Speaking of the New York Times most e-mailed stories (below), how about SARAH BOXER's article on Catherine Chalmers: Cockroaches as Shadow and Metaphor:

...during a book signing for "Food Chain," which includes pictures of a snake strangling a rat and a mantis chewing off its mate's head, an angry vegetarian came up to Ms. Chalmers and called her a Nazi.

The upshot, Ms. Chalmers said, was, "I bent over backwards not to hurt anything." With Hollywood movies no one wonders whether people are actually being killed, she noted. But with video, people expect honesty.

That did not stop her from making a video of roaches in a gas chamber. As the video begins, you see the misty gray air inside the chamber. The roaches are dead on their backs. Then a few legs twitch. Soon the air begins to clear. You can see the bricks of the gas chamber and the little pipe through which the gas came in. More and more roach legs and antennae wiggle. The sounds of whispers, giggling and breathing fill the air. Soon the roaches are crawling everywhere. It is the cockroach equivalent of Martin Amis's Holocaust novel, "Time's Arrow," in which time runs backward.

While making this video, Ms. Chalmers said, she got very upset, not because of the Holocaust parallel but because she thought she had actually put the roaches through an agonizing death. Previously she had always knocked her roaches out by chilling them. But Betty Faber, an entomologist, told her to try carbon dioxide. So she put the roaches in the chamber and with a pipe pumped in the gas from dry ice, which is frozen carbon dioxide. The roaches went into "dramatic convulsions," she said. "They tossed themselves all over the place, threw themselves against the walls. Then they all fell on their backs."

She thought: "I can't show this. It's visually too disturbing." But then, as the videotape kept rolling and the dry ice cleared, the cockroaches rose from the dead. Their legs started kicking. "The most beautiful part is their getting up," Ms. Chalmers said. She decided to show the uncut video from this point on. It shows the cockroaches as survivors. "I wanted to show their character," Ms. Chalmers says. "They keep coming back."

You might think that Ms. Chalmers would have been upset because she had, by effectively reversing the gassing process, given her Holocaust a happy ending. Or you might think that she would have worried that she had compared vermin and Jews, which is what the Nazis did. (Her photographs of lynchings bring up the same problem. She seems to be comparing African-Americans and insects.).

I can't say I think much of it as art, but geez, people, take it easy! They're bugs! Although I guess that little frisson people get is what's supposed to make it art.

KATHARINE Q. SEELYE and JOHN TIERNEY write how E.P.A. Drops Age-Based Cost Studies

Instead of the traditional assumption that all lives saved from cleaner air are worth the same, administration officials in two environmental studies included an alternative method that used two values, $3.7 million for the life a person younger than 70 and $2.3 million for an older person, a 37 percent difference.

Too bad; it makes perfect sense to me. John D. Graham, founder of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis and the regulations administrator at the Office of Management and Budget, has been the champion of this "life-expectancy analysis" and "has been urging rigorous cost-benefit analyses for all federal agencies"; he's identified here as "a b�te noire of environmentalists".

The life-expectancy analysis, intended to identify policies that would add the most years to people's lives, also accompanied two cost-benefit analyses at the E.P.A., as well as at other agencies in the Clinton administration....Environmentalists say the problem with Dr. Graham's approach is that it inflates the costs of regulations and diminishes the perceived benefits....

Wow! In other words, they reject it because it shows how much policies cost!

Milton C. Weinstein, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and a pioneer of life-expectancy analysis, said it had become routine among medical researchers but still aroused controversy.

"There's an equity argument that every citizen should be entitled to an equal claim on resources and shouldn't be penalized for the fact that they've lived a larger portion of their life span," Professor Weinstein said. "But you can never save a life. You can only prolong it. When you give medical treatment or make the environment safer, the relevant question is how much of a life you can save. Most people, if given the choice between applying resources to save a 10-year-old or a 70-year-old, would choose the 10-year-old."

Seems pretty balanced, coming from the much-maligned New York Times. Interestingly, it's one of their most e-mailed stories. Recently NPR pretty much took the side of the environmentalists withEPA Criticized for Plan to Reduce Value of Seniors' Lives.

The reason we didn't watch any movies last week: we spent 3 hours hiking on a segment of the Tunnel Hill trail from Vienna (Vie-ENNA) to Tunnel Hill (9.3 mi.).

China Brings Back the Bow in SARS Fight

For more than 20 centuries, bowing was the way Chinese mandarins greeted each other, commoners paid obeisance to their ruler and everyone worshipped their ancestors. China's communist rulers did their best to stamp out the practice, believing it reeked of the hated imperial past.

Now, in an unusual turn amid attempts to stop the SARS virus and with the explicit endorsement of the Communist Party, the bow is making a comeback....

It isn't a choice the communists make lightly. Even after 24 years of economic and social reforms that have remade China, the ruling party carefully weighs the political symbolism of every word and gesture. And memories of Chinese being forced to bow to foreigners in colonial Shanghai and Japanese invaders during World War II can still prompt a cringe.

It isn't just any style of bow the party is reviving. The official Xinhua News Agency, outlining the new etiquette, described a greeting used by Confucian gentlemen, a class the communists swept away: "a slight bow with hands clasped at head level."

The government's willingness to embrace such a cultural throwback is a sign of just how desperate the times are...In imperial China, the bow could be as slight as the nod of a head from one court official to another. Or it could be an all-out "kowtow" -- literally, "knocking the head," when a subject prostrated himself before his ruler and banged his head on the floor.

Even the emperor bowed -- though only to his ancestors at the dynastic shrine and to the spirits at temples.

Chinese court officials demanded foreign diplomats bow to them -- and were furious when the 18th-century British envoy Lord Macartney refused. Later Westerners followed suit, and their refusal became a symbol of foreigners' ability to dictate to China.

The bow has stayed in fashion on Taiwan, the island refuge for China's Nationalists after their 1949 defeat in a civil war on the mainland.

Taiwanese political candidates bow to supporters, sometimes dropping to their knees on election eve to appeal for those last few votes. On inauguration day, the winners bow to voters in thanks. Even many modern young Taiwanese couples bow to their ancestors at the family shrine on their wedding day...

From the headline, I thought they were talking about bows & arrows--or violins. Damned English speling.

About the Group of Eight, not SARS

China Shows Interests Converging with Rich World

China's interests are more in line with developed than with developing countries.

Speaking of tacky, see Evan Kirchhoff on Bennett's gambling (link via Colby Cosh):

I think the worst aspect of this story for Bill Bennett isn't the fact that Mr. Book of Virtues turns out to be a feverish Vegas gambler who has burned through sums of money potentially in the high seven figures, but the fact that he's done it in the trashiest possible way....

the revelation that what turns Bennett's crank is squatting on a solitary stool for hours at a time, stabbing at blinking slot-machine buttons like a Skinner-boxed rodent, has got to be hard for a lot of his fans to take....

Hmm...sounds like Bennett's a philistine to me. And this is priceless:

Bennett is not a cold rationalist; he believes in the personal God of traditional Christianity, a deity who takes a direct interest in human affairs. That's fair enough. What interests me is how he integrated the two cosmologies of theism and magical thinking, which would seem to contradict each other. Or did he subconsciously see them as same thing? Did he believe, for example, that slot-machine wins accrue naturally to the virtuous?

Prince Roy suggests 'tacky' for su2qi. That's not bad. Bartleby defines it as:

2a. Lacking style or good taste; tawdry: tacky clothes. b. Distasteful or offensive; tasteless: a tacky remark.

It's an older expression than I would have thought; the OED has this citation from 1883:

Two little cards (with his name printed on them in gilt. Tackey? Ugh).

(That's from Isabella Maud Rittenhouse's Maud, a journal about Cairo, IL.) I was thinking 'bourgeois', which the OED defines in this sense as "selfishly materialistic or conventionally respectable and unimaginative". Or, if a Philistine is a

person deficient in liberal culture and enlightenment, whose interests are chiefly bounded by material and commonplace things.

But often applied contemptuously by connoisseurs of any particular art or department of learning to one who has no knowledge or appreciation of it; sometimes a mere term of dislike for those whom the speaker considers 'bourgeois'.

then the adjective can mean "uncultured; commonplace; prosaic." That sums up most Americans and even more Chinese.

But I don't like to use either of those words because they sound so snobbish, and there are things in mass culture that I find appealing. Like Girardot in his Victorian translation of China : James Legge's Oriental pilgrimage: in a footnote describing Legge's trip throught the US, he complains that Legge's

accounts of Japan and the United States are also mostly in the genre of tourist literature--e.g., his meandering overland route included stops at Yosemite, the Mormon Temple, and, most egregiously, Niagara Falls!

Ah, yes--visiting Niagara Falls: how egregious! Poor Jimmy Legge. I know how he must feel. And since he lived 1815-1897, he might well have known what 'tacky' meant. I've been told my taste for 19th-century Romantic music is bourgeois, and it stung. I guess it's only OK to like that stuff if you do it as a post-modernist, ironically. (Be detached, not involved).

Reuters reports China farmers fight SARS spirits with firecrackers ("China farmers"?):

Chinese peasants, lacking the medical knowhow and funds to fight the deadly SARS virus, are lighting firecrackers and kowtowing to the Buddha to scare off the "god of plague".

Some farmers in Shanxi, the hard-hit northern province near SARS-infested Beijing, set off firecrackers in the belief they would help to frighten off SARS, the official Xinhua news agency said on its Web site, www.xinhuanet.com.

Rumours that SARS was a natural disaster "brought on by spirits" or "haunting genies" were circulating in some parts of the countryside, and farmers were burning joss sticks before Buddhist statues and praying for good fortune, Xinhua said.

Sure, that'll help. Funny they don't mention the Chinese herbal meds people think will help.

The Cranky Professor wonders if civil libertarians going to protest the decision by the University of California at Berkeley to exclude students traveling from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and mainland China.

More on Diane Ravitch's book. (Link via Banana Oil). In Merle Rubin's Tests, textbooks: Only men bake cookies in these parts, a review of The Language Police, How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn:

A "bias and sensitivity" panel rejected a number of reading passages for a voluntary national test (which was eventually defeated in Congress), including

a passage about the patchwork quilts made by 19th century frontier women: "The reviewers objected to the portrayal of women as people who stitch and sew, and who were concerned about preparing for marriage." The fact that the passage was historically accurate was considered no defense for its "stereotypical" image of women and girls.

Yeah, this is the kind of stuff I see in many surverys of Chinese history. For most of Chinese history, women didn't have much power, so what do some people want to do? Focus on Nyu shu (women's writing) and non-marrying sisterhoods. Sure, they existed, but that wasn't the way things worked for most women.

Jane Galt (still banning me, for reasons unknown) links to this: Robert Weissberg, the author of Polling, Policy, and Public Opinion: The Case Against Heeding the "Voice of the People" argues

that polls designed to ask voters if they want more government spending on any given item don't generate politically useful information....Weissberg defends periodic elections as all the democracy we require, thank you very much. He thinks most people don't have the slightest idea what they are talking about when it comes to public policy. That's why, he argues, we should be thankful for having elected representatives to make decisions for us.

He's tough about it too. Not for him the pat-on-the-head doctrine of "rational ignorance." That's the widely accepted notion from the public choice school of economics that says it makes perfect sense, given the high cost-benefit ratio of public policy savvy, for citizens to have only dim notions of what the hell is going on in government.

Economists have gone even further in explaining/excusing public sloth in regard to political beliefs and actions. George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan recently has posited the appropriateness of rational irrationality, whereby we choose an optimal amount of absurd and counterfactual things to believe based on what it costs us to hold these unrealistic beliefs...

Weissberg's findings, which show that people seem to credulously accept the endless possibilities of government goodies, believing they will all deliver exactly the benefits they promise. Weissberg argues that most polls are systematically biased toward manufacturing a vox populi that clamors for an ever-growing welfare state.

To test this thesis, he designed and executed a pair of surveys that he thinks provide a more sophisticated and accurate way of gauging an intelligent, informed decision -- not just an ignorant wish. He used these polls to retest public support for a couple of Clinton-era government expansions: shrinking public school class size by hiring tens of thousands of new teachers, and increasing government-supported day care.

Weissberg found exactly what he was looking for (and one wonders how often that happens in social science research -- there's a poll whose results I'd like to see). If you give longer, more detailed polls that demand citizens balance costs within a necessarily limited total budget, and inform them of both the possibilities of failure and the real dimensions of the problem allegedly being solved, previous apparent support for government action and spending quickly fades.

Fascinating.

Jasper Becker writes, SARS unmasks a wider scandal:

It is good that the Chinese government is grappling, albeit belatedly, with severe acute respiratory syndrome. But the real question is: What salutary lessons will the Chinese Communist Party draw from the spread of SARS?...

The arbitrary sacrifice of two senior party officials, Mayor Meng Xuenong of Beijing and Health Minister Zhang Wenkang - both punished for obeying party orders - is not necessarily a good sign. Meng and Zhang hid the real numbers of SARS patients because the party believed its power depended on hitting high economic growth targets and that nothing should interfere with this goal. The two officials were caught only because there happened to be an honest Chinese doctor who dared reveal the truth about the hidden SARS cases in Beijing.

...the party should extend its open market reforms by withdrawing from more public sectors, especially health and the environment, where its involvement has patently failed.

The half-baked reform of China's health system is nothing short of scandalous and the country is now paying for it. Peasants - who can least afford it - must shoulder their entire medical burden, while the wealthy party elite and state employees enjoy a lavishly subsidized health system that consumes most of the state health budget.

Only those who can afford to pay can expect treatment for SARS, AIDS or other modern plagues. The Communist Party should be taxing the rich to subsidize the poor, not the other way around.

Link via The Peking Duck.

In When Crises Strike, China's Leaders Adapt to Survive, JOSEPH KAHN writes,

Humanitarian calamities have come and gone in China, often exposing the inhumanity of the Communist system but never really threatening party rule. The system, however authoritarian, paranoid and faction-ridden, has shown it can cope with natural and man-made disasters, which have claimed millions of lives, without relinquishing the levers of power....

"Every time something happens in China people in the West talk about this big challenge to one-party rule," said Dai Tianyan, a political scientist at the Central Party School of the Communist Party, in Beijing. "But we don't see it the same way."...

Longer term, the fear among some liberal-leaning analysts and journalists is that the crisis could actually feed the government's instinct to be heavy-handed. The central government needs more intrusive powers so that local officials do not hide problems, the thinking goes. The press has to be policed so it does not incite panic. Migrant workers must be controlled. Singaporean efficiency is the model.

People used to try to censor printed materials; now we've generally moved to censoring nudity, "foul language" and sometimes violence in audio and visual media. Already, people can photoshop tabooed types of porn. It's entirely possible that in the future virtual reality will enable us to engage in all kinds of immoral behavior. Imagine the most horribly disgusting thing people are capable of. What if they can do it in the privacy of their own home without actually harming another person? Will we allow them to do it?

Alexander Stille, in Did Knives and Forks Cut Murders?, writes,

...murder was much more common in the Middle Ages than it is now and that it dropped precipitately in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Something very important changed in Western behavior and attitudes, and it stood much prevailing social theory on its head. "It was very surprising because social theory told us that the opposite was supposed to happen: that crime was supposed to go up as family and community bonds in rural society broke up and industrialization and urbanization took hold," said Eric H. Monkkonen, a professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles and the author of several works on the history of criminality. "The notion that crime and cities go together made emotional sense, particularly in America, where at least recently crime is higher in cities."...

Randall Roth, a historian at Ohio State University who has recalculated murder rates for the 15th and 16th centuries in many countries. "The data we are getting doesn't line up with most theories of either liberals or conservatives about crime. The theory that crime is determined by deterrence and law enforcement, by income inequality, by a high proportion of young men in a population, by the availability of weapons, by cities, most of those theories end up being wrong."

Which is interesting. First of all, it shows how intellectuals tend to theorize based on their personal experience. It also suggests that the quest for what is "natural" can go too far, especially in human behavior. If we want to live as our ancestors did for most of human history, we'll have to treat each other pretty brutally. Speaking of the intellos' personal prejudice, one has to take what they--we--say with a grain of salt, especially after the journalists get ahold of it. Emily Eakin, in Writing as a Block for Asians, discusses William C. Hannas' "polemical" The Writing on the Wall: How Asian Orthography Curbs Creativity:

Mr. Hannas's logic goes like this: because East Asian writing systems lack the abstract features of alphabets, they hamper the kind of analytical and abstract thought necessary for scientific creativity.

Although she quotes J. Marshall Unger, a professor of Japanese, who argues

how can you be sure writing � and not some other cultural feature � is responsible?

, she gets some things wrong: few Chinese linguists would call written Chinese a "syllabary". Anyway, Unger's right: correlation is not causation. This book only got published because it might make a little stir.

Michael Pollan in The Futures of Food writes,

The counterculture seized upon processed food, of all things, as a symbol of everything wrong with industrial civilization. Not only did processed foods contain chemicals, the postwar glamour of which had been extinguished by DDT and Agent Orange, but products like Wonder Bread represented the worst of white-bread America, its very wheat ''bleached to match the bleached-out mentality of white supremacy,'' in the words of an underground journalist writing in The Quicksilver Times.

As an antidote to the ''plastic food'' dispensed by agribusiness, the counterculture promoted natural foods organically grown, and whole grains in particular. Brown food of any kind was deemed morally superior to white -- not only because it was less processed and therefore more authentic, but because by eating it you could express your solidarity with the world's (nonwhite) oppressed. Seriously. What you chose to eat had become a political act, and the lower you ate on the food chain, the better it was for you, for the planet and for the world's hungry.

I never really went that far, but I feel that food that has been processed less is more nutritional and, more importantly, tastes better. So I'm skeptical about the uniquely tailored diets based on one's genes that Bruce Grierson writes about in What Your Genes Want You to Eat. It'll be quite awhile before we're that sure about exactly what people need in their diets.

Today I was trying to translate �U�� su2qi, but vulgar or common don't sound quite right to me. Or maybe American culture is so vulgar that most people don't think of it as vulgar.

Michiko Kakutani writes Young Minds Force-Fed With Indigestible Texts, about THE LANGUAGE POLICE: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn By Diane Ravitch. What's excluded?

�Mickey Mouse and Stuart Little (because mice, along with rats, roaches, snakes and lice, are considered to be upsetting to children).


�Stories or pictures showing a mother cooking dinner for her children, or a black family living in a city neighborhood (because such images are thought to purvey gender or racial stereotypes).


�Dinosaurs (because they suggest the controversial subject of evolution).


�Tales set in jungles, forests, mountains or by the sea (because such settings are believed to display "a regional bias").


�Narratives involving angry, loud-mouthed characters, quarreling parents or disobedient children (because such emotions are not "uplifting").

Political correctness isn't just a foible of the left:

While censors on the right aim "to restore an idealized vision of the past, an Arcadia of happy family life" in which Father knows best, Mother takes care of the house and kids, and everyone goes to church on Sundays, censors on the left believe in "an idealized vision of the future, a utopia in which egalitarianism prevails in all social relations," a world in which "all nations and all cultures are of equal accomplishment and value."

Via Radley Balko, The Center For Consumer Freedom adds:

California's textbook review process routinely eliminates reference to foods considered unwholesome -- French fries, sodas, cakes, and even ketchup and butter. Some of the outrageous changes made to textbooks and tests include:

A piece on George Washington Carver, the inventor of peanut butter, was nixed because it might offend children who are allergic to peanuts.

A picture of a birthday party was purged because it included an "unhealthy" birthday cake.

The story "A Perfect Day for Ice Cream" was renamed "A Perfect Day." Also cleansed from the tale were the chili burgers and pizza.

Then there are the people that won't let us use "dirty" words.

Chris Suellentrop asks, Does Hu Jintao really run China? I read on renminbao.com that there's now an on-going struggle between Hu and the Jiang clique, but the article sounds a little hysterical. Laurie Garrett's China's Epidemic Discord talks about "contradictory edicts".

Update
John Pomfret: China Feels Side Effects From SARS: Political Fallout Follows Coverup:

The mishandling of the SARS crisis is feeding tentative calls for political reform in China and has exacerbated a broad power struggle among current and former Communist leaders, according to government sources, journalists and political analysts.

On one side of the divide is an increasingly strong alliance among China's new president, Hu Jintao, its new premier, Wen Jiabao, and senior officials allied with former premier Zhu Rongji, who have been moved quickly into positions of responsibility to deal with the crisis.

On the other side, government sources say, is a network of officials loyal to former president Jiang Zemin....

Officials loyal to Jiang, who stepped down from the presidency in March, are believed to have backed the idea of underreporting the SARS epidemic and lying to the World Health Organization and foreign governments about its spread...

The problem with Jiang's allies, however, is that most of them have little practical experience in handling day-to-day issues. For example, Vice President Zeng Qinghong, who rose to power as Jiang's enforcer within the party, is a skilled politician and is known as a trusted interlocutor by U.S. and Japanese officials. But he had never held a government job.

In his moves against the Jiang faction, Hu has found a willing ally in Wen Jiabao, the new premier, who rose to his position with the backing of his predecessor, Zhu Rongji, who battled with Jiang unsuccessfully for more than a decade in Beijing...

Jiang's allies were slow to respond to the about-face that Hu ordered for April 20, when the government inaugurated a nationwide campaign to begin truthful reporting about SARS. In the first few days, only Hu and Wen were seen on the state-run media. Slowly, each of Jiang's allies has emerged, somewhat halfheartedly supporting the campaign.

Jiang also expressed support for the new SARS campaign, but in a way that illustrated his conflict with Hu. On April 26, he made his first public statement about the virus from Shanghai, leaving many Chinese with the impression that he had fled the capital to escape the disease. Jiang appeared out of touch; Hu and Wen had been seen in the media almost daily on the front lines of the fight against SARS, at hospitals, universities and laboratories. And Jiang's remarks, saying "China has scored notable achievements in containing the disease," directly contradicted the tone being put forward by Hu and Wen that the disease had not been contained and that the country faced a crisis.

Li Yongyan: Chinese media: Whom are they kidding?:

according to the Chinese media, Washington is hell-bent on first destroying China and then going on to dominate the world...

Totalitarianism is propped up by two things: force and lies. It works like this: "We know you don't believe, but we make sure you don't voice your dissent. So we can keep spinning out 'Newspeak'. And we are under no pressure whatsoever to explain or account for anything that we say."...

So in the end, the self-serving rhetoric becomes self-indulging, and self-deluding.