My friend Lars, dressed like a Western tourist might, emerged from Tokyo station’s ticket gate yesterday to be suddenly swarmed on by three police officers. “Are you a tourist?” Lars answers, “Umm, No.” Then they ask, “Do you work here?” and Lars replies, “No. I am a graduate student [at Waseda University]” The police officers [...]
Joel at Far Outliers mentions an article about a trend towards the “suppression of free speech” in South Korea. In addition to the harassment that a “free North Korea” group has apparently gotten from “self-styled ‘progressive’” protesters discussed in the article by Aidan Foster-Carter, Joel mentions the recent bizarre (and inexcusable) banning of online blogs [...]
Media Matters, a great source for a little breakfast rage against conservative media madness. Today, there was an entry about the whack Michael Savage’s comment about the Nick Berg incident, “Nick Berg, an American, not military, over there building transmission towers, was captured by the Untermenschen the sub-humans, who wrap themselves in a religion. He [...]
Jonathan Dresner wrote an interesting article on HNN which talks about democracy in Korea and Taiwan. In a later posting on Cliopatria he lists three “landmark moments” for democracy (first transfer of power to the opposition, first peaceful transfer of power to another party, resolution of first major constitutional crisis) and says Taiwan is struggling [...]
There has been a day of full protests here in Taipei. After lunch, Sayaka and I headed downtown to see what was going on. Chiang Kai-shek memorial hall and the surrounding area was pretty empty but a few thousand people were protesting in front of the KMT headquarters and the red presidential building. You can [...]
Things are getting crazy here in Taiwan, much more so than yesterday (the election day). The opposition is out of control with anger and there are protests everywhere, some violence. Sayaka and I are going down town to see how things are in Taipei. This is sooo sad. I’ll be blogging here throughout the next [...]
The Taiwan election is officially over and Chen Shuibian has won another term. I’ll be reading the various newspapers tomorrow at nearby coffee shops (which Taipei has an abundance of). The opposition KMT party has disputed the election, the suspicious facts surrounding the assassination attempt yesterday, hundreds of thousands of invalidated votes, etc. Whether or [...]
The election polls closed 48 minutes ago. All the TV channels are showing the votes adding up on screen. I don’t understand what is going on. Of the four channels we are flipping back and forth from, there are 3 different vote counts being displayed for the two sides (Blue and the President Chen’s Green). [...]
Wow, my first full day in Taiwan and the President and VP have been shot (with one bullet?). They are in the hospital but not in critical condition. The election goes ahead tomorrow. UPDATE: This happened about 13:45 this afternoon and special editions of the newspapers, evening papers and TV have been saying all sorts [...]
In my posting Dean against the Incombent I was extremely confident Dean was going to sail through the primaries and face a tough battle against Bush. After Dean’s failure to win a state so far, and especially his losing Washington, it looks like I was completely off the mark. He did amazing things for politics [...]