Asian Games Quotes

People told me to give up trying to be special and settle down to a regular life. There ain't nothing wrong with a regular life, and that's the Lord's truth...But it wasn't for me, because I wanted to be something special...I knew how easy it was for a dream to die. I seen that all around me. You could let it die by just looking the other way—you know, some of those Asian people say they don't kill nothing, but they'll take a fish out of water and lay it on the ground and then say it just died on its own—you can do that with a dream, too. And sometimes you can get so frustrated, you feel so bad about your dream, that you go on and kill it yourself. When you do that, you're killing a piece of yourself, too." —Mr. Cephus

Your own politicians make our Dr. Goebbels look like a child playing with picture books in a kindergarten. They speak of morality while they douse screaming children and old women in burning napalm. Your draft-resisters are called cowards and ‘peaceniks.’ For refusing to follow orders they are either put in jails or scourged from the country. Those who demonstrate against this country's unfortunate Asian adventure are clubbed down in the streets. The GI soldiers who kill the innocent are decorated by Presidents, welcomed home from the bayoneting of children and the burning of hospitals with parades and bunting. They are given dinners, Keys to the City, free tickets to pro football games.” He toasted his glass in Todd's direction. “Only those who lose are tried as war criminals for following orders and directives.

The world seemed filled with interesting books to read, interesting plays and movies to see, interesting games to play, interesting food to taste, and interesting people to have sex with and sometimes even to fall in love with. To Marx, it seemed foolish not to love as many things as you could. In the first months she knew him, Sadie disparaged Marx to Sam by calling him “the romantic dilettante.” But for Marx, the world was like a breakfast at a five-star hotel in an Asian country—the abundance of it was almost overwhelming. Who wouldn’t want a pineapple smoothie, a roast pork bun, an omelet, pickled vegetables, sushi, and a green-tea-flavored croissant? They were all there for the taking and delicious, in their own way.

Do I want to bed her? Sure. So mount a campaign, maneuver her into bed without commitments. Don’t play the game of life according to female rules, all’s fair in war and war. What’s love anyway? It’s like Casey said, sex’s only a part of it.

Detectives discovered gross contradictions to Eric’s insta-profile already cemented in the media. In Plattsburgh, friends described a sports enthusiast hanging out with minorities. Two of Eric’s best friends turned out to be Asian and African American. The Asian boy was a jock to boot. Eric played soccer and Little League. He followed the Rockies even before the family moved to Colorado, frequently sporting their baseball cap. By junior high he had grown obsessed with computers, and eventually with popular video games.

Bruce Lee was proof: not all Asian Men were doomed to a life of being Generic. If there was even one guy who had made it, it was at least theoretically possible for the rest. But easy cases make bad law, and Bruce Lee proved too much. He was a living, breathing video game boss-level, a human cheat code, an idealized avatar of Asian-ness and awesomeness permanently set on Expert difficulty. Not a man so much as a personification, not a mortal so much as a deity on loan to you and your kind for a fixed period of time. A flame that burned for all yellow to understand, however briefly, what perfection was like.

Because sometimes I feel like everyone my age is ahead of the game and I’m just totally fucked. I thought I knew what I wanted,

It seems like the best escape games come from Japan for some reason. It makes me proud.

The two board games that best approximate the strategies of war are chess and the Asian game of go. In chess, the board is small. In comparison to go, the attack comes relatively quickly, forcing a decisive battle.... Go is much less formal. It is played on a large grid, with 361 intersections — nearly six times as many positions as in chess.... [A game of go] can last up to three hundred moves. The strategy is more subtle and fluid than chess, developing slowly; the more complex the pattern your stones initially create on the board, the harder it is for your opponent to understand your strategy. Fighting to control a particular area is not worth the trouble: You have to think in larger terms, to be prepared to sacrifice an area in order eventually to dominate the board. What you are after is not an entrenched position but mobility. With mobility you can isolate your opponent in small areas and then encircle them... Chess is linear, position oriented, and aggressive; go is nonlinear and fluid. Aggression is indirect until the end of the game, when the winner can surround the opponents' stones at an accelerated pace.

... the hybrid breeders dream big. "The end game is to create the most beautiful example of something that looks wild but is domestic," says Anthony Hutcherson, who breeds Bengals, a mix of house cat and Asian leopard cat lineage whose name nods to a type of endangered tiger. "It's great to win a cat show, but it is more rewarding to make something that looks like a little leopard or jaguar or ocelot that eats cat food and purrs on sight.

Life will give you what you need once you will do something with it. It may not give you what you want so as to be as comfortable as you want, as Nature’s concern is need as it relates to evolution. In my humble opinion, Nature is too kind, but, as I say, the game is big, and the challenges and temptations absolute. And this is a fascinating aspect of the totality of beauty; it gives more than is only necessary. The generosity is mind- and heart boggling.

As sneakily addictive as a game of Pong (which was named, we're told, after the narrator's dad), this zany zip-line of a novel takes the piss out of the Asian-American 'good immigrant' story. Full of charming antiheroes making comically bad choices, the story dazzles us with its absurdity, which makes its eventual wisdom--about lineage, ethnicity, and the meaning of family--all the more wonderfully surprising.

Transcendence is a word I don’t use often; I prefer transformation. Why? Because the essential game is about using what is in front of you and in you exactly as it is, but finding a way to do something with that that is surprising and an expression of inspiration and intuition. You engage reality and make something out of it that only you can, alchemizing limitation, conflict or what appears to be bad into something else.

The PBA was a symptom of the Philippines' basketball obsession, not the cause. I was thrilled to be witnessing the professional game from inside Alaska's locker room, but that wasn't what brought me to Manila in the first place. I was inspired by the idea that a Southeast Asian nation populated by five-foot-five men and mostly forgotten by America except for its political corruption, widespread prostitution, and violent Muslim separatist movement could be devoted to hoops with a passion unequaled by any other country. It was a nationwide tale of unrequited love. Forty million short men obsessed with basketball--they might as well have been a nation of blind art historians.

This is even more puzzling than the Asian flushing gene’s failure to sweep through the world. As Tomáš Masaryk saw clearly, a culture that spends entire evenings consuming liquid neurotoxins—created at great expense and to the detriment of nutritious food production—should be at an enormous disadvantage compared to cultural groups that eschew intoxicants altogether. Such groups exist, and have for quite some time. Perhaps the most salient example is the Islamic world, which produced Ibn Fadlan. Prohibition was not a feature of the earliest period of Islam, but according to one hadith, or tradition, it was the consequence of a particular dinner at which companions of Mohammed became too inebriated to properly say their prayers. In any case, by the end of the Prophetic era in 632 CE, a complete ban on alcohol was settled Islamic law. It cannot be denied that, in the cultural evolution game, Islam has been extremely successful.

To the untrained eye, the Wall Street people who rode from the Connecticut suburbs to Grand Central were an undifferentiated mass, but within that mass Danny noted many small and important distinctions. If they were on their BlackBerrys, they were probably hedge fund guys, checking their profits and losses in the Asian markets. If they slept on the train they were probably sell-side people—brokers, who had no skin in the game. Anyone carrying a briefcase or a bag was probably not employed on the sell side, as the only reason you’d carry a bag was to haul around brokerage research, and the brokers didn’t read their own reports—at least not in their spare time. Anyone carrying a copy of the New York Times was probably a lawyer or a back-office person or someone who worked in the financial markets without actually being in the markets. Their clothes told you a lot, too. The guys who ran money dressed as if they were going to a Yankees game. Their financial performance was supposed to be all that mattered about them, and so it caused suspicion if they dressed too well. If you saw a buy-side guy in a suit, it usually meant that he was in trouble, or scheduled to meet with someone who had given him money, or both. Beyond that, it was hard to tell much about a buy-side person from what he was wearing. The sell side, on the other hand, might as well have been wearing their business cards: The guy in the blazer and khakis was a broker at a second-tier firm; the guy in the three-thousand-dollar suit and the hair just so was an investment banker at J.P. Morgan or someplace like that. Danny could guess where people worked by where they sat on the train. The Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, and Merrill Lynch people, who were headed downtown, edged to the front—though when Danny thought about it, few Goldman people actually rode the train anymore. They all had private cars. Hedge fund guys such as himself worked uptown and so exited Grand Central to the north, where taxis appeared haphazardly and out of nowhere to meet them, like farm trout rising to corn kernels. The Lehman and Bear Stearns people used to head for the same exit as he did, but they were done. One reason why, on September 18, 2008, there weren’t nearly as many people on the northeast corner of Forty-seventh Street and Madison Avenue at 6:40 in the morning as there had been on September 18, 2007.

Porridge is our soup, our grits, our sustenance, so it's pretty much the go-to for breakfast. For the first time, I ate with a bunch of other Taiwanese-Chinese kids my age who knew what the hell they were doing. Even at Chinese school, there were always kids that brought hamburgers, shunned chopsticks, or didn't get down with the funky shit. They were like faux-bootleg-Canal Street Chinamen. That was one of the things that really annoyed me about growing up Chinese in the States. Even if you wanted to roll with Chinese/Taiwanese kids, there were barely any around and the ones that were around had lost their culture and identity. They barely spoke Chinese, resented Chinese food, and if we got picked on by white people on the basketball court, everyone just looked out for themselves. It wasn't that I wanted people to carry around little red books to affirm their "Chinese-ness," but I just wanted to know there were other people that wanted this community to live on in America. There was on kid who wouldn't eat the thousand-year-old eggs at breakfast and all the other kids started roasting him. "If you don't get down with the nasty shit, you're not Chinese!" I was down with the mob, but something left me unsettled. One thing ABCs love to do is compete on "Chinese-ness," i.e., who will eat the most chicken feet, pig intestines, and have the highest SAT scores. I scored high in chick feet, sneaker game, and pirated good, but relatively low on the SAT. I had made National Guild Honorable Mention for piano when I was around twelve and promptly quit. My parents had me play tennis and take karate, but ironically, I quit tennis two tournaments short of being ranked in the state of Florida and left karate after getting my brown belt. The family never understood it, but I knew what I was doing. I didn't want to play their stupid Asian Olympics, but I wanted to prove to myself that if I did want to be the stereotypical Chinaman they wanted, I could. (189) I had become so obsessed with not being a stereotype that half of who I was had gone dormant. But it was also a positive. Instead of following the path most Asian kids do, I struck out on my own. There's nature, there's nurture, and as Harry Potter teaches us, there's who YOU want to be. (198) Everyone was in-between. The relief of the airport and the opportunity to reflect on my trip helped me realize that I didn't want to blame anyone anymore, Not my parents, not white people, not America. Did I still think there was a lot wrong with the aforementioned? Hell, yeah, but unless I was going to do something about it, I couldn't say shit. So I drank my Apple Sidra and shut the fuck up. (199)

You're certainly not dressed like you're running a business." Eyes blazing, she glared. "What's wrong with how I'm dressed?" "An apron and a pink tracksuit with Juicy written across the ass are hardly serious business attire and they certainly don't scream swipe right on desi Tinder." Sam didn't know if there was such a thing as Tinder for people of South Asian descent living abroad, but if it did exist, he and Layla would definitely not have been a match. Layla gave a growl of frustration. "You may be surprised to hear that I don't live my life seeking male approval. I'm just getting over a breakup so I'm a little bit fragile. Last night, I went out with Daisy and drank too much, smoked something I thought was a cigarette, danced on a speaker, and fell onto some loser named Jimbo, whose girlfriend just happened to be an MMA fighter and didn't like to see me sprawled on top of her man. We had a minor physical altercation and I was kicked out of the bar. Then I got dumped on the street by my Uber driver because I threw up in his cab. So today, I just couldn't manage office wear. It's called self-care, and we all need it sometimes. Danny certainly wouldn't mind." "Who's Danny?" The question came out before he could stop it. "Someone who appreciates all I've got going here-" she ran a hand around her generous curves- "and isn't hung up on trivial things like clothes." She tugged off the apron and dropped it on the reception desk. "I'm not hung up on clothes, either," Sam teased. "When I'm with a woman I prefer to have no clothes at all." Her nose wrinkled. "You're disgusting." "Go home, sweetheart." Sam waved a dismissive hand. "Put your feet up. Watch some rom-coms. Eat a few tubs of ice cream. Have a good cry. Some of us have real work to do.

It was 1996, and the word “appropriation” never occurred to either of them. They were drawn to these references because they loved them, and they found them inspiring. They weren’t trying to steal from another culture, though that is probably what they did. Consider Mazer in a 2017 interview with Kotaku, celebrating the twentieth-anniversary Nintendo Switch port of the original Ichigo: kotaku: It is said that the original Ichigo is one of the most graphically beautiful low-budget games ever made, but its critics also accuse it of appropriation. How do you respond to that? mazer: I do not respond to that. kotaku: Okay…But would you make the same game if you were making it now? mazer: No, because I am a different person than I was then. kotaku: In terms of its obvious Japanese references, I mean. Ichigo looks like a character Yoshitomo Nara could have painted. The world design looks like Hokusai, except for the Undead level, which looks like Murakami. The soundtrack sounds like Toshiro Mayuzumi… mazer: I won’t apologize for the game Sadie and I made. [Long pause.] We had many references—Dickens, Shakespeare, Homer, the Bible, Philip Glass, Chuck Close, Escher. [Another long pause.] And what is the alternative to appropriation? kotaku: I don’t know. mazer: The alternative to appropriation is a world in which artists only reference their own cultures. kotaku: That’s an oversimplification of the issue. mazer: The alternative to appropriation is a world where white European people make art about white European people, with only white European references in it. Swap African or Asian or Latin or whatever culture you want for European. A world where everyone is blind and deaf to any culture or experience that is not their own. I hate that world, don’t you? I’m terrified of that world, and I don’t want to live in that world, and as a mixed-race person, I literally don’t exist in it. My dad, who I barely knew, was Jewish. My mom was an American-born Korean. I was raised by Korean immigrant grandparents in Koreatown, Los Angeles. And as any mixed-race person will tell you—to be half of two things is to be whole of nothing. And, by the way, I don’t own or have a particularly rich understanding of the references of Jewishness or Koreanness because I happen to be those things. But if Ichigo had been fucking Korean, it wouldn’t be a problem for you, I guess?

You may have noticed that the questions asked are better than the answers given. What do you expect? Perhaps we could submit these answers in a game and see if anyone could figure out what the hell the question was. “Ahh, how to be happy?

A people does not become superfluous by itself, any more than natural waste creates itself. It is society that declares some persons to be waste. Human trash is not an unfortunate burden on a society, an indirect result of its proper conduct; it is its direct product. European settlers in the American, African, and Asian continents did not happen to come upon populations of unwanted persons nature had thrust their way; they made them superfluous by way of the some of the most important and irreversible principles of their societies.

The bar/restaurant was still open, and there was some kind of forgettable baseball game featured there, on the large screen, with no one watching, and you could see this from the uninhabited and threadbare lobby. The young man at the front desk looked like there was no sorrow he had not experienced, and you could imagine that the pariahs of Waterbury - the convicted frauds and disgraced politicians, the collectors of serial-killer memorabilia, the embezzlers of church donations, those found guilty of exposing themselves, the mortuary assistants with suppressed necrophiliac tendencies, the sadistic gym teachers and embittered traffic cops - all settled here when they were in search of the loneliest night imaginable, and nothing made them feel better than exceedingly loud smoove playing in the lobby. If you were experiencing catecholaminergic polymorphic ventricular tachycardia, some flügelhorn soloing just might do the trick, could render you functionally unconscious in that way that hotel life can often do, unaware of any aspect of civilization that involves continuity, stability, devotion. However, it's also possible that smoove could be seen as a music that requires absolute submission to the American economy, to the need to buy and consume, and, as such, it is straight out of the robber-baron playbook, the music that can and must drive you to your knees so that you can do nothing but purchase plastic trinkets of Southeast Asian manufacture.

There is no foreseeable scenario under which Beijing will back away, either rhetorically or in practice, from its territorial claims in Taiwan and in the South and East China Seas. As Xi Jinping told the then US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis in June 2018, China will not give up 'even an inch' of its territory, which includes its expansive maritime claims and a large land area disputed with India. Within the Chinese system, any leader who stepped back from these claims would be committing political suicide. The internal sensitivity of the territorial issue helps explain the bellicose way Beijing handles these disputes outside of its borders. China constantly schools its Asian neighbours on its red lines in territorial disputes, all the while rapidly building up its military capability and regional diplomatic sway to entrench them. With the possible exception of Vietnam, smaller countries have taken to either submitting or swerving in the face of Beijing's pressure. Yet it is far from game over, if history is any guide. Total capitulation in international relations is rare. Behind the scenes in Beijing, there has always been recognition that it was dangerous for China to bully its way to regional domination. 'The history of contemporary relations does not provide any precedent of a large country successfully bringing to its knees another country,' wrote Wang Jisi, formerly of Peking University, and for many years an informal government adviser. Wang pointed to America's experience in Vietnam and more recently Afghanistan, where its vastly superior military firepower couldn't drag it out of a military and then political quagmire. Wang was writing in 2014. Such strategic humility is rare in Beijing these days, either because the Chinese themselves have become cockier or because the country's diplomats fear being caught out of step with the temper of Xi's times. Nonetheless, the point stands. Beijing cannot bully its way to superpower status without engendering a strong pushback from other countries, which is exactly what is happening.

If a lot of people are suffering because of a few people, why didn’t the majority do something about it a long time ago? Why’d everyone let it get so bad?” “If you drop a lobster in a pot of boiling water,” Zyrha tells him, “it’ll thrash around for its life.” “Wouldn’t we all?” Darrion smirks. “If you drop the lobster in a pot of cool water and slowly raise the temperature, it’ll die without a struggle. It’ll get used to the incremental increases until it’s too late to know it’s dead. You asked how we got here. The temperature had been rising in the Old States for a long time. People were dying left and right without a struggle. A few leaders had control over everything: money, power, the military, health care, schools, utilities, transportation, laws, courts, and the media. They had everything. Everything except the one thing every person in power needs.” “What’s that?” Darrion asks through a strained quiver. “An enemy.” “An enemy,” he repeats. “The question became which one. There were so many to choose from.” Zyrha claps her hands and gives a sarcastic laugh. “Black people. Brown people. Asians. Mexicans. Arabs. Women. The biracial. The multiracial. Old people. Young people. Short people. The overweight, the underweight, the sick, the helpless, the homeless, the unemployed. The asexual, the bisexual, the homosexual, the transgendered. People with special needs. The neurodivergent. Pot-smokers. Immigrants. Socialists. Communists. Atheists. Jews. Muslims. Intellectuals. Influencers. Athletes. Academics. Writers. Pacifists. Celebrities.” Zyrha pauses to draw in a long breath. “They were all contrived of course. They were invented enemies designed to occupy the amygdala—that’s the brain’s fear center—so the prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain responsible for rational thought and good decision-making—wouldn’t take over. Anyway, there’d been a lot of manufactured enemies, and, frankly, they’d been done to death.

You must have padded that résumé somehow. After all, Asians don’t really count as minorities anymore, do they? Do you play any instruments?” Mr. Remington asks. I wince.

Maury and I spent more than one month in Pakistan, talking with AID personnel and their Pakistani counterparts and learning about the conduct of the projects over the six-year period. Most importantly, we focused on the dialogue between senior U.S. embassy and mission personnel and those in the Pakistani government responsible for economic policy formulation. One day, he and I were asked to attend a “brown bag luncheon” with the senior mission staff. The idea was to be totally informal, put our feet on the desks and just chat about our impressions. Everyone was eager to learn what Maury thought about the program. Three important things emerged for me out of that discussion. 1. The mission director explained that he had held some very successful consultations and brainstorming sessions with senior Pakistani government leaders. He said the Pakistanis were open to his ideas for needed reform, listened carefully and took extensive notes during these meetings. Although there had been little concrete action to implement these recommendations to date, he was confident they were seriously considering them. Maury smiled and responded, “Yeah. They used to jerk me around the same way when I was in your position. The Paks are masters at that game. They know how to make you feel good. I doubt that they are serious. This is a government of inaction.” The mission director was crestfallen. 2. Then the program officer asked what Maury thought about the mix of projects that had been selected by the government of Pakistan and the mission for inclusion in the program for funding. Maury responded that the projects selected were “old friends” of his. He too, had focused on the same areas i.e. agriculture, health, and power generation and supply. That said, the development problems had not gone away. He gave the new program credit for identifying the same obstacles to economic development that had existed twenty years earlier. 3. Finally, the mission director asked Maury for his impressions of any major changes he sensed had occurred in Pakistan since his departure. Maury thought about that for a while. Then he offered perhaps the most prescient observation of the entire review. He said, when he served in Pakistan in the 1960s, he had found that the educated Pakistani visualized himself and his society as being an important part of the South-Asian subcontinent. “Today” he said, “after having lost East Pakistan, they seem to perceive themselves as being the eastern anchor of the Middle-East.” One wonders whether the Indian government understands this significant shift in its neighbor’s outlook and how important it is to work to reverse that world view among the Pakistanis for India’s own security andwell-being.

Maury and I spent more than one month in Pakistan, talking with AID personnel and their Pakistani counterparts and learning about the conduct of the projects over the six-year period. Most importantly, we focused on the dialogue between senior U.S. embassy and mission personnel and those in the Pakistani government responsible for economic policy formulation. One day, he and I were asked to attend a “brown bag luncheon” with the senior mission staff. The idea was to be totally informal, put our feet on the desks and just chat about our impressions. Everyone was eager to learn what Maury thought about the program. Three important things emerged for me out of that discussion. 1. The mission director explained that he had held some very successful consultations and brainstorming sessions with senior Pakistani government leaders. He said the Pakistanis were open to his ideas for needed reform, listened carefully and took extensive notes during these meetings. Although there had been little concrete action to implement these recommendations to date, he was confident they were seriously considering them. Maury smiled and responded, “Yeah. They used to jerk me around the same way when I was in your position. The Paks are masters at that game. They know how to make you feel good. I doubt that they are serious. This is a government of inaction.” The mission director was crestfallen. 2. Then the program officer asked what Maury thought about the mix of projects that had been selected by the government of Pakistan and the mission for inclusion in the program for funding. Maury responded that the projects selected were “old friends” of his. He too, had focused on the same areas i.e. agriculture, health, and power generation and supply. That said, the development problems had not gone away. He gave the new program credit for identifying the same obstacles to economic development that had existed twenty years earlier. 3. Finally, the mission director asked Maury for his impressions of any major changes he sensed had occurred in Pakistan since his departure. Maury thought about that for a while. Then he offered perhaps the most prescient observation of the entire review. He said, when he served in Pakistan in the 1960s, he had found that the educated Pakistani visualized himself and his society as being an important part of the South-Asian subcontinent. “Today” he said, “after having lost East Pakistan, they seem to perceive themselves as being the eastern anchor of the Middle-East.” One wonders whether the Indian government understands this significant shift in its neighbor’s outlook and how important it is to work to reverse that world view among the Pakistanis for India’s own security andwell-being.

Murphy’s grandfather, Paul Furst, told KSDK that Murphy was mentally challenged and did not deserve to die:4 I believe this is another one of the Trayvon Martin stories where people are getting so gun happy they shoot just on impulse now. I could understand if he was a threat. But on the property, he was not a threat. Murphy was fifteen years old. The Knockout Game is also popular with Asian immigrants. As victims. In April 2011, two elderly Vietnamese immigrants were attacked. Seventy-two-year-old Hoang Nguyen and his fifty-nine-year-old wife, Yen Nguyen, were “walking in an alley behind the 3800 block of Spring Avenue [when] two males and two females approached the couple, who were on their way home from a Vietnamese market. Nguyen was punched in the head and kicked in the abdomen. He died at a hospital. His wife suffered an eye socket fracture when she was punched in the face. Elex Levell Murphy was arrested for the attack and told police the attack was part of the “Knockout Game.”5

Eight months [after 9/11], after the most intensive international investigation in history, the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation informed the press that they still didn't know who did it. He said they had suspicions. The suspicions were that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan but implemented in Germany and the United Arab Emirates, and, of course, in the United States. After 9/11, Bush II essentially ordered the Taliban to hand over Osama bin Laden, and they temporized. They might have handed him over, actually. They asked for evidence that he was involved in the attacks of 9/11. And, of course, the government, first of all, couldn't given them any evidence because they didn't have any. But secondly, they reacted with total contempt. How can you ask us for evidence if we want you to hand somebody over? What lèse-majesté is this? So Bush simply informed the people of Afghanistan that we're going to bomb you until the Taliban hand over Osama bin Laden. He said nothing about overthrowing the Taliban. That came three weeks later, when British admiral Michael Boyce, the head of the British Defense Staff, announced to the Afghans that we're going to continue bombing you until you overthrow your government. This fits the definition of terrorism exactly, but it's much worse. It's aggression. How did the Afghans feel about it? We actually don't know. There were leading Afghan anti-Taliban activists who were bitterly opposed to the bombing. In fact, a couple of weeks after the bombing started, the U.S. favorite, Abdul Haq, considered a great martyr in Afghanistan, was interviewed about this. He said that the Americans are carrying out the bombing only because they want to show their muscle. They're undermining our efforts to overthrow the Taliban from within, which we can do. If, instead of killing innocent Afghans, they help us, that's what will happen. Soon after that, there was a meeting in Peshawar in Pakistan of a thousand tribal leaders, some from Afghanistan who trekked across the border, some from Pakistan. They disagreed on a lot of things, but they were unanimous on one thing: stop the bombing. That was after about a month. Could the Taliban have been overthrown from within? It's very likely. There were strong anti-Taliban forces. But the United States didn't want that. It wanted to invade and conquer Afghanistan and impose its own rule. ...There are geostrategic reasons. They're not small. How dominant they are in the thinking of planners we can only speculate. But there is a reason why everybody has been invading Afghanistan since Alexander the Great. The country is in a highly strategic position relative to Central Asian, South Asia, and the Middle East. There are specific reasons in the present case having to do with pipeline projects, which are in the background. We don't know how important these considerations are, but since the 1990s the United States has been trying hard to establish the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline (TAPI)from Turkmenistan, which has a huge amount of natural gas, to India. It has to go through Kandahar, in fact. So Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India are all involved. The United States wants the pipeline for two reasons. One reason is to try to prevent Russia from having control of natural gas. That's the new "great game": Who controls Central Asian resources? The other reason has to do with isolating Iran. The natural way to get the energy resources India needs is from Iran, a pipeline right from Iran to Pakistan to India. The United States wants to block this from happening in the worst way. It's a complicated business. Pakistan has just agreed to let the pipeline run from Iran to Pakistan. The question is whether India will try to join in. The TAPI pipeline would be a good weapon to try to undercut that.

But easy cases make bad law, and Bruce Lee proved too much. He was a living, breathing video game boss-level, a human cheat code, an idealized avatar of Asian-ness and awesomeness permanently set on Expert difficulty.

Identarian antiracism is an approach to racism that begins and ends with racial identity, prioritizing (white) racial identity as racism’s starting point and championing (non-white) racial identity as antiracism’s end game. In the academy and beyond, identarian antiracism is the dominant approach to race and racism. Its dominance rises to the level of established doctrine.

Bila satu negara baru lahir dan orang-orang yang sebelumnya tidak pernah punya apa-apa itu ditempatkan pada jabatan yang "basah", terdapatlah salah urus dan korupsi, bahkan pada kalangan atas. Baru-baru ini aku mengeluarkan ancaman hukuman mati untuk pengacau ekonomi. Seorang pemilik penggilingan padi membuat harga beras membumbung tinggi dengan menimbun enam ribu ton. Bila dia nanti ternyata bersalah, aku sendiri yang akan menandatangani perintah hukuman mati terhadapnya. Banyak dari para pengusaha kami menyimpan hartanya di bank luar negeri. Aku tahu hal itu. Tetapi selagi mereka bekerja membantu kami, bukan menentang kami, hak milik perorangan tidak akan dihapus sebagaimana di sejumlah negara sosialis lain. Sukarno dengan gembira membolehkan warga negaranya kaya. Beberapa orang kawanku sendiri adalah kapitalis-sosialis. Tetapi hal itu harus dibatasi. Mereka yang menghisap kekayaan negara dan menjadi patriot apabila sakunya berisi, akan ditembak mati. Undang-undang kami sekarang harus tegas, atau ekonomi kami tidak pernah beres. Di negara Barat kehidupan sangat menyenangkan. Orang bisa membeli gula, dasi bagus, barang-barang mewah seperti lipstik dan krim wajah. Di Timur terjadi kekurangan yang serius. Di negara-negara kapitalis orang dapat bergerak bebas. Di negara-negara sosialis apa yang disebut kebebasan tidak ada. Bahkan kelaparan masih sering terjadi. Ada pembatasan di setiap bidang, ini bukan karena sistem kami yang salah, melainkan karena kami masih dalam proses mewujudkan cita-cita. Menderita akan membuat kuat. Aku tidak menghendaki rakyatku menderita, tetapi kalau semua diperoleh dengan mudah, mereka pikir Bung Karno adalah Sinterklas. Mereka akan duduk saja menunggu Sukarno mengerjakan semua untuk mereka. Mungkin kalau aku memiliki kemampuan untuk memberikan kesenangan, aku tidak akan menjadi pemimpin yang baik. Aku harus memberi rakyatku makanan untuk jiwanya bukan hanya untuk perutnya. Seandainya aku memakai semua uang untuk membeli beras, mungkin aku akan dapat mengatasi kelaparan mereka. Tapi bila aku memiliki uang 5 dollar, aku akan mengeluarkan 2.50 dollar untuk membuat mereka kuat. Membesarkan suatu bangsa merupakan pekerjaan kompleks. Semangat suatu bangsa yang pernah tertindas tidak boleh disia-siakan. Di Kalimantan Barat sungainya tidak dapat di lewati, perhubungan tidak mungkin diadakan. Sebagian besar bahan makanannya diimpor. Ketika aku pertamakali berkunjung ke sana, tahukah engkau apa yang sangat mereka inginkan? Bukan bantuan teknis. Bukan pembangunan pertanian. Tapi sebuah fakultas hukum! Dan begitulah sekarang telah berdiri sebuah universitas di tengah-tengah rimb raya Kalimantan. Manusia tidak hanya hidup untuk makan. Meski gang-gang di Jakarta penuh lumpur dan jalanan masih kurang, aku memutuskan membangun gedung-gedung bertingkat, jembatan berbentuk daun semanggu, dan sebuah jalan raya "superhighway", Jakarta Bypass. Aku juga menamai kembali jalan-jalan dengan nama para pahlawan kami. Jalan Diponegoro, Jalan Thamrin, Jalan Cokroaminoto. Aku menganggao pengeluaran uang untuk simbol-simbol penting seperti itu tidak akan sia-sia. Aku harus membuat bangsa Indonesia bangga terhadap diri mereka. Mereka sudah terlalu lama kehilangan harga diri. Banyak orang memiliki wawasan picik dengan mentalitas warung kelontong menghitung-hitung pengeluaran itu dan menuduhku menghambur-hamburkan uang rakyat. Ini semua bukankah untuk keagunganku, tapi agar seluruh bangsaku dihargai seluruh dunia. Seluruh negeriku membeku ketia Asian Games 1962 akan diselenggarakan di ibukotanya. Kami lalu mendirikan stadion dengan atap melingkar yang tak ada duanya di dunia. Kota-kota di mancanegara memiliki stadion yang lebih besar, tetapi tak ada yang memiliki atap melingkar. Ya, memberantas kelaparan memang penting, tetapi memberi jiwa mereka yang telah tertindas dengan sesuatu yang dapat membangkitkan kebanggaan ini juga penting.

There is a party of 100 high-powered politicians. All of them are either honest or liars. You walk in knowing two things: - At least one of them is honest. - If you take any two politicians, at least one of them is a liar. From this information, can you know how many are liars and how many are honest? Answer 243.     A very famous chemist was found murdered in his kitchen today. The police have narrowed it down to six suspects. They know it was a two man job. Their names: Felice, Maxwell, Archibald, Nicolas, Jordan, and Xavier. A note was also found with the body: '26-3-58/28-27-57-16'. Who are the killers? Answer 244.     A smooth dance, a ball sport, a place to stay, an Asian country, and a girl's name. What's her name? Answer 245.     To give me to someone I don't belong to is cowardly, but to take me is noble. I can be a game, but there are no winners. What am I? Answer 246.     There are several books on a bookshelf. If one book is the 4th from the left and 6th from the right, how many books are on the shelf? Answer 247.     How many letters are in the answer to this riddle? Answer

My host denied any rivalry existed, because Iran wasn't playing the same game as Turkey. If there was any race, it should be compared to the story of the tortoise and the hare. The Turks were investing all sorts of money in television, the press, and high-profile visits in an effort to dominate the new republics, Habkin said. But this was a short term policy that would explode in their faces when the local cultures decided to define their own place in the sun The Turks were likely to lose a lot of money--and respect--when that happened. Iran's policy, in contrast, was one based on regional stability and allowing the new republics to make up their own minds about where their interests and identities lay. There was no competition in this, it wasn't a zero-sum game: Iran had things to offer and Turkey had things to offer; so did Pakistan, and even Afghanistan, once it recovered from its decade-long civil war. Let the Azeris and the Central Asians come and take a look and decide for themselves what they wanted to take from Iran's material, moral and political culture, Habkin said. Iran wasn't beating people over the head with this ideology or that. What you see is what you get.