China: A democracy is built

"Indeed, 22 years after students flocked to Tiananmen Square, online calls for a homegrown Jasmine revolution have gone largely unanswered, though they have produced a thuggish response from local security officials. The country lacks a large constituency of disaffected, Facebook-friendly twentysomethings hankering for regime change. Rather it is the boom in the property sector, and the resulting political tensions, that will pose Beijing with some of the greatest threats to political stability in the next decade." http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/07434446-48f6-11e0-af8c-00144feab49a.html?ftcamp=rs...

EastSouthWestNorth: Fake Western media coverage of Jasmine Revolution in China

Examples of European and US publications using old & unrelated photos to make the "jasmine revolution" demonstrations over the weekend look more serious than they were. Mind you, the cops were nicking journalist's cameras, so maybe they had little choice. Still no excuse for misrepresenting photos like that though. The last one of a Hong Kong policeman with the caption "demonstration in Beijing" is pretty hilarious though. http://www.zonaeuropa.com/20110226_1.htm

The Secret Politburo Meeting Behind China’s New Democracy Crackdown

Interesting, if true... "On Saturday, February 12, the day after Hosni Mubarak resigned in Egypt, some of the members of the politburo of the Communist Party of China held a special meeting in Beijing to discuss the events in the Middle East. News of this meeting came via a democracy activist in Beijing, who said that a secretary who was present had leaked a summary of its contents. The democracy activist is a person who is well positioned to judge the authenticity of such a report." http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/feb/20/secret-politburo-meeting-beh...(The+New+York+Review+of+Books)

Space Stasis: What the strange persistence of rockets can teach us about innovation - by Neal Stephenson

There is no way, of course, to guess how rockets might have developed, or failed to, were it not for the fact that, during the 1940s, the world's most technically sophisticated nation was under the absolute control of a crazy dictator who decreed that vast physical and intellectual resources should be hurled into the project of creating rockets of hitherto unimagined size.