Sunday, June 23, 1991

Akira Kurosawa's Rhapsody in August

Akira Kurosawa's Rhapsody in August
Bevin Chu
June 22, 1991

Calendar Letters
Los Angeles Times
Times Mirror Square
Los Angeles CA 90053

Dear Editor:

Director Akira Kurosawa (Calendar June 23, Conversation with Gabriel Garcia Marquez) in referring to "Rhapsody in August," set in Nagasaki, proclaimed:

"I have not filmed shockingly realistic scenes which would prove tobe unbearable... I remember the day... clearly, and evennow I still can't believe that it could have happened inthe real world. But the worst part of it is that the Japanese people have cast it into oblivion."

Ironically, his words indicting America for using the atomic bomb against Japan could easily refer to a well-documented but seldom mentioned act of genocide committed by the Japanese Army against China. Historian Paul Johnson writes in "Modern Times, The World from the Twenties to the Eighties":

"The Chinese capital, Nanking, fell in December 1937. For four weeks the streets of the city were given over to one of the largest-scale massacres in history. Men, women and children, said an eyewitness, 'were hunted like rabbits. Everyone seen to move was shot.' Some 20,000 male Chinese civilians of military age were marched out into the countryside and killed by bayoneting and machineguns, foreshadowing the Soviet massacres of the Poles in 1941 at Katyn and elsewhere. The killings went on until 6 Feb, 1938, and by then between 200,000 to 300,000 Chinese were dead. Even an official Nazi embassy report described the scenes as 'the work of bestial machinery'. The atrocities got wide coverage in world newspapers. The Emperor and the civilians in the cabinet claimed later that they knew nothing of these events until after the war."

Akira Kurosawa had the chutzpah to declare:

"at the very least, the country that dropped the bomb should apologize to the Japanese people. Until that happens this drama will not be over."

As a Chinese-American born in Nanking permit me to respond:

"At the very least, the country that massacred a quarter of a million civilians should apologize to the Chinese people."

Filmmaker Kurosawa could launch this enterprise by producing and directing a trilogy acknowledging Japan's culpability in World War II, starting with "Nanking," followed by "Pearl Harbor" and concluding with "Bataan." Were he to do so, I for one would not object to the inclusion of "shockingly realistic scenes which would prove to be unbearable."

Yours Truly,

Bevin Chu
Santa Monica, CA

Thursday, May 09, 1991

Pat Buchanan vs. Sarah Brady

Pat Buchanan vs. Sarah Brady
Bevin Chu
May 08, 1991

Mr. Patrick Buchanan
c/o CNN
Box 740166
Atlanta, GA

Dear Mr. Buchanan:

Thank you for speaking out on "Crossfire" against the Brady Bill.

Your opponent Michael Kinsley kept demanding of you and Mr. Heston: "What would be the harm of asking [sic] people to wait seven days before they could get their hands on a handgun?" Perhaps Mr. Kinsley can better appreciate gun owners' "hysterical opposition" if one answers his question with another question: `What would be the harm of "asking" people to wait seven days before they could see and hear news stories?'

Applying the logic of Brady Bill advocates, local police chiefs such as Daryl Gates would evaluate footage of say, the Rodney King beating for its potential to "undermine public order." (Perhaps even conduct background checks on potential purchasers of video camcorders. Black troublemaker Al Sharpton need not apply.) Hot-headed, crusading news editors would have the benefit of a week long "cooling off" period to reconsider the wisdom of their editorial choices. In Congressman AuCoin's words, "a simple...seven day wait, a modest inconvenience."

Perhaps Tipper Gore would evaluate problematic films prior to theatrical release, films such as Scorsese's "Taxi Driver," which according to John Hinckley's own testimony inspired him to fire the shots which struck James Brady.

If expediency and pragmatism are the criteria by which legislation is to be evaluated, why not censor films, books, and print and broadcast media in order to prevent future criminal acts, the First Amendment be damned?

Congressman AuCoin remarked that when it came to gun control the NRA has always favored "nothing at all," as if that fact invalidated the legitimacy of their Second Amendment concerns. Since the ACLU has always favored "nothing at all" in reference to infringements of the First Amendment, that presumably invalidates their concerns as well.

James Madison, who framed the First Amendment said:

"Americans have the right and advantage of being armed, unlike the citizens of other countries which are afraid to trust the people with arms."

Do you suppose he knew something about the underlying principle of individual rights that Connie Chung, Peter Jennings, Sarah Brady and Congressman Les AuCoin don't?

Yours Truly,

Bevin Chu
Santa Monica, CA

Tuesday, January 01, 1991

Introduction

Welcome to The China Desk [http://thechinadesk.blogspot.com], created and maintained by Bevin Chu, an American architect and author currently living and working in Taipei and Shanghai.


CIA World Factbook Map of China

The China Desk offers hard-hitting, no punches pulled commentary on the often stormy Divided China Problem, from an uncompromisingly laissez-faire capitalist, anti-interventionist perspective.

China Desk articles have appeared at the wildly popular libertarian website, LewRockwell.com, where Chu is a columnist/commentator, at the China Post, where Chu is a contributing editor, at Antiwar.com, the best known anti-war website on the Internet, at oOblue, the most popular Pan Blue website on Taiwan, and at Journey to the East, an exquisitely designed website introducing China to the English-speaking West. They have featured prominently at Yahoo! News Full Coverage portals, in Google News Alerts, and have even appeared in Pravda -- the post Cold War, post Communist Pravda, of course.

The China Desk receives tens of thousands of views per month.

China Desk articles on Sino-American relations have been cited by China scholars in American universities, have earned Bevin Chu invitations to speak before the Harvard-Radcliffe Chinese Students Association, and live interviews on talk radio shows in Canada.

Articles explaining the non-threatening reality of post Cold War, post-Communist China to westerners have inspired character attacks against the author by the Falun Gong mouthpiece known as the Epoch Times.

Articles exposing the Dalai Lama's feet of clay and the true nature of the Tibetan independence movement meanwhile, have earned the Politically Incorrect author angry denunciations from the Dalai Lama's official website.

Chu is the son of the late Tsing-kang Chu, a high-ranking diplomat with the Republic of China government on Taiwan. Chu is the translator of the English language edition of "Taiwan at the Crossroads: An Expose of Taiwan's New Dictatorship," a landmark book by the celebrated native Taiwanese liberal reformer and political commentator, Joyce C. Huang (Huang Chi-hsien). "Taiwan at the Crossroads" is an eye-opening expose of the Taiwan independence movement that rips the "democratic" and "progressive" mask from the face of Taiwan independence and reveals it for what it is -- an authoritarian fascist political movement motivated by primitive ethnic hatred.


Taiwan at the Crossroads, An Expose of Taiwan's New Dictatorship
Written by Joyce C. Huang, edited by Tu Yang, translated by Bevin Chu, published by BAZACH, 2005, ISBN 986-81084-2-x

Downloads

PERSONAL FAVORITE WINDOWS FREEWARE SITES

I immediately install the latest Linux Mint distro on desktops I build for myself, but Windows applications remain necessary for the notebook PCs I purchase, which come preloaded with Windows operating systems.  



Download.com
http://www.download.com/
FileHippo
http://www.filehippo.com/
Gizmo's Freeware Reviews
http://www.techsupportalert.com/content/top-freeware-picks-category-editors.htm
MajorGeeks
http://www.majorgeeks.com/
SnapFiles
http://www.snapfiles.com/freeware/freeware.html
Softpedia
http://win.softpedia.com/
SourceForge
http://sourceforge.net/


PERSONAL FAVORITE WINDOWS FREEWARE

7-Zip
File archiver with a high compression ratio in 7z format with LZMA and LZMA2 compression. Supported formats: Packing / unpacking: 7z, XZ, BZIP2, GZIP, TAR, ZIP and WIM, Unpacking only: ARJ, CAB, CHM, CPIO, CramFS, DEB, DMG, FAT, HFS, ISO, LZH, LZMA, MBR, MSI, NSIS, NTFS, RAR, RPM, SquashFS, UDF, VHD, WIM, XAR and Z. For ZIP and GZIP formats, 7-Zip provides a compression ratio that is 2-10 % better than the ratio provided by PKZip and WinZip
http://www.7-zip.org/

Belarc Advisor
Builds a detailed profile of your installed software and hardware, missing Microsoft hotfixes, anti-virus status, CIS (Center for Internet Security) benchmarks, and displays the results in your Web browser. All your PC profile information is kept private and is not sent to any web server
http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html

CalcTape
CalcTape is a revolutionary new kind of pocket calculator. With CalcTape, also extensive calculations remain clearly structured. CalcTape makes the arithmetic process visible - you can generate intermediate results and subsequently correct or change all numbers and operations.
https://www.schoettler-software.com/en/calctape/windows

CCleaner (Crap Cleaner)
System optimization and privacy tool removes unused files allowing Windows to run faster, freeing up valuable hard disk space, cleans traces of your online activities such as your Internet history, fast, takes less than a second to run
http://www.ccleaner.com/

Defraggler
Speed up your PC with quick & easy defragmentation. Defrag entire hard drives or individual files. Works with HDD and SSD and supports NTFS and FAT32 file systems!
https://www.ccleaner.com/defraggler

Epson Perfection V33 Scanner Driver 
http://www.driversepson.com/epson-perfection-v33-driver/

FreeCommander 
FreeCommander is an easy-to-use alternative to the standard windows file manager

GIMP
An acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program for photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. Can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, or image format converter. It is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything
http://www.gimp.org/

Google Chrome
Browse with the power of Google
With Google apps like Gmail, Google Pay, and Google Assistant, Chrome can help you stay productive and get more out of your browser.

LibreOffice
Power-packed Open Source personal productivity suite for Windows, Macintosh and Linux. Gives you six feature-rich applications for all your document production and data processing needs: Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Math and Base
http://www.libreoffice.org/download

MiniTool Partition Wizard Free
All-inclusive free partition manager to organize disk partitions to get the best of your hard drive Measure drive performance and analyze disk space usage in simple ways Fully compatible with Windows 10/8.1/8/7 all editions
https://www.partitionwizard.com/free-partition-manager.html

NoteTab Light
Leading-edge text and HTML editor, winner of software industry awards since 1998, easily handles a stack of huge files; lets you format text to your heart's content; does system-wide searches, and multi-line global replacements, even corrects your spelling mistakes, build document templates, add bookmarks, convert text to HTML on-the-fly, and take charge of your code
https://www.notetab.com/notetab-light

Open Shell
Classic style Start Menu for Windows 7, 8, 8.1, 10. Reborn of Classic Shell
Open Shell is the continuation of Classic Shell, which was is a collection of features that were available in older versions of Windows but were later removed.  
Features:  Classic style Start Menu for Windows 7, 8, 8.1, 10 Toolbar for Windows Explorer Classic copy UI (Windows 7 only) Show file size in Explorer status bar Title bar and status bar for Internet Explorer
https://open-shell.github.io/Open-Shell-Menu/

PosterPrint
Did you ever need to print out a large poster or banner but you couldn't make it big enough on your standard printer? PosterPrint can take a document created by any Windows ® printing application, zoom and print it on several standard sheets of paper using any available printer. This is a Multipage Printing - if a poster doesn't fit into one sheet of paper, print it on several and glue (or tape) them together! PosterPrint automatically adds glue margins, prints trim and alignment guides and offers several ways for easy zooming
http://www.grandutils.com/PosterPrint/

qBittorrent
The qBittorrent project aims to provide an open-source software alternative to µTorrent.  Additionally, qBittorrent runs and provides the same features on all major platforms (FreeBSD, Linux, macOS, OS/2, Windows).
https://www.qbittorrent.org/

VLC Media Player
Multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols, can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.
http://www.filehippo.com/download_vlc/

Windows Movie Maker 6 for Windows 7/8/8.1
Installs an updated version of Windows Movie Maker 6.0 (WMM6) from Vista, in Windows 7/8/8.1. Windows Movie Maker 6 is the best version of Windows Movie Maker ever offered. It is much better than Windows Live Movie Maker, or WLMM, which comes standard with Windows 7/8/8.1
http://noeld.com/programs.asp?cat=video
http://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia/Video/Other-VIDEO-Tools/Windows-Movie-Maker-Installer.shtml



The Linux Penguin

PERSONAL FAVORITE LINUX DISTRO


Linux Mint
Linux Mint is the Linux distro that finally persuaded me to convert to Linux on my desktop PCs, permanently, and not look back. Linux Mint is what has long been promised Windows users -- an Open Source operating system as easy to install as Windows, but which has all the virtues of Linux.

No, I am not double-booting into Linux and Windows. No, I did not partition my hard drive for both Linux and Windows. I formatted my entire hard drive and installed Linux Mint on the entire disk. I will not be going back.

If you're like me, if you're a Windows user who has been waiting for Linux to get its act together so you can finally make the switch, your wait is over. Linux Mint is what you have been waiting for. Linux Mint will give you a seamless, trouble-free installation, and seamless, trouble-free updates thereafter. All through menus and mouse clicks. No line commands required. Linux Mint is what Mandrake, Xandros, and OpenSUSE promised to be, but weren't.

Download the Linux Mint ISO and have Linux up and running within the hour. Complete with apps such as Firefox, Thunderbird, and Open Office. Be the proud owner of an operating system and office suite superior to Windows and Microsoft Office. All for free.

Linux Mint, like almost all Linux distros, is completely free. Your only cost will be a blank thumb drive and a little download time.

http://linuxmint.com/

PERSONAL FAVORITE LINUX SITE

Distrowatch
http://distrowatch.com/

Which China Desk?

1. The China Desk at Blogspot [http://thechinadesk.blogspot.com]
is the new home of The China Desk.

2. The China Desk at WordPress [http://thechinadesk.wordpress.com]
is a mirror for China Desk articles.

3. The China Desk at Tripod [http://thechinadesk.tripod.com]
is being phased out.

Links

CHINA AND THE CHINESE

 

Cyrus Janssen 
Cyrus Janssen is an American Expat that has lived in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Vancouver over the past 13 years. He is passionate about showing a true insight into China and loves sharing about his travels around the world 

Global Times 
China's most informative English-language newspaper the Global Times distances itself from the extreme provocation common in the Western media’s China reportage, taking great pains to present facts and views that help readers better understand China 

Gregory Clark 
Former Australian diplomat, vice president of Akita International University, and a bona fide expert on East Asian affairs 

Iris Chang - the official home page of Iris Chang 
bestselling author of The Rape of Nanking, The Chinese in America, and Thread of the Silkworm http://www.irischang.net/ 

Journey to the East A diverse group of Chinese-Americans presenting their heritage, good, bad, beautiful, ugly 

Martin Jacques 
Martin Jacques is the author of the global best-seller When China Rules the World: the End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order, which has since sold over 350,000 copies and been translated into fifteen languages. Martin is a Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing, and Fudan University, Shanghai 

Nathan Rich 
"It's okay to love China" 

New Party - 新黨 [traditional Chinese] 
I know of no political party that is 100% corruption free, except the New Party 

One China - 中國統一聯盟 [traditional Chinese] 
One China (Alliance for the Reunification of China) promotes national unity, domestic peace, and a democratic nation 

Qiao Collective Qiao Collective is a diaspora Chinese media collective challenging U.S. aggression on China, our name (桥) plays on the Chinese words 桥 qiáo (meaning bridge and pronounced “chee-ow”) and 华侨 huáqiáo (meaning overseas Chinese) 

Robert Temple Robert Temple is visiting professor of the history and philosophy of science at Tsinghua University in Beijing; fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society; member of the Egypt Exploration Society, Royal Historical Society, Institute of Classical Studies, and the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies; and visiting research fellow of the University of the Aegean in Greece. He is the author of 12 books, including The Genius of China. 

Tom Fowdy Tom Fowdy graduated from Oxford University’s China Studies Program. He has lived in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, Seoul and Australia. Fowdy endeavors to keep an open and objective view of the world, even if that means challenging conventional understandings of things or questioning things people do not want to question. 

The Unz Review
Alternative media outlets of the Left and Right have become a crucial supplement to our knowledge of the world, providing those perspectives usually ignored by our mainstream media. This small webzine will aim to provide convenient access to at least a fraction of those voices and topics. https://www.unz.com/tcategory/foreign-policy/ 


CLASSICAL LIBERALISM / LIBERTARIANISM / FREE MARKET ANARCHISM

 

Advocates for Self-Government 
Home of the World's Smallest Political Quiz, the original Internet political quiz http://www.theadvocates.org/ 

Antiwar.com 
The pre-eminent non-interventionist site on the internet, daily coverage of breaking news, and analysis http://www.antiwar.com/ 

Eric Peters Autos 
Automobiles, Motorcycles, and Libertarian Politics 

Future of Freedom Foundation 
Providing the moral and economic case for individual liberty, free markets, private property, and limited government 

Guncite 
Until the Second Amendment is treated as normal constitutional law, this web site will always be under construction 

LewRockwell.com 
Property, Freedom, Peace 

Ludwig von Mises Institute 
Defending the market economy, private property, sound money, and peaceful international relations http://www.mises.org/ 

Molinari Institute 
To promote the philosophy of Market Anarchism as a sane, consensual alternative to the hypertrophic violence of the State 

Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity 
The Institute continues and expands Dr. Paul’s lifetime of public advocacy for a peaceful foreign policy and the protection of civil liberties at home. A prosperous America is profoundly linked to a foreign policy rooted in peaceful relations and trade with all. With peace, comes real prosperity. 


GREATER CHINA AND EAST ASIAN NEWS

 

United Daily News - 聯合報 [traditional Chinese] 
Largest circulation Chinese language daily on Taiwan, the only one still defying the Taiwan independence Green Terror http://www.udn.com.tw/NEWS/ 


MILITARY AFFAIRS

 

G2mil, The Magazine of Future Warfare 
What someone doesn’t want you to publish is journalism, all else is publicity 


PHILOSOPHY / PSYCHOLOGY

 

Brugh Joy
One of the wisest men I have ever known, whose profound teachings forever transformed my perception of reality