This so high-raised courage, so swelling and so obstinate against sorow, death and povertie, was it nature or arte made it relent, even to the utmost strai ne of exceeding tendernesse and debonarety [translating debonnaireté] of complexion?

Lung-hai in Fukien There is an enlightening report about Lung-hai county (龍海縣). Lung-hai is three or four miles from the sea, and 28 km by sea from the city of Amoy.

I only knew one of the men at the table — a friend of a good friend from China — and after listening to several speeches that I did not understand, and several gulps of whiskey, I went to go talk to him. But he doesn’t speak much English, and I felt communicating with him in Mandarin would be in poor taste. So I smiled at him, and he smiled sadly at me, and pulled out his accordion. We eat, we talk, we drink — water or tea, not vodka, like me, Alptekin said with an exaggerated wink, as my friend stared into the distance beyond the gym wall and started playing a mournful song on the accordion. And that’s how we free East Turkestan.

[…] higher education performs much the same dystopian function, though with the ideological valences switched: tenured radicals are interpellating — that is, brainwashing — students in Marxism, feminism, gayism, Afrocentrism, deconstructionism […]