Cubs vs Indians in World Series! Apocalypse Nigh Links

Mugumuyu in the fog

KMT news -- the asset issue and the KMT's declining position is making it swing hard to right. Unhappy with its current spokesman's "soft" position on the asset issue, today the KMT appointed rabid mainlander ideologue Alex Tsai to the position. Tsai, readers may recall, was the campaign manager for Sean Lien's inedible Taipei mayoral run. This is not the kind of appointment that will increase Taiwanese participation in the KMT, since it is just another signal that the Party remains a mainlander bubble world.

Enjoy a few links...

• Interview with Freddy Lim, fighting for Taiwanese independence
• Great photo blog: Focused on Taiwan
• KMT NEWS: The hilarious infighting in the KMT and poverty is leading the Party to solicit donations from members... whose salaries have gone unpaid. The Party promises not to punish any member who doesn't donate. Note that although the Party has served the nation's wealthy since its inception, none of the big whales appear to be willing to be tapped for funds to sustain the Party. You also have to love the special memorabilia straight out of the early years as gifts for donors, which will have a huge appeal to today's voters, I'm sure. The battle over the Party's ideological position also continues apace, with Hung increasingly isolated. Meanwhile the grand justices declined to review the asset law, because it requires 38 legislators to bring the legislation before the tribunal, and the KMT cannot summon up so many. The legislative loss just keeps ramifying... Comically, Wang Jyn-ping, who spent his entire political career supporting the Party that fought to suppress democracy in Taiwan as it was headed by dictators, complains about presidential power.
• Good piece on Mona Rao and the Wushe Uprising
• Republican platform has great Taiwan statement
• Gordon Chang says Say Hello to Taiwan in the National Interest.
• The importance of President Tsai's apology to the aborigines as a pro-independence move was shown in news from China this week. The Taiwan aborigines had an exhibition in Hangzhou, but were not permitted to call themselves "indigenous" because that would mean they had a prior claim to the island. The Chinese wanted them to be called "minorities."
• Nikkei: Taiwan to build subs 
• Taiwanese sailor held since 2012 finally freed by Somali pirates
• Liberalizing energy markets in Taiwan
• Latest cycling Taiwan vid from the Tourism Bureau here. Glad they shot the snow over Wuling, but they still don't know the good stuff here.
• Tainan police arrest 8 missing Indonesian caregivers. These people are so abused here. Too often the solution for some social problem in Taiwan is to find some exploitable group of women who can be disciplined via official sanction, custom, and control to perform the task while being massively overworked and underpaid, from prostitutes to handle male sexual desires to nurses in the National Health Insurance System to female factory workers to living room taskwork for the old factory production system to Indonesian maids for elderly in need of nurses. And this is what happens...

Trends for student enrollment at Taiwan's universities. Now we need to do two things: (1) close all the crapshit private universities that exist only to farm subsidies off the government and (2) revert many of the universities of technology back to their vocational roots. They were important sources of entrepreneurs in the heyday of the miracle....
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