Someone's gonna be late for work

Chinese traffic jam enters its 10th day.

It's Like a Chinese World of Warcraft Club

24 million Chinese men unable to marry.

Drudge Today

How will we know where one ends and the other begins? From Drudge: "Peta Plans to Protest Circus."

My assessment: Rarrrr! (And very far up the crazy-hot scale)

If the U.S. is lost in the wilderness when it comes to economic and property rights, maybe we can find our way home by moving away from what we are not.

See also: Kelo.

Highlighting the main difference between solving societal problems through private charitable acts and government mandates. The government can put a lien on your house and then throw you in jail when you refuse to pay the last red cent.

No one really talks about the gap in employment between men and women in the fields of teaching and nursing. (Or the now emerging gap between college-educated men and women.) Glass ceilings? Intimidation from even entering the field to begin with? Perhaps aided by gender-biased social normalization? Drastic reparations are needed! A cottage industry of seminars, undergraduate male studies programs, grant money should be en route...but won't be. Because when men aren't doing well at something, it's turnabout for centuries of oppression.

China

The most apt colorful phrase that I could think of to describe China's efforts at beautification (in every aspect of Chinese life) for the Olympic games is: "Like putting lipstick on a pig." But that might be an insult to pigs.

The Rape of Nanking

Today is the 70th anniversary of the Rape of Nanking.

The Japanese have been downplaying the Nanking atrocities since the siege of the city began; Japanese journalists following the Imperial army wrote dispatches about the valorous deeds of their soldiers. Japanese textbooks were heavily censored,leading to a lawsuit by Japanese professor that took 32 years to resolve.

So, grudgingly, the Japanese have begun to acknowledge their sordid past.

Meanwhile, here in the US we've also had a change in outlook about our past.

The massacres are rarely mentioned at any length in most modern books I read recounting the origins of the Second World War,

... it is common to hear that by 1941 the U.S. had backed Japan into a corner leaving Japan no choice but humiliation or war ...

or by my students, when they enumerate the causes of American entry into the Second World War, but rising American determination to stop Japanese aggression in Chine spiked sharply when news of the massacres reached the United States. It is more common than it used to be to hear that by 1941 the U.S. had backed Japan into a corner, leaving Japan no choice but humiliation or war, and it’s much less common than it used to be to hear about what moved American opinion to push Japan so hard. Japanese rightists explain government-backed Chinese interest in the Rape of Nanking as a cynical excuse for mobilizing nationalist sentiment. This may be true, but Japanese inability to face the fairly recent past is at least as remarkable as widespread Chinese interest in a crime of such magnitude. What is more remarkable yet is that although the numbers murdered in Nanking may be the equivalent of three or four Hiroshima bombings, no phrasemakers describe the horrors of the twentieth century as those of “the age of Auschwitz and Nanking.” “Auschwitz and Hiroshima,” however, has become a familiar yoking of crimes. The politics of historical memory has in recent decades been a popular topic in my profession. Oddly enough, the people who profess the greatest interest in it seem likeliest to have the most imprecise and wispy memories of the Rape of Nanking.

China bans sexy ads

Don't they realize that advertisers use sex to sell everything from perfume to auto insurance?

n a circular on Tuesday, Sarft [State Administration of Radio, Film and Television] said that adverts featuring suggestive language or scantily-clad women were "detrimental to society", Xinhua news agency reported.

"Sexually suggestive ads and bad ads not only mislead consumers seriously and harm public health, but are socially corrupting and morally depraving, and directly discredit the radio and TV industry," the circular said.

Broadcasters that do not obey the rules would face severe penalties, it said.

I don't think they've completely nailed down this capitalism thing.

Yuck

Used chopsticks.

BEIJING (Reuters) - A Beijing factory recycled used chopsticks and sold up to 100,000 pairs a day without any form of disinfection, a newspaper said on Wednesday, the latest is a string of food and product safety scares.

Virginia Tech: Blame it on the Internets

China's "leading information technology expert," Li Ji-bing;

In examining the campus shooting incident in Virginia, it is clear that the personality of the murderer, Cho Sheung-hui, was withdrawn, eccentric and twisted. This young man's mentality is a reflection of the fact that over past 10 years, the rapid development of information technology has not only brought great opportunity and wealth, but a perversion of the human spirit due to the influx of distorted information. With the Internet culture and virtual world under constant development, the ability of individuals to communicate and interact with the surrounding society has steadily weakened.

Scientific experiments prove that communication skills are inversely proportionate to the degree of reliance on the Internet. More importantly, when people increasingly rely on the Internet and the virtual world, not only do his communications skills weaken, but his ability to make rational judgments in response to changes in the real world tend to weaken as well.

A good argument for China's policy of Internet censorship, no doubt.

China sends young Internet addicts to reeducation camp

Complete with electro-shock therapy.

The Chinese approach, coupled with the element of propaganda surrounding the cases of young people like Yang Yang, lead critics to believe it has a broader aim of instilling ambiguity about the internet and the freedom it brings.

"I do believe they want to fight this internet addiction," said Julien Pain, of Reporters Sans Frontières. "But with the Chinese government always behind this justification there is also the will to control political speech.

"If you have thousands of small illegal cybercafes it is very hard to know who posted what, who downloaded what on the internet."

Ya think?

Banned in China

C'est moi, via Coyote Blog, who can be accessed there.