So much hope and optimism in this young fellow’s face. I don’t believe anyone or anything can keep down the irrepressible Chinese spirit. Discuss (that, or any other topic you choose).

This article from the NYT is worth being copied for posterity. Note the web sites that have been created to offer alternatives to Google, and the refusal of some site owners to take Google ads any longer. (And I admit, I am not one of them; I’m not one of the Boycott Google school of thought. I simply believe they are now just another US company doing what US companies do, with no claims, any more, to its once squeaky-clean image.)

It all goes back to Imagethief’s well-phrased question of some weeks ago:

But the question that situations –and excuses– like this raise for American tech-media companies is this: where is your ethical horizon? Every country has its own laws and regulations. Some are more egregious than others. Some are indefensible. When do a company’s values supercede its desire to make money and generate shareholder return? Does that point exist in the absence of public scrutiny? Perhaps some American tech-media companies would like to articulate what kind of “local laws and regulations” would push them too far?

Here’s the article, one of the few that really takes Will’s question seriously and explores it in gritty detail.
——————————————————————

LET’S play “What if?”
By TOM ZELLER Jr.
Published: February 6, 2006

What if the Chinese authorities didn’t simply force Google to exclude sites like hrw.org (the Human Rights Watch Web site) and lesbian.com from the Chinese version of its search engine results, or insist that Yahoo hop to whenever the government fancied the identity of one of its e-mail users, as the authorities have done?

What if they also stipulated that the chief executive of any Internet company doing business in China had to have “Mao Zedong — Luv U 4 Eva” tattooed across his back? Would the companies leave China?

(more…)

For more than an hour after seeing the film last night I couldn’t talk. All I could do was struggle to hold back tears, and keep from being overcome by a flood of memories of opportunities lost, of friends who aren’t with me anymore, and of the “eternal note of sadness” that defines human existence.

I went to the movie with low expectations, since it has been hyped so much. Gay cowboys, I thought – who cares? But Brokeback Mountain is not a movie about gay cowboys. It is much more than that, an understated thinking man’s movie that forces viewers to think hard about their own lives and the lives of the people they love and who love them.

There are moments in this movie that are so painful, so poignant that I know it will take me some weeks to get over them. The image of a shirt on a clothes hanger at the end and all that it represents is so agonizing, so impossibly painful I have to force myself to think about something else.

There is nothing sensual or erotic about Brokeback Mountain, and there’s no “action” to speak of. Every scene is underplayed, the dialogue sparse, which only adds to the near-unbearable sense of loneliness it conveys. After watching it, I kept thinking of those pangs we all feel at times, those moments when we suddenly think about how things might have been if only we hadn’t done what we did years ago; moments so painful and piercing, so aching, reminding us of our disappointments and broken dreams, that all we can do is hold them down and fight to expunge them.

The lessons: never give up love, never deny what you are, never sacrifice what you hold most dear to your heart. I’ll be thinking about these things for a very long time, and will never think about love in quite the same way.

My mother’s family is all from the Fall River-New Bedford-Providence area, the place of my happiest childhood memories. Reading about yesterday’s horrifying attack in a New Bedford gay bar followed today by the incredibly bloody and heartbreaking drama that resulted in the death of the sick teen as well as an Arkansas police officer, I feel sick, and shocked. It’s a shame the neo-Nazi murderer was killed; I wanted him to face a public trial and a permanent jail sentence. Monster.

My former blog buddy and occasional nemesis (always in a gentlemanly way) Adam Morris is blogging again, and it looks good. Now he’s in Vietnam, though it’s obvious China will always be with him. Be sure to check it out.

A guest post by Taichung dream expert William Stimson. Some great insights into what makes Taiwan such a unique and wonderful country.
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SOMETHING AMAZING HAPPENING IN TAIWAN

by William R. Stimson, Ph.D.

Amazingly enough, Taiwan, which seems to have everything for the entertainment seeker, now also has a place for the deeper sorts — those rare spirits who care to probe the inner workings of the human heart through the exploration of dreams. Taichung’s new dream group meets on Thursday nights in an apartment a few blocks from the art museum. As might be expected, the group is small. Sitting around in a circle on the floor and working with dreams is not for the common crowd. Those drawn to this endeavor are that tiny minority who somehow are able to get beyond the ordinary reaction to dreams and glimpse in them instead the portal to a truer life, a fuller way of knowing and being.

(more…)

From the unlinkable NY Times Select.

Down With Torture! Gimme Torture!
By SARAH VOWELL
Published: February 5, 2006

Whenever I hear the president mention, oh, every 12 minutes, that his greatest responsibility is “to protect the American people,” the insufferable civics robot inside my head mutters: “Actually, sir, your oath, the one with the Bible and the chief justice and the Jumbotron, is to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. For the American people are not mere flesh whose greatest hope is to keep our personal greasy molecules intact; we, sir, are a body politic — with ideals.”

(more…)

Oh dear. Isn’t this going just a bit far for a nation that’s all about free trade and making our own decisions? And if we do as Lipscomb suggests, what’s next? Surely we can find excuses to punish every company in bed with the CCP, like KFC, WalMart and just about every other American business. Here’s his thinking:

Google is perverting its own wonderful market leading search technology, that opens up the resources of the entire internet to everyone, into becoming the world’s most efficient censorship machine. And it is doing this so it can get even richer by gaining access to the fastest growing internet marketplace in the world. China is now second with over 100 million users and will soon to surpass the United States and become the largest internet market in the world.

In spite of Google’s aging hippie rhetoric on its website about “Do No Evil,” there can’t be anything much more evil than helping a totalitarian regime, that once brainwashed captured United States POW’s during the Korean War, brainwash its own citizens more efficiently. Political analyst Ralph Peters puts it perfectly: “Forget all the new-age-has-dawned rhetoric: Google agreed to turn the information superhighway into a prison corridor (while posturing about freedom of information back home in the USA). Google hasn’t simply betrayed American interests — its executives have betrayed the aspirations of a billion Chinese, reducing them to just more digits in Google’s digital universe.”

For many years the State Department in coordination with the Department of Defense has been clearing or denying exports of hi-tech hardware or software that might have “dual-use” capabilities that could threaten the security of the United States. Normally this is applied to products with military applications, but one of the problems with it has always been the wide range of discretion the government has in exercising its powers made its decisions unpredictable to American business.

…If the Bush Administration and GOP-led Congress continue to do nothing in the face of open defiance by American high tech companies like Google who wish to sell the new tools of oppression to authoritarian governments, there is no doubt that they will be “complicit in the oppression of others” as well.

The Bush Administration should immediately ask for an ongoing review of Google’s or any other American high technology company’s exports that in its opinion may threaten the national security of the United States by adding a useful tool for oppression to the arsenal of the tyrannies we say we oppose. If it fails to, Congress should remember the Jackson-Vanik Act it passed which did so much to help liberate the former Soviet Union.

I cited an earlier Lipscomb article some days ago, which I found far more level-headed. This one goes way too far. He never mentions that most Chinese are grateful for Google’s censored search engine, and might be worse off if it were taken away.

Okay, last post of the day.

Two years ago, China was whipped into a frenzy of anti-Japanese rioting, ignited by a skit by some Japanese students at a university in Xi’an.

The third annual cross-cultural performance night at Northwest University in Xi’an was meant to showcase the international flavor of the school’s language institute. Such talent shows at Chinese universities generally cleave to conventions: skits are formal, easy to understand and never bawdy. But when three Japanese students and a Japanese teacher took the stage they had something a little more racy in mind.

The teacher held a female mannequin in his hand. “This is my girlfriend,” he said. “She’s too fat, and she ought to go on a diet.” Then the three students, who wore cardboard boxes on their heads inscribed with words like “sushi” and “ninja,” cast off overcoats to reveal they were wearing red brassieres, with paper cups protruding suggestively from between their legs. They began to dance, gyrating their hips in a manner that “for Chinese was just nauseating,” said one spectator. After three minutes university authorities frantically motioned for the organizers to close the curtains. The Japanese contingent had certainly performed in bad taste; but had it been their intention to offend their Chinese hosts?

Chinese students viewing the skit in the context of the long history of antagonism between Japan and China believed so. The following day, Oct. 30, word of the performance had spread, and many of the campus’ 18,000 students concluded the Japanese had been out to humiliate China. Posters appeared on dormitory walls. “Protect our nation, throw out the attackers,” read one. Rumors that the Japanese had worn pig’s heads and had racist insults written on their costumes circulated quickly via mobile-phone text messages and Internet bulletin boards. More than a thousand angry students massed outside the foreign students’ dormitory and sang the Chinese national anthem, before shouting for the “Japanese pigs” to come out and apologize. When no one appeared, protesters broke windows with bricks, burst into the dorm and beat up two Japanese students who had had nothing to do with the dance, says a Japanese diplomat sent to investigate the case. Over the next two days crowds of students and other Xi’an residents demonstrated in public squares across the city. According to witnesses, the main gate of the campus was demolished by a mob of demonstrators trying to breech a People’s Armed Police barricade.

Like this week’s explosion of Islamic outrage over some ill-considered Danish cartoons, the reaction was nothing short of bizarre when seen in relation to the “crime.” As a Jew, I get offended by anti-Semitic cartoons, crosses painted on synagogues, hateful rhetoric from the president of Iran, etc. Do I riot and attack Moslems? Do I allow myself to indulge in a self-immolating orgy of hatred and violence? (In case you haven’t figured it out, the answer is “No.”)

In both cases, I believe the raw, blind rage is rooted in insecurity and a sense of inferiority. (Note, I said a sense of inferiority, not that Chinese or Moslems are inferior.) I think it’s correct for the US to voice disapproval and I think the cartoons were ill-considered, to say the least. (In the case of the Xi’An incident, I am less charitable; the Japanese skit was not intended to offend, dumb as the young students may have been in not taking into account the unique sensitivities of their hosts.) But the reaction….

No people who are secure about who they are and aware of their accomplishments and worthiness behave like this. Mature people channel their outrage constructively and never burn things down and attack innocents. People who see themselves as perennial victims, however, are always vulnerable to being incited to violence by the smallest catalyst. Like a silly college skit, or some offensive cartoons. The rage feeds on itself, and the catalyst is blown out of all proportion, transformed into something Meaningful when it was nothing more than dumb.

Like the Moslems, the Chinese always seem prone to such conflagrations that arise out of nothing, like the Japanese businessmen in 2003 who bought prostitutes at a Guandong hotel. It created a firestorm, all because it occurred on the anniversary of the start of Japan’s occupation of China’s northeast. (Do you really think the orgy’s organizers took that date into account as they arranged the seedy event? No matter; they were sentenced to life in prison.)

Again, self-confident, mature, successful people rarely if ever allow themselves to be manipulated to acts of violence over a racial/cultural slur, real or perceived. Because they are secure in the knowledge that the slur is nonsense, and they know they can be far more effective if they protest intelligently as opposed to childishly. When Jews were furious over Reagan’s decision to visit Bitburg they launched letter-writing campaigns, took to the airwaves and wrote op-ed columns. They never advocated violence against Republicans or Germans. What the Moslems are doing now – storming and defacing embassies, declaring an “International Day of Anger” – it’s in the same vein as Chinese attacking Japanese restaurants (run by Chinese) or destroying Toyotas. It’s self-defeating and weakens their cause. And it’s a telltale sign, whenever we witness this phenomenon, that the delirious crowds have a lot of growing up to do, as do their leaders who instigate the insanity.

Update: Now the cartoonists’ lives are in danger. And always true to form, Michelle Malkin and Charles Johnson of Little Green Cesspools, are calling on readers to buy Danish products to show their support of the cartoons. I love the Danes (what they did for the Jews in WWII is one of the great inspirational stories in history). I can see celebrating and cherishing them for many things they’ve done. But these cartoons are not one of those great things. I neither praise nor blame Denmark for them (it wasn’t a state-sanctioned act), and I certainly don’t see the publication of these cartoons as anything to celebrate.

The great Mark Kleiman reports on a young “Bushoid’s” attempt to dumb down America and declare war on science.

I’ve argued in the past that since most anti-Darwinists don’t object to scientific cosmology — which is after all just as contrary to a literal reading of Genesis as is natural selection — their objection to Darwin must have other roots, in particular to the perceived moral implications of the denial that human being are made in the Image of God.

Well, that theory may have some substance to it, but the premise needs work. It turns out that some especially ignorant and bigoted Biblical literalists do want to deny the Big Bang along with natural selection. That isn’t surprising, I suppose. What ought to be surprising, but also isn’t really surprising by now, is that the Bush Administration has put some of those especially ignorant and bigoted Biblical literalists in positions where they can threaten and boss around actual scientists.

It turns out that George Deutsch, the juvenile Bushoid who told the top climate guy at Goddard that there would be “dire consequences” if he didn’t shut up about global warming, also applied his talents for obscurantism and censorship to the origins of the universe:

The Big Bang memo came from Mr. Deutsch, a 24-year-old presidential appointee in the press office at NASA headquarters whose résumé says he was an intern in the “war room” of the 2004 Bush-Cheney re-election campaign. A 2003 journalism graduate of Texas A&M, he was also the public-affairs officer who sought more control over Dr. Hansen’s public statements.

In October 2005, Mr. Deutsch sent an e-mail message to Flint Wild, a NASA contractor working on a set of Web presentations about Einstein for middle-school students. The message said the word “theory” needed to be added after every mention of the Big Bang.

The Big Bang is “not proven fact; it is opinion,” Mr. Deutsch wrote, adding, “It is not NASA’s place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator.”

It continued: “This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue. And I would hate to think that young people would only be getting one-half of this debate from NASA. That would mean we had failed to properly educate the very people who rely on us for factual information the most.”

The good news is that the NASA Director just sent out a memo telling the political hacks to knock it off and let the scientists do their work. The bad news is that NASA, like the rest of the government, is still infested with an especially noxious species of political hack. And note that Dean Acosta, the NASA director’s press secretary, says that NASA will, in fact, insist on referring to the “Big Bang theory” just as the junior commissar insisted.

Sure, the Big Bang is a theory. Like evolution. But we don’t refer to evolution as “the theory of evolution,” at least not usually. This isn’t about scientific integrity. As Kleiman says, it’s about obscuring the origins of the universe in order to keep the door open for a less reputable theory, Creationism.

[I know, I said I’d be hibernating. But blogging can be compulsive. I’ll try to get back to my vacation now.]