An economic colossus, born in bloodSince 1978, [China’s] annual economic growth rate has been a formidable 8% to 9%; and since 1990, per capita annual income has risen from $350 to $3,000. There are the predictable claims of imminent Chinese world economic supremacy, but we have heard all that before from the Nazis, Soviets, and Japanese, and they should be received with caution.

There are still at least 800 million Chinese peasants who live much as they did thousands of years ago. There is a population control plan that will raise the average age by one year every two years for at least two decades, and reduce the worker-to-retiree ratio from 3-to-1 to 2-to-1 in the next 20 years. There are acute shortages of land and water, and most social services.

Government spending on health and education has declined from 25% to 35% in 20 years. The private sector has taken up a lot of this, but about half the population receives no medical care at all. The percentage of middle school students going on to high school has actually declined by a third in the last 20 years.

The state still owns the country’s banks, natural resources, heavy industry and telecommunications, and controls about 35% of all production. Ecological damage is very serious and costly, affecting three quarters of the country’s water courses and most of its air. Distinguished China specialist James Fallows reckons that China suffers 250 deaths in mining accidents every day.

The last word: Nothing but the truth

Radical Honesty is based on a simple premise. [Brad Blanton, founder of the movement], a 69-year-old psychotherapist, claims that everyone would be happier if we just stopped lying, if we just told the truth, all the time. That would be radical in itself, of course—a world without fibs. But Blanton goes further. He says we should toss out all the filters between our brains and our mouths. If you think it, say it. Confess to your boss your secret plans to start your own company. If you’re having fantasies about your wife’s sister, Blanton says to tell your wife and tell her sister. To him, it’s the only path to authentic relationships, the only way to smash through modernity’s soul-deadening alienation. Oversharing? No such thing.

My interview with him turns out to be unlike any other in my years as a journalist. Usually, there’s a fair amount of butt kissing and diplomacy. But with Blanton, I can say anything that pops into my mind. In fact, it would be rude not to say it. I’d be insulting his life’s work.

“I was disappointed when I visited your office,” I tell him. (Earlier, he had shown me a small, cluttered single-room office that serves as the Radical Honesty headquarters.) “For my essay, I want this to be a legitimate movement, not a fringe movement.”

“What about a legitimate fringe movement?” he says.

Blanton’s movement is at least sizable, if not huge. He has sold 175,000 books in 11 languages and has 25 trainers assisting workshops and running practice groups around the country.

Leaner times ahead for Mayor

Ralph Lean, the chairman of the Cassels Brock law firm, has a long list of grievances against his Mayor, David Miller. Yesterday, he took time off from golfing in the Justin Eves Foundation charity tournament in Milton to spell those out in detail.

He is upset at Mr. Miller for overspending, for failing to freeze councillors’ salaries, for narrowing Jarvis Street, for fighting with Porter Airlines (“I’m a big supporter of Porter”) and for refusing to examine outsourcing some city functions.

Mr. Miller could shrug this off, except that Mr. Lean is not just any old disgruntled voter: one of the city’s most influential fundraisers, he co-chaired the team that funded Mr. Miller’s runaway victory in the 2006 municipal election. And now Mr. Lean is walking away.

“I quite like David Miller,” Mr. Lean said. But, he adds, “He’s gotten off track. He’s made a lot of mistakes. His supporters on council have pushed him in directions I don’t agree with.”

“Everybody I talked to, 100% of the people, have stopped supporting the Mayor,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like it in my political career.”

Mr. Lean now says he will support either Mr. Tory or George Smitherman, the deputy premier, in a mayoral bid.

“I guarantee you one of those two will run,” Mr. Lean says, adding, “Both of them told me, ‘Only one of us is going to run.’ ”

Mr. Crombie is also declining to work on another Miller bid for the mayoralty, although he took pains to say he is not opposing the Mayor. He says he signed on in 2006 because it was a multi-party effort with Mr. Peterson and Mr. Miller, to make Toronto better.

A genius wearing a fool’s mask

Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, having served about eight years of a life-sentence imposed on him in 2001 for his role in bombing Pan Am Flight 103 that exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, killing 259 crew and passengers and 11 people on the ground, was set free last month as an act of executive clemency by Scottish Justice Minister Kenny MacAskill.

Well, why did Scotland release him? Those who know the West have a better question. Why did Scotland jail him in the first place?

The crime was heinous; the investigation slipshod, even corrupt. The evidence against the two Libyan suspects, Megrahi and Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah, was so flimsy it left the Scottish judges no choice but to acquit Fhimah.

I also saw Felicia Day at the show, who gave me a brush and told me to groom her. This is a thing that really happened, and it was bizarre, but not so bizarre that I wouldn’t do it. It was like brushing a unicorn.

The scam we call ‘Employment Insurance’What EI really is, is a regional wealth-transfer scheme taking money from workers in low-unemployment regions and transferring it to workers in high-unemployment areas so the latter are not forced to move to find work.

Not coincidentally, it also ends up taking money from workers in provinces and regions — such as Alberta — where few Liberals are elected and giving it to workers in regions such as rural Quebec and Atlantic Canada, where Liberals have historically won lots of House of Commons seats.

The Panic of 1825

Writing in December 1825 to her friend Hannah More, [Marianne Thornton] said: “There is just now a great pressure in the mercantile world, in the consequence of the breaking of so many of these scheming stock company bubbles.”

Sound familiar? These were not bubbles in high-tech stocks or in mortgage lending and house prices, however, but bubbles in shipping lines, canals, and textile-spinning factories.