Word: potemkinism
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...free press, independent bewigged judges (a legacy of the British) and regularly scheduled elections - although there are no direct elections for the SAR's Chief Executive or for half of the legislature, which has seats reserved for "functional constituencies" representing various professions. Hong Kong is no Potemkin village, but it isn't a city on a hill either. (See more about Hong Kong 10 years after the handover...
...refunded in the form of lower payroll taxes. But the House Democrats, still playing by Reagan-era ground rules, were too frightened to go there: they proposed instead a weak, inelegant cap-and-trade system of the sort that has provided precious little carbon reduction in Europe. It is Potemkin legislation, designed to give only the appearance of dealing with a problem...
...form. From a 19th century photograph by Eadweard Muybridge he could take the squatting silhouette of a man and dissolve it within the outlines of a crouching boy attributed to Michelangelo. He could borrow the eyeglasses from a famous shot of a screaming nurse in Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin and perch them on a Pope's nose. In the same way, the meaning of his screaming Pontiff in Head VI fluctuates. Trapped in a kind of isolation booth, where a thunderstorm of granular black strokes rains down on him, this Pope suggests the baying, baboon madness of authority. (Indeed...
...Beijing the Summer Games in 2001, China had lavished $44 billion on transforming the capital into a city whose time was now. Stadiums were built, entire transportation networks laid out. The areas that couldn't be prettified in time were hidden behind Olympic billboards that would have made Grigori Potemkin proud. Lest visitors think that China was somehow not sophisticated enough to merit hosting the world's premier sporting spectacle, local residents were admonished not to wear more than three contrasting hues at the same time. At a time of national glory, it just wouldn't do to have clashing...
...Karzai, who rarely leaves the palace for fear of assassination attempts, Obama will be equally sheltered from the real Afghanistan. According to the Associated Press but as of yet unconfirmed by the US military, Obama visited US troops in the relatively safe province of Nangahar. While not exactly a Potemkin village, the provincial capital Jalalabad is one of the country's rare success stories, and far removed from the devastating instability that plagues most of the country. "I don't think that he will get the reality of Afghanistan," says Sancharaki. "Part of his visit will be with the American...