China Meets AIDS Crisis With Force: Police, Not Physicians, Answer Villagers' Pleas by Philip P. Pan. China loses face for itself again.

Chinese Economic Concerns Trump Safety By AUDRA ANG is about lifting the ban on the sale of civet cats in China. Doesn't sound too clever, but as a World Health Organization official points out, more research is needed to determine the origin and transmission path of the virus to justify a ban.

Steven Den Beste has a superb post about how American power is not intentional, which is why resisting it is so hard, but those who detest America can only see it as harmful. (link via Occam's toothbrush). Of course, he's preaching to the converted with me, even if I don't particularly like the low-class culture he celebrates. Then again, I'm still stinging from one of my snobbish peers who derided my tastes as bourgeois. Speaking of preaching to the converted, Occam's toothbrush also links to the Confessions of an Anti-sanctions Activist by Charles M. Brown, who remarks that the only books about Iraq they read were by Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and Edward Said. I hope that's just exaggeration. And speaking of only paying attention to those you agree with, David Brooks argues that that's what Americans do. (link via Hit & Run).

Instapundit writes:

RADLEY BALKO WRITES:

You might say that today, President Bush is doing many of the same things President Clinton did, only backwards, and in cowboy boots.

No, not those things. Get your mind out of the gutter.

Ahh, the reverse cowboy!

I read William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. I liked the idea of the heroine's susceptibility to trademarks, but her insistence on wearing certain items herself, like her beloved flight jacket, was a kind of commodity fetishism of its own. Also, his evocation of foreign cities, particularly Tokyo, I found less than convincing, although it was interesting to discover that Tarkovsky used the Japanese highway for his futuristic Solyaris (1972; the original for Solaris 2002. I saw the Tarkovsky version shortly after it came out, and liked it quite a bit; I always liked Stanislaw Lem, but his stories are singularly unsuited to make into popular films). I am also happy to have learned from Gibson the word apophenia, "the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena". What I couldn't get was the heroine's insistence on eating Western food there. I blame Gibson for not liking Japanese food, but maybe he was trying to tell us something about her. Anyway, I ended up liking Brad Smith's All Hat more, and found its evocation of rural Ontario more convincing (not that I've ever been there).


The thing I dislike about people is their fondness for brands that are far more expensive than they have to be, so I liked Gibson's idea about being practically allergic to them. Meanwhile, I've been reading some intellectual bs recently that complains about commodification, by which they apparently mean putting a price on practially everything, as capitalism does. I have little objection to that; it's paying more for a brand that's not measurably better that annoys me. So I was happy to see this subscriber-only article in the Economist about how many items of clothing are becoming commodities; deflation of clothing prices means that clothes are cheaper.

China Seeks to Protect Official Emblem By TED ANTHONY. From the headline, I thought people were fooling with China's seal or flag, but the Chinese go'vt is worried about counterfeiting of its Olympic logo.

We finally finished the 20-part serial Niezi. It started out OK, but there was really not enough material for twenty hours, so it was far too long. The behind-the-scenes disk was interesting, though; it made me realize that technically the series was well done and well acted, even if there was something anachronistic about the way the people dressed and spoke.

I just got the DVD of Eat Drink Man Woman from Overstock.com. (Fast service!) In the extras, they interviewed Ang Lee and James Schamus; the latter claimed that when he tried to write about the characters as if they were Chinese, Lee was greatly dissatisfied, so he treated them as if they were Jewish. So it's really a movie about a Jewish family!

DAVID W. CHEN on split crotch pants: A New Policy of Containment, for Baby Bottoms. For children, that is.

In Grim Facts on Global Poverty, JEFF MADRICK mostly gives bad news. But get this:

some take solace in the fact that only 23 percent of the global population lives on less than $1 a day, compared with 30 percent in 1990. But most of this improvement has to do with the stunning economic progress in China, a nation that conspicuously did not follow Western economic policies. In absolute numbers, more people are now extremely poor than in 1990 if China is excluded.

Even in countries that have made significant progress on average, including China, the report notes that there are often large pockets of deprivation, especially in inland or rural areas. For example, only three nations with adequate statistics narrowed the gap in child mortality between the rich and the poor in the 1990's.

Yes, I like to hear that. But then as he says,

In recent years, critics assert that good governance among recipients has been neglected too often. Corruption, lack of follow-through and cookie-cutter policies afflicted development projects. But surely the call for good governance is no panacea, either. For example, did dictatorial China have good governance and dictatorial Russia poor governance? How can one tell before the fact? How do you enforce good governance even if you can define it?

Finally I figure out how to configure blogBuddy, and I've got nothing to say, except my archives are only readable by me.

China Under U.S. Scrutiny as Trade Anger Grows by Glenn Somerville and Doug Palmer

A shrinking U.S. job market has put China under an increasingly harsh spotlight as manufacturers and labor unions complain about the Asian giant's trade practices and currency policy.


With the 2004 presidential election looming, the rumblings are an uncomfortable reminder for President Bush of a staggering loss of jobs in his tenure -- some 2.6 million in manufacturing alone since mid-2000.


The issue is unlikely to go away.


"My sense is that things are going to get worse," said economist Sung Won Sohn of Wells Fargo Bank in Minneapolis.


"We're going to see more jobs continue shifting to China, and its manufacturing sophistication will keep increasing," given China's vast work force and expanding design and engineering skills, he predicted...


China expert Nicholas Lardy of the Institute for International Economics said China's "very weak" banking system meant that pushing the country for currency reform could be unwise, and he praised Snow for recognizing that.


"He's clearly signaling the Bush administration does not believe this is the time to push for opening China's currency system to the full force of competition," Lardy said.


Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Economic Strategy Institute, said China presents a perplexing problem since the United States lacks leverage over the country's currency system and also has a vested interest in China's continuing economic health.


"China is one of the few areas of the world that's growing, and one reason they're growing is because their currency is undervalued," Prestowitz said. But, he asked, "Are we really going to zap them and effectively tell them to stop growing?"

Yeah, we probably will.

Last week, we also saw Eric Rohmer's L'Amour l'apr�s-midi, (Chloe in the Afternoon; 1972). I didn't think I'd like it, but it was watchable despite the trademark talkniness.

Here's another one for the gays: we're halfway through the serial Niezi, based on the Bai Xian-yong novel (translated as Crystal Boys by Howard Goldblatt). The series often seems interminable. If gay-ness were catching, you think I'd get it from all these gay movies. And as Lileks says,

Does gay marriage threaten heterosexual marriage? Of course! Who knows how many women woke last week to find notes on the kitchen table: "Dearest Wife, now that homosexual sodomy is legal in Texas, I have to go try it. Took the cell phone. Farewell."

(link via Instapundit)

My archives are gone. I guess they'll come back.

And in Blood on Our Hands? NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF argues

the greatest tragedy of Hiroshima was not that so many people were incinerated in an instant, but that in a complex and brutal world, the alternatives were worse.

I found STEPHEN J. DUBNER's The Probability That a Real-Estate Agent Is Cheating You (and Other Riddles of Modern Life) on Steven Levitt interesting, particularly what DUBNER calls this "famous" statement:

If you own a gun and have a swimming pool in the yard, the swimming pool is almost 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is.

Not because I'm particularly in favor of gun ownership, but because I'm interested in risk. So I Google "Steven Levitt" gun pool, and I find this big controversy involving John Lott. I haven't been following him or his research very closely, but together with the Mary Rosh business, he's beginning to look pretty kooky. Of course, it's not as bad as the Bellesiles mess, but it's funny that these two big "guns" are to one degree or another such frauds.

Update
In The Bellesiles of the Right? Another firearms scholar whose dog ate his data, Timothy Noah presents some further evidence against Rosh--I mean Lott. (link via Instapundit, who's highly dismissive, of course)

Oh, and this is huge: my gloxinia have germinated. How gay am I?

We saw Patrice Leconte's L'Homme du train (2002; The Man on the Train); not bad, with its ironic contrasts. I also appreciated the fact that not only did the character of the "planner" regret not having had a wilder life, which is what movies seem to prefer stressing these days, but also that the wild boy regretted not having had a more structured life. I've got a feeling that whoever thought of the story (Claude Klotz?) started by seeing the parallels between two "operations"--a bank robbery and surgery. Some time ago we also saw Leconte's Monsieur Hire (1989), which I liked, and more recently La Veuve de Saint-Pierre, (2000; The Widow of Saint-Pierre), which I absolutely detested. It's a movie about the death penalty that is imposed on a man who murdered someone while drunk, but turns out to nevertheless be a good fellow. The movie comes off as a screed against the death penalty. Although I am myself opposed to the death penalty, I found this idiotic.

At home, we saw A Taste of Honey (1961), another one from our library's huge collection of gay-related movies. Still, it was quite touching.

An old article I meant to save: Tide of China's Migrants: Flowing to Boom, or Bust? By ERIK ECKHOLM.

DeNeen L. Brown on Canadian efforts at harm reduction: With Injection Sites, Canadian Drug Policy Seeks a Fix