Newsweek speculates that China’s uncertainty (wait – didn’t they name a mountain range after the movie?) about Avatar has less to do with its usurpation of local cinema fare (namely a recent Confucius biopic starring Chow Yun-Fat)  and more to do with uncomfortable parallels between the Na’vi and Earth’s Tibetans, who are not exactly blue and 12-feet tall but have [...]

I really don’t have it in me to be snarky about this, so I’ll let the original material speak for itself – suffice to say that religion and governments make really shitty bedfellows. Last year the Chinese passed a law that gives Beijing the power to approve the reincarnation of living Buddhas or lamas, of whom the Dalai Lama is [...]

Tibetan spiritual leader Tenzin Gyatso, better known as the Dalai Lama, has apparently given up hope that China will come to some sort of agreement on Tibet. I can’t say I’m surprised. China is supremely recalcitrant, especially with regards to land masses they consider to be their property – and the Dalai Lama is nothing if not a realist. One [...]

When I was a kid I used to love reading about all things Fortean – particularly cryptozoological phenomenon. Things like Bigfoot and the Yeti fascinated me, and to this day I’m totally unnerved when swimming in natural bodies of water for fear there might be some Loch Ness Monster thingie hanging out in the depths. As a result, whenever I [...]