Dragon millipede, Desmoxytes purpurosea, has glands producing cyanide to defend itself

Though full of conventional eco platitudes and gush about “vital habitats” and “precious landscapes,” the World Wildlife Fund has an otherwise entertaining, and well-illustrated, report on new species discovered in recent years in the general vicinity of the Mekong River watershed.

According to a new report launched by World Wildlife Fund (WWF)... First Contact in the Greater Mekong... 1068 species were discovered or newly identified by science between 1997 and 2007 – which averages two new species a week. This includes the world’s largest huntsman spider, with a foot-long leg span and the Annamite Striped Rabbit, one of several new mammal species found here. New mammal discoveries are a rarity in modern science.

While most species were discovered in the largely unexplored jungles and wetlands, some were first found in the most surprising places. The Laotian rock rat, for example, thought to be extinct 11 million years ago, was first encountered by scientists in a local food market, while the Siamese Peninsula pit viper was found slithering through the rafters of a restaurant in Khao Yai National Park in Thailand.

“This report cements the Greater Mekong’s reputation as a biological treasure trove—one of the world’s most important storehouses of rare and exotic species,” said Dekila Chungyalpa, Director of the WWF-US Greater Mekong Program. “Scientists keep peeling back the layers and uncovering more and more wildlife wonders.”

The findings, highlighted in this report, include 519 plants, 279 fish, 88 frogs, 88 spiders, 46 lizards, 22 snakes, 15 mammals, 4 birds, 4 turtles, 2 salamanders and a toad. The region comprises the six countries through which the Mekong River flows including Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam and the southern Chinese province of Yunnan. It is estimated thousands of new invertebrate species were also discovered during this period, further highlighting the region’s immense biodiversity.

World’s largest spider, Heteropoda maxima, has a legspan of up to 12 inches (30 centimeters)

National Geographic slideshow

older photo of MV Iran Deyanat in different paint

After Somali pirates hijacked the Iranian freighter MV Iran Deyanat (aka Deyant or Dianat) on August 21, 2008, as ransom negotiations proceeded, in late September, reports of strange illnesses striking down the pirates began appearing in the international press.

South Africa Times 9/28:

Somali pirates suffered skin burns, lost hair and fell gravely ill “within days” of boarding the MV Iran Deyanat. Some of them died.

Andrew Mwangura, the director of the East African Seafarers’ Assistance Programme, told the Sunday Times: “We don’t know exactly how many, but the information that I am getting is that some of them had died. There is something very wrong about that ship.”

ShiratDevorah offers the following explanation:

The MV Iran Deyanat is owned and operated by the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines (IRISL) – a state-owned company run by the Iranian military that was sanctioned by the U.S. Department of the Treasury on September 10, shortly after the ship’s hijacking.

According to the U.S. Government, the company regularly falsifies shipping documents in order to hide the identity of end users, uses generic terms to describe shipments to avoid the attention of shipping authorities, and employs the use of cover entities to circumvent United Nations sanctions to facilitate weapons proliferation for the Iranian Ministry of Defense. The MV Iran Deyanat departed Nanjing, China, July 28, and, according to its manifest, planned to sail to Rotterdam, where it would offload 42,500 tons of iron ore and “industrial products” purchased by an unidentified “ German client”. The ship has a crew of 29 men, including a Pakistani captain, an Iranian engineer, 13 other Iranians, 3 Indians, 2 Filipinos, and 10 Eastern Europeans, stated to be Albanians.

The MV Iran Deyanat was brought to Eyl, a sleepy fishing village in northeastern Somalia, and was secured by a larger gang of pirates – 50 onboard and 50 onshore. The Somali pirates attempted to inspect the ship’s seven cargo containers but the containers were locked. The crew claimed that they did not have the “access codes” and could not open them. Pirates have stated they were unable to open the hold without causing extensive damage to the ship, and threatened to blow it up. The Iranian ship’s captain and the engineer were contacted by cell phone and demanded to disclose the actual nature of the mysterious “powdered cargo” but the captain and his officers were very evasive. Initially they said that the cargo contained “crude oil” but then claimed it contained “minerals.” Following this initial rebuff, the pirates broke open one of the containers and discovered it to be filled with packets of what they said was “a powdery fine sandy soil” ....

Within a period of three days, those pirates who had boarded the ship and opened the cargo container with its gritty sand-like contents, all developed strange health complications, to include serious skin burns and loss of hair. And within two weeks, sixteen of the pirates subsequently died, either on the ship or on shore. ...

Although American intelligence and government sources are maintaining a strictly observed silence, the same does not apply to the Russians and so it is that we learn the real story of the MV Iran Deyanat. She was an enormous floating dirty bomb, intended to detonate after exiting the Suez Canal at the eastern end of the Mediterranean and in proximity to the coastal cities of Israel. The entire cargo of radioactive sand, obtained by Iran from China (the latter buys desperately needed oil from the former) and sealed in containers which, when the charges on the ship are set off after the crew took to the boats, will be blasted high into the air where prevailing winds will push the highly dangerous and radioactive cloud ashore.

Given the large number of deaths from the questing Somali pirates, it should be obvious that when the contents of the ship’s locked cargo containers finally descended onto the land, the death toll would be enormous. This ship was nothing more nor less than the long-anticipated Iranian attack on Israel. Not the expected rocket attacks (which could be intercepted by the Israelis) but an even more deadly and unexpected attack by sea. It is very interesting to note that the Israeli government has in the past few weeks, been loudly demanding that the United States establish a naval blockade of Iran.

On October 10, Iran evidently having paid the required ransom, the Deyanat was released, and allowed to depart. It sailed apparently in the direction of Muscat.

Bruce Walker, at American Thinker, argues that, just as it was no accident that Ronald Reagan armed with conviction and consciously asserting the ideals of Liberty the United States was founded upon was able to bring down Communism and win the Cold Water, it is also no accident that the post-Reagan return to political “realism” has enabled the enemies of Liberty worldwide to regroup.

After Reagan, the candle glowed brightly, then it flickered, then it died. Why? The Old World has always been torn between the remnants of its ancient empires and the bold promise of human liberty. Its elites, its sophisticates, its nationalists have always whispered that America and its promises are lies. German culture, Japanese uniqueness, Chinese civilization, Islamic greatness, French grandeur and Russian tsars of myriad denominations—these were truth, and liberty was a lie.

For a few brief years, the East no longer believed the tale of its political and ideological bosses. Hong Kong, not Beijing, was the future of China. Bricks of the Berlin Wall were solid souvenirs of Marx’s folly. Russians dreamed of a joyful future. Reagan had been Washington again, and when Madison and Jefferson did their work, the world would be well, so it seemed.

Then nothing happened. When Reagan left office, it was like when Lincoln was shot. The keen mind and the wondrous soul which endured everything to emancipate men was gone. Small minds and smaller hearts scurried in. George H. Bush, famously, sacked the men of Reagan and replaced them with more sensible functionaries. ...

Anyone could see that the pressure which worked on the Soviets would work on the Chinese Communists as well. Students in Beijing begged the world for freedom in 1989, something unprecedented under the Soviets. The theme of liberty should have permeated every transaction between America and China. Not just government, but business should have resonated with the importance of human rights over commercial profits. If Clinton believed that, he might have been able to rally the nation, but Clinton emphatically rejected the value of liberty over comfort.

The Presidency in eight short years went from being occupied by a moral colossus to a moral dwarf. Clinton sold national security secrets for something as banal as campaign contributions. Although Yeltsin was President of Russia during all of Clinton’s administration, our clever Clinton was unable to prevent on August 19, 1998 – one decade ago – the collapse of Russian financial markets and the destruction of the hope of a Russian middle class. This was the midpoint between the presidential campaign to elect the successor to Reagan and our grim world today—ten years ago.

What was Clinton doing ten years ago? He was on national television, the very same day that the Russian economy collapsed and the rise of Putin was assured, explaining that he had an “inappropriate relationship” with Monica Lewinsky and, by the way, he was ordering cruise missiles to hit aspirin factories in Sudan to combat a terrorist threat.

The original Olympic Games were played by competitors representing a variety of Greek cities sharing a common civilization, culture, religion, and ethical perspectives. Having a lot more sense than modern Europeans and Americans, the Greeks did not invite barbarian nations to compete or to host games.

Barbarian participation in competition is a firmly established part of the modern day Olympics. But the contemporary Olympic committee ought to make a policy of refusing to allow the Olympic Games ever to be hosted by totalitarian or non-European countries, period.

The 1936 Nuremburg Olympics, long ago, demonstrated the unseemly manner in which the spectacle of Olympic competition could be appropriated to glorify a criminal regime and to legitimize in the eyes of the world its despicable ideology.

The 1988 Seoul Olympics featured flagrant cheating by host country judges on behalf of native athletes, and ought to have made clear the undesirable problems associated with trying to conduct fair competitions under the authority of representatives of non-European cultures where the rule of objective law is unknown and in which “face” is valued far above integrity.

Predictably enough, the Red Chinese Olympics are proving to be another carefully orchestrated pageant of deceptive spectacle glorifying the Chinese State and its authoritarian regime, and cheating in competition and judging is well underway.

Phony fireworks in opening ceremony broadcast.

The actual 7-year-old singer replaced with a more attractive lip-syncher mouthing to a recording.

56 Chinese minority ethnic groups falsely represented by 56 ordinary Chinese (Han) children.

China cheats, winning Olympic gold medals with underage gymnasts.

Jonathan Kay rants indignantly, too.

The NBC Olympic web-site is making videos of all events available on-line.

To view them, you will first have to allow Microsoft to install its Silverlight plugin, then restart the browser.

Here is the Equestrian events video page.

Now that is convenient.

Yahoo Sports explains that, though fireworks were actually used at the Beijing Olympic Games opening ceremonies, the astonishing display broadcast around the world on television was faked, combining computer generated images with prerecorded shots of fireworks.

Anne Applebaum caught a totalitarian news double-header on television last night.

The rise of China to the status of a major economic power and relative prosperity creates opportunities its regime is only too likely to misuse. Meanwhile, Russia was delivering a lesson on how to misuse power.

For the best possible illustration of why Islamic terrorism may one day be considered the least of our problems, look no farther than the BBC’s split-screen coverage of yesterday’s Olympic opening ceremonies. On one side, fireworks sparkled, and thousands of exotically dressed Chinese dancers bent their bodies into the shape of doves, the cosmos and more. On the other side, gray Russian tanks were shown rolling into South Ossetia, a rebel province of Georgia. The effect was striking: Two of the world’s rising powers were strutting their stuff.

The difference, of course, is that one event has been rehearsed for years, while the other, if not a total surprise, was not actually scheduled to take place this week. That, too, is significant: The Chinese challenge to Western power has been a long time coming, and it is in a certain sense predictable. As a rule, the Chinese do not make sudden moves and do not try to provoke crises.

Russia, by contrast, is an unpredictable power, which makes responding to Moscow more difficult. In fact, Russian politics have become so utterly opaque that it is not easy to say why this particular “frozen” conflict has escalated right now. ...

Previous tensions, both in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the other piece of Georgia that has declared sovereignty, have somehow been resolved without a war. Someone, clearly, wanted this one to go further.

Both sides have deeper motives for fighting. The Russians want to prevent Georgia from joining NATO, as Georgia, a Western-oriented democracy—George Bush has called the country a ” beacon of liberty”—has long wanted to do. In this, they will almost certainly succeed: No Western power has any interest in a military ally that is involved in a major military conflict with Russia.

The Georgian leadership, by contrast, had come to believe that the constant pressure of Russian aggression, coupled with the West’s failure to accept Georgia into NATO, compelled them to demonstrate “self-reliance.” President Mikheil Saakashvili has indeed been buying weapons in preparation for this moment. Those who know him say he believed a military conflict was inevitable but could be won if conducted cleverly. As of last night, with Russian soldiers fighting in South Ossetia—only a few dozen miles from Tbilisi, the Georgian capital—it seemed as though he might have miscalculated, badly. Russia has not sent 150 tanks across that border in order to lose.

Svante Cornell believes Russian behavior is all about Georgia’s potential NATO membership.

John Murrell says foreign journalists arriving to cover the Olympics in Beijing are finding there’s more than air quality different about the local atmosphere.

Apparently, China’s promise that the 20,000 foreign journalists covering the Olympic Games would have unfettered Internet access is going the same way as its pledge to provide breathable air — up in smoke. ...

Early arrivals at the main press center found themselves unable to access scores of sites on the usual topics the Chinese government prefers to keep quiet — among them Tibet, Taiwan, Tiananmen Square and the sites of Amnesty International, Radio Free Asia and several Hong Kong newspapers. “It has been our policy to provide the media with convenient and sufficient access to the Internet,” said Sun Weide, the chief spokesman for the Beijing organizing committee. “I believe our policy will not affect reporters’ coverage of the Olympic Games.” ...

Meanwhile, Sen. Sam Brownback, R.-Kan., says he has documents indicating that China has forced all the major foreign-owned hotels to install spying equipment that will monitor the Net activities of journalists, athletes’ families and guests during the Games and beyond. The Public Security Bureau’s order says failure to comply could bring financial penalties, suspension of Net access, or the loss of a license to operate a hotel in China. “These hotels are justifiably outraged by this order, which puts them in the awkward position of having to craft pop-up messages explaining to their customers that their Web history, communications, searches and key strokes are being spied on by the Chinese government,” Brownback said.

I’m sure the host country will put on a lovely tribute to the Olympic ideals during the opening ceremonies, but it’s going to be awfully hard not to gag a little while watching.

Depkafile reveals that China’s recent earthquake impacted a large number of Chinese facilities containing radioactive materials, including nuclear weapons plants, and a significant number of the sites impacted by the disaster remain to be secured.

Eleven days after the 7.9 magnitude earthquake struck western China, vice environment minister Wu Xiaoqing first revealed Friday, May 23, that 50 hazardous radioactive sources have been located – 35 recovered and controlled; “three more buried in rubble and 12 in dangerous buildings. At present, tests show no accidental release of radiation,” he reported as the death toll climbed past 55,000.

Two of the most badly damaged cities housed China’s secret nuclear weapons design facility – at Mianyang – and a plutonium processing facility – in Guangyuan – both close to the quake’s epicenter.

Soon after the quake struck, Chinese soldiers were sent to protect nuclear sites and preparations made for an environmental emergency.

DEBKAfile’s military sources note that the Beijing announcement did not specify the nature of the hazardous sources or disclose how they – or the secret nuclear weapons and plutonium facilities were secured – whether sealed with cement and lead like the Chernobyl reactor in Ukraine in the 80s or their contents removed to safe places.

According to the Beijing government’s official Web site, “nuclear facilities and “radioactive sources” included power plants, reactors, scientific research labs and medical treatment facilities, a big concentration of which are located in the worst hit areas.

French sources disclosed that 489 hospitals with laboratories containing radioactive materials, as well as hundreds of high-risk industries, were leveled.

Hans Kristensen, a nuclear arms expert at the Federation of American Scientists, said it was hard to believe that the military plants with nuclear materials had escaped the disaster. Other experts suspect that the damage to radioactive sites and radiation leaks may extend beyond the stricken Sichuan province.

France24 The Observers:

Yahoo! China pasted a “most wanted” poster across its homepage today in aid of the police’s witch-hunt for 24 Tibetans accused of taking part in the recent riots. MSN China made the same move, although it didn’t go as far as publishing the list on its homepage.

Yahoo indignantly wrote France24 saying: “Yahoo! isn’t doing this. It’s Yahoo! China*.”

*Yahoo had to accept a Chinese partner, and Chinese control, to gain access to China’s market.

Hat tip to Matt Brown Hamlin

John Mangum argues that the US Government’s failure to strengthen the dollar is a clever and deliberate (and unannounced) gambit in the economic contest between the US and China.

we must ask, why is this happening? Why have the prices of commodities like oil and gold risen so dramatically in the last year? Why has the dollar fallen so much? Normal business cycle? Bad management from the world’s financial institutions? And why hasn’t the world’s largest and strongest economy, backed by the most powerful government, been able to change the course of the situation?

Perhaps the larger picture is that the United States is waging an economic war against China.

The United States could strengthen the value of the dollar. It has not. China is hurt because now Chinese products are very expensive in the United States, and this will reduce the US trade deficit with China. China must import huge amounts of oil and strategic metals which are very much more expensive now. China holds hundreds of millions of physical dollars, the value of which is now much less.

China has refused to revalue its currency to a realistic level to improve its trade position with the United States. China has used its huge dollar reserves as a sword against the United States by threatening to sell those dollars, and thereby causing the dollar to drop in value. In effect, the United States is using China’s strength against China.

In order for China to maintain the levels of its trade with the United States, it will be forced to lower the value of its currency. However, if it does that, it faces two major problems. Foreign direct investment (FDI) into China would become less expensive, and China is worried that more and cheaper FDI would spur China’s inflation. Further, a devalued currency would reduce the profit to China for its exported goods.

If China keeps it currency at its present levels, the United States will buy less. The United States wanted a stronger yuan to reduce trade, which China was unwilling to do. That objective is now achieved by a weaker dollar.

China’s dollar holdings are worth much less when buying goods like oil and metals that China depends on for its development and growth. Further, China has been talking and trying for some time to diversify its foreign-reserve holdings form dollars to other currencies and gold. Now, their dollars are worth much less when buying gold, yen and euros. ...

the “crisis” is being used to further the US economic position, long-term position, particularly with regard to China. From Sun Tzu: “All warfare is based on deception.”

Spook86 has some interesting observation, including a speculation that Admiral Fallon may have provoked China’s denial of port access at Hong Kong to the US Navy last Thanksgiving.

My own impression has been that Esquire’s Barnett took advantage of the Admiral’s indiscretions to produce a hit piece on Bush Administration policy using Admiral Fallon as an involuntary cat’s paw. It is heartening, of course, to see the Bush Administration actually firing someone for undermining its foreign policy. Is it possible, do you suppose, that this novel approach to personnel management may yet extend into the Departments of State and Justice and the Intelligence Community before George W. Bush leaves office?

Sky News:

British athletes competing in this year’s Beijing Olympic Games must sign contracts banning them from talking about politics, it is reported.

Athletes must not mention politics -The clause – inserted in contracts for the first time – mean competitors must not comment on “politically sensitive” issues.

It then refers to the International Olympic Committee charter, which “provides for no kind of demonstration, or political, religious or racial propaganda in the Olympic sites, venues or other areas”.

The ban means athletes cannot discuss issues such as China’s human rights record or Tibet.

Those who refuse to sign-up face not be allowed to compete and anyone breaking the order could be sent home.

Andrei Chang, editor of the Kanwa Defense Review Monthly, thinks that China lacks the capability of conquering Taiwan if an extended military operation is required.

By calculating the amount of fuel oil required by the Chinese navy and air force in a large-scale attack across the Taiwan Strait under high-tech conditions, it becomes apparent that such an assault could not be sustained for an extended period. ...

..should high-intensity warfare break out across the Taiwan Strait, the daily fuel consumption of the PLA Air Force would be a minimum of 10,794 tons, taking into consideration only the third-generation fighters and H-6 bombers, JH-7A fighter-bombers and attackers. Actual consumption would be far greater if the large number of J-7E and J-8F serial fighters and Q-5 attackers currently in service are figured in.

The three major fleets of the PLA Navy would have a daily fuel consumption of 1,200 tons. As a result, the navy and air force would consume a total of 11,994 tons of fuel each day on average.

An initial large-scale landing operation against Taiwan would likely involve 20 divisions or brigades of amphibious, light and heavy mechanized troops. If each mechanized division or brigade needed fuel reserves for 500 kilometers, and one division or brigade consumed an average of 200 tons of fuel each day, the daily total of the 20 divisions and brigades would be 4,000 tons. Here, helicopters deployed by the ever-growing Army Aviation Forces have not been included.

The combined fuel needs of all combat forces engaged in an assault on Taiwan would amount to a minimum of 15,994 tons each day, not including the Second Artillery Forces and logistic support troops. These calculations alone indicate that the PLA forces would need a total of 240,000 tons of fuel to sustain 15 days of assault operations against Taiwan.

What is the total annual fuel consumption of the Chinese armed forces? A report published by the PLA General Logistics Department in 2007 says that the PLA forces saved 55,000 tons of oil in 2006, approximately 5.1 percent of their total consumption. Based on this figure, the total would be over 1 million tons, about 2,954 tons on average per day. It can be concluded that fuel consumption in a 15-day large-scale assault operation would surpass 20 percent of the annual total consumption of the Chinese military.

The hard fact is that China has only 7 million tons of oil reserves available for a period of conflict. The country has set its 30-day oil reserves at 10 million tons for civilian consumption, an average of 330,000 tons per day. During a 15-day assault, the country would require 4.96 million tons. The conclusion is that China’s current oil reserves could sustain a high-intensity assault operation against Taiwan for no more than 15 days.

The Daily Mail yesterday (10 Nov 2007) reported:

When the U.S. Navy deploys a battle fleet on exercises, it takes the security of its aircraft carriers very seriously indeed.

At least a dozen warships provide a physical guard while the technical wizardry of the world’s only military superpower offers an invisible shield to detect and deter any intruders.

That is the theory. Or, rather, was the theory.

American military chiefs have been left dumbstruck by an undetected Chinese submarine popping up at the heart of a recent Pacific exercise and close to the vast U.S.S. Kitty Hawk

– a 1,000ft supercarrier with 4,500 personnel on board.

By the time it surfaced the 160ft Song Class diesel-electric attack submarine is understood to have sailed within viable range for launching torpedoes or missiles at the carrier.

According to senior Nato officials the incident caused consternation in the U.S. Navy.

The Americans had no idea China’s fast-growing submarine fleet had reached such a level of sophistication, or that it posed such a threat.

One Nato figure said the effect was “as big a shock as the Russians launching Sputnik” – a reference to the Soviet Union’s first orbiting satellite in 1957 which marked the start of the space age.

The incident, which took place in the ocean between southern Japan and Taiwan, is a major embarrassment for the Pentagon.

The lone Chinese vessel slipped past at least a dozen other American warships which were supposed to protect the carrier from hostile aircraft or submarines.

And the rest of the costly defensive screen, which usually includes at least two U.S. submarines, was also apparently unable to detect it.

According to the Nato source, the encounter has forced a serious re-think of American and Nato naval strategy as commanders reconsider the level of threat from potentially hostile Chinese submarines.

It also led to tense diplomatic exchanges, with shaken American diplomats demanding to know why the submarine was “shadowing” the U.S. fleet while Beijing pleaded ignorance and dismissed the affair as coincidence.

Analysts believe Beijing was sending a message to America and the West demonstrating its rapidly-growing military capability to threaten foreign powers which try to interfere in its “backyard”.

The People’s Liberation Army Navy’s submarine fleet includes at least two nuclear-missile launching vessels.

Its 13 Song Class submarines are extremely quiet and difficult to detect when running on electric motors.

Commodore Stephen Saunders, editor of Jane’s Fighting Ships, and a former Royal Navy anti-submarine specialist, said the U.S. had paid relatively little attention to this form of warfare since the end of the Cold War.

He said: “It was certainly a wake-up call for the Americans.

“It would tie in with what we see the Chinese trying to do, which appears to be to deter the Americans from interfering or operating in their backyard, particularly in relation to Taiwan.”

What is particularly interesting is that a nearly identical incident occurred one year ago 26 October 2006 involving a Chinese Song-class submarine and the same U.S.S. Kitty Hawk.

Also discussed by Spook86.

Photo hopefully not taken from Chinese submarine

Norman Hsu, a bankrupt Hong Kong business, seems to have come to America and set up a shell corporation solely for the purpose of funneling large sums of money to democrat candidates, particularly Hillary.

New York Times story.

Gosh! Who do you suppose was supplying Mr. Hsu’s corporation with cash? Remember the Johnny Chung campaign contributions of the 1990s?

The Chinese government has announced the planned construction of a blacktop highway to Everest base camp to facilitate the carrying of the 2008 Olympic Torch to the summit of the highest mountain in the world.

AP:

China plans to build a highway on the side of Mount Everest to ease the Olympic torch’s journey to the peak of the world’s tallest mountain before the 2008 Beijing Games, state media reported Tuesday.
Construction of the road, budgeted at $19.7 million would turn a 67- mile rough path from the foot of the mountain to a base camp at 17,060 feet “into a blacktop highway fenced by undulating guardrails,” the Xinhua News Agency said.

Xinhua said construction, which would start next week, would take about four months. The new highway would become a major route for tourists and mountaineers, it said.

An official from the Secretariat of the Tibetan government, who declined to give his name, confirmed the project was planned, but refused to give any details. Tibet and Nepal are the most commonly used routes up the mountain.

In April, organizers for the Beijing Summer Olympics announced ambitious plans for the longest torch relay in Olympic history—an 85,000-mile, 130-day route that would cross five continents and reach the 29,035-foot summit of Everest.

Taking the Olympic torch to the top of the mountain, seen by some as a way for Beijing to underscore its claims to Tibet, is expected to be one of the relay’s highlights.

Julian Dibbell describes, in the Sunday Times Magazine, the strange new economy of on-line gaming, featuring out-sourcing of tedious game tasks required for advancement of one’s avatar. The author tries to tell it as a suffering sweat shop workers story, and to milk all the sympathy he can, but I think those Chinese fellows have a job a lot of high school kids in America would envy.

It was an hour before midnight, three hours into the night shift with nine more to go. At his workstation in a small, fluorescent-lighted office space in Nanjing, China, Li Qiwen sat shirtless and chain-smoking, gazing purposefully at the online computer game in front of him. The screen showed a lightly wooded mountain terrain, studded with castle ruins and grazing deer, in which warrior monks milled about. Li, or rather his staff-wielding wizard character, had been slaying the enemy monks since 8 p.m., mouse-clicking on one corpse after another, each time gathering a few dozen virtual coins — and maybe a magic weapon or two — into an increasingly laden backpack.

Twelve hours a night, seven nights a week, with only two or three nights off per month, this is what Li does — for a living. On this summer night in 2006, the game on his screen was, as always, World of Warcraft, an online fantasy title in which players, in the guise of self-created avatars — night-elf wizards, warrior orcs and other Tolkienesque characters — battle their way through the mythical realm of Azeroth, earning points for every monster slain and rising, over many months, from the game’s lowest level of death-dealing power (1) to the highest (70). More than eight million people around the world play World of Warcraft — approximately one in every thousand on the planet — and whenever Li is logged on, thousands of other players are, too. They share the game’s vast, virtual world with him, converging in its towns to trade their loot or turning up from time to time in Li’s own wooded corner of it, looking for enemies to kill and coins to gather. Every World of Warcraft player needs those coins, and mostly for one reason: to pay for the virtual gear to fight the monsters to earn the points to reach the next level. And there are only two ways players can get as much of this virtual money as the game requires: they can spend hours collecting it or they can pay someone real money to do it for them.

At the end of each shift, Li reports the night’s haul to his supervisor, and at the end of the week, he, like his nine co-workers, will be paid in full. For every 100 gold coins he gathers, Li makes 10 yuan, or about $1.25, earning an effective wage of 30 cents an hour, more or less. The boss, in turn, receives $3 or more when he sells those same coins to an online retailer, who will sell them to the final customer (an American or European player) for as much as $20. The small commercial space Li and his colleagues work in — two rooms, one for the workers and another for the supervisor — along with a rudimentary workers’ dorm, a half-hour’s bus ride away, are the entire physical plant of this modest $80,000-a-year business. It is estimated that there are thousands of businesses like it all over China, neither owned nor operated by the game companies from which they make their money. Collectively they employ an estimated 100,000 workers, who produce the bulk of all the goods in what has become a $1.8 billion worldwide trade in virtual items. The polite name for these operations is youxi gongzuoshi, or gaming workshops, but to gamers throughout the world, they are better known as gold farms. While the Internet has produced some strange new job descriptions over the years, it is hard to think of any more surreal than that of the Chinese gold farmer.

1:20 video

Shane Danielson argues that Zhang Yimou’s Chinese martial arts films should be viewed as successors to the Hollywood musicals, featuring the same massive budgets, and similar attractive men and women performing show-stopping ensemble numbers against aesthetically-gilded backgrounds.

He makes the case for his perspective in this essay occasioned by the release of Curse of the Golden Flower (Man cheng jin dai huang jin jia -2006).

trailers

A web-site named Great Firewall Of China will test any website address to see if it is accessible to Chinese users.

My result is:

Your URL is Blocked!

AP reports:

China will boost military spending by 17.8 percent this year, a spokesman for the national legislature said Sunday, continuing more than a decade of double-digit annual increases that has stirred unease in Washington and some of China’s neighbors.

Read the whole thing.

And this increase comes after the Chinese market crash!

Robert Tracinski thinks Bush needs to widen his approach beyond the insurgents in Iraq and go after their state sponsors.

Going wide means recognizing that Iraq is just one front in a regional war against an Islamist Axis centered in Iran—and we cannot win that war without confronting the enemy directly, outside of Iraq.

Going wide means recognizing that the conflict in Iraq is fueled and magnified by the intervention of Iran and Syria. One of the reasons the Iraq Study Group report flopped was that its key recommendation—its one unique idea—was for America to negotiate with Iran and Syria in order to convince these countries to aid in the “stabilization” of Iraq. This proposal wasn’t so much argued to death as it was laughed to death, because it is clear that Iran and Syria have done everything they can to de-stabilize Iraq, supporting both sides of the sectarian conflict there.

It is obvious that both regimes have a profound interest in an American failure and retreat in Iraq. After all, if America can successfully use force to replace a hostile dictatorship with a free society, then the Iranian and Syrian regimes are doomed. So as a matter of elementary self-preservation, they have done everything they can to plunge Iraq into chaos, supporting guerrillas and militias on all sides of the sectarian conflict. Just today, a US official confirmed new evidence “that Iran is working closely with both the Shiite militias and Sunni Jihadist groups.” Most ominously, Iran has brazenly provided training and weapons to the Shiite militias—who carry rifles straight off the assembly lines of Iranian weapons factories—and these militias have emerged in the last year as the greatest threat to US troops and to the Iraqi government.

How can we quell the conflict in Iraq, further suppress the Sunni insurgents, and begin to dismantle the Shiite militias—if we don’t to anything to stop those who are funding, training, and supporting these enemies? Just as we can’t eliminate terrorism without confronting the states who sponsor terrorism, so we can’t suppress the Sunni and Shiite insurgencies in Iraq without confronting the outside powers who support these insurgents.

Every day, we see the disastrous results of fighting this war narrowly inside Iraq while ignoring the external forces that are helping to drive it. To fight one Shiite militia tied to Iran—Sadr’s Mahdi Army—we have recently signaled our support for an Iraqi political coalition that includes another Shiite militia tied to Iran, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim’s Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and its Badr Brigades. And so it should be no surprise that a US military raid on Hakim’s headquarters last week netted two Iranian diplomats and members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards—the outfit responsible for supporting global terrorism. That’s what happens when we fight the symptoms in Iraq rather than fighting the disease.

Going wide also means recognizing that more is at stake in this war than just the fate of Iraq. This is a war to determine who and what will dominate the Middle East. Will this vital region be dominated by a nuclear-armed Iran, working to spread Islamic fascism? Or will America be able to exert its military influence and political ideals in the region?

He’s clearly right, but he isn’t going wide enough.

Behind Syria and Iran, you find China fishing in troubled waters in order to thwart American “hegemony.” China is Iran’s arms supplier (often via North Korea) and soon to be leading trading partner. But we are China’s number 1 trading partner.

We have a far more powerful weapon to use against China to force her to withdraw support from her surrogates operating against the US than arms. We can threaten to deny China our trade.

China is planning to build a 400 room resort-hotel in a water-filled quarry in Songjiang. Atkins Architectural Group won the international design competition.

Hat tip to Andy G.

David Lai, at the Army’s Strategic Studies Institute, published a thought-provoking paper in 2004 comparing the differences between Chinese and Western Strategic thinking to the differences between the Chinese game of Go and such Western games as chess, poker, and football. Learning From the Stones is now available online, and makes for very interesting reading.

With over 2,000 years of inï¬u201auence from Sun Tzu’s teaching, along with the inï¬u201auence of other signiï¬cant philosophical and military writings, the Chinese are particularly comfortable with viewing war and diplomacy in comprehensive and dialectic ways and acting accordingly. Indeed, many of these observations have become proverbial components of the Chinese way of war and diplomacy. The most notable ones are bing yi zha li (war is based on deception), shang-bing fa-mou (supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy’s strategy), qi-zheng xiang-sheng (mutual reproduction of regular and extraordinary forces and tactics), chu-qi zhi-sheng (win through unexpected moves), yin-di zhi-sheng (gain victory by varying one’s strategy and tactics according to the enemy’s situation), yi-rou ke-gang (use the soft and gentle to overcome the hard and strong), bishi ji-xu (stay clear of the enemy’s main force and strike at his weak point), yi-yu wei-zhi (to make the devious route the most direct), hou-fa zhi-ren (ï¬ght back and gain the upper hand only after the enemy has initiated ï¬ghting), sheng-dong ji-xi (make a feint to the east but attack in the west), and so on. All of these special Chinese four-character proverbs are strategic and dialectic in nature. All bear some character of ï¬u201aowing water. This Chinese way of war and diplomacy is in striking difference to the Western way of war from ancient Greece to the United States today. In the Western tradition, there is a heavy emphasis on the use of force; the art of war is largely limited to the battleï¬elds; and the way to ï¬ght is force on force.

With Google and Yahoo playing ball with the Communist regime in China, Microsoft (of all companies) is talking about possible non-cooperation.

A senior executive for Microsoft has said the firm could pull out of non-democratic countries such as China.

Fred Tipson, senior policy counsel for the computer giant, said concerns over the repressive regime might force it to reconsider its business in China.

“Things are getting bad… and perhaps we have to look again at our presence there,” he told a conference in Athens.

“We have to decide if the persecuting of bloggers reaches a point that it’s unacceptable to do business there.”

“We try to define those levels and the trends are not good there at the moment. It’s a moving target.”

BBC

Suzy Bennett, in the Telegraph, takes the ten-day Beijing to Lhasa rail tour.

The final 15 hour, 710 mile (1143 km) stretch from Golmud in China’s western Qinghai province to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, was only opened last July 1st. The carriages are pumped full of oxygen, and a supplementary supply is available by tube, since the route reaches a height of 16,640ft (5072 meters). As Bennett writes, breathlessly:

There are no crampons or ice picks in our gear. Instead we – a band of 77 rail enthusiasts, retirees and foreign journalists – have crammed altitude-sickness pills, painkillers and oxygen supplies into our bags in the hope of combating the effects of our journey across the roof of the world. We are the first group of Western holidaymakers to take Tibet’s new Sky Train and, although carriages will be pumped with supplementary oxygen, no one – not even the doctor who is accompanying us -knows whether it will be enough. At best we have been told to expect breathlessness, tiredness and headaches; at worst, pulmonary oedema or death.

If the railway causes a headache for its passengers, it has proved a chronic migraine for the engineers. A constantly freezing and melting permafrost along the route has meant that a network of pipes has had to be driven into the ground to pump liquid nitrogen and cold air beneath the track to keep it frozen all year round. Just four weeks after the line opened, the Chinese government admitted that global warming had raised temperatures faster than expected and that the foundations had begun sinking into the permafrost. The day before our group boarded the train, one of the dining cars derailed 250 miles from Lhasa. No one was hurt, but it sparked fears about what would have happened if the oxygen supply to the 600 passengers had been cut off.

Sky News reports:

Mobile execution buses being used by the Chinese government…

Dominic Waghorn found that between 3,500 and 10,000 people are put to death each year.

The volume of executions has meant that China has invented new ways of killing, mobilizing and mechanizing its execution system.

Brochure shows execution buses A brochure acquired by Sky News reveals details of China’s new execution buses now operating across the country.

Fitted with lethal injection equipment they can deliver on the spot executions.

Sky News spoke to a number of people affected by the executions including the family of Nie Shubin who was only 20-years-old when he was wrongly accused of rape and murder.

His mother and sister told how he was held in jail for three years, without being allowed to see his family once.

Sky’s Dominic Waghorn Nie Shuie said: “They never let me see him after his arrest. That continued till the end. I never saw him again before he was executed.

“And nobody told us that he had been executed.”

Nie was accused of attacking a woman in a field near his home, but only after his execution did another man confess to the attack.

In an exclusive report earlier this year, Sky News gathered evidence linking China’s execution system and its booming organ transplant industry.

Amnesty International says the demand for transplant organs may be driving the high number of executions in China.

Even by official figures more people are executed every year in China than the rest of the world put together.