Iran's economic stimulus package

With the price of oil crashing, look for an "incident" to scare it back up, says Galrahn at Information Dissemination:

As the price of oil drops, the pursuit of nuclear power doesn't justify the economic costs to the autocratic driven economy in Iran. The loss of government revenue due to lower oil prices comes at the same time the UN is discussing the next round of sanctions. It also comes at the same time that Iran's biggest supporter Russia suffers a stock market crash, which is noteworthy because the Micex is where a lot of Iranian autocrats go with their investments.

So what will Iran do? Raise the price of oil, and they have a time tested strategy for doing exactly that.

unique elegance and nimbus

For your next holiday, China's own Dead Sea: Yuncheng Salt Lake. "Compared with the bath place at the Dead Sea in lsrael,it is endowed with more vitality and unique elegance and nimbus." Perhaps so:


From the November 30, 2002, Ottawa Citizen:

The potential of Yuncheng Salt Lake as a tourist area was not spotted until the president of the Nanfeng Chemical Industry Group, which mines the lake for salt, read an article about the Dead Sea.

Wang Mengfei flew to Israel last year and returned with mineral compounds which were subsequently found to be similar to those at Yuncheng.

But tourism experts said the similarities with the Dead Sea ended there, and predicted bosses of the Yuncheng Salt Lake resort would struggle to capture the public's imagination.

Zhang Guangrui, director of the Tourism Research Centre at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said: "Shanxi has few tourist attractions in comparison with Israel's appeal as the birthplace of Jesus.

"It is also far from big cities. Affluent Chinese people will travel to nearby places for recuperation, but not hundreds of kilometres."

Wang was not discouraged.


Apparently Nanfeng is Nafine these days. Their Chinese website is much more fun; be sure to have the sound on. Here you'll find commercials for their many household products.

All your translation are belong to us

From the quality control page of Shanghai Ju Peng Translation Co., a representative sample:

★1．We have a sound and stable pool of translation team, tasks of translation are strictly selected and assigned in accordance with languages and specialty fields.

★4．We track up and monitor text pieces in the course they are being translated, and deal with and resolve all the way those key points and pitfalls involved; project team is so created whenever for any large project of translation work and senior translators, professors or foreign experts are initiated to be in charge of jobs of aligning, tuning glossary and of ensuring texts consistent to the style of overall work translated.

★5．Once pieces of translation completed, there are other translators assigned to conduct follow-up proofreading in order to eliminate occurrences of usual errors as letter omission, mistranslation, wrong figures and improper typeset.

If you need work, offer to clean up their copy....

More piratey stuff

If you thought my pirate post was interesting, check out EagleSpeak, who really gives the topic a working over.

And if Pirate Jack Muller (at right) catches your fancy, go here.

HPV isn't cervical cancer

An AP story today says 1/4 of all US teen girls have received Merck's vaccine against human papilloma virus, Gardasil. HPV causes genital warts; it also predisposes a woman to cervical cancer, hence the recommendation that girls be vaccinated. But just how do you think /women are exposed to HPV? Holding hands with other females? Sex with men, obviously; who almost certainly were exposed via sex with women. So: why aren't boys asked to get the vaccination?

I think it's odd that feminists haven't made anything of this.




The question becomes even more pressing when you consider that as of July, the US Citizenship and Immigration Service requires girls and women between the ages of 11 and 26 looking for permanent residence to be vaccinated against HPV. The requirement does not apply to males. As a consequence, women must fork over $300 to $1400 more than men, according to this article.

Worse, the committee responsible for the new regulation was unaware that "Under a 1996 immigration law, any vaccination recommended by the U.S. government for its citizens becomes a requirement for anyone seeking permanent residency in the U.S." when it recommended Gardasil for girls ages 11 through 26 in 2006.

Officials at the CDC say that the agency’s Gardasil recommendation was not meant to make the Gardasil vaccine mandatory for immigrants. A CDC spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal that the vaccination committee did not realized the way its Gardasil recommendation would impact immigrants.