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"I don't care if it's a white cat or a black cat. It's a good cat so long as it catches mice." -- Deng Xiaoping, who opened China to foreign investment after 1978China is being called a "miracle economy." It seems to have decoupled from the rest of the world, preserving an 8% growth rate while the rest of the world sinks into the worst recession since the 1930s. How is that phenomenal growth rate possible, when other countries relying heavily on exports have suffered major downturns and remain in the doldrums? Economist Richard Wolff skeptically observes:
We now have a situation in the world where we have a global capitalist crisis. Everywhere, consumption is down. Everywhere, people are buying fewer goods, including goods from China. How is it possible that in that society, so dependent on the world economy, they could now have an explosive growth? Their stock market is now 100 percent higher than at its low -- nothing remotely like that hardly anywhere in the world, certainly not in the United States or Europe. How is that possible? In order to believe what the Chinese are saying, you would have to agree that in a matter of months, at most a year, no more, they have been able to transform their economy from an export-based powerhouse to a domestically focused industrial engine. Nowhere in the world has that ever taken less than decades.
"The Apollo astronauts planted seismometers on the Moon, primarily to measure Moonquakes. But they got diverted from their business by the discovery that objects, which they didn't expect at least, were hitting the Moon. These seismometers regularly recorded large bodies hitting the Moon like the meteoroids which I've just been describing. And this diagram is an illustration of the record of the incidence of these meteoroids, integrated over a period of about seven years until NASA switched the machine off- in exasperation, apparently, because they didn't think it was telling us anything very interesting.
Nevertheless, for seven or eight years they accumulated this data, and what you see here is the integral result of the observations, per day, through the years, throughout the whole of this seven or eight year period. And, of course, it looks a little like the skyline of Oxford, where I come from, but never mind, the prominent thing is that you see one remarkable peak in the middle which is, in fact, centered on about the 30th June. And all that peak, in fact, coincides with the products of one year's observing. So in that one year, 1975, in fact, we had a flood of objects hitting the Moon, which actually were also hitting the Earth, and they all were present, apparently, in the same stream, as was responsible for the Tunguska object in 1908 which, as you recall, also arrived the end of June. In fact, this end of June is an interesting time. It's the time when we pass through the Taurid stream, going in one direction. And the other direction is, in fact, the beginning of November, and you can see some signs of that in this same diagram."