Is China poised to become the world’s next superpower?

LONDON – Is China poised to become the world’s next superpower? This question is increasingly asked as China’s economic growth surges ahead at more than 8% a year, while the developed world remains mired in recession or near-recession. China is already the world’s second largest economy, and will be the largest in 2017. And its military spending is racing ahead of its GDP growth.

The question is reasonable enough if we don’t give it an American twist. To the American mind, there can be only one superpower, so China’s rise will automatically be at the expense of the United States. Indeed, for many in the US, China represents an existential challenge.

This is way over the top. In fact, the existence of a single superpower is highly abnormal, and was brought about only by the unexpected collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The normal situation is one of coexistence, sometimes peaceful sometimes warlike, between several great powers.

For example, Great Britain, whose place the US is often said to have taken, was never a “superpower” in the American sense. Despite its far-flung empire and naval supremacy, nineteenth-century Britain could never have won a war against France, Germany, or Russia without allies. Britain was, rather, a world power – one of many historical empires distinguished from lesser powers by the geographic scope of their influence and interests.

The sensible question, then, is not whether China will replace the US, but whether it will start to acquire some of the attributes of a world power, particularly a sense of responsibility for global order.

Even posed in this more modest way, the question does not admit of a clear answer. The first problem is China’s economy, so dynamic on the surface, but so rickety underneath.

The analyst Chi Lo lucidly presents a picture of macro success alongside micro failure. The huge stimulus of RMB4 trillion ($586 billion) in November 2008, mostly poured into loss-making state-owned enterprises via directed bank lending, sustained China’s growth in the face of global recession. But the price was an increasingly serious misallocation of capital, resulting in growing portfolios of bad loans, while excessive Chinese household savings have inflated real-estate bubbles. Moreover, Chi argues that the crisis of 2008 shattered China’s export-led growth model, owing to prolonged impairment of demand in the advanced countries.

China now urgently needs to rebalance its economy by shifting from public investment and exports towards public and private consumption. In the short run, some of its savings need to be invested in real assets abroad, and not just parked in US Treasuries. But, in the longer term, Chinese households’ excessive propensity to save must be reduced by developing a social safety net and consumer credit instruments.

I Lost My Faith in Humanity.

[Note: The interviewee still holds this job

and wanted to remain anonymous.]

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Q: When did you lose your faith in humanity?

A: I work at a casino. About six years ago a guy keeled over on the smoking patio. There were two women with him. One ran into the casino to get help, but the other one who was still out there—she stole his chips. That’s when I lost faith in humanity. It turns out that the woman who stole his chips was a registered nurse!

Q: How did you start working at a casino?

A: My fiancée was a table games dealer, so I started as a dealer for two years. I spent another year as a supervisor. Then I went to another casino and started doing surveillance, which is what I do now.

Q: Is it tough to be a dealer?

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First US Agent Orange Cleanup Underway in Vietnam

During the Vietnam War, US forces sprayed millions of gallons of the herbicide Agent Orange onto Vietnam’s forests and crops in an effort to destroy cover for enemy movements as well as food sources. In the decades since, exposure to the herbicide has been blamed for an abnormally high incidence of miscarriages, skin diseases, cancers, birth defects, and deformities among Vietnamese. For the first time since the war ended in 1975, the US is working directly to clean up the contamination, embarking on a four-year project to decontaminate 73,000 cubic meters of soil at Danang International Airport.

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Magellan Space Probe Reaches Venus (This day in 1990)

The first planetary spacecraft to be launched from a space shuttle, Magellan took 15 months to reach its destination, arriving in orbit around the second planet from the Sun in August 1990. It was then put to work generating high-resolution maps of Venus’s surface and measuring the planet’s gravity. Four years later, with its mission complete, Magellan plunged into Venus’s tremendously dense atmosphere and disintegrated. What do Magellan‘s images reveal about the planet?

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Pussy Riot v. Putin: A Front Row Seat at a Classic Russian Black Comedy

On the morning of February 21, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina, and Ekaterina Samutsevich walked up the steps leading to the altar of Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior, shed their winter clothing, pulled colorful winter hats down over their faces, and jumped around punching and kicking for about thirty seconds. By evening, the three young women had turned it into a music video called “Punk Prayer: Holy Mother, Chase Putin Away!” which mocked the patriarch and Putin. (“The head of the KGB is their patron saint,” they sang, by turns shrieking and imitating a church choir.)

The video went viral: it was two weeks before the election and Putin, facing a wave of unprecedented protests, was feeling shaky. Three days later, a warrant was issued for the girls’ arrest.

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6 Historic Acts of Revenge That Put ‘Kill Bill’ to Shame

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Finally, a draft of the official wording for the change in the Democratic Party’s platform to include support for marriage equality — courtesy a leak by a party committee member:

We support the right of all families to have equal respect, responsibilities, and protections under the law. We support marriage equality and support the movement to secure equal treatment under law for same-sex couples. We also support the freedom of churches and religious entities to decide how to administer marriage as a religious sacrament without government interference.

We oppose discriminatory federal and state constitutional amendments and other attempts to deny equal protection of the laws to committed same-sex couples who seek the same respect and responsibilities as other married couples. We support the full repeal of the so-called Defense of Marriage Act and the passage of the Respect for Marriage Act.

From : towleroad

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Cyborg America: inside the strange new world of basement body hackers

Shawn Sarver took a deep breath and stared at the bottle of Listerine on the counter. “A minty fresh feeling for your mouth… cures bad breath,” he repeated to himself, as the scalpel sliced open his ring finger. His left arm was stretched out on the operating table, his sleeve rolled up past the elbow, revealing his first tattoo, the Air Force insignia he got at age 18, a few weeks after graduating from high school. Sarver was trying a technique he learned in the military to block out the pain, since it was illegal to administer anesthetic for his procedure.

“A minty fresh feeling… cures bad breath,” Sarver muttered through gritted teeth, his eyes staring off into a void.

Tim, the proprietor of Hot Rod Piercing in downtown Pittsburgh, put down the scalpel and picked up an instrument called an elevator, which he used to separate the flesh inside in Sarver’s finger, creating a small empty pocket of space. Then, with practiced hands, he slid a tiny rare earth metal inside the open wound, the width of a pencil eraser and thinner than a dime. When he tried to remove his tool, however, the metal disc stuck to the tweezers. “Let’s try this again,” Tim said. “Almost done.”

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2012 olympics volleyball hotties

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Portland is where young people go to retire? Economic renaissance in Portland

The city where “young people go to retire” is having an economic renaissance, with lessons for the rest of the country.

While I was in Portland, Ore., last week to give a few talks on economic policy, at least four different people told me the same joke about the local economy.

“Portland,” they said, “is where young people go to retire.” Fun city, in other words, but a bleak labor market. The joke turns out to be borrowed from the IFC show Portlandia. The city is described as reminiscent of a time when “people were unambitious; they’d sleep till 11 and just hang out with their friends.” Or a time when there were “no occupations whatsoever, maybe working a couple of hours at the coffee shop.” This is said with affection on the show, but the city’s reputation for labor-market difficulties weighs heavily on residents, particularly because they’re proud of its quality of life. If, despite all the bike paths and painstakingly made pour-over coffee, you’re an economic backwater, that seems to suggest you’re doing something wrong.

And it wasn’t just jokes told in coffee shops or on TV shows. In 2010, a consortium of area business groups released a report (PDF) attempting to explain “why Portland-metro’s economy underperforms” relative to comparable cities such as Seattle, Denver, and Minneapolis. The authors noted a substantial and growing gap in per-capita income between the Portland and Seattle metropolitan areas, driven primarily by weak workforce participation.

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Nation of Exiles | Watch Free Documentary Online

A short documentary examining the civil unrest in Iran following Ahmadinejad’s re-election in June 2009, and the role of social media in the Green Movement. Featuring Columbia Professor of Iranian History Hamid Dabashi and Poynter Institute’s Ellyn Angelotti.

A characteristic of a strong and legitimate government – Islamic or not – is that it is capable of respecting all opinions, whether they support it or oppose it. This is necessary for any political system, in order to embrace all social classes and encourage them to participate in the affairs of their nation, and not dismiss and repulse them and, therefore, increase their numbers (the opponents) every day. I am afraid that because the regime is considered a religious government, such acts of its officials will lead to the loss of people’s faith in their religion, and will hurt Islam.

GO HERE.

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How to suck at your religion

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Aztec burial with skeleton, piles of 1,789 human bones uncovered in Mexico

Mexican archaeologists say they have found an unprecedented human burial in which the skeleton of a young woman is surrounded by piles of 1,789 human bones in Mexico City’s Templo Mayor.

Researchers found the burial about 15 feet below the surface, next to the remains of what may have been a “sacred tree” at one edge of the plaza, the most sacred site of the Aztec capital.

The National Institute of Anthropology and History said the find was the first of its kind, noting the Aztecs were not known to use mass sacrifice or the reburial of bones as the customary ways to accompany the interment of a member of the ruling class.

University of Florida archaeologist Susan Gillespie, who was not involved in the project, called the find “unprecedented for the Aztec culture.”

She said Tuesday that when the Mayas interred sacrifice victims with royal burials, they were usually found as complete bodies, not jumbles of different bone types as in this case. And, except for special circumstances, the Aztecs, unlike other pre-Hispanic cultures, usually cremated members of the elite during their rule from 1325 to the Spanish conquest in 1521.

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