intellectual

President Barack Obama plans to nominate Commerce Secretary Gary Locke to be the next U.S. ambassador to China, replacing Jon Huntsman, an administration official said.

Locke, 61, who is of Chinese ancestry, is a former two-term governor of Washington and has led annual trade talks between the U.S. and China. Obama may name Locke as soon as today, the official said yesterday, speaking on condition of anonymity because the announcement hadn’t been made. Huntsman, 50, is set to vacate the ambassador’s post on April 30.

If confirmed by the Senate, Locke would take over the diplomatic mission in a country that is a linchpin in Obama’s trade policy. China’s economy passed Japan’s to become the world’s second-largest last year, and the Asian nation is the second-biggest U.S. trading partner after Canada.

From our work at WTC, we have come to see racism and the internalization of racism as the primary assaults on our love for ourselves and each other. I understand love here as our ability to care for ourselves and each other spiritually, emotionally, physically and intellectually and to do it in a way that does not split us off from ourselves - body from mind, spirit from emotion, individual from community and so forth.

Like most progressive anti-racism trainers, we define racism as having to do with power. Separating it from the human flaws we all share such as prejudice and scapegoating, we see racism as a system of oppression based on race that in this country is perpetrated by white people against people of color.

It involves an unequal distribution of systemic power for people with white-skin privilege in four main areas:

1. the power to make and enforce decisions;
2. access to resources, broadly defined;
3. the ability to set and determine standards for what is considered appropriate behavior; and
4. the ability to define reality.

By Jeff Yang, Special to SF Gate
Thursday, February 25, 2010

The notion that Asians and Jews are two shoots from the same cultural rootstock is an old but evergreen meme.

You see it in fringe theories about the Lost Tribes of Israel -- there's an entire body of cryptoarchaeological canon that uses similarities between customs, language and naming convention to "prove" that the ancient vanished Jewish clans ended up in China, India or Japan. (Japan's 50,000-member Makuya sect, which has as its central dogma that the Japanese are descendants of a lost Jewish tribe, keep kosher, speak Hebrew and use the seven-armed menorah as their symbol.)

Friendster may be one of the Internet’s oldest social networks, but mammoth growth attributed to the likes of Facebook, MySpace and Bebo have kept the service in the shadows. Now, if whispers are to be believed, Friendster will soon be sold on in the face of insurmountable competition.

Citing sources familiar with the matter, the Reuters news agency reports that an unnamed Asian buyer is expected to acquire the network, which was founded in 2002, for around $100 million USD before the close of December.

Despite that valuation falling well short of the estimated $10 billion USD placed upon market leading social network Facebook, Friendster still carries with it a formidable user base of around 100 million – the vast majority of which is based in Asia.

According to the unnamed source, there is currently a shortlist of buyers angling for a potential purchase, the most notable of which is Chinese online giant Tencent Holdings, which holds a market valuation of some $35 billion USD.

Hegemonic Harvard and omnipersent Oxford: Western Dominance in the Global Organization of Higher Education

JAMES JF FOREST , P H.D. Assistant Dean, Academic Assessment and Assistant Professor, Political Science United States Military Academy West Point, NY 10996 james.

A Paper For Presentation at the Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association Montreal, Canada March 17-20, 2004

The views expressed are those of the author and not of the Department of the Army, the U.S. Military Academy, or any other agency of the U.S. Government.

The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Strategic Studies Institute in funding research for this paper Abstract Universities worldwide stem from a common model. Even in India and China, which have their own rich traditions of advanced learning, modern universities are Western in origin.

China's new intelligentsia
by Mark Leonard

Japan & USA. Animal Planet collaborated with eco-terrorists claims Institute of Cetacean Research

Thursday, 30 October 2008

The Institute of Cetacean Research (ICR), a Japanese scientific body that studies whales, today accused the United States television broadcast channel Animal Planet of involvement in ecoterrorism, following criminal attacks against its research ships in the Antarctic Ocean.