MEANINGLESS STATISTICS

Does it matter if 15,000 or 18,000 people get killed. (Only the 3,000 care.) Is this news or just space-filling statistics to feel negative about?....It's obvious, more people are poorer, without hope, poisoned by the environment, manipulated by toxic leaders, and angrier without focus, and no place to put their fury.

RUBBER & REAL DUCKS GO VIRAL IN CHINA

COMMUNISTS AND OLIGARCHS HAVE NO SENSE OF HUMOR.....

CULTURAL DIFFERENCE

Pakistan is America's ally.

http://www.upworthy.com/watch-a-brave-little-girl-take-on-her-rapists-her-village-and-her-culture-2?g=2&c=upw1

POLITICAL ART CAN BE GOOD ART

ARTISTS: Self-promotion is not wrong and doesn't pollute art...if you have something worthwhile to promote.


http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/27/arts/design/ai-weiwei-dioramas-depict-his-imprisonment.html

FLAPPERS

Women were allowed to own and drive cars in the 1920s and 1930s. They could go dancing, have fun, have sex, explore life, make their own decisions, and live independently....

Then World War 2 came, and women worked physically hard in factories building guns, tanks, boats, and planes for America's (male) Armed Forces....

Then Peace came, and women were sent back into the home to do dishes, clean, cook, and take care of babies.

Now woman can serve in the Armed Forces, where they are often raped like Comfort Women. They can also go into battle and get killed equally with men.

Progress.

ACTIONS LEFT UNDONE

There are two specific, practical, moral things our nation can do within this year: relieve poverty and bring Americans into a sane, relatively fair economic balance. We all know it will not be done. But it is possible to do in reality. Therefore, the responsibility and blame is on the politicians of both parties, the citizens who accept and vote for them, as well as our own personal lack of compassion and courage....Writing this, I don't feel superior. I feel equal in human hypocrisy, weakness, guilt, fear, awareness, and lack of redemptive positive action.

GOODBYE, MY COUNTRY . . .

Today is the fall of Saigon....Caring people throughout the world share mourning for a culture and country with all Vietnamese, outside or inside Viet Nam, and trust they will finally have the freedom to choose a government that cares about all its people.

Trinh Cong Son, greatest Vietnamese composer,

and Khanh Ly, best interpreter of his songs,

during the American War until after the loss of South Viet Nam

MORALITY

ETHICAL QUESTION:  Assad is a killer who gasses his people and bombs villagers....Should America destroy Syria's Assad, who is pro-American (when its suits his purpose) and allows other religious to exist, knowing that an anti-American religious fundamentalist government will take over?  Or should we keep his brutal dictatorship in power?

AMERICA

Non-Americans must understand that America is not culturally insulated, cloistered, monolithic, evil, or good. America consists of people from every other country, culture, religion, race, and language in the world....including Americans who are brilliant, stupid, open-hearted, prejudiced, terrified, brave, creative, boring, super-rich, homeless, nationalistic, internationalist, fundamentalist, atheist, power-mad, immoral, amoral, moral, greedy, charitable, humanists, environmentalists, and people who hate people, nature, and the Earth.....America gives wrong and even insane people the freedom to be wrong and insane, but not to legally kill, rape, or abuse each other.... America is full of lofty philosophical ideals and destructive hypocritical reality, because America is not Heaven, and Americans are not gods...only human, and very flawed.

PERFECTLY BRILLIANT FACEBOOK SITES

THESE ARE THE GREATEST SITES

I've discovered on Facebook so far..

They are so powerful, creative, sublime,

often sad, absurd, moving, and visionary.

Nearly every post is stunning.

Your life can be inspired and changed:

Hamza Nesrate

Chung-Ting Huang

台灣行道樹 (Community)

StreetArt in Germany

Creativity & Life

TwistedShifter

Al Jazeera English

The Guardian

ABUSE

From New York Times

Payment for Afghan Debt: Daughter, Age 6

If a man at a refugee camp who borrowed $2,500 for medical care for his family cannot repay his debt, his daughter will have to marry the lender's 17-year-old son.

Comment

Immediate response: Pay the father's debt. Long-term solution: Birth control, sexual and moral education..... The physical, sexual, and psychological abuse of children, girls, wives, women, and non-married lovers has been going on in every tribe, every culture, every country, every religion, for as long as human history. Because of improved media and the internet, we now know about some of it.....Our response must be immediate, unyielding, ethical, practical, effective, and long-term. This can only be done, for more than a handful of abuse cases, at a national and global level. Yet the moral and political corruption at that level is endemic.... "Think Tanks" abound in the civilized world, yet nothing seems to change.  Are there any realistic solutions?

HATE

Why do fundamentalist clerics, extreme conservatives, ultra-nationalists, and the super-rich almost always look so tormented and ugly?

ENGLISH DOESN'T TRANSLATE WELL

My short Facebook comment ("Fighting songs are better than funeral songs!") in full support of the "Do You Hear the People Sing" terrific anti-nuclear protest and photos (posted by 曾智偉 and many others), upset some readers....I want to explain what I really meant:

I know some / many of my comments in English are often misunderstood, because I use New York-style dark or absurd humor to twist English words, ideas, and meanings. Sometimes readers may even be hurt or angry, when I use tongue-in-cheek (indirect) or ironic humor to be FRIENDLY and caring. I apologize, seriously. I do not know Chinese, and will never know the beautiful, complex subtleties of Chinese enough to use it creatively.....My positive anti-nuclear protest march comment (above) is an example. "Fighting songs" refers to anti-nuclear protests, AND resistance to the impending take-over (economic, cultural, political, military) of democratic Taiwan by dictatorial China....."Funeral songs" refers to the memorial to Chiang Kai-shek, the losing temporary conqueror of Taiwan, where the people are protesting, AND it refers to the fact that if the Taiwan government builds (allows the building of) another nuclear power plant, there will be a tragic "accident" (human failure or corruption) in the future, and many people will die.....I'm very sorry for any misunderstandings!

REMINDERS

W  H  A  T     I     L  E  A  R  N  E  D

                      

I was a teacher for the past 5 months. Sometimes I think I was a great teacher. (Some of my students wrote me emotional letters...after I gave them grades.) Sometimes I think I was a bad teacher, because there was so much I wanted to communicate, but could not. (Laziness? Language and cultural barriers? Just Life?)

Most of all, I was and always will be, a student....Paid more than my students. Treated with more respect than my students. With more life experience, self-confidence, and the "wisdom" of age (maybe), than my students.

What did I learn? (Of course, as soon as I learn something, I forget it and must continuously re-learn it.).....

I learned that everybody's pain feels the same.

PRO-LIFE IN THE REAL SENSE

200,000+ peaceful Taiwanese, Hakka, Aborigine, and Han protestors in the Capital city, protesting against the building of yet another nuclear power plant on the pristine Taiwan coast, on a major earthquake fault, subject to tsunamis, yearly typhoons, greed, corruption, shoddy workmanship, and guaranteed human error....near Taipei, the largest city.

Unlike China, no army or police beat them ,or fired tear gas and bullets into the crowd.

Young and old, families, students, farmers, workers, fishermen, artists, sat down in front of the President Building, listening to fiery speeches, passionate songs, pleas from the heart, and terrifying scientific facts.

Controlled Western news media covered the story minimally, with headlines reducing the nearly 1/4-Million protestors to only "Tens of Thousands."

VETERANS' HOUSING DEMOLISHED

First, young men are forced by the Warlord to fight the People's Army (which later became the Madman's Guards, then the Oligarchy's Enforcers). Then, the survivors and maimed young men are given concrete bunkers to temporarily live in for 3 generations. Now the apolitical addicted Money Launderers evict them to die, destroying their aging communities, and sentencing their neighbors to invisible extinction.....Life is certainly not fair, at all, at all.

LANTERN FESTIVAL

I TOOK THE TRAIN TO PINGXI…..The first time I sent a lantern to heaven to honor my mentor, film director Kurosawa Akira…..The second time I thanked Taiwan for the peacefulness of Pingxi, Tamsui, Hsimenting, Taipei 101, the Non-Violent Transfer from a 50-Year Old Dictatorship to Democracy, Hands Across Taiwan, and the Million-Person Sit-In, instead of Hajj, the Ganges, and soccer riots,….The third time I prayed that Taiwan would have a visionary, humanistic, effective President who would not sell Taiwan to China, developers, bankers, or controlled media corporations…..

A GOOD WOMAN

February 3, 2013

Sotomayor, a Star on the Book-Tour Circuit, Sees a New Niche for a Justice

By JODI KANTOR

CHICAGO — At her Wednesday night book talk here, Justice Sonia Sotomayor glided through her audience of 700, dispensing homespun wisdom through a cordless microphone, interrupted by impromptu applause.

When the moderator read a question from Tabbie Major, age 7, about which books Justice Sotomayor loved as a child, she found the girl, locked her in an embrace, held on while reminiscing about Nancy Drew mysteries and then called out for a photographer to capture the moment. No need: a good portion of the crowd was already snapping pictures.

Welcome to another night in the life of Sonia Sotomayor, Supreme Court justice, current queen of the best-seller list and suddenly the nation’s most high-profile Hispanic figure.

TV IS SERIOUS

One of the greatest moments ever on television.

Not 100% true about "old" glorified America, 

but as close to the political Truth as you can find on TV.

(The Wire" was even closer social truth.)

Pilot: "THE NEWSROOM" (2012, HBO). 

Created and written by Aaron Sorkin ("Studio 60").

Starring Jeff Daniels.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16K6m3Ua2nw&feature=youtu.be

OBAMA

Although Obama will not / cannot follow the powerful humanistic passion of his own words and beliefs, at least he SAID them...for the first time in American Presidential Inauguration history!  Obama's speech may serve as the final brilliant burst of American ideals, as it grows dimmer and possibly flickers out…..

NEW YORK TIMES - January 21, 2013 - by Peter Baker

OBAMA OFFERS LIBERAL VISION: “WE MUST ACT”
He became the first president ever to mention the word “gay” in an Inaugural Address as he equated the drive for same-sex marriage to the quests for racial and gender equality.