These pages contain my thoughts on life in East Asia — Taiwan above all — on the people I meet here and the things I experience. I was always a closet Orientalist. I want exotic countries to be exotic. After all, what else is the point of them? Since I’ve read Edward Said, however, I’ve learned to be ashamed of this approach to the world. So, I promise, I’ll hold off on the exotica. In particular, there won’t be many references to mangoes. Too many references to mangoes are a sure sign of travel writing gone wrong.
But there will also be observations on other places where I’ve lived — Sweden, the UK, US, Japan, Italy. And there will be other themes: my family, life in academia, politics, and reports on things that I’m writing and thinking.
A group of LSE students have started a Facebook group, “LSE: Not for Profit.” And I quote:
The LSE is one of Europe’s most expensive universities. But compared to the UK’s other top universities, the LSE provides a poor quality of teaching and little contact time with academics. Despite a £26m surplus, the School’s administration is trying to close the Nursery and refuses to cough up the £30,000 it would cost to keep the library open 24 hours a day. These issues exist because the LSE is being run like a business, not a student centred university. LSE students deserve better.
There was a time when I would have commented on this, but I’m very glad I don’t have to anymore. OK, I’ll say one thing: education should be free! Free like air, love and free beer.
In China red is the color of happiness and good luck, and naturally it is associated with the New Year. A popular New Year’s present is to give away red fruit and berries — red apples, grapes, strawberries. Lucky me, I got a number of boxes of bright red fruit this year. Funnily enough recent research has shown that fruit and berries with bright red colors often contain more antioxidants and thus first-class anti-cancer protection. If a billion people have been doing something for thousands of years, you can bet there is a good reason for it!
To add to our quota, we went strawberry picking today. That’s right. In the pleasantly green mountains in the Taian valley, an hour south of Hsinchu, the strawberry season has just started. We sent the kids out into the muddy fields and they returned with big smiles and a big box all filled up. They have great hiking in Taian too, hot springs, and hotels where guests wear bath robes for dinner. We’re definitely going back for more.
Celebrating Western New Year in China is a lot like celebrating Chinese New Year in the West. It’s interesting, foreign, and not quite for us, thank you very much. We’ll hold off on New Year’s until mid-January and then we’ll have a month off from school!
If you’re a pretty young thing you probably want to be seen in Taipei night-clubs tonight. Yes, and there’ll be fireworks on what used to be the tallest building in the world — Taipei 101 (see above). Once, in my misspent youth, I had a falling out with a Japanese air hostess in a club in Taipei on New Year’s Eve. I ended up on the street heartbroken and penniless. It was very sad and very beautiful.
Weather report: It suddenly got really cold. About 14 degrees. If that doesn’t sound very impressive you should remember that there is no heating inside the houses in Taiwan. If it’s 14 outside, it tends to be 14 inside as well. We are sitting watching TV with our hats and gloves on.
This past year wasn’t so great for me. I’m glad it’s over, and may the new year bring only what’s best to all of us. Mainly, this New Year’s Eve, we are counting our blessings. I’m amazed at our girls — they are getting smarter and more beautiful every day (and they weren’t ugly and stupid to begin with).
Actually, to tell you the truth, I have a bit of a tradition of falling asleep around 10.30 and not waking up until next year. Maybe I’ll stick to that this year too.
Season’s greetings to you all. May yours be jolly and white and all that.
As in previous years we are trying to fit a European holiday into a Taiwanese schedule. It’s not easy. Today and tomorrow are regular school days for us, with school bus in the morning and homework at night. We have added some Christmas traditions to that schedule, but the result is necessarily that we get too stressed out. How can you buy presents, cards, food, clean the house, cook and bake, when you leave your home at 7 in the morning and come back at 7 at night?
This year I’m very nostalgic for the Christmases of my childhood. The deep snow, the forest where we cut our tree, the blazing fire in the fireplace. All the presents and the food; the relatives, the cookies and the candy; watching TV with the whole family. My father always dressed up as Santa Claus, even when we were grown up and before we had children of our own. No, we didn’t go to church with a horse and cart, but we drove there before six in the morning through the snow drift. And my sisters always sang in the choir.
There is none of that here in Taiwan. All those memories that symbolize an entire world of comfort and joy. Yes, I miss that comfort and joy, this year more than most previous years. And I feel terrible that I can’t pass any of it on to my children.
If comfort and joy is yours this holiday, enjoy it! We’re too busy doing homework.
Brute force attacks cause a multitude of issues. Network problems that can go so far as to restart services, or make it appear that your VPS is offline. Or they can even spawn resource usage spikes, that in some cases are extreme. Or delay email. Or any other number of things.
I wonder who it is and what they want? Maybe it’s Santa trying to distribute all his electronic Christmas cards?
My friend Tsung-yi has just finished the translation of my blogging book into Chinese. My deepest thanks to him for all his hard work. Here is the first chapter. Enjoy!
Athens is a great service provided to British universities. With one simple logon, you get access to an incredible amount of data: all scholarly journals, all articles from The Times going back to 1788, British parliamentary reports, contemporary stock market data … You basically get everything you need.
The only problem is that you have to be affiliated to a British university. I used to be, but now I’m not. It took the Athens people some time to catch up with my change of status and it is only now that they’ve cut off my access. No more scholarly articles for me, no more access to all back issues of The Times. I feel like a member of an exclusive club who’s misplaced his membership card. And of course my research suffers, of course it does.
The crazy thing is that access to information should be restricted in this way. Why do you have to be affiliated to a British university in order to get this data? Long live the Internet Archive where access is free and universal.
This time every year we hear those tedious calls for a “return to the true meaning of Christmas.” What various kill-joys and wet blankets want us to do is to celebrate in a simpler style, with less eating, drinking and groping of colleagues in broom-cupboards at the office Xmas party. Inevitably they then start saying something about Jesus, the “message of Christmas,” and some similar notions, equally woolly and vague.
Now, let me tell you a few things about the true meaning of Christmas. A thousand years ago us Scandinavians celebrated Midvinterblot at this, the darkest, time of the year. The “mid-winter sacrifice” was a ritual to convince the sun to return to the dark north. By all accounts it was a great party. They ate a lot, drank even more, and no doubt some groping of co-tribalists was taking place. The Vikings, by all accounts, didn’t need broom cupboards.
Have you ever considered why Christmas trees have red decorations? Originally they were dead animals the Scandinavians hung up as sacrifices. Queen Victoria’s German husband Albert took the Christmas tree with him to England and the tradition caught on. Few Anglo-Saxons know the gory origins.
When Christians missionaries appeared in northern Europe a thousand years ago they decided to do something about this great pagan party. People were clearly enjoying themselves too much. Gradually they turned it into a Christian holiday. Sacrifices were banned, together with over-eating, over-drinking and over-groping. The ruse should have been easy to expose: their man, Jesus, was actually born in the spring.
Luckily old traditions die hard and Midvinterblot will long outlive Christianity. So next time someone tells you in a superior tone of voice to “return to the true meaning of Christmas,” answer with a drunken cheer and tell them in no uncertain terms to stop messing with your celebration.
Diane just heard back from her supervisor at Essex — she got her PhD! Yes, indeed. She is now Dr. Diane.
It’s been a long haul, over 10 years. In which time she not only wrote and rewrote thousands of pages but also plopped out four babies. The theory was that doing a PhD is great for mothers — they get to combine breast feeding with intellectual pursuits. But it probably wasn’t worth it in the end. Too many darn kids and too many darn footnotes. Today, however, we’re all very proud and very happy.
For a while we had an idea that Diane getting her PhD, me surviving my illness, and Obama becoming US president had about equal, and not very good, odds. Now all three have happened. Awesome!
I turn 48 today. Birthdays used to make me sad — “another year gone by,” “only x number of years to retirement,” etc … But this birthday is special. For a while there I wasn’t sure if I’d ever get to have it. But I am. And let me tell you, having a birthday is so much better than not having one
Lets hope there’ll be many, many more birthdays for all of us!
Thanks for all the birthday greetings, you wonderful people!
This is an academic article I just finished for a conference in Taipei next weekend on the theme of “the unthinkable” (the things these academics come up with, hey?)
The notion of “wonder” can mean two different things, it turns out. It’s either a kind of curiosity, as in, “I wonder what this is?” This kind of wonder is the beginning of a scientific investigation. But wonder can also refer to “the wondrous.” The wondrous amazes and blows you away. As in, “Wow man, that’s incredible!” If you’re blown away, you know you can never quite understand what it is you’re confronting.
When the Europeans went off to discover non-European lands they always reacted with wonder. But the fact that the two kinds of wonder were so different meant that they always got confused regarding what they were seeing. Well, that’s the argument anyway.
Yeah, of course it was. But not in the way most people would imagine. Top-Ivys too have their fair share of lousy, under-prepared teachers, and big-name professors who have no time for students are legio. As always, the main asset of a first-rate university is the student body. The professors may be middling, but the students are exceptional: very bright, hard-working, well-heeled, good-looking and left-leaning. It’s a very attractive combination.
And if you stay around long enough — I was there 8 years — you’ll eventually come across that quirky professor who does his/her own thinking for him/herself. The professor who will have a lasting impact on the way you view the world. Jim Scott — peasants in Southeast Asia — and Alex Wendt — theories of international relations — made a great difference to my intellectual trajectory.
Yale’s biggest problem is its location. New Haven was the fifth poorest city in the US when I got there and the third poorest when I left. Walking home to my grad student abode in the outskirts of the ghetto late at night was scary!!!
Much later — reading Michael Lewis, who was at Yale at the same time — I realized that 60% of Yale students applied for jobs at investment banks once they graduated. This option didn’t ever cross my mind. Clearly I misunderstood the whole point of a Yale degree.
It’s that time of year again — time to write letters of recommendation for students who want to do a PhD in the US. One piece of advice is to avoid the Harvard, Princeton and Yales of this world. It’s just really hard to get in. Like a 1 in 500 chance. Getting into top-flight Ivys is not about being smart, it’s all about being lucky.
I was lucky. I got a Fulbright Scholarship from Sweden which, at the time, wasn’t that hard, mainly since they didn’t give any actual grants. What Fulbright did do, however, was to help peddle my application to various American universities. Yale eventually said yes. But note, this was for a Master’s program in International Relations. As far as IR Master’s go, the one at Yale had a really low status. The kids looking for international careers, and money, would much rather go to Columbia, Johns Hopkins or any of about 25 other universities.
When I arrived at Yale it took me about two weeks to realize the problem (already the catering for our welcoming party — taco chips — indicated something was wrong). And that’s when I started taking classes, and brown-nosing with the professors, at the political science department. Later I applied for the PhD in political science and since they all knew me already, I was accepted. At the time this was considered the best polisci PhD program in the US
Point is, I would never have been accepted if I had applied cold from Sweden (for one thing, my SATs were pathetic — 75 % of Americans had better math skills than me! Americans for heaven’s sake!!!). But I was lucky and I got in through a backdoor. Yes there are backdoors and you might get lucky, but don’t bet on it. Make other plans.
It is now three years since I flew over from London to Taipei for a job interview. I left my LSE evening seminar a bit early and dashed for the airport, spent three days here, and then flew back and went straight to another LSE seminar.
It was very difficult, impossible, to make my mind up about whether a move to Taiwan would be a good or a bad idea. I hadn’t seen very much and above all, Diane and the kids weren’t with me, and how can you make such a decision alone? When I came back I tried my best to describe the place to them but of course I couldn’t convey anything much of what our life would be like.
In the end we decided to take a two year sabbatical from LSE. I was supposed to have returned to London in the spring of 2009, but instead, as soon as we got here, I resigned.
Was it a good decision? Yes, it was a good decision to leave London. The whole London experience was over and it had been over for a few years already (mainly since our house was too small and our children too many). Was it at good idea to come to Taiwan? Yes, probably. There are lots of great things about this country — the people above all — but there are also some problems — more than anything that we don’t have a place to live that feels like home. And sometimes I wonder whether we shouldn’t have had more time to think it all through together …
Diane sometimes talks, wistfully, about how gorgeous small European university towns can be. Hint, hint, nudge, nudge.
Somalia is such a mess. It’s like a right-wing utopia — a case study of what happens if “the government gets off our backs.” In Somalia, the government really did — and society imploded.
But the right-wing types might have a point: the lack of government interference seems to be good for entrepreneurship. Witness the war lords and the pirates! Those pirates are very entrepreneurial indeed! But Somalia has other amazing entrepreneurs: like the guys who set up internet-based radio stations although there is no electricity and no internet. Why not tune in to Radio Garowe in Puntland?
One of the things I tell students is that Western development depends very little on individuals and very much on institutions. The smarter the institutions are, the stupider ordinary people can afford to be. And, all in all, they are. By contrast, in societies without institutions — Somalia is paradigmatic — the opposite is the case. Since you can’t rely on predetermined outcomes, everything has to be done by individuals. And these individuals become very smart and very resourceful.
What’s interesting is what happens when smart and resourceful individuals migrate to societies with smart and resourceful institutions. Usually they do extremely well for themselves. The Indians who were thrown out of Uganda by Idi Amin is the most famous example. They totally outperform “normal” Brits on all conventional measures of success (education, income, good looks). Let me predict that Europe in twenty years’ time is completely dominated by extremely successful Somalis.
The Saisiyat are one of Taiwan’s 12 tribes of Aboriginal peoples, comprising some 5,000 members who live in the mountains east of Hsinchu. This past weekend they put on three days of singing, dancing, drinking and ghostly seances.
According to Saisiyat lore, back in the olden days there was a tribe of small, black, people living next to them. They had a reputation as being very lecherous and the Saisiyat grew increasingly impatient with them trying to conquer their women. Once when the entire neighboring tribe was crossing a river, the Saisiyats seized the opportunity and destroyed the bridge, and all but two of the small, black, people were killed. Feeling terrible about what they had done, the Sansiyats promised the two survivors that they would perform a ceremony of remembrance and expiation. The ceremony has been going for 400 years by now, every second year (and every ten years the festivities are particularly rowdy).
This weekend the ceremony was held by a little lake up in the high mountains east of Hsinchu. Unfortunately, by the time we arrived, most of the festivities had already concluded. We mainly saw a lot of people who looked distinctly worse for wear. We have to make up for it in two years’ time when they’ll have another go at apologizing.
Still, we enjoyed ourselves in the high mountains. We found another aboriginal tribe on another mountain top, and a very good hostel where we are planning to stay some day. We also bought persimons. (This was my first day out, I drank soup from a thermos that Diane had pre-prepared).
The database that powers this blog crashed early this morning. Since I never remember how to fix it, I had to spend some time googling for answers. Apologies. Lets hope what’s up stays up (as the girl said).
After a meeting with the executive committee of the Ringmar family, the decision has been taken to lift the embargo on trips to the United States of America. The decision comes in the wake of the election of Barack Obama as president. “Now that these terrible Bush years are over,” said Diane in a statement on Sunday, “the Ringmars are once again happy to travel to the US. Indeed, I’m very much looking forward to seeing my family again. It’s been too long.”
The Ringmar family is happy to note that their embargo finally has had an effect on the American electorate. “This proves that sanctions can be more effective than military action,” said Erik (Diane nodding vigorously).
The new arrangements will not, however, come into place until after the inauguration on January 20, 2009.
What more than anything gives me confidence regarding Obama’s presidency is the fact that he’s such a great Dylan fan. According to an interview he gave to Rolling Stone, Obama’s iPod contains 30 Dylan songs, including the entire Blood on the Tracks album. He mentions “Maggie’s Farm” as a particular favorite:
Well, I wake up in the morning,
Fold my hands and pray for rain.
I got a head full of ideas
That are drivin’ me insane.
What a great way to start the day in the White House!
This is an interesting twist: If you listened to Obama’s victory speech from Chicago on election night, you remember phrases like: “It’s been a long time coming, but tonight … change has come to America.” Great as Barack’s oratory is, these were lines pinched off Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come” from 1964 — a classic statement of the hopes as well as the desperation of the African American community.
How many years can a mountain exist
Before it’s washed to the sea?
Yes, ‘n’ how many years can some people exist
Before they’re allowed to be free?
Yes, ‘n’ how many times can a man turn his head,
Pretending he just doesn’t see?
Cooke just couldn’t believe that a white man had written those lines. Not to be outdone, however, he sat down and wrote “A Change is Gonna Come.” So there you have it. Who can we thank for Obama’s great campaign theme? Why Dylan of course.
And what does Dylan think of Obama? As he put it to The Times in June this year:
[Obama's] redefining what a politician is, so we’ll have to see how things play out. Am I hopeful? Yes, I’m hopeful that things might change. Some things are going to have to.
Maybe we can look forward to Bob playing at the inauguration party?
It was extraordinarily moving to watch the faces of all those civil rights fighters on election night. The people who grew up with real racism — mean, hard, uncompromising racism — and never thought they’d live to see this day. America has come a long way in only 50 years; Martin Luther King’s dream has come far closer to realization. And in the process people of all colors have been liberated. Not least white people — liberated from their prejudices, their fears, their ignorance.
“The down-trodden rise up,” is a classic story-line and of course it dominated the coverage of the major media outlets. You have to be particularly cold-hearted not to be inspired by it. I and Diane certainly went through half a box of tissues on election night …
Yet it seems to me the big story here isn’t that America got its first African-American president. The big story is that millions and millions of voters didn’t care about issues of race. These are the people who knew affirmative action but never Jim Crow — people under fifty, predominantly with college degrees — for whom race just isn’t a big deal. “Yeah, he’s black. So what?”
In this way, ironically, Obama’s victory closes the book on the civil rights era. It pushes it right down into history; makes it irrelevant for our time and even more irrelevant for the future. We cry when we see the tears on the faces of the old fighters, but our tears are theirs, they are not our own.
This is not to say that African-Americans have the same opportunitites as white people. Far from it. American society is shot through with injustice and discrimination. But these problems are not about race as much as about class. What America needs now are equal opportunitities not only for black and white, but also for rich and poor.
Obama’s kids, Sasha and Malia, are getting a new puppy when they move into the White House. My 10 and 7-year olds have decided that it’s not fair. Moving to the White House is nothing, they argue. We moved much further — all the way to Taiwan and we didn’t get a puppy or anything.
I’m thinking of Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham. Few people talk about her. Clearly they find her enigmatic. Embarrassing perhaps. As a 17-year old girl she moved from Kansas to go to university in Hawaii and soon she fell for this guy from Kenya. After he left, she went on to marry a person from Indonesia and worked with NGOs in rural development projects around Asia.
Northern Sweden isn’t that different from Kansas. Both are places where nothing happens and everything is the same. I completely understand her desire to discover the different, the exotic. Part of the attraction is sexual. You want to possess otherness and you want to be possessed by it. But the sexual aspect is secondary to a much deeper desire to both forget yourself and to find yourself in an embrace of the completely unknown. I too have lived my life like that.
Sometimes I think my kids will suffer from my eccentric life-style choices. But then I think about Barack Obama. He seems to have done OK. In fact, there is research which says that multi-cultural cross-fertilization — especially of languages — helps your brain develop better. Maybe one of my kids too one day will become president of the United States. Then they can finally have that puppy.
The world was waiting. The world was watching. I and Diane snuggled up in front of an MSNBC stream on my laptop. It was very convenient to watch it in our time zone. Coverage started at 7 in the morning.
For a long while it seemed like a repeat of 2004, but once Ohio fell to Obama we knew nothing would be the same again. And when California, Oregon and Washington were declared, we opened the champagne. Once Obama was on stage giving his speech in Chicago, we just cried and cried. We cried together with Jesse Jackson and Operah Winfrey and millions of people watching all over the world. Finally this eight year long nightmare is over — the wars, the torture, the corruption, the mismanagement, the arrogance, the hatred, the willful ignorance. Finally the US has a president we can all look up to and be inspired by. This is a president not just for America but for the world. He is my president too!
Still, the world needs a better system for electing its leader. Right now we are in the hands of American voters and half of the time that’s really scary. During the last 8 years, the world has been held hostage by a small minority of bigoted, gun-toting, rednecks. Thankfully, after months and months of inanity and innuendo, even the Americans managed to pick the man the world already long ago had chosen.
Good luck to you Barack Hussein! Lets make the world a better place!
We went to a wedding today (well, I didn’t, I was at home eating soup, but I sent my girls). My wonderful Chinese teacher, Chen laoshi’s, son was getting married. It was a great opportunity to dress up and have a real Chinese banquet lunch. (Bride and groom to the left, Chen laoshi next to Diane, and her husband, professor Huang, to the right). A good time was had by all.
If there are readers of this blog who still haven’t made up their minds about who to support in the American election, this video should provide the decisive argument. It’s the good citizens of the Japanese city of Obama who are making it clear who they would like to see win. “Obama,” as they point out, “Is Beautiful World.”
Obama, 小浜, meaning “small harbor,” is a Japanese city of 32,185 inhabitants, located north of Kyoto on the northern coast of the main island of Honshu. Fishing is the major industry here but the town is also famous for its lacquered chopsticks.
Not to be outdone, the Irish are claiming Obama as theirs. After all, his great great grandfather came from Offaly, Ireland.
Since McCain and Sarah Palin still are talking about Bill Ayers, let me reprise this entry I originally wrote in July:
Some Republicans are trying to present Barack Obama as having “connections to terrorists.” The real life reference of this fantasy is that Obama for a while served on the board of the same Chicago charity as Bill Ayers, a former member of the Weather Underground.
The Weather Underground were university kids who in the 1970s decided to declare war on the American government. They blew up bombs in the Pentagon, in police offices and military installations. They never killed anyone, except two of their own members. Their bombs were pedagogical. They wanted to “bring the war home,” and show Americans what kinds of crimes that were committed in their name. “To live a regular, American, middle-class life, while your country is murdering millions of people,” says Ayers in a documentary I show students every semester, “is itself a kind of violence.”
I don’t like bombs. Nasty people — the IRA, Muslim extremists, nail bombers — were constantly trying to blow us up when we lived in London and I didn’t like it one bit. Still it always surprises me why people are so ready to accept government sponsored bombings without any questions. Although I reject the methods, I fully sympathize with the moral outrage which guided Ayers in 1970. I also think his crimes were, and are, lesser than the crimes of the American government. Bush has more blood on his hands.
It’s interesting what happened to the Weather Underground. Half of them are still in prison; the other half are university professors — demonstrating that prisons and universities are the two places where societies keep their misfits. As for Bill Ayers, he is today a professor of Education at the University of illinois (and actually a very respected, and respectable, member of the community).
I have thousands of pdfs of books, articles and newspaper clippings — all relating to my research on European imperialism in China in the 19th century. The only problem is how to read them all. The obvious solution is to print them out. But I don’t want all those stacks of loose papers laying about. A suggestion might be to read them on the screen. But I refuse to do that. I hate reading books on the computer.
The ingenious solution is instead to get an e-reader. I’ve wanted one for years. There is a Sony one, and there is the Amazon Kindle. The problem with both is that the screen is too small. There is a Chinese company, Hanlin Electronics, that promised to have a new model out early in 2008 which could deal with A4-size paper. But their product seems terminally delayed.
Looking for an alternative this morning I found this wonderous product. What a beauty! You can store thousands of pages on it. It’s sleek, light, and the batteries run for weeks, not hours. This is surely the future of reading (and publishing). Amazingly, it’s made out of plastic, and for that reason also next to indestructible. The company that makes them, Plastic Logic, is based in Cambridge, UK, with production facilities in Germany. It’s being launched in the spring of 2009. Please don’t make me wait any longer than that!
We were invited to an Obama fund-raiser in Taipei. Diane was very excited about it. “Finally,” she said, “a chance to meet some reasonable Americans. All Obama voters are my friends.”
I’ve never donated to a political campaign before. In Sweden, political parties are funded through taxes and giving money to a political party is a bit like giving money to a government agency like the Dept of Motor Vehicles. You just don’t do it. I always took a position in American political debates — always Democrat — but I never felt compelled to hand over my savings before. After all, it’s not my country and not my problem.
This time around, however, it’s different. The Bush years have not only been bad, they have been disastrous, and not only for America, but for the whole world. Besides, there has not in my life-time been a more qualified Democratic candidate than Barack Obama. It’s very important that he wins, and I’m very happy to support that. With money too.
Here is an interesting question: if you knew for sure that your donation would guarantee the victory of your candidate, how much would you be prepared to give? I discussed it with Diane and we decided, as a family, if it’s an eight year term, we’d be happy to pay 24,000 US dollars. It’s only $500 per family member per year — a cheap price for the opportunity to wake up every morning as proud Americans.
In the end, we didn’t go to the fund-raiser in Taipei. I’m not very mobile and Diane is too busy caring for me. And of course our donation won’t magically assure Obama’s victory. Still, we want to help out and we sent him $100. Obama accepts donations of $5 too. It’s easy to pay online (but, legally, you have to be a US citizen).
So, the American government — the George W. Bush, Republican administration — has now nationalized A.I.G., American International Group, the largest insurance company in the US and the world’s 18th largest company. Ha, ha, ha, ha!!! Can the Republicans now go on arguing that “the government is the problem, not the solution”? Or will they finally have to concede that their government only is intended to work for the rich? Perhaps this is what they call “socialism with American characteristics”?
Of course there must be free markets, but of course those free markets must have strict limits. Otherwise we’ll always and continuously end up in pickles like this. Europeans have known this for years, and East Asians — well, pretty much every one but the Americans.
Did you know that A.I.G was founded by a man called Cornelius Vander Starr? In 1919, Starr made his first pot of gold selling insurance in Shanghai, China. Maybe the American government now will be forced to sell A.I.G. back to the Chinese. Ha, ha, ha, ha!!!
OK, I’m not a fan of Sarah Palin, but half a paragraph in today’s New York Times should alarm us all:
And four months ago, a Wasilla blogger, Sherry Whitstine, who chronicles the governor’s career with an astringent eye, answered her phone to hear an assistant to the governor on the line, she said. “You should be ashamed!” Ivy Frye, the assistant, told her. “Stop blogging. Stop blogging right now!”
I’ve noticed something interesting: conservatives, even really pretty conservative conservatives, are almost always acceptable as long as they take a strong stand in favor of free speech. You can talk to them about stuff, exchange views, learn things. They are my friends. But conservatives who are trying to ban free speech are always my enemies. And they should be the enemies of us all.
It is now 148 years, 2 months, and 20 days since the Europeans burned down the Yuanmingyuan. (Lots of people in China have not forgotten -- more here).
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What more than anything gives me confidence regarding Obama’s presidency is the fact that he’s such a great Dylan fan. According to an interview he gave to
So, the American government — the George W. Bush, Republican administration — has now nationalized A.I.G., American International Group, the largest insurance company in the US and the world’s 18th largest company. Ha, ha, ha, ha!!! Can the Republicans now go on arguing that “the government is the problem, not the solution”? Or will they finally have to concede that their government only is intended to work for the rich? Perhaps this is what they call “socialism with American characteristics”?
