This ad has been making the rounds on the internet since the Super Bowl. I usually ignore race-baiting political ads about China - I’ve come to expect a certain lack of nuance or attention to facts… but this one is SO BAD I actually started laughing. I thought it was satire - and definitely not one of Stabenow’s spending policies.
The racism of this ad for Pete Hoekstra is less crazy than the fact that somebody could have come up with this, okayed it and aired it in the first place. And I’m not even talking about this dude’s actual budgetary history (I won’t pretend to know it) or the questionable logic that spending public money in Michigan by borrowing from China creates jobs in China (maybe banker jobs?). It’s just both a terrible concept and terrible execution!
1) Debbie “Spenditnow” is a terrible pun to try to wrap your mouth around. I’ve come up with some half-baked puns in my time, but they have never made it into what could only be a pretty expensive-to-run political ad during the Super Bowl.
2) Same for Pete “Spenditnot”
3) Why is China girl speaking bad English in a fully American accent and delivering her lines like she’s about to win the Miss Universe title?
4) Is that… Vietnam?
5) How exactly is a comely maybe-Vietnamese-American lass with a brilliant smile in the middle of a sunset-lit rice field supposed to scare you into voting against Debbie Spenditnow again? Especially considering Superbowl demographics.
According to the Associated Press, this piece of work is the genius creation of “Fred Davis of Strategic Perceptions Inc.” Makes me wonder what Hoekstra did to make Davis hate him so very much.
Daily chart: this Chinese new year could bring good fortune to stockmarket investors. Between 1900 and 2011, the nine previous dragon years have seen America’s Dow Jones Industrial Average price index increase by an average of 7.7% in real terms.
by John Offenbach, China (exact location unknown).
Totally looked in the Notes section to see if anyone had told NPR that this was Shanghai. LOLed at the comment about someone wishing their city streets looked like this. Someone turned the saturation on the green waaaay up - usually all those leaves are covered in dust.
(Source: mpdrolet)
We’ve learned, time and time again, that damming rivers causes all sorts of problems for both nature and society—and yet we keep building dams all over the world. World Rivers Review, the quarterly magazine of the advocacy group International Rivers, reports on the state of the world’s free-flowing rivers—those that remain, that is:
Of the world’s 177 largest rivers, only one-third are free flowing, and just 21 rivers longer than 1,000 kilometers retain a direct connection to the sea. Damming has led to species extinctions, loss of prime farmland and forests, social upheaval, loss of clean water supplies, dessicated wetlands, destroyed fisheries and more. …
Unfortunately, the nations building the most dams—India, China, and Brazil—do not have legislation to protect the free-flowing status of their rivers, and are not using the laws they do have to protect important rivers.
1937 Shanghai: My grandma + siblings at Sinan Lu
I wrote about the particular house in which’s backyard they’re posing in on Shanghaiist. Remarkably, that side of the street still hasn’t been torn down. Or refurbished. Or anythinged… perhaps the company that brought us Sinan Mansions is, like everyone else now, scrambling to stay in the black?
The new touchmedia fitness guru playing in taxi cabs all over Shanghai - i think there was a rainbow flag on his right arm! A show of support?
Um, if anyone happens to be in Shanghai this Friday, go to this!
Greetings, fellow Revolutionary Comrades of highest and utmost esteem! We would like to announce the Shanghaiist work unit’s Gloriously Benevolent Anti-Imperialist Peacefully-Rising Chinese Communist Party 90th Anniversary Special Disco Plenary Conference from 9pm to 1am at Not Me on Friday, July 1st!
For the special anniversary price of 90RMB, comrades displaying the correct anti-rightist spirit will be welcomed to partake in an all-night struggle session involving Red Songs, Red Dance and all-you-can-imbibe alcoholic beverage intake.
Favor and points will be awarded to Comrades attending in Revolutionary Communist regalia (10RMB off the 90RMB all-you-can-drink cover charge), with Shanghai’s most representative model workers and most politically correct students being granted special pictorial glorification on the Shanghaiist internet location.
The food to be found in a small city in Hunan: snails, pig tripe and sweet potato noodles. (More)
P.S. On being lucky not to be born in rural Hunan
The topic of being lucky came up multiple times throughout the trip, as in, do you realize how lucky you were to have the life that you have? Or I hope this trip opened you up to your good fortune
I know I’m lucky. In fact, I don’t think my dad even really gets how lucky I know I am.
I should probably preface this by saying that everyone we came across was extremely hospitable and nice. Rough around the edges and prone to bombastic pronouncements about hometown pride and how much better local food is than outsider food - but that’s part of that fourth tier city Hunan charm, I guess.
Still:
My dad, obviously, was asked a lot of questions about his work. He’s been around here quite a few times now, so they’ve been up-to-date about what he’s been doing and most of the questions were along the lines of “how’s that project going?” or “when do you think you’ll expand business into Leiyang?” My little brother got a lot of questions too – about college, his major, working at Expo and now working for a P.R. firm.
The only questions I was ever asked the entire time was if I could stomach the cuisine (yes, of course, and it’s delicious) and if I had any plans to get married (I look like a high school student still, I joked, so I think I can delay a few more years).
In the village, on every grave marker and with more detail on one wall, there was a list of all the sons of Zhou. Just the sons.
It’s weird to know that - beyond the poverty and hard labor, beyond the lack of educational opportunities and material comforts, there is a greater sense that, if things had turned out differently I just wouldn’t matter at all.
My grandfather tried to visit his home village once in the 1970s, when China was going through its economic reform policy and finally re-opening to the world. But he only made it as far as Leiyang when a sudden rainstorm washed away the tiny pathway to the village. Though he delayed and delayed his return flight in hopes that the road would get fixed in time, it just didn’t happen.
He never got another chance.
