Taiwan

Is China about to make a move on Taiwan and plunge the world into World War III?  The signs are becoming increasingly alarming that they are.  The Afghanistan debacle may convince them that they have little to fear from the US, a grave miscalculation.  I recall that right before the Great War, the attention of the British cabinet was focused on Ireland.  Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty at the time, was preoccupied, as was the rest of the British cabinet, with the issue of Irish Home Rule, which threatened to lead to violent clashes in Ireland and a possible revolt by segments of the British Army in Ireland against Home Rule.  This was a major crisis and it was not until July 25, 1914 that Churchill grasped what was coming on the Continent.  After a long discussion on the issue of Home Rule in Ireland. the Foreign Secretary read to the cabinet the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia:

“We were all very tired, but gradually as the sentences and phrases followed one another, impressions of a wholly different character began to form in my mind.  As the reading proceeded it seemed absolutely impossible that any State in the world could accept it, or that any acceptance, however abject, would satisfy the aggressor.  The parishes of Fermanagh and Tyrone faded into the mists and squalls of Ireland, and a strange light began immediately, but by perceptible gradations, to fall and grow upon the map of Europe.”

In this Vale of Tears we may think we have an assured course and future, but the events of 1914 demonstrate just how illusory such beliefs tend to be, and how swiftly our world can be turned upside down.

On the idle hill of summer,

                Sleepy with the sound of streams,

Far I hear the steady drummer

                Drumming like a noise in dreams.

Far and near and low and louder,

                On the roads of earth go by,

Dear to friends and food for powder,

                Soldiers marching, all to die.

A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad XXXV-1896

Update:

Hmmm, Facebook and all of its apps going down simultaneously.  Probably nothing to worry about—

I wonder how you say This is a Test in Mandarin?