New Moon

New Moon, originally uploaded by Balakov.

aw....

Updated Blue Skies China site

Here's the latest news from the fully updated Blue Skies China website:
Check it out!

Now no-one believes the Lancet

The Lancet has come up with some controversial figures regarding the number of violent deaths in Iraq - and after years of relying on it for out-of-context health-scare stories, the media and general public suddenly do not believe it.

Indeed, it seems the general public knows better than the British medical journal. Everyone has become an armchair statistician. Journalists, pundits, Joe Blog... they all know more about stastics and the situation in Iraq than a team of scientists who have now produced their second report into violent deaths in this war-zone.

This is the most recommended moderated comment on the BBC website:

Using the figure of 650,000 I have worked out (V V roughly) that no less than 515 people have been killed every day over the last 42 months. That is day in and day out. I cannot begin to believe such a figure. Certainly the killing that has ocurred has been absolutley awful but bandying nonsense figures about helps no one and certainly discredits "The Lancet".
John, Oban

OK John from Oban - what figure can you believe? The ones spawned from counting death reports in the media? Official government figures, if there are any? Or just cut to the chase. Tell us how many people you think have been killed by the conflict, and we'll find a source that matches up with that. Is that what you want? The world to slot into agreement with your tiny brain?

John from Oban cannot imagine 500 people a day dead from violence because, at that rate, Oban's entire population would be slain in just over three weeks. So it isn't true.

Even the BBC offers a totally flawed "this can't be so" analysis. It uses an assumption that existing UN figures are correct, to debunk, in a roundabout way, the proposed figures from the Lancet.

BBC Paul Reynolds: Baghdad is not the whole country of course, but AP reported the United Nations as saying that in July and August, 6,599 people were killed across the country, of which 5,106 were in Baghdad.

This suggests that Baghdad has by far the highest number of actual and percentage dead.

So, if the current rate in Baghdad is about 86 and the countrywide figure should be about 500 according to the Lancet report, where are the "missing" dead?"

This is like debunking Copernicus with:

"The Earth is at the centre of the universe. Copernicus has a different view. Therefore... Copernicus is wrong. And he's a dangerous liar, let's put him under house arrest before he ruins everything."

The Lancet has done a difficult and unpopular job. Sure they may wish they had a larger sample, or a more diverse sample, or a smaller, more accurate, sample, or whatever sort of sample it is statisticians dream of. But the fact is, they have a sample, they have come up with a result, they have published it and put their scientific reputations behind it. This is science. You can disagree with it but you can only discredit it if you have a better way. And the armchair statisticians have nothing, except angry scared voices.

Sound familiar?

Will the editors of the Lancert now be burned as witches?

They'd better be careful. RIP David Kelly - an unpopular scientific view can get you in a whole lot of trouble in the third world war.

Blame Bush's belligerence

A good piece here on Iranian and North Korean nuclear weapons development. The Logic of Proliferation is written by Floyd Rudmin, a professor of social & community psychology at the University of Tromsø.

The simplest solution to the present crisis would be for the US to stop threatening other nations, to return to rule of international law, and to give the guarantees of non-aggression that North Korea and Iran have been requesting.
...
The sooner America realizes that it is merely one nation among many, comprising merely 5% of humankind, the sooner will the world be more peaceful and able to face the real threats to our existence.

Rice: very ma fan

WASHINGTON, Oct. 13 (Xinhua) -- U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will visit Japan, South Korea and China on Oct. 17-22, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian affairs Christopher Hill said on Friday.

The key part of Rice's trip will focus on making sure the UN Security Council resolution to be passed on imposing sanctions on the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) "will really have teeth," Hill said.

Condoleezza Rice, if you're reading this (and I know you are): FUCK OFF LAH. DO NOT COME TO CHINA. You're not welcome.

Wherever you and your bullying cohorts go, there extends a cloud of misery and threats. You are coming to ensure sanctions against North Korea are really going "to have teeth" - well what if China doesn't want to sanction North Korea? Are you going to threaten to bomb China "back to the stone age" like you did with Pakistan?

You thought five of the six-party nations would roll over with shock and outrage at North Korea's announced nuclear test but now things are not going your way, you're planning a little hate-tour of Asia. Japan, South Korea and China.

Behind the scenes, the political games must be more complicated than the plot outline for the new Dan Brown thriller. And just as formulaic.

Within minutes of the alleged nuclear test, US geological offices announced they had NO seismic record of the event.

www.guardian.co.uk - October 8 AM The U.S. Geological Survey said it had detected no seismic activity in North Korea, although it was not clear whether a blast would be strong enough for its sensors.

This was no doubt to give the Bush administration time to awaken from their slumbers, brush their bloodthirsty teeth and plan a suitable response. Several hours later, US geological offices were practically the ONLY seismic experts in the world quoted by the press.

AP - October 8 PM The U.S. Geological Survey said it has recorded a seismic event with a preliminary magnitude of 4.2 in northeastern North Korea that coincided with the country's announced nuclear test.

Their press releases were as finely crafted as the "good old shoe" song in Wag the Dog, complete with neat headline-friendly seismic graphs. The Guardian UK ran with the graph half page: "This is the moment North Korea became a nuclear power".

(As an aside, according to French geologists, North Korea detonated nothing more than a gigantic brown paper bag. The explosion's seismic signature identified the bag as the packaging for the French luxury food hamper arrived at the North Korean government offices last week. Luxury goods sanctions? "Qu'es que c'est, un 'sanction'?")

But the US geologists have now been replaced with more CIA-reliable science - secret radiation reports from CIA spies in North Korea. Their results are still inconclusive - the last thing the US wants right now is conclusive evidence of real testing either way. But secret raditation reports are much easier to maniuplate than seismic scientists.

The CIA will have to "silence" less geologists this way. It's better for Earth Science as a whole.

Expect the story of exactly who or what the North Korean's blew up to unravel like a political thriller. Who cares? North Korea SAYS it conducted a nuclear test. A real explosion or not is irrelevant; since it has said it would never strike first with nuclear weapons if it had them, its intentions are clearly to annoy the rest of the six-party nations and give itself some political manouevering room at the hungry-dog table. It has been treated like shit by the international community, particularly the US. Now it wants some respect.

It doesn't look like it's gonna get it. Rice plans this little junket around Asia to press for further sanctions. She will visit South Korea, Japan and China. Why not North Korea? It is a bona fide six-party member, even though it has stained its record of late. Why is Rice going around behind it like that, like a double-crossing bitch?

The whole point of the six-party talks is to allow each state - including North Korea - a frank forum for discussing North Korea's nuclear weapon's testing.

It makes me sick that this bully Rice is going around like a schoolyard sneak. Rice's visit to China is pathetic snivelling behaviour at best - at worst, if threats are involved, it's just plain old bullying.

And you know what they say about bullies? Well, pick your insult. Did the US wet its bed as a child? Did its mother not love it? Is it hopelessley insecure?

China is unlikely to bow to even Rice's smallest demands, but her presence here is going to make for some nasty name calling and all-round China-hating in the international press.

I can only hope that, upon Rice's arrival at Beijing Immigration, the infrared body temperature cameras glow bright red. "Sorry dear. You're running too hot. Perhaps a fever. Perhaps it's bird flu. We're going to have to place you into quarantine for six weeks. You wouldn't want to spread bird flu around Asia now would you?"

And then the rest of the six parties can get along and decipher this whole political game without the hair tugging of the spoilt kid who wants everything for herself.

"Ladies first", warned Chinese tourists

Chinese tourists are an embarrasment for their government - the travellers are loud, they spit, they litter and they deface national monuments, according to a report from government news agency Xinhua. Calls for tourists to improve their behaviour were mostly ignored during the week-long National Day/Mid-Autumn Festival holiday, with 40 tonnes of litter left in Tian'anmen Square alone on October 1.
But the government should not be too hard on these travellers. Sure, they are noisy, uncouth and annoying. But then, look at any nation on holiday. Look at the Brits. We are the worst travellers in the world. We're like a group of Chinese tourists who have been forced to drink Special Brew all day. The Chinese tourists may be loud but they can only afford one can of lager between them, and they won't be vomiting in the street at least until the economy picks up. By then, the government hopes, it will have taught them some manners...

BEIJING, Oct. 9 (Xinhua) -- The government calls for Chinese tourists to improve their behavior that was mostly ignored during the week-long National Day holiday from Oct. 1 to 7, according to a commentary in Monday's China Youth Daily.

"The uncivilized behavior of many Chinese people can not be eradicated in just a few days - it needs long-term efforts," said the report.

The newspaper exposed the bad habits of Chinese tourists both at home and abroad during the past week and called on Chinese people to behave in a more civilized manner.

"Some improvement has been seen among Chinese tourists traveling abroad, with less spitting and littering," said Li Xi, a Chinese travel guide in Paris. "But what annoys the locals most is that Chinese tourists always speak loudly and make noises in public," Li said.

The Civilization Office with the Spiritual Civilization Steering Committee and the National Tourism Administration jointly issued an etiquette guide on Oct. 2 telling Chinese travelers to pay attention to everyday etiquette and hygiene while abroad.

Travelers are asked not to litter, not to talk loudly, to respect queuing rules, be polite in public places, and observe the rule of "ladies first".

Uncivilized behavior is becoming a real embarrassment for China as tourism continues to increase rapidly. Some experts attribute the uncouth behavior to Chinese people's lack of awareness of public property and selfishness.

Education in manners and etiquette has been strengthened in some kindergartens and primary schools in China. But experts believe it may take several generations to nurture civilized behavior and form a positive image of Chinese tourists.

North Korea - it's all about the oil (sound familiar)?

Look out for unbelievable shock, outrage and political grandstanding upon North Korea's nuclear test. The country's foreign minister has previously said the coiuntry would NEVER be the first to fire nuclear weapons but this stance is unlikely to surface as world leaders condemn this morning's nuclear weapon test and the world's self-righteous media hypothsises how North Korea is likely to deliver its new weapons.
Shame on the BBC, for example, for this little information box:

North Korea: * Believed to have 'handful' of nuclear weapons
* But not thought to have any small enough to put in a missile
* Could try dropping from airplane, though world watching closely

For a different view try Blue Skies China's story on North Korea's dependence on Chinese oil.

Beijing has previously used its oil exports to DPRK [North Korea] to coerce participation in the six-party talks (a forum for DPRK, South Korea, Russia, China, Japan and the US to set out their positions on DPRK's nuclear weapons programme). The DRPK's test today will allow China a gracious exit from existing oil supply deals - oil sanctions are likely - and thus force DPRK's hand in developing its own oil resources.
But here's where the politics gets interesting. To develop these offshore resources, DPRK needs China's offshore oil experience and an agreement on political boundary setting in the waters between the Korean peninsula and China. Previous efforts to develop the fields with South Korea, the UK, Malaysia, Sweden and Australia have all dried up and Beijing is considered DPRK's last hope in getting this offshore energy out of the ocean.
While a DPRK with its own secure oil supply would weaken China's sanctioning hand in future six-party gamesmanship, a share of the 22 billion barrels may prove irresistable, and China is likely to put political differences aside to get its drills in the water. The prize for China would be a greater share of the offshore reserves than it might have obtained from a six-party compliant DPRK. Boundary lines have not yet been drawn and it seems likely, given DPRK's snub of the international community, that China would be able to claim moral high ground and thus the lion's share of offshore waters, leaving North Korea with just enough for its own needs.

And yes, I'm plugging my own blog. Seems like better behaviour than most world leaders these days.

911 cover up

If you believe every scrap of evidence this movie presents - and the conclusions it draws - then it's time to march on the Capitol.

But hold on - there is no way of proving many of these facts; the movie's sources include Wikipedia, and the filmakers conclusions are ambigious. The "are you sitting down" conclusions are very disappointing. After a solid hour of reporting, it falls back on kids spy stories about hidden gold bullion and clandestine Wall St manouvres. Get this conspiracy theorists: stock options in airlines are bought and sold in "above average" amounts every day, and millions of dollars of options go unexercised each week. It doesn't mean someone knows something you don't about a terrorist attack. And tiny flashes of light/dust purporting to be demolition charges in the two towers of the World Trade Center could be explained a million different ways, especially given the poor quality of the videos available. Take a picture of any airplane flying overhead on your mobile phone camera and you could probably see enough suspicious shadows to turn it into a cruise missile.

The movie states with absolute confidence that the cell phone calls made from Flight 93 are fake. This, if proved true, would be huge news. The filmakers base this claim on cell phone call research made by a doctor in a light aircraft, who found call success rates above 8,000 feet to be impossibly low. But whether the researcher was flying over the same airspace, and on the same handsets and networks as the victims as Flight 93 is not explained. If this is valid research - then, wow - something is indeed going on. If not - then it falls into the same sham basket as quoting Wikipedia on the amount of gold deposits "rumoured" to be in the WTC basements.

Alas like every other conspiracy theory the movie itself falls down with its "and another thing" arm-tugging child attitude - if the filmmakers just spent some time investigating one or two inconsistencies in the "official" story rather than trying to discredit almost everything that happened that terrible day, they might be able to expose some truths. The mobile phone calls seem like a good place to start. The dialogues do seem strange, absurd even. But then, who knows what you might say to a loved one on the ground when under such duress? The "fakeness" of the conversations is not evidence in itself, but perhaps a pointer to something amiss. True, a flight attendant shouting "oh my god i can see water, buildings" reads like a bad novel character, when a real flight attendant would probably recognise Manhattan and say so... but it's not hard proof and perhaps just insulting to her memory to pick holes in her final words like this.

Nevertheless, something is rotten in Denmark for sure, and I hope these filmakers continue their investigations and come up with something more solid. Finding Flight 93 "heroes" alive and well and living in North Carolina would do it. But coming up with a theory based on grainy news pictures of the events seems childish, pointless and arrogant.

Virgin Galactic promo

Space travel just got sanitised into a slick science fiction wet dream. Somehow being an astronaut just lost all its glamour. Where's the clunky danger?

81 bad habits of Hong Kong boy

Hong Kong boy was asking for trouble posting "81 bad habits of Hong Kong girl" on she.com last week. Hong Kong girl has responded with a list of ALL Hong Kong boy's bad habits:
1. ugly
2. immature
3. has lots of bad habits
4. loves to look under skirts
5. watches too much Japanese porn
6. thinks of girlfriend as AV girl (japanese porn girl)
7. when the bill arrives in a restaurant, they are always going to the toilet...
8. ... or forgetting their wallet;
9. and when they say they want to take you out for a meal, Hong Kong boys mean they want you to buy them dinner.
10. they have bno time for their family
11. they like to visit prostitutes
12. they have 10 credit cards in their wallets....
13. ...but all of them are frozen
14. they see an expensive clothes shop, they turn to the other side of the street
15. they consider dating to be free sex
16. they want to french kiss on first date
17. Hong Kong boy dresses bad
18. they have big tummy;
19. ... and no hair
20. their underwear is bought by their mum
21. they talk rubbish without thinking first
22. they judge the girl by her face and body shape alone
23. no responsibility
24. they cancel date without any notice
25. they love to give condoms as birthday presents
26. they never wash their hands after they go to the loo
27. they sing pretty bad at karaoke...
28. ...but always blame something wrong with the microphone
29. they punch the girl
30. they are not well educated
31. they never think about the future
32. they love only the pretty girl
33. their English is bad and they can't type Chinese
34. they only call their girlfriend pretty in front of them
35. they judge against Hong Kong girls...
36. ...but they forget their mum is also a Hong Kong girl

Brainwashed porkchop steals HK$7,000 to pay for beauty treatment

本 報 訊 】 在 便 利 店 任 職 收 銀 員 的 貪 靚 少 女 ， 不 甘 被 同 事 喚 作 「 肥 妹 」 ， 加 上 抵 不 住 時 下 纖 體 公 司 的 誘 惑 ， 在 職 時 多 次 「 穿 櫃 桶 底 」 ， 將 顧 客 的 買 煙 錢 據 為 己 有 ， 合 共 偷 取 7,000 元 ， 經 理 查 賬 揭 發 事 件 。 涉 案 少 女 昨 在 觀 塘 裁 判 法 院 承 認 10 項 偷 竊 罪 ， 還 柙 至 9 月 27 日 判 刑 。 　 記 者 ： 蔡 曉 楓 　 陳 達 浩

Sad tormented girl stole from the till to pay for beauty treatments after abuse from her colleagues. But she got caught, and is now in an "education centre" awaiting further judgment.

Oh for f**k's sake could someone just shoot all the environmentalists

Here is a tragic story. Barbara, a wood-burning tree-hugger, wishes to attend her best friend's wedding in Brisbane, but cannot bear the thought of all the CO2 produced by today's modern airliner. So she's going by land. From London.

Instead of 22 hour flight, which produces an estimated 5.2 tonnes of CO2 per passenger (Belfast Telegraph figures), she will spend seven weeks travelling in buses, trains and a cargo vessel.

HK Devil despairs of environmental nonsense, to the point where comment seems futile. But this one really is the most ridiculous plan ever concieved.

Barbara, for sure, is going to produce far more local pollution and harmful particulates as she chugs across the planet on a BUS or an unregulated BUNKER-FUEL TANKER. And for what? Seven weeks of her life gone to save a few tonnes of CO2? I'm going to leave the lights on for the rest of the year just to negate her gesture.

For a young woman whose commitment to reducing the impact of the modern lifestyle on the environment means she lives in an old caravan without electricity, heated by a small wood burner, it was the only acceptable solution to the quandary of how to be on the spot to throw confetti in Australia at the end of October.

Ah, now it all makes sense, what can you expect from someone who burns WOOD in their home? Raw wood produces more CO2 and particulates when burned, joule for joule, than electricity produced from a modern power plant. Wood is filthy stuff. Even rural China farmers recognise wood burning is bad for the environment; they're switching to gas.


Please, someone, take a whale-blubber candle and shove it up this poor deluded girl's ass. We don't need any more emissions from the likes of these mushroom-chomping caravan dwellers. You wanna take a seven week trip, great, sounds like a fantastic adventure. But please, not in the name of green.

If she really cared, she'd just buy enough carbon credits to offset ALL the wedding guests' transportation CO2. For the amount of money she's spending on this trip, and the depressed price of carbon right now, she could achieve far more this way.

It's not China polluting LA after all

Seems those crazy Californians got the wrong end of the stick from Steve Cliff's atmospheric research atop three west coast mountains. While Cliff said SOME particles from China were found high up in the air, he said local pollution mostly came from, well, local sources. Tankers are to blame for much of the filth. And a high proportion of particulates in the air are sea-salt.
Shame on the US press for jumping on Cliff's work in such a hamfisted way. Especially the New York Times.
Check out Blue Skies China for a more accurate story.
Blue Skies China home page here
Story here

Michael Crichton on environmentalism

It's quite old now... still a great speech by Michael Crichton on the dangers of environmentalism as religion.
http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speeches_quote05.html

Three girls in my recent life share the same birthday. Discounting sociological mating patterns and zodiacal zygote formations which sway the statistics, the odds of this happening are about 50 million to one.

That's too high odds for the universe to resist. When anything has odds of 50 million to one, you can be pretty sure of it happening right away.

One of the January 19th birthday brigade is a friend. One was a lover and a friend and now just a friend in love with someone else. And one was a fuck and is now nothing to me as I am nothing to her. A pretty selfish fuck, as it happens, but what can you expect from someone who looks like Audrey Hepburn and earns billions of dollars a year?

My agent is annoyed with me. He saw this coming he says. "A lifetime of wisdom can be snuffed out by a cute ass in a red thong," he says.

I chew the lecture. I don't think about red thongs but about January birthdays.

"Love is like life," my agent is yelling at me, almost at breaking point from my recent behaviour. "Love's death is irreversible!" he screams.

I've had this lesson a hundred times. I've even done detention. I've been held back year after year, like no other student ever before me.

It's not I'm lazy. It's not I can't understand.

It's just, when it comes down to it, the lessons go right out the window when the examination begins.

"From first eye contact there's trouble," my agent is yelling down the phone. "Celibacy is the new casual relationship!"

He gets all this from Cosmopolitan.

The trouble with Cosmopolitan magazine is it doesn't tell the truth.

I was once asked to write a few words on love for the UK edition, my girlfriend too, our joint stories to appear as a snippetty column on the page template known in the industry as the "buy more copies because you're in it" feature section.

"Be honest," said the magazine. "We want to hear YOUR experiences."

I wrote the first thing that came to mind.

"I love my girlfriend because she has good prospects and a great ass."

"I first realised I was in love with her when I started writing a book about her," I wrote.

Not one of these words was printed. The simple mud hut of my honest bare emotion was razed by a shitehawk work experience gal, redeveloped as a 1990 supermarket cum day-care centre cum stain on the landscape, rendered vague, massive and wrapped in bubble-wrap, regressing thousands of years into zeroth century Roman architecture to be approved by a bland committee of several million readers.

"You're supposed to be writing about love," screams my agent. "Give them what they want!"

Suddenly I want to be in the magazine.

"I love my girlfriend because she has a beautiful smile," I say.

"MORE! Give me more!" My agent's face becomes a happy mess of thready red veins.

"I first fell in love with my girlfriend when we wandered along the beach hand in hand at sunset."

"PARFAIT!" cries my agent, "We have it! Can you give her a disability?"

"I first fell in love with my girlfriend as I wheeled her across the beach and she complained of the sand in her bearings."

"NON NON NON NON you miss the whole point of l'amour," he says.

"Love is conformity," he screams.

But then he heard about the birthdays.

I told him about January 19th. About the 50 million to one odds.

Five times less likely than winning the Florida state lottery.

My agent hears the word "lottery". He perks up. He wants me to write about birthdays.

"C'est remarkable" he says, "this January 19th."

Yeah I say, but it's no spiritual biggy, I just like to fuck goats.

I mean, a few more hours in the womb, a minor birth complication lasting an hour or two each, they'd all be Aquarians. Who cares, right?

It's not like you'd delay the birth to align the stars.

My agent likes that idea.

He is in the library now researching birth delay drugs, vaginal plugs, giant plungers which suck onto a baby's head and force it backwards, cervical bungs.

"Horoscope horror!" he says. "Babies aborted not for being the wrong sex, but the wrong star sign!"

He loves that sort of stuff.

"Aquarius!" he says. "A new master race of Aquarians! It's good. It has legs."

"Water," he says, "is the bringer of life."

And crabs, I say, are the bringer of crabs.

I think I need a new agent. This post was supposed to be a tribute to a special girl, a friend. Someone a cut above. Someone who sees things differently. Someone good to know.

To that person: enough about goats, agents, cosmo - and instead a hearty and loving *salute* from my tattered soapbox. If I had the funds to drag it up to Chep Lap Kok... to claim it at Heathrow luggage belt 4.... to cram it onto the Piccadilly line, to endure the myriad slowing down, stopping, beeping, doors opening, beeping, doors closing, accelerating, slowing down of the tube repeating itself ad nauseam until Hyde Park Corner where the soapbox has its home..... if I could do that I would.

x

Kidney source "secret area" says Chinese transplant company

Bek Transplant
Click on FAQ, then click on "Do the organs come from alive or dead donors?"

This story originally broke in April when the British Transplantation Society claimed thousands of Chinese organs were being used without consent.

Back then, a foreign ministry official said: "Recently, the Chinese Ministry of Health introduced regulations on this matter. I feel puzzled about why the British organization [BTS] still issued such a report regardless of the fact. I want to remind this organization not to forget what happened in Britain several years ago. It was reported that some hospitals took away the organs of the deceased patients for other purposes, leaving their families totally in the dark. I suggest that you should also remind this organization," he told Chinese journalists.

BTS - consider yourself reminded.

But back to the organ transplants - Bek Transplant says it carries out 270 liver transplants a year using executed prisoners' livers and kidneys. Is this still going on, despite the Chinese government's denials?

Hong Kong Devil spoke to a Bek Transplant employee, who did not wish to be identified and would not give his name.
When asked about the situtaion with the transplant organs coming from executed prisoners wihout their permission, he said: "It has changed now," he said. I asked him where the organs were coming from now. "I don't know. It's a secret area. If I ask the doctors or surgeons, they won't say anything."

That's as much as he would say.

Have the Chinese Ministry of Health regulations come into effect? Are they policing the new rules? Because, at risk of having an organ removed for saying so, it appears nothing has actually been done.

Badger hair imports illegal in China

Just in case your killer China business plan involves badger hair at all, watch out - it is a BANNED import.

Who knew?

Here are the top five banned substances from the Catalogue of Commodities Forbidden to Import (fourth batch) from the Chinese government:

1. unprocessed human hair, no matter washed or not; wasted human hair
2. bristles and wasted bristles
3. badger hair and other wasted animal hair used for making brushes
4. wasted horse hair
5. sugarcane molasses...

the list goes on to include "old clothing" at number 15. Nor does it want any of the world's broken TVs, VCRs or duplicating machines, the kind of old office crap that hawkers make a living from piling up and selling on Queen's Road Central here in HK....

Beijing Olympics 2008 Swimming Suit design

these may slow the female swimmers down some!

but good for volleyball and the medal ceremonies.

The Wan King Monkey Construction Co., Ltd.

Science news (from a small-business entrepreneur talking to the Wisconsin entrepreneurs Conference):

Near his conclusion, Steven Little told the story of the orb weaver spider and the dwarf goat of Nigeria. Scientists took a gene from the spider that allows it to make the strongest silk fiber in the world and implanted it in the goat. From the milk substance, a prototype vest was made that is stronger than anything on the market.
“My 15-year-old son told me about that,” he said. "My only response was 'Wow.' The world is changing, and you can grow with it."

My only response was: what's in it for the goat? and who needs such a vest?

But such genetic modifications are indeed remarkable. Only last week, Hong Kong Devil chanced upon the story of the Wan King Monkey Construction Company Ltd, based in a small town in Shaanxi Province.

Scientists found, by extracting the genes from the Great Sticky Spider of the aboriginal plains of Australia, and implanting them in a common monkey, the monkey's jizz becomes the strongest setting substance known to man - so much so, in fact, that construction companies such as Wan King Monkey are using genetically modified monkeys to scramble around their building sites and masturbate onto the joints of the bamboo scaffolding, saving many days of manual tying of the joints.

"We just dangle a female monkey from a crane above where we want the scaffolding to go," says the foreman of Shaanxi Crane company, which is in charge of the project.

"During the night, the monkeys pretty much do all of the work, and the scaffolding is complete," added the foreman of Shaanxi Scaffolding company, which is in charge of the project. "There's usually great teamwork from the monkeys in erecting the bamboo to reach the female. Of course we just keep winching her higher."

Wan King Monkey, which is in charge of the project, said the genetically modified monkeys were in no way harmed during the experiments or scaffolding procedure.

"Yes it's true, many of them seem to have their hands stuck to their dicks," said an official.

"But we don't know yet if they're actually stuck, or if they just like walking around like that."

Aussie wonders why Beijing is polluted

250,000 motorists joined Beijing's "No-car" event on World Environmental Day, using alternative transport along with the 1,289,000,000 Chinese who don't own cars.

But according to an article in Monsters & Critics, no-car day had little effect and things are as bad as ever in Beijing.

"I drive to work everyday and today was no different", said Melinda Turner, an Australian teacher at an international school. "It took me 20 minutes to cover about two miles - the traffic was as bad as ever. And the pollution was the worst I've seen for weeks."

Quite.

Did she miss the point of no-car day?

Did she think she was exempt?

Was it just for "them"?

What is with people's belief that clean air is some kind of right which should be bestowed upon us? That we somehow deserve it? We're modern. We won't put up with dirty air. Bah to the government. Bah to the utilities, burning all that coal.

Meanwhile the coal plant manager turns up for work rubbing his hands with glee at all of the black stuff he can turn to smoke and ash...

Get real people.

It doesn't work like that.

There is no "they" who's gonna clean up the planet.

It requires individuals to drastically reconsider their energy use.

Not just turning the lights off when you remember. Not just turning down the air conditioning, heating, water heating - these are all tidying measures.

None of these actions, NONE of them, will make the merest difference a year from now when there are an extra 85 million souls on the planet, 85 million living breathing human beings added every year to the world population.

Just their respiring alone will add 2 billion tonnes of CO2 to our atmosphere. And that's before they've produced or consumed ANYTHING but air. That's before they eat any food, construct houses, power their lives. Reproduce themselves.

We may be saving the planet for our grandchildren, but it's them who are going to choke us with their constant in-out respiration at 46 grammes of CO2 exhaled per person per minute as the population grows and grows.

As the air grows heavier and hotter, will they move us to low oxygen old folks homes? In sooty backwaters? Will there be mass euthanasia, funded by selling the "avoided carbon" on the emissions trading markets? One human life cut short by ten years saves 241 tonnes of carbon dioxide from respiration.

"Thanks for leaving us so much coal and so many desolate broken down puny wind turbines, now fuck you," say our grandchildren.

"Thanks for bringing us into a world of seven billion people, but really, thanks most of all for those little green recycling bins. Top effort. NOW GET BACK IN YOUR CARBON HOLE."

They should, really. I wouldn't complain, we've got it coming. We need to reprioritise our carbon dioxide use. Cleaning up our act is one thing. But a total denial about the real cause of our problems is not the way to go.

Hong Kong utility CLP for example has announced its latest "green" campaign; it will plant 30,000 trees here in Hong Kong. It's quite a big deal locally, it will create eight or nine forestry jobs (it should do, unless they're just going to scatter the seeds around then f**k off and leave them for 30 years). It will be very pretty, up in Tai Lam country park and it will help clear the air in the area.

But in terms of CO2 reduction, it is utterly pointless. The trees would be better planted as city shade to reduce air conditioning cost.

At maturity, this many trees will absorb 170 tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere in a year.

The Hong Kong population will exhale this much carbon dioxide in their breath in 36 seconds.

CLP's Castle Peak power plant will exhale this much carbon dioxide through its stack in 5 minutes.

So really, we're pretty much screwed whatever we do. Tree planting is not going to save us. When the world population reaches 10 billion, we'll need more trees than we have space for. That's when we'll need to start sending tree farms into space, when earth will enjoy rings of orbiting trillion-acre CO2 removal factories.

An electric utility planting 30,000 trees is just a gesture. It's what people who drive to work want to hear, they want the "big bad utility" to do something green like this. They want to get excited about a cause. They want to point the finger at the power generator, the power plant built, approved and paid for by them but owned by the scapegoat entity wrapper we call utilities.

It's easy and it's fun.

Which t-shirt is the rad grad do-gooding greener going to wear: the unrealistic "DEATH TO COAL, PLANT MORE TREES"? The practical "FIX THE FGD UNITS AT 600MW COAL-FIRED POWER PLANTS"?

Or, for the brave, the only real solution to the CO2 problem: "STOP REPRODUCING"?

Malthus was right. He just had the wrong commodity.