Subjects whose brains are exposed to "transcranial magnetic stimulation" often describe feeling an invisible presence or a feeling of being connected to the whole world. Naturally occurring magnetic interference may be at the heart of mystical and other paranormal phenomena. So God is just magnetism. Sounds convincing to me.

As far as China and India are concerned, the East Asian "brain drain" is more of a "brain circulation."

This is progress: the Chinese government's reaction to the recent Air China crash: they used to try to cover up such disasters, but since they've cleaned up their safety record, now they're worried about it.

It was a top story on state television, which showed pictures of smoking wreckage. A senior Chinese airline regulator was shown leaving for South Korea to join an investigation. Air China set up a hotline for families of passengers.

Continuing to chip away at Hong Kong's independence,

Tung Chee-hwa's system will create a new layer of 14 top posts for political appointees, who can be fired more easily than the civil servants who now hold key Hong Kong government positions.

After US Pilot Erred in Bombing Canadians,
President Bush telephoned Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien to convey condolences. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said,

"On behalf of the Department of Defense, I want to express my deep regret and sadness over the tragic accident in Afghanistan that killed and wounded a number of Canadian troops. "Our thoughts and prayers go out to them, their comrades and their families."

The fact that the US didn't apologize for what the government acknowledges actually happened is interesting in light of the US's unwillingness to apologize to the Chinese for something that was the fault of the Chinese. In other words, there was absolutely no reason for the US to aplogize to the Chinese.

From another Henry Miller (no, not the sex one):

People tend to overestimate risks that are unfamiliar, hard to understand, invisible, involuntary, and/or potentially catastrophic�and vice versa.

The suspicion of modernity that animates much of today's prattling seems to owe something to bourgeoisophobia. Even though by most objective measures, as this piece from the British Medical Journal states, technophobia makes a lot of us to feel worse than our ancestors. I'm all for the
unnatural:

Consider the true state of nature. In pre-modern, pre-urban society, men and women lived in filth and were hostages to disease. According to science commentator Ronald Bailey, life expectancy at birth for a primitive hunter-gatherer was 26. For early agricultural communities, it was even lower: 19 years of age. It could even be argued that rape and unwanted pregnancy are both features of nature. The proscription of non-consensual sex is something guaranteed by civilisation.

This article is mostly about Britain, but it also describes a more widespread anti-technology mindset.

Windmills are pretty if you are on holiday in Norfolk or Amsterdam. But how did we end up wanting them as a symbol of advanced modern society? How did we get from the Nuclear Age, where the successful application of a scientific breakthrough meant that people believed we never needed to worry about sources of energy running out, to the Wind Age, where we give ourselves over to the unpredictability of nature and look to little Denmark as a model?

Well, it wasn't because of Three Mile Island, or Chernobyl, or the other nuclear scares and accidents that still play heavily on our minds. What is surprising is how few such disasters there have been. There are legitimate concerns about the disposal of nuclear waste, but these are blown way out of proportion - this is a practical problem needing a solution, yet it tends to be discussed as an apocalypse in the making. What really killed the Nuclear Age was an explosion of self-doubt across the Western world, where we stopped trusting in science and politics and started believing in our own nightmares.

Nuclear power was intimately linked in the popular imagination with the terrifying threat of nuclear war laid it open, from the start, to a host of doubts and preoccupations that had very little to do with energy supply.

The nuclear weapon came to symbolise everything that radicals were supposed to hate in modern society: from war and patriarchy to money and non-vegetarianism.

The anti-nuclear demand was, simply, 'Stop'. Stop moving forward, and start asking why we need these power plants anyway. Stop, and ask what's more important - keeping safe, or better cheaper energy production.

Among the Bourgeoisophobes, about why the Europeans and Arabs, each in their own way, hate America and Israel. The Chinese Communists hated the bourgeoisie, too, and look where it got them. Now the bourgeoisie is being admitted to the party. Funny how China stands on the US side for this one.

An old article from Slate discusses "social hypochondria": we always seem to be obsessing about some social "problem." Even though America is not a society lurching from one acute social crisis to the next, it is often hard to see things that way. Factors include the major political parties, which are to a great extent coalitions of convenience among people who each feel strongly about one or two hot button issues and the media, which have an obvious vested
interest in sowing serial social panic, and finally lawyers: suing is our national sport.

"In China there is a very strong tradition that to be a man you must get married and have a child, so I did," explains an anonymous gay man. "We also respect and obey our parents' wishes, so I did it for them, too." Many gays even want to be "cured."

How To Rank Risks. Not the way most of us do. In fact, I think another thing we're overly worried about is terrorist attacks, letting them terrorize us, which is just what they want.

Oxfam backs globalization and free trade, slamming the US & still more the EU for their protectionism. Via the Kolkata Libertarian.

In China, agricultural overproduction has caused surpluses, depressing farm prices, compounded by abuses by the rural bureaucracy, by high taxes and utility bills. At the same time, small rural enterprises that might have provided alternative jobs have collapsed, but the government is still dithering over allowing migration of farm workers to cities.

With regard to Bush's effort to ban therapeutic cloning, Virginia Postrel argues

there is also good reason to preserve the freedom to do research even when it's speculative. The proponents of the ban keep saying that the research isn't necessary, so outlawing it is justified. They are in effect demanding that science, an open-ended process of exploring the unknown, have answers in advance�and practical ones at that.

And she points to a couple of petitions: her own and another.

Just had an egg salad sandwich on the sourdough rye bread I made last Sunday. The bread keeps well. The sandwich was delicious.

Excellent. A call for rigorous scientific testing of alternative medicine.

Spiked argues:
Today's opposition to genetically modified organisms (GMOs) has little to do with objective scientific evaluations of the risks posed by GM. It more stems from a prejudice that says man should avoid interfering with nature. There was something similar in last week's Far Eastern Economic Review.

Now this is frightening! In a haunting Senate hearing today on risk assessment and emergency readiness, officials from dozens of government agencies conceded the United States is "grossly unprepared" to deal with thousands of threats.

In China, the sparrow's deadliest enemy is farmers' haphazard and extravagant use of pesticides. They're disappearing from the countryside. Sometimes they "reappear on sticks, skewered and roasted or fried."