I've been saying the same as this: Wall Street may have to endure a long spell � a decade or longer � in which the stock market, while providing plenty of ups and downs, repeatedly disappoints investors.

Kaohsiung is like this: "My drawers feel like an old wet diaper. It's suffocating, it's sticky. I'm soaking wet at 7 o'clock in the morning, top to bottom."

Contrary to the doomsayers, economic and scientific advances have made it possible for the developed world to be more efficient in its natural resource usage, to find or make new resources, and maintain or revive endangered species.

Supposedly, Americans are fat because they're eating too many carbohydrates. But what about skinny Chinese, Japanese, & Indians?

An update from Dean Ornish, who says that complex carbs are the solution.

According to a UN report,

The UN Development Programme and Unicef have finally admitted in a new report what many scientists and policy wonks have known for years. Chernobyl killed thousands -- not from radiation, but from policy based on radiophobic hysteria.

Falun Gong hijacks Chinese broadcasts: taking over a satellite signal is difficult for the government to track down and stop.

Local leaders who use their cash and connections to bend the party and government to their will challenge the leadership of the Communist Party, because China has a fragmented power system. Here.

According to Yahoo:

China's chief justice has slammed "incompetent" judges for blindly following orders from superiors, and promised sweeping reforms to the way they are recruited and trained, state media said.

Xiao Yang, president of the Supreme People's Court, told a conference on Sunday that incompetent judges were "one of the most vital factors in judicial inequity" the Xinhua news agency reported.

"Courts have often been taken as branches of the government, and judges viewed as civil servants who have to follow orders from superiors, which prevents them from exercising mandated legal duties like other members of the judiciary," Xiao said.

The unusually stern criticism marks yet another attempt by China to improve the quality of its famously ill-qualified judges.

Seventy percent of them have no college degree, only a vocational training degree and not necessarily in law, according to earlier reports by China's state media.

Xiao told the conference that judges should be immune from local interference, be better paid and "revered for their integrity", Xinhua said.

Although China has trimmed the number of judges by 10 percent, of those remaining "many are incompetent to hold the position of judge", he said.

A new class of professional judge should be brought in, "a chosen group of elites who speak the same legal language, think in a unique legal formula, believe in and pursue social justice," Xiao said.

Reforms to speed this change along will include making new judges pass two exams, and forcing incumbent ones to take a law degree within a set time or face dismissal.

Additionally, to prevent outside influence, judges should not be fired or disciplined without due process.

China has pledged many times in the past to improve its legal system, especially the calibre of the 200,000-plus judges that administer it.

The system is heavily influenced by traditional legal values with a high premium placed on rulings that conform with and protect state policies, Western legal experts in Beijing say.

This also opens the way for rampant corruption in the areas of civil litigation where rulings are often awarded to the highest bidders, they say.

Apart from miscarriages of justice to its own citizens, the lack of legal consistency has prompted concern among foreign companies doing business there, some of which complain they have been the victims of arbitrary and biased rulings.

During a visit to Beijing in February, US President George W. Bush stressed to his hosts that as a new member of the World Trade Organisation, China must ensure "a consistent rule of law" to govern commerce.

Rapid globalization of the world economy has sliced the proportion of abject poor across the planet, according to a study from the London-based Center for Economic Policy Research. But this report from Yahoo terms it "controversial", because, according to the European Commission (the European Union's executive body) that commissioned the report, they are unwilling to concur with all the study's analysis, because "In many respects, the findings will prove controversial, at least to those outside the circle of professional economists, contradicting as they do certain deeply held beliefs about the negative consequences of globalization."

Arrgh! Because many people simply believe that it can't be true, the European Commission won't accept it!

An article entitled "The education shibboleth" from the Economist suggests there are drawbacks to encouraging more & more people to attend college. But the author concludes, �Our recent forebears, living in significantly poorer times, were occupied with the cultural, moral and intellectual purposes of education. We impoverish ourselves by neglecting these.�

Sounds like more legal abuse to me.

Those charts in the June 5 issue of The Journal of the National Cancer Institute again.

Stuff about blood pressure.

Let's hear it for sweatshops!

Advice on weight training from Gina Kolata that jibes with what I've heard.

According to the Economist, For every tiger in the wild, two are kept as pets in America. 12,000 pet tigers in the US vs. just 5,000-7,200 that remain in the wild.

To ask entails one instance of shame, not to ask entails lifelong shame.

In greater numbers than ever, China's villagers are using inexpensive prenatal scans and then abortion to prevent the birth of unwanted daughters and to ensure that they will bear a son, recent studies and census data show.

Through the last decade, a time of rapid economic growth, the gap between male and female births only widened, giving China the largest gender disparity among newborns of any country in the world. In pockets of the countryside the imbalance is staggering, with births of as many as 144 boys recorded for every 100 girls.

Decades of Communist rule and recent pell-mell development, far from uprooting the male bias in the Chinese countryside, have yielded new pressures to have sons.

...in much of rural China, daughters move away to their husband's family at marriage, and the government no longer provides even a pretense of old-age or medical care.

This compares with the international average of about 106 boys to 100 girls.

Social scientists also speculate about the disruptive effects another decade or two from now, when there will be tens of millions of excess men in a country with a population of more than 1.3 billion, unable to marry and likely to be concentrated on the bottom rungs of society.

In the biggest cities, the excess of male births is surprisingly low despite the existence over the last two decades of a strict one-child policy. In part, the low urban disparity reflects the more effective enforcement of laws against prenatal gender determination.

But it also reflects a greater acceptance of female children, not least because many urban couples can expect that daughters will be more apt to assist them when they grow old.

Valerie Hudson, a professor at Brigham Young University in the United States is cited in the Economist on the potential consequences:

societies with large numbers of unmarried males tend to experience more crime, unrest and violence. While acknowledging that sex imbalance is only one of many factors influencing levels of violence, Miss Hudson points out that the 30m unhappy unmarried men China is likely to have by 2020 could become "kindling for forces of political revolution at home". There could also be an impact outside China, she says. The government may decide to use the surplus men as a weapon for military adventurism and "actively desire to see them give their lives in pursuit of a national interest".

The actress says, "Everybody's face looks like some animal," she jokes, adding that the actor Jiang Wen's looks like a gorilla's.

Meanwhile, what does Jiang Wen have to say?

"Ever had horse meat?" he asks as the waitress delivers a plate of blood red sashimi. He clenches a fist and then grips his tensed forearm, adopting the tone of an older, more experienced brother. "It makes you strong."

And he got a woodie from watching the 1960s propaganda ballet The Red Detachment of Women.

So what do the Chicoms do about protests about corruption? They blame the messenger. The fate of one of the people involved in the cannon battle mentioned earlier.