Two women have become China's first female astronauts thanks to a critical qualification: They are wives and mothers. Yeah, they know how to fly a spacecraft and stuff, but they also meet the country's requirement that its women reproduce before traveling in space, according to The Guardian.
The reasoning here is that hurtling through outer space could damage women's fertility, according to Xu Xianrong, an expert at the country's Air Force General Hospital. "It's out of the consideration of being responsible for the female pilots," he told the official government news agency Xinhua. "Though there is little evidence on how the space experience will affect the female constitution, we have to be extra cautious." Evidence, shmevidence. Of course, he doesn't mention any fears about men's fertility. I wonder whether the requirement has to do with China's shortage of girls and women, or whether this is just your run-of-the-mill case of paternalism.
On a different note Xianrong said that, as the Guardian paraphrases, women generally have "advantages as astronauts over men because they were more mentally stable, better able to bear loneliness and had better communication skills." Sex stereotypes: Sometimes they work for you, sometimes they work against you -- whaddayagondo.
When you look past the craziness, chaos and confusion of politics these days, you still find roughly two major schools of thought that aim to explain What's Fundamentally Wrong.
The first says America is paralyzed by a political system that is too democratic -- too responsive to citizens' whims. This is the religion of almost everyone in the permanent Washington elite, regardless of party. Its canon mixing paeans to noblesse oblige with shrill authoritarianism is most clearly articulated by high priests like the Washington Post's David Broder and the New York Times' Tom Friedman. The former has said democracy threatens to make "official Washington altogether too responsive to public opinion"; the latter dreams of Chinese-style dictatorship.
"One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages," Friedman recently gushed, adding that the chief "advantage" is the ability of despots to "just impose" policies at the barrel of a gun.
By contrast, most people living outside of Washington (i.e., the Rest of Us) see America harmed by a political system that is too undemocratic -- too controlled by moneyed interests, unaccountable lawmakers and a servile press. An organizer friend of mine sums up this view by saying, "The best kind of politician is a nervous politician" -- and the trouble is that gerrymandering, extended terms, incumbent fundraising advantages, obsequious media coverage, lame duck-ness and other travesties make sure few politicians are ever nervous about keeping their jobs.
Over the course of history, neither side of this divide has had a full monopoly on truth. But recent moves by three senators teach that, at least at this moment, the Rest of Us are more accurately diagnosing the root problem than our Beltway adversaries.
What, for instance, is Sen. Jim Bunning but the personification of unaccountability's downsides? The Kentucky Republican announced in July that he is not seeking reelection. Thus shielded from democratic pressure, he felt free to let his conservative extremism fly with an outrageous attempt this week to block unemployment benefits for thousands of jobless Americans.
Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd is Bunning's Democratic analogue. When he was planning to face voters in 2010, he was motivated to represent their support for stronger financial regulations. For instance, he promised to use his Banking Committee chairmanship to pass a bill constructing a Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) -- one independent of the Federal Reserve, which he rightly said "failed for over 14 years to put an end to the predatory mortgage lending practices that led to the financial crisis."
Now, however, Dodd has opted not to run for reelection -- and guess what? He's started working with lobbyists to make sure any CFPA is run by the Fed.
The converse of Dodd and Bunning is Michael Bennet, who embodies the same axiom -- but in the opposite way. Confronting an increasingly aggressive Democratic primary challenge from former state legislator Andrew Romanoff, the Colorado senator is suddenly shaking off his backbench lethargy. Last week, he released a letter endorsing the use of majority rules ("reconciliation") to create a much-needed government-run health insurer that will compete with private insurance monopolies. Polls in Colorado and nationally show his initiative is wildly popular -- and since he needs voters' support to retain his Senate seat, he is reinvigorating this critical fight.
Bennet is nervous; Bunning and Dodd are not. The one facing democracy is serving the public interest; the two insulated from democracy are serving their own interests. In government today, the election-related trepidation and legislative responsiveness is the exception, the insulation and indifference the norm.
If you want to understand What's Fundamentally Wrong, here endeth the lesson.
David Sirota is the author of the best-selling books "Hostile Takeover" and "The Uprising." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado and blogs at OpenLeft.com. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com or follow him on Twitter @davidsirota.
© 2010 Creators.com
Melting ice-caps -- It's a good news bad news kind of thing. Because while on the one hand the rapid release of methane gas from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf may doom the planet to a catastrophic rise in temperature, on the other hand, open sea lanes in the North could save the Chinese a lot of time and money.
From "China Prepares For an Ice-Free Arctic," an exceedingly well-sourced monograph by Linda Jakobson, the Acting Program Director and Beijing-based Senior Researcher of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute's China and Global Security Program: (Thanks to Ben Muse for the link.)
Because China's economy is reliant on foreign trade, there are substantial commercial implications if shipping routes are shortened during the summer months each year. Nearly half of China's gross domestic product (GDP) is thought to be dependent on shipping. The trip from Shanghai to Hamburg via the Northern Sea Route -- which runs along the north coast of Russia from the Bering Strait in the east to Novaya Zemlya in the west -- is 6400 kilometers shorter than the route via the Strait of Malacca and the Suez Canal. Moreover, due to piracy, the cost of insurance for ships travelling via the Gulf of Aden towards the Suez Canal increased more than tenfold between September 2008 and March 2009.
Since the prospect of climate change isn't a hotly contested political football in China, the country is free to pay serious attention to the real-world implications of rising temperatures. China has no territorial rights to the Arctic, but nonetheless boasts "one of the world's strongest polar scientific research capabilities," writes Jakobson.
Chinese research remains primarily focused on how the melting Arctic will affect China's continental and oceanic environment and how in turn such changes could affect domestic agricultural and economic development. However, a small number of Chinese researchers are publicly encouraging the government to actively prepare for the commercial and strategic opportunities that a melting Arctic presents. Li Zhenfu of Dalian Maritime University has, together with a team of specialists, assessed China's advantages and disadvantages when the Arctic sea routes open up. "Whoever has control over the Arctic route will control the new passage of world economics and international strategies," writes Li, referring both to the shortened shipping routes between East Asia and Europe or North America and to the abundant oil, gas, mineral and fishery resources presumed to be in the Arctic.
Hmm, maybe we'd better send Senator James Inhofe to Beijing, to tell them about how the whole climate change thing is a crock. He's doing a pretty good job at stalling action on climate change in the U.S., so perhaps he can also prevent the Chinese from controlling "the new passage of world economics and international strategies."
Does the prospect of a few billion more upper middle class conspicuous consumers roaring down the highway ensure the planet's doom.... or its rescue?
Simple mathematics suggests that everybody in the world can't live like Americans or Western Europeans currently do without creating impossible strains on the planet's resources. But maybe such mathematics are too simple. Matthew Kahn, an environmental economist at UCLA suggests that we might be looking at the problem in the wrong way.
Under "business as usual," of course it is the case that rising demand will exhaust a finite supply. But, the whole field of "rational expectations" in modern economics is based on the idea that self-interested households and firms plan ahead and use all available current information to plan for future scenarios. The innovation sector is a crucial part of modern capitalism.
China and India's ongoing growth is a credible signal that resource demand will rise -- if this is predicted to lead to rising resources prices over time then this creates sharp innovation incentives to devise substitutes for the increasingly scarce natural resources. The net result of this innovation activity, caused by the need to find substitutes for increasingly scarce fossil fuels, will be a "green economy". Thus, we owe China. Its anticipated appetite for energy will green the world!
I'm not sure I have the same faith in rational expectations as the average economist -- to paraphrase John Maynard Keynes, I think humans might be able stay irrational a lot longer than the planet's biosphere can stay habitable. But then I look at the latest news from China, where every major car company has plans to bring electric cars to market, the deployment of wind turbines is growing at an astonishing annual rate, and solar power module makers are rapidly conquering the U.S. market.
China can read the writing on the wall. It remains to be seen what level of reading comprehension will be demonstrated by the U.S.
China's space program will launch an unmanned experimental module next year, the first component of its permanent space station, state media reported Wednesday.
Before the completion of the station, the 8.5 ton module, named Tiangong 1, or "Heavenly Palace," will be used for docking practice by China's Shenzhou space craft, Qi Faren, the program's veteran chief designer, was quoted as saying by the Xinhua News Agency. The unmanned Shenzhou 8 mission is expected to dock about two years after Tiangong's launch, followed by manned Shenzhou 9 and 10 flights.
Xinhua quoted Liang Xiaohong, head of the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, as saying Tiangong 1 would be slung into space atop a modified version of the two-stage Long March 2F rocket capable of carrying payloads of more than eight tons.
A permanent orbiting space station is a component of China's space ambitions, although no target completion date has been given.
The space program's strong connection to China's armed forces and the secretive, authoritarian nature of Beijing's communist one-party government has inhibited cooperation with the U.S. and other nations -- including on the newly completed International Space Station.
Other Chinese plans include launching a second lunar probe in October in preparation for an unmanned moon landing by the end of 2012. A possible manned lunar mission has also been proposed -- with a target date of 2017 -- putting China in the forefront of a tightening Asian space race involving India, Japan and South Korea.
China launched its first manned flight in 2003, joining Russia and the United States as the only countries to launch humans into orbit, and in 2008 carried out its first spacewalk.
Chinese exporters can't find workers, according to the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times. Or, to be more precise, they can't find the kind of workers who used to be willing to plunk themselves down in front of mind-numbing assembly lines for wages of around $250 a month. The millions of migrant workers from the inland who once poured into China's coastal regions willing do any kind of work at all appear to be getting more choosy, even when offered a dazzling array of perks.
"We haven't found anyone today," Ms Liu admitted, clutching flyers that smacked of desperation. They boasted of complimentary food for the first month of employment, cooling herbal teas on hot days, free dorm rooms with en suite washrooms and hot water, and computer, library and leisure facilities.
Various domestic media reports put the labor supply gap at around a million people in Guangzhou and neighboring cities such as Dongguan, legendary centers of China's export boom in the past three decades. Numerous assembly lines and construction sites are sitting idle while anxious employers have raised salaries by more than 30 percent but still can't attract enough applicants.
The Journal's Shen Hong speculates that government efforts to spur development in China's inland regions have ameliorated the economic pressure that previously motivated workers to head East. The FT backs up that theory by noting what a difference it makes to upgrade transportation links connecting previously remote cities to wealthier markets.
In December, China unveiled the world's fastest passenger train service between Guangzhou and the central city of Wuhan, covering 1,100km in just three hours. The Harmony Express line has reduced travel time between Guangzhou and Shaoguan, an industrial backwater in Guangdong's remote mountain region, to just 40 minutes, anchoring local workers closer to home.
The noteworthy aspect to all of this is how fast it appears to be happening. The huge income disparities between coastal and inland China have long been regarded as potentially destabilizing. But the extent to which China is remaking itself, in real time, makes yesterday's assumptions obsolete at a speed almost as fast as the rate at which China's trains now fly down the tracks.
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