User profile: Alien

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Forums > Living in Kunming > Disposable chopsticks bad for nature

Good digression. Not good to pollute the planet, kill trees, etc.; but the serious pollution and species endangerment is carried out by a type of industrial organization that is dedicated, not to keeping the planet alive and nonpoisonous, but to making a buck.
Hard to get leverage on this, but necessary. Start with the chopsticks, if you like, but...

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Forums > Study > Book Club Kunming

I found SEX AT DAWN to be a very readable, entertaining and often humorous presentation of very serious, well-documented research. Seriously recommend it to anyone who has chosen, or is planning to choose, monogamy. Not the last word on the subject, I'm sure, but the clear challenge to what have become standardized ideas about sexuality and human sociability are very much worth considering. The implications of the authors' research go far beyond the immediate subject matter, and are understood by the authors as well.
For me the most important generalization is a clear and welcome refutation of the quite idiotic point of view that one hears all the time, from people who look around at the world they live in - a matter of human-created CULTURE over a few millennia of class society, beginning with the invention of agriculture - that it can be reduced to a very simplistic formula: that 'human nature' is, at bottom, merely a matter of individualistic competition for 'the survival of the fittest', that the lives of humans before our recent wonderful creation can be reduced to Hobbes idea that it was all brutish and short, and that our inherent social nature, as inherently social beings, is in fact simply some kind of disguised war of all against all. This is dead wrong - if it were true, we wouldn't be here.
If all that sounds too heavy, read the book, there are lots of laughs mixed in with the scholarship, which is presented in a form anybody ought to be able to follow. - it's a good read, with lots of raunchy apes, including people!

The next meet will be at The Park on Wednesday, Nov. 29, at 6:30PM. We will have read Graham Greene's TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT.
The Kunming Book Club has a wechat group in which many regular attendees participate, but is open to all. Readings, locations and times of meets are chosen by attendees. New participants welcome.

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Not quite what you'd call a jumping place, but not bad at all for rather standard US-type meals, not overly expensive, and with a really good salad bar that's cheap, or free with most dinner dishes after 5:30PM. You can get a bottle of beer or even wine if you really want to, but I've never seen anybody do it - maybe that's just to take out. Chinese Christian run, and they hire people with physical disadvantages, who are pleasant and helpful. Frequented by foreign (mostly North American) Christians and Chinese Christians - was started by a Canadian couple associated with Bless China (previously, Project Grace), who are no longer here, but no religious pressure or any of that. Steaks are nothing special, and I avoid the Korean dishes, which I've had a few times but which did not impress me.

As a shop and bakery, it's very good bread at reasonable prices, of various kinds (Y18 for a good multigrain loaf that certainly weighs well over a pound. Other stuff too, like granola and oatmeal that is local, as well as imported things, including American cornflakes and so forth, which some people seem to require.

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Large portions, seriously so with the pizza, which is Brooklyn/American style, I guess. Convivial, conversational, good place to drink with good folks on both sides of the bar, especially after about 9PM.

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Really good pizza and steaks. The wine machine fuddles me when I'm a bit fuddled, & seems unnecessary. Good folks on both sides of the bar.