A Veiled Issue
I had my first encounter with a face-veil at age 16, greeting some African friends at Leeds-Bradford airport. A strapping Malawian man stood beside his burqa-clad wife and introduced themselves. Without thinking, I reached out and shook the lady’s hand, looking her in the eyes as I did. Then I recoiled slightly, and wondered if I’d made some colossal faux pas. However, nobody seemed to register this, and the group continued to chatter away quite happily. In fact, I engaged well with this mysterious woman in conversation, even though on parting I had yet to see any more than her eyes.
Powering the Future
The Obama Administration and Congress must work together to establish a five-year “Bucks for Belchers” Program modeled on “Cash for Clunkers.” Half of our electricity and a third of our carbon dioxide emissions come from coal-fired power plants. “These coal fire plants are going to continue to operate for decades, even as our industry turns to carbon-free electric power generating technologies,” wrote Entergy Corporation CEO Wayne Leonard. “Once built, coal plants are, in most cases, the cheapest source of power generation.” Because our coal-fired power plants will be belching out CO2 for decades, we should implement a “Bucks for Belchers” program that will curb emissions from these plants and jump start our green economy.
Year-end Check Up
Karl Marx famously postulated that capitalism was a step on the road to socialism, but looking at the world today, one gets the impression that the road goes both ways. In America, a country that ostensibly sees life as an unalienable right, the battle over universal health care rages on, framed correctly but maliciously as a step toward socialism. But China, the only major “socialist” power left in the world, has seen the crumbling of its health care system over the last thirty years, coinciding with its slip into “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”
Playground Politics
A 10-year-old Arkansas boy named Will Phillips has refused to stand up in class and recite the pledge of allegiance as he feels that gays are not allowed to get married and are not included as part of a nation that provides ”liberty and justice for all.” My first instinct: well done, young sir! I commend your brave and principled political stand against the forces of evil. More people should be sticking up for the oppressed, especially in the so-called “Land of the Free.”
Then I read on.
The Game of Life
Two Swiss human rights organizations have slammed a series of war-related strategy and FPS games for permitting violence against civilians, including torture and massacres. They added that those who “violate international humanitarian law end up as war criminals, not as winners.” I think Pol Pot and Stalin may beg to differ, but political semantics aside, the point of computer games is to simulate reality in an entertaining format.
Writer’s Block
There is a Chinese idiom about a man who buried a sum of silver underground and, worried that passersby would find it, placed a sign next to the plot that read “ci di wu yin san bai liang,” or “There is not 300 liang of silver here.” Needless to say, the next day his silver was gone.
I wonder if the censorship bureau understands this parable because one thing everyone in China should know by now is that if you ever come across a website that terminates your Internet connection, start digging.
Homogenizing News
I had a very frustrating conversation with a Chinese woman once. She was a bright, intelligent person, web-savvy (she was a computer programmer), and on her way to Redmond to work at Microsoft. We began talking about the news, and I may have said some disparaging things about the reliability of the Chinese media. What surprised me was the sudden vehemence of her reaction. She was quite offended by the insinuation that the Chinese media was not trustworthy, and countered by telling me that the Western media was just as biased and unreliable. “How do you know that what they say is true? So how can you say that what the Chinese media says is not true? Maybe it’s not always completely true, but the West is just as bad.”
The End of Free News
Recently, there’s been quite a spate of articles proclaiming the death of news as we know it. Newspapers are teetering on the edge of financial insolvency, shedding staff like bad dandruff, and bemoaning the popularity of aggregation sites like The Huffington Post (or, for example, our own site). A number of suggestions have been floated to solve the problem, mostly involving making people pay for the news access that they currently get for free on the web. But will this alone be enough?
Obama for President
The question confronting the American electorate is this: are we a decadent power? This query should not be misconstrued; I am not sure whether America’s finest days are behind her, nor is the goal of this essay to prove that they are. Rather the following must be understood as an attempt to understand the full implications of the current electoral cycle.
The past does not guarantee the future. Although the United States will still be the preeminent power in the world in 2012 regardless of who is elected as the next President, there is significant danger that the 2008 election could mark the beginning of the end of the American Century.
Hypocrisy and Face: An Open Letter
The China-Tibet Olympics commotion depresses.
We all knew CCTV was a joke. Now we are disappointed to learn that the BBC has a political agenda as well, joining what Mick Hume of The Times calls the newest Olympic sport—”China bashing.” No Pulitzers for this mess. CNN will win the gold medal in “China bashing” for mislabeling Nepalese crackdown pictures as Chinese (the single most effective Chinese propaganda tool in years—good job CNN!); the BBC will have to settle for the silver for their coverage of the London Olympic relay.
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