Interesting stuff at Distributive justice (via Julian Sanchez), according to which I believe in a meritocracy. Because I've done well out of it right? But funny, a lot of intellectuals, who have also done well, don't agree.

Chinese destroy the Amazon

Today soybeans are eating up larger and larger chunks of the Amazon, leading to a 40 percent jump in deforestation last year, to nearly 10,000 square miles.

...experts are unanimous in warning that as soybean farming continues to spread through the adjacent southern Amazon states of Mato Grosso and Para, the threat to the Amazon ecological system is likely to worsen in the next few years....

Economists say that the main spur to the soybean boom is the emergence of a middle class in China, much of whose newly disposable income has been spent on a richer, more varied diet. During the past decade, China has been transformed from a net exporter of soybeans to the world's largest importer in some years of whole soybeans as well as oil and meal byproducts.

From Relentless Foe of the Amazon Jungle: Soybeans, By LARRY ROHTER.

Dalai Lama Says Terror May Need a Violent Reply By LAURIE GOODSTEIN. What, she didn't read SCOTT LINDLAW's article in the WaPo? But she does add this:

He said one reason he advocated that Tibet remain part of China is that "we are materially very much backward."

Not exactly news: Taiwan Again Fails to Win U.N. Recognition.

Prince Roy (his comments are currently down, like mine) suggests that "May you live in interesting times" may be related to the phrase he links to here about how being a dog in peaceful times is preferable to a human in turbulent times. The citation uses gou3, the common vernacular word for dog, but most citations prefer the more classical quan3, even though the phrase apparently comes from an early vernacular story (The Oil Peddler Courts the Courtesan). Probably sticklers will say using gou3 here is wrong, but classical and vernacular Chinese are close enough that it's grammatically correct. Besides, plenty of Chinese sayings change the original.

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deson't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteetr by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.

Can You Raed Tihs?

Cultural Revelation: In China, a Picture of Its People Takes Shape One Snapshot at a Time By Peter S. Goodman tells of pictures poor villagers take:

The photos are an outgrowth of a project being conducted here by the Nature Conservancy that has placed cameras in the hands of villagers to capture glimpses of their lives as they see them. The project is part of a larger undertaking -- the fashioning of a patch of land roughly the size of West Virginia into a collection of nature reserves. The photographs amount to data being collected as the environmental group works with provincial and national authorities to design the protected area. They are visual aids guiding efforts to accommodate the needs of local people by illustrating how they farm, build their homes and generally go about their lives in one of the more remote regions of China....

The images and the connected narratives have become a visual database drawn on by social and environmental scientists as they try to balance the everyday needs of local people with their mandate to preserve the surroundings. As they have studied pictures of people collecting wood for their cooking fires, they have responded by handing out low-tech but efficient stoves that need less timber. They have used photos of people trudging long distances to collect buckets of water as a way of pressing local and provincial governments to install much-desired tap systems....

But if the project began as a creative way to acquire basic information, it soon evolved into something larger, delivering a wholly unexpected outcome: Many of the images are stunning in their composition. Many are intensely personal, accessible and open in a way that has drawn an emotional response -- from the local people who saw them first, to the audience in Shanghai that saw them last month as part of an international art show....

The photos and stories evince a pride in workmanship in the daily tasks of producing food and the travails of not always succeeding. Two dugout canoes float empty against a riverbank. "Life is hard for the fishermen," reads the story. "They have to sleep in the cabin on the boat whenever they guard their fishing nets." A man cloaked in a brown felt poncho lies on a moss-covered boulder, his dog at his side. "They went hunting one day and came back empty-handed."

The images illustrate a tendency toward collectivism that predates the advent of communism in China and still endures. "After wheat is harvested, the land needs to be trimmed before rice is planted," reads the story attached to a panoramic view of golden stalks, mist-covered mountains looming in the background. "Villagers help each other in the work." Older men in blue cotton robes encircle a table, playing cards. A family kneels in a half-cut wheat field, over a pot of rice they eat together....

Perhaps the most striking thing about the collection is how these images challenge the notion -- common in the West -- that upland villagers in remote places are not built to handle change and abhor it as an assault on their pure way of life.

The glimpses of life in these photos reveal how even this corner of the world -- seemingly as far from the capital markets and advertising dens as one can get -- is nonetheless imbued with a palpable sense of upward mobility. Modernity is not the enemy so often portrayed by those intent on preserving village life and villagers themselves as if they were breathing display pieces. While the photographs revel in scenic beauty and tradition, they are not hung up on the conceptions of innocence that underlie every narrative about the next destroyed Shangri-La.

In the village of Wenhai, a settlement of 800 beneath the often rain-obscured peak of Jade Dragon Mountain, the arrival of cameras last year produced an abundance of photos of the new drinking water system. One villager took a picture of a water buffalo pulling a cart set against yellow flowers. The viewer sees a pastoral scene; the villager is focused on the fact that the cart is full of bags of cement. "Now we know how to use cement and don't have to hire workers from the urban areas," he says.

One of the photographers, He Huanzhen, 50, speaks emphatically of his desire for a road connecting the village to Lijiang, the largest town in the area, allowing more goods to flow to the shelves of the local shop, where a bare light bulb illuminates packages of instant noodles, toothpaste and bottles of Dali beer. He shows a picture of people carrying sections of pipe on their shoulders, another of people carrying in the pieces of a disassembled tractor. He shows a photo of his family threshing grain by hand in their muddy courtyard. "We need machinery," he says. "This is too traditional." He shows a picture of the table saw that one of his neighbors brought in. The whine of its blades now fills the valley.

He is a physician, one of the original "barefoot doctors" trained in the days of Mao to provide a basic level of care in the hinterlands. His green jacket is shredded and fraying, his blue pants worn down to holes. Many of his photographs document his working conditions in a thatched-roof house with a single thermometer and blood pressure machine. In one picture, an old man lies on a bed suffering from pneumonia, a small child sleeping next to him. In another -- a photo taken by his daughter -- He kneels on the porch of his clinic examining a 5-month-old infant cradled in her mother's arms. His doctor's kit, a weathered leather suitcase, is propped on a log. Mud cakes his boots.

For He, every click of the shutter is a kind of political act, an effort to focus the attention of the people who run China on injecting more resources here. He wants more equipment for his clinic -- a stomach pump, tools to extract abscessed teeth, oxygen canisters for respiratory troubles. "We feel our life is very poor," he says. "We were happy to have this camera to show people how we live. It's kind of a tool to report to the local government."

In the village of Xuehua, where Hong Zhengyong grew up, a satellite dish now dominates the courtyard of the family home, its metallic shine strikingly anomalous against its surroundings -- the soot-stained boards of the house, the tattoos on his mother's arms that identify her as a member of this family, the long pipe his father smokes, the scroll he nestles in his hands.

Hong's brother brought the dish from Lijiang last year. Now the television is almost always on, bringing in 18 channels, the sound blasting as smoke from the cooking fire fills the room.

Television! How bourgeois!

I'm inspired to post a few links (mostly via here) by a comment on Prince Roy's posting on mooncakes where Matt asks about so-called 1000 Year Old Eggs, aka 100 Year Old Eggs, or in Chinese pidan. In fact, they're only a few months old.

Kate Heyhoe characterizes the flavor as "rich, pungent and cheese-like." Well, not as pungent as some European cheeses.

Chef Meng has a picture here, and recipes for pidan and tofu salad, which is really easy to make, and pidan and lean pork congee.

RecipeSource tells you how to make them.

However, so fearsome is their reputation, even though Fear Factor admits they're not literally 100 years old,

But they could just as well have been. They are preserved well past their prime and taste like no egg you have ever tasted before. The yolk turns into a horrible green mold and the white becomes a dark brown gel with an alkaline taste. Sounds yummy, eh?

Nonsense. The yolk may be greenish, but it's not moldy, and if that's what an "alkaline" flavor is, they taste fine to me.

I couldn't swim my usual mile this morning and I probably won't be able to swim all week because I burnt my arm yesterday baking our weekly baguettes. I'm all bent out of shape about that.

I should be happy, because my baguettes are improving. The recipe is still basically this recipe, but I've discovered a couple of things. Not only is over-priced King Arthur flour not necessary; even bread flour isn't. All-purpose unbleached white flour has worked just fine the last few times. I let the dough ferment all week, which seems to add to the flavor a little. I've also finally noticed that the dough is supposed to "rest" after folding into a sausage shape & before lengthening. My trouble slashing the risen loaves just before putting them in the oven was apparently because I covered them with oiled plastic wrap. I've discovered a floured cloth works better. And now that I can slash them, the crust is just a little crisper, if still not as good as the real thing.

Also, I put in 3 Tablespoons of wheat bran and 3 Tablespoons of wheat germ to be just a little healthier; it doesn't seem to hurt the texture.

They're so good that the past couple of weeks on Sundays our lunch consists of nothing but a tomato and olive oil & balsamic vinegar & garlic salad and bread. The juice of the tomatoes mixes with the dressing, and we dip pieces of the bread in it. It's delicious. Once the fresh summer tomatoes are no longer available, we'll have to go back to bread & butter. Life is tough, but we live with it.

Cecil Adams at The Straight Dope:

Freudian practice is pseudoscience (quackery, if you will) because it fails an essential test of a true science--that is, it does not produce propositions that, in principle, can be shown to be false.

And yet so many educated people still eat it up. It makes you wonder what other nonsense we believe.

OldTasty is yet another China blog. He's got pictures, too.

John Pomfret's Chinese Fight A New Kind Of Land War: Many Citizens Battling Tide of Development

limited property rights have become a flash point at which people are confronting authorities, as well as a platform for unprecedented civic activism. Citizens groups are accusing local governments and government-backed developers of expropriating farmland to enrich themselves, failing to offer a fair market price for buildings and homes they condemn and routinely violating contracts on the size and quality of new apartments....

The political stakes are high as well. In the cities, a generation of grass-roots leaders is emerging from newly formed associations of middle-class apartment owners to fight the often corrupt entanglements of developers and local Communist Party functionaries. In recent elections in the southern city of Shenzhen, 10 candidates running for positions in the local People's Congress came from apartment-owner associations. The Communist Party was so threatened that it ensured that only one of them -- a loyal Communist Party member -- won, according to sources in that city's bureaucracy....

Zheng Enchong, a lawyer who has helped people in the burgeoning metropolis of Shanghai bring more than 500 cases against developers, was tried last month on charges of revealing state secrets in what other lawyers have said was a move by the government to stop lawyers from taking such cases. He has yet to be sentenced.

Zheng was arrested because he told his clients that Shanghai's wealthiest man, Zhou Zhengyi, obtained a 360,000-square-foot swath of land in the city's center for free by bribing senior party officials.

Ranked as one of China's richest men by Forbes, Zhou apparently will receive a slap on the wrist for the deal. He was arrested last week but charged with minor violations, including falsifying reports on registered capital and manipulating securities prices, according to Chinese news reports.

Widespread corruption is the main factor fueling the real estate war in China. Local government officials, factory bosses and other Chinese in positions of power sell the rights to use chunks of land to developers for a low price plus a hefty kickback. They then collude with gangs to oust villagers or urban residents of the area. The compensation paid to those residents, if any, is often a fraction of what the property is really worth....

When a development is built, corruption kicks in again.

I made English muffins according to the recipe in the old Joy of Cooking, which claimed they were much better than store-bought. Well, maybe. But too much trouble for what they are. On the other hand, the good points are: you can cook them on a stove top so you don't need an oven, and they cook faster than a loaf of bread. Otherwise, you might as well just bake an ordinary loaf.

What happens when people are allowed to get all the medical care they can demand? According to Patients in Florida Lining Up for All That Medicare Covers, by GINA KOLATA, costs mushroom, without any apparent medical benefit; in fact, mortality rates may be even higher.

Colby Cosh writes:

Ronald McDonald is the cousin of Joe Camel. Jack Daniels and Samuel Colt, unquestionably, are his uncles. If there were some convenient personification of the sport utility vehicle, he'd be the squalling baby brother.

Here on campus smoking is banned inside all buildings and will soon be banned within 25 feet of them. I don't smoke, or as far as that goes, eat much fast food, drink alcohol, own a gun or an SUV (I don't even drive much). Yet I fully realize people are capable of all sorts of stupidity, but I do wonder where all this is will end. If I were to decree that people should live according to my standards, I suspect they'd be pretty miserable.

Update For instance, I don't like sugary carbonated beverages or sugary uncarbonated beverages, either, and I don't see why schools should sell them. Back in my day, they didn't. In fact, I don't know why they sell them on our college campus, either. And then there's the question of why students spend money on them.

Colby Cosh also wrote a National Post piece quoting Mickey Kaus:

Isn't it possible that when people tell surveyers they are self-employed they are actually self employed? If we're entering a new economic era--one in which traditional cyclical employers won't start rehiring, as this excellent WaPo analysis suggests--isn't it likely, even, that workers will adjust by pursuing entrepreneurial opportunities? And if entrepreneurship is real, what does calling it "involuntary" mean? I might prefer to have a full-fledged "job" at Microsoft, complete with stock options, health insurance, etc. Instead, I'm a freelance contractor. Calling my entrepreneurship "involuntary" might be accurate, but it doesn't mean I'm not working and feeding myself. In the "newer" economy, you'd expect such self-employment to increase, no?

Why doesn't he cite the author of the "excellent WaPo analysis"? It is Jonathan Weisman, by the way. And for the record, the Doom-laden title reads: Casualties Of the Recovery: Jobs Cut Since 2001 Are Gone for Good, Study Says. And yet,

The vast majority of the 2.7 million job losses since the 2001 recession began were the result of permanent changes in the U.S. economy and are not coming back, which means the labor market will not regain strength until new positions are created in novel and dynamic economic sectors, a Federal Reserve Bank of New York study has concluded.

He characterizes this as "sobering news". Although I can't find the article on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York site, he cites one of the authors saying,

Instead of seeing a recession as something just to weather, managers this time seem to have seen it as an opportunity or even a mandate for permanently changing the way they operate

Weisman also says,

When a firm ships a $60-an-hour software job to a $6-an-hour code writer in India, the most obvious benefit goes to the Indian. But, the McKinsey study reports, the U.S. economy receives at least two-thirds of the benefit from offshore outsourcing, compared with the third gained by the lower-wage countries receiving the jobs.

I was impressed with his marshalling of these reports. However, the McKinsey study actually says,

Of the $1.45 - $1.47 of value MGI estimates is created globally from every dollar spend a domestic company chooses to divert abroad, the U.S. captures $1.12 - $1.14 while the receiving country captures on average 33 cents. In other words, the U.S. captures 78 percent of the total value.

So 78%=2/3, eh?

Jonathan Watts writes China bans police torture of suspects.

While welcoming the move, some analysts warn that it will require an independent complaints system - something that China does not have.

That's the thing about the laws and regulations the CCP promulgates with great fanfare--they aren't necessarily applied.

The 300 Tang Poems online, with Witter Bynner's English translation (originally published as The Jade Mountain). I found it via Yefei He.

The movies we've seen over the past couple of weeks:

Matchmaker (1997) was pretty awful; Janeane Garofalo was miscast, but the real problem was the dumb script. Yet we had to watch it to the end.

Eugene O'Neill's Desire under the elms (1958) wasn't bad. It was interesting to see Sophia Loren so young, and Burl Ives not as his usual avuncular self. We didn't have a TV when Bonanza was on, so although Pernell Roberts looked really familiar, I couldn't place him. Somehow Anthony Perkins seemed to be getting ready for Psycho. Loving his mother figure too much, ya know. But the behavior of Sophia Loren's character seemed too unlikely.

I never think of myself as a fan of Spike Lee, but his She's gotta have it (1986) was like the other movies of his that I've seen so far, really watchable. It was odd to see S. Epatha Merkerson looking pretty good. It's funny to realize that a minor character on a TV show can have a big career elsewhere. Not to be cruel, but she should lose a little weight.

I think I refused to watch Coming home (1978) when it came out, because I had somehow contracted a dislike of Bruce Dern. I don't know why now; he was OK. It's easy to see how Hanoi Jane in particular wanted to teach that the war destroyed every American who went. Although that indeed became the mythology, I don't think that's actually true, so that was annoying. Still, it's not a bad movie.

We just watched a little of D.W. Griffith's Broken blossoms or, the yellow man and the girl (1919). I had forgotten that it actually has some Chinese actors in it. We watched up until the part where Lillian Gish tries to force a smile.

Before sunrise (1995) was pretty dumb; we watched about 2/3 of it and then looked for something else, which turned out to be Eric Rohmer's Le Genou de Claire (Claire's knee; 1970), which I may have actually seen when it came out; at least the title made a big impression on me. In our library collection, it's next in line after Before sunrise, which seemed like a poor imitation of it, but we didn't feel like watching the whole thing.

The first videocassette of Gone with the wind had something wrong with it, so I still haven't seen that.

I believed someone who once dismissed Orson Welles as over-rated, but The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) was probably my favorite among all of these, even if there was a little missing. (Of course I knew that because the video had to tell me that). I've got to mention Agnes Moorehead . Even though I didn't watch that much TV, I seem to remember an awful lot of it.

Update I don't think much of the pronouncements of either Janeane Garofalo or Jane Fonda, but I like to watch them act, even if Janeane's range is pretty narrow.

And I also forgot to mention Come Back, Little Sheba (1952). Shirley Booth's pathetic "Are you mad at me, Daddy?" echoes my mother's relationship with my father (not that he's an alcoholic). And TV again: Shirley Booth wasn't much different from her annoying Hazel. It was OK, but the symbolism of the lost dog was a little heavy-handed. I seem to remember the character in some hard-boiled novel sneering "Come Back, Little Sheba" in some forgotten context. I've got a feeling it's Raymond Chandler, who I did not realize had serious alcohol problems. Hey, I've got an idea! Let's make it illegal!

Via China Now's Book Review section, I found this on Irving Babbitt & his influence in China.

There's also a reprint of Can India Overtake China? by Yasheng Huang and Tarun Khanna.

And an article about artist Jiao Yingqi�s proposal to invent new characters, by Yu Rongfu

�The radical chart of a Chinese dictionary,� says Jiao, �is a laundry list of pre-20th century, pre-Industrial Revolution concepts. But there is no reason it has to be that way.�

To address the disconnect between China�s writing system and the post-steam engine world, Jiao embarked on a personal and theoretical project he calls New Characters (Xin Hanzi). Via a trial-and-error process that tightly integrates his artistic, design and theoretical interests, he has thus far created 32 new radicals.

Each new radical, combined with existing or new radicals, carries the potential for hundreds of new characters and words.

What's the character for "tool"?