Monday, September 26, 2016
Daw Aung San Suu Kyi's UN General Assemby speach 9-21-2016
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMHRHA0gN_k
presented in global terms without naming names, she said however "Rakhine" and the em word.
I personally find nothing objectionable in it and was disgusted to see the "real" em thugs at the beginning and end.
Why can't we dump those 5? men in the Hudson River.
presented in global terms without naming names, she said however "Rakhine" and the em word.
I personally find nothing objectionable in it and was disgusted to see the "real" em thugs at the beginning and end.
Why can't we dump those 5? men in the Hudson River.
Excellent speach by Dr. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi--"are we all going to stagnate in a facade of democracy which is not much better than--
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdtnE1_iAx8
from 2015, keynote address Burmese-American Association, Indianapolis.
retrieved 9-26-2016
Image Daw Aung San Suu Kyi at moment she saw me in audience--2012 frame grab from TV
from 2015, keynote address Burmese-American Association, Indianapolis.
retrieved 9-26-2016
Image Daw Aung San Suu Kyi at moment she saw me in audience--2012 frame grab from TV
Stratfor report--US dam safety from 2008--posted with permission
"Another Dam Threat is republished with permission of Stratfor."
Good article on Facebooking--
http://www.dailydot.com/via/why-you-should-delete-facebook-start-over/
I decided I won't delete and open a new one till I get a literary agent and a breakthrough in my writing career.
I just had a long vacation with folks I got back in touch with again via FB.
But I found many people (on FB) do not check their email inboxes.
And also FB is too dangerous to keep using.
It needs to resolve the cloning and hacking problem.
I only had it for 3 years.
In contrast I have had this blog for more than 10 years.
So maybe--
and as for writing & painting, it has been around forever.
So hooray for old tech.
The advice was--"go back to paper and pencil"
(if you were hacked or cloned)
and so it is and so it will be,
KMKaung
9-26-2016
PS--I think FB was "too close" and too much sharing anyway.
I decided I won't delete and open a new one till I get a literary agent and a breakthrough in my writing career.
I just had a long vacation with folks I got back in touch with again via FB.
But I found many people (on FB) do not check their email inboxes.
And also FB is too dangerous to keep using.
It needs to resolve the cloning and hacking problem.
I only had it for 3 years.
In contrast I have had this blog for more than 10 years.
So maybe--
and as for writing & painting, it has been around forever.
So hooray for old tech.
The advice was--"go back to paper and pencil"
(if you were hacked or cloned)
and so it is and so it will be,
KMKaung
9-26-2016
PS--I think FB was "too close" and too much sharing anyway.
Sunday, September 25, 2016
The Prayer--
I was in Bakersfield CA very recently, and my friend said on my last evening there--
"Wait for me to finish doing the dishes, and E and I will say a special prayer for you."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5vrPaE5Y1o
She then came to the sofa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5vrPaE5Y1owith E holding her family Bible. It had a red cover.
USP was sitting nearby, and earlier E had crocheted a white beret for me for winter, adding a sun visor at my request.
I said it would be OK if she just read that psalm, number 24 or 25.
Woman sheds veil--by KMKaung--now in private collection.
She did.
Earlier, as we had been separated by circumstance since about 1990 or 1991, I told her about my epiphany in hospital which happened about 1994.
As I have told her already about that, I think I am now ready to write it as a novel, if I can find a literary agent.
Burma is chugging along one track and does not need me, but I need to write.
KMKaung
9-25-2016
"Wait for me to finish doing the dishes, and E and I will say a special prayer for you."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5vrPaE5Y1o
She then came to the sofa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5vrPaE5Y1owith E holding her family Bible. It had a red cover.
USP was sitting nearby, and earlier E had crocheted a white beret for me for winter, adding a sun visor at my request.
I said it would be OK if she just read that psalm, number 24 or 25.
She did.
Earlier, as we had been separated by circumstance since about 1990 or 1991, I told her about my epiphany in hospital which happened about 1994.
As I have told her already about that, I think I am now ready to write it as a novel, if I can find a literary agent.
Burma is chugging along one track and does not need me, but I need to write.
KMKaung
9-25-2016
Saturday, September 24, 2016
Was there, did that--de Young Museum at Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco--
https://deyoung.famsf.org/
Saw Ed Ruscha show and Minimalism exhibit on textiles
and Andy Goldsworthy split rocks and cracks in paving in the entry courtyard.
All excellent.
KMKaung
9-24-2016
Saw Ed Ruscha show and Minimalism exhibit on textiles
and Andy Goldsworthy split rocks and cracks in paving in the entry courtyard.
All excellent.
KMKaung
9-24-2016
I have been away--thank you for keeping my page hits up--
over 10,000 blog hits per week from France
over 1300 blog hits yesterday
over 1400 blog hits day before yesterday.
and here is how the NYTs moderates its comments on line.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/09/20/insider/approve-or-reject-moderation-quiz.html?_r=0
I am still off Facebook and may never return, however, had much face to face interaction with folks I had come back in touch with through FB.
So I have mixed feelings about FB but I like the time it has freed up.
I can do useful things like real work and sleep.
And my eyes they ache and grow weaker and so I can't go back to FB.
KMKaung
9-24-2016
over 1300 blog hits yesterday
over 1400 blog hits day before yesterday.
and here is how the NYTs moderates its comments on line.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/09/20/insider/approve-or-reject-moderation-quiz.html?_r=0
I am still off Facebook and may never return, however, had much face to face interaction with folks I had come back in touch with through FB.
So I have mixed feelings about FB but I like the time it has freed up.
I can do useful things like real work and sleep.
And my eyes they ache and grow weaker and so I can't go back to FB.
KMKaung
9-24-2016
Thursday, September 08, 2016
Wednesday, September 07, 2016
Tuesday, September 06, 2016
Human Rights Watch advises USA keep sanctions on Burma--
She is not "de facto" leader, but nominal facade
advisor.
Do not understand remark about "mansions"
and I advised all along to keep the sanctions.
Now people are beginning to realize they have been had yet
again.
Comment left on Irrawaddy site.
KMKaung--
9-6-2016
NOT TO CARE what people think and to be free of the little pricks, is the best Freedom of all--click if you agree--have left Facebook for good--the flack was counter productive and annoying. Here you cannot comment at all, and I cannot respond at all. It is set up that way. Ha ha ha.
THIS BLOG IS NOW 10 YEARS OLD! HAPPY BIRTHDAY!-- It has been one helluva journey--
KMKaung
9-6-2016
Monday, September 05, 2016
Review by Kyi May Kaung of Nien Cheng's Life and Death in Shanghai--
Nien Cheng arrived in the USA about the same time I did, though she was about the age of my mother.
I came from Burma and was studying, in secret, why socialist or communist systems and central planning fail. Immediately after 1988, when the Burmese embassy sent agents to check on what my colleague Yasmin (now deceased) and I were studying, I said to the rather stupid man, "development economics." And I mentioned names he was likely to know already.
In those first years in graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, I was too busy with course work-related reading to do much "outside reading."
But I do remember distinctly reading abridged versions of Nien Cheng's book and Dr. Li Zisui's Life of Chairman Mao as excerpts in Time Magazine.
However, as excerpts they were much less satisfying than the full length books.
--
When I first got to Washington D.C. to work at a radio station broadcasting to Burma, I walked to Politics and Prose Bookstore and sat at one of the tables downstairs.
It turned out the group at the next table was discussing Life and Death in Shanghai.
My eavesdropping became too obvious, and the women invited me over.
It was a women's bio group.
A few weeks later they invited Nien Cheng to P's house, and I got to meet her!
I distinctly remember what she said, and I wrote a short piece for the radio newsletter.
She told us the exact amount of money she had "in blue chip stocks" when she arrived, and how she had no idea of how she would get any more.
She re-wrote her manuscript 4 times.
She said, "There were so many interrogations," (so she had to combine some).
I asked if she would go back to China.
She said, "No. Maybe if my daughter had lived--"
The regime returned her daughter's clothes, including a barely worn padded jacket.
--
This book like Dr Li's illustrates so well the violent zig-zagging of Chinese policy, really one man, Mao's whims, and how everyone is warped and suffers as a result.
As I am from Burma, which more or less aped Chinese and Soviet economic policies, it is very easy for me to relate to Nien Cheng's experiences.
I think partly the writing is so economical and precise because she is a trained economist, a graduate of LSE or the London School of Economics.
The other is because she is just a very good writer, able to look at herself and her past objectively and write it as it was.
Brilliant.
When I told my economist mentor from Burma, now at Columbia Univ., in about 2001 that I had met Nien Cheng, he asked, "Is she as impressive as people say?"
"Oh, definitely."
I am even more impressed at how she managed her life, after reading Life and Death in Shanghai, unabridged.
I was sad to learn she had passed away, but even when we met she said calmly, "If my (arthritis) gets worse, I will just go to managed care,"
and "I am leaving everything to Sibley Hospital."
For me, Nien Cheng is a great role model.
To survive Maoist China and prison, to leave China and start again at age 70+, to write one book which was a best seller, to be able to live a gracious, generous and good life, all this is admirable.
She died in 2009 of renal failure at her home in D.C., Wikipedia says.
What a great lady and a great life.
Kyi May Kaung--
9-6-2016
Kyi May Kaung--9-6-2016
Review by Kyi May Kaung of Bertil Lintner's Outrage--
This book has been on my to-read list for a very long time, but until now, was not easy to obtain.
In about 1991, I saw an edition published in Thailand, at the home of my Karen friend in Princeton, but it was a poor physical production, done on rather cheap paper.
Also, I could only glance at it, as all my friend's many friends were lined up to read it too, and it was starting to fall apart at the spine.
I am so glad I could get the new revised edition now.
It goes blow by blow from the historic brawl in a Rangoon Institute of Technology tea shop to the events of 1988, 89 and up to 1990.
Not only is the detail and the writing good and clear, it also does not forget the wood for the trees. Lintner never pulls any punches and always lays it out as it is or was.
It puts everything in perspective.
The regime's alternate bungling and brutality, its time honored fall back on the only thing it understands, state sponsored violence.
Its disrespect and underestimation of the Burmese people, its trotting out of one front man puppet after another.
I was not in Burma during this period, and writing my dissertation at the Univ. of Pennsylvania, Bertil Lintner's reports in the Far Eastern Economic Review, Seth Mydans in the New York Times and the BBC broadcasts through NPR, were all I had.
My dissertation was on why totalitarian systems like Burma, China and the USSR/Russia make such an infernal mess.
Reading Outrage recalls many of the events, such as Dr. Maung Maung, ridiculed as "Hpaung gar sar Maung Maung," a king who ruled only one week.
In time I met Bertil Linter as well as Mrs. Lintner (Hseng Noung), and others mentioned in the narrative, such as Htun Aung Gyaw and Moethee Zun.
I believe everything Lintner writes, because it all logically hangs together, and it coincides with everything I heard in those embroiled years and later.
This is truly Bertil Lintner's magnum opus, and I am happy there is at last a Burmese translation.
Lintner's work shows the power and the lasting value of the written word.
Incidentally, that it this book is still in demand and is becoming a classic is shown by the market price of the books.
One volume of Lintner is worth more than 100s of copies of sycophantic writers like Dr. Maung Maung, Htin Aung (he allegedly wrote his history to curry favor with Ne Win so he could return home in his old age) and Thant Myint-U.
--Kudos--I hope you will write of after 1990 including up to now and the facade democracy.
Kyi May Kaung (Ph.D.)
9-6-2016
Indian trains--from CNN
http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/04/travel/cnnphotos-india-trains-temporary-home/index.html
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