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About StumbleDNA StumbleDNA
31 Fun Treats To Make In A Muffin Tin
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Wow, beautifully simple! Love it! I have clipped this recipe and look forward to trying it for dinner for the kids. I think they'll eat broccoli happily if it's combined with cheese and shaped in little round balls!
The Perfect Baked Tofu — Healthy Tipping Point
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27 Ways To Make Your Groceries Last As Long As Possible
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46 Awesome String Light DIYs For Any Occasion
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Make a Lunch Box from a Milk Jug
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Tim Allen '78
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In his regular column in the university's alumni magazine,
President Tripathi answers student questions and updates the alumni
community—which includes more than 230,000 alumni living in
130 countries around the world—on timely UB issues.
"Preparing today's students—from pre-schoolers to
graduate students—to be the next generation of leaders in
their fields is a key priority at every level."
Satish K. Tripathi

subset: commoncrawl


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It is likely if you listen to country music, you know a song Tony Arata has written.
Jamie Laval, U.S. National Scottish Fiddle Champion and touring Celtic music performer, has followed his passion for music throughout the United States, Canada, Scotland, Europe and even Hong Kong.
The High Museum of Art, in collaboration with the Mauritshuis, The Hague, will present a major exhibition of Dutch masterworks in 2013, including Johannes Vermeer's iconic "Girl with a Pearl Earring," which has not been on view in the United States for more than 15 years and has never been seen in the Southeast.
Katie Deal and her husband, Chris Wright, will perform an outdoor benefit concert at 7 p.m. Saturday, June 29, at Gardens on Green.
Every song has a memory, especially the styling sounds of the 1940s and Frank Sinatra, which are coming to the mountains this month.
Music Pickin' on the porch will be Friday, July 5, in front of Inside Out Sautee, 2454 Ga. 17, in the Sautee Nacoochee Valley.
Brenau University Galleries is holding a reception today to celebrate two of its summer exhibitions. The reception will showcase the exhibitions "The Good Wife" and "Brenau Family Ties."
Independence Day is right around the corner along with several activities to do in North Georgia. From events in Gainesville to Blairsville, there will be something for the entire family. So, join one of the many activities going on in North Georgia.
Lakewood Baptist Church, Gainesville First United Methodist and Dunwoody United Methodist Church are honoring the military men and women this weekend with their own patriotic celebration.
The second concert of the 2013 summer series at Peachtree Pointe Amphitheater is Gainesville, Fla.,-bred band, Sister Hazel. The band takes the stage at 8 p.m. Saturday, June 22.
The North Georgia Chamber Music Festival, hosted by the University of North Georgia, will continue with its final two concerts Saturday, June 22, and Sunday, June 23.
The Humane Society of Northeast Georgia will celebrate 100 years in operation Saturday at Lakeview Academy in Gainesville. The humane society was founded in 1913 and is the oldest non-church, nonprofit organization in Northeast Georgia.
The Humane Society of Northeast Georgia is looking for pure bred pups to all-American mutts for its 2014 Life Savers Calendar.
"Days of Our Lives" star Chandler Massey, 22, won his second Daytime Emmy on Sunday night for his role as Will Horton. Massey won the outstanding younger actor award. He is the grandson of Gainesville residents Abit and Kayanne Massey and was attending the University of California, Los Angeles, when he was cast as Will Horton.
Aurora Theatre assembles the best children's performers in the region, bringing them to Gwinnett County for the Aurora Children's Playhouse series.
As the temperatures begin to rise and flowers begin to bloom, the Hall County Master Gardeners are putting the final touches on its upcoming annual Spring Garden Expo.
For the second year in a row, downtown Gainesville will be crammed with people and their four-legged friends for the Mutts on Main event.
Anglers of all ages will vie to be the best fisherman in the 26th annual Helen Trout Tournament this weekend.
While many pieces of art can fill a gallery, it is a rare to see one piece take over one room. But the University of North Georgia has such a piece of art.
The classic tale of a toymaker and his wooden puppet which comes to life will appear on stage in Dahlonega this weekend.
For outdoor enthusiasts, the annual Dahlonega Trail Fest is the event to attend in Northeast Georgia.
Book lovers may rejoice. The annual Literary Festival returns to Dahlonega once more with more than 20 authors schedule to attend this year.
As the Bowen Center for the Arts aims to entertain members and visitors from all across the region, it tries to teach area residents how to create their own arts, too.
Aiming to supply deceased veterans the honor they deserve and ease families' burden of transportation, Donald Ware began a company to provide these services with In Their Honor Transports.
"There's a bright golden haze on the meadow" and "the corn is as high as an elephant's eye" in "Oklahoma!"
Riverside Military Academy cadets will morph into the quirky and memorable characters of one of William Shakespeare's most well-known comedies this week.
Music lovers with an affinity for Johann Sebastian Bach and his other classical friends will be delighted with the upcoming concert from the Lanier Chamber Singers.
Walkers and runners of all shapes, sizes and fitness levels can trek across Riverside Military Academy as part of the annual Chamber Chase next week.
Pet owners seeking an affordable way to care for their four-legged friends will have their chance this weekend.
While the Easter fun comes a little early this year, the Hall County Parks and Leisure Department is having its festivities later in the day to accommodate its new event.
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I want to tell Anna to put the doll down. I want to explain that it isn't nice to bang Baby. I want to grab it and stuff it into my bag. But the reality is, she's not banging the doll all that hard, and it's not making much noise, hurting the doll or the seat, or, appearances aside, indicative of any deep-seated psychosis. Anna's just bored, and I'm mostly worried about what other people might think. Realizing this makes it easier. I don't comment on the doll-pummeling and instead offer her stickers. She takes them, and the doll, now at her feet, is spared. So are Anna and I, who have resolved the incident without confrontation.
Moderating my reaction and gently redirecting my daughter's behavior (or, in some cases, out and out ignoring it) is a parenting skill I've only recently -- and sporadically -- put into practice. It runs counter to my quick-response, take-action, talk-it-out personality. And the airplane episode was one of the easier ones for me to cope with. Sidelong glances from strangers and battered plastic babies I can ignore. But what about whining, or tantrums, or eleventh-hour bedtime begging? I know that my usual reactions -- exasperation, exhortation, submission -- will never put an end to these annoyances, and may in fact encourage them. Could I apply nonreaction to these as well?


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Emma Roberts Oscars Party 2013 Makeup
Oscars Beauty: Emma Roberts's Golden Eyes
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Emma Roberts attended the Elton John Oscars viewing party with a swath of golden shadow; her eye makeup rivaled the metallic shade of the iconic Academy statuettes. To complement the liquid gold on her eyes, she wore a pink lip color. A low, off-center chignon completed the look.
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tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91389949044112255762015-03-29T01:22:13.627-07:00fear of a red planetFOARPhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9138994904411225576.post-22110280423935487452015-02-07T12:01:00.002-08:002015-02-07T13:41:11.098-08:00Caribean Notes

Two weeks ago my wife and I flew back into a typically cold, wet and horrid British January after having spent a wonderful time sailing around the Eastern Caribbean on a much belated honeymoon. Before those warm memories are driven entirely from my head, I thought it best to run off a quick post about some of the places we went to, with the caveat that, having only visited these places for a couple of days each, I cannot possibly do each place full justice:

Cartagena, Colombia
The city was surprisingly nice, especially given that I had expected Colombia to be the roughest stop on our trip due to the security situation there. Whilst heavily armed police were in evidence in some parts of the city, however, the atmosphere was relaxed. There was both no sign of the FARC, nor any sign of concern about them.

The old town of Cartagena is a gem, if one with parts that were over-run by tourists. The gold museum, entry to which is free, was a great place to visit, and the food we had at a restaurant in the less-touristified Getsemani side of town was first rate.

Colon, Panama
Sad to say, Colon itself proved to be a quite forgettable and insalubrious town, and the area near the docks had a particularly threatening feel to it - police on bikes eventually rolled up on us as we wandered the streets near the port area to and told us in no uncertain terms that the area simply wasn't safe to walk around in.

By contrast, Portobelo, 40 minutes by taxi from Colon, was well worth a visit. Black vultures flocked around the fortresses of the old town, and the sun beat down upon the bay where, 400 years before, Sir Francis Drake (who the local museum labeled a "pirate") had been laid to rest. We were slightly concerned to see groups of locals with their faces painted black who were carrying long, heavy bats standing at points along our route to the town collecting money from passing cars, until we learned that they were actually celebrating a local festival and were likely dressed as the Black Christ of Porto Belo. The calamari we ate there was simply excellent.

San Lorenzo, across the Panama canal (the locks of which we also visited at Gatun) from Colon proved to be a ruined Spanish fortress standing in the middle of virgin jungle. Standing on the ramparts of the old fort and looking down on the bay below, where brilliant blue water lapped at the edge of dense jungle, you felt you knew what things would have been like there in the days of the conquistadors.

Whilst Colon itself was nothing special, one of my abiding memories of the whole trip was our leaving of the place - a cloud of black butterflies seemed to flock around the ship and followed us until we were several miles out to sea, a strange and beautiful experience. We caught one final, perplexing sight of land - a flare-gun had been fired in the city for some reason - and then as the flare fell, the sun set and we were off on the next part of our journey.

Montego Bay, Jamaica
It's a shame to say this, but the town of Montego Bay also proved to be more than a tad unmemorable, which combined with all the warnings we heard of robberies there (true or not, I don't know), and the continual and tiresome shouting from touts, put us off from doing too much exploring there. Except for a visit to the civic centre to see the exhibit about Sam Sharpe, who was hung by the British in the main square outside the museum 181 years ago this year, we saw little of the town.

Doctors Cave Beach, on the other hand, was immaculate. The coral reef which we snorkeled on was an exquisite riot of colour, with fish of every size wizzing over the coral. Everyone should swim on a coral reef at least once in their life.

Playa Del Carmen, Mexico
Roughly an hour's drive from Cancun, Playa Del Carmen is definitely part of the the same holiday resort world as it's more famous neighbour, which is not to say it was unpleasant. Actually, after the unsettling atmosphere of Colon and Montego Bay it was quite welcome.

The Mayan ruins at Tulum which we visited (we didn't have enough time to get to Chichen Itza) were spectacular, if seemingly over-run by iguanas. It was odd to think that only half the old buildings there have been explored properly, with many more remaining buried or un-protected in the surrounding mangrove swamp. My advice to anyone who wants to go there is to take your swimming clothes, as there is a beach directly below the main tower that makes an excellent break in the middle of a hot Mexican day.

Havana, Cuba
Having lived in China certain aspects of Cuba were not unfamiliar - the propaganda slogans one saw around Havana, for example. A visitor to the propaganda-packed Museum of The Revolucion (the exhibits of which bear only a tangential relation to history) would have found little to choose between it and some of the museums in Beijing.

Others aspects were, for me, quite new - the generally ruined state of many buildings in the capital was something I had heard about but not expected to be so omni-present. Even the North Korean-style monuments at Plaza De La Revolucion looking somewhat time-worn, with cracked and over-grown curb-sides.

Indeed, with the long queues we saw forming outside bakeries, the talk of shortages of basic necessities (although this may just have been a local version of the powdered milk scam - grifters and beggars were, despite what you may have read elsewhere, prominent on the streets of Havana), my wife was reminded of Poland in the 1980's. I have heard journalists ascribe the state of modern-day Cuba to the embargo, but pretty much every country governed according to Marxist economics has ended up this way (the main square in Wroclaw was almost falling apart by the end of the 80's), so colour me unconvinced.

All this aside Havana was definitely an interesting place to visit, many of the colonial-era buildings had a faded grandeur to them, and the people were very friendly. Sitting in the department store at Plaza Carlos III, which opened in 1997, and seeing the new developments and restorations near the port area, it looked like Cuba is on the way to eventually rejoining the modern world and ditching the insane economic policies of the communist era. The US's re-establishment of relations with Cuba will hopefully greatly hasten this. Whether democratic reforms will also occur is impossible to say, but the Cuban leadership is at least likely to try to copy the example of China, and seek to stay in power by resisting any political reform.

Georgetown, Grand Cayman
Going from the dilapidated worker's paradise to the beating heart of one of the world's biggest tax-havens and playground of the plutocrats was quite a switch. Happily the Cayman Islands (over which the British flag still flies) turned out to the nicest and friendliest place we stopped at in the whole trip. My must-dos from the Cayman Islands include the local craft beers, which were delicious, and any of its seafood establishments.

We left port behind a Royal Navy warship, and started our journey back to Gatwick.

[Picture: A local fishing boat in the San Blas islands off the coast of Panama, where a planned stop was cancelled due to rough seas] FOARPhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9138994904411225576.post-87858962151420682442015-02-07T09:47:00.002-08:002015-02-07T09:47:17.260-08:00As seen in Havana

FOARPhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9138994904411225576.post-80261405789481445782014-12-10T05:19:00.000-08:002014-12-10T05:19:08.159-08:00The United States: Rogue State.There's pretty much no other way to read the details of the CIA's torture program without coming to a very simple conclusion : that the United States is currently harbouring people known to have committed war crimes of every imaginable variety including many of the very worst short of genocide. Inevitably, other countries, including quite probably the UK, were involved also, but the main driving force behind these war crimes seems to have come from the US's incompetent, scared leadership of the time.

If the United States does not investigate these crimes and punish those reponsible it will be little better than Sudan, Syria, Iran, North Korea, the People's Republic of China, and other countries where human rights are regarded by those in power as having little consequence, except that we may at least hope that the torture program is no longer operational.FOARPhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9138994904411225576.post-56581331134879939442014-12-02T12:24:00.003-08:002014-12-02T12:24:40.597-08:00China refuses to allow MPs to visit Hong Kong: a modest proposal

Here's how Britain should respond to China's refusal to allow a parliamentary delegation to visit Hong Kong: just as unreasonably as China has acted in blocking a perfectly reasonable attempt to see whether the PRC was sticking to the terms of the 1984 Sino-British agreement.

Let's start by cancelling the student visas given to the children of high-ranking CCP officials like Bo Guagua and Yang Li. After all, the mantra that Britain is "no longer a colonial power" and shouldn't try to interest itself in Hong Kong and Chinese affairs, then this must cut both ways - there is no reason for Chinese officials to be sending their children to the UK to learn in Britain if British officials cannot visit China to investigate affairs there.

As a second move, let's close down all Confucius Institutes (Chinese state-funded educational centres, normally based in UK universities) that have been set up in the UK. As all good paranoiacs know, these are basically spy command centres, and tools of cultural imperialism. If "western values" that the UK's parliamentarians might spread like democracy are a threat to China, then by the same absurd logic, bodies designed to teach about Chinese cultural values may also be a threat to the UK.

Finally, if compliance with bilateral treaties between our two countries may not be monitored without accusations of "colonialism", then it is not only British officials who must be barred from travelling. There are a whole raft of treaties and exchange programs (e.g., this one) visit the UK: let's scrap the lot.

But of course, we're too reasonable to do any of this.

[Picture: the original modest proposal]

FOARPhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9138994904411225576.post-33167787372150981672014-10-29T06:54:00.001-07:002014-10-29T07:33:44.829-07:00Why North Korean tourism is ghoulish and wrong

As someone who has always had a slight yen to see what it is like to live in the world's last remaining Stalinist state, I have sometimes thought about visiting North Korea on tous such as those organised by the Koryo group. The one thing that has stopped me from doing so is the thought that foeign visitors may be used in North Korean propaganda as evidence of foreign support for the regime of the Kims, as well as the potential use of foreign currency earned from tourists in the Kim's various terrorism and drug-dealling enterprises.

A partial confirmation of this idea came in North Korean defector Park Yeon-Mi's live Q&A today in answer to a question about what the ordinary people of North Korea think about the outside world:

 Of course, beyond this, there is the distastefully ghoulish aspect of visiting a country which suffers under such a disasterous system merely for the rarity value, for the bragging rights of saying you saw a totalitarian dictatorship close-up. The nearest comparison would be taking photos at a deadly car-crash merely so you could say you had been there.

Am I wrong about this? At least it seems I am not the only one who thinks so.

[Photo: Tourists chat with local North Koreans. By Norman Harak, via Wiki] FOARPhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9138994904411225576.post-17779337531372926552014-10-16T14:32:00.000-07:002014-10-16T14:34:21.107-07:00Memories of Serbia

Last year, as my now-wife and I were driving down through the Balkans on our way from Poland to a friend's wedding in Greece, we stopped off in Belgrade for a few days, followed up by a night in Niš. The truly troubled countries of the Balkans - Bosnia and Albania - were saved for our return trip, but Serbia did not strike us as, in the main, a happy country, though it seems churlish to dwell on this given the welcome that many Serbs extended to us whilst we were there.

Most of the damage from the 1999 bombing had been repaired - though there still are ruined buildings in the centre of Belgrade - but there was an understandably suspicious attitude, at least at first, in much of the population to foreigners. Happily Poles are pretty welcome as brother-Slavs, and whatever initial suspicion people had towards us seemed to melt away when they heard we were travelling from Poland (I thought it best not to mention that I was British unless necessary).

One particularly striking memory was walking through the lovely quiet of a Belgrade night-time near the fortress, and looking across the Sava to see the massive Gazprom building with its giant neon sign on the other side. Here, it seemed to say, was an outpost of Russian influence in a country which, judging by the growing willingness of its people to display the EU flag and engage with the rest of Europe, was very slowly slipping away from them.

I claim no real expertise about Serbia or the Balkans as a whole, but still it is not a surprise, given what I saw there last year, to read of Serbian politicians simultaneously feting Putin in what appears to have been a trumped-up excuse to meet him with a parade (the anniversary it is supposed to celebrate does not even fall for four more days), whilst on the other hand talking of how they are irrevocably set on the road to Europe. The Serbs have already been through the grinder of war and want no more of it, though some of their people may have a sentimental attachment to the kind of politics of nationalistic pride amongst Slavs that Putin represents, and which he has used to slice bleeding chunks out of his Georgian and Ukrainian neighbours.

[Picture: The crypt in the church at Topola, final resting place of the Kings of Serbia, where we made a relaxing stop after Belgrade. The wine from the neighbouring vineyard was also well worth sampling]

FOARPhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9138994904411225576.post-26124790594952554232014-10-02T07:44:00.000-07:002014-10-02T12:31:48.006-07:00"Caged Birds Think Flying Is An Illness" - The Stand-Off In Hong Kong

And the beat goes on. Having basically provoked these mass demonstrations throughout Hong Kong through their rash bombardment of the of peacefully demonstrating students who originally turned out to protest Beijing's failure to allow the genuine democracy in the territory, the Hong Kong authorities have struggled to come up with an effective way of coping with them.

The Hong Kong authorities first bombastically condemned the demonstrations as illegal. As an example of the kind of world these people live in, Regina Ip's comments that the students actions could lead to another Tiananmen (rather than, I don't know, the authorities unleashing lethal military force on unarmed protesters? Like actually happened in Tiananmen in '89?) is a stunning example.

Then the Hong Kong authorities, perhaps realising they had over-stepped the mark, started to make more conciliatry and moderate statements. One un-named government official was quoted as saying that "Unless there's some chaotic situation, we won't send in riot police ... We hope this doesn't happen . . . We have to deal with it peacefully, even if it lasts weeks or months." The rather obvious plan being here to wait for the demontrations to make themselves unpopular through the disruption they might cause to the city.

Perhaps this was rather too conciliatory for Beijing's tastes, since the mainland authorities have since then made ever more strident warnings against continuining the demonstrations. A People's Daily editorial yesterday which has been compared to the infamous editorial threatening the demonstrators in Tiananmen square, described the consequences of continuing the demonstrations as "unimaginable". The Chinese Foreign ministry has followed suit by warning foreign diplomats to stay away from demonstrations (never mind that this may well be impossible, given the location of the demonstrators). Pictures of baton-rounds and tear-gas being distributed to police have been circulating on Twiter - the good reputation of the Hong Kong police, described by some as "Asia's Finest", has definitely taken something of a knocking over the last week or so.

Responses from ordinary people on the mainland to the demonstrations in Hong Kong have been somewhat unsympathetic, with this moronic cartoon doing the rounds (if widespread bloodshed does occur in Hong Kong, does anyone seriously think it will not be the Chinese authorities who initiate it?). This explanation has much truth in it -

Quote of the night regarding negative Mainland reaction to HK protests: "Caged birds think flying is an illness."
— Cam MacMurchy (@zhongnanhai) October 2, 2014
 Of course another explanation is that people on the mainland who are sympathetic to what is going on in Hong Kong are liable to be arrested.

Less easy to understand have been the attempts from some in the Sino-blogo-sphere to seemingly down-play the Hong Kong demonstrations.

One example of this is J Michael Cole's attempt to pooh-pooh the Hong Kong demonstrations as somehow a re-run of this year's much smaller Taiwanese demonstrations against the elected-but-unpopular KMT government's trade treaty with the PRC, a story which the world's news media largely ignored. The idea that a minor - if noisy - episode in Taiwan's domestic politics just wasn't as important as a people demonstrating for freedom from a dictatorship doesn't seem to have occured to him.

Another example is Kaiser Kuo's attempt to draw a straight line from pro-democracy demonstrations to anti-mainlander sentiment in Hong kong. I sure hope this wasn't intended as the smear it came off as.

And what is likely to be the outcome of these demonstrations? Predictions of an early exit for Hong Kong Chief Executive CY Leung have been doing the rounds, but I cannot believe that would happen as a direct sop to the demonstrators (not least because that would embolden them). Anyway, the CCP has been making supportive statements about heir picked man in Hong Kong - though their talk of "fully trust[ing]" Leung and being "very satisfied" with him do sound a bit like the kind of statements the board of a Premiership football club would make about an embattled manager right before sacking him. If Leung is going, they'll drop him at the end of his term in 2017 similar to the ousting of Tung Chee-hwa, not now.

Still less likely are any concessions from the CCP to allow meaningful elections in the territory. Whilst the broken promise of free elections is what led to these demonstrations in the first place, the CCP is no more likely to deliver on them now than it was, and seems fixed on its policy come-what-may. Pace  McMurphy, since the CCP decided what it was going to do ages ago - likely as long ago as 2007, conciliatory measures from the pro-democracy camp would do nothing to improve the system on offer, but then again neither are demonstrations - though this cannot be known for sure.

Most likely, sooner or later the demonstrators will quit, hopefully having given the Hong Kong authorities and the Chinese Communist Party the humiliation that they so richly deserve, but likely without having acheived much in the way of meaningful concessions. The pro-dem members of the Legislative Council will veto proposals that do not allow them to even run for election, thus preserving the current system where they may run but not be elected. Hong Kong will go back to business as usual - until the next time.

[Picture: Demonstrators occupying Harcourt Road, Admiralty hold a "candlelight vigil" with mobile phones. By Wiki user Citobun]FOARPhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9138994904411225576.post-88514737944984280372014-09-28T11:26:00.000-07:002014-09-28T11:32:38.681-07:00This Not What Democracy Looks LikeThousand of peaceful demonstrators in Hong Kong gathered to protest Beijing's failure to allow meaningful democratic elections in the territory are scattered with tear-gas, whilst Chinese state television reportedly tries to explain the events as a mass celebration of the national holiday. Words fail.FOARPhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9138994904411225576.post-1633911169915637522014-09-20T10:06:00.000-07:002014-09-21T14:11:06.049-07:00This Is What Democracy Looks Like

So the results are in, the ballots counted, the results accepted, and the Union preserved by a healthy, if not totally overwhelming margin of nearly 11%. A region voted on its independence without - Moscow take note - the requirement of thousands of Kalashnikov-wielding thugs invading and declaring a suspiciously massive majority for one side.

The cause of Scottish independence has obviously seen a set-back here, though they'll long talk about their 1.6 million votes for an independent Scotland, and anyway thrive on historical remembrances of what might have been going right back to 1707 if not earlier. Unionists like myself cannot rest too easy since 45% of voters voting against the Union indicates that many Scots do not agree that preserving the Union is in their interest - there's certainly work to be done.

Regionalists in the rest of the UK are now beginning to take note of the new powers promised to Scotland. I personally think this will be flash in the pan - other experiments in devolution in England outside of London have been met with outright apathy (particularly the experiment in elections for crime commissioners, which cannot even raise a 20% turnout). The idea that Scottish-style politics will energise the rest of the UK is an odd one when you consider the low turnouts typically seen in Holyrood elections.

For myself, though, playing very, very small part in keeping the Union together has been a revelation. The next likely referendum in the UK will be those on EU membership, promised if there is a Conservative government elected in the next parliament (though the Conservatives are committed at the moment to staying in), and I intend to help out in them too.

[Picture: Scottish independence referendum results - red is "No", green is "yes". By Wiki user Sceptre]FOARPhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9138994904411225576.post-69798358820813191212014-09-17T14:03:00.000-07:002014-09-17T15:09:38.897-07:00My (Unwritten) Constitutional Patriotism

I attended the Unity Rally in London on Monday, where I took the above picture. Geldof spoke well, and movingly, about the opportunities he found in the UK that he could not find in Ireland, and how it seemed crazy to him, as an Irishman, given the things that drove Ireland to independence, that Scotland should seek it over matters so much more minor and temporary. "If I were Scottish, I might ask myself 'why not?'" he said, "But I'm Irish, so I ask 'Why?'".

 I have to say the last two weeks have left me surer than ever that I am, first and foremost, British, and a Unionist. Some authors on the left have spoken of this kind of sentiment as somehow "fake" or as a kind of evil nationalism (normally whilst ignoring or dismissing the genuine nationalism of the SNP). I can only speak for myself, but I see it as something closer to what the Germans call "constitutional patriotism", but in country with no written constitution. It would be a great shame if this is the last 24 hours in which I can claim it to be so.

 [You can read the BBC report on the rally here. I'm standing to the right of the guy with the sign in the bottom-most picture]FOARPhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9138994904411225576.post-43492287592225304222014-09-06T21:52:00.002-07:002014-09-07T02:43:54.133-07:00Say No To A Vote From The Gut.

Scottish voters are due to vote, as is their democratic right, on independence in ten days time. The arguments on the virtues of the SNP's independence plans have been argued and re-argued. By now, if you're not convinced that independence along the lines that Alex Salmond is proposing makes little or no sense, that it will result in economic turmoil, in a country using another's with no say in how its run, in a Scottish exit from the EU, in bad blood, and the end of the most successful union-state, there's little that can be said to change your mind.

The heavy negative impact of independence was why the clear lead the 'No' camp had up until last week made sense, and why the progress 'Yes' has made in recent days in the polls is so bizarre and shocking. My feelings on the issue are much the same as Will Hutton's here:

Without imaginative and creative statecraft, the polls now suggest Scotland could secede from a 300-year union, sundering genuine bonds of love, splitting families and wrenching all the interconnectedness forged from our shared history.

Absurdly, there will be two countries on the same small island that have so much in common. If Britain can't find a way of sticking together, it is the death of the liberal enlightenment before the atavistic forces of nationalism and ethnicity – a dark omen for the 21st century. Britain will cease as an idea. We will all be diminished.

Hutton is right about the character of the feelings pushing some Scottish voters towards voting for independence when arguments based on the facts weigh so heavily against it. He's also right about what the cost would be. I personally will never be able to think of my family in Scotland as foreign, or Scotland as another country, and for me interposing a border between us would be a monstrous act.

There's still hope, of course, that this is all just a blip, that cooler heads will prevail, and that the Scottish people will decisively say 'No' on the 18th of September in the same way they were planning to up until last week. It should also be pointed out that there will be Scottish elections in May 2016, and that whilst Alex Salmond has set a deadline of March 2016, he has no more right to demand such a deadline than he does to demand the currency union that British political leaders have decisively rejected. A win for Unionist parties in 2016 could therefore theoretically render a 'Yes' a dead letter - but this is a slender reed to grasp.

I hope that in time Britain can look back on this much as Canada looks back on the Quebec vote of 1995, where independence also took the lead in some polling before a razor-thin vote against it, and where now the prospect of a split is further away than ever after BQ (the main pro-independence party) was soundly defeated in the last election..

FOARPhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9138994904411225576.post-89133296260067521702014-09-02T11:33:00.000-07:002014-09-03T05:30:29.276-07:00Xi As The Undoer Of Deng, Continued
I read a very interesting piece over at the Peking Review on Xi's apparent rejection of Deng's low-profile foreign policy, in contrast to the assertive policy of the Mao era:

A phrase that is making the rounds among China watchers is "tao guang yang hui." I will not attempt to explain the concept: any brief explanation would hide too many nuances, and nuances are important here. I just watched an online debate amongst some of my more scholarly friends, and the battle was about different interpreteations of of the phrase.

One interpretation of the phrase is captured in Deng Xiaoping's maxim "keep a low profile and bide your time, while also getting something accomplished." Given the noises China has been making in the South China Sea, the East China Sea, the Indian frontier, and Hong Kong, it appears to some that China has abandoned the tao guang yang hui strategy altogether.
The piece echos a sentiment also expressed in response to the PRC government's announcement that Hong Kong was to be denied meaningful democracy: that the modern-day PRC government under the leadership of Xi Jinping had rejected the pragmatism of the Deng era.

Distrust of the Chinese Communist Party runs deep in Hong Kong, a city built largely by refugees from famine and party-sponsored political violence in mainland China. Deng Xiaoping understood this, and deftly worked around it.

His formula for recovering Hong Kong from Britain in 1997—One Country, Two Systems—was an acknowledgment that the party's credibility in Hong Kong was low and that if it simply moved in and took over it would destroy public confidence and likely wreck the economy. Hence, Hong Kong was allowed to keep its British-style law courts and administration. And it was promised democratic elections for its future leaders.

Today's Chinese leadership shows far less willingness to embrace such political pragmatism, or to employ subtlety and compromise in its dealings with the territory.
For anyone who cared to look, the signs that Xi Jinping would strike a much more strident tone than the technocratic Hu/Wen team, or the mildly reformist governing style of Jiang Zemin, were there even before he assumed power. The turning point for me was the crack-down of 2011, when controversial Chinese artist Ai Weiwei was arrested, as well as many others. Back then I wrote:

It is easy to see where the impetus for this crack-down is coming from. We may be more than a year away from the beginning of Xi Jinping's reign, but it is hard not to see the same crude artlessness in these arrests that Xi has betrayed in many of his public pronouncements.

I hope I'm wrong, but I cannot rid myself of the idea that Xi's rule is going to be disastrous for both the CCP and China. It is hard not to think that we are seeing the end of the balancing act that the CCP has so successfully conducted these past 32 years, and the beginning of an unashamed totalitarianism which few in the CCP ranks want, even if their new leader apparently does. The relatively subtle touch introduced by Deng in 1979 risks being undone, if not the economic reforms of that year and later.
Everything we've seen this year, both internally in the "anti-corruption" campaign that seems to only find corruption amongst Xi Jinping's political enemies, and externally in the assertive tone of China's new foreign policy, supports this analysis.FOARPhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9138994904411225576.post-9040015198442114872014-08-31T05:33:00.000-07:002014-08-31T05:51:32.067-07:00CCP to HK: Drop Dead

So, the new elections system for Hong Kong, a system that was probably decided many years ago, has now been made public. As suspected, it will basically be weighted so as to practically exclude anyone from the democratic camp from running.

There's people out there with more insight on this than I have (word up The Big Lychee blog), but I'm struck by a singular thought: this decision will literally leave the PRC government in the position of having to explain why it is that a pro-democrat like Albert Ho could run in the 2012 election, where he stood no chance of winning, but in an electoral system where he could win, the new system will almost certainly block him from running as "unpatriotic" (i.e., not a supporter of the Chinese Communist Party). No doubt the PRC government will be no more phased by this contradiction than they are by the myriad other contradictions of modern-day China, not least of which is the anachronism of their rule, but people in Hong Kong will not so easily dismiss it.

Journalist Mark Mackinnon thinks this violates the spirit of the handover agreement, but personally I think that already happened when the CCP issued a white paper saying that they could end Hong Kong's autonomy if Hong Kong did not "fully respect" the mainland's political system. The promise of 50 years of unchanging autonomy is empty if the government says it can change it at any time it likes on such vaguely-defined grounds as a lack of "respect".

EDIT: This also seems pretty relevant -

for those who say #hk dems brought this on themselves by demanding too much, being too uncompromising, I say look at Macau
— Yuen Chan (@xinwenxiaojie) August 31, 2014

[Picture: former Hong Kong chief executive candidate Albert Ho addresses supporters of Occupy Central, 19 June, 2014, via Wikicommons]FOARPhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9138994904411225576.post-25803149851513054212014-08-24T08:07:00.001-07:002014-08-24T08:07:45.691-07:00A Wedding In Poland

Two weeks ago today I was resting on a river bank by a lazy river, nursing an epic hangover after the greatest, most enjoyable and touching bash I had ever attended, whilst my brother worked on composing the above song. There is something awfully self-serving about praising one's own wedding, but the reception we held at Palac Alexandrow, formerly the home of the von Richthofens (including supposedly the famous Red Baron - a fact too good to check), was, to quote my seven-year-old niece, "magical".

The wedding also was a leaving-party of sorts, since I am now returning to the UK to start a new job and a new life. Life's going to get a lot more staid, I'm afraid - after more than a decade of travelling between different countries, speaking different languages, I'm now back in the UK for the forseeable future, married to a wonderful woman, with a house and a car and a serious job.

As a result posting is bound to become less frequent, though I'm not going to abandon this blog, as the world has hardly become a place less worth writing about. I might even get around to finally carrying out the big re-vamp that I've been putting off for the last few years.FOARPhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9138994904411225576.post-53747092851874414952014-07-18T06:44:00.003-07:002014-07-18T06:44:30.606-07:00The world, and Europe in particular, needs to tell Putin they've had enough.Nearly four years ago, after a relatively short hop over the East and the South China seas from Kansai International, and a far-too-long lay over in Kuala Lumpur, I sat on a Malaysia Airlines flight and watched the desert shores of the Caspian Sea slip by some ten thousand metres below, and the plane then headed on over Rostov-on-Don and Eastern Ukraine. That was four years ago, but it could just as easily have happened yesterday, and I - and anyone else who regularly flies between Europe and Asia - could just as easily have been on flight MH17 as it was blasted out of a sky by a missile that was almost certainly fired by either the Russian military or their proxies within Ukraine.

Some people - Tom Friedman being a shining example - are given to talking about the interconnected-ness of the modern world, and how the shared interests this should generate should act to limit conflicts as the damage will no longer be limited to a single area of the globe. If this is at all true then the citizens of all the countries affected by the conflict, particularly those closest to it in Europe, need to finally take a stand against Putin's incursion into the Ukraine, an incursion which has now resulted in the deaths of hundreds of perfectly innocent people. They need to do it now, and they need to do it in a definite and un-ignorable way.

That's why the very first thing that needs to be questioned is whether it is appropriate to be hosting the 2018 World Cup in Russia, and whether the teams of countries whose citizens have been killed by Putin's proxies should really be planning to attend a sports tournament that will be a major PR coup for the Putin government.FOARPhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9138994904411225576.post-9560148250670508952014-06-23T11:48:00.000-07:002014-06-23T11:48:11.214-07:00700,000 votes, China, and Hong Kong.

So Occupy Central's unofficial referendum on the voting system to be used for future elections in Hong Kong is over, and the number of (unvetted, unobserved) votes are in - and it's quite a figure. If (and it is an "if", though probably not a big one) the figures are accurate, something like 15-20% of the eligible voters in Hong Kong voted in an unofficial poll that the Hong Kong government and their Beijing-based overlords have done everything in their power to disuade them from taking part in.

The take-away from this, just as in every other occasion when Beijing has attempted to put pressure on a free society, is that such acts are liable to back-fire by driving people to the other side. It is difficult to believe that so many Hong Kongers would have voted in this poll without all the free publicity that the (unloved, at least in Hong Kong) central government has gifted to Occupy Central, the intransigence of the latest white paper on Hong Kong being the most striking example of this.

I feel the Occupy Central organisers missed a trick, though, in not putting the central government-proposed system, but only "genuinely democratic" options on their ballot paper. Giving the voters the option to vote down the government's proposals would have made their message so much clearer.

[Picture: the leaders of the Occupy Central movement. Via Wiki]

FOARPhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9138994904411225576.post-78306672963522318642014-06-18T03:26:00.002-07:002014-06-18T03:26:32.122-07:00What remains of China's dissident movement?This article about the "Nanfang Street Movement", a translated version of an article that originally appeared in Le Monde about a pro-democracy organisation operating in southern China, is worth a reading if only to sample the quixotic, fringe nature of modern-day opposition to the authoritarian Chinese government within mainland China. Indeed, the dissidents quoted in the article sound so idealistic and earnest for a post-Tiananmen, post-Charter 08 China as to be a little hard to credit, which is a pity because what they are saying is exactly the kind of thing that needs to be said in modern-day China, the kind of voice missing at events like today's London love-in :

It was raining the day three militants, accompanied by a fourth there to photograph the scene, unfurled a banner reading, "A party is not the same as a country. The Chinese Communist Party doesn't represent the people." In the center of the photo from that day, 23-year-old Jia Pin is holding up another message that reads, "Democracy, Liberty, Human Rights, Constitutional Government." At his side a follower carries an even more incendiary one that says, "Unelected parties are outlaws."
At least in my experience, these are not unrepresentative of the (unspoken except in safe circumstances) sentiments of a good portion of the Chinese people regarding their government, though it should also be said that a good portion also buys either largely or wholly into the government's message of their rule being solely benevolent. The poignant thing here is just how small the so-called "Nanfang Street Movement" actually is:

"there are only about 10 activists willing to demonstrate publicly," says Wu Kuiming, a lawyer in Guangzhou who defends members of the Nanfang Street Movement when they are arrested. "Quite a few people support the group, but very few are prepared to risk being arrested during a demonstration," says Wu.
The contrast with 25 years ago, when hundreds of thousands of people marched throughout China demanding reform, to today's dissidents, who would struggle to assemble enough people in one place to form a football team, couldn't be more striking.

It is hard not have a feeling of dread when reading this article, knowing that many of the people described in this article will eventually end up either in jail, in exile, or harassed to the point of quitting, because this is what has happened to every other attempt to organise dissident movements in China since 1989. For anyone who has been watching Chinese affairs for more than a few years, there is something nostalgic in reading dissidents putting their faith in the power of the internet, and in government promises of modernisation and reform - since this was exactly how dissidents like Liu Di spoke ten years ago.

Does this then necessarily mean that groups like the "Nanfang Street Movement" are doomed to the same over-all failure that has encompassed organisations like Charter 08? Perhaps not, though nothing short of an economic slow-down that no-one wants to see (but which may be programmed in to China's current development model) could conceivably create the opening for reform that they are looking for.FOARPhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9138994904411225576.post-9374343621555809792014-06-12T06:51:00.002-07:002014-06-12T06:51:47.667-07:00RIP "One Country, Two Systems"Reading the PRC governments recently-released white paper, snappily titled "The Practice of the "One Country, Two Systems" Policy in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region", it is hard not to think that the promise by which the PRC achieved assumption of control over Hong Kong in 1997 of ensuring 50 years without change in Hong Kong's essentially liberal politico-economic system, is now something of a dead letter.

Why? Well, amid waffle about the help that the mainland gave Hong Kong during the SARS epidemic (an epidemic that spread to Hong Kong due to the failings of the PRC government), and the benefits that Hong Kong receives from the PRC governments efforts to prevent "foreign forces from interfering in Hong Kong's affairs" (which are?), the white paper dropped this bombshell:

As a unitary state, China's central government has comprehensive jurisdiction over all local administrative regions, including the HKSAR. The high degree of autonomy of HKSAR is not an inherent power, but one that comes solely from the authorization by the central leadership. The high degree of autonomy of the HKSAR is not full autonomy, nor a decentralized power. It is the power to run local affairs as authorized by the central leadership. The high degree of autonomy of HKSAR is subject to the level of the central leadership's authorization.

(my emphasis)
That is, the PRC government wishes to make it known that it does not consider the promise of 50 years without change to be a binding one, but that Hong Kong's autonomy could be removed by the central leadership before that. What could cause them to remove it? Well, the white paper further goes on to state that:

. . . the "two systems" under the "one country" are not on a par with each other. The fact that the mainland, the main body of the country, embraces socialism will not change. With that as the premise, and taking into account the history of Hong Kong and some other regions, capitalism is allowed to stay on a long-term basis. Therefore, a socialist system by the mainland is the prerequisite and guarantee for Hong Kong's practicing capitalism and maintaining its stability and prosperity. For Hong Kong to retain its capitalist system and enjoy a high degree of autonomy with "Hong Kong people governing Hong Kong" according to the Basic Law, it must fully respect the socialist system practiced on the mainland in keeping with the "one country" principle and, in particular, the political system and other systems and principles in practice.

(my emphasis)
This is pretty clearly a threat to the people of Hong Kong from the CCP: don't do anything that might threaten our death-grip on the mainland, otherwise we'll take away whatever freedoms you currently enjoy that are not granted to the rest of China. That this comes at the same time as Occupy Central is preparing demonstrations and unofficial referenda that may be embarrassing to the central government can hardly be a coincidence.

Some critics have attempted to make this out as merely a restatement of long-running government policy. It is nothing of the kind, as even CCP-apologist Lau Nai-keung has to concede, the PRC government has never actually stated anything like this before. Whilst many simply suspected that the PRC government would be willing to abrogate "One Country, Two Systems" if they felt it suited their interests, they have never gone so far as to actually say so.

So where does this leave us? Well, clearly the prospect of Taiwan ever willingly joining mainland China to form a single country under the "One Country, Two Systems" formula is deader than a Dodo for at least as long as the CCP remains in power. Who would ever trust the CCP not to simply withdraw their promise because they felt that people on Taiwan did not "fully respect" the mainland's political system?

"One Country, Two Systems" is an idea that can work, at least in theory, so long as the two systems are on a par with each other. To state openly that they are "not on a par with each other", is to state that one may over-ride the other, which is to state that there is no real guarantee of two systems coexisting.FOARPhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9138994904411225576.post-59567792011108692402014-06-10T04:48:00.001-07:002014-06-10T04:48:08.983-07:00Taiwan's advantages are not imaginary.Via MKL's facebook feed I read this piece on Tsai Yingwen's return to the top of the DPP, a shining example of Want China Times's commitment to talking down Taiwan's achievements over the past two decades:

Tsai doesn't have the firm will, determination and capability to address the sense of "Taiwanese superiority" felt by many in the pro-independence camp — a social psychological barrier that is hindering the DPP's transformation.

The sense of Taiwanese superiority refers to the belief that Taiwan's economic development, democratic politics and way of life are superior to that in mainland China.
 That Taiwan's economic development, way of life, and democratic politics are superior to those of mainland China is not merely a "belief". It is a clear, demonstrable fact, even judging by the most basic metrics.

According to the IMF Taiwan's per-capita income in 2013 was, in nominal terms, more than three times larger than that of mainland China (20,930 USD in Taiwan versus 6,747 USD in China). Clearly, Taiwan's economic development is superior.

According to the WHO in 2013 Taiwanese people had an overall life-expectancy more than six year longer than that of people across the straits in mainland China (80.3 in Taiwan versus 74.2 in China). Again, Taiwanese people appear to live lives that are at the very least much longer than those of mainland Chinese, reflecting a healthier and better-looked-after way of life.

Taiwan has experienced precisely zero deaths due to political disturbances and terrorism in the past year, yet the same can hardly be said of mainland China which has suffered repeated terrorist attacks, and had citizens killed in foreign rioting. In the past six years mainland China has suffered two large-scale uprisings (Tibet in 2008 and Xinjiang in 2009) and has engaged in repeated crackdowns against dissidents, sentencing people like Liu Xiaobo to jail merely for speaking their mind. No amount of bloviating about the occupation of government buildings by students during the Sunflower movement can hide the fact that Taiwan's democratic system is undoubtedly superior to mainland China's authoritarian "Market-Leninist" system.

The piece's main premise - that Taiwan succeeded only because of the US and now needs to "learn from" mainland China - founders on the rock that Taiwan has little to learn from the mainland except "how not to do it". As both Ma Yingjiu's KMT and Tsai Yingwen's DPP have at various time acknowledged, mainland China has much to learn from Taiwan, but the same is not true in the other direction. Indeed, the article does not identify anything concrete that Taiwanese people can learn from the mainland, instead talking only of Taiwan's "failure to see from an international perspective" - a "failure" that has far more to do with China blocking Taiwan's international relations at every turn.

FOARPhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9138994904411225576.post-79876860059920743322014-06-09T22:46:00.001-07:002014-06-10T00:08:30.750-07:00Taiwan and the US Department of Defense reportFlicking through the recently-released US Department of Defense's annual report on the Chinese military, there's quite a few things that stand out for those of us with an interest in Taiwanese affairs:

Despite various noises that have been made since the election of the Chinese Nationalist KMT government (which this analyst bizarrely describes as "less hardline-nationalist"), Taiwan remains, in the words of the DoD, "the focus and primary driver of China's military investment". The KMT may have taken the sting out of the war of words, but force has not been taken off the table. As the report points out, Xi Jinping has been quite open in stating that the Taiwan issue "cannot be passed from generation to generation."

The report points out that "China today probably could not enforce a full military blockade. However, its ability to do so will improve significantly over the next five to ten years." This is something that I think people who over-estimate the PRC's ability to use force against Taiwan at the present time (including, e.g., predicting a forced annexation of Taiwan in 2012) need to think about. China at the present moment is not capable of this level of coercion - but the day when it will be powerful enough to use military force to coerce Taiwan is approaching.

The above point is further reinforced by the US DoD's assessment that, whilst the PLA could probably carry out small-to-medium scale attacks on outlying islands with a reasonable chance of success, a full-scale invasion of Taiwan "would strain China's armed forces and invite international intervention [making an invasion] a significant political and military risk". The report goes on to note that "China does not appear to be building the conventional amphibious lift required to support such a campaign" and that "The PLA Navy currently lacks the the amphibious lift capacity that a large-scale invasion of Taiwan would require", meaning that China is likely to remain incapable of launching an invasion of Taiwan with any degree of certainty of success at least in the near-term. However, the exact nature of the aircraft carriers now being built in China is not known.

Far from the panicked picture drawn elsewhere, it appears that, at least according to the US DoD, Taiwan is not under a significantly greater threat now than it has been over the past decade, though it may be within the next 5-10 years. Narratives that basically require support for one or the other political parties in Taiwan in order to rescue Taiwan from an immediate threat to Taiwanese democracy coming from its own elected government, with no supporting evidence of anything new, should be treated with suspicion.

FOARPhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9138994904411225576.post-5149360901964362732014-06-05T11:47:00.000-07:002014-06-05T11:47:15.187-07:00"The War of The Running Dogs", and China's role in it.

Lately I've been reading Noel Barber's excellent (if definitely of its time) The War of The Running Dogs*, a book which tells the story of the Malayan Emergency in an engagingly Boys-own-like style. The book's succeeds by largely eschewing the dust-dry blow-by-blow account of technical and political happenings that so many histories of other counter-insurgency conflicts engage in, and instead dishes up gripping accounts of events demonstrative of the situation as a whole.

The conflict, which began 66 years ago next week, following the murder of three planters by communists in attacks marking the beginning of a wave of terrorist attacks aimed at destablising Malaya (as it was then known) in the run-up to its independence, and creating 'liberated zones' into which the British would not dare to go, was marked by many contradictions. The communist rebels were nominally fighting for an independence which was already promised, albeit without a fixed date, and had learned their jungle-warfare skills whilst fighting alongside the British against the Japanese during the Second World War. The British were fighting to keep control of a country which they were going to lose control of anyway, against rebels using British weapons which had mostly been air-dropped into Malaya during WW2. The communist leader, Chin Peng (陈平), who died only last year, had even been awarded the OBE for his role in fighting the Japanese.

For anyone interested in China, it is interesting to look at the ways in which the influence of China was felt throughout the conflict. In a war in which one side was largely ethnic-Chinese, and in many cases combatants on both sides were first-generation immigrants from mainland China, China was always likely to be a significant impact, but the coincidence of the struggle in Malaya with the titanic conflict inside China and along its borders between communists and non-communists during this time made China a major factor.

Whilst the idea (which Barber briefly examines) that the start of the conflict in Malaya was part of a co-ordinated effort by communists across Asia, is something we can safely set to one side as having no basis in fact, the conflict was definitely modeled on Mao's insurgency in China, with its emphasis on dominating the countryside and encircling the cities. Chin Peng certainly seems to have seen himself as a Mao-like figure, although he deviated from Mao's doctrine by not making political warfare at the same time and with the same intensity as he made guerrilla warfare, although this is largely the result of him having already tried the political route to power in the years between the war and the start of the guerrilla campaign with indifferent results.

With the end of the civil war in China in late 1949, officers from China's People's Liberation Army arrived at Chin Peng's headquarters. Barber points out that it was likely their influence that led Chin Peng to back off from his attacks on civilian targets that had served to antagonise the Malayan population in a change of policy that was announced in October 1951. This seems likely given the way it meshes with Mao's philosophy of trying to get ordinary people in the countryside onto the side of communists.

Another change prompted by the end of the Chinese civil war was the extension of British diplomatic recognition to the People's Republic of China in 1950 - a move that was seen in Malaya as a total betrayal at a time when the colonial administration there was fighting PRC-backed communists. We may reflect that, whilst the recognition was only a common-sense move given the communist victory, Britain does not seem to have derived any noticeable advantages from recognising the PRC decades before any other Western European state beyond better facilitating the administration of Hong Kong, least of all in Malaya. Perhaps this should be remembered the next time the advantages of "opening up" relations with an oppressive state are touted.

Finally, China was the last refuge for Chin Peng following his defeat in Malaya and the retreat of the Malayan communists across the border into Thailand, where they kept alive a vicious totalitarian-state-in-miniature which Chin controlled from Beijing. Chin Peng launched his second, much less successful campaign (not covered in Barber's book) from Thailand with a promise of financial support from the PRC personally delivered by Deng Xiaoping. Chin Peng's communists were riven by the Cultural Revolution in a fashion from which they never fully recovered, and eventually surrendered amid the global retreat of communism in 1989.

The net result of Chin's war against the British and their "running dogs" was an independent Malaysia that enjoyed a limited form of democracy hampered and defended by equal part by a security apparatus, that, as I found out when I visited there in 2009, remains in place despite its raison d'etre having largely disappeared.

*Barber claims that this was how Malayan communists themselves unofficially referred to the conflict (officially they called it "反英民族解放战争" - the Anti-British War of National Liberation), however searching around for various combinations of the terms "走狗" and "战争" I haven't found any Chinese language sources using this name.

[Picture: A leaflet promising Malayan communists who surrender with a machine gun "a new life", and 1000 dollars. Via Wiki]FOARPhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9138994904411225576.post-73975310537083140002014-06-04T05:10:00.000-07:002014-06-04T05:10:11.670-07:00Relevant meme

FOARPhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9138994904411225576.post-76915917996719415192014-06-04T04:12:00.004-07:002014-06-04T04:12:59.579-07:00The day I forgot about Tiananmen.Ten years ago today I sat in Bella Napoli near Xinjiekou in Nanjing chatting with a good friend of mine about something I'd seen that day. Between mouthfuls of the excellent seafood salad they serve there, I described how suddenly, for reasons not immediately apparent to anyone, police vans had showed up outside each of the gates of South East University, where I was studying Chinese, and the same appeared to be happening at other universities in the city.

He just leaned across the table and said "Guess what happened 15 years ago today?". Even then it took a little while to click - you see, whilst the 1989 massacre in and around Tiananmen Square in Beijing is commonly mentioned in histories of the country, it is hardly kept present in the minds of people living in the People's Republic of China, even those who normally try to keep on top of events.

The defensive posture of the government is therefore a bit contradictory given their largely-successful efforts to keep the people of the country from even thinking about the massacre, in which perhaps as many as 3,000 people were killed. Probably very few of the Chinese-born students at South East University had even thought about the massacre that day in 2004, so to prepare for potential trouble in the fashion they did was to risk reminding them.

The response then, and perhaps more so now, speaks a of deep-seated fear amongst China's rulers that people will remember what happened, and call the communist party to account for it. If China really was as politically stable as it's leaders try to present it as being, if young people really were as forgetful as this preposterous article in Global Times presents them as being, they would not be busy trying to censor even oblique references to an event that happened 25 years previously, nor arresting foreign journalists for showing photographs of it, nor would they be "inviting" foreign students on compulsory trips announced on short notice to take them out of the capital on that day.

Instead, China continues to be a country in which the government at least behaves like its rule is insecure. Perhaps they're right about that.FOARPhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9138994904411225576.post-63579786914418806432014-06-03T11:22:00.000-07:002014-06-03T11:22:02.884-07:00The UKIP opportunity.The results of last month's European elections have caused quite a stir in the UK, since they are the first elections in more than 100 years in which neither the Conservatives nor the Labour party have won the greatest number of votes. As UKIP rose, it was generally believed that the Conservatives were the ones who would suffer most as UKIP's anti-EU, anti-immigration message would appeal most to their supporters, but then UKIP started to siphon off votes from the equally xenophobic base of the Labour party. As Steve Fisher, Associate Professor in Political Sociology and the Fellow and Tutor in Politics at Trinity College, University of Oxford, pointed out:

What seems to have happened is that between 2010 and 2012 UKIP took votes mainly from the Conservatives, but between 2012 and 2014 they have had more success in attracting Labour voters. The net effect is that the UKIP rise from 2010 to 2014 has been at similar expense to Labour and the Conservatives.

This is certainly a story that fits the main pattern of change in the general election vote intention opinion polls. The narrowing of the Labour lead over the past two years has been mainly due to a Labour fall and UKIP rise.
This of course isn't the whole story - it should be pointed out that one party's collapse in the
voting share at the EU elections seemed almost total, and seems very likely to be due to UKIP. It is that of the far-right extremist British National Party, which received 943,598 votes in 2009 but only 179,694 in 2014.

My personal take on this is, if the anti-EU, anti-immigrant section of each of the main parties, as well as the support base of the far-right BNP, choose to assemble themselves under one flag, then finally the main parties will be able to run against them without having to upset their own base. Moreoever, at the same time as UKIP has assembled an electoral machine that allows them to capitalise on anti-immigration and anti-EU sentiment in the UK, they have been losing the argument amongst the British people, who are steadily becoming more pro-EU and pro-immigration.FOARPhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9138994904411225576.post-25048977987271357862014-06-02T11:00:00.002-07:002014-06-02T11:00:59.773-07:00Juan Carlos, the case for constitutional monarchy, and defending the indefensible.

At one of the banquets I attended whilst teaching at Nanjing University of Finance and Economics, one particularly boozy cadre asked me "why does Britain still have a queen?". Having been asked this question a few times, I shot back with the question "why doesn't China have a monarch, and wouldn't it be better off if it did?". His reaction was amazement that anyone would want to argue in favour of a monarchy, and much discussion of the Xinhai rebellion then ensued.

I was reminded of this discussion when I saw the news of King Juan Carlos's of Spain's abdication today. There's few arguments that can be made in favour of a monarchy, and no-one can really say that, beginning from a tabula rasa, you would rationally chose to have a country ruled by a head of state chosen by accident of birth. All the same, Juan Carlos's actions in the attempted 1981 coup make the best possible case that can possibly be made for this basically irrational way of running a country - he represented a non-political reservoir of power that could take action where no-one else could, and he acted decisively.

Personally, however, I have to admit that my own support for the monarchy in the UK comes mostly from the gut. I certainly believe that, given that we are where we are there is no point in changing now, and that there are economic and constitutional advantages to having a monarchy, but in the end my support comes from history and tradition.

Occasionally I get accused of not understanding the emotional commitment that some Chinese people have to the Communist Party. Believe me, I get it - but "getting it" and being able to excuse it are two different things.

[Picture: King Juan Carlos I of Spain, who announced his abdication today. Via Wiki]

FOARPhttp://email@example.com


text:
A surface mount connector has a dielectric housing with first and second opposing mating faces. The first mating face includes first terminals and the second mating face includes second terminals. The first and second terminals each have a tail portion, a contact portion and a terminal retention portion. The terminal retention portion engages the connector housing, and an opening, or hole, is formed in the retention section of the terminal. This opening is sized to keep sufficient metal remaining to retain the terminal in the housing, yet having sufficient surface area to provide a desired capacitance and/or inductance for tuning the impedance of the terminal to the preselected level, the second terminals each having a second terminal retention section with a central portion removed thereof, the removed central portion being spaced away from the first terminal retention area, while minimizing the surface area, size and shape of the central section for tuning the impedance of the terminal to a preselected range.
1. A connector for providing a connection between a circuit board and an opposing electronic element, the circuit board having a plurality of conductive traces disposed thereon and the opposing electronic element including a male portion having a plurality of conductive members disposed thereon, comprising:
an insulative connector housing having first and second ends interconnected by an intervening body portion, the first end being a mating end including a receptacle portion for mating with said opposing electronic element and the second end being a mounting end for mounting said connector housing to said circuit board, the connector housing including a plurality of first and second terminal-receiving cavities;
a plurality of conductive terminals disposed in said cavities, the terminals being arranged in distinct sets of first and second terminals, the first and second terminals including contact portions for contacting a corresponding conductive member of said opposing electronic element, mounting portions for mounting said terminals to a circuit board, body portions interconnecting the terminal contact and mounting portions together, and retention portions for retaining said terminals in place within said connector housing, the terminal retention portions being disposed intermediate said terminal contact and terminal mounting portions, each of the first cavities receiving a single first terminal therein and each of the second cavities receiving a single second terminal therein and said second terminals including two retention portions disposed thereon intermediate said second terminal contact and mounting portions; and,
said second terminal retention portions including openings disposed therein, the openings being centrally located within said terminal retention portions and being of sufficient size so as not to weaken the retention of said second terminals within said connector housing by said terminal retention portions.
2. The connector as claimed in
3. The connector as claimed in
4. The connector as claimed in
This application claims priority of U.S. Provisional Patent Application No. 60/379,950, filed May 10, 2002.
The present invention is directed generally to edge card connectors and, more specifically to edge card connectors in which the connector impedance is controlled by shaping of the connector terminals.
High speed data transfer systems require electrical connectors in which the electrical impedance can be controlled in order to maintain the required data transfer rate of the electrical system. It is desirable at high speed data transfer rates to obtain a specific impedance in a connector that matches the impedance of the entire electronic system, i.e., the circuits on the a circuit board of an electronic device and either the circuits of opposing electronic device or in a transmission cable. The impedance of a connector may be controlled by the spacing of the terminals, the size of the terminals and the thickness and location of material within the connector housing.
However, low profile connectors, such as those used in SFP (Small Form Factor Pluggable) applications are desired in electronic devices in which space is a premium and thus it is difficult to control the impedance by modifying the spacing and size of the terminals in a reduced-size connector housing. When the terminals are modified, it becomes difficult to retain all of the mechanical functions of the connector, such as terminal retention and engagement while tuning the impedance of the connector
The present invention is directed to an improved electrical connector system that combines the aforementioned characteristics.
Accordingly, it is a general object of the present invention to provide a low profile connector in which the terminals may have varying shapes for controlling the impedance of the connector.
Another object of the present invention to provide a surface mount style connector for mounting on a circuit board, the connector having a plurality of conductive terminals supported therein in spaced apart order, the terminals having stubs and slots formed as part thereof, thereby reducing and/or increasing the amount of metal to influence the capacitance and/or the inductance of the terminals and control the impedance thereof.
A further object of the present invention is to provide a right angle, low profile surface mount connector for use in high speed applications in which the connectors have a specific structure for controlling the impedance and inductance of electrical connectors.
A still further object of the present invention is to provide a connector for surface mounting to a printed circuit board, wherein the connector includes a dielectric housing having first and second opposing mating faces, the first mating face including a plurality of first stamped terminals, the second mating face including a plurality of second stamped terminals the terminals of a first type that are stamped from a metal strip and are inserted into slots in the housing from a front face, and terminals of a second type which are stamped from a second metal strip and are inserted into slots in the housing from a rear face, such that the first and second terminals are offset from each other and wherein the front and rear faces are substantially perpendicular to the printed circuit board onto which the assembly is mounted.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a connector assembly with the aforementioned terminal arrangement, wherein each of the second terminals include a first terminal retention section having a portion removed from the central portion thereof, the first terminal retention section having sufficient metal remaining to retain the terminal in the housing, yet having sufficient surface area to provide a desired capacitance for tuning the impedance of the terminal to the preselected level, the second terminals each having a second terminal retention section with a central portion removed thereof, the removed central portion being spaced away from the first terminal retention area, while minimizing the surface area, size and shape of the central section for tuning the impedance of the terminal to a preselected range.
A further object of this invention is to provide a connector assembly with the aforementioned terminal arrangement and shape, and with a second terminal with a solder section that is used to mount the connector to a printed circuit board, of a size and shape that is used to minimize metal area and the size and shape of the solder portion being used to tune the impedance of the terminal to the specified amount.
The present invention accomplishes the aforementioned and other objects by the way of its novel and unique structure.
In one embodiment of the invention, a connector assembly is provided for mounting to a circuit board with surface mount technology. The connector includes a dielectric housing and terminals of a first type which are stamped from a metal strip and are inserted into slots in a front face of the connector housing. Terminals of a second type are stamped from a second metal strip and are inserted into slots along the rear face of the connector housing so the first and second type terminals are opposing each other. The first and second sets of terminals are inserted into the connector housing along two distinct faces of the housing, which are preferably on opposite ends of the housing.
The first and second type terminals have cantilevered contact arm portions that extend into an internal receptacle of the connector housing which is designed to receive the edge of a circuit card. At least the second type terminals have contact portions, tail portions and intervening body portions. Part of the second type terminal body portions include terminal retention portions that are press fit into slots formed in the connector housing. At least one of these terminal retention portions has an opening formed therein, which has the practical effect of reducing the surface area of the metal, which affects the capacitance and inductance of the terminal (i.e., lowering the capacitance and increasing the inductance), thereby also influencing the impedance of the connector insofar as adjoining terminals are concerned and the openings are preferably used to tune the impedance of the terminal to a desired level. In order to compensate for the removal of metal in this portion of the terminal, the connector housing is modified to provide additional reaction surfaces that abut the terminal retention portion.
In another embodiment of the invention, the terminals have two terminal retention portions, each of which has an opening formed therein for impedance tuning. In one retention portion, the opening is disposed in a central part of the retention portion and preferably takes the form of a circular opening, while in the other retention portion, the opening takes the form of a slot extending along a central part thereof.
These and other objects, features and advantages of the present invention will be clearly understood through a consideration of the following detailed description.
In the course of this detailed description, the reference will be frequently made to the attached drawings in which:
The first terminals 4 are mounted into slots 71 formed in the connector housing 3 along its front face 6, while the second terminals 5 are mounted in slots 72 that are formed in the connector housing 3 along its rear face 7. The front and rear faces 6, 7 are oriented substantially perpendicular to the printed circuit board 2 onto which the connector housing 3 is mounted. Mounting portions 20 formed in the terminals 19 are located on the terminals 19 in locations spaced away from the connector housing 3 and serve as a means for connecting the terminals of the connector to corresponding conductive pads 22 formed with the circuit board 2 in a surface mount manner. These mounting portions are illustrated as conventional surface mount tails. The connector housing 3 may also include mounting pegs, or posts 24 formed therewith that are received within complementary openings 26 formed with the circuit board 2. This Figure depicts the connector environment in which terminals and connectors of the present invention are used.
The first retention portion 92 includes a relatively large central part 98, which has an opening 95 formed therein. This opening is shown as circular and completely enclosed within the terminal retention area and serves to reduce the metal of the terminal and this particular portion thereof and it also reduces the capacitance of the terminal with respect to any adjoining terminal, by reducing the amount of surface area of the terminal. This reduction of material also increases the inductance of the terminal, which also influences the impedance of the terminal. The reduction of capacitance (or increase in inductance) will in turn, as is known, affect the impedance of the terminal, and of the connector overall in the region from the second terminal contact portion 91 to the mounting portion 97 thereof. The second terminal retention portion 94 also has an opening 96 formed therein and this opening 96 takes the form of a slot that preferably extends from an edge and through a portion of the central area of the second terminal retention portion 94. This slot 96 is not completely enclosed in the retention portion 94 as in the top retention portion. In the illustrated embodiment, the opening 95 is shown as circular, a variety of other shapes, preferably polygon shapes may be used. The size and shape of this first retention portion 92 may be varied in order to vary the impedance of the system.
The terminals are easily stamped from sheet metal, but because of the openings 95, 96 formed thereon, a concern is raised about the ability to retain the second terminals 101, 102 within the connector housing 3. This concern is alleviated by modifying the connector housing 3′, as illustrated in
The length and width of the second retention portion can also be varied in order to vary the surface area of the terminal, and therefore also the impedance. Both first and second retention sections of the second terminal may contain barbs, or teeth 51 which are used to embed the terminals 101 firmly and reliably within the slots 72 of the connector housing 3. The size of the board mounting section may also be varied to provide adequate area for mounting to the printed circuit board, while also being tuned to provide a specific impedance in the terminal.
While the preferred embodiment of the invention have been shown and described, it will be apparent to those skilled in the art that changes and modifications may be made therein without departing from the spirit of the invention, the scope of which is defined by the appended claims.
Patent Citations
Referenced by
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