Via Fark, the Associated Press reports:

A man tried to use a stun gun to fend off a carjacker and ended up being shot five times.

...While trying to reach for his money, the man also pulled out his stun gun and shocked the carjacker. But the carjacker reacted by shooting the man at least five times, [Atlanta police Sgt. Lisa] Keyes said.

...Keyes stressed the importance of simply giving up the vehicle when confronted by a carjacker.

Bzzt, wrong. The correct answer was: "Quit messing around with Tasers and get a real gun."

The Associated Press brings us another sweet, sweet story about the Chinese government freaking out at the realization that it can't perfectly control the media — especially the media of other countries with that whole pesky "freedom of the press" thing:

China warned the media Tuesday against exaggerating its food safety problems and stirring consumer panic, even as officials announced dozens of snacks for children had failed standards and more fake blood protein was found in hospitals.

China's dismal product safety record — both within and outside its borders — has increasingly come under the spotlight as its goods make their way through global markets. Major buyers such as the United States, Japan, and the European Union have pushed Beijing to improve inspections.

"I think it would be better if the media would stop playing up this issue," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said at a regular news briefing.

Hey, Gang, you know what? I think it would be better if China would stop exporting contaminated food, deadly toothpaste, and poisonous toys. How about it?

The Arab News reports:

MINA, 29 December 2006 — The increased security vigilance in the holy cities has been a headache for motorcycle drivers used to scooting around town without proper paperwork or helmets. This is also the first Haj where motorbikes have been banned from the holy areas of Makkah and Madinah.

As of yesterday, officials have already impounded about 350 motorbikes since heightened security operations began earlier this month, according to an officer who didn’t want to be named.

...At a press conference held in the tent city of Mina at the General Security Headquarters, Maj. Gen. Mansour Al-Turki, Interior Ministry spokesman, said he prefers not to call it a “ban”, but rather simply a way to make the traffic more organized and the safer. [sic]

Of course, just about every year during the Hajj pilgrimage, hundreds of people get trampled to death on foot. If safety is such a concern, perhaps it would be better to call the whole thing off.

More importantly, with this ban, Saudi Arabia now joins China and Nigeria on the list of countries banning motorcycles from certain areas. They are also three of the least-free countries on the planet, with three of the worst human rights records around. Call them the Axle of Evil.

I recently noted that officials in Guangzhou, China are banning motorcycles. And now, sadly, Nigeria's capital city of Abuja is following Guangzhou's lead. The New York Times reports:

“They don’t want to see the common man, the poor man,” said Comrade Daniel, a motorcycle taxi driver, standing in the rubble of his neighborhood. He lost first his home and then his livelihood to a recent campaign to rid this stately capital of the blemishes of poverty. “They only care for themselves,” he said.

Mr. Daniel and others who live on the unruly edge of this tidy city in the mossy hills of central Nigeria say that Abuja has declared war on its poorest citizens.

In the interest of cultivating an image as a world-class city, comparable to London, Paris, New York or Hong Kong, the government has been razing unauthorized and unsightly slums, clearing out street hawkers and banishing popular and cheap motorcycle taxis, all in the name of spiffing up the city.

Nigeria, of course, is one of the international community's true basket cases, where corrupt rulers exploit a severely impoverished citizenry and human rights are a cruel joke. I'm starting to think that the fairness and justness of a government can be determined by its attitude toward motorcycles.

FOLLOW-UP:
Interestingly, the Times itself can't quite seem to decide how it feels about Abuja's motorcycle taxis. First it describes them as "popular and cheap", but later on in the same article, we find the following:

Abuja is a planned city, originally designed by a group of American firms in the 1970s.

...But the city’s master plan was ignored for years by corrupt officials who allowed illegal neighborhoods to blossom, unauthorized street markets to spread and torpedo-like motorcycle taxis, called okada, often driven by illiterate young men, to choke the streets.

So, are motorcycle taxis a good thing, or a bad thing? It depends. If you want to show how the wealthy elite of Abuja are hurting the masses, they're popular and cheap. But if you want to point out how a plan devised by American firms has failed, they're torpedo-like street chokers.

I've never shied away from criticizing China's lack of civil rights and basic human freedoms. But this time, they've gone too far. McClatchy Newspapers reports that city officials in Guangzhou, China are banning motorcycles:

GUANGZHOU, China - When officials decided that swarms of motorcycles and scooters had become a plague on the streets of this huge city, they didn't wobble in their course of action.

The solution? Ban motorcycles.

As of Jan. 1, the city's 260,000 or so registered motorcycles will be forced off the roads. Tens of thousands of people who use the vehicles to make deliveries or otherwise earn livings must turn in their motorcycles or take them out of the city.

Despicable. That's communism for you.

I got my recent speeding ticket in part because I simply didn't notice the rather unobtrusive signs on which the speed limit for that particular road was posted.

I feel pretty sure, however, that I would have noticed the limit and slowed down accordingly if only Tokyo's traffic authorities had used the Danish approach. (Warning: mildly NSFW)

Tokyo should adopt this tactic immediately — lives are at stake! (Found via Helmet Hair)

Via Fark, the Evening Standard reports on another Brit who probably wishes he were allowed to carry a gun.

Liberals like to make fun of the Robert Heinlein saying that "An armed society is a polite society." There are plenty of arms in Iraq, they'll say, and things don't seem too polite over there.

Yeah, well Iraq is in a state of war. London isn't. And if Londoners were allowed to carry any sort of weapons — guns, knives, pepper spray — for their personal defense, I'd bet we'd be seeing a lot less of this sort of thuggery. (Via Instapundit)

FOLLOW-UP:
Here's a disturbing video of another Brit who would have been better off shooting a gun instead of a camera.

I got a dreaded "red ticket" (actually pink) today for going 87 km/h in a 50 km/h zone. That may sound like a lot, but it was actually quite a reasonable speed given the road and the conditions. I've ridden at that speed on that road hundreds of times with no consequence. Now I have to attend a one-day class on safe driving, plus I received a whopping 6 points on my license.

Unfortunately, there was no bowing my way out of this one: A platoon of cops had set up a little ticket-giving operation by the side of the road, registering your speed with a radar gun, and printing it out on the ticket as proof. And since practically everyone exceeds the 50 km/h limit, the cops were giving out tickets as fast as they could pull people over and process them. At a bike shop later on, someone told me the cops always set up these "ticket traps" toward the end of the year, to meet quotas and earn bonuses.

When I had tried to get the cop to let me off with a warning, he pointed to a thick stack of receipts from tickets he'd already written for other people that morning, and said, "If I let you go, it wouldn't be fair to them."

Maybe not. But it's not fair to suddenly and strictly enforce a rule that everyone regularly ignores, either.

How can you tell that the right to speak anonymously is (as the U.S. Supreme Court says) an essential component of the right to free speech?

Easy: China wants to get rid of it. ESWN translates an article from the Chinese press:

Several tens of millions of Chinese bloggers are concerned about the fate of their blogs. On October 31, this reporter learned that the real-name blogger registration system is about to enter on the agenda list of the Ministry of Information Industry. This means that there is a chance that test trials of the real-name blogger registration system will be held soon.

...The provincial research department deputy director Li Houqiang told the media: "If you don't trample on other people's right to speech and you don't engage in activities outside of the law, you should not be afraid of using your real name. If you don't tell lies, you won't have a guilty conscience and you'll have nothing to be afraid of."

Spoken like a true totalitarian. Of course, the real danger Chinese bloggers face comes not from telling lies, but from telling the truth.

Via TokyoTom (who found it linked here), the Telegraph reports:

Most traffic lights should be torn up as they make roads less safe, one of Europe's leading road engineers said yesterday.

Hans Monderman, a traffic planner involved in a Brussels-backed project known as Shared Space, said that taking lights away helped motorists, cyclists and pedestrians to co-exist more happily and safely.

..."It works well because it is dangerous, which is exactly what we want. But it shifts the emphasis away from the Government taking the risk, to the driver being responsible for his or her own risk.

Wow. That's an article tailor-made for this blog if ever I saw one. Thanks, TT. Unfortunately, despite the apparent success of the above program, I doubt the EU will drop its regulate-everything mentality any time soon.

Cory Doctorow, writing on BoingBoing about a BBC article on Britain's "surveilance society":

Not only are cameras all over Britain — especially London — but many indoor spaces have rules that say you aren't allowed to shield yourself from their gaze, prohibiting motorcycle helmets and even hooded sweatshirts. The hoodie has become a symbol of surveillance-dodging hooligans — a favorite (ab)use of the expansive, extra-judicial "anti-social behaviour orders" (ASBOs) is to order kids to stop wearing camera-foiling hooded jumpers.

George Orwell, 1984:

There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

Part one of what now, dispiritingly, seems to be turning into a series of posts can be found here. Also, I wrote about Britain's use of ASBO's here.

At TheTruthAboutCars.com (which is a great site even if it is about cars), Robert Farago has a nice little piece about the unintended negative impact of excessively strict, and excessively enforced, speed limits in England:

The national government has “ring fenced” the money generated by speeding tickets: mandating that local “safety camera partnerships” must spend the revenue from speed enforcement on speed enforcement. This supposedly virtuous circle has led to an explosion of speed cameras, a huge increase in speeding tickets and a very nasty unintended consequence. Just as Prohibition eroded the American public’s respect for law and law enforcement, the United Kingdom’s extremely effective anti-speeding jihad has undermined the public’s respect for the police.

At the risk of alienating road safety-minded readers, many of whom have suffered personal losses from traffic fatalities, the issue of the public’s faith in its police force is far more important than speed-related road safety. When a law criminalizes a behavior practiced by the majority of its citizens, it criminalizes its citizens. When the police rigorously enforce this law, hypocritically enough, the public comes to resent the police.

I believe that speed limits are mostly useless, especially on wide-open highways. People drive (or ride) at a speed that's safe given the road conditions at the time, not because of some law, but because they don't want to die. And the reckless daredevils who blast along at unsafe speeds aren't going to obey the law anyway.

As you have probably heard, Steve Irwin, the famed "Crocodile Hunter", is dead at 44. The Associated Press reports:

Steve Irwin, the hugely popular Australian television personality and conservationist known as the “Crocodile Hunter,” was killed Monday by a stingray while filming off the Great Barrier Reef. He was 44.

Irwin was at Batt Reef, off the remote coast of northeastern Queensland state, shooting a segment for a series called “Ocean’s Deadliest” when he swam too close to one of the animals, which have a poisonous bard on their tails, his friend and colleague John Stainton said.

“He came on top of the stingray and the stingray’s barb went up and into his chest and put a hole into his heart,” said Stainton, who was on board Irwin’s boat at the time.

Poke around the Internets a bit, and you'll have no trouble finding comments snarkily noting the irony of Steve being killed by one of the animals whose deadliness he sought to showcase. If you mess around with dangerous creatures, such wags note, you're likely to make a fatal mistake sooner or later.

Irwin certainly knew that. He was well aware of the dangers he faced in coming so close to the crocodiles, snakes, and other beasts of his trade. But he did it anyway, and he loved what he did. I'm guessing that for him, a nice, safe office job would have been a waking death of endless tedium. It just wasn't an option.

Similarly, motorcyclists are at higher risk than car drivers — and, yes, even train passengers — of having a fatal accident. We can take measures to minimize that risk, but we can't eliminate it completely. And that's as it should be. Because without it, we'd be completely safe. And bored.

You can't be a superpower if you're this insecure:

Apparently, some Israeli tourists going to travel in China with the latest Lonely Planet book were asked to hand in their very expensive book at the border-crossing due to its 'political nature' showing maps of China which color Taiwan in a different color suggesting that Taiwan is not a part of China.

From fiLi’s world, based on this Israeli message board post. I found it on Asiapundit, which got it from The View from Taiwan. Truly, the Web is a powerful tool.

Big Ben emailed yesterday to say that Japan is soliciting comments from the public on its horrible new parking law. He writes:

I wish I had heard about this earlier, since the deadline is tomorrow. It's not like they went out of their way to tell anybody about it or anything.

Indeed. Here's a link with information on how to share your opinion on the law with the powers that be. Today's the deadline, though, so whip out that Japanese dictionary and get cracking.

The traffic cops (not parking inspectors, but actual police officers) were out in force today. It seemed like every major intersection had a motorcycle cop stationed at it, just waiting to nab people for the slightest offense. While riding around town doing errands, I myself was pulled over twice — once near Shibuya and once near Roppongi. Both times, my offence was grave: moving my scooter between or around lanes of cars to get to the head of the line at a red light. (Apparently, this is legal in some places and illegal in others. I think the rule is that you can't do it where there's a yellow line between lanes instead of a white one.)

Anyway, I talked my way out of both tickets. I've talked my way out of tickets before, but never two in one day. Man, I'm good.

I've blogged quite a bit about Tokyo's new parking restrictions, but I had never seen the parking inspectors in action — until today.

I was having brunch at a sidewalk cafe with the Tokyo Riders. Our bikes were lined up at the edge of the sidewalk — not bothering a soul, as the streets were pretty much empty. Then, suddenly, we noticed two elderly men with clipboards and construction worker-style reflective vests heading toward us.

Fearing the worst, one of our group rushed over to talk to them. Here's a shot of him fighting the power:


"They're going to ticket us unless we move our bikes," he yelled back. So we got up, moved our bikes a few feet off the public sidewalk and onto a private plaza — outside the inspectors' jurisdiction — and went on with our brunch. The elderly inspectors walked on, satisfied that they had managed to have some effect on the outside world, even if only an annoying and inconsequential one.

I used to think the only purpose of the new restrictions was to raise money for the government through fines. But now I see it has another purpose: giving aimless oldsters something to bother people about besides how they sort their garbage.

Chinese reporter Li Yuanlong was recently sentenced to two years in prison for criticizing China's government in essays he posted on the Internet. The Washington Post reported:

Li Yuanlong, a reporter for the newspaper Bijie Daily in the southern city of Bijie, was detained in September after posting essays on foreign Web sites.

Li was convicted by the Bijie Intermediate People's Court of "inciting subversion" and sentenced to two years, said his lawyer, Li Jianqiang, who is no relation.

What did Li actually write? ESWN provides a translation of one of his essays, titled, "On Becoming an American in Spirit". It includes the following passage:

When a Chinese used a hunting rifle to shoot at birds on a university campus, he shot a hole in the Communist's red diaper cloth [the Chinese flag] by accident. As a result, he was sentenced to 20 years in jail. In America, "publicly" burning the American flag on the street is regarded an expression of thought and an exercise of freedom of speech, and is constitutionally protected.

The day that I can burn the Chinese national flag at Tiananmen Square will be the day when mainland China becomes an "America" with democracy and economic wealth — a beautiful, good and wealthy country.

Li's words should be emailed to every US senator who recently voted in favor of adding a flag-burning amendment to the Constitution.

The good news of Hao Wu's recent release by the Chinese government should not obscure the fact that it's still detaining many other people whose "crimes" involved nothing more than speaking their minds or reporting the news.

I blogged about the case of Shi Tao, who was arrested after Yahoo helped Chinese authorities link him to materials he had posted online, here and here. The Associated Press reports that Shi and over 40 other Chinese journalists are still behind bars.