Danial Henninger, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, had used my analogy in a column.  He is all over media news, because of his words, which are really mine. Here is the original link to my words back in the day.  (”My Link”) He is also a Fox News Contributor. (”His Link”)  I am appalled how much fame he is getting out of my words, but getting used to it.  Being a forty year veteran in the writing game, I have mane words under my belt, and many were taken by comedians, writers, talk show monologues,  and even sitcoms. There needs to be a line drawn somewhere and I am drawing it now.  If Henninger, is creative enough to scroll the web for lesser known journalists words, where does it need to stop?

Words are special to me, to my livelihood.  I create many things for many people, but for those who pay me, I am honored, and for those who borrow to gain fame, I am shames to be called a colleague by some of them.  To get ahead on the back of others, is a shameful act indeed.  I hope by now, many will see my creativity, I mean I have been doing this since 1969, my friends.  I am going to call them out because, I am simply not going to take it anymore. The Link is time stamped and proof of one of those who borrow, “Cough, cough,”  Read it for yourself and you be the judge.

When Paul returned home to pen one of the best, if not the most entertaining memoirs of expatriate life in China in recent memory, he didn’t just leave a lasting impression on his readers. Hollywood director Ivan Reitman of Ghostbusters fame picked up on Paul’s story and purchased the rights to the memoir, currently in movie pre-production. With regards to the movie, Paul explained, “I want China to be captured, as accurately as possible, and the experience of living as a Westerner in China, and the experience of living abroad… and that it’s all true to the complicated realities of life.” In an interview with AsianTalks, Paul recounts not just three years of magical thinking, but also plenty of doing that involved reaching across the aisle and befriending his Chinese counterparts. Here’s our conversation with a man of action.

AT: Alan, since you’ve published, you’ve also become something of an American expatriate ambassador to China. Do you feel you have played a bridge role?

(Laughs) Well thanks! There’s maybe a bridge role in two different respects. One is just for the expat world to the non-expat world. I think I helped demystify the whole concept of living abroad, and I think there’s obviously plenty of us who have had similar experiences. I feel that first through the column, and more so through the book and the subsequent publicity from the book, I was able to demystify that concept of who we are and what that whole experience is like.

And I think to a certain extent I was able to do the same thing for China. My column was translated into Chinese and I’m now completing some rewrites for the Chinese translation of the book, which I’m really excited about. I do think that with the column being translated, and now hopefully with my book next, I was able to break down some barriers of Chinese perceptions, misperceptions, and confusion about Americans.

AT: So your street runs both ways. You’re not just interpreting China for an American audience, you’re actually doing the reverse as well.

Yes I am! I certainly was doing that throughout with my column, and I’m really, really excited about the book coming out in Chinese to continue and further that. The Wall Street Journal has a great Chinese-language website, which has a large and growing readership, and obviously people in China who are reading the Journal are a select group. I mean it’s a large group, but obviously it’s educated people who are interested in Western things, and in many cases work with Westerners, or even with American or other Western companies, and didn’t always understand, you know, what made us tick, so to speak. So (via the column) they sort of understood Western life. There had been a lot of mystery – and a lot of confusion – about what we were really thinking, and what we were doing, and how we felt about China, so I provided some insight into that. I’ve always taken that role seriously, and try to do justice to it, going both ways.

AT: One of the highlights of your book is about reaching across the aisle to your Chinese counterparts. How did you take that proactive step? Do you have any advice for expats in your situation looking to make Chinese friends?

Well, I think in terms of advice, it really depends where you are in life, and where you are living, if you have kids. I think if you are a single person it’s a lot easier because you’re in control of your life and you can go out and do things, and maybe live in a more Chinese area and what not.

If you have kids, and you’re committed to them adapting, you have to make maybe more of an adjustment towards just helping them, so we lived the lifestyle a little bit differently, or definitely a bit differently than we would have if we hadn’t had kids. And so if you are in that kind of setting like you are starting out in the expat bubble, I think the first step towards not remaining in it, is to really, when you arrive somewhere, doesn’t have to be China, or wherever you are, to seek out friends in a social circle of people who are not living in that bubble.

I found that one of the interesting things about expat life to me is that it’s a lot like college, and so when you arrive an expat, you are like a freshman in college! Who you associate with has a huge impact, and I think it’s the same in college. So if you’re talking specifically about China, and some of the stuff has really gotten easier, and it had gotten easier by the time I left, compared to when I arrived, and it just continues to be more so, but you know there are certain people who would just always be complaining, because the Internet connection was slow, or it took a long time to get something fixed, and you know, I would sort of be more of the attitude like, “Hey you’re in China. You have Internet. That’s pretty cool.”

AT: So armed with a positive attitude about life in China, you began making inroads into involving yourself more in Chinese life. Could you tell us about the circumstances that brought you together with your Chinese band members, some of your closest friends? And what bonded you together across cultures?

It all happened when I met Woodie (Wu), because I had this broken guitar. At that point I had been in Beijing for a year, and I hadn’t made that key relationship that started opening it up, but I had been open to meeting other people, I was already quite close with my Chinese teacher, and I was getting out and about into Chinese life as much as I could, so that when I met the right person who turned out to be my good friend, I was sort of ready. I was open to it. So I think that’s really the key: it’s to be open to it, and not to limit yourself, because sometimes people put limits on themselves that don’t have to be there.

In terms of what brought us together, humor can have a lot of cultural barriers, and part of my humor is, it’s more subtle, and just kind of laughing at the absurdities of situations. And I don’t think my band members always totally got that. But I think the more time I spent with them the more they understood that, and you know, the more we would engage in just this normal kind of goofy humor, and even pranks that any group of friends or bands would do, like putting a ‘Kick Me’ sticker on someone’s back. (Laughs) That type of broad, silly stuff we did do. Things like that.

AT: Your Chinese band members are obviously some of your closest friends, but now with the book, and your column, you now have a global Chinese audience who’s learning about Americans through your life experience. What have they said about your book, and your story?

I think what a lot of people responded to in the book wasn’t necessarily what I anticipated that people would. And it was a lot about family, and my dedication to my family, to my children and my wife, and also to my father, who was a character in the book, and gets ill. That struck a chord with a lot of Chinese readers.

Traditionally for the Chinese the family is very front and center, in life there, and that’s been under attack a bit for various reasons. But I think there’s still a very heartfelt love of family. So a lot of people responded to my reaction to my father being ill. I mean, that was really important for me to have in there, but I didn’t necessarily expect that to have quite as much resonance as it did.

Last week the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) published a half-page letter entitled “No Need To Panic About Global Warming” above the center fold of its Opinion page. The letter was signed by 16 prominent scientists and claimed, among other things, “Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now.” Such a stark assertion would be devastating to the consensus on climate change if it were true. But it is not true. Data published by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) show that global warming is real and well-documented:

This year tied 1997 as the 11th warmest year since records began in 1880…This marks the 35th consecutive year, since 1976, that the yearly global temperature was above average. The warmest years on record were 2010 and 2005, which were 0.64°C (1.15°F) above average.

While the NOAA report used selected official data sets, the well-known global warming skeptic Richard Muller initiated the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project to re-examine all available data from around the world. The analysis changed his mind. On October 21, 2011, he summarized his conclusions about the reality of climate change, also in the WSJ, in an article entitled “The Case Against Global-Warming Skepticism“:

We discovered that about one-third of the world’s temperature stations have recorded cooling temperatures, and about two-thirds have recorded warming. The two-to-one ratio reflects global warming. The changes at the locations that showed warming were typically between 1-2ºC, much greater than the [official] average of 0.64ºC.

The press needs to be open to all streams of opinion. But we learned from the Iraq War, which was based on faulty arguments about weapons of mass destruction, how important it is for the press to note and contradict statements that are demonstrably false. Is it too much to expect the WSJ to have referred to its own October 21st article? A simple note at the end could have alerted its readers to the questionable nature of the statements in the opinion piece it just published so prominently. Instead, the WSJ appeared to endorse the misleading arguments in the “anti-panic” letter by that very prominence. Is some unhealthy editorial agenda at work here? The future of climate change reporting in the WSJ should allow us to answer that question.

The company plans to file papers with the US money watchdog on Wednesday, in line with the Monetary Times and the Wall Street Journal.

The flotation later this year would raise regarding $10bn, they reported. This would be one in all the most important share sales seen on Wall Street. It would dwarf the $1.9bn raised by Google when it went public in 2004.

It would still, but, be some method short of the $20bn raised by carmaker General Motors in November 2010.

‘Brilliant achievement’ The reports counsel that Morgan Stanley can be the lead underwriter for the sale, with Goldman Sachs additionally expected to be heavily involved.

Rumours of Facebook’s therefore-referred to as initial public providing (IPO) have circulated for many months, and the company has maintained it can not inquire into the topic. The reported valuation would build Facebook one in all the planet’s biggest companies by market capitalisation.

“Facebook a brilliant achievement, however $75-$100bn? Would make Apple look really cheap,” said Rupert Murdoch on Twitter.

The corporate was started by Mark Zuckerberg and fellow students at Harvard University in 2004 and has quickly grown to become one amongst the globe’s most common websites.

source: bbc.co.uk

The Wall Street Journey reports that up next week begin to prepare an Initial Public Offering (IPO) is estimated to be worth USD100 million (Rp911 billion).Similarly, as quoted from ST.

From The Wall Street sources say that Facebook will prepare the files for IPO to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

“The parties Facebook executive is considering to prepare a file IPO next week,” said a source from The Wall Street Journal.

Some earlier news speculated that a Facebook IPO would value reached U.S. $ 100 million (Rp911 billion), making it the largest IPO in the IT world.

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Since I work at The Wall Street Journal, the people I meet often ask me questions as to mislead the economy, such as “Why is it so bad” and “When is it better to go?”. Unfortunately for them, I have no great answer to give. Two reasons: 1) I am not an expert, economist, or even a professional writer who is paid to research and write the economy every day, my colleague, the Wall Street Journal. I’m just a guy who has an alarm goes off an hour before dawn, and spent most of his time reading and looking at what others say, looking in the mood to make sense of all my public / government school education. 2) No one knows when it will be better. Even the best and the brightest are baffled.

Constantly asked “When will it get better?” He also asked me wonder … are things really that bad for most of us, or are simply unable to survive a prolonged recession? My grandfather came of age during the Great Depression, an economic “slowdown” that has lasted, not 3 or 5 years

years, but more than ten years … ends very soon, because the second world war. In these dark economic times of the people who had barely scraping without the government programs that we have today in the form of welfare, social security and unemployment. My grandfather, his parents, and the rest of his generation had to make real sacrifices to imagine that many people today just to put food in their bellies and clothes on his back. Growing up in the ERA took my grandfather in a cheapskate permanently (or so it seemed to me when I was a child), that 50 years later, he fought the waiters more than the discrepancy of a few hundredths of a check restaurant, and has coached Honestly, the age of schooling, how to get the most bang to my buck buffet dinner. This generation, in which the phrase “reduce, reuse, recycle” has been more than a simple call to save the planet, had a way of life.

Fast forward to today. While unemployment continues to sit at a level far too high and there are more Americans face the problems that there have probably been in my life, most of us still have a roof over their heads, food on the table, a smartphone in our pockets, high speed internet, and TV large flat screen with 500 channels in the lounge.

For those of us lucky enough to have a job, what our grandparents think of us spend hundreds of dollars a month just to entertain in the latest gadget, or food, because what we do “is to feel like

cooking “or” do not have time to do lunch tomorrow? “What they think of us make the car payments eternal because we do not want to drive a car that is” old? “What they would like to drive up huge credit card debt to pay for extravagances, and others, does not give us money in our bank accounts, and very little breathing space, if we lose our jobs? And what would they say to us when we come home from our jobs (we are so lucky that is), and complaints of not being “satisfied” or how our careers are not “proceeds as expected “?

You might say something like “back in my day … (blah blah blah)” Even though they generally do not want to hear about the difficulties of the older generations, we must always take seriously the warnings our old, when it comes to money matters. When they were growing, was the survival of the fittest. If we had the bad news at work today, I doubt that many of us would be terribly unfit to survive.

Mike Gavin is an occasional blogger, and producer of “Wall Street Journal This Morning” and “Wall Street Journal this weekend” nationally syndicated radio programs. The views expressed are personal and not necessarily those of Wall Street Journal, is the parent, or affiliate radio stations.

Image via CrunchBase

Among the guests are some of the luminaries of Silicon Valley and close co-founder of Apple Inc., reported the newspaper The Wall Street Journal. The company said the event would be private.

Speech. It was at Stanford University where Steve Jobs gave an emotional speech on June 12, 2005, at the graduation ceremony of the home studio.

In this speech reminds Jobs origin of “unwanted child” who was taken in adoption and that, despite the efforts of his foster parents did not finish college, “one of the best decisions I ever made” (see video).

Stanford. So far there had been answered calls made ​​to The Associated Press at Stanford University, located in the Bay Area of San Francisco, looking for details of the celebration.

For its part, Apple announced that it had planned memorial services open to the public.

Jobs, the mastermind behind popular items like the iPhone and the iPad, died on October 5 at age 56 after years of suffering from pancreatic cancer. A week ago we conducted a small private funeral, said the newspaper.

Tributes. Apple also plans an event on Wednesday to its employees at the company headquarters in Cupertino, California, also in the Bay Area of San Francisco. The event is billed as a celebration of the life of Jobs.

Meanwhile, California Governor Jerry Brown said Sunday as the day of Steve Jobs in California.

In announcing on Saturday the proclamation, the governor wrote that Jobs introduced the products to market “changed the way the world communicates.”

Amazon.com, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, is discussing the proposal with book publishers. These services will provide access to the customer to read all the books that are available by paying an annual fee. The project is referred to as digital libraries.

Cover via Amazon

During this time trying to hook the Amazon.com e-book enthusiasts by producing and selling e-book reader a well-known, Kindle. Kindle Production is based in Seattle allows consumers to read books in digital format. But these books are sold unit price set according to the publisher.

Digital library planned by Amazon.com will allow customers to pay only an annual fee to read a few books at once. Reportedly, Amazon.com promising big payments for digital library project, and Amazon will limit the amount that can read books free every month.

Instead, start

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by making sure you have 35 years of earnings.  People with less than 35 years have zeros computed into their average for every year without income.  If you have some low years in your highest 35 years of earnings, consider working longer to replace old low earning years with high earning years.  Depending on your age, working longer may allow you to retire later, which can also increase your benefit.

Under the current rules, people born in 1938 have a retirement age of 65 years and 2 months.  For people born after 1959, the normal retirement age is 67.  It is possible, however, to start receiving benefits  as early as age 62.  The price for this is that for the first 36 months of early retirement you permanently lose about .56% of your benefit per month. For additional months of early retirement, you lose about .42% per month.

In order to increase Social Security benefits, delay taking Social Security until age 70.  For people turning 62 after 2004, there is an 8% yearly increase in benefits for each year retirement is delayed beyond your normal Social Security retirement date.  That means by working for five more years, your Social Security check could increase 40%.

If your benefit is going to be based on your spouse’s earnings, there are still ways to increase your check.  In general, the lower earning spouse gets a Social Security benefit equal to 50% of their spouse’s benefit.  If you are close to having enough credit to earn your own benefit, however, you may want to see if working a little longer or even picking up a part time job could increase your benefit. 

One of these numbers was zero — the number of jobs created in August. the opposite was two — the interest rate on 10-year U.S. bonds, virtually as low as this rate has ever gone. Taken together, these numbers virtually scream that the inside-the-Beltway crowd has been worrying about the wrong things, and inflicting grievous harm as a result.

Ever since the acute part of the money crisis ended, policy discussion in Washington has been dominated not by unemployment, but by the alleged dangers posed by budget deficits. Pundits and media organizations insisted that the most important risk facing America was the threat that investors would pull the plug on U.S. debt. for instance, in could 2009 The Wall Street Journal declared that the “bond vigilantes” were “returning with a vengeance,” telling readers that the Obama administration’s “epic spending spree” would send interest rates soaring.

The interest rate when that editorial was printed was three.7 percent. As of Friday, as I’ve already mentioned, it was only a pair of percent.

I don’t mean to dismiss issues about the long-run U.S. budget picture. If you examine fiscal prospects over, say, ensuing twenty years, they’re indeed deeply worrying, largely because of rising health-care costs. but the expertise of the past two years has overwhelmingly confirmed what a number of us tried to argue from the beginning: The deficits we’re running straight away — deficits we must always be running, as a result of deficit spending helps support a depressed economy — are not any threat in the least.

And by obsessing over a nonexistent threat, Washington has been creating the real problem — mass unemployment, that is eating away at the foundations of our nation — a lot of worse.

Although you’d never are aware of it being attentive to the ranters, the past year has actually been a pretty sensible take a look at of the speculation that slashing government spending actually creates jobs. The deficit obsession has blocked a much-needed second spherical of federal stimulus, and with stimulus spending, like it was, fading out, we’re experiencing de facto fiscal austerity. State and local governments, above all, faced with the loss of federal aid, have been sharply cutting several programs and have been scraping plenty of employees, largely schoolteachers.

And somehow the non-public sector hasn’t felt these layoffs by rejoicing at the sight of a shrinking government and embarking on a hiring spree.

O.K., i know what the same old suspects will say — namely, that fears of regulation and better taxes are holding businesses back. but this is often just a right-wing fantasy. Multiple surveys have shown that lack of demand — a scarcity that is being exacerbated by government cutbacks — is that the overwhelming problem businesses face, with regulation and taxes barely even within the picture.

For example, when McClatchy Newspapers recently canvassed a random choice of small-business homeowners to search out out what was hurting them, not one one complained about regulation of his or her trade, and few complained a lot of about taxes. And did I mention that profits when taxes, as a share of national income, are at record levels?

So short-run deficits aren’t a problem; lack of demand is, and spending cuts are creating things a lot of worse. perhaps it’s time to alter course?

Which brings me to President Obama’s planned speech on the economy.

I notice it useful to suppose in terms of 3 questions: What should we have a tendency to be doing to create jobs? what will Republicans in Congress agree to? And only if political reality, what should the president propose?

The answer to the first question is that we must always have plenty of job-creating spending on the part of the central, largely within the style of much-needed spending to repair and upgrade the nation’s infrastructure. Oh, and that we want more aid to state and local governments, in order that they’ll stop scraping schoolteachers.

But what will Republicans agree to? That’s easy: nothing. they’ll oppose something Mr. Obama proposes, though it would clearly help the economy — or maybe I should say, particularly if it would help the economy, since high unemployment helps them politically.

This reality makes the third question — what the president should propose — laborious to answer, since nothing he proposes will actually happen anytime soon. so I’m personally ready to cut Mr. Obama plenty of slack on the specifics of his proposal, as long as it’s big and daring. For what he largely must do now could be to alter the conversation — to get Washington talking again about jobs and the way the government will help create them.

For the sake of the nation, and especially for voluminous unemployed Americans who see very little prospect of finding another job, I hope he pulls it off.