It’s good to see that something is being done to help reunite kidnapped children with their parents.
A few passages of interest:
Correspondents say the children of migrant workers are usually targeted. They are traded for a few hundred dollars and few are ever found.
As if life for migrant workers isn’t tough enough.
And…
In a society that favours male heirs, it is often boys who are taken.
I understand the heir thing. Our children are our thoughts and ideals, our immortality. But kidnapping your heir? That can’t come with the gut-level sense of continuity. I’m not saying that heirs are less “heiry” when…
I exchanged a few emails with a reader that works at a costume shop. I asked her where most of the costumes are made. She told me that they have a lot of vintage costumes and make many of them themselves. Of course, the ready-made costumes mostly come from China. Part of her response:
It was fun during the election to tell people that we didn’t know when we would get Obama masks back in stock because they were working on them in China and they had yet to ship. Some people got really mad, but they just didn’t make them here, they didn’t even try. They were ONLY made in China.
You just gotta wonder what the workers think while they are producing and packaging Obama masks…
I had a speaking engagement today. It went awesome. I overheard several compliments:
“He’s like Matthew McConaghey, but not so flaky.”
“Best speaker we’ve had.”
In the words of @garyvee, “I crushed it.”
In other news…
One of these days I intend to getting around to writing about book bloggers and independent reviewers. Unfortunately, today isn’t that day. Until then, here is one of the most in depth reviews of WAIW? that I’ve seen….
Online or in print, WorldHum has some of the best travel writing around. Of course, I am little biased. They highlight my piece Adventure Dad as one of their eight favorite family travel stories….
It’s nice when people with skills support your work. I can’t wait to see the finished product.
Today I’m at Rule29 for a photo/video shoot. It should be fun, but I just learned that there might be makeup involved. I grew a big zit for the occasion. I hope it smiles….
Just the other day I wrote about how travel makes the news more relevant: “If I have gained anything from my travels it’s not a well-traveled savviness, envied by others, but an increased caring.”
That being the case, when I read this story in the NY Times by on Chinese boys being bought, stolen, and sold, I couldn’t help but think of Dewan and Zhu Chun’s son Li Xin.
The crazy thing about this story is a man who bought a son didn’t think there was anything wrong with paying money for another human being until he learned that the child had been kidnapped. I try to look at the world with an open mind. My first reaction to this was repulsion, but then I try to…
…more than 70 percent of the British populace recognize the fair-trade mark, whereas consumer recognition in the United States is only 28 percent, according to recent surveys.
And as I pointed out here, environmentalism and organics tend to trump fair-trade. The article confirms that:
TransFair USA, the nonprofit that licenses products to carry the fair-trade certified label on agricultural products, says it is looking into establishing standards for apparel. But fair-trade fashion faces significant hurdles in the US.
“It’s quite easy for the fiber industry to develop their own weak ecolabels in order to pull the wool…
