Doesn’t help of course that I prefer my food ultra spicy (as in ghost pepper salsa is my go to salsa choice), guess what Tex-Mex and Cajun cuisine specialize in.

That is where the South Caucasus cuisine comes in. It is much more spicy than your typical northern Russian stuff. The Dagestanis and Chechens have a lot of central Asian and Persian influences in their cooking. If you go down as far as Georgia, they use аджика (adjika), a hot and spicy paste made from chillies, which I find quite tasty.

And then there is Russian горчица (gorchitsa) – mustard, basically, which has a tremendous kick when made right. It is more powerful than English mustard.

Now that I think of it – I should have brought back a few tubes of that stuff…

Thanks entirely to the morons in Washington (may they burn in hell) it now “appears” (i.e I hope it is fabricated and these numbers aren’t accurate) the pro-secessionist candidate is currently in the lead in Taiwan.

There is perhaps some good news on that front. The regional elections earlier this year saw the DPP get absolutely crushed, and the much more moderate, pro-unification Kuomintang seems to be coming back on top. There is also some news of a potential spoiler in the form of this new third-party candidate.

But, yes, it is a tense situation. The Taiwanese are watching Banderastan being fed feet-first into a woodchipper, and some of them are actually dumb enough to say, “I want a piece of that”…

With the inexperience and ineptitude of the Chinese and American militaries Taiwan may very well lead to someone pushing the big, red button none of us want to consider.

The saving grace there comes from the fact that the Chinks have hypersonic carrier-killers, with sufficient range to knock out incoming US Navy ships. All they need to do is to sink a carrier or two – which would result in thousands of American deaths – or, far better, simply force a carrier group to turn tail and run. At that point, American naval dominance of the Pacific is OVER, forever.

More broadly, the Chinese do not have a high-quality or well-balanced navy. The Russians do – their Northern and Pacific Fleets are more than capable of knocking out American carriers with their ship- and sub-based hypersonic Tsirkon missiles. That is why I think the future will look like a Russo-Chinese Eurasian superpower, with Russia providing the resources and military needed to protect the trade routes, and the Chinese providing the manufacturing capacity and capital.

Note on China: intriguing analysis, hadn’t considered it from that angle. Wish I could go see it in the flesh for myself, unfortunately I don’t see that as wise idea at the moment. Thanks entirely to the morons in Washington (may they burn in hell) it now “appears” (i.e I hope it is fabricated and these numbers aren’t accurate) the pro-secessionist candidate is currently in the lead in Taiwan.

If Washington ultimately does succeed in turning Taiwan into 404 2.0 this planet is fucked, it will be two nuclear powers going at it with no certainty of victory for either side. With the inexperience and ineptitude of the Chinese and American militaries Taiwan may very well lead to someone pushing the big, red button none of us want to consider. Even the (realistic) best case scenarios point to the loser of the conflict forcing the winner to suffer the consequences of a pyrrhic victory.