Keating the Master

...sells Gillards carbon tax better than Gillard or anyone else including myself ever could.

H/T Moira Rayner at Eurekastreet.

A few weeks ago, a canceled dog meat festival in South Korea prompted this Rice Bowl blogger to ask: What's really wrong with eating dog?

A few things, turns out.

...

Here is what Dr. Robinson had to say:

(1) Dogs are carnivores and are inherently different in temperament to most domestic livestock species that are more commonly raised for food. As pack animals, hierarchy is important. The dogs are crammed into cages to be transported to the markets, which leads to aggression and fighting. Equipped with efficient canine teeth — carnivore attacking carnivore — they are seen tearing into each other, inflicting horrific wounds.

(2) In many cases, dogs are bludgeoned to death slowly. They are given a blow across the muzzle, using an instrument resembling a baseball bat. The blow is not hard enough to render the animals unconscious for long — they regain consciousness within seconds, and try to get up, sliding around in the blood and crashing into other dogs also flailing around. At this point they are howling pitifully in pain and confusion, with blood and mucus pouring from their nose and mouth — only to be bludgeoned again and again.

...

But, to me, these arguments fail to address the crux of the issue.

...

So, I suppose there is a new question: Can the slaughtering of dogs be done humanely?

...

I'm not sure what the answer is, but given that millions of dogs are euthanized every year, it is worth talking about.

As Jonathan Safran Foer pointed out in the Wall Street Journal:

The simple disposal of these euthanized dogs is an enormous ecological and economic problem. But eating those strays, those runaways, those not-quite-cute-enough-to-take and not-quite-well-behaved-enough-to-keep dogs would be killing a flock of birds with one stone and eating it, too.

Given that we put an end to the lives of so many dogs every year, doesn't it make sense to put those lives to good use?

Who Owns America?

Here's a quick and fascinating breakdown by total amount held and percentage of total U.S. debt, according to Business Insider:

* Hong Kong: $121.9 billion (0.9 percent)
* Caribbean banking centers: $148.3 (1 percent)
* Taiwan: $153.4 billion (1.1 percent)
* Brazil: $211.4 billion (1.5 percent)
* Oil exporting countries: $229.8 billion (1.6 percent)
* Mutual funds: $300.5 billion (2 percent)
* Commercial banks: $301.8 billion (2.1 percent)
* State, local and federal retirement funds: $320.9 billion (2.2 percent)
* Money market mutual funds: $337.7 billion (2.4 percent)
* United Kingdom: $346.5 billion (2.4 percent)
* Private pension funds: $504.7 billion (3.5 percent)
* State and local governments: $506.1 billion (3.5 percent)
* Japan: $912.4 billion (6.4 percent)
* U.S. households: $959.4 billion (6.6 percent)
* China: $1.16 trillion (8 percent)
* The U.S. Treasury: $1.63 trillion (11.3 percent)
* Social Security trust fund: $2.67 trillion (19 percent)

So America owes foreigners about $4.5 trillion in debt. But America owes America $9.8 trillion.

(The 'Caribbean banking centers' are probably mostly American money too.)

Budget Hero

See if you can balance the US budget!

Sinofascists get upset

http://granitestudio.org/2011/05/25/when-the-fox-politely-questions-the-hound-the-hound-loses-his-shit/

Chinese secret police in action

http://granitestudio.org/2011/05/25/when-the-fox-politely-questions-the-hound-the-hound-loses-his-shit/

The blogger's analysis is spot on too.

The Sinofascists have no plan

I really get tired of people saying how the Chinese take a long view. Thanks to Granitestudio for telling like it is.

...the real secret of the CCP is this: There is no plan and there never was. For the last 90 years, the Party has lurched from one big idea to another without really ever stopping to think about what might happen next: Join the KMT, work with the urban proletariat, get purged by the KMT, work with the peasants, work with the KMT again, fight the Japanese, carry out land reform sometimes but not if it pisses people off, take over the country, reform the land again only this time you mean it, then take the land back, ask for help from the Soviets, antagonize Khrushchev and watch the Soviets leave, fight the US “invaders’ in Korea, invite Nixon to China, 100 Flowers and Anti-Rightist movements, criticize Confucius, communes and SEZs, Capitalists in the Party, put statue of Confucius on Chang’an Dajie. Four Modernizations, Two Whatevers, Three Represents and still no plan. Why do so many foreign pundits argue about the future of the CCP? Because the CCP itself has no clue where it’s going to be in 10 years. It’s going to continue to react to whatever is immediately threatening its hold on power and go from there.

There's a lot of gold in the original article, so dig away!

Why Bother With College?

Why Bother With College?
By Jiang Xueqin

I’ve always been sceptical about Chinese students studying in the United States. Many go to study business, and I used to tell them that they should take $10,000 of the $200,000 tuition money and become a fruit vendor. After four years of dealing daily with ignorant customers, arrogant policemen and thugs, they’ll have acquired the requisite knowledge of how to really do business in China, and with the $190,000 they can start their business career. I also told a former student, Zhou Yeran, that he was so talented that he ought to use his tuition money to make low-budget films for four years. (I was popular neither with those students who wanted to study business, nor with Zhou Yeran’s mother.)

...

Since then I’ve grown up a bit, and nowadays I tell my Peking University High School International Division students that, as China becomes increasingly more international and increasing bilingual in Chinese and Chinglish, the ability to read and write well in English is what will guarantee their professional success and personal happiness in life. While Chinese may speak fluent English, they’ll eventually hit a glass ceiling in a multinational because they can’t write well enough in English. But if our students develop the habit of reading, they’ll discover that new worlds would immediately open to them: the Internet would suddenly become an infinite continent...

Our plan is to have students avoid applying to large state universities and the Ivy League, and apply only to humanities programmes at liberal arts colleges. This is ironic because when Americans mention overpriced, useless degrees they mean the humanities programmes at liberal arts colleges. ...

Why Chinese Make Bad Managers

Why Chinese Make Bad Managers
By Jiang Xueqin

In his New York magazine article ‘Paper Tigers,’ the Korean-American writer Wesley Yang argues that the Asian parenting model and cultural values mean that Asians will excel in schools, and only in schools: ‘According to a recent study, Asian-­Americans represent roughly 5 percent of the population but only 0.3 percent of corporate officers, less than 1 percent of corporate board members, and around 2 percent of college presidents.’

...

To ease their own violent paranoia, Chinese managers instil and augment violent paranoia in their staff. To maintain absolute control, they will practice divide-and-conquer by constantly changing favourites, spreading innuendoes and rumours and lies, and acting arbitrarily and violently to induce terror. They won’t compose memos or read financial statements, but they’ll probably have watched ‘The Godfather’ dozens of times, and have memorized The Art of War. China’s management problem isn’t that there aren’t enough alpha males—it’s that there are too many.

Role of parents in educability

This was a surprise:

Last year, when we at the Peking University High School International Division selected our students, we didn’t consider our students’ relationship with parents in our admissions decision: It was a naïve and costly mistake.

After a year, we realized there are no smart or stupid students: Whether our students choose to use the Internet to read the New York Times or play World of Warcraft is determined by the student’s relationship with his parents. Those students that come from supportive and loving, [b]tolerant and progressive[/b] families thrive here, while those who don’t have turned out to be too much to handle. It seems some parents just dump their problem child on us, and run away.

Evil Sinofascists busted...

The Sinofascists have been busted being evil Sinofascists.

Not that anyone was for a minute taken in by their "fake smile", but for some reason it is important that documents in which the evil Sinofascists talked about how they were going to be evil were leaked to the free, Western press.

The Evil Sinofascists take this seriously. "For the Communist Party, information control is a matter of regime survival. Free information and free press will lead to a ”national collapse”, an article in the party’s own journal, Search for the Truth, stated last year."

Here:

”In particular, crackdowns must be imposed on any aggression directed against the party and its leaders as well as against the promotion of other political systems and a free press.”

...the official document outlines several instances of how the Chinese authorities should prevent people from getting in touch with ”politically sensitive information”. Such information must be either ”blocked”, ”destroyed” or ”cleansed” from the Internet, media and books...

”all illegal and harmful information on Chinese and foreign web sites should be completely blocked.” And that people who disseminate such information should be ”indicted and prosecuted quickly before a judge and be quickly convicted.”

"...Beijing’s perceived threat from the West to the party’s power should be resisted, among other things by tightening the reigns on foreign journalists and NGO’s and by exerting ”greater control over the access of Western cultural products to the Chinese market.” This should be combined with a strengthened propaganda effort against the Chinese population, making it less susceptible to ”dangerous information from the outside” and promoting ”a better understanding of the Communist Party’s strength”.

Here:

The contents of the document points to a Chinese leadership plagued by a growing siege mentality. Beijing sees itself as being under attack by the West and forced into a propaganda struggle against internal and external enemies. In this frame of reference, nothing less than the Communist Party’s hold on power is at stake.

And look at the implications of this piece of 'self-criticism':

”China must compete with the U.S. on friendship with the rest of the world’s nations. If our number of friends shall be smaller than America’s, we will never be in a position to offer a better international leadership than they do,” he says. ”Many people express a dislike of America’s hegemonic leadership, but they also tend to think that China would be the worse alternative. China must show that we can do better. And this can not only be done through propaganda efforts. We must also find practical ways to manifest our human authority.”