Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
James R. Rummel So what’s the most successful plant on the planet? Which species has the greatest biomass?
Trick question. The answer is a few types of sea-growing algae.
Okay, so what’s the most successful land-based plant on Earth? The answer is rice. It’s not only the single species with the greatest biomass, but it also has the greatest growing range. With the rather notable exception of Antarctica, it’s being cultivated right this minute on every continent.
As a side note to the post below, it seems that Strategypage.com is reporting that China is developing ways to control access to the Internet. (Post from May 19, 2005.) Not only are they trying to control access, but they’re also trying to influence content by hiring bloggers to push the party line. One can only speculate that the Chinese are also developing a database of Western pundits that bear watching.
This report seems to be true, and I found evidence for it right on the Strategypage.com server. Here’s a discussion post written by a Chinese blogger that extols the prowess of the PLA. He does this by stating that the Communist Chinese have decisively won every single conflict that they’ve taken part in.
I wonder if The Chicago Boyz will ever come to the attention of Chinese shills. If they do I hope they get it right. It’s “Rummel” with one “L”.
One of the biggest problems when dealing with a closed police state is figuring out what’s really going on in there. The intelligence game isn’t a science, and it’s prone to errors. This is an important point that just about everyone forgets.
Case in point is this post at Strategypage.com. (Post from May 25, 2005.) The post points out that it’s difficult to figure out just how much China is spending on defense, or how effective the stuff they’re buying really is.
This is something that I’ve pointed out before. China is certainly increasing its military spending, and most people would agree that they now have the 2nd largest defense budget on the planet. But what’s really confusing is whether or not this means that their conventional forces are going to be a credible threat anytime soon.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think so. It seems that most of their increased budget is going towards modernizing their weapons systems, like their warships and fighter planes. This is troubling until one realizes that all those upgrades simply allow a portion of the Chinese fleet and air forces to operate on rough parity with the West’s 2nd tier equipment, and not the top-of-the-line stuff. When the next generation of weapons are deployed, like the F-22, then China will have to run even harder to try and catch up.
This doesn’t mean that they aren’t a problem, or that they can’t do a great deal of damage. But I think that the danger is rather overstated.
It’s been a good so far as finding things that I want to post about. Case in point is this news story. It seems that doctors have long advised women suffering from otosclerosis, a degenerative disease that causes hearing loss, to avoid becoming pregnant. It seems that pregnancy would heighten the risk of increased hearing loss, and might even lead to complete deafness.
But it seems that this is simply not true. A doctor from Ohio not only conducted a study to disprove the notion, but he also researched the literature and found that the original source for this belief was a 1939 seminar conducted by German doctors. The Nazis used the idea to promote racial purity.
What caused our perceptive physician to question prevailing medical opinion? He started a teaching job in a foreign country, and he noticed that women there with the disease who had given birth to many children didn’t seem to suffer any greater hearing loss than those with few children. That foreign country was Israel.
Trust the Israelis to distrust advice given by a Nazi doctor.
Blog goddess Natalie Solent posted a few comments at this post. One of the things she said was…
Hooray! I have finally posted a comment at Chicagoboyz. Every previous attempt has been met by an automated message saying my harmless opinions were liable to deprave and corrupt.
People have informed me that they’ve had problems like this in the past. The Boyz, like all blogs, is the target of spambot attacks just about every day. Our MT Blacklist will screen out the offending URL’s, but sometimes they contain words that crop up in the comment that someone is trying to leave. This results in your inoffensive comment being deemed offensive and blocked from the site.
Our policy has been to welcome any comment as long as it doesn’t contain profanity and it’s not simply an ad hominem attack. If there’s a problem then please send me an Email that includes a description of the problem, the URL or title of the post where you want to leave the comment, and the comment as you want it to appear. I’ll see what I can do to make sure that you are included in the debate.
My Email address is james_43202 AT yahoo.com.