Any fool can have a Blog – even me

October 8, 2010

Recently a comment came in to iLook China and wasn’t sent to the SPAM folder.  When I opened it, the first thing I saw was Him Yao Sui, Emperor of China.

The comment said, “I am dropping you a line to let you know that I have visited your website.”

Oh my, I’m so honored!

I’ve opened e-mails by accident from some African prince who needs money to get his inherited fortune out of some bank in some European country.

When I open one of those by accident, I delete them immediately.

However, this SCAM is on WordPress, and it is a Blog.

President Lincoln once said, “You can fool some of the people most of the time…”  That’s who these e-mails are aimed at.

I might be stupid, but I’m not that stupid.

I want to share some of the suffering of Him Yao Sui (this link will take you to the Blog if it’s still up), the exiled “fictional” Christian Emperor of China.

1. I am an international VIP. Someone who is currently poor… I might be described as a beggar, a leech on society.

2. I am needing a house and a job.

3. I would like to find a good church to call my home.

4. The Emperor has asthma and his majesty needs a motorized wheelchair but he has no money and no medical insurance.

The exiled Emperor of China offers an introduction to himself and China’s Hebrew Jo Dynasty (3896 BC to 2010 AD).

The exiled emperor lists a 24 hour 808 number. 

Don’t call, it’s probably one of those numbers that charges and your next phone bill may have a charge for several thousand dollars on it.

According to the note that follows the 808-telephone number, the service will be gone after July 31, 2010.  The comment that was linked to this WordPress Blog arrived on September 30, 2010. 

After I posted this, I deleted the comment.

If this exiled emperor is homeless, how did he manage to find a computer and put up this extensive Blog on WordPress?  Maybe somewhere in all the posts there is another tearjerker explanation.

Discover The Xia — China’s Oldest Known Dynasty (2205 to 1783 B.C.)

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. 

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

2 Comments | China, crime | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Journalists and Jail Time

September 22, 2010

China isn’t the only country where reporters go to jail.

In September 2006, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that two Chronicle reporters were sent to prison for as long as a year and a half for not revealing their sources.

In July 2005, Judith Miller, a Pulitzer Prize winning American journalist, who worked for the New York Times at the time, was jailed for contempt of court for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury.

In fact, the First Amendment Center has a list of U.S. reporters who have gone to jail. 

The first case was in 1848 when a Senate committee confined John Nugent, a correspondent for the New York Herald.


An example of how one law is different around the world.

Then between 1848 and 1897, there were five more cases.

Starting in 1911 and through the 20th century, the “free” press in America had more than 30 collisions with the law.  

I stopped counting at thirty.

When I started to research the China side of this topic, I learned that Yahoo’s Hong Kong office helped China catch journalist Shi Tao for “divulging state secrets”.  Shi Tao was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Source: BBC

In fact, The Committee to Protect Journalists reported that in 2008, 125 journalists went to prison around the globe. Twenty-eight were in China.

 China’s laws and sentences tend to be longer and harsher, but China does not have America’s legal system or Constitution, which were designed to protect American citizens from the government and criminals in the U.S. – not China.

Every country has different penalties for crimes.  For example, what is the worst that could happen if you were caught in Turkey with illegal drugs?  Up to 20 years in prison.

However, in Singapore and Thailand, there is a death penalty for this crime. Source: Drug laws abroad

See Growing China’s Legal System

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. 

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

Leave a Comment » | America, China, crime, cultural differences, legal system | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Global Censorship and Corruption

September 21, 2010

Gordon Ross at Global Geopolitics & Political Economy reports that in spite of “overwhelming obstacles” in China, a few courageous reporters are exposing official corruption and criminal behavior and it is dangerous.

Why doesn’t Ross’s piece mention that there are crime fighters in China like Bo Xilai, who may be China’s number one crime fighter?

Bo’s much-publicized crackdown on gangsters in Chongqing resulted in the arrest and conviction of thousands of gangsters, according to the official Xinhua News Agency. Source: The Diplomat.com

How about crime and corruption in America?  UCLA Professor of Public Affairs Mark Kleiman is “angry about having too much crime and an intolerable number of people behind bars.”

The United States is home to five percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, yet, says Kleiman, our high incarceration rate isn’t making us safer. Source: Reason.com

Threats and fear or reprisals and lawsuits in the U.S. have put witnesses, police, reporters and whistle blowers in danger.

For example, Serpico, the true story of an honest New York cop who blew the whistle on rampant corruption in the force only to have his comrades turn on him.

Being a witness in the United States can also be dangerous, which is why the U.S. Government has the United States Federal Witness Protection Program.

Due to many of the same problems China faces today, America also has the U.S. Department of Labor Whistleblower Protection Program.

Then Serendipity says that censorship exists to some extent in all modern countries, including the U.S.A., the U.K., Germany, France, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand.

Crime and corruption is a global problem and is not exclusive to China.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. 

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

Leave a Comment » | America, China, crime, legal system, media | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Global Blood Suckers

September 8, 2010

It looks like Goldman Sachs & Co is under attack from the two most powerful countries on the earth.

Recently, the SEC in the United States penalized the Wall Street firm $550 million to settle civil fraud charges.

Meanwhile, in China, a book called the Goldman Sachs Conspiracy has been published and is selling well.

“The nearly 300-page, highly dramatized account covers much of the same ground as a widely cited piece by Matt Taibbi last year in the Rolling Stone magazine that portrayed the Wall Street institution as a ‘a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.’ ” Source: The Huffington Post

The Young Turks reported that Golden Sachs conspired with John Paulson, who made $3.7 billion dollars in profits when the global economy collapsed and bought into Bank of America with some of that money becoming the bank’s fourth largest investor.

According to the Young Turks, Goldman Sachs set up clients, who lost billions while Sachs made billions from the clients’ losses. 

The Young Turks read one email from a Goldman Sachs’s employee, who calls himself the Fabulous Fab. “The whole building is about to collapse anytime now. Only potential survivor, the Fabulous Fab, standing in the middle of all these complex, highly leveraged, exotic trades he created without understanding all the implications of those monstrosities.”

The Young Turks say that there will be more court cases to follow the SEC case. Maybe China will also take a few Sachs employees to court using some of Sun Tzu’s strategies and put that well-known death penalty to use.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. 

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Leave a Comment » | America, business, capitalism, China, crime, economy, legal system, politics | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

The Human Rights of Individualism

September 3, 2010

The Guardian.co.uk reported that China moves to reduce number of crimes punishable by death.  Considering that in 1980, China had no legal system much has been accomplished and more is yet to come.

I agree that some of the crimes that warrant the death penalty in China are unfair for the crime committed, but China is not a Western country and the history of China prior to Communism shows that convicted criminals were often executed for a long list of nonviolent crimes.

Call me an Old Testament man. I believe if someone is convicted with overwhelming evidence of a brutal crime, he or she should face punishment equal to or worse than the crime they committed.

A trial for first-degree murder should end in a swift execution.

Face it, there are convicted criminals who cannot be allowed out of prison. Instead of locking them up for decades at a high cost to honest hardworking taxpayers, the criminals should be executed.

The Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says, “Recognition of inherent dignity and the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world.”  Source: Human Rights Here and Now

I disagree with the term “all members” of the human family. Some criminals forfeit that right due to the nature of his or her crimes.

In forty-six American states and the District of Columbia, convicted criminal offenders are denied the right to vote while serving a sentence in prison. Thirty-nine states also disenfranchise felons on parole and twenty-nine disenfranchise those on probation.

In fourteen states, even ex-offenders who have served their sentences remain barred for life from voting. Source: The Sentencing Project

However, there is pressure on the United States to go easier on ex-offenders and allow them to have the right to vote again.

In fact, almost every country is changing due to pressure from human rights groups.  I don’t oppose what the human rights groups are doing yet slavery didn’t end during the American Civil War. Why isn’t more being done to end slavery?

Today, more than 27 million men, women and children endure brutal working conditions for no money and under the constant threat of beatings, torture and rape. Source: iAbolish.org

All a slaver has to do is make sure he or she lives in a country that, at worst, will lock him or her up for life and provide free shelter, free food and free medical—something that China doesn’t do for these types of crimes.

Do you believe pampering hard-core criminals is going to change them? Maybe theWest should consider what “human rights” looks like in a collective culture as opposed to individualism.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. 

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5 Comments | America, China, Chinese Culture, Chinese history, crime, cultural differences | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

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