28 November 2010

Obama Admin = Playing Amateur with State Secret Docs

See the wikileak document dump.

Why are they unable to secure these critical documents of state? Huh?

Political Violence in Chinese Taipei

From the Taipei Times


Sean Lien (連勝文), one of former vice president Lien Chan’s (連戰) sons, was shot last night as he was campaigning for a Sinbei councilor candidate in Yonghe (永和), Taipei County. He was hit in the face and was rushed to National Taiwan University Hospital.

Yonghe police precinct said a 29-year-old man was also shot at the rally, but died on the way to a hospital.

In a press briefing at 10:05pm, the hospital said Sean Lien, was still undergoing surgery, but was not in a life-threatening situation. He was conscious when he arrived at the hospital, officials said.

Witnesses said a man burst onto the stage at Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) councilor candidate Chen Hung-yuan’s (陳鴻源) rally and fired a shot at Sean Lien shortly after he took the stage and as he was about to address the crowd. The bullet hit the left side of his face, eyewitnesses said.

A man named Lin Cheng-wei (林正偉) was quickly apprehended by police. The motive for the shooting is under investigation.

Pan-green politicans condemned the shooting, while KMT politicians condemned it as “election violence.”

Lien Chan joined Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin’s (郝龍斌) rally after visiting his son at the hospital. Choking back tears as he discussed his son, Lien Chan urged supporters to support Hau and the KMT’s other mayoral candidates.

“My son is in the hospital right now and the condition is unknown. I will say no more. May God bless Taiwan and the public,” he said.

President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), who doubles as KMT chairman, later walked onto the stage amid cheers from the crowd. Ma pledged to fight against such an “unforgettable example of violence.”

Late last night, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Taipei mayoral candidate Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) held a press conference to condemn violence, “at any time and any place.”

“We are praying for the victims,” he said. “We understand that the police have already arrested a suspect and ask them to release the truth about the incident immediately.”

However, he said political parties should avoid trying to take advantage out of the shootings, adding that he hoped “society can return to normal as soon as possible.”

26 November 2010

Death of a (Vietnamese) Salesman

Source: San Jose Mercury


Le Van Ba was a successful businessman in Vietnam when war forced his family to start over from scratch in a foreign country. Arriving in San Jose in 1980, Le and his children within three years had launched Lee's Sandwiches, a chain that now has more than 30 Vietnamese sandwich shops in California, plus locations in four other states.

Le Van Ba, who died of cancer Tuesday at the age of 79, was the patriarch of a creative and industrious clan that includes his wife, Nguyen Thi Hanh, and their five sons and four daughters. The family landed in San Jose as refugees, with Le becoming the Ray Kroc of Vietnamese sandwiches by adapting the American fast-food restaurant principles of Kroc's McDonald's to the delicious

meats, pates and spices of Vietnamese cuisine, all served on freshly baked French-style baguettes.

With seven shops in San Jose, a growing footprint in Southern California and across the Southwest, the chain launched by Le Van Ba and his family is among the first Vietnamese enterprises to cross over into mainstream malls and shopping centers.

"His most important contribution was taking something that was a mom and pop concept of a Vietnamese sandwich and mainstreaming it, using the McDonald's or Burger King model and popularizing it," said De Tran, publisher of VTimes, a Vietnamese language newspaper in San Jose. Le was also known in the Vietnamese community for his philanthropy, Tran said.

Before the war, Le Van Ba was a


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self-made man who owned a successful sugar plant in southern Vietnam. "Everybody used to call him the 'King of Sugar,' " his oldest daughter, Annie Le, said Thursday. "He was very famous at the time in Vietnam."

So when Le and his family came to San Jose 30 years ago after short stays in New Mexico and Monterey, Annie Le said her father was determined to work for himself, not as an employee in somebody else's business.

That meant family members had to teach themselves a new business, with the two oldest sons, Chieu Le and Henry Le, working with their father to operate a Vietnamese lunch wagon that ultimately grew into a successful catering business, Lee Industrial Catering.

After his wife phoned a relative in Vietnam who had been a chef to get some recipes for meats and pate, the family worked hard to refine those recipes. The first permanent Lee's Sandwiches opened in June 1983 at 264 E. Santa Clara St.

"I think he's very open-minded," Annie Le said of her father. "He kept saying to us, 'We can always learn something new from other people.' It's the same thing with our recipes. In the beginning, we didn't know much, so customers would come in and say they wanted to eat a certain item, and they told us how to make it. And we listened to the customers, and then we'd add that item to our menu."

About a decade ago, Minh Le, a grandson of Le Van Ba who was then a 21-year old business student at San Jose State, suggested the family adapt the principles of American fast-food companies such as McDonald's to its ethnic Vietnamese fare.

Since then, the Lee's Sandwiches chain has expanded rapidly across the Bay Area and Orange County and even to places as far-flung as Oklahoma City, Dallas, Houston and Chandler, Ariz.

Annie Le said her father was open-minded enough to listen to the ideas of his U.S.-born grandson, and the first modern, American-style store opened in 2001. Tragically, Minh Le was killed in a traffic accident a few months before that first modern store opened.

Through it all, Annie Le said Le Van Ba was the leader of the family. Laughing at the memory, she said he used to counsel his sons and daughters with a Vietnamese saying that, roughly translated, means that if you let somebody else get ahead of you in business, you might not like the smell emanating from them. A more polite translation, Annie Le said, is 'When you think something will be good, you better jump in and do it right away.' "

"I think he had a strength of will. He's very determined, and when he wanted to do something, he would just go ahead and do it," she said. "Almost up to the day he passed away, he'd go to work, because when he was younger he was very poor, so he's very scared of being poor. He enjoyed working. We told him, 'Dad, now you have money, and you can travel wherever you want. Enjoy your life.' "

But, she said, "working at the store, that was his happiness."

Even as he submitted to radiation and chemotherapy treatments in recent months, he generally would still check in on the same day at one of the laundromats he owned.

Le Van Ba is a former president of an association for people who came to the South Bay from the An Giang province in Vietnam.

"I think he was known as a kind and generous person," Tran said of Le Van Ba, particularly his philanthropy around organizations close to the Hoa Hao sect of Buddhism.

In addition to his wife and children, Le Van Ba is survived by 20 grandchildren.

The family is planning a public viewing at Oakhill Funeral Home & Memorial Park on Curtner Avenue from 3 p.m. to 8:30 p.m., Dec. 3 and from 9 a.m. to 10:45 a.m., Dec. 5, prior to burial.

"I think the most important thing we learned from him," Annie Le said, is that in business, "you have to be honest and trustworthy. You have to keep your promise -- whatever you say, you have to do. He was successful in the past because whatever he said, he had to do it."

25 November 2010

CHINA KICKS ASS AT ASIAN GAMES




HERE'S THE MEDAL COUNT. THE GAMES ARE CURRENTLY UNDER WAY IN GUANGZHOU, GUANGDONG PROVINCE, PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA...

24 November 2010

US Dollar Dead; Chinese RMB Now King



Pivotal moments in history result from crises. Great Britain came out of World War 1 exhausted and maimed. It had lost its status as the world's hegemonic power. The United States, with its massive industries, great institutions unmolested by socialists and illiberals as well as a large and industrious population, was the China of its time.

After World War 2, Europe, Japan and much of Asia lay in ruins. The United States was virtually untouched by the physical ravages of war. It became the only economic power in the world and one of two great military giants.

It is now apparent that when it's all said and done, the United States, like Britain after WW 1, will limp out of the current massive global recession, which it precipitated. The US economic hegemony will be replaced by China's. In this new world order, the US dollar becomes a secondary currency like the Japanese yen (or it could even play a lesser role in the world economy like the Australian dollar and the South Korean won). The Chinese Renminbi will be the currency of global economic hegemony.

In the immortal words of Nelson Muntz, "ha ha!"

-- Bian-lian Huang, associate editor, the Fairbank Report

23 November 2010

Here's the video...

Warning: Prurient and erotic video below.

http://www.oneasianworld.com/2010/06/indonesian-pop-singer-ariel-caught-up-in-sex-tape-scandal/

Sexy Indo Hunk On Trial for Sex Video

By BNO News

JAKARTA, INDONESIA (BNO NEWS) -- Indonesian pop star Nasriel Irham on Monday appeared in court after two homemade sex tapes released on various websites resulted in him being charged under Indonesia's 2008 Anti-Pornography Law.

Irham, 29, who is also known as Ariel, is suspected of appearing in two separate homemade sex tapes involving his current girlfriend, TV presenter Luna Maya, 27, who accompanied Irham to court, and actress Cut Tari, 33, known for her roles in Indonesian soap operas.

All three have denied accusations, but only Irham - who has been in custody since surrendering to police on June 22 - is facing charges, which include distribution of pornography.

Irham, frontman for Indonesian music group "Peterpan," has been dubbed by various media outlets as "Peterporn," as the scandal has stirred Indonesians nationwide.

While the hard-line Islamic People's Forum demand harsh punishment against Irham, several hundred fans gathered outside the court, screaming in support of his liberation.

If convicted, Irham could be facing a prison term of up to 12 years and a fine of up to Rr 6 billion ($672,000).

(Copyright 2010 by BNO News B.V. All rights reserved. Info: sales@bnonews.com.)

WAR!

NK shells SK with artillery fire. Beautiful noses seen running for their lives :-)

22 November 2010

"Undocumented American" Guilty of Chandra Levy's Murder

Whilst the illiberal media were targeting poor Congressman Gary Condit, they actually covered up this illegal alien's murderous deed. Shame on you, leftist, left-winged, Communist mainstream media!!!


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/22/AR2010112203633.html

21 November 2010

TSA molests boy

Certain Things Don't Change in China

Source: pekingduck.org


LOUHE, China — Xu Lindong, a poor village farmer with close-cropped hair and a fourth-grade education, knew nothing but decades of backbreaking labor. Even at age 50, the rope of muscles on his arms bespoke a lifetime of hard plowing and harvesting in the fields of his native Henan Province.

But after four years locked up in Zhumadian Psychiatric Hospital, he was barely recognizable to his siblings. Emaciated, barefoot, clad in tattered striped pajamas, Mr. Xu spoke haltingly. His face was etched with exhaustion.

“I was so heartbroken when I saw him I cannot describe it,” said his elder brother, Xu Linfu, recalling his first visit there, in 2007. “My brother was a strong as a bull. Now he looked like a hospital patient.”

Xu Lindong’s confinement in a locked mental ward was all the more notable, his brother says, for one extraordinary fact: he was not the least bit deranged. Angered by a dispute over land, he had merely filed a series of complaints against the local government. The government’s response was to draw up an order to commit him to a mental hospital — and then to forge his brother’s name on the signature line.

17 November 2010

Exam Anxiety in South Korea


As we write, South Korean high school students are taking the mother of all exams. Literally, their future rides on the results of this national college entrance examination. These kids -- and indeed their families -- have been preparing for this exam for years.

Parents have been known to engage in incessant prayer vigils as their children sit for the national exam. Airlines have been directed not to fly their planes during the listening portion of the exam, and there's a cottage industry selling goodies as well as good-luck charms to the examinees and their anxious family members.

Contrast this intensity with the cavalier attitude of the Americans toward the SAT exam, and we see why the USA is rapidly devolving into Argentina...

16 November 2010

South Korea's G-20 Disaster

South Korea’s HR disaster


THE ASIAN Forum for Human Rights and Development (FORUM-ASIA) strongly condemns the denial of entry and forced repatriation of seven Filipino human rights defenders who came to South Korea to attend the Seoul G20 International People’s Conference organized by Put People First! Korean People’s G20 Response Action. We note that all of them were granted South Korean visas prior to travel, but they were prohibited from entering the country because their names were on a blacklist.

In addition to this, we also learned that a number of human rights defenders from Pakistan, Nepal and Indonesia who were invited to attend the same conference were refused South Korea visas without reasonable grounds.

The seven Filipinos are well-known activists in the region on issues of human rights and development. It is particularly ironic that Paul L. Quintos, policy and outreach director for IBON International, had been invited by the South Korean government to attend the G20 Civil Dialogue last October. This time, however, no explanation was given to them as to why they were blacklisted. We can only conclude that the denial of entry and deportation is an act of repression to curtail potential criticism of the G20 summit.

We are also highly concerned with the reports that the seven were denied access to Philippine embassy officials, physically harassed while in detention and bodily forced to board a plane back to the Philippines. We deplore this maltreatment by South Korean government officials. They violated the basic rights of the seven Filipinos.

The initiative of the government of South Korea (the first Asian country to host the G20 Summit) to include “development” as a new agenda item should be welcomed, but its actions in barring activists from developing countries, who are working on development and human rights issues, to participate in this important debate stand out in stark contradiction to its good initiatives.
FORUM-ASIA strongly urges the South Korean government to respect and protect human rights as host of the G20 Summit. The participation and the voice of human rights and development activists should be encouraged instead of being curtailed. No real development can be achieved without the participation of peoples and respect for human rights.


—YAP SWEE SENG,
executive director,
Asian Forum for Human Rights
and Development (FORUM-ASIA)

09 November 2010

Not-so-Great Britain Brings Opium to Chinese Summit

From Bloomberg.com

Cameron Risks Spat With Chinese by Wearing Poppy During Visit
By Robert Hutton - Nov 9, 2010 5:05 PM PT Tweet (11)LinkedIn Share

U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron resisted a request from Chinese officials yesterday to remove the poppy symbol that Britons wear every November in memory of their war dead during his visit to Beijing.

Poppies have been Britain’s symbol of remembrance since World War I, when the flowers grew on battlefields. The Royal British Legion sells paper poppies in November to raise funds for veterans in the run-up to Armistice Day on Nov. 11.

The flower has a different resonance in China, which fought and lost two Opium Wars with Britain in the 19th century. Those resulted in the U.K. forcing the Chinese to open their borders to trade, including in the narcotic derived from the poppy. Britain also gained the territory of Hong Kong, which was not handed back to China until 1997.

Two British officials familiar with the matter said the Chinese had requested the prime minister and his delegation remove the poppies from their lapels before they arrived yesterday at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, where Cameron was greeted by Premier Wen Jiabao and inspected an honor guard of the People’s Liberation Army. The U.K. government refused, on the grounds that the symbol was important to Britain.

This year is the 150th anniversary of the Second Opium War, which ended when the British and French armies arrived in Peking, as Beijing was then known, and destroyed the emperor’s Summer Palace to remind the Chinese of their defeat.

Boosting Trade Ties

Cameron’s two-day visit has focused on boosting trade ties, yesterday signing an accord improving access for U.K. companies to China’s securities markets. Rolls-Royce Group Plc signed a $1.2 billion order to provide 16 jet engines to China Eastern Airlines Corp., and Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc reached a deal with Guolian Securities Co. to underwrite bonds and shares.

The two governments also agreed to work together to improve financing for small companies. British companies will help build corporate and government bond markets, develop alternative investment vehicles and create an offshore market for the Chinese yuan.

Cameron travels to South Korea later today for the summit of the Group of 20 leading economies. He will mark Armistice Day tomorrow by visiting a memorial for British troops killed in the Korean War, where their opponents included the Chinese.

Cameron’s relationship with China got off to a rocky start even before he became prime minister, when he said during a television debate before the May 6 general election that uncertainty over China was one reason for the U.K. to keep its nuclear weapons.

British officials refused to confirm or deny yesterday that Cameron would raise the issue of jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, the winner of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, with the Chinese leadership. China’s flagship Communist Party newspaper, the People’s Daily, attacked the peace prize last week as a “political tool” that is “in tune with U.S. global strategy,” maintaining Chinese criticism of last month’s award.

To contact the reporter on this story: Robert Hutton in Beijing at rhutton1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: James Hertling at jhertling@bloomberg.net.

03 November 2010

There's Only One George F. Will

Washington Post


A recoil against liberalism

By George F. Will
Thursday, November 4, 2010

Unwilling to delay until tomorrow mistakes that could be made immediately, Democrats used 2010 to begin losing 2012. Trying to preemptively drain the election of its dangerous (to Democrats) meaning, all autumn Democrats described the electorate as suffering a brain cramp, an apoplexy of fear, rage, paranoia, cupidity - something. Any explanation would suffice as long as it cast what voters were about to say as perhaps contemptible and certainly too trivial to be taken seriously by the serious.

It is amazing the ingenuity Democrats invest in concocting explanations of voter behavior that erase what voters always care about, and this year more than ever - ideas. This election was a nationwide recoil against Barack Obama's idea of unlimited government.

The more he denounced Republicans as the party of "no," the better Republicans did. His denunciations enabled people to support Republicans without embracing them as anything other than impediments to him.

He had defined himself as a world-class whiner even before Rahm Emanuel, a world-class flatterer, declared that Obama had dealt masterfully with "the toughest times any president has ever faced" - quite a claim, considering that before the first president from Illinois was even inaugurated, seven of the then-34 states had seceded. Today's president from Illinois, a chronic campaigner and incontinent complainer who is uninhibited by considerations of presidential dignity, has blamed his difficulties on:
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George W. Bush, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, the Supreme Court, a Cincinnati congressman (John Boehner), Karl Rove, Americans for Prosperity and other "groups with harmless-sounding names" (Hillary Clinton's "vast right-wing conspiracy" redux), "shadowy third-party groups" (they are as shadowy as steam calliopes), the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and, finally, the American people. They have deeply disappointed him by being impervious to "facts and science and argument."

Actually, as the distilled essence of progressivism, he should feel ratified by Tuesday's repudiation. The point of progressivism is that the people must progress up from their backwardness. They cannot do so unless they are pulled toward the light by a government composed of the enlightened - experts coolly devoted to facts and science.

The progressive agenda is actually legitimated by the incomprehension and anger it elicits: If the people do not resent and resist what is being done on their behalf, what is being done is not properly ambitious. If it is comprehensible to its intended beneficiaries, it is the work of insufficiently advanced thinkers.

Of course the masses do not understand that the only flaw of the stimulus was its frugality, and that Obamacare's myriad coercions are akin to benevolent parental discipline. If the masses understood what progressives understand, would progressives represent a real vanguard of progress?

Of course the progressive agenda must make infinitely elastic the restraints imposed by the Founders' Constitution and its principles of limited government. Moving up from them - from the Founders and their anachronistic principles - is the definition of progress.

Recently, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter decided, as the president has decided, that what liberals need is not better ideas but better marketing of the ones they have: "It's a sign of how poorly liberals market themselves and their ideas that the word 'liberal' is still in disrepute despite the election of the most genuinely liberal president that the political culture of this country will probably allow."

"Despite"? In 2008, Democrats ran as Not George Bush. In 2010, they ran as Democrats. Hence, inescapably, as liberals, or at least as obedient to liberal leaders. Hence Democrats' difficulties.

Responding to Alter, George Mason University economist Don Boudreaux agreed that interest-group liberalism has indeed been leavened by idea-driven liberalism. Which is the problem.

"These ideas," Boudreaux says, "are almost exclusively about how other people should live their lives. These are ideas about how one group of people (the politically successful) should engineer everyone else's contracts, social relations, diets, habits, and even moral sentiments." Liberalism's ideas are "about replacing an unimaginably large multitude of diverse and competing ideas . . . with a relatively paltry set of 'Big Ideas' that are politically selected, centrally imposed, and enforced by government, not by the natural give, take and compromise of the everyday interactions of millions of people."

This was the serious concern that percolated beneath the normal froth and nonsense of the elections: Is political power - are government commands and controls - superseding and suffocating the creativity of a market society's spontaneous order? On Tuesday, a rational and alarmed American majority said "yes."

georgewill@washpost.com