What Kills Us This Week.

Yesterday, around noon, an icy wind straight off the snows up North, hit us here in Hong Kong and I've been shivering under doonas ever since.  It's brutally cold and despite my body starting to rebel, wanting to be out and about, I can't make myself go out there, into that icy world, even in my wonderful Elle MacPherson thermals.

I'd like to go all smarty-pants and turn this "Brutal Wind Blowing Down from The North" into some sort of metaphor for what's currently happening up there in China, but I'm shivering too much to even start thinking of clever stuff.

And there is lots of stuff I could be clever about: like that awful trial of human rights activist Liu Xiaobo, who was jailed the other day for 11 years for starting a petition requesting China get itself a Constitution. Apparently they were going to give him a much lighter sentence but foreign journalists and diplomats got involved and so China evoked "the joke prison sentence" and gave him 11 years.

Do you know about that? That, apparently, since the English/Arabic symbol for "11" looks to the Chinese visual-pictorial-mindset like prison bars, whenever they want to thumb noses at the rest of the world, they chose that figure for a jail term.  Hahahahaha!  What a hoot!  What a funny bunch they have up there in Beijing! Hahahaha!

And I'd love to know why Premier Wen demanded to meet Small Third World Countries in a private meeting during the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.  And even more I'd love to know why Obama burst in on it, in a rage, and throwing himself around like he was about to ransack the place. And even more, why China is now laughing uproariously about it and saying "Wow, that Wen isn't even scared of America! He's SO my hero!" and stuff to that effect.  Like, can someone explain to me what the hell is going on, and if any of this is a cause for this week's THREATDOWN!

But whether it is or not, let's choose it anyway:

THREATDOWN

A serious power

that isn't a serious country

is a serious problem.