This was called "Hero's Slope" 英雄坡 because it was so hard to climb...or because so few climbed it, like "Hero Road" above?

Bamboo bridge (on the rock someone painted "This way to the parking lot). There were bamboo benches, but it was too dark in the bamboo groves to get a good picture.

Looking down on tea fields.


Tea fields.

The red strip is from a hikers' club.

Ruili bamboo & ferns.

In the bamboo grove.

Ruili bamboo & ferns.

Out of the Dark In Rural China: Electricity Transforming Village Life By Peter S. Goodman:

...if electricity has elevated material conditions, it has also heightened awareness of how poor this area is.

Tashi Phongtsok, 46, a father of three, has two teenage children studying at a school in Zhongdian. He pays $750 per year for their tuition and boarding. It is more than his annual household income, forcing him to borrow from relatives. Though he has faith this is a good investment in his children's future, the nightly television broadcasts rankle, the images of Shanghainese riding around in new cars and buying designer clothes in steel and glass malls.

"It makes us frustrated," he said. "We are so far away from the development. In the city, they have everything. Here, we have nothing."

A full day's walk upriver, on a trail blasted into the cliffs towering over the river, the village of Bala occupies a muddy plateau beneath snow-capped peaks. Electricity arrived here last June. It runs only between 7:30 and 10:30 at night.

The Niyi township government donated the diesel generator -- the village is too far above the river for hydro -- but keeping it running is the responsibility of the locals. Twice a year, each of the nine families of the village must trudge down the gorge to the road to buy diesel fuel, then carry it home on the back of a donkey. Each household contributes about $4 per month to cover the costs.

Here, too, pine branches have been replaced by light bulbs. But sawing logs for new houses remains manual labor. Water comes from a rain collection tank.

"If we had more electricity, we could use an electric stove, tape players, a rice cooker, a washing machine," said Tsering Lhazom, as she ran a wooden rod through a churn to mix yak butter tea, the creamy, salty concoction that is a staple in these mountains.

Bala is so far from the road that villagers are limited in their access to the cash markets of Gonjo. Household income here hovers around $300 per year.

Still, the lone teacher at Bala's school, Lobang Tashi, sees the arrival of television as a potential force of economic ascendance. Educated in town, he is one of the only people in Bala who can speak proper Mandarin Chinese, the national language that students must master in order to pursue advanced studies. Most here speak only a unique Tibetan dialect. Now, his students -- who range in age from 6 to 11 -- are parked nightly in front of the television, absorbing entertainment in Mandarin.

"It has improved their listening comprehension and it helps them understand life outside the village," the teacher said. "They see airplanes, cars, things they would never see here. It broadens their view."

So electricity leads to social upheaval?

Kaohsiung certainly has its share of lousy restaurants. Last week we ate at a Thai restaurant called Tai feng fu 泰豐富. Well, supposedly Thai food--it actually didn't taste like much of anything at all, and the servings were pretty small. The Ambassador Hotel 國賓大飯店 has 蜀珍宴 a supposedly Sichuan restaurant, but even the food that's marked on the menu as very spicy isn't. When we spoke to one of the waitresses about that, she said "If it were spicy, no one would eat it." Today we just went to 高雄中信大飯店 CHINA TRUST KAOHSIUNG. (You might well ask why a trust company has a hotel.) We went to 港都茶樓 for Cantonese style dim sum 港式飲茶點心, and most of the dishes were cold, the fried noodles were extremely salty, and some of the meat in the dishes tasted a little old.

JIM HOLT:

The happier your mood, the more liable you are to make bigoted judgments -- like deciding that someone is guilty of a crime simply because he's a member of a minority group...

As the British psychologist Richard P. Bentall has observed, "There is consistent evidence that happy people overestimate their control over environmental events (often to the point of perceiving completely random events as subject to their will), give unrealistically positive evaluations of their own achievements, believe that others share their unrealistic opinions about themselves and show a general lack of evenhandedness when comparing themselves to others." Indeed, Bentall has proposed that happiness be classified as a psychiatric disorder.

That may be going a bit far. But the evidence he cites, along with the newfound link between "well-feeling" and prejudice, might at least shake our belief in happiness as the summum bonum. Over the last few decades, it is precisely the groups that have made the most social progress in the United States -- women and educated African-Americans -- that have reported declines in their level of happiness. On reflection, this is not surprising. As education and freedom increase, desires -- and unmet desires -- inevitably multiply; our well-feeling may decrease, even as life becomes fuller and more meaningful. In Eastern nations like China, where happiness as a goal is less highly rated, people report lower levels of life satisfaction, but they also have lower suicide rates.

According to Nationmaster, in 2002 Afghanistan was the world's largest producer of illegal opium, with potential opium production of 1,278 metric tons. Burma was the world's second largest producer of illicit opium, with potential production of 630 metric tons. The world's third-largest illicit opium producer was Laos with an estimated potential production of 180 metric tons. Colombia's potential production of heroin was 11.3 metric tons, and Mexico's was 7 metric tons.

Minor or limited producers of illegal opium included (in no particular order): Thailand, Lebanon, Albania, Ukraine, Georgia, Russia, Moldova, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Guatemala, Vietnam, Cambodia, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Venezuela, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Peru.

India was the world's largest producer of licit opium, Australia apparently the second; Turkey also engaged in legal opium poppy cultivation.

It's zongzi 粽子 time. I don't find this link or this one totally correct. Nor even this one. Taiwanese zongzi favor dried shrimp or dried reconstituted squid. I find the first a little disgusting and the second superfluous. And the five-spice powder in the second link isn't really proper, either. No, the ideal zongzi has glutinous rice 糯米 with a little soy sauce; a piece of fatty pork, stewed until soft; some boiled peanuts or maybe cooked pigeon peas; a dried reconstituted shiitake mushroom; and if you want to get fancy, part of a salted duck egg yolk; and a fresh or dried reconstituted chestnut.

So what do I get? A zongzi with not very glutinous 糯 rice, black rice, mushrooms, and a little square of tofu in the middle, pretending to be pork. A vegetarian told me that fake vegetarian food was for helping non-vegetarians get used to vegetarian food, so meat eaters shouldn't criticize it for not being vegetarian enough. Still, this is ridiculous.

According to Mirror, mirror on the wall

...it is undeniable that the average person in the euro area is still about 30% poorer (in terms of GDP per person measured at purchasing-power parity) than the average American, and this gap has barely changed over the past 30 years. Thus even if income per person is growing at almost the same pace as in America, Europeans are still stuck with much lower living standards than Americans.

Then it cites Olivier Blanchard, an economist at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, on why Europeans work less than Americans. He

concludes that most, but not all, of the fall in hours worked over the past 30 years is due to a preference for more leisure as incomes have increased. Europeans simply enjoy leisure more. Americans seem more obsessed with keeping up with the Jones's in terms of their consumption of material goods. As a result, they may work too hard and consume too little leisure. Their GDP figures look good, but perhaps at a cost to their overall economic welfare.

Yeah, despite being an American myself, I find the Americans overly materialistic, even at the same time that they're more religious than the Europeans. I suspect that with increasing wealth, the Chinese will turn out to be pretty materalistic, too. I wonder if they'll be spiritual, too.

In Consumers corner multinationals, Antoaneta Bezlova reports,

...when consumer rights are cited in relation to a top-end foreign product, many Chinese feel their national dignity is at stake and join forces to fight perceived discrimination...

While government bodies have shown little hesitation in pursuing complaints targeting foreign products, by contrast, however, nationwide quality scams have been tolerated for months even when people's lives were at stake. For instance, domestic producers of fake milk powder who were responsible for the deaths of 12 babies in April were able to get away for a year before public anger jolted the government into action.

And where's the outrage there? Certainly the government censors encourage the bashing of foreigners, but I believe the average person (and not just in China) is more upset at a perceived harm or insult from what they see as an outsider, even if it's not as serious as one they receive from their own group. Fools.

Interviewed in Asia Times, Juan Cole says,

I discern an unwritten rule among American journalists, that the American public is not interested in places which have their own government. The real significance of the so-called handover of sovereignty is that the Bush administration and its political advisers are hoping that the American press will take this moment as a cue to turn to reporting about Laci Peterson and other nonsense stories, local murder mysteries.

Bruce Joffe wrote this letter to the Economist:

SIR - While many who would deify Ronald Reagan praise his being "tough" against communism and terrorism ("The first post-Enlightenment president?", Economist.com, June 7th), I am thinking about the 241 Marines who were killed when their barracks were bombed in 1983. President Reagan's tough response was to abandon Lebanon. It is only now that we know this was a seminal event in Osama bin Laden's career; it was the moment he saw the United States as a paper tiger. The larger-than-life image of a president who secretly sold missiles to terrorists in exchange for hostages and who used the money to conduct a war prohibited by our United States Congress deserves adulation for just one thing: the stagecraft of a Hollywood icon.

In a subscriber-only article about Water shortages in China

Last year China consumed four times as much water for each 10,000 yuan ($1,200) of GDP compared with the world average, the Ministry of Water Resources said this month.

But keeping the capital well supplied is a top political priority. Beijing relies heavily on water from Hebei, which has little choice but to provide generous quantities in spite of its own acute needs.

What about pricing it? John Peet wrote earlier, the wasteful misuse of water

stems largely from a wilful refusal to treat water as an economic good, subject to the laws of supply and demand. Water, the stuff of life, ought to be the most precious of all gifts. Yet throughout history, and especially over the past century, it has been ill-governed and, above all, colossally underpriced. Indeed it is often given away completely free. Not only does this ignore the huge costs of collecting, cleaning, storing and distributing it, to say nothing of treating waste-water and sewage. It also leads to overuse of water for the wrong things, especially for highly water-intensive crops. This survey will argue that the best way to deal with water is to price it more sensibly—to reflect, so far as possible, the costs of providing it (including environmental costs), as well as its marginal utility.

After all, China Boosts Power Prices to Slow Usage.

Victor Davis Hanson writes that Bin Laden's Islamic fascists can find ideological support in the West,

despite their agenda of gender apartheid, homophobia, religious persecution, racial hatred, fundamentalism, polygamy, and primordial barbarism....[T]hey sensed that there has always been a current of self-loathing among the comfortable Western elite, a perennial search for victims of racism, economic oppression, colonialism, and Christianity...

Our diplomats court the Arab League, which snores when Russians and Sudanese kill hundreds of thousands of Muslims but shrieks when we remove those who kill even more of their own. And a depopulating, entitlement-expanding Europe believes an American president, not bin Laden, is the greatest threat to world peace. Russia, the slayer of tens of thousands of Muslim Chechans and a big-time profiteer from Baathist loot, lectures the United States on its insensitivity to the new democracy in Baghdad.

via aldaily

In Kaohsiung some of the intersections have cameras to photograph trafic violations. It's possible to buy sevices to help detect the cameras, and also to bribe those who develop the photos, not to mention the police.

I've been told, in Bolivia, all you have to do to get out of trouble with the law is to open your wallet and pull out a twenty dollar bill because there is no police there, the army runs everything.

In New Tests for Fetal Defects, Agonizing Choices for Parents By AMY HARMON:

Fetal genetic tests are now routinely used to diagnose diseases as well known as cystic fibrosis and as obscure as fragile X, a form of mental retardation. High-resolution sonograms can detect life-threatening defects like brain cysts as well as treatable conditions like a small hole in the heart or a cleft palate sooner and more reliably than previous generations of the technology. And the risk of Down syndrome, one of the most common birth defects, can be assessed in the first trimester rather than waiting for a second-trimester blood test or amniocentesis...

Against the backdrop of a bitter national divide on abortion, couples are devising their own very private scales for weighing whether to continue their pregnancies. Often, political or religious beliefs end up being put aside, trumped by personal feelings. And even many of those who have no doubts about their decision to terminate say the grief is lasting...

Whatever they choose, couples find themselves exposed to judgments from all sides. Several of those interviewed asked that personal details be withheld because they had let friends and family believe that their abortion was a miscarriage. Others say they have been surprised that even conservative parents, who never faced such decisions themselves, have counseled them to abort rather than face too hard a life.

Activists for the rights of the disabled say that a kind of grass-roots eugenics is evolving that will ultimately lead to greater intolerance of disabilities and less money for cures or treatments.

Yeah, well, so what. People want beautiful kids, and I'm betting there are going to be more and more efforts to get them.