Absurdity, Allegory and China

When I first came to China in the late 90s, many of the people who are now stuck in traffic in their cars were still bicycling everywhere they went. Their dreams of ‘more things’ were there – of cars, of houses, of the latest in the latest, whatever that latest was – but money was [...]

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Google just can’t seem to keep themselves out of the news. With the developing tales of Chinese hacking – possibly traced to Jiaotong Univertsity in Shangahi and a particular class taught by a Ukranian prof at Lanxiang Vocational School in Shandong province – and their warning to China that they would be, sometime in the [...]

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Some links I’ve visited over the past week that might be of interest to readers of this blog, And if not to you, to me. Cultivating Failure: Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic. A pointed criticism of California’s gardening-in-school program, with valuable lessons in what is (or rather, should be) fundamentally important in education. If this [...]

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Here’s a question from the “things may not always be what they seem” file. Is Google’s rushed and premature rollout of its latest product, Buzz, related to its ongoing cyber tussle with China? With the world’s two most popular social networking products, Facebook and Twitter, blocked in the People’s Republic (PRC), and Google believed to [...]

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I’ve ranted in here for the past two days concerning Google’s saddling of all Gmail account holders with Buzz, and what that might mean for info/data miners in countries where public security bureaus use geek goons to harvest information and lists. I think that if you have people in your Gmail contacts list who might [...]

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I am a hard sell when it comes to supporting conspiracy theories. That said, I am also not one to buy into private corporations’ self-promoting jingles, even if they have a long trail of mission statements, supportive philosophical documents, digitally spinning prayer wheels and mumbled mantras. Google doesn’t get a pass because they preach a [...]

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In Nicholas Ray’s classic 1955 film Rebel Without A Cause there’s a short exchange between Jim Stark (James Dean), the rebellious protagonist, and leather-jacketed Buzz Gunderson (Corey Allen), the popular crowd favorite and daring, darling meathead who has challenged Jim to a game of chicken: a drive at full speed in stolen cars toward the [...]

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Below are links to some of the sites I’ve visited (and revisited) this past week which may be of interest to others. Never short a country with $2 trillion in reserves?: Michael Pettis, China Financial Markets. “We must be careful how we read history. The fact that the US and Japan had terrible decades following [...]

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China vs. the University of Calgary (UC), the latest chapter in the Chinese passion play, is a Chinese foreign policy trial balloon let loose (prematurely?) on the western Canadian plains. This began last week when it was reported that China had removed UC from its list of accredited universities a move school officials are concerned [...]

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Sometimes you just need to post a poem. This one is from Philip Whalen’s Decompressions, Selected Poems, 1969 Hymnus Ad Patrem Sinensis I praise those ancient Chinamen Who left me a few words, Usually a pointless joke or a silly question A line of poetry drunkenly scrawled on the margin of a quick splashed picture—bug, [...]

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