What Beijing learned from Tiananmen: Democracy isn’t needed for prosperity

Instead, China’s rise to superpower status has proved a happy model for authoritarian governments hoping to pull their economies out of poverty without sacrificing control or conceding ground to notions of civil society. It has delinked prosperity from democracy.

China hasn't done anything novel. Machiavelli sourly noted this in his satirical treatise, The Prince: “The answer is that one would like to be both the one and the other; but because it is difficult to combine them, it is far safer to be feared than loved if you cannot be both.”

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Death of B.C. aboriginal teen Paige blamed on 'brutal and cruel' support services

CBC News Ugh. Reading this sort of story just gets me. Deep in the heart, it hurts me. This girl. Hell. She looks just like any other girl on my reserve. Like any girl I've met in my community. She was allowed to die. She was passed around, passed off, and then simply passed away. All while in the hands of a ministry that doesn't know what to do with this girl, and the hundreds of kids just like her. Damn it! The best way of dealing with these kids is to work with the families, the communities these kids are being taken from. Instead the BC government plucks them out of the parents' care, sometimes for frivolous reasons, and sends then into this machine-like bureaucracy, and sets it on the spin cycle. Where the kid ends up, and how they end up, is of no concern to the province! Just so long as they can punt these kids further away. Work with the kids' families! Work with the kids' communities! That's the best way.

The Earth is Alive

It is not a being in a manner we can absolutely comprehend. It's deeper mysteries are probably too much for our abnormally large monkey brains. We can make good guesses as to its nuances and behaviors, but how do we prove anything above the level of the idea we believe there to be a molten core at its heart? We believe it breathes and maintains its temperature through the trees, the air, and the ocean. We can make good guesses at all this, modeling to best of our knowledge what it all may look like, and predict its future behavior, but we don't actually know, for certain. Which may seem like a weakness to some. We're nothing more than animals, really. We follow the strong, and the strong are certain. Uncertainty seems alike to fear to some. The Earth is alive, and it is ancient. We are mere insects to it, really. Its age is unfathomable, honestly. We can only imagine a time before humans. We wish for a sense of superiority, as though we're somehow important in the gra

The way forward

I've been a in deep, deep depression these past couple years. I'm naturally manic-depressive, but I've also been genuinely sad, without an inkling of what I've needed to do in my personal life. I've been lost, and I've lost some friends. Well, I'm still lost, but I'm emerging from my sadness. I've taken a lot of time to think whilst in my funk. I'd been thinking, "How do we extricate ourselves out of this mess we've placed ourselves? What is the way forward?" I've found no answer. There's no clear path forward. There's no strategy, no long term plan that can really account for every possible setback that will occur. I suppose that's true of all plans, though. "Plans are worthless, but planning is everything." The solution then, I guess, is we need to wing it. Improvise. Get tough, and push forward. Suffer the pains from the blows we will receive, without flinching. Start moving forward to a place we wan

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