The seemier side of life of proles in Hong Kong

You can feel, smell, and see the seeminess of ordinary living in that paragon of Asian luxury, Hong Kong, in this piece from Southern Weekend:

Thx to CDT for this link!

 

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I like a lot of what Olivia Judson writes

Image via Wikipedia

whether it’s about microbiology, insects, carnivores, or today Social Medicine. Here’s a meaningful excerpt:

If your friend’s friend becomes happy, that increases the chance your friend will become happy — and that you will too. Conversely, if you become obese or depressed, you may inadvertently help your friends, and your friend’s friends, to become fat or gloomy. (Intriguingly, happiness and obesity seem to spread in different ways. Obesity spreads most easily between friends of the same sex who are emotionally close. Happiness spreads most readily between friends who live near each other: a happy friend on the same block makes more difference than a happy friend three miles away.)

To me this Social Medicine stuff feels like a stretch, but Olivia, like the optimist she is, is for it. So who am I to do my contrarian thing about the infectiousness of happiness. There’s never enough of it to go around, especially for too often gloomy wife.

I wish my wife spent some time reading Olivia. Here is an upbeat note in the last para of this week’s essay:

I draw a couple of conclusions from this. The first is that unless you are a hermit living entirely alone, your choices and wellbeing do not affect just you. The second, and more important, conclusion is that medicine isn’t simply about improving the health of an individual here and an individual there. It’s about the health of the whole society.

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Yesterday it was images of fowl, but today

it’s a still skitched from a NASA video of our Galaxy:

Here’s a link to the video!

 

 

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Denise Milani is exceptionally endowed

1

Originally uploaded by tute23arg

And there are a host of her poses at this Flickr site.

Her torso is a definition of outstanding!

Why did world democracies fail to help the Republican forces during the Spanish Civil War 1936-39?

Here’s some pithy historical analysis, which must have resonated for George Orwell!

A Call to Arms

Oct 16th 2008

From The Economist print edition

We Saw Spain Die: Foreign Correspondents in the Spanish Civil War By Paul Preston   Constable; 436 pages; £20 Buy it at Amazon.co.uk

“IN SPAIN two vast world forces are testing each other out: if Franco conquers, Europe will be black or Europe will go to war as soon as Hitler and Mussolini are ready.” That was the correct prediction in 1936 of Louis Fischer, an American journalist so convinced of the dangers of Franco’s fascist rebellion that he joined the International Brigades to take up arms on behalf of the Republican government.

Fischer was hardly alone in his devotion to the Republican cause: in an excellent account of the foreign reporting of Spain’s three years of savage fratricide, Paul Preston cites an impressive list, from America’s egotistic Ernest Hemingway to Britain’s self-effacing Henry Buckley. By contrast, enthusiasts for Franco’s rebels were few (Mr Preston singles out William P. Carney of the New York Times for special, scornful mention). As Mr Preston explains, foreign correspondents were given relatively free rein by the Republicans’ press office, with easy access to the front lines. On the Francoist side they were often threatened with prison and execution.

So why did the reporting of so many pro-Republic correspondents not persuade outside powers, notably Britain, America and France, to lift their arms embargo on the hard-pressed Republicans? A prime reason was the fact that the Republicans were backed, more in materiel than men, by Stalin’s Russia: an antipathy to communism was, it seems, a good enough excuse to overlook the presence in Franco’s forces of German and Italian troops. Outside opinion was also offended by the anticlericalism of the Republican side, with its attacks on priests and vandalism of monasteries. Some of these attacks were horrible enough; others were exaggerated by Francoist sympathisers. Mr Preston notes that Carney invented many of his stories, which pro-Catholic editors at the New York Times printed despite the anguish of Herbert Matthews, its more objective correspondent on the Republican side.

Mr Preston’s own preference for the Republican cause is obvious, but it does not deter him from detailing the spying for their governments of several pro-Republic correspondents. He devotes a fascinating chapter to Russia’s Mikhail Koltsov, a Pravda correspondent for whom Republican Spain was an inspiring antidote to the terror of his homeland—and whose loyalty to Stalin was rewarded by torture and execution. Fischer, writing mainly for the Nation, was not a spy, but he was so well-connected in both Europe and America that his advice was welcomed by American and Soviet politicians alike.

One weakness of Mr Preston’s book is his concentration on the English-language press (Koltsov apart, non-Anglophone journalists are mentioned mainly in passing). Another is an overlong chapter on the dispute between Hemingway and John Dos Passos on the disappearance of Dos Passos’s friend, José Robles. But these are small criticisms. The author paints a marvellous portrait of the world of the war correspondent: the risk to life; the temptations to infidelity (Hemingway’s affair with Martha Gellhorn was hardly exceptional); and, in the days before satellite phones, the constant struggle to get the story out.

The story was tragic, not just as a prologue to the second world war but also because it condemned Spain to decades of dictatorship. Implicit in this book is the thought that, if the correspondents had been listened to, the outcome could have been different. As Mr Buckley later wrote, the outside world cared more for Spain’s art works, spirited to safety in Geneva, than for its thousands of refugees.

We Saw Spain Die: Foreign Correspondents in the Spanish Civil War.

By Paul Preston.
Constable; 436 pages; £20

Black and white fowl but not photogenic!

Here’s one and a link to the other fowl photos!

 

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Roger Cohen suggests in his NYT column today

Image by seiuhealthcare775nw via Flickr

that all Americans are in this together. A nice thought, but I know that significant numbers of Americans do and will disagree that they are in anything together with all those Democrat “Hitler and socialist” types.

Here’s some of Cohen’s food for their thoughts, even if they will ignore that good food anyway!

In any context, I would argue, health reform was important for America, but in this fractured one, the health care reform bill that just passed the House is critical. It’s critical because, although not perfect, it does involve the acknowledgment that, when it comes to health, we are indeed all in this together rather than zoned out on our individual screens. Pooling the risk between everybody is, as the rest of the developed world knows, the most efficient way to forge a healthier society.

U.S. health care has been grossly inefficient — spending has ballooned even through the recession — and a proposed new government insurance plan and national insurance exchange will help force waste out the system. A surtax on the wealthy will help pay for it. There’s going to be some sacrifice in the name of the general good. That’s an important idea right now. The Senate should quickly approve the legislation. It won’t “socialize” America but will solidify it by at last framing basic health care as a moral obligation rather than financial opportunity.

As Archibald MacLeish once wrote: “If we had not held these truths to be self-evident, if we had not believed that all men are created equal, if we had not believed that they are endowed, all of them, with certain unalienable rights, we would never have become America, whatever else we might have become.”

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A lot of people admire him as a man of peace!

So WTF is he doing raising hackles in Nepal!

Parsing Sino-Indian Tensions

I have an article up at Asia Times Online under the pen name Peter Lee entitledDalai Lama at apex of Sino-Indian tensions.

It’s keyed to a high profile news item–the Dalai Lama’s provocative visit to a border town in territory held by India but disputed by China–and a significant but rather underreported development–the escalating political struggle between pro-Chinese and pro-Indian political forces now reaching its climax in Nepal.

The Chinese themselves have said that the biggest irritant to Sino-Indian relations is the unresolved border dispute. To them, it’s more of an issue than economic competition, India’s growing integration into the U.S. South Asian security regime, or Indian unease at Beijing’s cozying up to Pakistan, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and the Maldives at New Delhi’s expense and raising the specter of maritime encirclement.

I have just setup a new hosted blog

Image by jesuscm via Flickr

Here is the link

This is my new try to monetize my blogging and get ready for e-commerce et al in China.

 

 

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A more authentic face of Beijing

This clip comes from a Flickr collection in CDT’s photo offering this morning.

The baked yam seller’s face shows the real anxiety of Beijing dwellers contrasted with the ad image of a young boy over his right shoulder. China is one and the other, an anxious man scrapping by and an image of youthful amazement harnessed to sell some consumer product other than baked sweet potatoes.

 

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