Absurdity, Allegory and China

“This is not a book that should be set aside lightly. It should be hurled with great force.”
– Dorothy Parker
(What follows is not a book review, but rather a response to a promotional book tour interview by the co-authors of China’s Megatrends: The 8 Pillars of a New Society (Harper Collins), John and Doris Naisbitt.)
Last [...]

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I have been quiet in here of late for a few reasons (excuses?), but my focus has temporarily shifted to creating more of a web presence beyond the blog by building a website to display photos and other content that is not necessarily blog-able. Doing this with a web connection that has done nothing but [...]

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There are moments in our lives that peg us to a position when an event of great weight unfolds. The afternoon of May 12, 2008 is one I will not soon forget. I felt ‘something’ that did not feel right, a noise of some sort as I lay in the bed reading. (I keep odd [...]

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CCTV’s Rui Chenggang, the host of a popular nightly financial news program hates the word “propaganda,” and accurately compares CCTV to Fox News when the GOP held all the cards. According to a feature in the NYT, Capitalism Finds Voice in China,
Because his positions often parrot Beijing’s critiques of foreign journalists, Mr. Rui is asked [...]

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“A fishing pole is a stick with a hook at one end and a fool on the other.”
–Samuel Johnson
There’s an old joke I heard nearly three decades ago concerning a Fish and Game warden named Joe, whose jurisdiction included a large, well-stocked lake. (I was living  in Wyoming at the time, and the ‘lake of [...]

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This from Reuters, via Yahoo: China targets big websites in Internet crackdown.
China has launched a crackdown against major websites that officials accused of threatening morals by spreading pornography and vulgarity, including the dominant search engines Google and Baidu.
China’s Ministry of Public Security and six other government agencies announced the campaign at a meeting on Monday, [...]

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In a recent article in the WSJ, the Bush administration’s chief muffin man and ‘architect’ of the bloody madness, Karl Rove, pitched a possible explanation as to why the Bush White House has been so terribly ineffective. In what can only be described as an act of political taxidermy and stick-in-your-eye propaganda that we’ve come [...]

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I know that picking on party rags is fish-in-a-barrel sport, but it’s Christmas and I’m full of good cheer. A wander over to the (English) People’s Daily Online today found this one floating on the surface: A new year approaching amid intense turmoil,  which outlines the world financial crisis in terms that are pretty odd. [...]

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From yesterday’s Xinhua, China earmarks 73 mln USD for rural environment protection we read that the Ministry of Environmental Protection is throwing what seems to be a lot of money into the polluted countryside to deal with environmental issues.
The fund would help save 600 villages out of severe environment problems and award 100 others which [...]

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In a 2005 essay by OMA (Office of Metropolitan Architechture) partner Ole Scheeren Made in China, which appeared as the introduction to Architecture and Urbanism July 2005 Special Issue entitled CCTV by OMA, Mr. Scheeren stated:
As the national television station, CCTV has a direct relationship to the State – is information filter and propaganda machine [...]

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