“When the final accounting is done, 2014 will have been the most lethal year for global terrorism in the 45 years [since] such data has been compiled,” intoned National Intelligence Director James Clapper, speaking before the Senate Armed Services Committee last week. Of course, the director may have been lying, something Big Jim does on…
Tag: China
Solar Panels—the drama continues
Was ever an industry so fraught as the solar panel industry? Spectacular flameouts of Obama-subsidized, Obama-connected, state-of-the-art, industry-of-tomorrow outfits like the renowned though now alas defunct Solyndra, charges and counter-charges of “unlawful” subsidies (i.e., bigger, or at least more effective than ours) made by, among, and between the U.S., Europe, and China, and now perhaps the…
China, land of the future
A three-hundred foot section of a ramp leading to a 9.6-mile bridge over the Songhua River collapsed today, nine months after the bridge opened, the New York Times reports. It’s the sixth major bridge to collapse this year. Last year, a crash involving a brand-new high speed rail line cost the lives of 40 people….
Thomas Friedman, getting worser all the time
In his December 14 column, Thomas Friedman deplores China’s handling of the Nobel Committee’s decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo, now serving 11 years in jail for the crime of free speech. Noting that China would not allow Liu to attend the ceremony (not that surprising, really) and even went to…
Let them wear Nikes
Nice piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Mara Hvistendahl on “The Great Forgetting: 20 Years After Tiananmen Square”, via Arts & Letters. Seen largely through the eyes of Kang Zhengguo, author of Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China, who participated in the famous demonstrations, the article describes how the Chinese government dealt…