 Share This- Yeongju Journal - Rural South Koreans' Global Links Grow, Nourished by...
 Jun 30, 8:25am  (1 review) asia, korea-television-satellite http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/30/world/...- Lee Si-kap, a shy farmer living in this central South Korean town, holds a record: He owns more satellite dishes than any other South Korean -- 85 of them, receiving 1,500 satellite television channels from more than 100 countries, some as far away as South Africa and Canada.
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- The New York Times & Log In
- Feb 13, 2:43pm (3 reviews) economics, japan, usa, money, finance http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/busine...
- The Obama administration is committing huge sums of money to rescuing banks, but the veterans of Japan's banking crisis have three words for the Americans: more money, faster.
The Japanese have been here before. They endured a "lost decade" of economic stagnation in the 1990s as their banks labored under crippling debt, and successive governments wasted trillions of yen on half-measures.
Only in 2003 did the government finally take the actions that helped lead to a recovery: forcing major banks to submit to merciless audits and declare bad debts; spending two trillion yen to effectively nationalize a major bank, wiping out its shareholders; and allowing weaker banks to fail.
By then, Tokyo's main Nikkei stock index had lost almost three-quarters of its value. The country's public debt had grown to exceed its gross domestic product, and deflation stalked the land. In the end, real estate prices fell for 15 consecutive years.
More alarming? Some students of the Japanese debacle say they see a similar train wreck heading for the United States.
"I thought America had studied Japan's failures," said Hirofumi Gomi, a top official at Japan's Financial Services Agency during the crisis. "Why is it making the same mistakes?"
Many American critics of the plan unveiled Tuesday by Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner said the plan lacked details. Experts on Japan found it timid -- especially given the size of the banking crisis the administration faces.
"I think they know how big it is, but they don't want to say how big it is. It's so big they can't acknowledge it," said John H. Makin, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, referring to administration officials. "The lesson from Japan in the 1990s was that they should have stepped up and nationalized the banks."
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- EARTHSHIP SUMMIT - Montreal 2010
- Jan 29, 11:20am
 (1 review) activism, ecology, environment, nature http://earthshipsummit.com/ - "The EARTHSHIP summit creates an enromous Global Village, by bringing together an alliance of 300 million schools, NGOs, businesses, governments, leaders, artists & individuals from around the world (young and old) to share ideas, form alliances and take action on saving planet earth & humanity."
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- http://spaceweather.com/eclipses/26jan09b/Gradient-Lok1.jpg
- Jan 27, 7:09pm (19 reviews) astronomy, sun, eclipse, malaysia, moon http://spaceweather.com/eclipses/26jan09...
"Solar Partial Eclipse in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia, with KLCC & KL Tower as background, & montage in Photoshop to put all into 1 photos, every interval of sun is 5 minutes."
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- http://iht.com/articles/2009/01/23/arts/design26.1-412695.php
- Jan 25, 1:36pm (1 review) science, technology http://iht.com/articles/2009/01/23/arts/...
- Which finger do you use to press a doorbell? Your answer will reveal your age almost as accurately as wrinkly hands, the way you dance, whether and where you've been pierced, and if you think "being poked" means a) a jab in the ribs, b) saying "hi" online, or c) something unmentionable.
If you're over 30, you'll probably press a doorbell with your index finger, while anyone under 30 may well use their thumb. That's because they've spent so much time flexing their thumbs when sending text messages on cellphones and gunning down baddies on games consoles. Thanks to all of that exercise, those thumbs have become stronger, nimbler and more dexterous, which is why they're likelier to use them more than their index fingers.
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- White House Farmer & Vote
- Jan 23, 11:28am (1 review) agriculture, obama, gardening, food, farming http://whitehousefarmer.com/?page_id=119
- There's always been a White House Chef... Now is the time for a White House Farmer... Nominations OPEN!
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- The New York Times & Log In
- Jan 20, 6:52pm (1 review) family, obama, sociology, usa, ethnicity http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/21/us/pol...
- For well over two centuries, the United States has been vastly more diverse than its ruling families. Now the Obama family has flipped that around, with a Technicolor cast that looks almost nothing like their overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly Protestant predecessors in the role. The family that produced Barack and Michelle Obama is black and white and Asian, Christian, Muslim and Jewish. They speak English; Indonesian; French; Cantonese; German; Hebrew; African languages including Swahili, Luo and Igbo; and even a few phrases of Gullah, the Creole dialect of the South Carolina Lowcountry. Very few are wealthy, and some -- like Sarah Obama, the stepgrandmother who only recently got electricity and running water in her metal-roofed shack -- are quite poor.
"Our family is new in terms of the White House, but I don't think it's new in terms of the country," Maya Soetoro-Ng, the president's younger half-sister, said last week. "I don't think the White House has always reflected the textures and flavors of this country."
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- http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/01/19/news/beijing.1-410734.php
- Jan 19, 10:48am (2 reviews) architecture, china, history, art, news-feature http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/01/19/n...
- The destruction of this 800-year-old city usually proceeds as follows: the Chinese character for "demolish" mysteriously appears on the front of an old building; the residents wage a fruitless battle to save their homes; and quicker than you can say "Celebrate the New Beijing," a wrecking crew arrives, often accompanied by the police, to pulverize the brick-and-timber structure.
But before another chunk of ancient Beijing disappears entirely, a hospice administrator named Li Songtang can often be found poking around the rubble, looking for remnants that honor what was among the world's best-preserved metropolises until a merciless wave of redevelopment gained the upper hand.
Since the 1970s, when Mao inspired his Red Guards to pummel every "reactionary" Confucius temple and Ming Dynasty statue they could find, Li has been salvaging architectural remnants and stowing them away, sometimes at considerable risk.
Manchu hitching posts. Ornate wooden doorways. A giant granite horse that graced an emperor's palace. These and thousands of other objects fill Li's warehouse and spill across the grounds of the hospice he runs in the western suburbs of Beijing.
Every item has a tale. That Song Dynasty lintel etched with a frenzy of folk scenes? Pulled from a pig sty. The lacquered screen that tells the history of a clan of scholars? Fished from the burn pile.
The most historically significant items are displayed in his private museum, where every Sunday he can be found leading tours and exhorting people to cherish the old before it is too late. "For 50 years I've been watching the destruction of this magnificent city," he'll say in admonishment. "We've been treating history like garbage."
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- The New York Times & Log In
- Jan 19, 9:42am (1 review) military, usa, jobs, ecoomics http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/19/us/19r...
- Sean D. O'Neil, a 22-year-old who stood shivering outside an Army recruitment office in St. Louis, said he was forgoing plans to become a guitar maker for now, realizing that instruments are seen as a luxury during a recession. Mr. O'Neil, a Texas native, ventured to St. Louis for an apprenticeship but found himself $30,000 in debt. Joining the Army, his Plan B, was a purely financial decision. With President-elect Barack Obama in office, he expects the troop levels in Iraq to be lowered.
Going to war, although likely, feels safer to him. "I'm doing this for eight years," he said. "Hopefully, when I get out, I'll have all my fingers and toes and arms, and the economy will have turned around, and I'll have a little egg to start up my own guitar line."
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- Godfrey Hodgson on Americas Deluded Sense of Self - ChronicleReview.com...
- Jan 8, 11:09am (1 review) political-science, usa, international-relations, world http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=...
- "I'm running the risk of being tarred and feathered," Godfrey Hodgson says from his home in London. He is speaking about the potential fallout from his new book, The Myth of American Exceptionalism (to be published this month by Yale University Press), an assault on the deep-rooted American belief that the United States is morally and politically superior to other nations. The country has embraced a "boilerplate and pompous version of American exceptionalism," he says, that is "a dangerous basis for national policy."
He accuses iconic historians like Frederick Jackson Turner, Perry Miller, and Daniel J. Boorstin of laying the foundations of that widespread belief by encrusting American history "with accretions of self-congratulatory myth." Recent scholars may have provided a more nuanced account, but the narrative of exceptionalism, Hodgson argues, continues to shape the American popular -- and political -- imagination. And in the past few decades, a deafening chorus of intellectuals, commentators, and politicians has insisted that America be not only admired but also worshiped. According to those apostles of exceptionalism, the United States is a nation of unrivaled virtue, a chosen land with a special destiny and duty to spread liberty, democracy, and the rule of law -- "a calling from beyond the stars to stand for freedom," in the words of President Bush, exceptionalist par excellence. Intoxicated by an exalted sense of national purpose, more and more Americans are "attracted to a national ideology that cast them as redeemers of a sinful world," writes Hodgson, a British journalist and an associate fellow at the Rothermere American Institute, at the University of Oxford.
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