Quotes from the news to think about

“A political system based on force, oppression, changing people’s votes, killing, closure, arresting and using Stalinist and medieval torture, creating repression, censorship of newspapers, interruption of the means of mass communications, jailing the enlightened and the elite of society for false reasons, and forcing them to make false confessions in jail, is condemned and illegitimate,”
---Ayatollah Montazeri, one of the fathers of the original Islamic revolution in Iran...in the NYTimes

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"...As Afghanistan opened itself up after the fall of the Taliban, the cuisine, movies, and money that flowed into the country were, naturally, Indian....South Asia is a tar pit filled with failed and dysfunctional states, save for one long-established democracy of 1.2 billion people that is the second-fastest-growing major economy in the world, a check on China's rising ambitions, and a natural ally of the United States."
Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek columnist.

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“Not since ‘The Birth of a Nation’ has a mainstream movie demeaned the idea of black American life as much as ‘Precious,’ ” Mr. White wrote in his review. “Full of brazenly racist clichés (Precious steals and eats an entire bucket of fried chicken), it is a sociological horror show.”

Armond White is the chief film critic of The New York Press and the chairman of the New York Film Critics Circle. Article from NYTIMES

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We tend to imagine China as a monolith: 1.3 billion people sharing the same language, history, and culture. The truth is far more interesting. China is a mosaic of several distinct regions, each with its own resources, dynamics, and historical character.

an article in the Atlantic byPatrick Chovanec,about the NineNationsof China
several other scholars have similarly noticed this on their own, says the discussion on theGraniteStudioBlog