Blogaround

1. It’s Year-end Party Season For Chinese Companies — Do Workers Like Them? (January 15) Ha. Yeah, so this is a thing in China. Every company has a big party for Chinese New Year. Lots of fancy food, dance performances, "lucky draw" prizes, managers giving speeches about how great the company is, going around to everyone else's table to drink with them, it drags on and on for hours...

I remember at my first job in China, another international employee astutely asked, "Why do parties always need to have performances?" Why indeed.

At my current job, we have annual parties which are a lot more casual than that, and I really like that. Just rent a party room and hang out and eat, some people can play mah jong or do karaoke if they want, and maybe win "lucky draw" prizes, and that's it.

Also from Sixth Tone: For China’s Plus-Size Women, Going Out Is a Daily Struggle (January 19)

2. There’s A Version of A Christmas Carol Where Scrooge is an Attempted Rapist (December 27) "The tremendous irony is that this adaptation adds so much darkness and evil to the Scrooge story but does not add more meaning. A worse Scrooge does not produce greater redemption – it produces less."

Also from Dr. Laura Robinson: How Much Exodus is Too Much Exodus? The Prince of Egypt and The Ten Commandments (December 31) It's an analysis which compares the movies "The Prince of Egypt" and "The Ten Commandments." Oh I am so here for this.

3. Wheaton College restricts employees’ ability to state preferred pronouns (January 10, via) This is just ridiculous. What if your name is Alex or Sam or something? Also, using a trans person's correct name and pronouns is BARE MINIMUM level of human decency.

4. Michigan’s new anti-poverty effort: $7,500 for Flint moms, no strings attached (August 1) "Beginning in January, Flint moms will receive up to $7,500 to help boost their infant’s footing in the first year of life — a one-time $1,500 payment in mid-pregnancy, followed by $500 per month for the first year of a child’s life." Great news!

5. China to grant Ireland unilateral visa-free treatment (January 17) and Swiss travellers to be allowed to enter China visa-free (January 16)

I tried to find a source from a more well-known western news outlet, but I only found this one from Bloomberg and it's paywalled: China Has Scrapped Visa Requirements for 11 Nations in Past Year (January 18)

Very interesting! China is very intentionally trying to improve relations with other countries, and encourage tourism. This is good news, from my perspective as an immigrant in China, but also I'm American so none of these new policies actually apply to me directly.

6. A few articles on Biden not taking a stand against genocide in Gaza:

Why is Biden engaging in disinformation on Gaza? (January 10) [content note: infant death]

Joe Biden Wants You To Believe He Is Opposed To Genocide In Gaza (January 17) "But his statement, which emphasized the Israeli deaths on October 7 and the hostages who remain in Hamas’s custody, made no mention of the 10,000 dead Palestinian children and what they never should have gone through."

US Democrats push Biden administration over civilian toll in Israel's Gaza campaign (January 20)

7. Enforcing the Law to Disqualify a Violent Insurrectionist Is Good, Actually (January 16) "Even if you wish really hard, Clarence Thomas is not going to recuse himself from this case; Donald Trump is not going to stop claiming everything is rigged because the liberal justices joined an unanimous opinion; and Senate Democrats are not going to betray every single warning they’ve raised about Trump being a threat to democracy for the past eight years to give him a special exemption from the Constitution’s insurrection ban. Donald Trump exists in the real world, not a law school exam hypothetical, and strategies for opposing him need to be rooted in reality."

Also on that topic: Catching up on Donald Trump (January 8) "But whether or not the Constitution bans him from holding office again is a question of law, not politics. The whole point of including things in the Constitution is to take them out of politics. If constitutional provisions are subject to politics, then all the rights the Constitution supposedly gives us are up for grabs. Your right to do any particular thing will depend not on the Constitution, but on whether your action is politically popular."

8. In Juneau, Alaska, a carbon offset project that’s actually working (January 4) "In an effort to mitigate a portion of that CO2, some of those going whale watching or visiting the glacier are asked to pay a few dollars to counter their emissions. The money goes to the Alaska Carbon Reduction Fund, but instead of buying credits from some distant (and questionable) offset project, the nonprofit spends that cash installing heat pumps, targeting residents like Roberts who rely upon oil heating systems."

Blogaround

A baby wearing a squirtle costume. Image source.

1. One type of diversity we don't talk about at work: Body size (posted January 3) "Studies show that discrimination increases the higher a person's body mass index."

2. Trump’s tweet about migrant kids' deaths caps a year that was horrible for children (posted December 31) [content note: mention of child death] "The rash of school shootings and the effects of immigration policies are glaring examples of direct harm to children, but there are a host of less visible issues that also are devastating to children."

Children are the most vulnerable members of society. Within any oppressed group that suffers discrimination, violence, poverty, etc, it's the children who suffer most. I believe that's why Jesus said the kingdom of heaven belongs to children. We need to do better. We need to prioritize children's needs.

3. Our Bail System Costs the Country $15 Billion Per Year (posted December 20)

4. The Women’s Resistance We Aren’t Hearing About is Happening Now In Kerala. (posted January 5) "On New Year’s Day, 5.5 million women formed a human chain across 385 miles spanning the state of Kerala, India. They demanded that the Hindu temple at Sabarimala should open its gates to women in accordance with a ruling by the Indian Supreme Court in September 2018."

5. ‘Sheer Joy’: Ireland Will Have Free Abortion Care on January 1 (posted December 17) "Abortion in Ireland will be free, safe, and legal up to 12 weeks into pregnancy starting January 1, a major blow to the Catholic Church and opponents of the country’s abortion rights law, who tried to drag out the legislative process with support from U.S. anti-choice advisers." Good news~

6. Film Theory: What is Disney's Body Count? (posted December 9) and part 2 and part 3. Wow. Matpat goes through every Disney movie (not including sequels) and overanalyzes everything in order to calculate death counts. I love it.

7. Every congressperson along southern border opposes border wall funding (posted January 8) "One thing they actually all do have in common is that they all agree with virtual wall protection but not physical wall protection."

8. James Dobson Wants You to Pray and Fast to Protect Trump from Impeachment (posted January 8) Grosssssssssss. How will I explain this to my children.

9. Why Was Dumbledore Teaching Defense Against The Dark Arts? | Harry Potter Theory (posted January 8) I LOOOOOVE videos like this because it's EXACTLY THE SAME THING as biblical apologetics. In this case, Jon Carlin noticed that the timeline implied by a comment by Dumbledore in "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" (set in the 1990s, published in 2005) seems to contradict what we see in the movie "Fantastic Beasts 2: The Crimes of Grindelwald" (set in the 1920s, released in 2018). Because of our firm belief that both of these sources are inerrant and set in the same universe, we need to go on a grand research quest to resolve this problem. It involves reconstructing timelines based on offhand mentions of durations and dates contained throughout the canon, quibbling about sentence structure and how something may or may not mean what it first seemed to mean, and completely missing the point of the story. Yep, that's apologetics.

10. Why a Medieval Woman Had Lapis Lazuli Hidden in Her Teeth (posted January 9) Science!