Al Hoang

You’ve got to be kidding me. This is really hard to believe. Note RAWA
stands for Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan.

…when the opportunity arose to overthrow that brutal regime, it was expected that RAWA activists would naturally back the insurrection.

However, it turned out these activists were more opposed to U.S. military intervention than they were in favor of getting rid of the Taliban, even if it meant that Afghanistan’s women remained in a state of perpetual slavery.

If you don’t favor military action which already happened. How exactly
are the women supposed to be ‘rising up’ against a known brutal regime
such as the Taliban? I mean those guys took down a 4000 year old Buddha
statue over some idealist principle. You really think they’ll be
listening to ‘liberate me’ speeches with any seriousness? I’d like to
think this is not true but who knows. Some acadamics do have a reputation
for living too deep in their Ivory Tower.

I’ll read it for myself

“Chinese businessmen are flocking to northern Thailand and marrying local Thai women to make it easier to open businesses.”

This is news to me but the strategy doesn’t seem that surprising to me. I
think the one thing that sort of surprises me is how the Thais aren’t
trying to put up a stiff fight to this increased competition. Perhaps they’ll
start working on it. Especially since it mentions that the Chinese have
put up resistance to Thai exports to China.

Chinese importers have the edge over their Thai counterparts as Thais usually cannot cannot speak Chinese well and have poor credit records despite having been in the trade for two to three decades.

Moreover, local regulations make it easier for Chinese to come here while Thais suffer many inconveniences in doing business in China, she said.

One thing that was not mentioned much is what is in it for the women.
According to a manager at a Thai-Chinese shipping firm:

the women have a much better standard of living once they get married.

So I think there you have it. The women aren’t getting a bum deal out of
this comparitively. What will happen? Who knows.

Seems that the number of qualified Arabic translators in the U.S. is still
too low to handle the massive input coming in. What to do? Training
a new crop of ready translators takes time. I’d cut and paste
a good tidbit but the CS Monitor makes it clear that reposting on the
web requires permission. Something, I’d rather not do. So instead
just follow the link.

Read it yourself

And this nice example from a bootleg of Sex and the City:

Original English: She gives hand jobs for a living.

Chinese subtitles: She is a manual laborer.

Read it for yourself.

Thanks Brainysmurf

Take a look for yourself.

Another science known as ijtihad (or reasoning and interpretation) was developed by Muslim scholars in order to understand and apply the message of the Qur’an to varying societal needs and conditions.

I hope that something like ijtihad can be cultivated to slowly change
sentiments in the Middle East. But these type of things take time and
the ability to have these voices freely heard without any fear of retaliation.
Are those conditions even there? Without them, these sentiments will find
no root to grow and will just be existing in a void.

Read it yourself

Thanks to Vuong Nguyen
on LiveJournal we have some information
from the U.S. Bureau on the distribution of Asian-Americans (and more noteable
for me, Vietnamese) throughout the U.S. as well as many other different
types of maps. This is really interesting stuff. As usual the west coast
has some of the most concentrated numbers however it is nice to be able to
see how other states are faring in regards to Asians. Overall, the Asian
population is still very thin comparitively. What would be really neat
is to overlay maps from the 50s up until today to be able to display
a moving timeline to show how the distribution has changed over time.

Oh man, unbelievable. I suggest you just read it for yourself.

What, what, lemme read it!

I’m curious about life for foreigners in the Middle East. From a western
perspective it currently is a place of turmoil, a clash between Islam and
the West, uprisings, terrorist acts, and many other things. However, I’m
curious about the life of an expatriate there. I think the first idea
most people would think is, “They’re crazy for wanting to live there” which
isn’t hard to see given the amount of violence in the area that can be
easily directed to an expat. However, one ESL teacher was kind enough
to write his thoughts on teaching English in Saudi Arabia during 2003. Here
are some choice snippets:

There is still a big demand for English tuition in Saudi Arabia. One reason for this is the country’s high unemployment rate.

Many of the English teachers in Saudi learn Arabic. For learners of Arabic the alphabet is the most difficult part. However, many Arabic words are related to Spanish so a knowledge of that language is an advantage in the acquisition of vocabulary.

Very fascinating and a nice break from the news you’ll get on the Middle
East which focuses mainly on the current tensions there.

Read it yourself

Yale University has samples of Arabic
and Persian Calligraphy in their Near East Collection. Pictures of
some of those samples are also available online for the curious who
want to see what Arabic Calligraphy looks like. I’ve always found
Arabic Calligraphy very beautiful even though I can’t understand anything
in Arabic at all. If you’re curious go
Check it out
yourself

Thanks to a new blog on Arabic culture called
Politics, Language and Cultures of
the Arab World for pointing out this link.

Been looking around for a good EnglishVietnamese electronic dictionary.
One feature I really want is pronunciation. I have found that the
pronunciation is one of the trickier things to pick up correctly on
one’s own so a dictionary that can speak a new word would be quite valuable.
The current contender I am looking at is the GD-305V
however I think
I’d like to test out a real model to make sure it can actually pronounce
Vietnamese words before I pick this up since the last time I tried a couple
it only pronounced English. After some bugging of the poor shopkeeper
I was informed that the set of electronic dictionaries he had were mainly
aimed at Vietnamese learning English hence no need for the Vietnamese
pronunciations. D’oh.

Thanks to USS Clueless for pointing a link
out on Logical
Rudeness. I’m reading through it now since it seems quite amusing.

Go read it yourself

Looking for a rather fuss free FreeBSD-based
distro to run your firewall? This one looks nice and very light
and looks like an active project with plenty of excellent documentation.
It might not be that easy to use but it seems for folks who want a balance
between ease of use and a decent set of features from a firewall without
paying tons for a commercial solution this might be a decent mid-point.

Check it out yourself