Tag: China

In the microcosm that is my world people have come to my aide.  Why, because they love me.  In two days massive progress has been made on cleaning up my second floor apartment.  My grandson delighted at the view from the second floor porch window.

When I am/was, not busy at work building stuff to support world known scientists I can also sweat copper pipes, run 14/3 romex, service my oil burner nozzle and skim coat over holes in plaster walls.  I have come to view the cheapening of building trade practices and materials and codes as another sub program in the Illuminati Plan to Destroy America.  No better example than Boston’s own Big Dig.

They talked about extending my “retirement” to give me time to train my replacement.  That might be appealing at first glance as it would/might put the lump sum severance package into the new IRS tax year.  Then I thought about it.  

I would be giving energy to the dark side of the force.

http://persistentillusion.file…

We sat, him and I and marveled from an elevated perch.  Grampy’s truck, Daddy’s truck, Grampy pool and Grampy’s camper could all be see from a different perspective.  Childhood innocence can be so wonderful until it’s used against the child.  I am getting to old to be doing the work of twenty something tradesmen but honest labor has made me feel really good.

http://www.scl.cc/home.php

Does it, can we generate our own positive space in the world?

My flowers

http://www.flickr.com/photos/t…

were alive with bees.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02…

Don’t give “it” energy.  By “it” I mean any one of the manufactured “issues” currently being used to end America.  

The global war on “terror”.

The global tax on energy use

The building of the surveillance structures that will be used against my grandson.

Uggghhh. It is a sad day when people on the Left turn against Keith Olbermann for any reason.

KO is one of the sole voices pissing into the hurricane/tsunami of disinformation and neo-con propaganda from the Murdoch Empire and all Minions Fox and elsewhere… and people ask him to stop his Editorials.

Let Kieth be Kieth.

These are the same People who attacked Reverend Wright for speaking Truths in this country.

If Obama stayed Obama, a man who admired Rev. Wright, he would not be losing ground via handlers and media-whores.

Why is it that people are uncomfortable with Truths? Oh they claim to want Truth, as long as it doesn’t interfere with their TV pleasure viewing the Opening Ceremonies of the Olympic games, the grandiose hoopla and the shiny young athletes.

America likes its Public Service Announcements snuggled in minute sound bytes during the breaks of their obsessive American Idol episodes… it makes their guilty pleasure of being brainless hedonists ease up a little to be able to yell “Right On” at a commercial that says “Green Power”.. all while turning up their Air Conditioning and keeping the volume on their TV’s cranked up to Prime Numbers.

But WATCH a whole documentary or turn off the TV and read a book about it?  Too depressing, man. They don’t want a bowl of whole-grain truths, when they can sprinkle a little fiber on their processed Sugar Puffs.

More about real heroes below.

cross posted from The Dream Antilles



The Chinese Government is very afraid of these two women.

Seventy-nine-year-old Wu Dianyuan, on the right, and her neighbor Wang Xiuying, 77, followed the law.  They applied for a protest permit.  They wanted to protest inadequate compensation for the taking of their homes in preparation of the Olympics.  They asked for the permit five times.  They didn’t get it.  They ended up instead being sentenced to a year of “re-education through labor.”

According to NY Times:

Two elderly Chinese women have been sentenced to a year of “re-education through labor” after they repeatedly sought a permit to demonstrate in one of the official Olympic protest areas, according to family members and human rights advocates.

The women, Wu Dianyuan, 79, and Wang Xiuying, 77, had made five visits to the police this month in an effort to get permission to protest what they contended was inadequate compensation for the demolition of their homes in Beijing.

During their final visit on Monday, public security officials informed them that they had been given administrative sentences for “disturbing the public order,” according to Li Xuehui, Ms. Wu’s son.

Mr. Li said his mother and Ms. Wang, who used to be neighbors before their homes were demolished to make way for a redevelopment project, were allowed to return home but were told they could be sent to a detention center at any moment. “Can you imagine two old ladies in their 70s being re-educated through labor?” he asked. He said Ms. Wang was nearly blind.

Join me in Beijing.

Chinese man kills U.S. tourist in Beijing attack

Attacker targeted two Americans before committing suicide

BEIJING – A Chinese man attacked two American tourists on the opening day of the Olympic Games, killing one of them before committing suicide, officials said Saturday.

The Beijing Municipal Government said the attack happened in downtown Beijing at noon on Saturday. Officials issued a statement saying the 47-year-old attacker, Tang Yongming, also injured an American woman and her Chinese tourist guide.

The report from Students for a Free Tibet.

Video from The Times of London.

Ex-CIA high official Victor Marchetti wrote:

“A ‘limited hangout’ is spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting – sometimes even volunteering – some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further.”

Scott Shane’s New York Times article, China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo (7/2/08), details the use of Albert Biderman’s “Chart of Coercion” by members of the the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape program, or SERE, program to teach torture techniques to interrogators. The article is a fine example of how to conduct a limited hangout, or selected revelation, of intelligence-related material. Its headline and story is disingenuous or betrays ignorance. The aim of the article is to demonstrate the nefariousness or deviance of those who taught SERE techniques to U.S. interrogators, and to hide the truth about the derivation of those techniques, and to the history of the their use by U.S. government agencies.

cross-posted from The Dream Antilles

Lost in the July 3 rush to start July 4th partying is the Commander Athlete in Chief’s announcement that he will support the athletes by attending the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics.  This direct, single digit salute to people who care about human rights in China and who are concerned about the continuing genocide in Darfur, was delivered to avoid outcry.  Put another way, it reeks of cowardice.

The New York Times reports:

The White House said Thursday that President Bush would attend the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics next month, a decision fraught with international political symbolism that quickly drew criticism from advocates for human rights.

The advocates have been pressing world leaders to boycott the Olympics or at least skip the opening ceremonies to protest China’s violent crackdown after riots in Tibet and its support for the government of Sudan, whose Darfur region remains enmeshed in violence.

The leaders of Britain and Germany have said they will skip the opening ceremonies. For some time, the White House has said that Mr. Bush will attend the Games, but has refused to provide further details.

That changed late on Thursday afternoon. With most of official Washington already gone for the Fourth of July holiday, the White House press secretary, Dana Perino, issued a simple statement outlining Mr. Bush’s August travel schedule, including the notation that he would go to the opening ceremonies.

The president’s press secretary mouthpiece, who gives frequent evidence of being both utterly tone deaf and unable to distinguish facts from opinions, explained in an interview:

“This is a decision by the president that he really wanted to go in support of our athletes,” Ms. Perino said in an interview. Asked if Mr. Bush was making a political statement, she said, “He does not look at it that way, but we recognize that others may.”

It has been 10 long days since the devastating 8.0 Sichuan earthquake and although there have been several recent rescues of people that have been trapped for 9 days, the mission has moved into the recovery stage.

According to China Daily Online, there are 5 million homeless in the region and 32,666 still missing. There are 25,681 still in hospital.

Many children have been orphaned but all have been adopted.

cross posted at The Ohm Project: an exercise in resistance

High resolution cameras covering nearly every inch of public space.  National IDs crammed with biometric data.  Facial recognition software that can’t be defeated even by plastic surgery.  And a massive database to connect the cameras, the IDs, all financial and medical data.

It’s not merely resident in the mind’s eye of a screenwriter of the next dystopian thriller.  According to Naomi Klein in the latest issue of Rolling Stone , China has already implemented much of the above and is only a year or two away from completing this Information Age 1984 with the eager help of U. S. corporations and an American government that looks the other way as anti-export laws are violated.

Klein says that the latest unrest in Tibet was a test for the ever-expanding system, called the "Golden Shield."  And the oppressive infrastructure earned at least an A-.  Dissident cell phones were jammed.  Information favorable to the protestors was blocked on the Internet.  Photos of the participants, especially the leaders, were rapidly disseminated on "Most Wanted" posters on the Internet and the protests were "spun" through Chinese media to make the Tibetans look like violent thugs.

No one event triggered this devolution, but it undeniably was pushed along many times by the moral relativism of the last 50 years, when most of society’s widely accepted norms were undermined by the quicksand of nonjudgmentalism; when the concepts of right and wrong, good and bad, were abolished in favor of differences that were to be respected if not celebrated, and codified when necessary to surmount widespread public opposition.

Paradoxically, people and institutions whose beliefs do not permit them to tolerate the most abhorrent differences were judged to be evil. Through rigid enforcement of increasingly fascist speech and thought codes, relativists turned America into a nation of lip-biters who with their silence condoned as normal behaviors and beliefs that are irrefutably unnatural and inherently immoral.

snip

No, the [recent California Supreme Court] ruling merely answered homosexuals’ purely emotional plea for cultural acceptance by giving civil unions their proper label – “marriage” – the will of Californians, as democratically expressed twice, and the dark societal consequences be damned.

–Editorial in the May 17, 2008 Waterbury Republican.

link: http://www.rep-am.com/articles…

Anyone who regularly reads my blogs probably thought to log in and find the latest news from Myanmar, or of the earthquake in China.

But today I want to write about something that underpins almost every headline here and abroad: human suffering. The answer on how to understand human suffering has been written about and expounded upon by far more eloquent and profound people than me. Everyone from Martin Luther King, to Gandhi, to the Dalai Lama agrees that compassion is the ultimate answer.

But what is the question?

On Monday, Fu Guanyu dropped off her young son, Wang Zhilu, at his grandparents’ house so she could go to work. Minutes later, the earthquake hit.

She rushed back home and saw their apartment building in ruins. She says soldiers came right away to help, but they had no equipment.

Two days later, the heavy machinery is on the way. As an excavator clears a path, Fu and her husband Wei Wang search the debris, calling for their son.

After a long while, the workers stop. They have found bodies.

link: http://www.npr.org/templates/s…

The NPR story concludes, tragically, with the rescue worker informing the parents that three bodies were found: the grandfather, holding his two year old grandson in his arms with his wife clutching his back.

h/t Cute Overload

Some good news out of China …

^kjdrill

Giant Pandas survive earthquake

Authorities confirmed Tuesday that captive animals in two of China’s major panda reserves were alive, according to Xinhua, China’s official news agency.

The Wolong Giant Panda Reserve Center in southwest Sichuan province is home to about 86 giant pandas, who were reported safe Tuesday.

Staff and critters at neighboring Chengdu Panda Breeding and Research Center were also reported safe, according to a spokesperson for the Atlanta Zoo, which has two pandas on loan from the wildlife reserve.

^kjdrill

~~~Do not Rec the Pony Panda Party.  This is Open Thread.~~~