- Barack Obama, John McCain, and Joe Biden, along with the rest of the Senate except Ted Kennedy, were in town for the bailout vote this evening. The text of the Senate resolution, which was approved 74-25, can be found here.
- We don’t feel expert enough to opine at great length about the bailout at this moment; what we will report is that the biggest portion of the student population here at Harvard College, including the editorial staff of the Crimson, seems to be in favor. We note that this is totally expected.
- Various events in international politics are surely slipping past many people’s radars due to the current financial crisis:
- The Senate decided to take care of some other random business before the bailout vote (because figured that Barack and John Sidney couldn’t hightail it out of there before they cast their yea for that?), like passing some motion for the railroad safety bill (more random tidbit: Joe Biden didn’t vote on that motion) that got a boost from the recent L.A. train wreck, and the U.S.-India nuclear deal, which was ratified 86-13.
- Potentially, India is our new China. (but who are the new Henry Kissinger and Zhou Enlai?) Depending on how the bilateral relationship pans out over the years, this could end up as the-one-universally praised-accomplishment-by-an-otherwise-terrible-president, i.e., exactly how Nixon is remembered with regards to his China policy.
- On the other hand, North Korea was in the news again—Christopher Hill (who is now more famous in Korea than Coca Cola) is in Pyongyang trying to save the disarmament deal after the North Koreans started rebuilding their nuclear facilities.
Posts Tagged ‘China’
Bailout, plus foreign policy bits
Thursday, October 2nd, 2008Beijing LOLympics 10: Good ol’ Boris
Wednesday, August 27th, 2008Apparently Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, was his usual self in China this past week, and as a result he pissed off the Chinese establishment. Not only did he walk with his hands in his pockets for parts of the closing ceremony, he wore an unbuttoned jacket and held the Olympic flag with one hand (madness!). Boris hilariously entertained his Chinese hosts later at a dinner by stating that the British had invented or codified every international sport, including China’s favorite, ping-pong. Then he said: “Ping-Pong is coming home. Athletics is coming home. Sports is coming home.”
Forget London 2012. We need Boris 2012.
Beijing LOLympics 9: “About China”
Wednesday, August 20th, 2008
This Week in Liberty (07/20-07/26): Mostly LOLympics Edition
Sunday, July 27th, 2008- King Barack tours his realm… [WP: synopsis in pictures, YouTube: Berlin Speech]
- And God sent a mighty hurricane to greet John McCain at his oil rig photo-op. [IHT, Wonkette]
- China, an old and decrepit civilization, has an old and decrepit population. [WP's J. Pomfret]
- They also opened a “village” to “house” and provide “services” to over 16,000 athletes. Take a hint, FEMA. [China Daily]
- Chinese Muslim Communists terrorists declare a Jihad on the Olympics. Holy Hu Jintao, China. [The Sunday Times]. The Muslims are still pissed off at this:
- In an apparent payback for China’s humiliating World Cup pwnage in the hands of Iraq, Iraqi athletes have been banned from the Olympics. They are accused of political interference in sports. Really? government getting its hands in sports? The ruling party picking who’s on the National Olympic Committee? China couldn’t help but be simply appalled. appalled. [CNN]
- We knew John Edwards was the worldly incarnation of transcendent evil, but does he really have to be so tasteless? [National Enquirer]
- In India, the Communists are defeated, and Freedom wins. [BBC]
- Radovan Karadzic, the Butcher of Bosnia and later the Hobo from Serbia, is captured. Pro-western politicians win. [BBC Profile, The Guardian]
Oh China
Friday, July 4th, 2008Chinese hoaxes encounter the Internet. Epic absurdity ensues.
Beijing LOLympics 3: BASKETBALL
Thursday, July 3rd, 2008The (PRC) Chinese are more humble than I thought:
“Yao Ming will face Kobe Bryant in the opening match of the Olympic basketball competition on August 10. By what margin (number of points) will the new US ‘Dream Team’ win its opening game against China?”
That’s the poll question being asked to online readers of China Daily, a widely circulated English-language newspaper in China. Needless to say, it doesn’t appear that the newspaper editors have faith in their basketball players. Who knows? This could be China’s “Miracle on Ice” moment, political and national symbolism included. China Daily commenter “people” believes his countrymen can pull the upset:
“you will wrong !we believe china ,chinese men !come on !”
Chinese men !come on ! indeed.
-L.
Beijing LOLympics 2: CHINA WITHOUT CHINGLISH LIFE
Tuesday, July 1st, 2008Last year I went to China (PRC), and by far the funniest part of the trip was reading all the poorly-translated English. In slang terminology, this “practice” results in Chinglish, or the direct translation of Chinese into English without applying any common sense. Most of the time I found Chinglish in more affordable establishments, such as the fake jewelry shops in the Pearl District or markets in the alleyways of Beijing, though certain stores in prominent commercial venues were not spared (read: Wangfujing). I can imagine why this happens: the Chinese shop owner, eager to sell his products to dollar Euro-carrying foreigners, feels compelled to accommodate them with the lingua franca so that the tourists can at least understand where they are and what they are buying. The shop owner just doesn’t know that what he actually wrote in English can be different from Mandarin. Thus, these efforts do not always come out as intended, especially in restaurants. Now the Chinese government is doing something about it:
“Local dishes like ‘Husband and wife’s lung slice’ or ‘Chicken without sexual life’ conjure lots of furrowed eyebrows on famished foreigners. So, with the Olympics a few short weeks away, China is giving its cuisine a linguistic makeover. It is proposing that restaurants change the names of exotic, but bizarrely named, delicacies to make them more delectable for the estimated 50,000 visitors arriving in August for the Summer Games. [. . .] The government has put down more than 2,000 proposed names in a 170-page book that it has offered to Beijing hotels, according to state media.”
So Beijing continues to change, presumably for the better, due to the Olympics. No fair. Westerners and other people who speak English should be able to chuckle when ordering the “chicken without sexual life,” or, in my case, the “sacrifice beef with red pepper” and “deep-fried chicken Muslim”:
In all seriousness, this cosmetic fix, though long overdue, takes away some of the adventure for tourists. Yes, the Chinglish is humorous, but oftentimes it is the navigation and interaction that comes from trying to understand what you are buying that makes Chinglish worth keeping around. I still remember the various instances when I had to use my Chinese-speaking skills (basically saying ni hao and glancing at my Lonely Planet guidebook every five seconds) to know what I was ordering. The waitresses and I developed a quirky bond due to my lack of understanding and her inability to explain right away the contents in the menu. I spoke to the waitresses longer than I would have done otherwise; it was a type of cultural exchange between two people from different societies. Isn’t that the ultimate goal of these Olympics? If you don’t like that reason, then isn’t just plain fun to say you ate a “chicken Muslim” for dinner? At least one Chinese journalist thinks so:
“The process of standardizing a menu translation is a double-edged sword. It removes the ambiguity and unintended humor, for sure. But then it takes away the fun and the rich connotation too. It turns a menu into the equivalent of plain rice, which has the necessary nutrients but is devoid of flavor.”
Nevertheless, though Beijing will try to erase the Chinglish…
…some of it will remain in place for the world to see.
-L.
Beijing LOLympics 1: ATTACK OF THE GREEN SEA ALGAE
Tuesday, July 1st, 2008International media report that the coastal seawater where they’re supposed to have the sailing events for the Olympics are filled with green algae. [IHT, AP/Google]
Maybe it was in Historical Study A-13 where we learned that every Chinese dynasty needs a color. How about the current one? We’d probably have said ‘Red,’ except that the Olympics are getting Beijing to pay a lot more attention to being Green. Then the color Red became very angry and green with envy, so it sent a big, scary Red Tide. Except all the green paint they were spraying on the Beijing sidewalks and mountainsides ran off onto the nearest coastline and the red tide turned green. Back in Korea, every summer we used to hear about red tides happening in the Yellow Sea or the South Sea East China Sea Fuck you, so the problem isn’t entirely new in those parts. The remedy that Koreans typically apply for red tide is to pour loess (break up the soil first!) into the water from boats. China is overflowing with loess, why don’t they just try that instead of trying to manually haul the algae out of the sea (photo 2)?