In The Ten Commandments vs. America, Harry Binswanger

The basic philosophy of the Ten Commandments is the polar opposite of the philosophy underlying the American ideal of a free society. Freedom requires:

-- a metaphysics of the natural, not the supernatural; of free will, not determinism; of the primary reality of the individual, not the tribe or the family;

-- an epistemology of individual thought, applying strict logic, based on individual perception of reality, not obedience and dogma;

-- an ethics of rational self-interest, to achieve chosen values, for the purpose of individual happiness on this earth, not fearful, dutiful appeasement of "a jealous God" who issues "commandments."

Link via Goobage, who's got plenty of stuff on taxes, too.

Laid-Off Workers Imprisoned in China Ill By TED ANTHONY

BEIJING - Two laid-off factory workers convicted of subversion after leading labor protests in China's industrial northeast last year are being systematically mistreated in prison and are in increasingly grave condition, a monitoring group alleged Friday.

The health of Xiao Yunliang and Yao Fuxin has "deteriorated rapidly" since they were sent to Lingyuan Prison in the northeastern province of Liaoning earlier this month....

Lots of people have linked to Ian Buruma's article Wielding the moral club, or is it Hands-off Left is the Right of old available here and here. He says that the leftist critics have

set themselves morally above the Right. So why do they appear to be so much keener to denounce the US than to find ways to liberate Iraqis and others from their murderous fuhrers? And how can anybody, knowing the brutal costs of political violence, especially in poor countries split by religious and ethnic divisions, be so insouciant as to call for more aggression?

Alas, the main issue, for them, is the power of the US.

Anti-Americanism may have grown fiercer than it was during the Cold War. It is a common phenomenon that when the angels fail to deliver, the demons become more fearsome. The socialist debacle, then, contributed to the resentment of US triumphs.

But something else happened at the same time. In a curious way, Left and Right began to change places. The expansion of global capitalism, which is not without negative consequences, to be sure, turned leftists into champions of cultural and political nationalism. When Marxism was still a potent ideology, the Left sought universal solutions for the ills of the world. Now globalisation has become another word for an assault on native culture and identity. So the old Left has turned conservative.

This defence of cultural authenticity comes in the guise of anti-imperialism, which is of course the same, these days, as anti-Americanism. Israel plays a significant part in this, as the perceived cat's-paw of US imperialism in the Middle East and the colonial enemy of Palestinian nationalism. Israel and the US have a way of triggering the reflexes of European colonial guilt that overrides almost anything else. Israeli policies, just as US policies, are often wrong and sometimes even wicked, but even if they were always right, Israel would still be hated as the Western invader on Arab territory.

The moral paralysis of the Left, when it comes to non-Western tyrants, may also have a more sinister explanation. Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit calls it moral racism. When Indians kill Muslims, or Africans kill Africans, or Arabs kill Arabs, Western pundits pretend not to notice, or find historical explanations or blame the scars of colonialism. But if white men – whether they are American, European, South African or Israeli – harm people of colour hell is raised.

If one compares Western reporting of events in Palestine or Iraq with far more disturbing news in Liberia or Central Africa, there is a disproportion which suggests that non-Western people cannot be held to the same moral standards as us. One could claim this is only right, since we can only take responsibility for our own kind. But this would be a rather racist view of world affairs....

The same double standard applies all over. From the modern PRC point of view, it's fine to murder a tens of millions of your own people, but let's not talk about that--let's focus all our hatred on the Japanese.

I've got 10+ years to go till retirement, but since my wife's Chinese & I like Chinese food, we're considering moving to a place with lots of Chinese restaurants, which means lots of Chinese people. city-data.com has the stats on race, as does AreaConnect. But since we're not familiar with the areas, first I've got to go to the U.S. Census Bureau; as of now, they've got a good explanation of how to find things here. I found P6. RACE (in the US, Asian generally means Chinese) and PCT10. AGE BY LANGUAGE SPOKEN (whatever the hell that means) most helpful.

• San Francisco County


• Alameda County (SF)


• Los Angeles County


• Orange County (LA)


• Sacramento County


• San Diego County


• San Mateo County (SF)


• Santa Clara (SF)


• Ventura County (LA)

Looks like the Chinese live in the priciest neighborhoods. Gah. Maybe other states are cheaper.

Carnival of the Capitalists also links to Vinod's Blog, which has a post on the American faith in democracy and capitalism as being the right thing for everyone. A few years ago at a meeting on doing business in China, I found it amusing that several of the businessmen felt a missionary zeal in bringing our business practices to the Chinese. I agree that democracy and free markets are generally a good thing, or at least the least of the various evils.

The business people are hardly unique in feeling that their own job is making an important contribution; despite all the cynicism, a lot of people still seem to feel the same way. (I don't feel that way now, in my marginalized field of study, and I suspect I'm too much of a realist/cynic/pessimist to feel that way no matter what my job was.) But everyone's in their own little world. All too often the businessmen look down on the liberal arts intellectuals as engaged in parasitic activities, while the intellectuals look down on what they see as money-grubbers engaged in parasitic activities, and the media mostly only reports the bad news about everything, while the reporters seem to think they're better than everybody else, even as they continually display their ignorance.

Hey, now I feel better!

Fascinating stuff on income inequality at Truck and Barter. What I got out of it is that Americans don't spend as much time in poverty as certain fear-mongers would have us believe. Discovered via Carnival of the Capitalists, which Jane Galt (still blocking me, grrr) linked to.

I heard about this on NPR's Marketplace and A New Can Of Worms mentions it appears in the WSJ: Manufacturing Payrolls Declining Globally: The Untold Story By Joseph Carson:

Factory Jobs Slashed. The popular explanation for the decline in US manufacturing payrolls is that American workers are being categorically replaced by workers in China and other parts of Asia. In truth, factory jobs have been slashed not only in America and Europe, but in Asia as well.

Contrary to popular belief, the global push to relocate facilities to countries with lower production costs has not caused an increase in manufacturing employment in those areas. In fact, since 1995, the reduction of manufacturing jobs in China has been as large as that of any other country.

Merely lowering operating costs is not enough for businesses to survive today. Enormous gains in technology have raised the bar on global competitiveness, punishing firms with outmoded facilities regardless of their location.

These new developments are certainly bullish for both the US and global economies, as manufacturers will need to continue to invest in innovative technologies in order to remain competitive.

...

China's Job Losses. One of our more interesting findings is that, taken on its own, China's job losses are double the average of the remaining 17 countries* for the same seven-year period. Manufacturing employment in the 17 largest economies other than China fell a little more than 7%, from 96 million in 1995 to 89 million in 2002. In contrast, China's fell a whopping 15% in the period, from 98 million in 1995 to 83 million in 2002.

Notwithstanding the continuous influx of foreign investment and new employment, China has been unable to escape the drive toward productivity enhancement and the resultant downsizing of the manufacturing workforce. In 2002 alone, although nearly 2 million factory jobs were created, China's manufacturing employment level for the year was below 1998 and far below 1995.

I bet the anti-trade populists won't change their tune, though.

Stinky Tofu.

In What the Stink Is All About, Walter Nicholls explains that chou dofu is made by marinating tofu squares in a basic brine that is made with a combination of long-fermented vegetables; the bean curd develops a unique, spongy consistency, and a characteristic smell. It's usually then deep-fat fried, although 獨臭之家 in Taipei serves cold, raw stinky tofu, and once in Taiwan my wife stir--fried it. Not a huge success.

As H. M. CHEUNG and some other Hong Kong scientists have written,
"This stinky flavor and other thermally generated aromatic compounds vaporize during deep-fat frying to produce the typical odor of chaw tofu....[These odors] generally possess unpleasant, medicinal, putrid, fecal and rancid odor." Fecal? That's a little strong. Anyway, a lot of us like it.

Sheesh. At The Volokh Conspiracy they've been talking about the Darwin fish. For the record, I think it's a little crass to display your anti-religiosity (or your religiosity, in the case of the original fish) with an adhesive emblem, just as it is to wave the flag. They link to this page of satirical fish (what about one that says "ghoti" inside?), which led me to the Christians aren't perfect, they just want you to be Magnet, and the Cthulhu Page, which led me to look for The Works of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, some of which I've downloaded.

Now the question is, will I print them out?

This is no surprise: Rights Group Exposes Conditions in North Korean Prison Camps By JAMES BROOKE

China's Boom Adds to Global Warming Problem By KEITH BRADSHER:

China's rapid economic growth is producing a surge in emissions of greenhouse gases that threatens international efforts to curb global warming, as Chinese power plants burn ever more coal while car sales soar.

Until the last few months, many energy experts and environmentalists said, they had hoped that China's contribution to global warming would be limited. Its state-owned enterprises have become more efficient in their energy use as they compete in an increasingly capitalist economy, and until recently official Chinese statistics had been showing a steep drop in coal production and consumption.

Even assuming one accepts the unprovable assumption that global warming is driven by pollution caused by humans (as the NY Times does), The Economist argued on Jul 4th 2002:

At the moment, the harm done to human health and the environment from burning fossil fuels is not reflected in the price of those fuels, especially coal, in most countries.

and on Aug 2nd 2001, Bjorn Lomborg pointed out with reference to the Kyoto Protocol,

fear of largely imaginary environmental problems can divert political energy from dealing with real ones....Some environmental policies, such as reducing lead in petrol and sulphur-dioxide emissions from fuel oil, are very cost-effective. But many of these are already in place. Most environmental measures are less cost-effective than interventions aimed at improving safety (such as installing air-bags in cars) and those involving medical screening and vaccination. Some are absurdly expensive.

Yet a false perception of risk may be about to lead to errors more expensive even than controlling the emission of benzene at tyre plants. Carbon-dioxide emissions are causing the planet to warm. The best estimates are that the temperature will rise by some 2°-3°C in this century, causing considerable problems, almost exclusively in the developing world, at a total cost of $5,000 billion. Getting rid of global warming would thus seem to be a good idea. The question is whether the cure will actually be more costly than the ailment.

Despite the intuition that something drastic needs to be done about such a costly problem, economic analyses clearly show that it will be far more expensive to cut carbon-dioxide emissions radically than to pay the costs of adaptation to the increased temperatures. The effect of the Kyoto Protocol on the climate would be minuscule, even if it were implemented in full. A model by Tom Wigley, one of the main authors of the reports of the UN Climate Change Panel, shows how an expected temperature increase of 2.1°C in 2100 would be diminished by the treaty to an increase of 1.9°C instead. Or, to put it another way, the temperature increase that the planet would have experienced in 2094 would be postponed to 2100.

So the Kyoto agreement does not prevent global warming, but merely buys the world six years. Yet, the cost of Kyoto, for the United States alone, will be higher than the cost of solving the world's single most pressing health problem: providing universal access to clean drinking water and sanitation. Such measures would avoid 2m deaths every year, and prevent half a billion people from becoming seriously ill.

And that is the best case. If the treaty were implemented inefficiently, the cost of Kyoto could approach $1 trillion, or more than five times the cost of worldwide water and sanitation coverage. For comparison, the total global-aid budget today is about $50 billion a year.

Despite Widespread Poverty, a Consumer Class Emerges in India By AMY WALDMAN

A year ago, India was in a national funk over China having surged ahead economically. Now, there is a cautious sense that over time, India could prove the turtle to China's hare, thanks to its entrepreneurial spirit, its strong higher education system and its democracy.

I found grouphug.us via Dean's World. Yeah, it's addicting, but I don't think this one's genuine. Still, I actually laughed out loud.

I found an old report by Rob Gifford about Phrase Book Helps China's Cops Prep for Olympics where he talks with Scott Simon about a couple of threads that run through the book:

One is that foreigners drink a lot. The other is that, if you believe this book, I think the perception is that every Western man, and especially Western reporters, is a sort of sexual predator who's after any Chinese woman he can get his hands on. 'Please, take your hands off that woman,' or 'Could you just leave that lady alone, please, and come along with me,' it gives us sort of an insight into maybe how the Chinese, or certainly the Chinese police, see Western men as behaving around women.

Simon says, "I wonder where they would have gotten that impression?" and Gifford responds, "I can't think." It's supposed to be funny, but it's a little annoying; it's not like Chinese men don't fool around with prostitutes.

Gov eyes student volunteerism plan, more P.E. BY DAVE MCKINNEY:

Illinois high school students could be required to perform volunteer work in their communities in order to graduate and devote more class time to physical education under ideas floated Thursday by Gov. Blagojevich.

Community service seems a little like affirmative action in college to me--too much social tinkering rather than education. And there are a lot of things that people ought to know, like how to handle their finances, that they aren't generally taught in school.

Xinhua reports,

China's first astronaut Yang Liwei said in an interview on the China Central Television Thursday evening that "I did not see the Great Wall from space."

That's what I thought, but actually many human constructs can be seen from Earth orbit.

In China: Sky's no longer the limit, By Antoaneta Bezlova:

A surge in nationalistic pride seems to have drowned out questions being raised by some critics who say the space program is a costly and misplaced effort that merely repeats what other world powers achieved 40 years ago.

Asked about the price of such an ambitious trip by a country that still has millions earning less than US$1 a day, building contractor Ma Bin shrugged: "This is not America, where money comes from the taxpayers. This is money of the Communist Party - they will do with it what they decide. It is great they are investing in something that makes us proud."

Yes, the launch probably appeals to the masses. But Poor Ma Bin doesn't get it--where does he think the Communist Party's money comes from if not its citizens? Perhaps he's not paying any taxes.

John Pomfret claims that Beijing Supports Right to Own Property, Amass Farm Holdings:

China's top Communist Party leaders ended a four-day meeting Tuesday with promises to protect private property and allow farmers to amass large land holdings, key steps toward creating a more capitalist economy, state-run media said.

We'll see. And as the article suggests, corruption and and the abuse of poor farmers by local governments are a problem.

Organ music 'instils religious feelings' By Jonathan Amos: People who experience a sense of spirituality in church may be reacting to the extreme bass sound produced by some organ pipes.

Then there's this:

Researchers have found that frequences as low as one hertz (one cycle per second) have a definite effect on the inner ear, somehow short-circuiting its equilibrium and causing dizziness.

Infrasonically-induced dizziness may not be the stuff of paranoid fantasies, but it may yet turn out to be a serious problem.

Dangerous places, churches.

Civic-minded Taiwanese?

NPR's Richard Harris reports on How to Stop SARS? He discusses quarantine experiences in Taiwan, where over 150,000 people were asked to stay home for 10 days. Susan Maloney, a representative from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was positively impressed, crediting Taiwan's good preparation (providing food, mental health counseling, and financial support) because of previous natural disasters. She believes that people seemed to feel that they were helping solve a social problem, and indeed less than one percent violated quarantine. Furthermore, in his report, Harris cites Lawrence Gostin, saying "The people of Taiwan share a community spirit that Gostin doesn't see in the United States." Gostin says Americans used to pride ourselves on civic duty and community relationships, but don't anymore.

I find the report is overly positive about Taiwanese public-spiritedness. Those subject to quarantine were paid a stipend equivalent to the average Taiwan salary; fines ranged from US$1000-$8000, which is a lot of money for most Taiwanese. So much for civic duty. It's almost as good as having a corrupt politico buy your vote.