Challenging your ideas about the Red Dragon

As the media is decrying a new Red Scare of clean energy, economics, the job market, etc., beware the blind men examining the elephant. Is China really so scary? I don’t think it is.

Celebrate family. Celebrate life.

“Celebrate family.  Celebrate life.” This was the title of the Focus on the Family commercial with Tim Tebow and his mom that aired tonight during the first quarter of the Super Bowl.  I saw it and after all the hullabaloo and ruckus in the days leading up to it, I was left thinking, “That’s it?  [...]

Photo submission to BBC news “In Pictures”

BBC News has a page called In Pictures and they publish reader’s submissions at the bottom of the page under the appropriately-named Your Pictures.  Each week they publish a gallery of submissions based around a different theme.  This week’s theme is “Comfort”: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/8480321.stm During the week of February 16 the theme is “water” and I [...]

Beijing is cold.

It’s cold in a I’m-sleeping-in-my-long-underwear, I-don’t-want-to-wash-my-face-or-bathe, I-haven’t-done-the-dishes-in-three-days, I-understand-why-Medieval-people-only-showered-once-a-year, I’m-only-warm-when-I’m-asleep-under-my-six-blankets kind of way.  It’s cold outside: it got up to about 18 degrees today and it felt like Indian summer after earlier this week.  It’s cold inside: we don’t have running hot water and the radiators heat the bedrooms to about 60 degrees, but the living [...]

E-waste: from China to North Korea

I wrote a post on this blog last December which was titled “Desperate people will do desperate things: should people have to choose between poverty and poison?“  I followed it up with “Pictures from Guiyu, the most toxic place on earth.”  So when Shanghai Scrap recently wrote a post about e-waste, it caught my eye.  [...]

Dave Barry’s year in review: 2009

Dave Barry begins his year in review by saying that 2009 was a year of Change, especially in Washington, where the tired old hacks of yesteryear finally yielded the reins of power to a group of fresh, young, idealistic, new-idea outsiders such as Nancy Pelosi. As a result Washington, rejecting “business as usual,” finally stopped [...]

Of nine nations, non-censorship, free books & an Obama of hair

I’ve come across a few interesting things online in the past week or so and I thought I’d share them with you. 1 First up is an article by Patrick Chovanec in The Atlantic breaking down the 1.3 billion people in China into “a mosaic of several distinct regions, each with its own resources, dynamics, [...]