Mostly white

I imagine many people will find it disappointing that so few minorities are dying, because now they can't say it's a racist war. Nonetheless, the blurb for the article accompanying the original of the graphic below states,

The roster of the dead is a portrait of a military in transition, with ever-widening roles and costs for part-time soldiers, women and Hispanics.

Power Struggle

Feng Liang reports

A couple of rare dissenting websites that indirectly criticized the attitudes, policies and cronies of China's military strongman, Jiang Zemin, were shut down early this month. But, voila, thanks to the apparent intervention of his rival, moderate reformist President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, they are back in business. For how long, no one knows, as the plot thickens on the eve of the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP's) crucial meeting and battleground in the middle of this month.

Feng also provides links to the two: China Petition Network, and Supervision By Public Opinion of China. By giving them more publicity, I'm probably contributing to their shut-down.

Racist?

JIM YARDLEY on Chinese race-based thinking:

Liu Xiang 刘翔, a high hurdler, has proved what many Chinese have long felt was not possible: that yellow men can jump, and sprint, too.

"It is a kind of miracle," Mr. Liu, 21, exulted at a post-race news conference after tying the world record and winning gold in the 110-meter high hurdles. "It is unbelievable - a Chinese, an Asian, has won this event."

He added: "It is a proud moment not only for China, but for Asia and all people who share the same yellow skin color."

In many countries, particularly the United States, this kind of racial stereotyping often touches a raw nerve in society. But among Chinese, the proposition that genetic differences have made Asian athletes slower in sprinting than their American, African or European rivals is a widely accepted maxim, if an unproven one.

The Communist Party apparently thinks so, too. At the midway point of the Athens Games, with China in a surprisingly tight competition with the United States for the lead in gold medals, the party's chief newspaper, People's Daily, cautioned that track and field events were about to begin.

While Chinese are "suited" to sports like Ping-Pong, badminton and gymnastics that require agility and technique, the newspaper noted, purely athletic events are different. Chinese had "congenital shortcomings" and "genetic differences" that created disadvantages against black and white athletes.

In an effort to give this halftime pep talk a positive spin, the commentary urged Chinese athletes to work harder. "If Chinese people want to make their mark in the major Olympic competitions, they have to break through the fatalism that race determines everything," the newspaper advised...

There are no credible scientific studies to underpin the idea that Asians are physically inferior to other athletes in sprinting. Nor are Chinese alone in succumbing to ingrained racial beliefs: the Olympics victory of the white American sprinter Jeremy Wariner in the 400-meter dash startled a fair number of people in the United States. He was the first white winner of the event in 40 years.

Crazy.

Update
This looks like one of the articles that YARDLEY's quoting. It's titled 别拿短处跟人家比 (Don't Use Our Shortcomings to Compare Us to Others). The author 萧鸣 points out that someone who at 185 cm. (about 6' 1") really stands out from the crowd 鹤立鸡群 ("a stork among chickens") in China is just an ordinary-sized person in Greece, the author goes on to say,

由此看来，先天的不足，人种基因的区别，使得中国运动员在许多运动项目上吃亏。篮球、排球、足球等大球项目尤其如此。在田径等素质、力量型运动项目，同黑人、白人选手相比，中国人也无多少遗传优势。比来比去，我们似乎只适合于乒乓球、羽毛球、体操、射击等灵巧型体育项目。

中国有句古话，尺有所短，寸有所长。在体育竞技奥运大赛中，中国人要想有作为，必须打破人种决定一切的宿命论。既然身高体重非我们所长，中国运动员就应在快、灵、变方面多下功夫，在集体配合与顽强斗志上胜人一筹，而不是一味地挑选大个子追赶人家。

As for the Liu Xiang quote, this is one source:

今天，中国人向世界证明了他们也可以像其他人一样跑得快。我希望这个结果可以改变认为亚洲国家或有着黄皮肤的亚洲人就一定跑不过欧洲人或美洲人的看法。

Links would have been nice.

We will bury you

KEITH BRADSHER reports the Chiang family plans to finally bury Chiang Kai-shek 蔣介石 and his son, Chiang Ching-kuo 蔣經國, failing to identify the latter as the person responsible for introducing democracy to Taiwan, probably because

the family's decision has awakened old ghosts of a sort: the anger and resentment of the relatives of tens of thousands of people who were tortured or killed or both under martial law, in the name of eradicating Communist sympathizers.

I can't help but feel all the fuss over corpses is a little silly. Then there's this:

A small group in southern Taiwan has even erected a little temple for the worship of Chiang Kai-shek, whom they revere as divine.

That's what happened to admired officials in ancient China.

Wolcott Weeps

James Wolcott roots for damaging hurricanes, but This Time, Man Defeated Nature.

Boost physical activity

In The Glycemic Index, Simpler, Sally Squires notes,

In China, where white rice is a staple, rates of obesity and diabetes have been relatively low until recently. Not only is a more Western diet creeping into the country, but physical activity is declining. The glycemic index "probably doesn't matter at all, provided that you keep your body mass index under 23," Jenkins said. "If you stay skinny and physically active, you don't have to worry about all this nonsense."

As Inas Rashad and Michael Grossman argued, people are better off when they're poor. So which presidential candidate will impoverish us?

The current deficit is not a record breaker

Deinonychus antirrhopus writes,

...if we look at deficits as a percentage of GDP this current deficit is even "smaller" in that it comes in as the 17th highest deficit. The years 1941, 1942, 1943, 1944, 1945, 1976, 1982, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1990, 1991, 1992 and 1993 are all higher as a percentage of GDP.

When will we hear this on the news? I think it's innumeracy as much as anti-Bush sentiment in the media. They similarly spout numbers not adjusted for inflation with regard to gas prices.

Why oh why doesn't J. criticize Kerry?

J. writes,

...in the post-World War II world, it seems clear that the U.S. has gained much more than it has lost from the economic development of its trading partners. The U.S. as a whole benefits enormously from the fact that Japan is a rich industrial economy rather than something like Indonesia. The producer and consumer surplus the U.S. gains from trade with rich western Europe far exceeds what it gains from trade with poor eastern Europe. The way to bet seems to be that examples like the growth of other producers to compete with the cotton south are the exception, and win-win benefits are the rule.

If this is not to be the case in the future, there needs to be an argument made as to why the normal post-World War II pattern will be broken. And I haven't heard anybody make such an argument yet.

Moreover, it is important to distinguish between situations in which foreign countries do not acquire the capabilities to produce goods traditionally made in the U.S., and situations in which the U.S. imposes tariffs and quotas to protect domestic industries. The first may leave America better off: we sell them good stuff at expensive near-monopoly prices. The second does not: we can't make them buy our (now overpriced) exports, and trade barriers simply cut off the benefits from mutual specialization in areas of comparative advantage that David Ricardo identified long ago.

This leaves the question of what is the appropriate public policy response to successful high-tech "outsourcing": Imposing tariffs and quotas to protect domestic demand is surely a bad idea, for standard Ricardian reasons. Attempting to slow the rate at which modern technologies are transferred to other countries is surely a bad idea too: there is no surer way to store up huge amounts of economic and political trouble for the future than for the United States to embark on a policy of trying to slow economic growth in India, China, and elsewhere.

I think that the correct policy response is the one outlined by Robert Reich in his Work of Nations of a decade and a half ago: First, get our people out of industry segments where we are about to lose comparative advantage and where wages are about to take a big dive--this is the reason we Democrats like various forms of Trade Adjustment Assistance, for those who work in such industries are about to get shafted and have done nothing to deserve it (and have the ability to impose enormous costs on the rest of us through trade barriers if the political dice roll their way). Second, make sure the public investments in basic research are there to spark applied research and development to create new industries and new forms of high-tech in which our labor and our capital can be very productive (NIH, NSF, DARPA anyone?). Third, remember that the principal determinants of our prosperity and our productivity come from within: get public investment in infrastructure right, private savings and investment high, and investment in education high as well.

Remember: few would be worried about "outsourcing" if the U.S. unemployment rate were still close to four percent, rather than at the above six percent level that it is. To the extent that a structural cure is being proposed for what is really a macroeconomic problem, do not expect it to end well. And remember: a network-design job artificially kept in Sacramento when it could be done more cheaply in Singapore produces extra income for a network engineer in Sacramento, but has costs as well: in a diminished capital inflow that reduces construction and the earnings of construction workers, in higher costs for businesses installing their networks that shows up in lower salaries they pay their workers, in lower earnings and stock prices for HP. Given the all-thumbs hand the U.S. government has to try to guide industrial development through tools other than maintaining the infrastructure of a market society and the provision of basic research and other public goods, it is hard to imagine that the costs to the country as a whole will not greatly outweigh the benefits.

I'm skeptical about the help the gov't can provide to those who lose their jobs, but certainly Kerry could use this argument instead of whipping up anti-trade sentiment. Or maybe he can't win without it. Sigh.

This sounds convincing, but...

Asian values lead suicidal parents to kill kids

"In 2001, 2,500 Taiwanese committed suicide. Of those, there were 18 parent-child suicides, accounting for 0.72 per cent of the total number of suicides," it said.

"This is three times higher than the number of parent-[child] suicides in the US," the report said.

Most of the Taiwanese parents were middle-aged when they killed their children and committed suicide, the report said. They ended their lives for reasons of unemployment, debt, marital troubles or mental problems.

The children they killed were mainly infants.

Taiwan mothers are twice as likely as fathers to kill their children when they commit suicide.

The high number of parent-child suicides results from Asian traditions, in which adults are seen as having the right to decide their children's life and death.

When the parents want to commit suicide, they take along their children under the excuse that if they left their children behind, no one would care for them, the report said.

Less than one percent is a pretty small figure to hang your hat on, though.

Where the sun don't shine

Seoul Tries Hard to Keep Its 'Sunshine Policy' Free of Clouds
By JAMES BROOKE

Being able to promote an image of peace and harmony on the peninsula helps South Korea keep its bond ratings low and offers a justification for reduced military spending. So South Korea goes to great length to avoid offending North Korea.

After North Korea's military grumbled this summer that when its soldiers looked across the demilitarized zone at night they saw neon-illuminated crosses atop churches, South Korea unplugged the crosses...

Few South Korean overtures are reciprocated. For example, under bills now in the National Assembly, South Koreans would be allowed to freely access North Korean Web sites and to travel to North Korea. South Korea's official defense papers would no longer describe North Korea as "the main enemy." Other bills would end national security laws banning advocacy of North Korea's Communist system.

None of these moves has been met with a wisp of a concession from North Korea. Instead, North Korea recently restricted cellphone use and travel to China.

"What is needed is a phased development program that draws the North Koreans out and opens them up," said C. Kenneth Quinones, an American aid worker who recently spent several days in Pyongyang, North Korea's capital. "But South Korea is doing a hodgepodge that is not going anywhere. The North Koreans are getting everything they need, without giving anything back."

The South Korean Unification Ministry likes to publicize the growth in inter-Korean travel and trade. But almost all the travel is from South Korea to North Korea. Much of the trade consists of South Korean gifts of rice to the North.

During the first six months of this year, 9,866 Koreans crossed the border for visits, a 74 percent increase over the same period of last year. But 9,545, or 97 percent, were South Koreans traveling to North Korea, compared with 321 North Koreans traveling to South Korea.

Those numbers do not count the 1,000 South Korean tourists a week who cross the demilitarized zone in buses to visit Mount Kumgang, a tourism enclave in the North. With minimal cost to North Korea, the resort was built with hundreds of millions of dollars invested by a South Korean company, Hyundai Asan. Even though North Korea levies a tourist tax estimated at $100 a head, South Korea's government promised in August to spend $2.6 million to build and pave roads in the area.

Mount Kumgang "is just a cash cow, it has no impact on the rest of North Korea," said Mr. Quinones, a former American diplomat who lived in Pyongyang in the mid-1990's.

...South Korea's government goes to great lengths to promote the image of reconciliation taking hold on the Korean peninsula.

In August, the two Koreas prepared to present a unified front to world television viewers, marching together behind a neutral "unification flag" at the opening ceremony of the Athens Olympics. But North Korea realized it did not have an athlete tall enough to match South Korea's flag bearer, a 6-foot-1 volleyball player named Koo Min Jung.

South Korea broke with protocol and agreed to let Kim Sung Ho, a North Korean coach, be a flag bearer. Mr. Kim, a 50-year-old former basketball player, is an inch taller than Ms. Koo. He also stood head and shoulder above most of North Korea's athletes, members of a generation whose growth was stunted during the famine of the mid-1990's.

Shiver.

Time for a reformation

Siege Prompts Self - Criticism in Arab Media

Muslims worldwide are the main perpetrators of terrorism, a humiliating and painful truth that must be acknowledged, a prominent Arab writer and television executive wrote Saturday, as Middle East media and officials expressed horror at the bloody rebel siege of a Russian school.

Unusually forthright self-criticism followed the end of the hostage crisis, along with warnings that such actions inflict more damage to the image of Islam than all its enemies could hope. Arab leaders and Muslim clerics denounced the school seizure as unjustifiable and expressed their sympathy.

Russian commandos stormed the school Friday in Beslan, Russia; it had been taken over by rebels demanding independence for Chechnya. Russian officials said Saturday that the death toll was in the hundreds -- many of them children.

Images of terrified young survivors being carried from the scene aired repeatedly on Arab TV stations. Pictures of dead and wounded children ran on front pages of Arab newspapers Saturday.

"Holy warriors" from the Middle East long have supported fellow Muslims fighting in Chechnya, and Russian officials said nine or 10 Arabs were among militants killed.

"Our terrorist sons are an end-product of our corrupted culture," Abdulrahman al-Rashed, general manager of Al-Arabiya television wrote in his daily column published in the pan-Arab Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper. It ran under the headline, "The Painful Truth: All the World Terrorists are Muslims!"

Al-Rashed ran through a list of recent attacks by Islamic extremist groups -- in Russia, Iraq, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen -- many of which are influenced by the ideology of Osama Bin Laden, the Saudi-born leader of the al-Qaida terror network.

"Most perpetrators of suicide operations in buses, schools and residential buildings around the world for the past 10 years have been Muslims," he wrote. Muslims will be unable to cleanse their image unless "we admit the scandalous facts," rather than offer condemnations or justifications.

"The picture is humiliating, painful and harsh for all of us," al-Rashed wrote.

Contributors to Islamic Web sites known for their extremist content had mixed reactions on the hostage crisis, with some praising the separatists. Others wrote that people should wait until the militants had been identified before implicating Arabs in the drama.

Ahmed Bahgat, an Egyptian Islamist, wrote in his column in Egypt's leading pro-government newspaper, Al-Ahram, that hostage-takers in Russia as well as in Iraq are only harming Islam.

"If all the enemies of Islam united together and decided to harm it ... they wouldn't have ruined and harmed its image as much as the sons of Islam have done by their stupidity, miscalculations, and misunderstanding of the nature of this age," Bahgat wrote.

The horrifying images of the dead and wounded Russian students "showed Muslims as monsters who are fed by the blood of children and the pain of their families."

Mohammed Mahdi Akef, leader of Egypt's largest Islamic group, the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, said in general, kidnappings may be justified, but killings are not. He said the school siege did not fit the Islamic concept of jihad, or holy war.

"What happened yesterday is not jihad because our Islam obligates us to respect the souls of human beings; it is not about taking them away," Akef told The Associated Press.

Ali Abdullah, a Bahraini scholar who follows the ultraconservative Salafi stream of Islam, condemned the school attack as "un-Islamic," but insisted Muslims weren't behind it.

"I have no doubt in my mind that this is the work of the Israelis who want to tarnish the image of Muslims and are working alongside Russians who have their own agenda against the Muslims in Chechnya," said Abdullah.

An editorial in the Saudi English-language Arab News put some blame for the bloody end to the school siege on Russian President Vladimir Putin, saying he couldn't afford to lose his "tough-man image." But it added that "the Chechens, with the choice of their targets, had put themselves in a position where no one would shed tears when the punishment came. They reached a new low when they chose toddlers as bargaining chips."

Heads of state from Egypt, Lebanon, Kuwait and Yemen offered their sympathy Friday to Russian officials and to the families of people caught up in the hostage drama. A prominent Muslim cleric also denounced it.

"What is the guilt of those children? Why should they be responsible for your conflict with the government?" Egypt's top Muslim cleric, Grand Sheik Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, was quoted as saying during a Friday sermon in Banha, 30 miles north of Cairo.

"You are taking Islam as a cover and it is a deceptive cover; those who carry out the kidnappings are criminals, not Muslims," Tantawi, who heads Al-Azhar University, the highest authority in the Sunni Islamic world, was quoted by Egypt's Middle East News agency as saying.

It's not a question of human rights

If you can believe the AP, mug shots of litterers

are posted on the Taipei government's Web site, along with an appeal to the public for help in identifying the messy offenders.

So far, four people are in the gallery of shame. There's an elderly man in brown-framed glasses and a blazer. A laughing man in his 30's who appears to show no contrition. And a man in his 20s who seems to be fleeing. All are guilty of flicking their cigarette butts on the ground, the city says.

Police snapped their photos because they refused to provide ID so that tickets could be issued, according to the Department of Environmental Protection's Web site.

But some think the city's policy, which began in May, is heavy handed.

"It's an obvious invasion of human rights," activist Wu Hau-jen told the Apple Daily newspaper. "I wonder which idiot came up with the idea."

I can't find the pictures, but this kind of reaction is typical selfish Taiwanese crap. It seems as if anytime you ask a Taiwanese to be public-spirited, they whine about human rights. Is the right to litter a basic human right? Oh, wait, that's in simplified characters, and anyway, it's from the UN, to which Taiwan doesn't belong. I'm sure if the commies let them in, Taiwanese conditions would be just as good as China's. (That's a joke, by the way. Despite its problems, Taiwan is a better place to live than China.)

靡不有初，鮮克有終

凡事都有個開始，但經常不了了之，沒個結果。Everything has a beginning, but some things never end. From the Odes 詩經.

Extreme ironing

Yeah, it's dumb, but I like it.

Movies again

I didn't cotton to Odd Man Out (1947), and didn't even finish it. The Interview (1998) was good, but not quite as good as I had expected (I made the mistake of reading the blurb.) Ghost World (2000) was hugely over-rated; I had thought I'd love it. Gosford Park (2001) was pretty good. In a meeting with an audience, one of the actors asks Altman if he's an American. Haw! And finally, Black Hawk Down (2001), which wasn't bad, particularly given that Jerry Bruckheimer was involved.

Three election sites

Tradesports, the Iowa markets, and the Electoral Vote Predictor. I suspect they're more reliable than polls.

THE END OF CONSERVATISM

I generally find Andrew Sullivan a little too shrill, but this is convincing and depressing:

...conservatism as we have known it is now over. People like me who became conservatives because of the appeal of smaller government and more domestic freedom are now marginalized in a big-government party, bent on using the power of the state to direct people's lives, give them meaning and protect them from all dangers. Just remember all that Bush promised last night: an astonishingly expensive bid to spend much more money to help people in ways that conservatives once abjured. He pledged to provide record levels of education funding, colleges and healthcare centers in poor towns, more Pell grants, seven million more affordable homes, expensive new HSAs, and a phenomenally expensive bid to reform the social security system. I look forward to someone adding it all up, but it's easily in the trillions. And Bush's astonishing achievement is to make the case for all this new spending, at a time of chronic debt (created in large part by his profligate party), while pegging his opponent as the "tax-and-spend" candidate. The chutzpah is amazing. At this point, however, it isn't just chutzpah. It's deception. To propose all this knowing full well that we cannot even begin to afford it is irresponsible in the deepest degree. I've said it before and I'll say it again: the only difference between Republicans and Democrats now is that the Bush Republicans believe in Big Insolvent Government and the Kerry Democrats believe in Big Solvent Government. By any measure, that makes Kerry - especially as he has endorsed the critical pay-as-you-go rule on domestic spending - easily the choice for fiscal conservatives. It was also jaw-dropping to hear this president speak about tax reform. Bush? He has done more to lard up the tax code with special breaks and new loopholes than any recent president. On this issue - on which I couldn't agree more - I have to say I don't believe him. Tax reform goes against the grain of everything this president has done so far. Why would he change now?

This is great. There are things about both candidates I dislike, and at least one of them has got to lose, right?

Does Globalization Work?

Arvind Panagariya reviews Martin Wolf's Why Globalization Works?

Flip a coin

THE UNPOLITICAL ANIMAL by LOUIS MENAND cites the political scientist Philip Converse's 1964 article on "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics"

Converse claimed that only around ten per cent of the public has what can be called, even generously, a political belief system. He named these people “ideologues,” by which he meant not that they are fanatics but that they have a reasonable grasp of “what goes with what”—of how a set of opinions adds up to a coherent political philosophy. Non-ideologues may use terms like “liberal” and “conservative,” but Converse thought that they basically don’t know what they’re talking about, and that their beliefs are characterized by what he termed a lack of “constraint”: they can’t see how one opinion (that taxes should be lower, for example) logically ought to rule out other opinions (such as the belief that there should be more government programs). About forty-two per cent of voters, according to Converse’s interpretation of surveys of the 1956 electorate, vote on the basis not of ideology but of perceived self-interest. The rest form political preferences either from their sense of whether times are good or bad (about twenty-five per cent) or from factors that have no discernible “issue content” whatever. Converse put twenty-two per cent of the electorate in this last category. In other words, about twice as many people have no political views as have a coherent political belief system.

Just because someone’s opinions don’t square with what a political scientist recognizes as a political ideology doesn’t mean that those opinions aren’t coherent by the lights of some more personal system of beliefs. But Converse found reason to doubt this possibility. When pollsters ask people for their opinion about an issue, people generally feel obliged to have one. Their answer is duly recorded, and it becomes a datum in a report on “public opinion.” But, after analyzing the results of surveys conducted over time, in which people tended to give different and randomly inconsistent answers to the same questions, Converse concluded that “very substantial portions of the public” hold opinions that are essentially meaningless—off-the-top-of-the-head responses to questions they have never thought about, derived from no underlying set of principles. These people might as well base their political choices on the weather. And, in fact, many of them do.

Findings about the influence of the weather on voter behavior are among the many surveys and studies that confirm Converse’s sense of the inattention of the American electorate. In election years from 1952 to 2000, when people were asked whether they cared who won the Presidential election, between twenty-two and forty-four per cent answered “don’t care” or “don’t know.” In 2000, eighteen per cent said that they decided which Presidential candidate to vote for only in the last two weeks of the campaign; five per cent, enough to swing most elections, decided the day they voted...

He mentions three theories, but this first one is my favorite:

The first is that electoral outcomes, as far as “the will of the people” is concerned, are essentially arbitrary. The fraction of the electorate that responds to substantive political arguments is hugely outweighed by the fraction that responds to slogans, misinformation, “fire alarms” (sensational news), “October surprises” (last-minute sensational news), random personal associations, and “gotchas.” Even when people think that they are thinking in political terms, even when they believe that they are analyzing candidates on the basis of their positions on issues, they are usually operating behind a veil of political ignorance. They simply don’t understand, as a practical matter, what it means to be “fiscally conservative,” or to have “faith in the private sector,” or to pursue an “interventionist foreign policy.” They can’t hook up positions with policies. From the point of view of democratic theory, American political history is just a random walk through a series of electoral options. Some years, things turn up red; some years, they turn up blue.

So awful it makes me laugh. Via aldaily

It's a miracle I found this article

Michael Shermer writes,

The Law of Large Numbers guarantees that one-in-a-million miracles happen 295 times a day in America.