First update in 10 years to this blog. My last post ten years ago on March 20, 2003 was about the effect that the U.S. Invasion of Iraq was having in China that day. I had been trying to just blog everyday stuff from China and keeping it apolitical. An hour after I blogged that post, I spoke to one of my sisters by long distance from the U.S. She's the least opinionated of my three sisters, but when I mentioned how stupid this whole idea was, she blasted me with, "Well, what do you know? You're in China!" What I knew then, but didn't tell her, was that I was outside the echo chamber of the run up to the war. And, no, I wasn't getting my news from Chinese sources (a common assumption among those who have never been here and assume we are being brainwashed). I was getting my news and information from commonly available western/US sources freely available (then) on the Internet. I would stop talking to her for 4 years after that comment. And I stopped being interested in blogging on stuff going on in China to my ordinary friends and family in the US. Thus the death, or remission, of this blog. I never wanted it to be political. But the tenth anniversary of the Invasion of Iraq has just passed and it seems as though all the nay-saying from those opposed at the time (like me) has gained traction in the young history of Iraq 2 (regardless of whether we were in China-few-or not). Much is yet to come, but the scorn poured upon those who were against it at the time (my sister to me; the neocons to the non-believers; Libby/Cheney to Plath) was unwarranted. This blog will not continue. (A) I don't like politics; (B) I HATE the Google Blogger/Blogspot format; but (C) I figured I needed a more transparent explanation of why ch-ch-ch-ch-china died. So there it is.