（4）中国想真正成为超级强国，首要的条件是不是军事的强大？造航母是不是我们成为强国的一种指标？
Is being a military power a necessary condition to China becoming a superpower? And would be making aircrafit carriers be a benchmark of that?
　　那不是首要条件，但肯定是不可缺少的一环。一个超级强国，经济上要很强大，话说过来，经济上不强大军事上也强大不起来。科技上也要非常先进，这个世界上应该是科技创新层出不穷的，但我们确实就差得很远。在文化上面也要有影响力，这点美国就有这个架子，不管好莱坞大片水平高低，全世界人民都在看，我们就需要这样的东西。但我认为，文化的东西可以放在后面一点，但经济科技军事肯定是少不了的。
No, that isn’t a sufficient condition, but it is definitely necessary. A superpower has to have economic strength, and you could say that without economic strength you could never develop economic strength. [...]

The title of this post is stolen from Susan Sontag’s book of the same name, which some might recognize as the “sequel” to the seminal On Photography. However, the topic is quite different.
The conventional wisdom is that when a person has become a source of pain in
another person’s life, that they ought to “cut themselves [...]

I was just reading an article about the social unrest that has plagued China in 2008, and it says, in the title that the problem lies with the government competing with the people’s interests, that is, the government has, if only through inaction, sided more with capital than labor, the companies more than regular people. [...]

The effects of the economic downturn are being felt in CHina. The Times of India reports that with export markets doing poorly, labor demand is down ad unemployment has spiked which leads to renewed fears, on the part of the Chinese government, of unrest and mass incidents (CNN). Unemployment threatens social stability, and the problem [...]

贵州桐梓举行公捕公判大会_网易新闻中心 via kwout

贵州桐梓举行公捕公判大会_网易新闻中心 via kwout

Throwback? Maybe they never quite got out of the Cultural Revolution. Some commentators support such measures, but I think that the distinction has to be made between fighting crime (which is naturally a good thing to do, unless that crime involves marijuana, in which case it is a waste of taxpayer [...]

MBA相亲会数百人参加 女性怨男性“素质低”(图)_网易新闻中心 via kwout

Hmmm it seems that kwout is having problems with Chinese character encodings…oh well. The link is to an article about a marriage, dating meetup that paired some highly-educated lasses with some not so tall men. Some men complained that they were afraid of women who were too well-educated, saying that they were [...]

I’ve been meaning to get this book for ages and I finally managed it. It’s an interesting book, almost too much so in my case, since it really gets to the heart of many of the issues I face in my life.
The main thesis in the book is that we have too many choices [...]

Spurred by the possibility of some hot pictures, I clicked on the link to a Chinese article about the pleasures of sex without penetration.* The article talks about we often place too much emphasis on genitals and penetration, oblivious of the body’s other erogenous zones, ignorant of the polymorphous pleasures that we’d unlearned in the [...]

OK, so internet addiction is old hat but I am continually amazed by the stuff that people will do just to get their fix. There are other, perhaps extenuating circumstances: broken homes, parental neglect, problems at school—but some young people in China are really falling through the cracks. Read an article about how an [...]

《恐怖分子》影评：杨德昌的手术刀-搜狐娱乐 via kwout

Edward Yang is, by any measure, a master of the cinema. Like his other films from this era (late 1980s and early 1990s), Terrorizers is a merciless dissection of the lives of the Taiwanese urban middle-class. I’ve been reading a Chinese review/essay on the film, and I think it brings out some interesting [...]