fashion beach

"I'm not happy about the way the Chinese are treating the Tibetans because I don't think anyone should be unkind to anyone else. And then this earthquake and all this stuff happened, and then I thought, is that karma? When you're not nice that the bad things happen to you?"

--Sharon Stone

Dear Ms Stone,

I am sure you mean well, and I'm not happy about China's treatment of Tibet either, but are you aware of the following facts:

• > The mountainous western part of Sichuan, where the earthquake struck, was historically part of Tibet before China annexed it.
• > Many, perhaps the majority, of the people in this region are ethnic Tibetans.
• > China is not a democracy.

So are you saying that Tibetans are being karmically punished for the way a government they did not choose and have no control over treats their ountry? And is it "kind" to tell five million people who have lost their homes, their possessions, their jobs and in many cases their children that it's their own fault for having the misfortune to live in a dictatorship?

How do you apply your theory to the events in Burma? Already suffering the karmic burden of having to live in a country controlled by a corrupt clique of crooks, many of them are now suffering a double dose of bad karma from the recent destructive cyclone.

Furthermore, if people's misfortune can be seen as a karmic payback for the evil done by their government, how do you view 9/11? After all, a succesion of elected American governments has done a lot of questionable things in various countries around the world.

In fact, do you even know what you are saying? Or should you do a little more research and analysis and thinking things through before making political statements in future?

Regards,
Private Beach

"7% of the voters in West Virginia voted for John Edwards. Faced with a black man and a white woman, these voters chose a white man who isn't running. And these are Democrats."

"In the former capital Rangoon, itself badly damaged by the cyclone, one man summed up the frustrations of a nation. 'When we had demonstrations last year the soldiers were everywhere,' he said. 'Where are they now?'"

"If file sharing is destroying the music industry, then how did Warner Music Group increase its sales in the first quarter 7 per cent to $989 million?"

"The severity of Chinese repression in Tibet since [1959] is well-documented. There is severe repression of Tibetan Buddhism, which in 1997 was labeled as a “foreign culture” Virtually all classes in secondary and higher education in Tibet are taught in Chinese not Tibetan, resulting in a high drop-out rate among Tibetans. Urban development has generally benefited Chinese immigrants, large numbers of whom have moved to Tibet and who are now about 12% of the population in the Tibet Administrative Region. Tibetans are routinely detained for long periods without charge or sentenced to long prison sentences for peacefully advocating independence or maintaining links with the Dalai Lama. Torture and ill-treatment in detention is widespread. Freedom of expression is severely restricted. Peaceful political demonstrations are invariably broken up and their participants arrested. Tibetan culture is treated as inferior to Chinese culture, and most key posts in the government and the economy are held by Chinese. Those few Tibetans who are able to enter Chinese government service do so at the cost of alienation from their own people and culture. Tibet’s environment and natural resources are ruthlessly exploited in the interests of China."

"The government said yesterday it would not welcome anyone who "seeks to damage the solemnity" of the Olympic Games in Hong Kong."

"Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."
--Dr Samuel Johnson

News reports of Friday's Olympic torch relay in Hong Kong stated that some peaceful protesters were physically threatened by elements of the pro-Beijing rentacrowd supporting the relay. "Goons and thugs", anyone?

In Macau's torch relay on Saturday, the ratio of athletes to Beijing toadies (19 out of 120) was even lower than in Hong Kong.

This site has some interesting points to make about the whole kerfuffle:

* The Olympic torch relay is not an ancient Greek tradition, but originated as a publicity stunt for Nazi Germany in 1936.

At that time, Germany's ally Japan was preparing for its bloody invasion of China, which resulted in millions of Chinese deaths. Today the 1936 Games are mainly remembered for two things: Leni Riefenstahl's magnificently crafted propaganda films, and black American sprinter Jesse Owens making a nonsense of Hitler's theories of white racial superiority.

* The Chinese translation of “Olympic flame” has misinterpreted it as “Olympic sacred flame”.

This is psychologically significant because it makes any protest against the torch relay not a political act, but an act of sacrilege. So an atheist regime has God on its side ...