Is this the criterion?

Parity in Style, Contrast in Substance By John F. Harris

Candidates should be judged on the ease and persuasiveness with which they can converse in the language of the Middle American kitchen table.

The reality of this year's candidates -- two sons of privileged families, two Yale graduates, two millionaires -- is that they are far removed from that table.

Doesn't policy matter?

Circle Swim!

This is the rule at many crowded swimming pools, like Boston University, which includes suggestions like the following:

• All swimmers must circle swim. (This means that you should always be on the right half of the lane.) Slower swimmers should stop at the wall and allow faster swimmers to pass.


• Lanes are designated 'slow' (lanes 1 and 5), 'medium' (lanes 2 and 4), and 'fast' (lane 3). Please select the appropriate lane for your ability.


• Water walking or running is allowed in the outside (slow) lanes and only if it is not disruptive to lap swimmers.

This morning the pool was rather crowded, partially due to a couple of walkers, and so when the two of us in our lane were joined by a third, I was able to convince them to circle swim. The trouble is, we're spoiled here, because we're used to having a small number of swimmers, and people think it's an imposition to share a lane with just one other person, much less two or three.

A Survey of Chinese Peasants

Chen Guidi 陈桂棣 & Chuntao 春桃 have received a Lettre Ulysses Award for A Survey of Chinese Peasants (中国农民调查), which has apparently been translated by Flora Drew, although I can't find a published version. I thought I mentioned this earlier, but anyway, EastSouthWestNorth has much more on what they call The Chinese Peasant Study.

Yech.

Kerry and Religion: Pressure Builds for Public Discussions

Aides attribute Mr. Kerry's visible discomfort in discussing religion to his Catholic upbringing in reserved New England, a contrast to Mr. Bush's spiritual rebirth into the more confessional tradition of evangelical Christianity. Also, pollsters say that the secular liberals, including many Jews, who make up part of the Democrats' base often recoil at blending religion and politics.

Polls suggest that Mr. Kerry may be paying a price for his privacy, with nearly three-quarters of the public wanting a president of 'strong religious faith,' and a swath of independent voters who identify as religious swaying toward Mr. Bush.

As a matter of fact, this secularism on the part of the Democrats' base is something that Glenn Reynolds neglects to mention when he talks of the religious streak running through US politics. By not mentioning it, I don't think he's being entirely honest, although by mentioning it, the NYT is playing to its readers. And as the NYT article goes on to say, Kerry wears a small crucifix around his neck and carries a rosary and Bible on the road, proving Reynold's point.

Baudrillardian irony

In The Village Voice: Film: Autumn Sonata, J. HOBERMAN writes,

Jia's rootless young adults are finally in the big city—and in a dizzying Baudrillardian irony, employed at a Beijing theme park that, with its replicas of global tourist attractions, promises "a new world every day."

What the hell is "Baudrillardian irony"? Baudrillard himself speaks impenetrable bullshit:

Though I like the term well enough, parody is still perhaps a little too theatrical, too specular, in spite of everything. The parodic still has a certain power. It is true that I use the term irony a lot more, and what is more, I do not use it in the subjective sense any more. It is no longer subjective or romantic irony, nor humour in that sense. Rather it is a form of irony that is pataphysical, but objective. Before, it was subjective irony. It was to some extent connected to critique, to a critical, romantic, negative point of view, to a form of disillusion. The new irony seems to me rather to be an excess of positivity, of reality. And that is why I call it pataphysical because pataphysics, Alfred Jarry's Ubu is precisely that. It is the too full, the too much of itself, it is an absolute, total over-awareness, positivity without fault. Ubu's big gut will clearly explode one day. And that is metaphysical irony, the irony of our world, and it is related to a kind of protuberance and excrescence of the system. It is no longer ridiculous in the classic theatrical sense, it is pataphysical. Ubu swallowed his own superego.

Everything is at the same time untouchable and non-existent, and that is the irony of non-existence, of in-significance. It is more radical than the Other. The Other was still, and that, moreover, is what gave it beauty and charm, complicity in the object, whereas irony now pertains to events themselves. The events in the East, where all of a sudden, at a time when one could have believed in the fall of capital, we witness the fall of communism. And that seems to be an ironic event to me, perfectly unforeseeable, and nevertheless dependent on a fantastic logic. It is that irony, rather, that I would insist on now. But it is difficult to thematize because it no longer lends itself to laughter, nor even to a smile really! Perhaps there is an object somewhere that smiles, but we do not know it.

In Unplugging The Matrix, Matt Feeney explains,

Baudrillard is the French postmodernist who comes closest to the stony spirit (and the philosophical sophistication) of the freshman dorm: "Dude, what if this all isn't, like, really reality, but instead it's, like, a simulation of reality?"

Works for me.

Oh, and

Pataphysics is the branch of philosophy that deals with imaginary solutions, and was coined by the French absurdist Alfred Jarry.

As those who recall Maxwell's Silver Hammer may know.

Zhuangzi was ironic before Bodhiretard

昔者莊周夢為胡蝶，栩栩然胡蝶也，自喻適志與！不知周也。俄然覺，則籧籧然周也。不知周之夢為胡蝶與，胡蝶之夢為周與﹖周與胡蝶，則必有分矣。此之謂物化。

From Burton Watson's Complete Works Of Chuang Tzu:

Once Chuang Chou dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was Chuang Chou. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Chuang Chou. But he didn't know if he was Chuang Chou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Chou. Between Chuang Chou and a butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things.

Sprawl May Harm Health

Sprawl May Harm Health, Study Finds (washingtonpost.com) By Rob Stein

People who live in sprawling communities tend to suffer more health problems, according to the first study to document a link between the world of strip malls, cul-de-sacs and subdivisions and a broad array of ailments.

The study, which analyzed data on more than 8,600 Americans in 38 metropolitan areas -- including the Washington region -- found that rates of arthritis, asthma, headaches and other complaints increased with the degree of sprawl. Living in areas with the least amount of sprawl, compared with living in areas with the most, was like adding about four years to people's lives in terms of their health, the study found...

But critics dismissed the findings, saying the study was flawed and the link between sprawl and health was tenuous at best.

"I remain a skeptic of the research, in part because the results they find are weak," said Samuel R. Staley, a senior fellow at the Reason Foundation, a Los Angeles-based libertarian group. "This study seems particularly prone to spurious results -- results that are statistically related but really don't tell us much about causes."

Peter Gordon, a professor in the school of policy, planning and development at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles agreed, calling the study "junk science." The areas studied, for example, are so large they could not distinguish important neighborhood differences, he said.

"Describing places this large via a simple ad hoc 'sprawl' index is nuts," Gordon wrote in an e-mail. "People have been suburbanizing for a very long time. Yet, life expectancy keeps getting longer."

This is old news, but I was thinking about as I walked home yesterday. We live in a small university town, and although many (most?) of us live within walking distance of campus, I don't see many others taking advantage of the opportunity to walk to school. On the other hand, I have visited friends living in big-city suburbs who live in residential neighborhoods that are small conclaves with or without sidewalks, where the only walk one could take would be slightly bigger than a tiger pacing in its cage.

Man, this is spooky

Starting with Intifada's Legacy at Year 4: A Morass of Faded Hopes, I mostly changed Arafat to Chen Shui-bian, the intifada to Chen's administration, and Israel to China, plus a few judicious cuts, and ended up with A-bian's Legacy at Year 4: A Morass of Faded Hopes. Of course it's not nearly that bad yet, but who knows what the future will bring.

Tyler Cowen writes, despite the negative economic consequences of the intifada,

many Palestinians support the intifada, and obviously some are willing to die for it. I conclude that economists need a better theory of human irrationality. Analogies from expressive voting theory suggest that (many) Palestinians support the intifada because their voices are not decisive. The support is seen as a kind of "cheap talk," leading to a collective insanity which perhaps no single person intended. But do individual Palestinians who support the intifada really mind that so many other people go along with them? Doubtful, the contrary is sooner true, namely that people prefer that their peers follow their position.

In my (admittedly unorthodox) view the degree of decisiveness is not the key to determining the degree of human rationality. I would sooner believe that the amount of pride at stake is what turns on the irrational part of our brains, whether we are decisive or not.

Oh, and by the way, the substitute for terrorists financed by outsiders became the US--which is probably how many Mainland Chinese view us in this context.

Save More...

In Saving Freedom, Arnold Kling argues that

the need for savings has grown tremendously in the past fifty years. However, because of Social Security and Medicare, many people feel insulated from this dramatic increase in the need for savings. In reality, Social Security and Medicare are already in deficit, and the situation will worsen dramatically going forward.

We can either fund our increased post-retirement spending needs individually, out of personal savings, or collectively, out of taxes on the incomes of those who create income and wealth. In the absence of reform to Social Security and Medicare, we will choose the route of higher taxes, with potentially disastrous consequences for economic growth and personal freedom.

So far, so good. But he also links to What Would Jesus Spend? BY DEIRDRE MCCLOSKEY. She says if people lived in a more thrifty way,

Nothing would befall the market economy in the long run, says the modern economist, if we tempered our desires to a thrifty style of life--one old Volvo and a little house with a vegetable garden and a moderate amount of tofu and jug wine from the co-op. The balloon theory sounds plausible if you focus on an irrelevant mental experiment, namely, that tomorrow, suddenly, without warning, we would all begin to follow Jesus in what we buy. Such a sudden conversion would no doubt be a shock to sales of SUVs at Ford and Toyota. But, the economist observes, people in a Christian Economy would at length find other employment, or choose more leisure.

In the new, luxury-less economy it would still be a fine thing to have light bulbs and paved roads and other fruits of enterprise, and more of these would be better than less. 'In equilibrium'--a phrase with resonance in economics similar to 'by God's grace' in Abrahamic religions--the economy would encourage specialization to satisfy human desires in much the same way it does now. People would purchase Bibles in koine Greek and spirit-enhancing trips to Yosemite instead of paperback Harlequin romances and package tours to Disney World, but they would still value high-speed presses for the books and airplanes for the trips.

I manage to save more than the average American myself, but this entails not spending money. (There's a novel concept). In fact, my first reaction on seeing her reference to Nick Hornby's How to Be Good was to see if the library had it.

...Because We Can't Afford "Health Insurance"

Arnold Kling wrote You Call This Health Insurance?, where he claims that

One of the most serious impediments to rational debate on health care is the misuse of the term "health insurance." What we call health "insurance" in this country was never designed to insure the consumer. Instead, its purpose is to insure steady, reliable incomes for health care providers...

What Blue Cross and Blue Shield pioneered was a "split-the-check" approach to health care. An equivalent plan for restaurant meals would be that instead of paying for your meal, you would pay an annual premium to "Blue Eats," which would in turn reimburse restaurants for their costs, plus a profit margin. Every individual member of "Blue Eats" would have an incentive to eat out a lot and order the most expensive items on the menu, because the cost is shared among all of the members of "Blue Eats."

The other approach he mentions is where a consumer gets someone else to cover the cost. What we think of as insurance is not really insurance.

One of the most important things to understand about insurance is that it is necessarily related to the concept of risk. A pool of people get together and share the risk of a rare event that affects one person at a time.

Insurance is only possible when the event that triggers a claim is highly improbable. The more likely the event is to occur, the less insurable it becomes.

A commenter on Kling's blog links to Why Health Care Costs Too Much by Stan Liebowitz, which explains

The excessive costs of our current medical system can be classified into three major categories:

• The first, and by far the largest excess cost, is due to the current overuse of medical resources by patients. Overuse is the rational response of consumers who do not have to pay the entire cost of the medical services they use. The causes of those excess costs are Medicaid, Medicare, and tax laws that provide incentives for individuals to have their employers purchase their medical care in the form of private health insurance.

• The second category of excess cost consists of administrative and paperwork costs that are unnecessary for the provision of health care, but that have come into existence because of the current patchwork of third-party payers and their attempts to control their increasing costs by closely monitoring the behavior of doctors and patients. Even worse is the fact that those cost-containment activities do not seem to have contained costs very well.

• The third excess cost is associated with the fear of malpractice suits. Administering medically unnecessary tests and procedures helps to insulate doctors and hospitals from the potential wrath of patients or their families when inevitable accidents occur in medical treatment or when treatments just do not work.

The Virtues of Linguistic Isolation

Study Shows Health Benefit for Immigrants By NINA BERNSTEIN.

...linguistic isolation helps protect them from the higher rates of obesity, asthma, and adolescent risk-taking that afflict native-born and Americanized children.

Though the report also cautions that the language barriers make it harder for children to get the health insurance and education they need, it finds that foreign-born children are healthier when they arrive in the United States than those of the same age who were born here.

In fact, the longer immigrant children stay in America, adopting the diet and lifestyle of their peers, the unhealthier they are likely to become, according to the report, a synthesis of several national studies by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, a California philanthropy that studies the well-being of children...

Americans tend to think of adolescence as a developmental period when it is common to experiment and take risks, some researchers say. Among first-generation immigrant teenagers, 8 percent report using three or more controlled substances. That figure rises to 17 percent in the second generation and to a quarter of native-born white adolescents with native-born parents.

"We give adolescents great autonomy," Professor Harris said. "When immigrants come here, they come from cultures where adolescence is not defined that way. As they assimilate and incorporate the U.S. norms, their involvement in less healthy behaviors increases."

Of course, there is a downside.

榮棧 BBQ & 老四川

We went to Chicago and went to the Phoenix (2131 S. Archer Ave.) for dim sum and later had dinner at Mandarin Chef/Lao Sze Chuan 老四川 in the mini-mall across the street (2172 S. Archer Ave.). We also brought back some roast duck from Wing Chan B.B.Q. in the same mini-mall (2157 S. China Pl.). Yum! Double Yum!

Where are Karmeier's ads?

Respublica links to an article on the Karmeier-Maag race. I've noticed a bunch of TV ads from Maag, striking a positiont in favor of tort reform. Where are Karmeier's ads? According to The Illinois Leader, the Illinois Supreme court is not "balanced":

The winner of the contest for Illinois' Supreme Court 5th Judicial District seat between Democrat Judge Gordon Maag from Glen Carbon (St. Clair County) and Republican Judge Lloyd Karmeier from Nashville (Washington County) could determine whether the court remains solidly in Democratic hands or emerges a more party-balanced panel.

Currently, five Democratic Supreme Court justices serve on the court with two Republicans -- Rita Garman and Bob Thomas. If Maag wins on November 2, the vote will remain solidly Democrat. If Karmeier wins, the Democrats would still maintain control, but the division would be four to three.

And someplace I thought I saw a note that Karmeier's election could shift the agenda of the state government.

China's domestic land grab

In China's Land Grabs Raise Specter of Popular Unrest, Edward Cody describes the struggle of peasants against officials who expropriate their land.

"The situation of peasants being deprived of their land is very serious in China," said Li Baiguang, director of the Beijing Qimin Research Center. Li, who has studied land seizures in Fujian and other rural provinces, added, "If the interests of the peasants cannot be properly protected and the conflicts cannot be settled, Chinese society might suffer from turbulence."

...a low-level Communist Party cadre caused a national sensation nearly two months ago by publishing an open letter accusing his superiors of blocking attempts to investigate similar land seizures in another suburb of Fuzhou. Within days, the letter was pulled from Web sites and the government-controlled press was ordered to stop reporting on it. The Fuzhou government said the official, Huang Jingao, had violated party rules. It ordered him to proceed with a self-examination of his errors, which a declaration said were caused by "individualism."

Individualism was a goal of the well-to-do professionals who, in the 1990s, built about 165 luxury houses on Xiao Guwei, an island in the Pearl River where it flows through booming Guangzhou 300 miles southwest of here. No two houses were the same, and most enjoyed serene views of the murky river that belied their nearness to the busy city center.

Cody earlier described Huang Jingao 黄金高's battle against corruption.

The Chinese version of the fruitcake

Chinese Commercialism Sends Mooncake Prices Into Orbit By Ralph Frammolino

Through advertising, slick packaging and a stunning array of new flavors, the traditional holiday dessert has been transformed into a modern-day status symbol.

And now the Chinese, to whom gift giving is a serious exercise in social etiquette, find themselves locked in a virtual mooncake arms race as they do their last-minute shopping for the pastries to give to friends, families and colleagues in time for tonight's annual moon festival dinner.

People are

cranking out mooncakes with increasingly exotic fillings — shark fin, mussels, crushed eggshells, salted beef soaked in liquor, abalone, even bits of swallows' nests.

There are sugar-free mooncakes, whole-grain mooncakes and Atkins diet mooncakes. There are Dove bar mooncakes and Haagen-Dazs mooncakes. For the metallurgically inclined, there's even the ornamental 9.5-gram mooncake made of gold, costing $225.

And that's only the half of it. Mooncakes now come packaged in individual boxes of carved jade or hand-polished wood. They are paired with expensive wines, fine porcelain tea sets, CDs — even cameras — in sets fetching as much as $1,210.

Yeah, I can live without the typical kind, but I have had some that weren't bad.

How to Help the Working Poor

David Warsh argues that solutions to help the working poor have little to do with the minimum wage. What is needed

is some combination of education and training reforms... [and] of various forms of financial support to individuals known as the "negative income tax" and exemplified by the child tax credit; and various subsidies to employers designed to increase the rewards to work -- the enhanced-wage jobs offered to scholarship students by universities being a case in point.

And he points out how the income threshold necessary to qualify for the child credit will climb from $10,000 to $11,000, putting out of the reach of many poor people.

A hero?

In Bullying Taiwan, Tim Lehmann critizes China's efforts to thwart Taiwan. He also points out how U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan bowed to a demand by China. Journalists had originally been scheduled to view--from inside the U.N. building--an address by Chen Shui-bian (via video-link from Taipei, because he's generally not allowed into the US). But without the consent of the head of the U.N. Correspondents Association, Annan forced them out of the building. Sure, the Chinese are being typically petty; this was after the Taiwanese bid to join the UN was rejected, at their behest. But Annan looks pretty bad, too.

It was curious that Chen should be singled out in not being allowed to speak at the UNCA. After all, the UNCA has traditionally been a "free speech zone," Jenkins pointed out to Annan, noting that the UNCA has in the past permitted a wide range of individuals and groups to speak on its premises, including a number of groups of dubious repute, such as the IRA, the Taliban, and the Iranian People's Mujahadeen.

Tim Lehmann also discusses a humiliation for Taiwan at the Paralympics:

Taiwan's first lady, Wu Shu-jen, arrived in Athens a week ago Sunday with the intention of leading Taiwan's delegation at the opening ceremonies of the 2004 Paralympic Games, a parallel event to the Olympics dedicated to athletes with disabilities. Wu, the emeritus president of the Chinese Taipei Paralympic Committee (CPTC), has been paralyzed from the waist down since 1985.

Once it became clear that Wu would lead Taiwan's athletes, China attempted to strong-arm the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) into revoking Wu's status as head of the "Chinese Taipei" (Taiwan's name at international events) team. China, which claims sovereignty over self-governing Taiwan, had averred that Wu's presence at the Paralympics would politicize the games.

Early in the week, the IPC bent to China's will and disqualified Wu from leading the team, stripping her of her National Paralympic Card on the ostensible grounds that she was not the official head of the CPTC. This decision, too, was taken at China's insistence, even though the IPC knew her status in August when it issued her the card. In response, Taiwan submitted an official protest to the IPC, pointing out that many of the other delegations to the games--including Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Japan, and Korea--were not headed by the presidents of their national paralympic committees.

My italics. So how does Lin Chieh-yu of the Taipei Times spin the humiliation? Huang returns a real hero

...one of the most famous heroes of Taiwan's delegation is not an athlete but the Deputy Secretary-General of the Presidential Office James Huang (黃志芳), who outmaneuvered China's diplomatic machinations and helped first lady Wu Shu-jen (吳淑珍) accomplish her trip to Athens.

Undiplomatic

Responding to criticism of Minister of Foreign Affairs Mark Chen's (陳唐山) blunt assessments of Singapore during his meeting with pro-independence activists on Monday, Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) spokesman Michel Lu (呂慶龍) yesterday said the foreign minister apologized for his inappropriate choice of words.

"I deeply apologize for the words I said which made others uncomfortable," Lu quoted Chen as saying.

In response to press queries on Chen's remarks, a spokesman for Singapore's Foreign Affairs Ministry said, "This is not the first time Singapore has stated our concerns about Taiwan. Many other countries also believe that Taiwan is pursuing a dangerous course towards independence. Resort[ing] to intemperate language cannot assuage these concerns."

Infuriated by his Singaporean counterpart George Yeo's criticism of Taiwan during the recent UN General Assembly, Chen called the city-state "a tiny nation no bigger than a piece of snot."

He also said, "Singapore holds China's lam pa (爛疤) with its hands, if I may use these ugly words."

In the Hoklo language, also known as Taiwanese, lam pa means testicles; saying that someone holds another's lam pa means that the former is fawning over the latter...

[A] KMT lawmaker, Bill Sun (孫國華), said that Chen's words were "a severe example of misspeaking in the international arena."

"In fact, Chen's comments were made to attract votes from the pro-independence camp," Sun said yesterday. "However, the nation's people will pay a considerable price for this eventually."

"Most of Taiwan's diplomatic allies are much smaller than Singapore. The ministry should immediately apologize for such inappropriate criticism," Sun said.

So much for Mark Chen being a stalwart Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) member.

My Kid Could Paint That

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl By MICHELLE YORK

The hottest new abstract artist in town has reason to celebrate.

This summer, she went from selling her work in a coffee shop to having her own gallery show.

After a local newspaper's feature on her, about 2,000 people came for opening night - everyone from serious collectors to the artist's preschool teacher. She earned more money than she could comprehend. The gallery owner said it was his most successful show ever and scheduled a second one for October.

So celebrate, the artist did. During a recent visit, she climbed on a big bouncing ball shaped like a frog, grabbed the handles and bounced around the house with laughter pealing and pigtails flying.

The artist is Marla Olmstead. She is 4.

Poor abstract artists like Mark Wolak! This is what they have to compete with! There were already elephant abstract painters.

It looked like snot

Swimming in syrup is as easy as water by Michael Hopkin:

It's a question that has taxed generations of the finest minds in physics: do humans swim slower in syrup than in water? And since you ask, the answer's no. Scientists have filled a swimming pool with a syrupy mixture and proved it.

"What appealed was the bizarreness of the idea," says Edward Cussler of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, who led the experiment...

while you experience more "viscous drag" (basically friction from your movement through the fluid) as the water gets thicker, you generate more forwards force from every stroke. The two effects cancel each other out.

via geekpress.