[deng xiaoping] foresight or blind determination

At first sight, this might seem both boring and irrelevant but when you consider the sheer size of the project, you can see it impacts on the world as a whole. Let me quote just a few stats concerning China's Three Gorges Dam Project:

181 metres high and 2.3 kilometres wide. When it is fully operational, it will supply 85 billion kilowatts of power annually — just 2 per cent of the country's energy needs by 2010.

That's massive. It has also attracted environmental ire:

Environmentalists and scientists fear the reservoir behind the dam will become a giant cesspool that will affect water quality for the 30 million residents a bottleneck for shipping, the migrants it has created will cause social turmoil for generations to come and thousands of people have been displaced, before the cost in wioldlife is even mentioned.

It was also opposed by one third of deputies in the National Assembly at a time of communist Party crackdowns. Still it went ahead. Now I ask the question - was Deng Xiaoping, the man whose quote gave this blog its name, perhaps right all along?

If he were still around and I put all the objections to him, I imagine he'd reply: "And would you prefer us to supply power to our people through coal-burning? How about nuclear means?" Think through the alternatives to what is clearly the cheapest and cleanest variant and the thing starts to look a bit different on the sort of scale we're talking.

Look at the whole article by Mary-Anne Toy, the url, alas, being lost in my pre-blogging days.

[stupidity] a second look

Not Juliet

When I wrote the post on stupidity, Mopsa made it into a gender issue and asked that I even the score. I asked the sweet lass, in turn, to point me in the right direction but sadly, on this she went quiet. Thank goodness for Juliet, who has finally provided me with the material:

I can't believe the Bishop of London, Richard Chartres has somehow found it appropriate to open his sermon during the otherwise beautiful memorial service for Princess Diana by yelling the words, "Who's cheating?!"

Read the rest here.

We love Mopsa

[september 1st] new academic year

Well, I just heard a huge noise with megaphones and everything and looked across the road at the school and yes - it's that time of year again. Across Russia and former republics, it's the start of the new academic year - much frenetic activity, the flower shops do a roaring trade as children buy flowers for their teachers, everybody's all hyper and I'm delighted I'm only observing at a distance this time.

The little guys in their suits and looking resplendent and hopeful, the little girls in their white shirts, hair in bows and their black skirts and the same colour scheme right across this vast land.

Managed to avoid the faculty meeting yesterday and have two ladies coming here today, both sisters and the good thing is that I don't know which is coming first and so I'm getting ready for the surprise. I also have to Min today - can you believe government departments working on this day?

It's not a good day to be out - the cafes and cinemas are packed and everyone's having a jolly good time. Little girl yesterday told me she was so looking forward to getting back and working again. I looked at her to see if she was kidding but she was dead serious.

[tolerant] does not mean equivalent

Here's a hypothetical.

I meet a visiting student from Zimbabwe, before the new academic year starts and invite her to dinner to meet my family. She turns out to be good company and the kids adore her.

Is she one of the family? No. Is she my gender? No. Is she my colour? No. Is she of the same background and experience? No. Do we listen to the same music and read the same literature? No.

Is she welcome at our home? Yes. She's a highly interesting person.

By any stretch of the imagination, she is not equivalent, she is not equal. She is included in this activity and more than this, she's welcome. This is beyond tolerance.

Do I invite her to a faculty meeting? No. She is not included here, not because we "don't want her" or don't "recognize her equivalence with the other professors as being just as good as them if they'll only let her" but through sheer common sense - she wouldn't want to be bored by a bunch of fuddy-duddies plus she can't speak the language.

So no, she's not equal here. Sanity. Common sense. Tolerance and inclusion in some areas does not equal Equivalence and Relativism. These latter two are catch-all rash generalizations based on no known reality in society.

They are political correctness which, by definition, is insane.

Now the Feministi at the university get to hear of her non-inclusion in the faculty meeting and press the board to decree that she MUST be included in all faculty meetings as this is a "tolerant, caring, all-inclusive campus".

So there we all are, not in a meeting but in a large auditorium with the professors lost in the middle, discussing the next academic year and surrounded by all manner of humanity, partying, listening to loud music [tolerance, remember, on pain of dismissal] and how much work gets done?

But at least it's politically correct and the Femnisti at the other end of the campus, whose own meeting no one wishes to attend, have a nice all woman discussion, in the cushiest armchaired room, making resolutions about who else they can find to "equivalentize" this academic year.

Do you detect a slightly intolerant note in this article?

By the way - here's an interesting exercise. Type "university" into Google and see what comes up on the first few pages. I was very surprised.

[culture and heritage] a fading memory

One of Banksy's

I swear I'm not a killjoy. In former days, if you liked breasts, you used to buy the Sun; if you wanted something harder, there was a little shop down the road or there was Soho. There was a place for tat and good luck to those who lapped it up.

There were others who preferred broadsheets - papers like The Times [former], The FT, Globe and Mail, NYT and so on and though a pain in the butt to read on the train, still, it was a good read once you had it folded into position and the crackling stopped. Plus it was great for a Millwall Brick.

Into this category fell the Melbourne Age. Staid old Melbourne was represented in this paper whilst for the print-challenged, there was always the Sun. The Age carried weight and conveyed authority. Now part of the Fairfax "stable", here are the sorts of headlines today:

1. Beach orgy shocks conservative Taiwan

2. Pastor had sex with daughters

3. Heroin addicted elephant to rejoin herd

Now I'm wondering if the April decision to turn all these into tabloids is connected with the distressing drop in taste over the past few years, rivalling Murdoch who's got most of the world press anyway.

However, that's not the most distressing thing. The most distressing thing is this:

Good Friday seems certain to become a part of next year's AFL draw, with the once-sacrosanct space on the football calendar likely to be filled by Carlton and Hawthorn.

Now I don't give a toss about the football these days [rugby and cricket are different] but I'm sure you see the point I'm getting at. Good Friday was always the last bastion and even when Easter Sunday fell to commercial pressures, GF remained respected in some sort of misunderstanding of the relative importance of the days.

Now we have yet another example of the relentless dismantling and rooting out of the last vestiges of Christendom and the west's cultural heritage, then they'll turn on the remaining believers and out of pure spite try to round them up and disappear them.

Oh how the west howled with anger when the Palestinians cheered and cavorted as the World Trade Centre collapsed and will the west do the same now that the new paganism in society and the g-dless blogosphere will gleefully chortle at this latest "victory for reason"?

Can you imagine Iran scheduling a match for the feast of Ashoura or Israel scheduling one for Yom Kippur? Or a Walpurgis Night Derby?

The jackboot is stomping out the flickering candle of Christian hope and joy wherever it can seek and destroy and one has to ask what more do they want? Why will they allow freedom of worship to all bar the Christian?

A whole generation has now grown up uneducated [and I charge that one must be of a former generation to be able to judge that], with a society now disintegrating around them [witness the subject matter on blogs and the divorce and crime stats], pressing on blindly, obliviously rudderless, down, down, down to the new feudal darkness of cold rationalism [as distinct from reason], the new 1984 and Brazil.

Surely that's enough for the forces arrayed against reason?

Not in the least. They have to spit on Good Friday and stomp out every last vestige of the ethical underpinning of our society, fearing something might go wrong and someone, somewhere, might stop and shout: "Hey, where are we all headed? What are we doing? Hey people, we're being lied to. Wake up!"

Pity suicide is not allowed because I now find myself completely at odds with the tat and mediocracy I see all about. I don't mind saying I'm feeling old, irrelevant and marginalized and I'm wondering how much is me and how much is what's happening out there.

I'm going to bed early.

By the way, I apologize in advance to all my friends for the crack at the g-dless blogosphere and the new paganism. I'm just a little distracted, that's all.

[computer] decisions, decisions

Every time I boot the computer now, I have to press reset but in the past two days, I've had to press it twice each time. Just now, I had to go through a long process to get in.

It's the video card and the Catch 22 is that I'd gladly replace it but it is of such an ancient type that no one sells it any more. So, the alternative is to get a new type but the motherboard won't accept the new type so I need a new computer.

I spoke to my Apple seller friend today and I'm getting a MacBook. We thought long and hard about getting the 15 inch Pro and it's not a case of money - it's more the usage of all the bells and whistles and putting the money where it's needed.

But this is also fraught because apparently there are new components coming in soon and it would be silly to buy the current model as is. Why is nothing straightforward?

The good news is that once this thing is up, I'll be able to zip from site to site and visit everyone rapidly. The downside is that at any moment now, say tomorrow, this current computer will irrevocably break down and therefore there'll be no site until the new components arrive and don't forget this is Russia.

My computer mates cannot believe the pressure the inadequate current components are having to operate under so do not fear if I stop posting - you now know what's happening.