Tag: China

Winnie The Pooh And Bieber, Too

pooh

I’ve seen some hardcore people in my time, but for the record, Justin Bieber isn’t one of them.  Except — oops! — apparently, he is.  Last week, the powers-that-be in the People’s Republic of China banned Bieber for — uh — “bad behaviour.”  (So, play nice, children — or China spank.)  Actually, with lyrics like “Baby, baby, baby, baby, baby” I can see China’s point, but just how subversive can a punk kid from Canada be?  Canada is, after all, the Land of the Bland.  We say “Sorry” as a greeting.  Of course, this comes hard on the heels of China’s banning that other badass, Winnie the Pooh*.  I’m still laughin’ about that one.  Bieber now joins a pretty select group of notorious troublemakers.  They include Harrison Ford (who, as Han Solo, was indeed, a member of the Rebel Alliance) Brad Pitt (who once made a movie called Seven Years in Tibet, a place China says doesn’t exist) and Richard Gere because — well — Richard Gere.  They’ve also banned Sharon Stone, but it’s just her movies that are unwelcome in the Middle kingdom. She can show up anytime (assuming she keeps her legs crossed.)

Over the years, along with Iran and North Korea, China has been in the forefront of state-sponsored censorship.  They’ve banned — or thrown in prison — all the usual suspects: poets, painters, writers, Nobel Prize winners, and generally anybody with an opinion who doesn’t keep their head down.  They’ve also banned Google, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and all the other stalwarts of Western social media — plus a myriad of Western movies and television programs — including, oddly enough, The Big Bang Theory. (I guess Sheldon is a jackass in any language.)  Of course, like all dictatorships, China has also bans books — thousands and thousands of books — and I suppose this is where things get serious.  However, I have a lot of trouble not laughing at a regime that feels the need to ban Alice in Wonderland and Dr. Seuss’ Green Eggs and Ham.  I can just hear the proclamation:
Will you ban Green Eggs and Ham?
Yes, I’ll ban it, if I can
I will ban it in Beijing
I will ban it in Nanjing
I will ban it here and there
I will ban it everywhere
Yes, I’ll ban Green Eggs and Ham
In Hong Kong, Szechuan and Hunan

*BTW, Winnie the Pooh’s offence was that people were using him as a caricature of President Xi Jinping, the guy who’s currently sitting on the Dragon Throne and running the show on the Yangtze.  Clearly, dictators don’t like people laughing at them.

There Is News Beyond Tr**p

In the big wide world of ours, there are tons of things going on that don’t include President What’s-His-Name.  In the great mediagasm journalists are having with the guy, here are a few things you might have missed.

news-world

In Mexico, the American DEA found a catapult that drug dealers were using to fling narcotics across the border — I assume marijuana.  And this wasn’t just your average medieval rock-tosser, either — the thing was huge.  There’s an “A” for ingenuity in there somewhere, but honestly, why didn’t anybody notice?  I can pick out where my car is parked with Google Earth, and one would think government satellite surveillance was a little bit more sophisticated than that.  But I guess it’s the same old story: when you don’t need a catapult, they seem to be everywhere, but the day you’re looking for one, they’re nowhere to be found.

Apparently, China has discovered that they have a gigantic gender imbalance.  They estimate that, by the end of the decade, there will be 30 million more men in China than women.  To put things into perspective, that’s more single men than the entire population of Austria, Switzerland and Sweden — combined.  The Chinese call them “leftovers,” and there are a number of academic studies trying to figure out how and why this happened.  But honestly, does it matter?  (Toothpaste out of the tube, etc. etc.)  Unfortunately, nobody is addressing the elephant in the room– which is what do you do with 30 million horny men, bubbling over with enough testosterone to melt the polar ice caps?  After all, baseball and cold showers can only do so much!

Oddly enough, the same day China admitted their gender situation, Playboy decided to bring boobs back to its pages.  Coincidence? Yeah, probably!  Pen and paper magazines continue their trudge to the grave, and a little nudity isn’t going to stop that for a nanosecond.  But there’s no law against full frontal irrelevance, I guess.

And finally, my favourite:

Grace Mugabe, wife of 92 year old President Robert Mugabe, who’s been running and ruining the beautiful country of Zimbabwe since 1980, was in the news.  (Honestly, I didn’t know he was married to anything but evil.)  Anyway, she maintains that her husband is so popular in Zimbabwe that, if he died, he could run for president as a corpse and still win the election.  Strange as this sounds, it actually happened — in Missouri, in 2000.  Incumbent Republican Senator John Ashcroft was beaten by Democrat Mel Carnahan who died in a plane crash two weeks before the election.  What a major kick in the self esteem!  When your opponent is dead, and he’s the one who gets elected — well — that pretty much seals the deal that the people of Missouri don’t want you around, John.  All’s well that ends well, though, because in 2001, President George W. Bush appointed Ashcroft Attorney General.  And we all lived happily ever after.

John Kerry, Korea and The Dragon Throne

korea8Do you ever wonder what happened to Kim Jong-un?  He’s that North Korean guy with all the nuclear weapons.  Believe it or not, it was just three weeks ago that he was striding around threatening to rain fire and hell on anything and anybody from Seoul to Guam (and all points beyond) unless he got what he wanted, which, BTW, was never made clear.  It actually got so serious that President Obama sent in some military ordinance — with real people inside.  So what happened?  Did he just take his finger off the trigger and go further out to lunch?  Maybe, but I don’t think so.  Even though I don’t have a direct line to the inner workings of American foreign policy (who does?) this is what I figure happened.

Okay, you do remember John Kerry?  He’s the guy who took Hillary’s job at the US State Department so she could run for President.  John’s been kicking around politics since the 70s and Washington since the mid 80s.  He was never what you’d call a go-to guy though.  After all, when it came to the biggest political decision of his career (Who’s going to be my Vice President?) he chose John Edwards.  Clearly, Kerry’s not exactly a fellow who does his homework.  Anyway, John’s job description comes with a couple of pages on nuclear crisis, so when Kim Jong whoever started cutting up rough, he packed his suitcase and headed for Asia.  After a couple of whistle stops in Korea and Japan (to reassure the locals that America would kick the snot out of Kimmie if it came to it) John went to China.  This is where it gets tricky.  Nobody in their right mind would suggest that the Secretary of State of the United States of America (President Obama’s personal representative on Earth) had been summoned to appear before the Dragon Throne.  However, a couple of Saturdays ago, there John Kerry was, all smiles and hairdo, standing around Beijing,korea7 diplomatic hat in hand.  Ostensibly, John was there to discuss the Korean problem with his Chinese counterpart, Yang Jiechi.  Sounds legit, right?  Maybe, but I don’t think so.  Personally, I think the Chinese wanted something.  Otherwise, they wouldn’t have let Kim Jong-un shoot his mouth off in the first place.  Secretary Kerry was there to find out what.

From here, nobody but John Kerry, Yang Jiechi and Wikileaks will ever actually know what went on — secret private talks are, after all, secret private.   However, unless you flunked history in high school (twice) you do understand that, despite a century of assurances to the contrary, secret protocols between nations do happen — with surprising regularity.  So it’s interesting to note that a couple of curious things have occurred since John and Jiechi put their heads together in the Forbidden City.  First, the Chinese government has suddenly jumped on the environmental protection bandwagon — which is totally odd because, less than a month ago, their official Party line was Climate Change was something the West had made up to piss them off.  Remember these are the folks who spray-painted the Beijing grass green to impress the IOC.  Secondly, and most curious of all, Kim Jong-un, who, two weeks ago, was mad enough to nuke a basket of puppies, has fallen off the radar entirely.  He doesn’t seem to want to vaporize his neighbours anymore, kill Imperialists, play with his warheads or even test his missiles.  In fact, aside from chillin’ with Dennis Rodman, nobody’s heard from the guy.

korea5So what caused these momentous events?  There are three possibilities.  One, John Kerry is the greatest diplomat since Coenus the Weary convinced Alexander the Great to give it up at the Ganges River, turn around and go home.  That’s a nice idea, but I don’t think so (given John’s track record.)  Two, the Chinese suddenly discovered their Inner Altruist and couldn’t wait to share it with the world.  Again, a nice thought but…  Or, finally, three, the Chinese (who, as you know, play puppeteer to Kim Jong-un’s marionette) got what they wanted.  Then, happy as a clam, they told Kim to sit down and shut up, tossed Kerry some Climate Change rhetoric to take home and called it a day.  If you go with Door #3 on this one, I don’t know what you bet — but I think you won.

But the most curious thing of all is, even with a multibillion-dollar budget it appears as if the folks down at Foggy Bottom have never seen fit to buy a copy of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War — and if they have they sure as hell have never read it.