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Aug-23-2006 22:01

I have created a sleuth miracle!

IT IS THE UNHIJACKABLE THREAD!

Go ahead and try, but this thread is about anything and nothing, all at the the same time!

This is the place where Al can talk about world domination, Crunch can worship David Hasselhoff, SS can try and find even more complicated questions for his pub quizzes, Nikkie can advertise for Tim Tams, cfm can troll for more Sharpie victims, JR can beg for the chance to win Bobo back, and bedazzling can be a way of life!

So go off, rant and rave, talk about anything, i don't care, I just wanted to see my avatar on the page (when its actually me anyways)

So go ahead, I dare you all to try and hijack me :)

Aug-24-2006 20:16

chimp?

eh, jstkdn I meant the Greek zodiac! Not the Chinese!!!!! :-)))

Aug-24-2006 20:55

hmm the chimp is smaller than I remember....

wonder if Rick Moranis got him with his "honey I shrunk the kids" ray....

hey Crunch how come I didn't get to go if you brought the damn chimp?????


Gemini (no shock there to those of you who know me, AND my other personality)

This reply has been deleted by a Moderator

Aug-24-2006 22:28

I'm a Leo :)

Aug-24-2006 23:20

hey hey hey. you people are almost hijacking the thread onto a topic here! DANGER DANGER WILL ROBINSON DANGER!!!!!!!!

Baddass almost pulled it off. lol

Aug-24-2006 23:39

I'm a Pisces. What were you drinking when you developed this obscure theory of yours, Bad Ass?

Aug-25-2006 00:04

From today's Wall Street Journal
Western Frontier
China's Big Push
To Stoke Economy
Rattles Rural Tibet
Meatpacking Modernization
Threatens Beloved Yaks;
New Train Brings Suspicion
Ni Ma's Quiet Resistance
By JAMES T. AREDDY
August 24, 2006; Page A1

NAGQU, China -- China is trying to revive poor rural regions through economic development. In Tibet, the plan has hit a snag: Ni Ma won't slaughter his yaks.

Duan Xiangzheng, a Chinese Communist Party official charged with stimulating the economy here, is pushing for the systematic slaughtering of yaks to kick-start a meat-packing industry. Mr. Duan says exporting the beefy tasting meat and the animals' black wool to markets elsewhere in China makes economic sense and is an "inevitable" development.
Ni Ma, 45 years old, wants to keep alive his 70 yaks, his family's most valuable and beloved asset. He sells yak milk, which is processed into the butter, cheese and yogurt that are the staples of Tibetan diet and Buddhist ritual. Even the dung is used, for fuel. Fingering a cigarette on his vast ranch, Ni Ma says his family slaughtered just three of its herd last year, even though "the local government requested that we kill more."

This remote, mountainous place, known mostly in the West as a human-rights cause, is feeling the force of China's economic juggernaut. The government in Beijing says it wants to make its 12 western provinces resemble the country's booming eastern seaboard. Lured by this vision, and by a new train connecting Tibet with the rest of China, entrepreneurs as well as tourists are flooding into the region known as "the roof of the world."

Aug-25-2006 00:06

Yet Tibet is also still very much a rural place -- some 80% of its 2.7 million population is spread out on grasslands that cover almost a quarter of the country. Tibetans are protective of their distinctive Buddhist culture, which abhors the killing of animals. Many are suspicious of Chinese interference and some see the economic integration, part of the government's six-year-old "Go West" policy, as a form of colonization.
Tibetans already believe that Chinese are taking over the economy. In the capital, Lhasa, it is difficult to find a local-born taxi driver, waiter or laborer, since Chinese from other provinces will work for lower wages. Even on the $4.1 billion railway project, only about 10% of the 100,000 construction workers hailed from Tibet, according to Zhu Zhensheng, a Ministry of Railways official. Now completed, the train promises to deliver an extra 800,000 visitors a year.

Tibet lags behind other Chinese regions in many areas, including literacy rates, life expectancy and average per-capita income, which is under $250 a year in rural areas. Unlike the U.S. West, where access to the Pacific Ocean opened new trade routes, China's western regions border land-locked central Asia, home to some of the poorest and most remote locations on earth.

Nagqu, which means "Black River," is a county situated 15,000 feet above sea level on the northern steppe of the Tibetan Plateau, about 125 miles north of Lhasa. On a typical day, the temperature is below freezing. Its main town is a military base and truck stop, where garbage is left to smolder in open containers on streets that aren't lit at night, a gritty contrast to Tibet's legendary Shangri-la reputation.

Aug-25-2006 00:07

Beijing's nationwide goal is to halt two decades of creeping inequality between urban and rural income, a gap the United Nations Development Program said last year may represent the world's most-uneven distribution of wealth. The Communist Party recognizes that its future depends on keeping people happy in the countryside, home to more than 80% of Chinese.

Shortly after China's communists took power in 1949, they grabbed control of Tibet, then an independent state. In 1959, the region's spiritual leader, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, who was 23 at the time, fled on foot over the Himalayan Mountains, fearing arrest. China's efforts to discredit the Dalai Lama, who in 1989 won the Nobel Peace Prize, have fueled support for one of the world's most-celebrated human-rights causes.
In the 1960s, the government tried instituting communal ranching and other Communist economic policies, with the same disastrous results -- such as famine -- seen elsewhere. During the next two decades, Beijing relaxed its supervision of the Tibetan economy and later started celebrating Tibetans as ethnic treasures, one of 55 groups distinct from the 93% of China who are of the Han race. But by the late 1990s, Tibet's economic semi-autonomy began to look like neglect as the region fell behind the sizzling east.

In Nagqu, the job of helping Tibet catch up has fallen to Mr. Duan, a 50-year-old agricultural expert from Beijing. An ethnic Han, Mr. Duan can't speak Tibetan. Like most outsiders, he says he struggled with the effects of its high altitude and thin air.

Still, he can count. The 7.4 million livestock in Nagqu far outnumber people and generate a third of the county's $400 million in gross domestic product. Yaks, sheep and cows, which Mr. Duan calls the region's "pillar industry," are key to his goal: 50% GDP growth this year and a quadrupling of the local economy over five years.

Aug-25-2006 00:08

Supporting his quest is the world's highest-altitude train, the $4.1 billion Qinghai-Tibet Railway, that at times travels 16,641 feet above sea level. Completed this summer, it links Tibet with the outside world by rail for the first time, including Beijing 1,572 miles away. Its tracks are set in permafrost and an oxygen system helps riders combat altitude sickness. It will eventually run to the Indian border.

Chinese officials compare the rail's significance with that of America's transcontinental railroad. The train has made Tibet much more accessible -- passengers can ride from Beijing for less than $200 -- and the cost of transporting freight is less than half that charged by truckers.

The world's highest-altitude bottling plant, Hong Kong-based Tibet Glacier Mineral Water Co., wants to use the train to transport branded water to Shanghai called "5,100," as in meters above sea level. The Yulong copper mine in eastern Tibet contains China's biggest deposit, with more than 10 million metric tons of proven reserves. In Nagqu, Canada's Sterling Group Ventures Inc. says it has signed a letter of intent with a Beijing company to extract lithium carbonate from a salt-water lake. The mineral is used to make batteries and glass.
Wu Yongpan, a 28-year-old entrepreneur from south China, bought an $85 ticket for a middle bunk on the first train into Lhasa last month. He figured getting to China's new western frontier quickly would give him a head start in the wholesale jewelry business. "Tibet is now opened," he says.

After nearly a month in Tibet, Mr. Wu says he found business trickier than he imagined, not least of all because, "Tibetans are not very open minded." Jewelry makers wanted to be paid in cash because they weren't comfortable using wire transfers. Jewelry distributors in southern Guangdong Province said the samples Mr. Wu bought were too big and heavy for the Chinese market. Mr. Wu says he didn't like the food and that his skin felt dry.