Posts by stephen walker
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and a nice time of the year to go to Seoul it is too.
i've been there four times, including five weeks in 1994 doing a summer language course at Yonsei University.
the last time i went was 2001, so i imagine it has changed a lot since.
unsurprisingly, the vibrant culture scene tends to be led by the students, so the areas near the universities are quite interesting for the shops, clubs, bars and theatres.
Ihwa Women's University, Shincheong (Yonsei) and the next station on that line are all worth a wander.
but Tehanro (the area of the old Seoul National University campus is the best. packed with interesting nooks and crannies.
and the guy Seotaiji that Yamis mentioned, i think i know who he means. he was so cool i souvenired a tour poster and brought it home, even though i only vaguely knew his music.
have a good one, and please pop over to Japan too sometime soon!
(summer is best because of all the outdoor music festivals in the mountains. unfortunately Tokyo is hell on earth in July-August) -
i vote for Seamus's blog post to be made into a PA Speaker post.
what do others think?
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How would you people who are parents feel about your kids using LSD etc if it were legal and available?
look, when my offspring are old enough to do all the (currently)LEGAL drugs of their own volition, then i hope they have the maturity and advice under their belts to choose how to approach the arbritrarily illegal ones too.
a large percentage of young people are going to try these things, whether they are legal or not. simple fact.
if the consciousness-altering substance is properly regulated, there is likely to be better access to realistic advice and education, and you know what you are buying/taking is what you think it is. Prohibition puts people at the mercy of crime syndicates, essentially. you cannot be sure if you are taking x, y or z. consumer guarantees act does not apply, for some strange reason.
i can think of a lot worse things for young people to get up to than taking LSD and going to the art gallery or park.
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Yes, Chinese nationalism is actively promoted through the schools, but every conception of nationalism depends on a selective and conscious retelling of history, and China's no different. It's taught as a historical narrative of China being once a great power, weakened by corruption and in-fighting, humiliated and subjudicated by a series of colonial powers; this narrative frames modern China from Sun Yat Sen onwards as a project to strengthen and protect China – from internal corruption and fracture, as well as from foreign interference.
Surely the Chinese students participating in these demonstrations are (at least partly) the product of the era in which they grew up and the version of history that has been forcefully promoted since they were born.
Taking the long view of Chinese nationalism, the Han Chinese are apt to see themselves as the "rightful" (natural?) leaders of East Asia and to some extent Southeast Asia. Until the Ming Dynasty, China had been the dominant culture in the region for a very long time (more than 1,000 years). Their influence on languages and cultures is similar to the Greek/Roman influence in Europe. Their technology was also way ahead of Europe in many areas before 1492.
Since then, their subjugation by European powers, the US and Japan was a stunning fall from power lasting several centuries. Civil war and the losing Nationalists fleeing to Taiwan added to the fracturing begun by colonialism.
The Cultural Revolution and internal CCP power struggles in the 1970s were pretty much the low ebb.
Economically, China seems to have achieved the impossible by rising so quickly from such a low base to where they are now. It's hard to think of any historical comparisons to this meteoric rise in fortunes. Just 30 years from the bottom of the heap to almost the top. Barely a single generation. Whoah! Hard to see how this wouldn't create incredible tensions down the track...
But back to those students. Born just before or since 1989. They have been on the receiving end of a very big push by TPTB to prevent any recurrence of what happened in 1989. The CCP came within a whisker of losing power. Sparked by student protests (oh, the irony) that had been inspired partly by Tibetan demands for true autonomy (more crushing irony?). There is unprecedented affluence among a large proportion of the Chinese population, for which the CCP is very eager to take full credit. And Chinese prestige in the world has been greatly restored.
The problem for these students is, imho, that they need to reflect on whether their generation's shunning of dissent as part of the all-important economic drive will be worth it in the long run. Or whether the current golden weather is really sustainable given the problems now beginning to surface. If, for whatever reason, the wheels fall of economically, will they still be keen to push the no-dissent line?
Environmental degredation and resource depletion loom large in the Motherland, even if they have the most money in the bank right now (meaning they can spend up large overseas to buy resources and productive assets). All those US dollars could turn out to be worthless much more quickly than the orthodox view would have us believe...
Tibetan demands for autonomy could turn out to be the least of the problems faced by China's current rulers and beneficiaries of the economic miracle.
(sorry, way too long. must do some work)
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How wrong he was, eh?
that's right.
WE bombed them back to the stone age (again).
haven't heard a peep out of them since.the whole of NATO is currenly holidaying in Ibiza at the moment, I heard...
wanna buy a poppy?
you can choose from RPG flavoured
or IED flavouredhave a nice day
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of course!
THC, MDMA and psilocybin are MUCH badderer than alcohol, nicotine and refined sugar because, well, because they're illegal!and because they can kill you!
and because they can get you addicted!
and because they can wreck your family!unlike alcohol, et al, which never cause anything like that.
well, only a bit.
for a few unfortunate people.
but they're ok becase the law says we can use them as long as we are responsible grownups about it.so, there are bad drugs we are allowed to experiment with,
and there are the really bad drugs we need to be morally strong enough to resist.now i understand.
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that's right!
all drugs are BAD!
except, of course, if they happen to be nicotine, alcohol, caffeine or refined sugar.
in which case they are not an issue at all.Are you all looking forward to your kids starting to engage in this rite of passage?
eh? i'm looking forward to educating my kids about their relationship with psychoactive substances (y'know, nicotine, alcohol, caffeine, refined sugar, SSRIs, and all those naughty illegal ones too).
after all, we wouldn't want drugs to be like free tertiary education, would we? (good for people born before 1970 but bad for the ones born after)
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Entire streets of people's holiday homes being offloaded. And yet, they're still ridiculously over-priced.
that always happens at the beginning of a downturn in property prices. look at the REINZ figures for Feb or the Barefoots figures for last month. Prices are standing still, but the volume of sales is dropping like a rock. and the number of listed properties is skyrocketing. people who want to sell are not accepting lower prices, so the number of sales drops and the number of unsold properties grows.
people will drop their prices when they get desperate to sell. it's just a matter of time. look at AK's massively overheated apartment market--the prices are being decimated. this is a leading indicator, imho.
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i/s wrote:
the benefit of biofuels is that (if produced by sustainable methods - i.e. not in the US) they're carbon neutral.
the trouble is, there are very few large-scale examples of biofuels being produced sustainably. Even ethanol from sugar cane (Brazil) is causing more destruction of rain forest, which is hardly sustainable or carbon neutral. In SE Asia, you have a similar thing happenning with palm oils. All of the sustainable stuff is only really possible on a relatively small scale, as far as i have seen.
nz has potential with animal tallow and trees, but the liquid fuels produced are just not going to replace the amount of fossil fuels we burn at the moment. algae is interesting, but the scaleability is seriously questionable. which is not to say we shouldn't try and reduce fossil fuel use by developing biofuels, but to me it is just avoiding the elephant in the sitting room.
if we want to maintain our current lifestyle
to me, this is just not going to happen. a fantasy even. the affluent lifestyles on this planet are based on a 100-year petroleum bonanza--a one-off boom, followed by the inevitable bust. as more and more people on this planet demand to have their own fossil-fuel slaves, we are going to end up either changing to a radically less energy intensive way of living or have even more wars over ever-decreasing energy supplies.
the kind of happy story our MSM and politicians love to discuss. not.
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the carbon neutrality of ethanol made from maize is a myth.
the process of growing the maize involves operating machinery and applying synthetic chemicals generally derived from fossil fuels.the process of making the ethanol is not carbon neutral either, in terms of energy usage.
as mr. haywood has probably pointed out, the energy return on energy invested (EROEI), or net energy yield, is very marginal if not negative.
in other words, it's mainly a U.S. ag subsidy scam.
and similar to dairy farming in canterbury, it's not sustainable either. they are going to run out of water and their topsoil is going to all end up in the gulf of mexico.
wrecking soil fertility and draining acquifers can be pretty profitable for some people. but you cannot keep doing it for decade after decade without causing a major collapse in yields sooner or later.