Dubai on Empty
A short but entertaining article packed with colorful descriptions of Dubai.

No one dreamed of this. Twenty years ago, none of this was here. No Narnia. No seven-star hotels. No tallest prick buildings. Just a home of pastoralist tented families herding goats, racing camels, shooting one another. And a handful of greasy, armed empire mechanics in khaki shorts, drilling for oil. In just one life span, Dubai has gone from sitting on a rug to swiveling on a fake Eames chair 100 stories up. And not a single local has had to lift a finger to make it happen. That’s not quite fair—of course they’ve lifted a finger; to call the waiter, berate the busboy. The money seeped out of the ground and they spent it. Pretty much all of it. You look at this place and you realize not a single thing is indigenous, not one of this culture’s goods and chattels originated here. Even the goats have gone. This was a civilization that was bought wholesale. The Gulf is the proof of Carnegie’s warning about wealth: “There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else.” Emiratis are born retired. They waft through this city in their white dishdashas and headscarves and their obsessively tapered humorless faces. They’re out of place in their own country. They have imported and built a city, a fortress of extravagance, that excludes themselves. They have become duplicitous, schizophrenic. They don’t allow their own national dress in the clubs and bars that serve alcohol, the restaurants with the hungry girls sipping champagne. So they slip into Western clothes to go out.

Lot 800: The Bainbridge Vase
The story of the most expensive antique Chinese piece (for now) that sold for 43 million…pounds! That’s like $80 million then. Of course, with a piece that expensive, it’s never simple.

That is because the future of the vase is nothing like resolved. Within days of the sale, there was speculation on the internet that the bidding had been rigged by Chinese agents, seeking to bump up prices ahead of the big sales in Beijing two weeks later. Then, in December, a respected American dealer expressed doubts about the vase’s authenticity. Since February, there has been a drip-drip of stories in the British press, mostly unsourced, questioning whether the anonymous buyer—a mysterious “businessman in Beijing”—is going to pay, or pondering the possibility of a conspiracy involving the Chinese state.

President Trump? ‘I’m Very Serious’
A look at Trump’s potential entry into the 2012 election. Sounds like he is ready:

In the deposition given by Trump in the suit he filed against O’Brien, Trump was asked whether he has ever “not been truthful” in his public representations of his properties: “My net worth fluctuates, and it goes up and down with markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even my own feelings, but I try,” he responded. When lawyers asked him whether he had ever exaggerated when describing what he owned and was worth to the press, Trump said: “I think everybody does. Who wouldn’t?” When a lawyer asked, “Have you ever lied in public statements about your properties?” Trump replied: “When you’re making a public statement, you want to put the most positive—you want to say it the most positive way possible. I’m no different from a politician running for office.”

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: chinese, instapaper, usa