This site includes my past two decades' teaching-n-leaning in Social Science fields, Educational Technology, Art, some of my cross-cultural observations, non-academic/sociocultural critiques, and pasquinades (after retirement). At the current stage, no guest blogs. No advertisements. All rights are reserved.
"...Government quizzed on what assessment they have made of (1) the estimates that less than one per cent of COVID-19 vaccines have been delivered to low-income countries (2) the reports of increasing COVID-19 (a) infection rates, and (b) fatalities, in parts of (i) South Asia, (ii) South East Asia, and (iii) Africa, and (3) the need to balance sending vaccines to these regions against the decision to provide a third vaccination for 32 million people in the UK..."
"...Low-income countries, most of which are in Africa, have received just 0.6 percent of the nearly 8 billion shots that have been administered, according to the World Health Organization. Just 1 in 4 front-line health workers on the continent are fully vaccinated, the WHO said last week..." (Refer to:
One was built based on a democratic-capitalistic principle, while the other one, was baptized through thousand years of feudalistic-hierarchical Confucianism. The latter was downtrodden through the 批孔揚秦運動/slander-Confucius-and-praise the first emperor Chin Shi Hwang, during 10 years' cultural revolution (1966-1976), replaced by a new type of powerful religion - Dictatorial "Democracy".
Since 2004, the Confucian Ideology was repackaged into the Confucius Institute Trojan Horses, "exported/sold" in infiltrating (correction of a typo - not infuriating) 146 countries with 9 million foreign learners.
Some research/propaganda disseminate the ideas that their 1.3 billion people don't fit, don't know/like, nor deserve the western type of "Imperfect" democracy, for freedom is at odd with their culture/traditions and the Hitlerian-Nationalism.
In short, pursuing "Happiness" without liberty, freedom/democracy is effective, efficient in defining and exercising their "Democracy".
子黃 Two older posts: on March 1 (M) and May 27 (Th), 2021, a couple of posters were relevant to the above issues:
子黃 Some fb friends might think that I am a "conservative" to post like these. Perhaps, just some facts, not related to specific ideologies - could be my biases...
子黃 In fact, a peaceful CCP which "values" human rights, animal rights and the earth justice, isn't it a good thing?
General speaking, some socialistically oriented countries or political entities tend to sympathize or align with similar politico-economic ideologies. Associated with communism (whether the original or a fake one), fighting for "social justice" with guts for the workers, farmers, the poor, and the powerless is applaudable in against capitalism.
Indeed, the early idealistic revolutionaries, some shed their own blood to dye the red flags, while majority turned into the new powerful social class, or tyrannical ones amid a time when the masses were submerged in the obscurantism.
A different level of the economic-cultural advancement enables the practice of the Nordic Model, prevailing in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. It comprises the economic and social policies as well as typical cultural practices. This model includes a comprehensive welfare state and multi-level collective bargaining based on the economic foundations of social corporatism, with a high percentage of the workforce unionized and a sizable percentage of the population employed by the public sector (roughly 30% of the work force in areas such as healthcare, education, and government).
Developed in the 1930s under the leadership of social democrats, the Nordic model gradually began to gain attention after World War II.
The Nordic model is recognized as a kind of genuine "hybrid" system which features a blend of capitalist economics with socialist values, representing an alternative to American-style capitalism. It has been positively received by some politicians and political commentators in the poverty reduction, gender equality, and the rest of protecting, promoting human rights, animal rights and the Earth rights.
"...It's been very common to use an evolutionary tree — or a family tree — of these SARS-CoV-2 viruses to catch introductions in places like Australia and Taiwan that have not had a lot of local spread," says Bedford. "You can figure out where the importations are coming from by looking at the viral genome and checking, 'Is it close in its sequence characteristics to [strains] that are circulating elsewhere that have been sequenced and shared with the database?' "
Scientists can then see, as they continue to take samples in the new region over time, how each particular strain starts to pick up additional — often benign — mutations step by step until it morphs into a significantly different strain.
But Bedford says that when you look at the family tree for this omicron variant, there's something surprising: "With omicron, your closest sequences are back from mid-2020 — so over a year ago. That is very rare to see."
In other words, while scientists can tell that this variant evolved from a strain that was circulating in mid-2020, in the intervening months there has been no trace of all the intermediate versions that scientists would have expected to find as it morphed into its current form..."
