ELISABETH ROSENTHAL, Factories Wrest Land From China's Farmers on how officials sell off farmland for commercial use,

often with little or no compensation for the farmers, who lease land collectively held by their villages and have only vague property rights....their small plots are unable to compete in a market economy. In practice, farmers say, the transition is being accomplished by selling the farmers' fields against their will, with the benefits of development and urbanization going only to a few.

Her reporting is starting to get good; that means she's probably about to be reassigned.

China Bars W.H.O. Experts From Origin Site of Illness, By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN and KEITH BRADSHER. The headline says it all. Compare this.

Iain Murray, $6.1 Million Men, on cost/benefit analysis, points out that the Environmental Protection Agency values each human life at $6.1 million, but

one consideration is saving lives, the public sector therefore has to come up with a figure that it can use to assess the economic value of a life. This is a difficult thing to do, but one way to do it is to assess how much economic activity an individual will undertake in his or her life - how much income will they earn, how much will they spend or invest and so on? This is generally the approach used in transportation economics and the standard value used by the U.S. Department of Transportation is $2.7 million.

Funny comments, too. Some people just don't get it.

Indira A.R. Lakshmanan has an article entitled Freed detainees cite rewards, beatings, and the story does indeed speak of some unnamed persecution and beatings, but

nearly all of the former detainees enthusiastically praised the conditions at Guantanamo and expressed little bitterness about losing a year of their lives in captivity, saying they were treated better there than in three days in squalid cells in Kabul. None complained of torture during questioning or coerced confessions....''The conditions were even better than our homes. We were given three meals a day -- eggs in the morning and meat twice a day; facilities to wash, and if we didn't wash, they'd wash us; and there was even entertainment with video games,'' said Sirajuddin, 24, a taxi driver from Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban.

(link via Jeff Jarvis via Iain Murray). Marc Kaufman and April Witt, Returning Afghans Talk of Guantanamo, are more negative.

I'm leaving for NYC tomorrow to present a paper at the Association for Asian Studies.

A couple of links via butterfliesandwheels.com: Francis Crick says, "The god hypothesis is rather discredited." He also

argues that since many of the actual claims made by specific religions over 2,000 years have proved false, the burden of proof should be on the claims they make today, rather than on atheists to disprove the existence of God.

His colleague James Watson agrees, "Every time you understand something, religion becomes less likely."

In 1961 Crick resigned as a fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, when it proposed to build a chapel. When Sir Winston Churchill wrote to him pointing out that "none need enter [the chapel] unless they wish", Crick replied that on those grounds, the college should build a brothel.

Meanwhile, Christopher Hitchens' Holy Writ:

Religion of every kind involves the promise that the misery and futility of existence can be overcome or even transfigured. One might suppose that the possession of such a magnificent formula, combined with the tremendous assurance of a benevolent God, would make a person happy. But such appears not to be the case: unease and insecurity and rage seem to keep up with blissful certainty, and even to outpace it.

That just about says it all.

A good report about encouraging free trade in Arab countries at Marketplace.

Over the years, any number of coincidental findings have suggested that exposure to a particular substance may cause a certain illness. But under the critical eye of careful research, most of these apparent associations turn out to have no cause-and-effect relationship.

Vaccines and Autism, Beyond the Fear Factors, By JANE E. BRODY.

I can't say I much like this, either:

Pick-a-Prof, a three-year-old Web business, is taking consumerism in higher education to a new level, allowing students on some campuses to see the grade distributions for every course and every professor, along with the percentage of students who dropped the course and student reviews of the professor....[Some professors] worried that increased emphasis on ratings would lead professors to focus more on popularity than on substance and to forgo complex and subtle instruction for what was easily accessible.

TAMAR LEWIN, New Online Guides Rate Professors.

Robert Lane Greene: Know Contest (what an execrable pun--I'm just sore because I didn't get it at first): on Saddam's probable lack of info:

the climate of terror which pervaded Hitler's regime compromised the performance of Hitler's highest-level advisers....Instigating perpetual terror may be a good way to amass power, but it turns out to be a bad way to run a government.

Of course I thought of the Chinese. But to give them their due, they're getting better.

Maybe some day I'll figure out these different aircraft. By the way, I understand the Chinese are fascinated by descriptions of weapons. I wonder why there's so little of that in the American media.

Michael Dobbs: Hussein Scores in Propaganda War cites Kenneth M. Pollack, who

argues that the American media have been playing into Hussein's hands by paying too much attention to the issue of U.S. casualties, which are still relatively minor, compared with other major conflicts.

No kidding. Last night on ABC news they showed the picture of the downed helicopter three times. They'll turn me into a hawk yet.

Update

The dark calculus of the moment is the likelihood that Iraqi commanders still hope they can actually win--becoming the first Arab force to defeat a Western force in centuries--if they can just inflict enough causalities....Does this mean American commentators must take a hard view of American losses? Within reason, yes....Also, commentators must accept that U.S. helicopters are going to get shot down. Helicopters fell in Vietnam whenever within range of small-arms fire. Our technological mastery has not altered the fact that helicopters remain fragile.

Gregg Easterbrook, Great Expectations

I thought my Gloxinia (I think it's Sinningia speciosa) had died, but it was just going through a natural wintering cycle, and it's come back to life.

Update
Yes, that's what it is.

And here's a forum.

Awhile ago I went online all the time to check how my index mutual funds were doing. Now I'm going online every few minutes to see how the war's doing, mostly at The Command Post. There's got to be a better way to spend my time.

A spoiler about Tess.

Last night we saw Bride of Frankenstein. I'd seen a clip of the bride herself somewhere along the line, but I don't think I'd ever seen the whole thing, although having seen Young Frankenstein, I was somewhat confused as to what I'd seen in the original and what I saw in the parody. It was watchable, but dullard that I am, I'm afraid I missed all the "subversive subtext" that keener minds than mine find.

We also saw Life of Brian, which has aged well, although it's still not that funny, any more than it was when I first saw it, not long after it came out.

Then over a couple of days we saw Polanski's 3-hour Tess (1979), somewhat intruiging in light of what The Smoking Gun calls the "1977 crime that prompted his French exile." Which I found via Colby Cosh:

Q: How do you know the girl's too young? A: When she tells the jury you "performed cuddliness" on her.

The spoiler: at the end of Tess, the heroine murders the man who seduced her and is instrumental in causing her life of misery--although she's responsible, too. Anyway, the movie wasn't bad.

Update
Nolo Consentire argues that a girl this young wouldn't know the word cunnilingus, and that the episode smacks of witness coaching. More here.

Another update

Steve Gorman reports that Roman Polanski Wins Best Director Oscar

Many in the audience at the Kodak Theater rose to their feet in a standing ovation as his name was read by presenter Harrison Ford, while others remained seated, including Polanski's "Chinatown" star, Jack Nicholson. It was at Nicholson's home that Polanski later admitted to having sex with the underage girl after plying her with champagne and pills. An unsmiling Anjelica Huston, who was in another area of the house at the time, applauded.

I guess Gorman thought stone-faced was too strong.

Paul Berman calls Sayyid Qutb " (pronounced KUH-tahb) "The Philosopher of Islamic Terror

As Qutb saw it, Europeans, under Christianity's influence, began to picture God on one side and science on the other. Religion over here; intellectual inquiry over there. On one side, the natural human yearning for God and for a divinely ordered life; on the other side, the natural human desire for knowledge of the physical universe. The church against science; the scientists against the church. Everything that Islam knew to be one, the Christian Church divided into two. And, under these terrible pressures, the European mind split finally asunder. The break became total. Christianity, over here; atheism, over there. It was the fateful divorce between the sacred and the secular.

Europe's scientific and technical achievements allowed the Europeans to dominate the world. And the Europeans inflicted their ''hideous schizophrenia'' on peoples and cultures in every corner of the globe. That was the origin of modern misery -- the anxiety in contemporary society, the sense of drift, the purposelessness, the craving for false pleasures. The crisis of modern life was felt by every thinking person in the Christian West. But then again, Europe's leadership of mankind inflicted that crisis on every thinking person in the Muslim world as well....

In writing about modern life, he put his finger on something that every thinking person can recognize, if only vaguely -- the feeling that human nature and modern life are somehow at odds.

Speak for yourself, Paulie. I'd agree that many people, particularly many Americans, feel a split, hence their excessive religiosity. Ironically, the religious nature of many Americans is reflected in that of the terrorists. Well, I guess we all have our fundamentalists. As far as I'm concerned, they can live their lives as they like, but that's not good enough for Qutb, who believed

people with liberal ideas were mounting a gigantic campaign against Islam -- ''an effort to confine Islam to the emotional and ritual circles, and to bar it from participating in the activity of life, and to check its complete predominance over every human secular activity, a pre-eminence it earns by virtue of its nature and function.''

So for Paulie, this is an ideological battle:

...it would be nice to think that someone is arguing with the terrorists and with the readers of Sayyid Qutb. But here I have my worries....There is something to worry about here, an aspect of the war that liberal society seems to have trouble understanding -- one more worry, on top of all the others, and possibly the greatest worry of all.

Maybe so. But as ambivalent as I feel about Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Disneyland and other cultural crap, my fellow humans seem to gravitate towards those, so aren't they a good ideological argument, since they've thrived under liberalism?

Update
What I mean to say is that Paulie seems to find Qutb's rantings oddly attractive, and unable to come up with a good liberal argument against them, wants someone else to do it. But for me, the American lifestyle is its own best argument, even though it is often tasteless.

I've heard about Asian women oppressed by their American husbands, but see what Tran Dinh Thanh Lam says about Taiwan's Vietnamese brides, citing Bruno Ciceri, a Catholic priest in charge of the Stella Maris International Service Center for migrants in the southern Taiwanese city of Kaohsiung.

"Many times women are used as a tool for reproduction and they must give birth to a boy, otherwise they are considered useless," he told a recent seminar on migration in Thailand....The lack of love, cultural differences and the language barrier make these marriages doomed to fail from the beginning," he said. He added that some foreign wives are barred from making friends and phone calls and do not know of local laws they can use to assert their rights. Those who cannot speak Mandarin find it almost impossible to get help if they are abused.

John Pomfret and Peter S. Goodman: Mysterious Illness Kills 2 In Beijing in Sign of Spread:

China often plays down or bans the reporting of news that could be construed as shedding a bad light on the government. Local governments often take the lead in suppressing bad news because officials worry it will cost them their jobs. For years, Henan province has denied the seriousness of its AIDS problem because of concerns that it would reflect poorly on the government and affect the "investment environment," a Chinese researcher said.

"SARS is no exception," he said. "We are seeing the government go into crisis mode. When it does that, all information is shut down. In the absence of information, the common people are left to rumors and panic."

Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan write Trade Brings Riches, but Not to Mexico's Poor. They blame NAFTA, but admit

Mexico's weak public education system condemns workers to low salaries in a global economy where skills count. Decades of systemic government corruption have robbed the poorest of everything from high school scholarships to subsidized milk. The broken banking system hands out little credit -- people without the cash to buy a house or start a small business must often do without.

Mexico's inability to enforce the rule of law also discourages the investment needed to create jobs.

Scott Wilson writes Coca Trade Booming Again in Peru: "The United States favors forced eradication, conducted by trained Peruvian police units, while the government wants to employ a mix of interdiction and financial incentives to collapse the coca market."