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3 Billion Blind Mice, See How They Run

We've had some millipedes invading our house lately. Speaking of pests, check out this story about what's going on in China. It's hard to imagine. From the current issue of The Week magazine:

Billions of mice are swarming across Hunan province, devouring rice paddies and clogging village paths. The mice were driven from their holes last month, when officials opened the sluice gates on Dongting Lake to relieve flooding from other waterways. The annual occurrence usually displaces thousands of mice, but this year, because of the major flooding, the swarm is many times larger. "They are like troops advancing," said farmer Zhang Luo. Villagers have killed an estimated 2 billion mice so far, beating them with shovels or using homemade poison. Tons of mouse corpses are now rotting in the fields and must be collected and buried. The poison has also killed hundreds of cats and dogs.

China Blue

chinablue.jpgEarlier this week I watched the documentary China Blue from PBS' Independent Lens series. From Wikipedia:

China Blue is a 2005 documentary film directed by Micha Peled. It follows the life of Jasmine, a young worker in a Chinese jeans factory, hence the title. The documentary discusses both alleged sweatshop conditions in factories in China and the growing importance of China as an exporting country on a global scale.

I thought it was really interesting. The poor living conditions, the ridiculously long working hours, the contrast betwen the workers and the boss, etc. It reminds me that the extremely cheap price we pay, for a pair of jeans for example, necessarily comes at the expense of someone making them for next to nothing. I give it 5 out of 5.

Benchmarks

From an article titled "Administration foiled by own Iraq goals" in the LA Times:

The Bush administration's decision to set benchmarks for measuring the progress of the Iraq mission is now seen by some U.S. officials as a costly blunder that has only aided the White House's critics in Congress and its foes in Iraq. Administration officials saw them as realistic goals that would prod the Iraqi government toward reconciliation, while helping sustain political support for the effort at home. The yardsticks include steps vital to Iraq's stability: passage of a law to divide oil revenue among the key communities, reforms to allow more members of Saddam Hussein's party back into the government, and elections to divide power in the provinces. Yet now, with the major goals still out of reach, the administration is playing down their importance. With an interim report on the U.S. effort due out today, administration officials instead are emphasizing other goals” some of which are less ambitious but have been attained. Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, recently told reporters that while the benchmarks remain important, "We have to look on a wider scale than the benchmarks themselves." In private, many officials were more scathing in their critique, saying that defining the goals in such a way galvanized resistance in Iraq and gave war critics a way to argue that the U.S. mission was falling short.

I think this is a fine illustration of one of the big problems. These guys see this as a game. Therefore, they think that defining goals was a mistake because it has aided war critics in arguing that the effort is falling short. The problem isn't how short the effort is falling. It's that people know how it is failing.

China is Overrun with Wangs

From the current issue of The Week magazine:

Beijing A shortage of names. China is overrun with Wangs and Lis-93 million and 92 million, respectively. Fully 85 percent of China's 1.3 billion people have one of just 100 traditional surnames. This week, the Ministry of Public Security declared the situation a security hazard, because it is too difficult to track down any particular Wang Tao, say, among China's nearly 100,000 Wang Taos. The ministry announced it therefore would let couples give children either parent's surname-or a combination of both. A Wang and a Li, for example, could name their child Wang, Li, Liwang, or Wangli. The child of a Zhou and a Zhu could be called Zhouzhu. Double-naming is already permitted in Hong Kong, where it has become trendy.

Sarkozy

You might have heard that France recently elected a right-wing candidate. A French friend told me. "We elected our George Bush." It's interesting to see what passes for right-wing among the French. From a recent editorial in The Week:

In the Gallic context, a right-winger doesn't resemble anything close to a Ronald Reagan. He's more like a Bill Clinton or a Tony Blair - tempering a respect for market economics with a strong commitment to social services. Sarkozy's version of tax reform, for example, envisions a cut in the top income tax rate from 60 percent all the way down to 50 percent - still among the highest in Europe. And his plan to reduce France's bloated bureaucracy doesn't call for a single job cut; he simply proposes not replacing some of the civil servants who will retire in the next few years. Add to that his pledges to ban "golden parachute" payouts to corporate executives, make all national museums free, and legalize gay civil unions, and Sarkozy starts to seem more left-wing than most Democrats. In foreign politics, as in foreign policy, perspective is everything. One country's conservative is another country's liberal.

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