Radical Transparency

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December 03, 2008

Another Reason to Love China

Please click this link.

It's an article about two pounds of very old marijuana.  Two pounds of very old marijuana found in a tomb in the desert in China.

My favorite quote is from the caption next to a picture of a rubber-gloved scientist tweezing a bit of the weed into a container for him to bring home and "test" over the weekend:

Scientists are unsure if the marijuana was grown for more spiritual or medical purposes, but it's evident that the man was buried with a lot of it.

I only smoked the greens in China a couple of times.  It was not locally sourced.  It was American.  A friend smuggled it back from a medical marijuana farm in Mendocino County, CA. 

And there is a very serious story behind it.  One that involves a lawyer, outsourcing the manufacture of clipping and gardening tools to a factory in Shenzhen, political dilemmas, cash in buried mason jars, socially responsible investors, and a SWAT team. 

It's probably best told when everyone listening is stoned.

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November 10, 2008

Another Election

My friends at Wokai need votes.

They are microfinance people using the internets to connect the Chinese microfinance community to the rest of the world.  They want to make it possible for me, from Delaware or Singapore or Easter Island or Reykjavik, to drop USD 50 into their system, choose a Chinese microentrepreneur to support, loan her that money, watch her use it to grow her little shepherding business, collect it, and then loan it out again.  They are about a month away from launching an early version of that long distance loan-making tool.

And they've got developers and interns to feed.  So they're hustling.

So far, they've hustled well at changemakers.net.  They're in the finals of a little nonprofit business plan competition over there, and they think they can win it.

To make that happen, however, they need support.  Votes.  From us.

-If you think responsible economic development in China is a cause worth supporting...

-If you think we ought to harness the technologies that make it ridiculously convenient to communicate in kitten dialect and use them to pass information and capital to the poorest places on earth...

-Or if you just simply like the idea of supporting entrepreneurs that are committed to their project to the point that they drink competitively with rural Communist Party officials, throw up everywhere, get carried back to their hotel, and show up at 7:30 the next morning ready to meet loan officers and microentrepreneurs and decode their heavily accented Chinese...

Then vote for Wokai.

It'll take a few minutes, for hopefully you'll read through a bunch of descriptions of finalists and vote for two other high potential startup nonprofits in addition to Wokai.  But it's good to give big love and respect to the future of the international philanthropy, so make it happen.  Today or tomorrow.  Then tune back in Wednesday to see if they win.

The pic below is from about 18 months ago in Beijing.  Wokai was just a baby, and I had recently taken the founders out to the desert in search of inspiration, partner microfinance institutions, and the grain alcohol we all have to wager if we want to make friends and do business in rural China.  Someday, when Courtney and Casey are famous, and I need people to vote for my competing business plan, I'll post the picture again, and hopefully everyone will think I'm awesome by association.