Archives for August 2011

In Which I Opine On Various Matters Of Great Importance

This in about Politics, and tagged , , , was written by on August 19, 2011 . 33 Comments

A collection of news stories and my take on them from the past month or so. 1. Bribes are growing quickly in Russia. Their average sizes, that is. It was reported by the MVD that they increased by 5x from a year earlier to $10,000. The usual Russophobe suspects wasted no time declaring this to […]

More On Learning Chinese

This in about Culture, and tagged , , , was written by on August 12, 2011 . 21 Comments

So today I finished my intensive Chinese class, which I celebrated by drinking lots of 啤酒 (and silently toasting the heroic oppositionistas struggling against UK bourgeois state tyranny). Here is my third set of observations. 1. Most other languages now look really easy, especially Spanish which I’ve long planned to learn but never really found myself […]