Quote of the Day -- On Fairness

On fairness. And sanity. And racism, too.



Think on this.

America has 315+ million citizens.

China?

China has 1.357 billion.

1.357 billion people. They dwarf us, by numbers.

Yet we have more people in jails and prisons than they.

To whom does this make any sense?

Bad Portents for the Nelson-Atkins?

This article is in the New York Times today:

The Chinese Want Their Art Back

Chinese art has become a prized liquid asset for superrich collectors, who, instead of putting their treasures on display, often deposit them in carefully guarded, climate-controlled warehouses. But the media’s emphasis on the white-hot market for contemporary Chinese works overlooks a more interesting story: the effort by the Chinese government, state-run companies, private collectors and even, quite probably, some criminal networks to bring Chinese antiquities back home.

One impetus for this effort is the Communist Party’s embrace of traditional culture as “a foundation for China to compete in the world,” as President Xi Jinping said in October. Having for decades viewed antiquities as relics of feudal oppression and bourgeois decadence, the party now says art can “lead people to live a life abiding by the code of morality,” in that way contributing to social stability. This is a turnabout from the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), when museums were ransacked, and countless antiquities destroyed. Old art is again prestigious; new buyers seek canonical work for the social status, not just potential profit, it confers.

The party has taken its new stance on culture at a time of rising nationalism. China openly promotes efforts to repatriate works pillaged during its self-defined “century of humiliation,” from the Opium Wars of the 1840s and 1850s to the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949.

We shall see. 

It doesn't look like it will be an issue, when you read the article, but one never knows.

Do you know how our Apple products are made?

This radio program, "This American Life", is played, weekly, on NPR. They tell different stories each week on different topics. This time, they told of how and where Apple products are made. (It's in China and it's with really horrible, slave-like conditions of the workers. 12, 13 and 14 year olds, in many cases with 12 hour days for as little as $17 per day, according to The New York Times (see link below). The incident of suicides are infamous. This podcast doesn't deal as much with those--the suicides--or things that gory, so you know.

Everyone needs to know. Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/business/ieconomy-apples-ipad-and-the-human-costs-for-workers-in-china.html?pagewanted=all. Also, at this link, there is Apple's response: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/blog/2012/01/a-response-to-the-news-from-apple

Another great, local idea: Harvest Public Media

Something good needs to be said about this new--to me, anyway--development that is Harvest Public Media.

What a cool idea.

More importantly, it serves such a great function, locally, regionally and nationally for farming and agriculture news and information.

It is a production/reporting group, as nearly as I can explain it and they report on global food security, according to the site, and all that goes along with farming and farm production throughout the country.

They are also, apparently, an outgrowth of our own local area NPR radio stations, too, which is really great.  Their site tells more about them, naturally:

OUR MISSION:   Global demand for food and fuel is rising, and the push and pull for resources has serious ramifications for our country’s economic recovery and prosperity. Today’s emerging agenda for agriculture is headlined by energy and climate change, food safety, biofuels, animal production and welfare, human health, water quality, and local food systems. By examining these local, regional and national issues and their implications, Harvest Public Media seeks to create a rich multimedia resource devoted to food, fuel and field.

HOW WE REPORT:  Most Harvest Public Media stories begin with radio — regular reports are aired on our six member stations in the Midwest. But Harvest also explores issues through online analyses, television reports, podcasts, photography, video, blogs and social networking.  

FUNDING:  Harvest Public Media is one of seven Local Journalism Centers nationwide created with the support of a two-year grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.  The initiative is intended to strengthen collaboration among six Midwest public broadcasting stations. Additional editorial support comes from American Public Media, National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System.

PARTNER STATIONS: KCUR in Kansas City (lead station); Iowa Public Radio; NET which operates statewide public TV and radio networks; KBIA in Columbia, Mo.; High Plains Public Radio/KANZ in Garden City, Kan.; and Kansas Public Radio/KNAU in Lawrence.

I've heard some of their reporting on NPR, nationally, already, too and they are stories we just wouldn't otherwise get, but for their creation and existence.

Some of the stories they're reporting on right now, for instance, are:

--Making (not so much) hay
--Stripped down: How ecosystems could help farmland weather climate change
--Floods, droughts, pests, oh my!
--No need to worry about Chinese buying farmland in Iowa

I thought it important to maybe put this out here, so more people know they're there, what they do and what we can look for from them and use their information for.  I thought it important, too, to just say how great it is and how rather proud I am of the fact that it's a local product, born and raised right here in the heartland.

So kudos and many congratulations and thanks to Harvest Public Media and the people and stations making all this information available to us.  Terrific job!

Link:  http://www.harvestpublicmedia.org/

But like the Sudan, they don't have oil

Gov't says forces loyal to Gbagbo kill 220 in Ivory Coast

So naturally, we aren't going to do a thing about it.

Quote of the day--on China

"Basically, people now feel nothing is safe to eat. They don't know what choices to make. They are really feeling very helpless." --SANG LIWEI, director of the Beijing office of the Global Food Safety Forum, on rising food safety concerns in China.

Between this--food safety, nationwide over there--and their gross, wholesale pollution and the inability to grant true free speech in China, you have to wonder: these are the people we have to fear?

Links:  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/world/asia/08food.html?scp=1&sq=chinese%20food%20safety&st=cse
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/10/world/asia/10writer.html?ref=world

China on the US dollar

Talk about a "back-handed compliment."

Chinese President Hu Jintao said, basically, two things over the weekend as he's about to visit us and meet with President Obama this week.

First, he said there needs to be "cooperation" between our two countries.

Well, yeah, since they make stuff (cheap) and we buy so much of it.  That and the fact that they are so heavily invested in us and have been for some time ($2.85 trillion at the end of 2010), I'd say cooperation is pretty much an important "given" for the foreseeable future.

Second, he called the present U.S. dollar-dominated currency system a "product of the past" and highlighted moves to turn the yuan into a global currency.


Ow.  That one hurt.


Talk about kicking a guy when he's down.  And the "guy", being us, is his "friend" and close trading partner.


What's kind of amusing about this, too, is that the US wants China to appreciate its currency, the juan, so it isn't so cheap and therefore, its products so cheap, while China criticizes us for efforts by the U.S. Federal Reserve to stimulate growth through huge bond purchases to keep down long-term interest rates, a strategy that China has loudly complained about in the past as fueling inflation in emerging economies, including its own. He said that U.S. monetary policy "has a major impact on global liquidity and capital flows and therefore, the liquidity of the U.S. dollar should be kept at a reasonable and stable level."


So, basically, we each want to tell the other one how, exactly, to run their economies, their currency and so, their country.  That's good.


Unfortunately for us--but great for China--is that they were relatively unscathed by the global financial crisis (we started).  


Here's the scary part, though:  Mr. Hu's comments add to the sense that China intends to challenge the post-World War II financial order largely created by the U.S. and dominated by the dollar.


It's fascinating to see this relationship develop.  For  now, it's "yes, we want to and will cooperate" but it seems they also want to be sure we know they're coming up on us, economically and competitively.  


Fortunately, for now and the foreseeable future, we both need each other.   And badly.


"Can't we all just get along?"


Link to original post:  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703551604576085803801776090.html

China---wth??

News out this morning:

5 preschoolers hit with hammer in new China attack

BEIJING – A farmer attacked kindergarten students with a hammer, injuring five, before burning himself to death Friday in China's third such assault in as many days and prompting the government to demand stricter school security nationwide.


More:

The hammer attack follows a rampage Thursday by a 47-year-old unemployed man armed with an eight-inch (20-centimeter) knife at a kindergarten. Some 29 students, aged 4 or 5 years old, were wounded, five of them seriously at the school in Taixing city in neighboring Jiangsu province.

And on Wednesday, a 33-year-old former teacher broke into a primary school in the city of Leizhou in southern Guangdong province and wounded 15 students and a teacher with a knife. The attacker had been on sick leave from another school since 2006 for mental health problems.

Really. What the heck?

What would cause anyone, especially any adult, to attack children like this?

What is it about the Chinese culture, it would seem, that would cause grown adult men to attack virtually totally defenseless children with knives, as in the first two attacks, and now, here, with a hammer?

I would love to have some psychologist and/or sociologist who knows the Chinese either explain this or study it and get back to us as to why these people acted out like this.

There is this from the article:

Most of the recent school attacks have been blamed on people with personal grudges or mental illness — seen as a growing problem because of feelings of social injustice and alienation in the fast-changing country.

But children? Attacking children?

To save my life I can't figure it out. Mental illness would have to be the closest I could come to 'splainin' this one.

Link to original story here:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100430/ap_on_re_as/as_china_students_attacked

The Chinese failure (amended/updated)

First the Chinese gave us toys laced with lead and poison for our children to play with, be exposed to and quite likely harm.

Of course, part of that is our own fault for having the adult-child George W. Bush in the White House where he denuded our EPA which was supposed to protect us from such things but that's another story.

Then, the Chinese poisoned their own children because some greedy idiot put melamine in their infant's formula food.

Better them than us, right?

All this time, they're poisoning their own water and air, horribly, but, hey, they want to be a wealthy superpower fast.

And of course they have the worst mines and mining accidents on the planet.

Sure, I'd like to see them raise their people out of the abject poverty they've experienced for hundreds of years, sure, but not at any price. Not at the price of unbridled, poisoning capitalism and consumerism.

Next, they poisoned lots of Americans recently in the South with their drywall products which virtually immediately sickened the residents who were exposed to it.

"But it was a bargain!"

Sick.

Now, check this out--a Chinese freighter is sitting on the Great Barrier Reef, down in Australia, about to foul that incredible, unique, magnificent and fragile ecosytem.

You know what? The world needs to tell the Chinese "enough!" "We've had it. We aren't taking this crap any more."

But wait.

That's what they should tell us, the US, too, given our near-destruction of the world economy, given the banking and mortgage mess we inflicted on the world.

Never mind.

Update on the stranded tanker at the G.B. Reef: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100405/ts_nm/us_australia_ship;_ylt=AiOEm81ILnRvmW47WjbF48as0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTNscDhraDYxBGFzc2V0A25tLzIwMTAwNDA1L3VzX2F1c3RyYWxpYV9zaGlwBGNjb2RlA21vc3Rwb3B1bGFyBGNwb3MDNgRwb3MDMwRwdANob21lX2Nva2UEc2VjA3luX2hlYWRsaW5lX2xpc3QEc2xrA3N0cmFuZGVkc2hpcA--