a few thoughts for the day
Very briefly: good for the Seattle Times editors, even if it does sound s bit flaky ("magical"?).
Secondly, my thought on all of this hype with defective Chinese goods? Its our own fault, our greed to blame. As a Communist nation, they repeatedly violated human rights, but we chose to look the other way, because we wanted cheap consumer goods, and our corporations wanted to be able to manufacture them as cheaply as possible using Chinese labor & Chinese factories. That all of this comes back to bite us in the rear, I find highly ironic.
To continue on the theme of greed & wealth, I was watching BBC World News tonight. As an in-depth story on India celebrating her 60th anniversary of independence, they followed an Indian man (a writer?) who is a "Midnight Child"- that is, he was born on the very evening/day of Indian Independence -and returned to visit Mumbai after years of living abroad. The changes he noticed in Indian society startled him, and I found them quite interesting. For such a historically religious country, he found young Indians increasingly secularized and turned consumerist. An education is important, but only to obtain the degree in order to get the high paying job; knowledge in and of itself is worthless. Everything pretty much comes down to the almighty dollar- he found the overwhelming majority of schoolkids wanting to leave India someday in order to make even more money. While much of this, particularly concerning education, sounds much like the U.S., to me it also eerily sounds much like the "new Russia". I guess the entire world, in striving to imitate us- even as they simultaneously vilify us -is succeeding in ways that are surprising, not to mention depressing.
Secondly, my thought on all of this hype with defective Chinese goods? Its our own fault, our greed to blame. As a Communist nation, they repeatedly violated human rights, but we chose to look the other way, because we wanted cheap consumer goods, and our corporations wanted to be able to manufacture them as cheaply as possible using Chinese labor & Chinese factories. That all of this comes back to bite us in the rear, I find highly ironic.
To continue on the theme of greed & wealth, I was watching BBC World News tonight. As an in-depth story on India celebrating her 60th anniversary of independence, they followed an Indian man (a writer?) who is a "Midnight Child"- that is, he was born on the very evening/day of Indian Independence -and returned to visit Mumbai after years of living abroad. The changes he noticed in Indian society startled him, and I found them quite interesting. For such a historically religious country, he found young Indians increasingly secularized and turned consumerist. An education is important, but only to obtain the degree in order to get the high paying job; knowledge in and of itself is worthless. Everything pretty much comes down to the almighty dollar- he found the overwhelming majority of schoolkids wanting to leave India someday in order to make even more money. While much of this, particularly concerning education, sounds much like the U.S., to me it also eerily sounds much like the "new Russia". I guess the entire world, in striving to imitate us- even as they simultaneously vilify us -is succeeding in ways that are surprising, not to mention depressing.