Janny Scott, Specialty Foods: Strong in Weak Economy shows how New Yorkers are more cosmopolitain than most Americans. Of course, it's a huge market.

Eun-Kyung Kim, Pentagon: China Gearing for Taiwan Attack

Defense officials said China was emphasizing a "surprise, deception and shock" doctrine in its campaign against Taiwan, which Beijing considers a renegade province.

The real logic of the war always had to do with cleaning up the aftermath of OPEC and switching the economies of the Middle-East to a different developmental path.


Once the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries gained control over oil prices in the early 1970s, with the complicity of the Nixon Administration, subsequent US administrations had little choice but to side with one well-financed Middle-East regime against another for twenty years. The Iran-Iraq War was one result. The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was another. Escalating terrorism was directed at Israel throughout.


Deposing Saddam Hussein�s government should be viewed as the taking-down of a dictator of America�s making � rather like the capture and jailing Manuel Noriega in Panama in 1990. Quite apart from benefits that the Bush Administration hopes will be conferred on civil society in Iraq, the pay-off already has been better Israeli-Palestinian relations. The next task is to jump-start some Palestinian growth � and to that end Palestinian prime minister Mahmoud Abbas was in Washington meeting with President Bush last week.

From economicprincipals.com.

I know the Chinese can sometimes show some pretty gory images; I don't know about the Middle East, but as L.T. Smash writes

Some people have criticized the decision to release photos of the late Uday and Qusay Hussein to the media. They complain that it is insensitive to Arab culture to display the dead in such a manner. (Have they ever seen al Jazeera?)

Most of the major media reports I found about the pics of the dead dictator's sons cited the same "Egyptian scholar" who told Al Jazeera television that displaying the bodies publicly violated Islamic law, but in the Nov. 18, 2001 issue of the New York Times Magazine, Fouad Ajami wrote

Al-Jazeera is not subtle television....Al-Jazeera loves grisly footage and is never shy about presenting graphic imagery.

And that's not the only evidence of grisly pics. Of course, there's a lot of hypocrisy here: back on March 23, 2003, Andrew Sullivan wrote of the pictures of dead Americans

The pictures on al Jazeera are Danny Pearl revisited. Cowardly, evil, depraved: and the fact that al Jazeera is broadcasting them shows exactly how unhinged the enemy has become.

I nearly don't feel like linking to What Chinese character are you?, because like most of those quizzes, it's a lot of crap, plus this one has some errors, like the one at Tim B. Liar Lies, where I found it.

Trying to figure out just what "subaltern" meant, I ran across the phrase "white men saving brown women from brown men", and I wanted to know if there was a China dimension for this (footbinding, etc.), so I googled "white men saving brown women from brown men" china. Google asks, did you mean: "white men shaving brown women from brown men" china. What a pervert. Anyway, I ran across this comment by John Hudock at Commonsense & Wonder about just how dangerous it is for the soldiers serving in Iraq.

We saw the eminently forgettable Tin Men (1987). That made a splash when it came out, but it doesn't speak to me. It was better than The Summer House (1993), which had some inexplicable stuff going on. That was alright, but something missing. Maybe I'll read the book by Alice Thomas Ellis. I actually preferred the made-for-TV Dead Gorgeous (2002), even though it was pretty predicatable (there's got to be a new expression for the surprise ending that's no surprise), and the title doesn't make a lot of sense. This was based on Peter Lovesey's novel On the Edge, which I think I will read. Maybe I should also read Strangers on a Train, which it imitates.

In the 4/21/2003 New Republic, Jasper Becker writes "Sudden Impact"

In Beijing's mind, the Iraq war shows Powell wasn't bluffing. Diplomats in Beijing say China now believes it has only a brief window to prevent an Iraq-like war from exploding near its borders and thus has drawn closer to the U.S. position...According to diplomats in Beijing, China has even begun considering how to push Kim Jong Il from power. Diplomats say some Chinese officials have privately started arguing that it would be better for Beijing to undertake actions that help remove Kim and install a new government in the North committed to economic reform and regional stability, which would benefit China. Some also feel it would be better for China, rather than the United States, to oust Kim so as not to extend U.S. influence in China's backyard.

In the 6/23/2003 edn., it's "Mussolini Redux", where he convincingly argues that the CCP is turning fascist, presenting several factors, including

To teach average Chinese that China is a waking power that has often been abused by outsiders, the CCP organizes frequent mass events, such as the garden ceremony and giant pageants attended by hundreds of thousands, as well as other propaganda. And, just as the press under Mussolini played up foreigners' invasions and humiliations of Italy, endless articles in China's state-controlled press remind the Chinese of the West's dominance of Chinese politics and economics before World War II and of Japan's invasion of China in the '30s. In so doing, the party instills a permanent resentment of foreigners, even though far more Chinese have been killed by the CCP than by the United States, Japan, and Great Britain....[The CCP] could become increasingly tempted to use its military strength to demonstrate national glory, as Mussolini did by invading Ethiopia in 1935. The CCP and the army are completely intertwined--Jiang is the head of the military--and China's rhetoric is often so vehemently irredentist that a demonstration of military strength, perhaps by invading Taiwan, seems all too possible. The propaganda machine is constantly engaged in an effort to elevate the military's prestige and glorify its victories and contributions to national unity.

(emphasis mine).

Judy Skatssoon's Religion 'could offer model for delusion'

Studying the mechanisms of religious belief could lead to a better understanding of what goes on in the minds of people with psychiatric delusions.

An international conference in Sydney this week will hear that some religious beliefs - including that a virgin gave birth to the son of God - qualify as delusions.

(via Improved Clinch--although he apparently disagrees.)

Robert Fulford's Humanities scholars spend lots of time reading, so why can't they write? cites some pomo-babble gems:

We can see a socio-sexual parallel between the geography of the wilderness and the topographies of narrative in this genre, which organizes a particular spatial itinerary and social anatomy.

It is the moment of non-construction, disclosing the absentation of actuality from the concept in part through its invitation to emphasize, in reading, the helplessness -- rather than the will to power -- of its fall into conceptuality.

Changing a brand of vodka

carries a metaphorical chain of deterritorialized signifiers, repackaged up and down a paradigmatic axis of associations.

He claims this, too, shall pass.

David Weddle has a superb article: Lights, Camera, Action. Marxism, Semiotics, Narratology. Film school isn't what it used to be, one father discovers. I usually don't seem to agree with Roger Ebert, but it's hard to argue with this:

Film theory has nothing to do with film. Students presumably hope to find out something about film, and all they will find out is an occult and arcane language designed only for the purpose of excluding those who have not mastered it and giving academic rewards to those who have. No one with any literacy, taste or intelligence would want to teach these courses, so the bona fide definition of people teaching them are people who are incapable of teaching anything else.

Unfortunately, an awful lot of literary "scholarship" is like this. (via Arts & Letters Daily).

Klaus Toepfer, the head of the U.N. Environment Program, argues that China's plans to quadruple their GDP threatens the consumption habits of the developed nations, or "so-called developed countries", as these Guardian reporters call them. But as the Washington Times argues,

the sort of developmental stasis envisioned by Mr. Toepfer is the last thing that the environment can truly sustain...The debate comes down to a fundamental disagreement in perspective: Mr. Toepfer and those with like minds see the size of the world's pie of resources as static, reduced each time any entity (individual or state) takes a slice. Conservationists are in many ways far more progressive. They expect that tomorrow's innovation will make taller pie (and so allow for greater environmental protection) from today's trash as it has innumerable times in the past.

They mention Michael Shermer's The Ignoble Savage: Science reveals humanity's heart of darkness, who explains that "Ignoble savages were nasty to one another as well as to their environments."

Propaganda works!


Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo criticizes the PRC's disinformation campaign against the people of Hong Kong and their demonstrations against article 23. He blames the disinformation for attitudes like this, which he finds on the xinlang BBS:
1. The national interest takes precedence over individual rights.
2. Social stability takes precedence over the protection of freedom.
3. Economic recovery takes precedence over political demands.
4. "One country" takes precedence over "two systems".
5. Criticism of the people of Hong Kong for their selfishness and ingratitude.
6. Criticism of Hong Kong's special status and the privileged consciousness of Hong Kong's people.
7. Accusations that the people of Hong Kong are being used by a small group of "hostile elements" and foreign anti-Chinese forces.
8. Without the mainland motherland, Hong Kong has no future.

Others go so far as to say things like, "If you don't support China's security, then get the hell out of China's jurisdiction!" or "It's time for liberating Hong Kong immediately and implementing 'one country one system'."

Original article here (in Chinese).

A NYT editorial favoring free trade. The story shows Americans using a trade-war trick perfected by the Europeans and so-called "antidumping" rules against Vietnamese catfish and

how wealthy countries that preach the gospel of free trade when it comes to finding markets for their manufactured goods can become wildly protectionist when their farmers face competition. The fate of Vietnam's catfish offers a warning to poorer nations short on leverage in the world trading system: beware of what may happen if you actually succeed at playing by the big boys' rules.

Just as I was wondering if the war in Iraq is worth paying the price of American lives lost, not to mention the amount of money it's costing, I read Peter Finn's A Lone Woman Testifies To Iraq's Order of Terror. Don't things like this make it worth it?

Ethan Frome & Through a Glass Darkly spoilers.


After Through a Glass Darkly, we saw Ethan Frome (1993), which was watchable, but had a lot of things that weren't done well, so I read the original Willa Cather story. The movie didn't explain very well why the protagonist Ethan got married to his wife Zeena, older than he was, and it didn't portray her as nasty as the original. It fails to explain the relations between Zeena and Mattie after what the movie portrays as an accident that leaves Ethan crippled, although in the story it's a suicide attempt. Finally, most egregiously for me, although the story is set in the early 1900's, Mattie and Ethan actually have sex in the movie, although this does not happen in the story. Ironically, Cather herself did have an affair while she was married to an older man, so maybe it's not that egregious. (I didn't mention I thought the incest in Through a Glass Darkly was a little much. Maybe that's a Bergman thing.)

I wrote what I thought was a clever letter to a classmate of mine once, and she dismissed my "gloomy riddles". Now I feel a lot of Bergman is gloomy riddles, but I liked Through a Glass Darkly (1962), even though my wife lost patience with it. A couple of things I'd like to remember. The schizophrenic's distant father tells her, "We draw a magic circle and shut out everything that doesn't agree with our secret games. Each time life breaks the circle, the games turn grey and ridiculous. Then we draw a new circle and build a new defense." Also the grim humor of the fact that it's the schizophrenic who sees God, who turns out to be a spider with "terrible, stony face". Ha-ha. But the ending after that was less appealing for those of us who find the idea of a God unbelievable--or unendurable.

Would it really be such a bad thing for the U.S. to Go Back to U.N. for Iraq Mandate?

Paul Saunders, director of the Nixon Center, a nonpartisan research organization whose honorary chairman is Henry A. Kissinger...said there were two reasons for the United States to go back to the United Nations.


"It would be helpful to diffuse responsibility for this massive undertaking, and share any dissatisfaction with others and not be the sole target ourselves," he said. "Externally, it's also helpful in rebuilding some of the relationships that were strained in the dispute over going in."

The problem is not just that some policy makers "would consider it humiliating", but

administration officials worry that United Nations participation might force them to cede operational control over Iraq, even as the United States continues to pay most of the cost.

Still, I hope we can work out some compromise, even though I have misgivings about a lot of UN behavior.

DAVID W. CHEN writes about Hu Jintao on Hong Kong's proposed subversion law:

Hong Kong, he said, "must carry out" some version of the security law.

"I'm sure that after conscientious, broad consultations, the proposed law will win the universal understanding, support and acceptance of the broad masses of Hong Kong compatriots," he said.

And the reports tell us that the people of Hong Kong like this guy?

David Cho: Not Just Anybody's Raw Fish Rolls--Area Japanese Chefs Say Others' Sushi Loses in Translation. One Japanese chef comments:

sushi is going to be international. . . . It's like pasta or pizza: It's not Italian anymore, which is good and a little bit sad

It's not like Chinese food in the US is authentic, either.