A summary of the China visa experience so far ( Read more... )

Ah, what a Sunday.

I acted the 1950's hapless husband and totally f***ed up my attempt to bake bread for my first brunch with the lovely coups upstairs.  (She's a disarming med student; he's a pacifist marine...)  I biked to the coop for Rustica instead.  (The brunch was lovely, by the way, and touched upon a tiny Siberian Soviet republic, Utah, and ( Read more... )

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(This might be the right time to consider this, as my own life is going quite well.It seems that some lives just don't work out. A person can do all the right things, make all the smart choices, scrimp and save and toil and try, but in the end their home is still bombed by the Japanese. Or they die in childbirth. Or lightning. Or any of the ( Read more... )

I predicted this just last night. I don't think this is the last suicide bombing China will see. With the finely-honed mechanisms of state power clenched arounde everyone's throats, there's no safe avenue for the rage, despair, etc, etc, that is part of the human process. Bottle up human emotion long enough and people will go insane; give no ( Read more... )

The Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution is a civil war (yeah, I'm using the term loosely) of which I know a little bit. From the biographies of Jiang Qing (the white-boned, demonic Madame Mao) and Deng Xiaoping, I was introduced the bare facts of this bloodly "revolution": the timeline, the top victims, the ultimate fallout. Jesse brought ( Read more... )