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Dear Mr. President, Here's How to...: by Thomas P.M. Barnett ... TO UNDERSTAND CHINA TODAY, you have to remember what it was like for the United States back in the early years of the twentieth century. Here we were, this burgeoning economic powerhouse with a rising yet still relatively small military package, and all the old-school powers worried about us as an up-and-coming threat. While the European form of globalization predominated at that time, our upstart version ("We don't need no stinkin' empire!") would come to dominate the landscape by the century's midpoint, primarily because Europe decided to self-destruct all its empires via two "world" wars that in retrospect look like the European Union's versions of the American Civil War. Biff- Barnett's views are interesting, but his MBA cracker meets jarhead prose (found elsewhere in the article) is too amusing...
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Curbing betel chewing in Taiwan a tough nut to crack "Taking it with a cigarette and a sip of Wisby (energy drink) is more than heaven," said Lin, as he took a break from distributing pamphlets in a betel nut shop in Taoyuan county, a drab industrial suburb 40 minutes from Taipei. Efforts to wean Taiwan off the habit range from puritanical -- a ban on young saleswomen showing off their breasts, bellies and buttocks in town -- to an environmental appeal for farmers to switch crops as the shallow-rooted betel nut trees have been blamed for deadly mudslides.
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A new world with Chinese characteristics: Prague's genius Franz Kafka, who did not know much about China but experienced the depth of humans' labyrinthic soul... (Biff- WTF?) The West, on the rise since the 15th century and which, through its American version, still dominates world affairs, will have difficulty conceiving and accepting that it will not anymore unilaterally dictate the global agenda; that it will have to adjust. Biff- As always, Asiatimes online can be counted on to deliver high-toned gibberish and fractured arguments. The West wasn't on the rise, capitalism was. Christianity kept the West down for a thousand years. The apex of Western achievement is intellectual and independent of regional tradition: i.e. secular humanism, empiricism, and so forth. This mindset is opposed to all boundaries of religion and tradition. It is not pro-Western or anti-Chinese. The author, like so many lefties, is a closet-racist. I don't say this to condemn but to clarify a process. There but for the grace of jeebus, goes I. 'Westernism' is a human achievement like long division and times tables, and not something tied to a piece of real estate. This is also one of the reasons cultural imperialism is such a bogus concept. As if two plus two equals four is Western and trying to persuade Zhou Sixpack makes one guilty of cultural hegemonizing. Pfft...
A new world with Chinese characteristics: Prague's genius Franz Kafka, who did not know much about China but experienced the depth of humans' labyrinthic soul... (Biff- WTF?) The West, on the rise since the 15th century and which, through its American version, still dominates world affairs, will have difficulty conceiving and accepting that it will not anymore unilaterally dictate the global agenda; that it will have to adjust. Biff- As always, Asiatimes online can be counted on to deliver high-toned gibberish and fractured arguments. The West wasn't on the rise, capitalism was. Christianity kept the West down for a thousand years. The apex of Western achievement is intellectual and independent of regional tradition: i.e. secular humanism, empiricism, and so forth. This mindset is opposed to all boundaries of religion and tradition. It is not pro-Western or anti-Chinese. The author, like so many lefties, is a closet-racist. I don't say this to condemn but to clarify a process. There but for the grace of jeebus, goes I. 'Westernism' is a human achievement like long division and times tables, and not something tied to a piece of real estate. This is also one of the reasons cultural imperialism is such a bogus concept. As if two plus two equals four is Western and trying to persuade Zhou Sixpack makes one guilty of cultural hegemonizing. Pfft...
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Pipes calls war a success: Q: What is the biggest lesson you have learned from the Iraq war? A: The ingratitude of the Iraqis for the extraordinary favor we gave them -- to release them from the bondage of Saddam Hussein's tyranny. They have rapidly interpreted it as something they did and that we were incidental to it. They've more or less written us out of the picture. Biff- if correct, this would match the ingratitude of European politicians for US assistance in WWI (denying US assistance determined the war's outcome and then welching on war debts) and WWII (the US acted out of self-interest: a non-sequitor complaint on all fours with whining about the icy inhumanity of two plus two consistently equaling four). Or think to the CCP which essentially claims it defeated the Japs singlehandedly. The more things change, the more...
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