particularly the 'war on drugs' and 'welfare reform'. He struck me as a politician who could be called liberal only in America.

Nevertheless, this initiative, and the publicity it's getting, I applaud, and loudly. I also applauded the Warren Buffett & Bill Gates initiative, and I'm a regular contributor to the Carter Foundation. But, with other readers, I question the thought behind "America leading". First, I saw Richard Branson kicking in some heavy bucks, and he's British. Second, America is not a monolith, and Clinton, Carter, Gates & Buffett - and there're probably others out there - certainly don't represent the thinking of the US government, not, one suspects, of a lot of "America". Third, who cares? These guys are doing good works, hurray for them, and I'll support them if I can. But I don't think they represent the country.

as well, where he played the Huo character. It sounds as though Li goes deeper than Lee did, a bit surprising given Lee's emphatic philosophy on what he thought martial arts films should be like (i.e., not Shaw Brothers magic shows). I wonder if Li is taking Lee's thinking further.

Perhaps they've forgotten the basic uselessness of screening a low prevalence population. They will be overwhelmed by false positives, who will be horrified to learn that they maybe have a deadly disease, an STD at that. And at this point you can't tell the difference between the false positives and those who truly have HIV infection. All those people will then have to go through retesting, meanwhile enduring the waiting.

We went through this in the early years of the AIDS epidemic, when there were proposals that HIV testing be required for marriage licenses (replacing the Wasserman test for syphilis, which was dropped because syphilis was rare, especially among young couples applying for marriage licenses, so the testing process generated almost nothing but false positives). The consensus at the time was that this was expensive and useless public health policy. And yet now we hear:

"I think it's an incredible advance. I think it's courageous on the part of the CDC," said A. David Paltiel, a health policy expert at the Yale University School of Medicine.

Idiocy!

a young woman soldier being interviewed somewhere on the tube about women in combat, and she said something along the line of "If people are uncomfortable with their daughters dying in war, why are they okay with their sons dying?"

As a long-term member of that well-known lefty org, the Religious Society of Friends, I'm here to tell we're a popular target for every fascist US president who begins to develop even a touch of paranoia. And what about our equally notorious action group, the American Friends Service Committee? Better add some more to the already very thick files on that bunch as well.

On the bright side, we'll probably have shady characters showing up for First Day Meeting, and maybe we can persuade them to see the Light, as it were. Don't laugh - that happened in the past, during both Nixon and Reagan.

with your final paragraphs.

I have a hypothesis about China - the differences in dialects are so broad, although getting less so, that the only reason we don't have another Europe in Asia is that the written language is not phonetic. Try that on; see how you like it.

Like the rest of you, I'm fascinated by the clarity of the derivation of words and concepts in Chinese. For instance, what sort of people represent "peace", of the contented or 'peace and quiet' variety rather than the anti-war variety, as a woman under a roof. And one could imagine that the Han people were originally nomadic sheep herders with a matriarchal society, if you look at the characters for 'beautiful' - a combination of 'big' and 'sheep' - and for 'family name' - which includes the character for 'mother'. It's great fun!

Obesity is a problem that we assumed we understood; it's so obvious after all - more energy taken in than energy expended means someone gets fat. Very simple - so you base all your thinking on cutting intake and increasing output. So why is there a rising proportion of fat people? After all, we understand the cause, right? So, must be our interventions aren't working well enough. Big pharma is researching new diet pills madly, surgeons are going gangbusters with bariatric surgery (sorry, stomach stapling/bypass), nutritionists and fitness gurus expound - and still nothing happens.

We do not undertand obesity because we are not questioning our underlying assumptions. It's ridiculously obvious that something else is adding to the obesity problem, likely several something elses, but that research is pretty sparse and little noticed. It's a medical maxim that you cannot prevent a disease, especially on the population level, until you understand it. Indeed it's difficult to find effective treatment even on the individual, clinical level without understanding the causes, and with obesity, especially morbid obesity, we are pretty much clueless.

difficulty reaching concensus. Not only have I belonged to a couple of large and small co-ops, I'm a member of one of the longest-lived co-op type organizations, the Religious Society of Friends. I think it's the nature of the beast that we have these contentious brouhahas periodically, and they often get loud and take some time to settle because of the way we come to consensus. Many Friends' Meetings are being loud and contentious (and have been for maybe 25 years or so) over the matter of same-sex marriages. And you should have seen us take on the slavery issue!

Co-ops also have a tendency to draw some bad press, simply because there are a number of American insitutions that are hostile to the idea. There's a recent article in Andrew Leonard's column on a co-op that for many years made a bicycle trailer that is pertinent in this respect.

why in blazes is he a Democrat? Nice enough guy, not too bad a governor, but Nebraska has had Deocratic senators who actually were part of the party - try Bob Kerrey, also a former governor.