I know that I would have stuck with Mandarin much longer if these xiaoxie laoshis had been MY tutors…
Row over saucy language school
(Hat tip to Instapundit)
Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before Me
From the Feb 11/2012 edition of the Taipei Times:
A man was taken into custody for allegedly swindling millions of New Taiwan dollars by selling Sesame Street dolls and other items which he said had “magic powers,” police said yesterday. The suspect, identified by his surname, Lin (林), was accused of conning about NT$3 million (US$101,000) from a businessman with products including an Elmo doll, a Sesame Street muppet, which he reportedly said was “holy” and could bring luck, the police said [Emphasis added].
Police were said to be astounded that a businessman of any acumen could be taken by such a transparent fraud.
(Since it is by now an established fact that there is no god but Snuffleupagus…and Big Bird is his Prophet.)
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Tsai Eng-meng: Portrait Of An Uncle Com ☭
A Washington Post image of Tsai Eng-meng, billionaire chairman of the Taiwanese food/media company, The Want Want conglomerate.
It seems that with the recent re-election of Taiwan's capitulationist president Ma Ying-jeou, the island country's small population of pro-Communist plutocrats feel emboldened to out themselves as Tiananmen Massacre denialists. Or are they simply angling for jobs in Ma's propaganda ministry?
Regardless, the Washington Post has the story:
Tsai said he . . . used to fear China’s ruling Communist Party and didn’t want to risk doing business on the mainland, but that changed after the 1989 military assault on student protesters in Tiananmen Square. While the crackdown outraged most in Taiwan, Tsai said he was struck by footage of a lone protester standing in front of a People’s Liberation Army tank. The fact that the man wasn’t killed, he said, showed that reports of a massacre were not true: “I realized that not that many people could really have died.”
Wow. It gives pause to realize these are not merely the views of a isolated flake, but the views peddled by Tsai Eng-meng's newspaper and television divisions all across the nation-formerly-known-as-Taiwan.
For the sake of consumers, one can only hope that Want Want's food is less poisonous ☠ than the noxious views of its black-hearted chairman.
Postscript: The Taipei Times reports a somewhat…less-than-overwhelming response to Tsai's Tiananmen revisionism (and his concurrent calls for a swift Taiwanese surrender):
Several netizens have also vowed to boycott food products from Tsai’s business chains, Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported on Tuesday. At press time last night, a “Resist the Want Want Group” page created on Facebook on Tuesday — whose boycott will continue until April 24 — had attracted 405 followers.
Not exactly the tar-and-feathers treatment, is it?
A whopping four hundred and five people.
Will boycott Want Want's products.
For the next three (count 'em, 3!) months.
(Bet the democracy-hating sonofabitch loses lots of sleep over THAT.)
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Happy (Organ) Harvest Festival
The Weekly Standard on China's practice of harvesting organs of its Uighur population.
…Beijing traditionally depicted all Uighur nationalists—violent rebels and non-violent activists alike—as CIA proxies. Shortly after 9/11, that conspiracy theory was tossed down the memory hole. Suddenly China was, and always has been, at war with al Qaeda-led Uighur terrorists.
…and yet, if the Chinese government claims that the Uighurs constitute their own Islamic fundamentalist problem, the fact is that I’ve never met a Uighur woman who won’t shake hands [with a man] or a man who won’t have a drink with me. Nor does my Jewish-sounding name appear to make anyone flinch. In one of those vino veritas sessions, I asked a local Uighur leader if he was able to get any sort of assistance from groups such as the Islamic Human Rights Commission (where, as I found during a brief visit to their London offices, veiled women flinch from an extended male hand, drinks are forbidden, and my Jewish surname is a very big deal indeed). “Useless!” he snorted, returning to the vodka bottle.
…the Xinjiang procedure spread. By the end of 1999, the Uighur crackdown would be eclipsed by Chinese security’s largest-scale action since Mao: the elimination of Falun Gong. By my estimate up to three million Falun Gong practitioners would pass through the Chinese corrections system. Approximately 65,000 would be harvested, hearts still beating, before the 2008 Olympics. An unspecified, significantly smaller, number of House Christians and Tibetans likely met the same fate.
(Organ Donor sketch from Monty Python's Meaning of Life. This was funnier back when it WASN'T true…)
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“Surrender…May Be Our Only Option!”
What's the difference between a KMT appeaser and a garden-variety appeaser?
Both feed the crocodile. But the KMT appeaser hopes it'll eat him FIRST.
Taiwan's China Post renews its perennial call for Taipei to sign a formal document of surrender to the Chinese Communist Party.
Except that "formal document of surrender" doesn't test well with Taiwanese focus groups. For some reason or another. So the paper gets out the lipstick, and dubs their red-lipped porker "a peace accord".
One wonders why the paper doesn't go all-out, and insist the agreement consist of 17 points…
(YouTube — Never Smile at a Crocodile by Rolf Harris)
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Kim Young’un Assumes The Throne
"Gemellus is a child. Rome isn't Egypt. Children don't rule because their fathers ruled. Rome must be ruled by men. Not infants."
Meanwhile, The Onion reveals shocking insider news: Kim Jong-Un Privately Doubting He's Crazy Enough To Run North Korea.
Which I think is more than a little unfair. The young'un is a kind man, a simple man, a generous man. The kinda guy who'd give you the straitjacket off of his back…
Update (Dec 22/2011): Rumors that Young'un tortured animals and was at interested in bondage porn as a young'un.
Ruh-roh, Shaggy.
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Chinese Attempt To Play Victim Card (While Persecuting Blind Man)
So the CCP goes on a soft power offensive, producing a movie on the Rape of Nanjing. "China is a victim," goes their carefully-cultivated narrative.
Then the Communist Party shoots itself in the foot with the sort of reflexive petty tyranny for which it is justly well-known:
One step forward.
Now, two back…
And don't forget to blame whitey for all the bad publicity.
Ayn Rand-Quoting, Beijing Apologist Bevin ☭ Chu Could Not Be Reached For Comment…
China hands 3 1/2-year prison sentence to 65-year old granny who organised retiree-benefit protest
In Chu's defense, I'm sure she was a VERY grave threat to Chinese national security.
Update (Nov 22/2012): China arrests blogger for TWITTER joke.
Beijing Bev could not be reached for comment. AGAIN.
“Talking Is Something You Can’t Do Judiciously Unless You Keep In Practice”
Apparently, Taiwan's China Post feels the same way about lying as well:
Frank comments by Central Bank Governor Perng Fai-nan (彭淮南) that Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou's proposal of a referendum on the latest 130-billion-euro bailout plan could be like “a bomb dropped on the global financial market” made news around the globe as the world weighs in on the latest eurozone crisis. [Emphasis added]
Now, I've never been to journalism school. But I am pretty sure one thing they don't teach is to just casually make shit up. (In the VERY FIRST SENTENCE of your editorial, no less.)
Perng Fai-nan's comments made news around the globe? Pray tell, in which alternate universe did his pronouncements raise such a stir?
Because in the one I currently inhabit, there's nothing about this in the New York Times.
Nothing in the Washington Post.
Nor in London's Daily Telegraph. Nor the Daily Mail.
Googling Perng Fai-nan Canada brings up a big goose egg. As does Perng Fai-nan Australia. Same for New Zealand as well.
While by no means the biggest lie the Post has ever perpetrated, it is amusing nonetheless. That a paper should have the face to start a piece explicitly pandering to the "China is the center of the world" prejudices of its ultra-nationalist readership . . . and then complain about POLITICIANS who engage in "populism".
Update: The Post again:
"Of course, if the referendum is indeed held, the Greek public may possibly pay little attention to the opinion of a Taiwan central bank chief." [Emphasis added]
Whoa. You called THAT one, dudes.
Update #2: Wanna know exactly how much of a non-event Perng's statements were on the world stage?
I'm as surprised as anyone to see the top search engine result for "Perng Fai-nan New York Times".
ROTFLMAO.
The Wolf and the Lamb(s)
Ran across some commenters at Michael Turton's site asking for the original link to a piece by a Chinese Communist Party militarist. (Fella by the handle of Long Tao demands that the People's "Liberation" Army Navy initiate a bloody war-for-oil against Vietnam and the Philippines in the South China Sea.)
Anyways, here's the original:
Time to teach those around the South China Sea a lesson
Which reminds one of the Aesop's fable:
A Wolf, meeting with a Lamb astray from the fold, decided not to attack the lamb, but to find some reason to justify to the Lamb why the Wolf had the right to eat him. So the Wolf said:
“Sir Lamb, last year you greatly insulted me.”
“But,” bleated the Lamb mournfully, “I was not born last year!”
Then the Wolf said, “You feed in my pasture.”
“No, good sir,” replied the Lamb, “I have not yet tasted grass.”
Again the Wolf said, “You drink water from my well.”
“No,” exclaimed the Lamb, “I never yet drank water, for as yet my mother’s milk is both food and drink to me.”
Upon which the Wolf seized the Lamb and ate him up, saying, “Well! I won’t remain supper-less, even though you refute every one of my accusations.”
Moral: The tyrant will always find an excuse for his tyranny.
(Wolf-in-Panda's-clothing image from Nelson Minar)
UPDATE: Here's a blast from the not-so-distant past. Taiwan's Chinese Communist-funded newspaper, the China Post, argues that Vietnam is solely to blame for tensions in the South China Sea.
Yeah, you heard me: Vietnam. Not China. (Please don't ask the paper to speak ill of Communist governments that lavish it with heaps of advertorial money…)
It's true that Vietnam is trying to manufacture a war scare over the Spratly Islands, a large archipelago that rides atop very rich oil reserves in the South China Sea.
The way the paper makes common cause with their ultra-nationalist brethren across the Taiwan Strait should raise a few eyebrows, too:
We are positive that no armed conflict will occur over the Spratlys. Despite the hollow saber-rattling, Vietnam and the Philippines have no stomach for a war against Taiwan and China. [emphasis added]
Taiwan AND China. Interesting proposal for a military alliance there.
Yet another reason why Taiwan will never be offered F-16C/D fighters…
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