Remember The Time?

Since sometime in late spring- around Memorial Day weekend and certain unspeakable events that happened twenty years ago around the first week of June- just about every Western blog has been blocked, leaving me unable to post anything without the help of a good proxy filter. Avoiding China's Great Firewall is not very difficult to do, but it's often a nuisance. I've been using Facebook and Twitter- two other blocked services- with much less frequency than the nearly hourly use to which I was accustomed. Like many other expats here, I was hoping this would all just blow over as the summer passed by notable anniversaries that could be exploited by overzealous internet users. Unfortunately, since then we've seen a steady stream of major blog-worthy events, of which several gave the monitors of the Great Firewall more cause to keep the current bans in place.

I fell ill and was treated at a Chinese hospital, giving me valuable insight into the current American health care clusterf*ck.

Michael Jackson died, which was a bummer but ultimately not world changing. His influence lasts, but them man was essentially irrelevant.

Chaos and violence in Xinjiang Province. The western province home to a substantial ethnic minority has been in a state of unrest due to ethnic and political tensions that spilled over into violence this July. Twitter got blocked again in the wake of this. I spoke to a guy from Xinjiang I know recently about this. He said that things out there are bad, but that his people are treated well in Shanghai. I found this curious, since many Chinese people I've spoken to stereotypically talk about Xinjiang people in racist stereotypes.

Friends and I formed a band and have our first concert scheduled for Novmember 4, the one year anniversary of the election of Barack Obama.

More ethnic tension across China as stabbings involving syringes and ethnic minorities occur.

I started working a second job as I learned the true face of working in China. Don't believe what you've read in the NYT or AP regarding working here. They're aloof.

Soon, we will have a major holiday: the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China. Things should get ridiculous.

The Yankees made it back to the playoffs.

Keep alive.

Dodgeball

Time to rub how great my job is in all of your faces again.

Yesterday, I got to teach a class on dodgeball. The timing of the event couldn't have been better, either, thanks to that Iraqi guy. President Bush's surprisingly good ducking skills were very helpful in illustrating proper technique:

White Goodman: "Hmm. Oh, I don't think I'm a lot dumber than you thought that I think that I thought I was once."

It was pretty weird how nonchalantly everyone's been taking this. Most of us in the office reacted to the video with a shrug, as though we were all thinking "I wouldn't mind doing that, myself." But I was more surprised that my students, having grown up in an authoritarian society, didn't really find it surprising to see objects being hurled at our President. I expected them to treat the situation with some severity- what if shoes had been thrown at Wen Jiabao or Hu Jintao?- but maybe Bush really is just that poorly regarded.

Anyway, the actual dodgeball was activity was great. If you're curious, I proved to everyone that sidearm totally dominates.

Great Depression 2: The Reckoning

For many years, my friends and I have joked that sequels always seem to be called "Blah Blah 2: The Reckoning." We looked it up once and found out that there has actually never been a sequel with this moniker. Regardless, we've gotten a lot of mileage out of this joke. People are always talking about the Great Depression these days; even I've been trying to get a copy of "The Grapes of Wrath". So it's only natural that we might consider this current financial crisis, now officially a recession (retroactive to one year ago), a sequel of sorts. People playing fast and loose with their money leads to people losing their homes. An inept president unable to solve the problem, with a charismatic, visionary successor. It's all there.

So it was only natural today that, upon opening up the New York Times this afternoon, I could not help but burst into laughter seeing the title of a story.


That's right folks, Great Depression 2: The Reckoning is here.

Or, at least, there. I've yet to actually meet someone really worried about the effects of the crisis here in China. We read in the news of the big steps the government is taking to spur domestic spending in the face of declining exports, but nobody seems to really be too nervous. People here are pretty big savers, and using a credit card is rare. From that side of the crisis, people here are in good shape. The bigger problem is simply the wake from other economies, and even that will affect other parts of China much more than Shanghai.

So, anyone looking for an escape... I've got a spare bedroom.

Baseball and Healthcare

Today, the New York Times printed a brilliant op-ed piece, co-written by former Republican Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, Democratic Senator from the state of Massachusetts, John Kerry, and General Manager of the Oakland A's, Billy Beane.

IN the past decade, baseball has experienced a data-driven information revolution. Numbers-crunchers now routinely use statistics to put better teams on the field for less money. Our overpriced, underperforming health care system needs a similar revolution. ("How to take American Health Care from Worst to First")

Americans always pull this BS attitude about how great our healthcare system is, even though it's clearly broken. "Try going to Canada and waiting," they always say. Frankly, I'd rather wait a little bit for a procedure than go into crippling debt in order to pay for it. But maybe that's just me.

Anyway, this piece is about how medical systems could apply sabermetrics in order to dramatically reduce costs and improve efficiency, which explains why Beane is a co-writer in the article. Gingrich and Kerry provide some serious bipartisan gravitas, as two incredibly bright people that come from opposite sides of the political spectrum.