5 questions, answered...

Tgirsch has graciously enlisted me to play the 5 questions game; here's my best shot...

1. Superstring theory: Legitimate science or mathematical masturbation? Explain your answer.

That's a pretty difficult one. As an engineer, basically, I am inherently suspicious of theories that require exponentially larger amounts of capital equipment to provide evidence in its favor, which, to my understanding, much of modern physics implies.

The other issue I have with superstring theory is basically, I am inherently suspicous of the possibility of time travel, for reasons, I am embarrassed to admit, come straight from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy- you know, once somebody does it, nobody can be sure of anything anymore.

But given that I suspect the time travel issue can be resolved (to forbid it), and ditto for worm-holes (they've got to be rare if possible) I see no reason why superstring theory can't be true.

But it's only science if there are good ways to prove its implications, which don't involve huge amounts of capital equipment. My guess is somewhat in favor of the mathematical masturbation argument, unless I see something really, really clever.

2. What religion, other than your own, are you most inclined to align with?

I have a friend and colleague who's an atheist Hindu- apparently depending on the school, that's not a contradiction. Maybe I'd be an agnostic Hindu. Or a Unitarian Universalist. I'd probably plump for the latter given that I'm basically a westernized person.

3. Boob man, leg man, or butt man?

I'd say butt.

4. Are there any core tenets of Buddhism with which you disagree? If so, what are they and why? If not, what is your biggest problem with Buddhism?

Buddhism doesn't really have core tenets; but sooner or later reincarnation comes up when I'm asked about it. Explaining reincarnatin as karma as anatman (the doctrine of the insubstianitiality of the self) usually sets my questioner's eyes aglaze. IOW, no, I don't think a self is necessarily literally reborn (although I'm reminded of Marx's dictum on things happening first as tragedy and then as farce.) But I don't think that's out of line with what Buddhism actually teaches, despite popular stories and beliefs of "doing something bad in a past life."

I could also mention vegetarianism; apparently many people think this is necessary to be a "good" Buddhists (which it's not).


My biggest problem with Buddhism is me. I'm the one who's got to live up to what is needed to be done. I hope that doesn't seem like a cop-out.

5. Precisely why are we thanking Mr. Roboto?

For doing the jobs that nobody wants to / For helping me escape just when I needed to
The problem's plain to see / Too much technology
Machines to save our lives / Machines dehumanize


The sad thing is most Japanese don't get this, and those that do are cooler than you or I will ever be...

These are the other folks that make Republicans troublesome

The "Constitution in Exile" movement, profiled today in the NY Times Magazine, is perhaps every bit as scary as the Christian Reconstructionists.

All restoration fantasies have a golden age, a lost world that is based, at least to a degree, in historical fact. For the Constitution in Exile movement, that world is the era of Republican dominance in the United States from 1896 through the Roaring Twenties. Even as the Progressive movement gathered steam, seeking to protect workers from what it saw as the ravages of an unregulated market, American courts during that period steadfastly preserved an ideal of free enterprise, routinely striking down laws that were said to restrict economic competition.

The most famous constitutional battle of the time was the 1905 Supreme Court case Lochner v. New York, which challenged a law that was passed by the New York State Legislature, establishing a maximum number of working hours for bakers. The court struck down the law on the grounds that it violated the bakers' freedom of contract, which was arguably, but not explicitly, included in the 14th Amendment's protections of ''liberty'' and ''property.'' In a dissenting opinion, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. objected that ''The Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer's Social Statics,'' referring to the celebrated Social Darwinist and advocate of laissez-faire economics...

Early on, the movement found its intellectual guru in Richard Epstein. In the words of Michael Greve, Epstein is ''the intellectual patron saint of everybody in this movement.'' Like Bolick, Epstein is too much of a libertarian purist to be a party loyalist. (''Our president is a most inconsistent classical liberal, to be charitable,'' he says. ''He's terrible on trade and a huge spender and not completely candid about the parlous situation Social Security is in.'') But his devotion to -- and influence on -- the Constitution in Exile is unsurpassed.

''Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain,'' still in print 20 years after its publication, purports to specify the conditions under which government can rightfully impose regulations and taxes that reduce the value of private property. Drawing on the political philosophy of John Locke, Epstein argues that before the existence of government, individuals in what political theorists call the ''state of nature'' have an inherent right of autonomy, which entitles them to acquire property by dint of their labor and to dispose of it only as they see fit through voluntary transfer of goods. Epstein also maintains that any form of government coercion -- including taxation or other forced transfers of wealth -- can be reconciled with the principles of personal freedom only if it makes individuals at least as well off as they were before the tax or regulation was imposed. Epstein's key insight, as the Constitution in Exile adherents see it, is that economic regulations are just as coercive as other involuntary wealth transfers. He insists that if the government wants to reduce the value of an individual's property -- with zoning restrictions, for example -- it has to compensate him for the lost value.

Moving from political theory to constitutional law, Epstein argues that the framers of the United States Constitution recognized these limitations on governmental power in the Takings Clause of the Constitution, which says that ''private property'' cannot be taken for public use ''without just compensation.'' According to Epstein, the Takings Clause prevents the government from redistributing wealth in any form without appropriate compensation and that a proper understanding of the clause calls into question ''many of the heralded reforms and institutions of the 20th century: zoning, rent control, workers' compensation laws, transfer payments,'' as well as ''progressive taxation.'' Liberal governmental reforms could be sustained, Epstein argues, only if the government were to compensate individuals for the lost value of their property or to make everyone better off in exchange for their taxes. ''This simple theory of governance could be expanded to cover all taxes, all regulations, all shift in liability schemes,'' Epstein wrote in an intellectual autobiography. ''It is also the recipe for striking down the New Deal.''...

Three candidates recently renominated by Bush for positions on the federal appellate courts are sympathetic to the ideas of the Constitution in Exile movement. In addition to William Pryor, the former attorney general of Alabama whom Greve praises, there is Janice Rogers Brown, a justice on the California Supreme Court and an outspoken economic libertarian. An African-American and a daughter of sharecroppers, Brown has been promoted by many libertarians as an ideal Supreme Court candidate. Known for her vigorous criticism of the post-New Deal regulatory state, Brown has called 1937, the year the Supreme Court began to uphold the New Deal, ''the triumph of our socialist revolution,'' adding in another speech that ''protection of property was a major casualty of the revolution of 1937.'' She has praised the court's invalidation of maximum-hour and minimum-wage laws in the Progressive era, and at her Senate confirmation hearing in 2003, she referred disparagingly to ''the dichotomy that eventually develops where economic liberty -- property -- is put on a different level than political liberties.''

I don't suppose it would do to say that this philosophy is inconsistent: as things stand today, "wealth" and "property" mean something different than they did bfore- your wealth and income are accounted for not by how much gold it's worth, but how much you can buy, and thus taxes are a part of the picture.

These people if put into power would wind up impoverishing vast numbers of Americans, and would bring back the near-slave labor conditions that existed in some factories and mines at the turn of the century.

This is what Americans voted for in 2004.

I hope they can deal with it, or transcend it, or re-relegate to the ash heap of history.


HT: DavidNYC at Kos.

Frank L. Rich- how does he channel H.L. Mencken?

I can just see from the title of this post that folks will want to conflate Buddhism and "new age" whatever....well...it's worth the risk to note the following:

As the lies and subterfuge of the go-go 1990's coalesced around sex, so the scandal of our new "moral values" decade comes cloaked in religion. The hair shirt is the new thong.

This time the plot begins with money. Two K Street fixers, a lobbyist named Jack Abramoff and a flack named Michael Scanlon, managed to snooker six American Indian tribes into handing over $82 million in exchange for furthering their casino interests. According to The Washington Post, some of their tribal takings, cycled through a nonprofit center for "public policy research," helped send Mr. DeLay golfing in Scotland. The pious congressman, a gambling foe, says he had no idea of his trip's sinful provenance. Never mind that Mr. DeLay was joined abroad by Mr. Abramoff, whom he has described as one of his "closest and dearest friends," or that Mr. Scanlon had once been his spokesman. Mr. DeLay was as innocent of the goings-on around him as a piano player in a brothel.

Beltway cronyism, dubious junkets, loophole-laden denials are all, of course, time-honored Washington fare. The few on the right backing away from Mr. DeLay, from The Wall Street Journal's editorial page to Newt Gingrich, make a point of reminding us of that. As they see it, more in sorrow than in anger, the Gingrich revolutionaries who vowed to end the corruption practiced by Congressional Democrats have now been infected by the same Washington virus as their opponents. That's true, but this critique of Mr. DeLay and company by their own camp all too conveniently sidesteps the distinguishing feature of this scandal. Democratic malefactors like Jim Wright and L.B.J.'s old fixer Bobby Baker didn't wear the Bible on their sleeves.

In the DeLay story almost every player has ostentatious religious trappings, starting with the House majority leader himself. His efforts to play God with Terri Schiavo were preceded by crusades like blaming the teaching of evolution for school shootings and raising money for the Traditional Values Coalition's campaign to save America from the "war on Christianity." Mr. DeLay's chief of staff was his pastor, and, according to Time magazine, organized daily prayer sessions in their office. Today this holy man, Ed Buckham, is a lobbyist implicated in another DeLay junket to South Korea.

But it's not merely Christian denominations that figure in the religious plumage of this crowd. Mr. Abramoff, who is now being investigated by nearly as many federal agencies as there are nights of Passover, is an Orthodox Jew who in his salad days wore a yarmulke to press interviews. In Washington, he opened not one but two kosher restaurants (I hear the deli was passable by D.C. standards) and started a yeshiva. His uncompromising piety drove him to condemn the one Orthodox Jew in the Senate, Joe Lieberman, for securing "the tortuous death of millions" by supporting abortion rights.

As William Blake noted so well, "Prisons are built with the Stones of Law, Brothels with the Bricks of Religion."

Some might think that this is a mere "cackling at the hypocrites" type of phenomenon, this criticism of Delay, FRC, Frist, etc. but its not.










Much as they are loath to go near the thought, there is a very good reason these scandals are intimately related with these people.




When one puts much effort into appearing righteous, one is often short of time and resources to actually be righteous.

Frank Rich should be commended for disseminating this information.

Disgusting

As somebody who's visited both Japan and China multiple times, I find the orchestrated violence from the Chinese against the Japanese pretty reprehensible.

While nobody's hands are absolutely spotless in this area, this simply isn't the time to gin up the violence.

China is where it is today- in positive as well as negative ways- due to Japan. Japan has invested very much to make China competitive.

The US, if it were truly an honest broker in the region, would be able to defuse this situation.

But, then again, the US is playing this stuff for its own benefits.

Why calling one's way a "false religion" is like using the "n-word"

I mentioned below about how Joe Carter jumped the shark - or really let slip out that it's OK to call non-Christian religions "false religions."

I don't think they were aware of it, but it is indeed along the lines of using the "n-word" in referring to African Americans.

Now, yourdictionary.com has a good definition of religion; there is a theme running through it of beliefs and practices.

Of course, there's religions and there's religions. The theistic religions do indeed have some element of the supernatural, a deity, and a creation narrative. The non-theistic religions tend to have many fewer beliefs (often grounded from personal experience), but many practices. Regardless, the more one engages in a religion, the more one's self changes. This is not simply "spiritual," it is also physiological, psychological, and interpersonal.

So, when one says that someone else follows a "false religion," they are in effect making a statement- and not a very pretty one- about the physiology, psychology, and interpersonal relationships, as well as the spirituality about people who follow the religion that someone ignoranty calls "false." It is another way of saying people who don't follow "my" religion are false, whether or not it is meant.

Oftentimes, though, that is what is meant; hence some Christian Reconstructionists have advocated putting Wiccans and gays to death (over what basically comes down to religious differences.) It is not a very long path from "their religion is false" to "they are false," to "they are a danger to our religion and must be cleansed."

The western world came a long way since the Thirty Years' War showed that wars over religion are immoral bloodbaths. One would hope that we have the wisdom to remember all that death, and try to avoid such things in the future.

Tom Friedman is spot on here

Somehow I missed this...

At a time when the global economic playing field is being flattened - enabling young Indians and Chinese to collaborate and compete with Americans more than ever before - this administration is off on an ideological jag. It is trying to take apart the New Deal by privatizing Social Security, when what we really need most today is a New New Deal to make more Americans employable in 21st-century jobs.

We have a Treasury secretary from the railroad industry. We have an administration that won't lift a finger to prevent the expensing of stock options, which is going to inhibit the ability of U.S. high-tech firms to attract talent - at a time when China encourages its start-ups to grant stock options to young innovators. And we have movie theaters in certain U.S. towns afraid to show science films because they are based on evolution and not creationism.

The Bush team is proposing cutting the Pentagon's budget for basic science and technology research by 20 percent next year - after President Bush and the Republican Congress already slashed the 2005 budget of the National Science Foundation by $100 million.

When the National Innovation Initiative, a bipartisan study by the country's leading technologists and industrialists about how to re-energize U.S. competitiveness, was unveiled last December, it was virtually ignored by the White House. Did you hear about it?...

Thomas Bleha, a former U.S. Foreign Service officer in Japan, has a fascinating piece in the May-June issue of Foreign Affairs that begins like this: "In the first three years of the Bush administration, the United States dropped from 4th to 13th place in global rankings of broadband Internet usage. Today, most U.S. homes can access only 'basic' broadband, among the slowest, most expensive and least reliable in the developed world, and the United States has fallen even further behind in mobile-phone-based Internet access. The lag is arguably the result of the Bush administration's failure to make a priority of developing these networks. In fact, the United States is the only industrialized state without an explicit national policy for promoting broadband."

Since it took over in 2001, the Bush team has made it clear that its priorities are tax cuts, missile defense and the war on terrorism - not keeping the U.S. at the forefront of Internet innovation. In the administration's first three years, President Bush barely uttered the word "broadband," Mr. Bleha notes, but when America "dropped the Internet leadership baton, Japan picked it up. In 2001, Japan was well behind the United States in the broadband race. But thanks to top-level political leadership and ambitious goals, it soon began to move ahead.

"By May 2003, a higher percentage of homes in Japan than the United States had broadband. ...

"Today, nearly all Japanese have access to 'high-speed' broadband, with an average connection time 16 times faster than in the United States - for only about $22 a month. ... And that is to say nothing of Internet access through mobile phones, an area in which Japan is even further ahead of the United States. It is now clear that Japan and its neighbors will lead the charge in high-speed broadband over the next several years."

South Korea, which has the world's greatest percentage of broadband users, and urban China, which last year surpassed the U.S. in the number of broadband users, are keeping pace with Japan - not us.

This is SO true, it's amazing how much Americans are behind.

We have relegated ourselves to the backwaters; my Chinese in-laws had broadband before I did I kid you not.

Bush and his cronies are destroying America.

Joe Carter thinks it's good to "unplug the god of information technology." If only he could unplug the Republican god.

書道: Old Stuff

Imperial Decree Granting Ecclesiastical Rank of Hôin Daikashô and Posthumous Name Chishô Daishi to Enchin...

from here. The explanation:

It is recorded that this imperial letter, issued by Emperor Daigo (885-930, r. 897-930), was composed by Fujiwara Hirofumi and transcribed by the renown calligrapher Ono no Michikaze (894-966). The voluminous and substantial characters, on pale blue paper with faintly drawn guidelines, reveal a strongly spirited hand. Michikaze, to whom is attributed the creation of Japanese-style calligraphy, was at the time, thirty-four years old and working as a minor scribe in the Ministry of Central Affairs (J. Nakatsukasashô) writing imperial letters and conferrals of rank. The letter has been marked in thirteen places on the front and two places on the back with a square red stamp reading "Emperor's Seal" (J. tennô gyoji).

Enchin (814-891) was the fifth abbot of Enryaku-ji Temple of the Tendai sect on Mt. Hiei and revitalized Onjô-ji Temple (also known as Mii-dera). He is considered to be the founder of the Jimon ("Temple School") branch of the Tendai sect.

John Bolton, stalker?

Really, if you or I did this kind of behavior we'd be canned from our jobs immediately.


Appointing this guy as UN ambassador is like appointing Bernard Law to keep track of pedophiles to protect young boys.

Wal-Mart and "Affluenza"

I posted this diary on Kos about my impressions of Wal-Mart from the standpoint of the merchandise available.

There are 2 other aspects of the questions I indirectly raised there ("Do you really need the stuff that Wal-Mart sells besides the stuff that you think you need? And is it really the stuff you need anyway?")

1. Wal-Mart - other than being a microcosm of a sick American economy addicted to petroleum is also a symptom of Affluenza. Wal-Mart relies on people buying stuff for no other objective than for people to buy stuff. (Tangential disclaimer: although I have and done make pancakes from scratch, I will buy mixed stuff if only because I've no other use for buttermilk.)

2. It would be really impossible for Wal-Mart -based on its business model alone- to be able to supply food (and goods) if one were to achieve a mindful existence. As an exercise, keep Dogen's Tenzo Kyokun in mind as you go through Wal-Mart's aisles. Of course, if there was nothing else to eat, wear or use as medicine, one would be constrained to make a feast from the meager offerings in Wal-Mart's aisles, but luckily we ourselves, through our actions/experience can make and use and find and grow ingredients that will never be supplied at Wal-Mart.



(Even the bathroom is a place of practice, you know.)

On the to-do list of cuisine research...

Hishiho ( ひしほ ) is a culinary ancestor of modern soy sauce and miso; it is said to be somewhere between the two.

I am not sure if it is an exact equivalent of Chinese thick soy sauce, but it is worth investigating.

Soy sauce of course, is one of those miracle food components, like vinegar and olive oil and peanut oil, that when skillfully combined with other ingredients, makes food spectacular.

Miso itself is a wonderful thing that can be used in many ways to flavor dishes outside of the well-known Japanese soup.

Something between miso and soy sauce might provide a taste that is worth exploring.

Joe Carter Jumps the Shark

It's going to be a banner day for blogging I see. Joe Carter writes today (emphasis added):

God, of course, doesn’t have to listen to his voice mail messages, return missed cell phone calls, answer email inquiries, delete trackback spam, write blog posts, and update his PDA. Sure, he has to listen to prayers. But since prayers can’t be sent by IM or text messaging how many people really take the time to pray?

Certainly not us Christians. Ironically, we consider it peculiar that followers of Islam stop five times a day to offer prayers to Allah yet we stop five times an hour to pay homage to our email. We contend that Islam is a false religion but what is it that we are worshipping?

I don't contend that Islam is a "false religion;" that is the religious equivalent of calling an African-American a n*&%(r. I don't call Evangelical Christianity a "false religion" even though many adherents in positions of power practice it in such a way that it increases harm to society. One wonders if Carter is enough of a bigot to call Judaism a "false religion."


Remember, folks, if Frist and company have their way, they're going to be calling your religion "false" ...and then they'll call you false.

Although Carter's bright enough to see that James Dobson's KKK remarks deserve a smackdown, one really wonders why he doesn't put 2 and 2 together when it comes to religious issues like this. Does Carter really not know about "Christian" websites like this one?

Utter Demagoguery

It's not everyday I wake up in the morning and immediately find a good topic to blog about, but this morning- before I've had my first sip of coffee this caught my eye:

Link

WASHINGTON, April 14 - As the Senate heads toward a showdown over the rules governing judicial confirmations, Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, has agreed to join a handful of prominent Christian conservatives in a telecast portraying Democrats as "against people of faith" for blocking President Bush's nominees.

Fliers for the telecast, organized by the Family Research Council and scheduled to originate at a Kentucky megachurch the evening of April 24, call the day "Justice Sunday" and depict a young man holding a Bible in one hand and a gavel in the other. The flier does not name participants, but under the heading "the filibuster against people of faith," it reads: "The filibuster was once abused to protect racial bias, and it is now being used against people of faith."

Organizers say they hope to reach more than a million people by distributing the telecast to churches around the country, over the Internet and over Christian television and radio networks and stations.

Dr. Frist's spokesman said the senator's speech in the telecast would reflect his previous remarks on judicial appointments. In the past he has consistently balanced a determination "not to yield" on the president's nominees with appeals to the Democrats for compromise. He has distanced himself from the statements of others like the House majority leader, Tom DeLay, who have attacked the courts, saying they are too liberal, "run amok" or are hostile to Christianity.

It is, of course, Frist and the Family Research Council that are actually "hostile to people of faith," for example, people who have my religion.

It is Frist and the Family Research Council that want "people of faith" to forget about justice for the imprisioned, feeding the hungry, caring for the sick and infirm, and all of the other things that don't have to do with fetuses and people who are already dead that more enlightened socieities than ours do as a matter of course.

Frist needs a response.

Whaddaya know, we won one...

link

A federal judge Thursday struck down the FDA ban on ephedra, the once-popular weight-loss aid that was yanked from the market after it was linked to dozens of deaths.

The judge ruled in favor of a Utah company that challenged the Food and Drug Administration's ban. Utah-based Nutraceutical claimed in its lawsuit that ephedra "has been safely consumed" for hundreds of years.



Supplements that included ephedra have been widely used for weight loss and bodybuilding, but have linked to 155 deaths, including that of Baltimore Orioles pitching prospect Steve Bechler. The FDA ordered the substance off the market in April 2004.

Judge Tena Campbell's ruling sends the matter back to the FDA "for further rulemaking consistent with the court's opinion" and keeps the agency from enforcement action against the companies.

Indeed. It's infuriating to have to use decongestants like sudafed (which can be easily converted to meth) when ma huang works just as well, and can be made into a nice tea that even Mormons wouldn't find offensive.

Remember- Republicans are not for the troops

AP:

Democrats were furious that the GOP leadership allowed none of the 35 amendments they had proposed earlier to be voted on. They particularly wanted provisions that would exempt from the new bankruptcy requirements military personnel returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, and people whose indebtedness is the result of financial identity theft.

Identity theft is a real problem. So is getting your life together after being in Iraq or Afghanistan.

What I really wonder about though, is why we're giving this giveaway to the credit card companies- they charge usurious interest because of the risk of default.

Hopefully, in the long run, this will cause people to use credit cards less. But it is also likely to help torpedo the economy.



HT Kos

Interesting useless post on cooking verbs

link

Which of course is part of a more interesting language blog.


And all because I was bored and wanting to include words in a report that were common in restaurant reviews, just to get me to write the report.

Keeper from Kos

The Myth of Low Prices at Wal-Mart.

Wow- this foreign currency stuff is even more complicated than I'd thought...

I hate to bash the China bashers, but this article from the London Times is the thing to read to understand just how simple-minded some folks are being about this currency stuff.

I quote:

...The dollar and the euro should depreciate against Asian currencies. But how is this to be achieved? At present all Asian governments, with the partial exception of Japan, either peg their currencies officially to the dollar (as in China and Hong Kong) or spend tens of billions of dollars to intervene in the foreign exchanges. This currency intervention is openly justified by Asian politicians as a means of protecting competitiveness and promoting exports. This Asian currency mercantilism represents an export subsidy and trade distortion far bigger than the steel, textile and aircraft disputes, on which the US and European trade ministers waste most of their time.

Why, then, has nothing been done to force the Asians to abandon their currency manipulation? The answer is surprisingly simple. Markets and G7 policymakers have focused on the only two Asian countries that seemed to matter — Japan and China. But on closer inspection, neither Japan nor China, turned out to be appropriate targets.

Japan has not intervened in its currency markets for more than a year. And when Tokyo was artificially holding down the yen, it had a reasonable justification — a cheap yen was need to help to pull the world's second-largest economy out of a 12-year recession, which was doing the global trading system even more harm than the undervalued yen. Now that the Japanese economy is recovering, it could certainly cope with a gradual strengthening of the yen. But Japan’s relatively high labour costs relative to Asian countries such as Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, which are now at a comparable technological level, make the Japanese nervous about being undercut by cheap-currency competitors.

China, meanwhile, has been selling renminbi (RMB) and buying dollars not so much to keep its exports competitive, but to maintain some semblance of stability in its domestic banking system. Moreover, while China has a large surplus with the US and Europe, its overall global trade is not far from balance, because of the enormous deficits it runs against Japan, Korea and Taiwan. On closer inspection, it turns out that much of the value of the goods shipped by China to the US and Europe actually originates in Japan, Korea and Taiwan. Finally, China's wages are so low that even a huge RMB revaluation would be no help to labour-intensive industries in the US and Europe, which China would continue to undercut. The beneficiaries of an RMB revaluation would be factories in Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines, not in South Carolina or Spain...

For these reasons, the Chinese and Japanese would almost certainly be willing to participate in a currency revaluation which extended across the whole of Asia but they see no reason why they should take the lead. But if Japan and China will not lead, who can? Two months ago, I suggested a possible answer on this page. The smaller Asian economies, specifically the five newly industrialised “Tiger economies”: Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. These are the countries with the world’s biggest trade surpluses relative to GDP. Their industrial structures are now directly competitive with Western countries. Although living standards in Taiwan, Korea and Singapore are comparable to those in the US and Europe, wages are 50 to 70 per cent below Western levels.

Moreover, these countries have been accumulating reserves much faster than either China or Japan. Korea foreign exchange reserves at the end of March stood at $205 billion, and Taiwan's at $247 billion, compared with Japan’s $841 billion and China’s $610 billion. Since the Korean and Taiwanese economies are about one-eighth the size of Japan and China, their reserve accumulation has been far more aggressive — and potentially disruptive to global trading. This is even more true of Malaysia and Singapore.

So far, neither investors nor Western policymakers have paid much attention to these smaller Asian currencies. Most investors have considered buying these currencies to be too risky.

Buy Singapore. Buy Vietnam. Malaysia.

In NYC? Want good Japanese confections?

This is the place.


They also deliver anywhere in the US.

Mmmm...junk television

Carter today points me to "blogs4God" which in turn teaches me something I didn't know:

In the mail today I received the pilot episode of NBC's six-hour series "Revelations" which is set to premier Wednesday, April 13 (9-10pm ET) on NBC. Public relations firm Grace Hill Media has distributed the pilot to select Christian bloggers in an effort to tap into the power of the blogosphere.

The series centers around two unlikely partners - one who worships God and one who worships Science - that come to find the world is reaching The End of Days. Bill Pullman ("Independence Day") stars as Harvard professor Dr. Richard Massey, an astrophysicist whose science-based view of worldly events is challenged by a nun, Sister Josepha Montifiore, played by Natascha McElhone. God's miracles are evident, but Satanist Isaiah Haden (Michael Massee of "24") answers his own "Lord" to help ensure the Armies of Darkness win the apocalyptic battle to come.

Christians often complain about a lack of representation in mainstream media, but they often fail to admit that modern Christian shows often lack quality screenplays, acting, and production. Such is not the case with "Revelations." which offers a refreshingly well-made series putting Christianity in a positive light. It's truly a production that both Christians and secularists will enjoy.

To which I reply:

1. I sure as hell hope Richard Gere doesn't send me anything the next time he makes a Buddhist -themed flick.
2. Oh, good, NBC is telling everyone that scientists should be naturally opposed to religious people (out of the scientists' ignorance, of course).
3. Those nasty Satanists always bring about the apocalypse.

I'm sorry folks, but this isn't "quality Christian programming," it's junk television. But I'll try to tune in tonight if I'm awake; I think it's good thing to cultivate a taste for le bad television; but American "Christian" TV will have a long way to go before it even begins to approach the cheesy cinematic genius of something like Karan Arjun.

Update:

I noticed Salon has an amusing take-down of this show. I hadn't realized that David Seltzer, who wrote this show, also wrote "The Omen," which admittedly had me laughing at loud in the movie theater when I first saw it, simply because the principal characters were so dense that they couldn't see the foreshadowing.

But I don't think that Salon's right here: I won't be annoyed; if Seltzer lives up to his previous opus, this is going to be laugh-out-loud funny again.

Does anyone "get" it?

With the exception of the last one (although arguably it was, but mostly it was posted becasause a) I wanted to learn what Dogen's name was in kanji, and b) it's a good thing to remember what Dogen said on studying one's self), the posts in the past day or two have been about Joshu's Dog. Actually not about Joshu's Dog, they've been Joshu's Dog.

While this koan can have many meanings imparted to it, there is one specific meaning that is taken to be "passing" this koan. The use of the terms "passing" and "meaning" here is quite interesting, because it is probably unique usages of those terms.

The "answer" given to the koan, as the Westerners after WWII noted out of their anthropological curiosity about the Japanese and Zen, was not so much a rote answer as it is a way of being. In fact, the "answers" to the koans are supposedly widely known, and have been published in English and Japanese. But reading the answers will do you no good in sanzen or dokusan, if you've got any kind of a "teacher" who is properly deeply realized himself.

And this is ultimately why we practice Zen: to have the true freedom to have a very particular way of being. When you have this freedom, every word that koan Joshu's dog (interestingly translated by Google from Chinese as "son of a bitch") makes perfect sense. If you have no awareness that such a freedom can exist, it looks almost like sentences generated at random. "What the hell is up with that hot iron ball stuff anyway? " you might ask. Who the heck is this "General Kuan" (as it appears in some versions of the koan)? Why would I want to kill the Buddha?

I could go on ad nauseum, but suffice it to say that in this very particular way of being , suffering may be transcended. But it ain't static for nobody.