Hard Drive Fried + The Coming Asia Pivot

A quick post here to say that this page will be updated only sporadically for the next week, maybe every other day.

My hard drive died early Sunday morning. I spent the small hours trying to restore operations and was successful in getting the PC, now four-years old, to boot. I was then a performed a disk backup before another crash. One more successful boot allowed me to transfer to Amazon Cloud Player the music I had added to my iTunes library in the last couple of weeks. Then the final crash came.

I considered hopping on the bus and going up to the Northgate shopping center and picking up a brand new box. But I was beat from being up since 1:30 AM and doing three loads of laundry which required numerous trips up and down three flights of a stairs with a left foot that I am diagnosing as suffering from tendonitis. So I decided to enjoy a quiet day reading on my mattress on the floor. The time was 11:00 AM.

I did make one call to the big local PC repair/re-manufacture store. But they were closed. I had a couple of mailers from Dell that have been sitting on my kitchen table for over a month. Knowing for a long time (since last fall) that there was something wrong with my hard drive, I have been intending to get either a Dell laptop, a Google Chromebook, or a tablet of some sort to have around as a backup. My problem is that I don't like shopping. So I put it off.

Now, at work this morning, I went ahead and made a quick decision to purchase a relatively inexpensive Dell Inspiron 15.6" laptop. I should have it by Thursday.

Having the cyber umbilical severed yesterday brought home, clearly and conclusively, how much I am tethered to the Internet. Matrix-like, I am usually plugged in, pouring out what little qi I have -- any that doesn't get slurped up by the rat race -- by tapping out my pitiful impressions. It is a flat, obsessive world with very little air. I wish I could say that I was unusual, a lone madman unrepresentative of the mass of humanity in our current body politic. But I am afraid my kind is all too common.

I am looking forward to being offline more.

There was a good story this morning by Floyd Whaley, "A Leviathan Turns Philippine Fishermen Into Desperate Darters," about China asserting its dominance over Scarborough Shaol in the South China Sea. Both China and the Philippines claim the reef, which happens to be a rich fishing ground. The Filipino town of Masinloc has been hard hit since the Chinese Coast Guard showed up two years ago and started blocking  access.

The full impact of the story hit me at the end:

While the town hopes to regain access to the shoal, Mayor Edora has taken other steps to try to help the fishermen. She has worked with the national government to provide them with artificial reefs that can be anchored to the ocean floor to attract fish, but she said the so-called aggregators had attracted far fewer fish than the natural reef. 

“That area is ours,” said Mr. Escape, the fisheries officer. “But the Chinese are strong, so they can do what they like. We are weak, so there is nothing we can do.” 

Tolomeo Forones, Mario’s brother and a part-time fisherman himself, said the solution was clear: Bring back American bases. He noted that when the United States military maintained bases in the Philippines, the Chinese Coast Guard was never seen near the country. 

In the short term, that looks unlikely. The United States and the Philippines recently forged a deal that would establish military facilities — mostly on the coastlines facing China — that are expected to host large American warships and possibly squadrons of United States fighter jets. But it could take several years to get those facilities up and running. 

Tolomeo Forones said he felt that the best chance for his weaker nation to stand up to China had been squandered years ago, when the Philippines in the 1990s ejected the Americans from their former naval base at Subic Bay, just 70 miles south of Masinloc. 

“If Subic was still a U.S. Navy base, those Chinese would not be there,” Mr. Forones said. “Now that the Americans have moved out, the Chinese have claimed our islands. They aren’t afraid of our navy. They only laugh at us.”

As the U.S. pivots to Africa, here is evidence of its Asia pivot. With a frontpage story of the DOJ charging Chinese PLA personnel with espionage (there is also the Eurasia pivot underway in Ukraine), know that, if you are an American, you are going to be expected to pay for a perpetual, fully global military mobilization. The price is going to be the further erosion of what remains of the social safety net along with what little hope there is in the United States of democratic renewal.