p. 196):
"Lando was discussed as 'a new Han Solo character.' He is described as a slick, riverboat gambler dude. Unlike Han Solo, this guy should be elegant, sort of like James Bond. There were discussions about getting this new character a sidekick, a girl or female alien or a matched set of girls...possibly something odd and outrageous. This man should be charming so it will not occur to the audience that he would betray Han and Leia. "
Nothing there about him sticking his dick into the Millenium Falcon's hyperdrive motivator.
UPDATE #2: There was also some discussion that Lando could be a very rich businessman, with connections to the highest echelons of the Imperial elite. So that he'd be someone that even Darth Vader would be reluctant to tangle with.
UPDATE #3: Also some discussion that Lando could have been one of the last remaining clones from the Clone Wars.
"Hello, this is Mark Waid from Marvel Comics. Yes, THE Mark Waid. Youse guys better back out from publishing this guy's graphic novel, or I'll use my industry muscle to bankrupt your small publishing company. Because I don't like his politics, that's why. So just do as you're told, or I'll ruin you."
"Oh, and have a nice day."
Sounds like a potential fair trade violation. Did Marvel give Mark Waid their blessing in this blatant effort to stifle the competition and protect their near-monopoly?
Mark Waid used intimidation to keep me from getting my goods to market. https://t.co/f53KTJrs3K
— Diversity & Comics (@DiversityAndCmx) May 12, 2018
Businesses are supposed to compete on the shelves not by intimidating smaller publishers through industry weight and rumors.
What Mark Waid and the other SJW comic book pros did yesterday to Antarctic Press was not only unconscionable and unethical, but possibly illegal as well.
— Diversity & Comics (@DiversityAndCmx) May 12, 2018
Mark Waid acted maliciously knowing that he and his cohorts in the industry could bear incredible pressure on this tiny mom-and-pop operation down in San Antonio. https://t.co/0aKwOI8dmA
— Diversity & Comics (@DiversityAndCmx) May 12, 2018
Mark Waid & the other SJW Crybullies were TERRIFIED of having to compete against a non-political crowd-funded superhero comic book on the stands.
They bullied a small publisher so viciously that the owner's nerves were shot in less than 36 hours.https://t.co/f5Vk6jRjKm
— Diversity & Comics (@DiversityAndCmx) May 12, 2018
It's been confirmed that after maliciously spending all day attacking @AntarcticPress and using his elder statesman status to intimidate them, that Mark Waid has shut down his Facebook.
Iranians murdered & maimed an awful lot of American soldiers with IEDs in Iraq. So it warms the cockles of my heart to see those Islamofascist sons-of-bitches being sent back to Teheran in bodybags.
Iran has long been building up a force on Israels borders in Syria along the Golan and in Lebanon via Hezbollah. War with Israel was imminent and probably forced Trump’s decision to scotch the deal to preserve strategic clarity.
It would have been absurd to keep the deal in the face of a conflict where America could not remain neutral. Besides, Iran's has fallen into a strategic trap too good to be missed.
Iran is now fighting two major foreign wars. One against anti Assad forces and now against Israel. The ayatollahs would have been invulnerable had they remained within Iran. But the Islamic elite became an expansionary force and sowed the seeds of their own destruction.
Israel's strategic problem was to lure the Iranians close. The IDF has always been a very short range force. All its wars have been fought near or inside Israel itself. In Iran the ayatollahs were beyond the combat power of Israel to destroy.
Part of the problem was solved by the Iranian guard itself. They moved into Lebanon where thru Hezbollah they ruled a lucrative private state, where they could launder money and run rackets. The neck was out, but Israel needed the body.
The rest of the solution was provided, albeit unintentionally, by Obama. The collapse of Syria tempted bigger forces in. Iran are now the foot soldiers of the wretched Assad. The money Obama so generously provided paid for their deployment into the foreign quagmire.
Iran is now neck deep in Syria and Lebanon. The ayatollah's foreign legions are far from home loaded down with the crippled Assad and inside the lethal short range of the IDF. They must either retreat or be bled dry.
I don't think Trump plotted this. Maybe Netanyahu did. But it would have clear to Mattis who realized the Deal would become a dead letter in that scenario. So Trump did the only thing he could. He chose a side.
Eventually clearer heads in Tehran will grasp the magnitude of the debacle and we may see them try to negotiate an exit from Syria. Not total victory but a bigly one.
A man suspected of stealing hundreds of computers used to mine Bitcoin in Iceland escaped from prison and fled to Sweden, reportedly on a plane carrying Iceland’s prime minister https://t.co/p2xQMUudyLpic.twitter.com/Hn0iu2mf9V
Melania knew what she was getting into. The American electorate knew what they were getting into - if America wanted a morally-upstanding Republican, Mitt Romney would've been halfway through his second term by now.
And the press? Too clever by half, the press gave Trump coverage for ratings during the primaries, and propped him up thinking he'd be a pushover for Hillary in the general.
Sen. Al Franken is a major proponent of Title IX policies that would get college students in trouble and strip them of due process when facing investigations for the exact same kind of misbehavior he seemingly committed.
Picture traveling back in time a year, and telling people that by November 2017, sex harassment allegations had not derailed the Trump presidency, but had effectively ended the careers of Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, Mark Halperin, Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Leon Wieseltier...
I would like to apologize to any of the women or men who were offended by my numerous horrible sexual perversions that I absolutely am not admitting to at this time
You know, #Halloween jack-o-lanterns were originally made out of turnips. Hmm, neat. I wonder what that looked li- JESUSFUCKINGCHRIST pic.twitter.com/fxALiANr2W
ISIS had hundreds of thousands of fanatical troops and billions of dollars, Joe Hung said. The world would just have to live with the Islamo-Nazis' new Thousand-Year Reich, he insisted. Because ISIS would bring peace and love and understanding to the Middle East, just like all the Caliphates did before it.
Oh, and never you mind about the lowly infidel (Yazidi and Christian women) relegated to sexual slavery to soldiers of the Master Faith. Yazidis & Christians are little people, and in Joe Hung's world, the rapes of a few thousand little people are well worth the price of the grand Middle Eastern Utopia he assured us was just around the corner.
A few of Joe Hung's mighty, invincible rapist-terrorists. After their defeat. Why, they look ten-feet tall, don't they just?
#ISIS lost nearly 6000 terrorists in #Raqqa, then surrendered in large numbers. Once purported as fierce, now pathetic and a lost cause. 4/6 pic.twitter.com/JV9EFywqd4
THE FORCE AWAKENS: “What if we had a Death Star but, like, a bigger Death Star?” Audiences: “Here’s $2 billion.” THE LAST JEDI: pic.twitter.com/iHEcvbT8af
Used to consider myself a little more of a Star Wars guy than a Star Trek guy, but lately I've begun thinking about how depressing the Star Wars cinematic universe really is.
Take any World War 2 movie: no matter how harrowing, it's either explicit or implicit that all the carnage and sacrifice results in 75 years of real-world peace. Even if the characters die, the ultimate payoff to all the conflict is peace.
Now take Return Of The Jedi. Good guys win, galaxy is liberated, everyone lives happily ever after.
Except that they don't live happily ever after. Poor bastard Luke Skywalker spends the next 35 years of his life fighting the remnants of the Empire, until he gets PTSD and crawls into a fetal position in his hermit's cave.
And who can blame him? What's he got to look forward to? Or we, the audience, for that matter? Just movie upon movie of war without end.
And that's why the Star Wars universe is a depressing place. In the Star Wars universe, peace can never be the ultimate payoff. Disney expects yearly returns on a 4.5 billion dollar investment. Can't say that I blame them, but any final "victory" in the latest trilogy is going to seem very hollow when the next band of plucky heroes just have to fight Empire 3.0 in the trilogy which inevitably follows.
More Death Stars, more planetary genocides, more nihilism, ad infinitum.
Sorry Disney, count me out.
UPDATE (Aug 11 / 2017): Just to expand upon one point: in Star Trek, the default state is peace. Of course, in order to have drama, some kind of conflict has to exist. So in any given episode or movie, violence or brinksmanship or diplomacy is used to deal with the conflict.
With the conflict resolved, the Star Trek universe once more reverts to its natural state, peace. (Even if, in the case of the Original Series, that peace sometimes was imperfect and took the form of cold wars with the Klingons or Romulans.)
Conversely, with Star Wars, the default state of nature is war. The audience always knows that war continues between episodes. There's rarely any respite, other than perhaps the occasional happy end-of-trilogy celebration sequence to signify a brief, fragile peace before the resumption of hostilities.
(About the only way to avoid this problem would be to set the next trilogy in the Old Republic or a thousand years into the future in the Third Republic. Which I don't see happening -- they'd lose too much on the merchandising of the current characters, etc.)
PhD is such a terrestrial term and it's dumb to use it. He could have easily said something like "a scholar of Alderaan University" instead. https://t.co/qtVkzboby2
“The last Nobel Peace Prize Laureate to be effectively killed by his own government was Carl Ossietsky, in Germany in 1938,” [Bill] Bishop notes. “Does Xi care that the the likely precedent here for Beijing will be pre-World War II Nazi Germany?”
"In what amounts to nothing less than a 'war on law' that is unprecedented in its scale and severity," the New York [City Bar Association] said, "Chinese human rights lawyers and activists have been summoned for questioning, kidnapped by secret politic, detained incommunicado in 'black jails' and other prisons, humiliated and subjected to marathon interrogation sessions and other forms of sadistic psychological and physical torture, including sleep deprivation, forced medication (often with grave consequences for mental and physical health), brutal beatings, electric shocks, prolonged subversion in water, death threats, and months of solitary confinement."
If the China Post had been this honest about China over the past 15 years, it might still have a print edition.
But instead, the Post elected to be Chinese Communist Party shills, thereby driving their 65-year-old newspaper into the ground.
[There are no atheists in the foxholes...or on the campaign stump!]
Just a billionaire who formerly considered himself an atheist hanging out in a black church not running for president or anything. https://t.co/RTjV4twLNr
"Perjury is the intentional act of falsifying an affirmation to tell the truth, whether spoken or in writing, concerning matters material to an official court proceeding. Contrary to popular misconception, no crime has occurred when a false statement is intentionally or unintentionally made in court while subject to penalty. Instead, criminal culpability only attaches at the instant the declarant falsely asserts the truth of statements which are material to the outcome of the proceeding."
You sound very knowledgeable and erudite and...hey, did you just copy all that from Wikipedia? Because here's Wikipedia on perjury:
"Perjury is the intentional act of [...] falsifying an affirmation to tell the truth, whether spoken or in writing, concerning matters material to an official proceeding. Contrary to popular misconception, no crime has occurred when a false statement is (intentionally or unintentionally) made while under oath or subject to penalty—instead, criminal culpability only attaches at the instant the declarant falsely asserts the truth of statements [...] which are material to the outcome of the proceeding."
"Statements that entail an interpretation of fact are not perjury because people often draw inaccurate conclusions unwittingly, or make honest mistakes without the intent to deceive. Individuals may have honest but mistaken beliefs about certain facts, or their recollection may be inaccurate, or may have a different perception of what is the accurate way to state the truth. Like most other crimes, to be convicted of perjury one must have had the intention (mens rea) to commit the act, and to have actually committed the act (actus renus).
Furthermore, statements that are facts cannot be considered perjury, even if they might arguably constitute an omission, and it is not perjury to lie about matters immaterial to the legal proceeding."
"Statements which entail an interpretation of fact are not perjury because people often draw inaccurate conclusions unwittingly, or make honest mistakes without the intent to deceive. Individuals may have honest but mistaken beliefs about certain facts, or their recollection may be inaccurate, or may have a different perception of what is the accurate way to state the truth. Like most other crimes [...] to be convicted of perjury one must have had the intention (mens rea) to commit the act, and to have actually committed the act (actus reus). Further, statements that are facts cannot be considered perjury, even if they might arguably constitute an omission, and it is not perjury to lie about matters immaterial to the legal proceeding."
Hung maintains, quite wrongly, that Chen's testimony was immaterial to the conviction of Fung. Why exactly he should think so is rather a mystery, for Chen claimed to have been on the phone with Fung the entire time the rape occurred.
If Chen's claim was indeed truthful, Elmer Fung should have been exonerated. The innocence of Fung in a court of law hinged upon Chen Peng-jen's testimony, making that testimony material by definition.
As for the actual evidence used to convict Chen Peng-jen of perjury, Joe Hung is light on specifics.
On the one hand, phone records no longer exist that would corroborate Chen's testimony (leading Hung to suggest there wasn't enough evidence to convict Chen).
But on the other hand, Chen claimed he spoke with Fung while on the way to the American Institute in Taiwan to pick up a passport with a new visa.
The only problem with his story was that AIT was apparently closed that day. Oops!
But before I close this discussion of convicted perjurer Dr. Chen Peng-jen, there's one sentence in Hung's column that almost deserves some kind of award for its deceitfulness:
"No questions were asked of Professor Chen to defend himself [at his perjury trial]."
The impression that Hung clearly is trying to convey is that poor Chen Peng-jen was railroaded, and his conviction was a terrible miscarriage of justice.
When instead, what most likely happened is that the prosecutor asked Chen to take the witness stand, and Chen declined to testify in his own defense.
Whether that decision was his alone or done in accordance with the advice of his lawyer is - dare I say it? - immaterial.
Postscipt #2: A quick backgrounder on Elmer Fung. Some from memory, some from Wikipedia. (And NONE of it plagiarized, I hasten to add):
In 2003 / 2004, Fung was the vice-presidential candidate in Taiwan for a minor party advocating unification with Communist China. (His "New Party" received very little support in that election, garnering a meager 17,000 votes out of 13 million cast).
But a few months before the election, Fung's Filipino maid accused him of raping her. Fung insisted the sex was consensual, and claimed she framed him by fishing out his used condom from the toilet and depositing it in a wastebasket for the police to discover.
[About this: It should have been pretty easy to verify Fung's claim by having lab techs determine if the condom had been contaminated with toilet water.]
A very sordid he-said-she-said situation. Who to believe?
For me, that dilemma was solved when Fung fired the maid, and paid her a "bonus" of something like 6 months salary? [about $24,000 USD]. (That was all above board - no one knows how much he paid her under the table.)
Because of Taiwan's immigration laws, the unemployed maid was required to return to the Philippines. Once out of country, it'd be difficult for her to testify against Fung now. And on top of that - mirabile dictu! - the maid signed a sworn statement withdrawing her accusation. Ain't it grand what a little hush money'll do?
Nevertheless, the case was brought to trial.
Which resulted in his conviction.
Which was subsequently overturned.
A couple years later, he'd be convicted again. Only to win in a later appeal.
Anyways, I lost track, but apparently there were 7 trials held between 2005 & 2016.
Frankly, I was unaware that Taiwan's supreme court found him guilty in 2016, and sentenced him to 3 1/4 years in prison. And I also didn't hear that he only spent 85 days in prison before being released on medical parole.
But it does lead one to wonder though: will Chen Peng-jen the KMT perjurer spend more time behind bars than Elmer Fung the New Party rapist?
"In most jurisdictions, the false statement made by the individual must have been important to the case. For instance, a witness who lies about his whereabouts during the crime is committing perjury."
Multiple fines issued to Taiwanese farmer for selling cabbage in streets of the southern city of Tainan:
A 59-year-old farmer [surnamed Chen (陳)] from Tainan’s Kuantien District (官田) faces multiple fines after attempting to sell his produce on the streets of the city over several days last month.
[...]
“I come into the city like this only once or twice a year; I do not want to see all my hard work be for nothing. These fines are really a big blow to me,” Chen said.
Police said Chen was fined according to Article 82 of the Act Governing Punishments for Violations of Road Traffic Regulations (道路交通管理處罰條例), which stipulates that vending on the roadside without a permit may result in fines from NT$1,200 to NT$2,400.
Police said they would only continue to fine Chen if they received complaints from residents, adding that if any vehicle accidents occur as a result of Chen’s activities, he could face criminal charges.
Bit absurd to fine someone for selling cabbages, but one can see where the police are coming from. Surely the farmer could have rented a stall at a night market somewhere in town to avoid creating a vehicular hazard.
But if the rental fees there were too steep, one possible solution might be to rent space to small entrepreneurs like this in one of the city's "mosquito halls". (For those not familiar with the term, a "mosquito hall" in Taiwan is a government building constructed with legislative pork, which then sits idle most of the time -- attracting only mosquitoes.)
It'd be win-win all the way around. The government would generate at least some revenue from under-utilized facilities, and part-time vendors would obtain low-cost floor space. Given that the February 28 Massacre and the Arab Spring were both sparked by heavy-handed police responses to poor people just trying to earn a buck, I wouldn't call this charity. It's instead an investment in maintaining social peace.
(Although on second thought, there would be ONE loser: the local politician who squandered taxpayer money in constructing a building that was never needed in the first place. Oh my god, what was I thinking! My proposal is utterly unfeasible! Politicians can't be made to lose face now, can they?)
... a personal e-mail of former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton recently leaked by WikiLeaks suggested an adviser, Jake Sullivan, once shared with her an article titled “To save our economy, ditch Taiwan” by Paul Kane, a former international security research fellow at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. [Emphasis added]
In the article, Kane suggested that US President Barack Obama could bolster US economic security by ending its military assistance and arms sales to Taiwan, in exchange for a write-off of US$1.14 trillion in US debt held by China.
“I saw [Paul Kane's proposal to sell out Taiwan] and thought it was so clever. Let’s discuss,” said Clinton...[Emphasis added]
The veracity of this is open to question, given Wikileaks' status as a likely Russian front group. It would therefore be helpful if America's supine press asked Secretary Clinton to confirm or deny whether it would have been the policy of her government to stab fellow democracies in the back.
Helpful, yes. But it's pretty difficult to picture this planeload of throne-sniffers ever asking the Haggard Queen any tough questions:
Postscript: Paul Kane's from the JFK School of Government? For real?
"Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty...Offer not applicable if one trillion dollar bribes are on the table." —John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Inaugural Address, probably
UPDATE:The original Wikileaks document. Not much different from the Taipei Times' account, though it does include Paul Kane's article in its entirety.
"A German regional court in the city of Wuppertal affirmed a lower court decision last Friday stating that a violent attempt to burn the city's synagogue by three men in 2014 was a justified expression of criticism of Israel’s policies."
"The court sentenced the three [Muslim men responsible for the arson] ... to suspended sentences."
An evil fate awaits Jews in Eurabia, given the anti-Semitism of European natives and the unbridled Judenhass of the continent's new Muslim rapefugees.
Israel awaits. Best get out, while the gettin's good.
>I want to be able to criticize Israel without being called anti-Semitic! >OK, go ahead. >Awesome. *burns synagogue*https://t.co/EVa0zxbOGN
So if I understand FBI Director James Comey correctly, Hillary Clinton was grossly negligent with classified information...but shouldn't be prosecuted for the felony of gross negligence because she wasn't intentionally negligent...
The FBI says Hillary's extremely careless with classified info, so let's give her the nuke codes!
"...the practice of killing dogs by beating, burning and other painful methods [is performed] in the belief that dying by torture makes their meat taste better."
"Why do people pretend that a political system that rolls tanks and artillery out against civilians without weapons represents a government worthy of our admiration or (is such a word possible?) affection?"
If he truly would like an answer, he could do worse than to ask his fellow China Post colleague, "Traitor Joe" Hung.
"After the conquest [of Taiwan], China would rule Taiwan as a province as Japan did from 1895 to 1945. The Japanese colonizers did improve the life of the colonized a great deal. The Chinese conquerors would outperform the Japanese."
"Perhaps, it may be much better to be conquered for Taiwan's next generation and those after them. All's well that ends well."
Accusations that the Taiwanese member of the South Korean pop group TWICE, Chou Tzu-yu (周子瑜), was a “pro-Taiwanese independence” activist has caused China’s Huawei Technologies Co (華為) to demand LG Uplus drop Chou from endorsing its Y6 chain of cellphones.
Hey, remember that "1992 Consensus" -- the one which allows that there's only one China, but China & Taiwan are both free to define that One China however they wish?
You didn't really believe that fairy-tale bullshit now, did you?
If you were stupid enough to believe it, just picture poor little 16-year-old Chou Tzu-yu, who in her innocence, thought it was OK to define One China as Taiwan, and wave her country's flag.
Let us return to learn a little more about Huang An, shall we?
Huang, despite being Taiwanese by birth, began developing his career in China in the late 1990s. Huang has made a name for himself in recent years by informing the Chinese government and netizens about what he regards as pro-Taiwanese independence individuals and their activities.[emphasis added]
Bravo, Huang An. It's not everyone who can boast of possessing Taiwan's most punchable face:
(Backpfeifengesicht Huang An, hard at work naming names to Communist China's secret police. Ka-ching!)
Once Huang's treachery became known, he immediately ran under the skirts of "former" Taiwanese mob boss Chang An-le.
Because, you know: punchable face.
Meanwhile, Huang has returned to Taiwan ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday and is said to be fearing for his safety [from angry Taiwanese]. Huang has reportedly written to former Bamboo Union (竹聯幫) gang leader Chang An-le (張安樂), known as “the White Wolf,” asking for protection.
There is a story - probably apocryphal - which says that some years after sentencing Socrates to death, the citizens of Athens repented of their decision. Unable to restore life to the old man after the fact, they did the next best thing: they shunned one of his prosecutors.
This was more severe than it sounds, for it went beyond mere social disapprobation. As part of this informal punishment, they refused to have anything to do with him -- not even buying or selling or engaging in the simplest of commerce.
Under these conditions, the prosecutor of Socrates was unable to procure so much as a crust of bread to sate his hunger, and is said to have starved to death within a week.
Just throwin' that out there...
UPDATE: A stunned and pallid Chou Tzu-yu bows and apologizes, lifelessly reading a scripted self-criticism straight out of the Mao Tse-tung era.
It's like watching an ISIS captive ritually denouncing his home country at gunpoint. About the only thing missing is her eyelids blinking out in Morse code:
T-H-E-Y H-A-V-E M-Y F-A-M-I-L-Y
Of course, I don't know Morse code, so maybe I missed it.
UPDATE #2: Huang An represents Chinese nationalism at its finest.
Call me crazy, but I don't think the Communist Party's brutal decision to demand this the day before Taiwan's presidential election is going to win the CCP's preferred candidate Eric Chu (KMT) any votes.
This is the "friendly" cross-Strait relations the KMT has been bragging about?
UPDATE #3: Like many other snakes, Huang An has a detachable lower jaw. In this photo, the ophidian Huang illustrates the girth of the Chinese Communist phalluses he routinely fellates.