Semi-Charmed Life

Crazy in Vancouver

Yeah, so Vancouver basically went nuts and destroyed itself from the inside because their hockey team couldn't win the Stanley Cup.

Even amongst the chaos though, I'm glad there are some people who can still engage in good old fashioned non-violent fun and still be rebels at the same time.

Race to the Bottom

Much of the contempt I hold for China is because of how their government chooses to advance the growth of the nation at the expense of the well-being of its citizens.

News had spread that workers and villagers had been poisoned by lead emissions from the factory, which had operated for six years despite flagrant environmental violations. But the truth was even worse: 233 adults and 99 children were ultimately found to have concentrations of lead in their blood, up to seven times the level deemed safe by the Chinese government.

One of them was 3-year-old Han Tiantian, who lived just across the road from the plant. Her father, Han Zongyuan, a factory worker, said he learned in March that she had absorbed enough lead to irreversibly diminish her intellectual capacity and harm her nervous system.

“At the moment I heard the doctor say that, my heart was shattered,” Mr. Han said in an interview last week. “We wanted this child to have everything. That’s why we worked this hard. That’s why we poisoned ourselves at this factory. Now it turns out the child is poisoned too. I have no words to describe how I feel.”

via

Heart-breaking.

China just recently surpassed Japan as the world's second biggest economy, but at what cost?