Number One Eggs

Funny, but just yesterday I was looking over my blog -- laughing at decade old articles, vacuuming the dead links, important stuff like that -- when I noticed the seldom used post label "gross food." I've only used the label twice, starting with a 2008 blurb about a hamburger in can.

Wow, I really should get back to writing about gross food, at least when politics and environmental catastrophes start getting me down. And then today, as if the Internet read my mind, I find this on Boing Boing:

In Dongyang, has already formed such an old custom: the street vendors who sell eggs boy or lad boiled eggs to their own people, would mention a plastic bucket to a school boy to collect the urine.

Students long ago got used to this, one to three grade boys to urinate, they will align the plastic bucket outside the classroom. School teachers, but also acquiesced in such conduct, they will always remind the children during illness in the cold to the plastic bucket can not pee. The children all came to listen.

People who are not familiar with the situation should surprise: the boy with the boy in urine egg is boiled eggs, eggs in the spring of stalls selling all over the boy Dongyang streets. The boy a fifty-one eggs more expensive than ordinary eggs, can always sell out of stock.

Just in case you think the above quote is an instance of Babblefish run amok, here is another article written in proper English.

Yes really, in China, hard boiled eggs soaked in the urine of virgin boys is considered a great delicacy. The makers of these "virgin eggs" place plastic buckets outside elementary school classrooms and boys are reminded to pee in them. The urine is used to boil the eggs which are slightly cracked so the flavor can seep in. They "have the taste of Spring," or so they say.

This is obviously a cultural difference... no wait, it's totally gross. I wonder if this concoction was the actual inspiration for Dr. Seuss.

I do not like spring eggs in piss.
I will not eat them served like this.
I will not eat them soaked in urine.
I will not eat them with Martin Van Buren.

Filtering the Revolution

In the aftermath of the election in Iran, Twitter emerged as the most powerful way for Iranians to disseminate information and organize protests. The Iranian government has been censoring the Internet for years, but of course -- as the Cute Cat Theory explains -- firewalls don't stop anybody for long.

But don't expect our own government to understand technology, firewalls, or cute cats. Sens. Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., plan to introduce a bill that would bar foreign companies that sell technology to Iran from receiving federal contracts.

My first thought -- have these senators heard of China? China's net censorship is well documented. American companies like Cisco, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo have all been complicit in China's human rights abuses. Heck, you might even say they were enthusiastic.

But why do these companies make technologies with wiretapping features built in anyway? Our lawmakers should know the answer to this simple question. In the EU and the US, telecommunications networks are legally required to have those capabilities for Lawful Intercept. Unfortunately, the exact same network hardware that is sold over here is also sold over there.

This fact shouldn't give the above mentioned companies a free pass for supporting oppressive regimes. However, our own government has to see the bigger picture. We want our law enforcement agencies to be able to wiretap (with a court order -- wink wink), but these Lawful Intercept requirements have consequences far outside our own borders.

Oh, and this leads me to my second thought -- why the hell aren't we punishing the companies who enabled warrantless wiretapping within the US? Schumer and Graham ought to work on that one for a while.

Cute Cat Theory

Activism, the internet, and cute cats -- there's a relationship here that I never would have dreamed of. The theory is that when oppressive governments try to censor the internet, they inevitably make activists out of everybody, because people who previously had no interest in subversion are suddenly determined to get their rightful dose of cute cats:

With web 2.0, we’ve embraced the idea that people are going to share pictures of their cats, and now we build sophisticated tools to make that easier to do. as a result, we’re creating a wealth of tech that’s extremely helpful for activists. There are twin revolutions going on - the ease of creating content and the ease of sharing it with local and global audiences.
...
Blocking banal content on the internet is a self-defeating proposition. It teaches people how to become dissidents - they learn to find and use anonymous proxies, which happens to be a key first step in learning how to blog anonymously. Every time you force a government to block a web 2.0 site - cutting off people’s access to cute cats - you spend political capital. Our job as online advocates is to raise that cost of censorship as high as possible.

Okay, the point isn't really about cute cats. "Cute cats" are symbolic of everything banal on the internet. When everybody is using a tool, it makes it harder for the government to sweep it away -- even behind the great firewall of China.

Still, some countries, China especially, have become quite adept at creating their own Web 2.0 clones with censorship built right in. While one study has concluded that it is difficult to carry out web censorship consistently and effectively, we know U.S. corporations will always be up to the lucrative challenge.

Pirates of Somalia

"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats." -- H.L. Mencken

Nobody reminded me about International Talk Like a Pirate Day earlier this month. We can laugh at the hats, the flags, and the sea shanties, but now let me be the party-pooper and scare you about stories of real pirates:

The Somali pirates who hijacked a Ukrainian freighter loaded with tanks, artillery, grenade launchers and ammunition said in an interview on Tuesday that they had no idea the ship was carrying arms when they seized it on the high seas.

“We just saw a big ship,” the pirates’ spokesman, Sugule Ali, said in a telephone interview. “So we stopped it.”

The pirates quickly learned, though, that their booty was an estimated $30 million worth of heavy weaponry, heading for Kenya or Sudan, depending on whom you ask.

Even with the heavy weaponry, the story never really caught my interest. The pirates are clearly after a ransom and not the weapons.

But then I read another story about a pirated Iranian ship with very different cargo. This cargo was described as "chemicals, dangerous chemicals."

Somali pirates suffered skin burns, lost hair and fell gravely ill “within days” of boarding the MV Iran Deyanat. Some of them died.

Andrew Mwangura, the director of the East African Seafarers’ Assistance Programme, told the Sunday Times: “We don’t know exactly how many, but the information that I am getting is that some of them had died. There is something very wrong about that ship.”

The vessel’s declared cargo consists of “minerals” and “industrial products”. But officials involved in negotiations over the ship are convinced that it was sailing for Eritrea to deliver small arms and chemical weapons to Somalia’s Islamist rebels.

I'm not a doctor, but I watch House a lot. Sounds like these pirates have a serious case of radiation exposure. But with so little coverage of this story, it's hard to know what's going on.

And if it is nuclear material or chemical weapons, then who shipped it, where was it headed and for what purpose? If it involves Iran, Russia, and/or China, then I'm sure we'll be hearing much more about it.

French Bashing

I never quite understood French bashing, but I've heard these jokes a million times. I always took them to be lighthearted. The more malicious bashing, however, comes from guys like this one.

What got me thinking about the absurdity of Francophobia was a passage in The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder: "But the reality is that France never opposed the notion of war with Iraq. Responsibly seeking to avoid, if possible, the inevitable horror of armed conflict, it only opposed Bush's mad and irresponsible rush to war in Iraq. Such a war, French president Jacques Chirac feared, would outrage Arab and Islamic public opinion and 'create a large number of little Bin Ladens.'"

So we single out France and change our menus to read "freedom fries" while forgetting that Germany, Russia, China and other UN members also opposed our rush to war. We characterize the French as pacifists even though they sent thousand of troops to join our efforts in Afghanistan.

Anyway, why am I talking about this? French bashing is so 2003. China bashing is the newest trend... Though they deserve every bit of scrutiny over their human rights abuses. And so do we.

Subversion is a Crime Against The State

Isn't that one cute and non-threatening avatar? In China, he pops up every thirty minutes on web surfers' screens to cheerfully remind them that subversion is a crime against the state.

Beijing has declared war on cybercafes, the Internet, and bloggers. The government has frequently raided cybercafes claiming that pornography and violent, addictive video games are cultural pollution and threaten their youth and their future.

But the control-freak government doesn't stop there (they never do). Project "Golden Shield" is the name of the Chinese high-tech surveillance and censorship program. The program involves some 300,000 surveillance cameras, often disguised as lampposts, connected to a single, nationwide network. This network involves a massive, searchable database of names, photos, residency information, work history, credit records, Internet usage and biometric data.

When I read about these tools of oppression, somehow I don't shout "wow, great opportunity to make money!" Maybe that's why I'm not rich like those people at Cisco who are helping to build the Great Firewall of China (while possibly violating U.S. sanctions). Western companies -- even those that proudly attach themselves to the Internet’s reputation for anarchy -- peddle their wares to China’s Ministry of Public Security. Shanghai Business Magazine recently estimated that the Chinese security industry is enjoying 15% annual growth.

Undermining privacy is a profitable business. And privacy is the rock that dignity, freedom of association and freedom of speech are built on.

China, hosting the summer Olympics, is trying to awe us with their technology, planning, efficiency and social order, but this is not progress.

Naomi Klein describes the new police state:

The goal of all this central planning and spying is not to celebrate the glories of Communism, regardless of what China's governing party calls itself. It is to create the ultimate consumer cocoon for Visa cards, Adidas sneakers, China Mobile cell phones, McDonald's happy meals, Tsingtao beer, and UPS delivery -- to name just a few of the official Olympic sponsors. But the hottest new market of all is the surveillance itself. Unlike the police states of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, China has built a Police State 2.0, an entirely for-profit affair that is the latest frontier for the global Disaster Capitalism Complex.

I used to believe that free people and free markets were a package deal. It's not true, unless you only value your freedom to buy stuff.

BBC News has an online video exploring China's cyberspace. I had to pause at the point where Sherang Chen, editor for BBC China, says that the Chinese "do feel they are enjoying quite a degree of freedom..." When Police State 2.0 arrives in the U.S., "quite a degree of freedom" won't be enough for me.