Powerblogs had server problems, which means that the site was inaccessible for nearly twenty-four hours and that one or two comments have disappeared (sorry). Also, I’ve lost two relatively inconsequential posts that may or may not be restored. They were both links to good things at other blogs, so I’ll just give them here without much commentary, which I’m not really of the mind to reproduce:

Simon posted a few days ago about a South China Morning Post article headlined “Still an inspirational leader.” It’s China we’re talking about, so if you’re now thinking, No, it couldn’t be about…, well, yes, it is. The first paragraph of the article (which must have been in the print edition, since Simon doesn’t link to it, goes like this:

Almost 30 years after the death of Mao Zedong, many are still trying to define the controversial leader. But, like China, Mao defies simple classification. And his name still evokes deep respect amonst many Chinese.

After all, there’s nothing more important than being free from labels, even at the expense of a few lives. Simon says:

The latest estimate is Mao was responsible for more than 73 million deaths. In case you’re wondering, that’s a record.

Simon suspects that many of those people would fail to have respect for Mao if they were alive now.

The other post was by Gaijin Biker, who reports that the United Nations has–you’ll want to be sitting down for this–been discovered to be guilty of bureaucratic waste. The story he cites is from UPI:

Up to about a third of the $590 million U.N. fund spent for the Indian Ocean tsunami relief may have gone to pay for overhead.

The Financial Times says its two-month investigation showed the money appears to have been spent on administration, staff and related costs. The $590 million was part of the United Nation’s $1.1 billion disaster flash appeal.

…

The newspaper said details of that appeal it obtained from U.N. agencies such as the World Health Organization and the World Food Program showed 18 percent to 32 percent of the expenditure related to staff, administration and other costs.

A natural disaster that affects multiple Third World countries is just the sort of thing that the UN is supposed to be more suited than any other entity to deal with.

Oh, and I guess I could also mention here that I got a very perky e-mail notifying me that somewhere called Red Orbit, which apparently covers tech stuff and is not a site Michael uses as an outlet for any closet communist tendencies, named White Peril as one of its blogs of the day. That’s very kind, though kind of bewildering, since I hardly ever talk about tech stuff. The post that was linked as a sample was this one complaining about the process of getting Toshiba to replace my CD-ROM drive. I was thinking of writing another post complaining about the user-unfriendly iPod remote control, too. Otherwise, the only time technology is a topic here is when Japan is making a deal with the US military to develop cool stuff. But Red Orbit looks as if it may be a good aggregator, so there‘s the link again.

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