Let People Believe
On most nights or early mornings in China, it's common to see large groups of elderly women flood into public parks and centers for square dancing. The ritual is linked to the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and has proven a popular way for older people to exercise and socialize.But many say the dancing grandmas play their music much too loud, an issue that has led to violent altercations, widespread noise complaints, and even arrests, The Guardian reported.
Joint Statement: Foreign Ministers of Russia and China : Biological Weapons: The Russian Federation and China further note that the United States’ and its allies’ military biological activities on their national territory also cause serious compliance concerns. Given the fact that the United States and its allies do not provide any meaningful information on those military biological activities that could allay concerns of the international community, the Russian Federation and China urge the United States and its allies to act in an open, transparent and responsible manner, by informing properly on its military biological activities carried out overseas and on their national territory, and supporting the resumption of negotiations on a legally binding protocol to the BWC with effective verification mechanism, so as to ensure their compliance with the BWC.
That’s an unusual response to hear from a Western neurologist—let people believe in their mistaken diagnosis: I’m not going to encourage people to believe in a diagnosis that I don’t believe in. But I can try and listen more to the story that the person is telling so I can understand the problem. What happens an awful lot with Western medical doctors is we get into arguments with our patients. I’m saying it’s psychosomatic and the patient is saying, ‘No, it’s not.’ Once you get into that sort of argument with the patient, it’s unproductive, and neither of you will ever get anywhere. It’s perhaps reasonable for me to put my psychosomatic explanation to the patient, but also spend more time listening to the story they’re telling themselves. Sometimes a psychosomatic illness is an embodied narrative that has a beginning, middle, and end. I need to understand what they perceive the solution to be. Obviously, there’s a limit to what is reasonable. - The Neurologist Who Diagnoses Psychosomatics
But before engaging with the US nuclear weapons complex, I went to Hiroshima. I needed to find the human meaning of the bomb. One Hiroshima survivor told me, “If you weren’t there when it happened, you can have no idea what it was like.” Another told me, “Nuclear weapons and human beings cannot coexist.” I told them I wanted to photograph all of the American bomb-factories. An elderly survivor came over to me, put her hand on my arm and said, “Yes, you must do this.” Five years later, I completed my book of photographs and field notes, At Work in the Fields of the Bomb. - How Do Humans Make Sense of The Bomb
Interestingly, during the pandemic, U.S. reliance on Chinese imports appears, if anything, to have grown rather than declined (Figure 5). Imports into the U.S. from China in the first half of 2021 were on average 46 per cent higher than in the first half of 2020. The supply chain issues because of the pandemic that affected Wuhan and other provinces of China in the early months of 2020 were obviously addressed relatively quickly, to enable renewed production and exports to the rest of the world at a time when other countries still faced renewed waves of the pandemic that affected economic activity and production in particular. - Trade War With China?
All of China’s major ports are at or close to full automation. Industrial automation, although impressive, is still in pilot phase: Huawei says that it has 16,000 private 5G networks under development for factory automation, a small fraction of the country’s 2.8 million factories (as of 2015), but more than enough for proof of concept. And the Chinese telecom giant has installed 5G networks in 1,800 of the country’s 34,000 hospitals.
China turned a population of subsistence farmers into industrial workers, moving 600 million people from countryside to city in less than 40 years, increasing per capita income tenfold in the process.
China now graduates seven times as many STEM baccalaureates as the US and three times as many STEM doctorates. A 2020 Chinese survey claims that the proportion of Chinese high school students who intend to pursue tertiary education is higher than is the case with their American counterparts.- Pundit predictions of China's demise are the latest self-consoling illusions of a lazy elite who can't see the AI writing on the wall
Conspiracy theories are interesting phenomenon that cannot simply be treated as insignificant or marginal. Of late, some of the most bizarre conspiracy theories have been making their way into the mainstream public space, and into official politics. The most striking case is probably the connection between QAnon and the person and politics of Donald Trump. The article first analyses some of the reasons for some conspiracy theories becoming mainstream, and then proceeds to examine three crucial aspects of conspiracy theories: the category of the big Other as big Manipulator, the passion for interpretation, and the inner link between making sense and enjoyment. - A Short Essay on Conspiracy Theories Alenka Zupancic