December 15, 2022
Today on Microsoft Flight Simulator, I’ll be flying a famous stubby-nosed racer, the Gee Bee Super Sportster, that won speed records in the 1930s – but proved deadly to many who flew it. And there’s a reason I’m here under wintry, overcast skies at Detroit’s Wayne County Airport, because this is where this plane, at […]
December 15, 2022
Today in Microsoft Flight Sim, I’m back to flying the Spitfire again – but this time the original Mk Ia version which fought in the Battle of Britain. You might recall that a flew a much later model Spitfire, one with a unique post-war story, here: This Spitfire also has a special story. KL-B (P9398) […]
December 15, 2022
Today in Microsoft Flight Sim, I’m off to the interior of Brazil to fly the Embraer EMB200 Ipanema, and explore the surprisingly fascinating world of crop dusters. f this airplane looks familiar, that’s because it was the model for Dusty Crophopper in the movie Planes. Well, technically Dusty is an Air Tractor AT-502, manufactured in […]
December 14, 2022
Today in Microsoft Flight Simulator I’m going to be flying the Fokker F.VII, one of the world’s first civilian airliners that, in the hands of aviators like Richard Byrd and Charles Kingsford Smith, also blazed new paths to uncharted reaches of the globe. Anthony Fokker was Dutch, born in the colonial East Indies. In 1910, […]
December 14, 2022
In December 2012, I had an article in Foreign Policy magazine that summarized what seemed at the time, and many years since, as a somewhat arcane topic — a standoff between US and Chinese regulators over audit standards. In fact, in December 2020 (eight years later), Congress passed a bill that threatened to delist Chinese companies from […]
December 14, 2022
On August 3, 2022, in the wake of Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, I tweeted a brief thread providing some perspective on Taiwan’s history. Since people seemed to appreciate the conciseness of its style and content, I repost that thread here, in its original form: 1. The attention surrounding Pelosi’s trip has prompted a […]
December 14, 2022
This op-ed of mine was published in the Wall Street Journal on September 12, 2012. You can read below or view the original here. At the very last moment, one paragraph was cut from the final version, presumably due to space limitations. I have restored it here in italics, because the crisis facing Suntech (the world’s largest […]
December 14, 2022
This article of mine appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review in June 2009. To my knowledge, it was the first article that proposed the now-commonplace observation that Chinese citizens were purchasing and stockpiling empty apartments as a form of savings. Though many later assumed that I had predicted an imminent crash in Chinese real estate that […]
December 14, 2022
Today in MSFS, to celebrate the Fourth of July holiday, I’m go to try out a unique made-in-America piece of innovation, the Rutan Long-EZ, over some uniquely prohibited American airspace: Washington, DC. The Long-EZ may just look kind of weird to you, but its story harkens back to the early days of aviation pioneers, and […]
December 14, 2022
Welcome back to Microsoft Flight Simulator where today I’ll be flying the Mitsubishi A6M2, Japan’s main fighter of World War II, famously known as the Zero. Introduced in 1940, the A6M was dubbed the Navy Type 0 carrier fighter or Reisen (零戦, “Zero Fighter”) for short, in reference to the Imperial Year 2600. To set […]