Now, normally I would never write about this sort of thing. But the idea of a world without Microsoft Excel is just too exciting, too glorious – I simply can’t ignore it. Let’s hope Google does as spectacular a job with this as they have with their other products (I am a huge fan of Google Desktop, Gmail, Picasa and, more recently, Calendar.) Now, if only they could replace Microsoft altogether and make the company and its ulcer-inducing products obsolete – imagine what a better world this would be. What I love about Google’s products is their radical simplicity, the fact that I can run them on intuition alone. I don’t want to have to think of telecommunications technology when I make a phone call, and I never want to think about computing and manuals and IT as I use the applications on my computer. Google and Apple really get this. Why do we need a company like Microsoft when we have Google and Apple?

Update: I just thought of the obvious question: Will China let you access this or will it go the way of gmail and google.com, both subject to blockage in the PRC?

I do think China owes its people a complete and open investigation into what happened on June 4 and the following days. I also find it embarrassing for the US to be demanding such an investigation at a time when we are stamping as “Classified” every document related to “extreme renditions” and the secret East European “terrorist containment camps” we’ve set up and NSA surveillance of everyday citizens, etc., etc.

China opposes the “rude interference” of the United States in calling for a full accounting of the crackdown on the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, the official Xinhua news agency said on Wednesday.

“The U.S. statement is a groundless criticism and attack on China,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao was quoted as saying in a statement.

The State Department issued a statement on Sunday, the 17th anniversary of the pro-democracy protests bloodily put down by Chinese troops, calling for a re-evaluation by China which has branded the protests subversive.

“The U.S. urges China to provide a full accounting of the thousands who were killed, detained, or went missing and of the government role in the massacre,” spokesman Sean McCormack said in a statement.

China considers the incident history and closed to further questions.

About that last line – China may feel the story is “closed,” but history doesn’t work that way. WWII ended 61 years ago and we’re still examining it with a flood of new books each year, just as we still examine the fall of the Caesars. History is never closed. The only time anyone proclaims it so is when they have something to hide, when they’re guilty, when they want to cover up past sins.

You can make your nominations now. I will not be in the running this year, but there are many, many other sublime Asian blogs waiting for your nomination.

Whether the compromise Google made with the PRC benefitted the Chinese people or not (and I think it probably did), there was never any doubt that with the deal Google betrayed its much-vaunted code of values. I have no doubt that this was an agonizing decision to make and one that did not come easily. It’s good to see that Google’s founders at least admit they betrayed their own principles.

Google Inc. co-founder Sergey Brin acknowledged Tuesday the dominant Internet company has compromised its principles by accommodating Chinese censorship demands. He said Google is wrestling to make the deal work before deciding whether to reverse course.

Meeting with reporters near Capitol Hill, Brin said Google had agreed to the censorship demands only after Chinese authorities blocked its service in that country. Google’s rivals accommodated the same demands — which Brin described as “a set of rules that we weren’t comfortable with” — without international criticism, he said.

“We felt that perhaps we could compromise our principles but provide ultimately more information for the Chinese and be a more effective service and perhaps make more of a difference,” Brin said.

Interesting to see that they are debating “reversing course” – I’d like to hear more about that. Maybe it has to do with the fact that for all the compromises, google.com and gmail are still often blocked in most parts of China. (Check the comments to this post for verification.)

Friedman on the importance of immigrants in America, and what foreign students bring to our education system. But before we get to Friedman’s article, I’d like to encourage you to visit a blog post (which recently won high praise from black bigot La Shawn Barber) offering a set of 20 suggestions for ending America’s woes. They read like the Nuremberg Laws, and here’s one example, related to Friedman’s piece:

(16) Tourists from other nations are quite welcome for limited periods, as are businessmen. I would suggest we no longer take students from other nations, as I see no point in giving away our technologies and knowledge to our competitors. Our citizens are free to welcome these tourists and visitors, but they should understand that if they wish to marry them they will have to renounce citizenship and leave the country to do so. If they have a child with these visitors, they will be required to leave. Birthright citizenship will be abolished; only a child of two citizen parents will automatically be a citizen.

(Links via the must-read-everyday LGF Watch.)

This is what we’re up against. I’ll take Friedman’s philosophy on this topic anytime. Read on:

A Well of Smiths and Xias
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: June 7, 2006

Muhammad Waqar, Avi Wolfman-Arent, Yiran Xia, Victoria Sandoval, Jacqueline Orellana-Flores, Elizabeth Packer, Ramona Singh, Anuja Shah, Mayra Ramos, Emily-Kate Hannapel, Natasha Perez, Samir Paul, Ekta Taneja, Linden Vongsathorn, Michael Tsai, Nardos Teklebrahan, Matiwos Wondwosen …

I went to a high school graduation Monday and a United Nations meeting broke out.

(more…)

Dowd on Bush’s bogeymen – one of BushRove’s most despicable and most successful tactics. This column verges on cutesiness at first, but read on to where she gets to the most frightening bogeyman of all, gay marriage. Dowd can still deliver.

Damien, Demons and Dubya
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: June 7, 2006

As I write this on 6-6-06, with a new Damien demonically wheeling through movie theaters trying to kill his mom in a remake of “The Omen,” let us now speak of famous bogeymen.

The Bushes have always been good at using bogeymen to their political advantage.

Lee Atwater, the devilish strategist for Bush Senior, turned an obscure criminal named Willie Horton into the Candyman in 1988, whipping up the fear that if Michael Dukakis were elected, hordes of swarthy skels would be freed on weekend parole and swarm into your neighborhood.

(more…)

The China-founded Shanghai Cooperation Organization has no dreamy mission statements or quixotic, warm-and-fuzzy objectives. It was created by dictators for dictators, and it’s all about consolidating and increasing their power, as well as their hold on energy supplies. And as this intriguing article mentions, some see it as the replacement of the old Warsaw Pact.

Few may yet have heard of it. But out of the east comes a radically different paradigm for 21st-century international organisation, short on idealism and long on hard-headed self-interest. The “universal” principles of “liberty, democracy and justice” lauded by Mr Blair are hardly its driving force.

Founded by China, the five-year-old SCO groups together like-minded authoritarian leaderships in Russia and four central Asian republics – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Pakistan, Mongolia and India are observer members. So too is Iran.

In terms of total population, area and resources, the SCO is far bigger than Nato or the EU. It dwarfs older regional organisations. It is not yet a mutual defence pact but it is heading that way as Sino-Russian military ties deepen. Its charter pledges “non-interference and non-alignment” while seeking to create “a new international political and economic order”. David Wall of Chatham House’s Asia programme calls it “a club for autocrats and dictators”.

The SCO’s next summit meeting, in Shanghai on June 15, will pursue joint security, energy and development goals, including enhanced cooperation against terrorism, Islamist extremism and separatism. For China, this means a common front on Taiwan and Muslim “splittists”. For Russia, it means solidarity over Chechnya. For the likes of Uzbekistan, a year after the Andijan massacre, it means no awkward questions about human rights abuses.

…Russia and China are suspected of using the SCO to shut the US and its allies out of fast-developing central Asian energy markets, thereby monopolising supply. Beijing, for example, is offering $900m (£480m) in soft loans to central Asian partners. At a deeper level, US strategists see a threat that might one day produce renewed, cold war-style confrontation between opposing east-west poles. In some analyses, the SCO is a born-again Warsaw pact; Russia has already been “lost”; India and Pakistan are swing voters; and Iran is the wild card.

….This contest could be one of the new century’s defining struggles. Viewed from this rough-and-tumble frontier world of realpolitik, real estate, and repressive governance, Mr Blair’s trumpeting of “universal” values may look naive or unhelpful – or simply irrelevant.

Looking at the roster of this good old boys’ club, I’d be hard pressed to think of a more unappealing set of thugs and scoundrels. However, considering America’s own attempts to monopolize oil supplies, not to mention our own justification for torture and contempt for human rights in the name of “anti-terrorism,” I don’t see how we can criticize the SCO without appearing blatantly hypocritical. Yes, it sounds like an evil cabal, and the idea of this group acquiring power on the level of the old Soviet empire is terrifying. Too bad our Codpiece in Chief has robbed us of our claims to a moral high road. We can criticize, but to many our complaints will ring hollow. Thanks George.

Link via CDT.

I’ve held off posting about the June 4 Incident this year, as I’ve written so much about it in the past. But I do urge everyone to see this superb compilation video over at Rebecca’s site, which brings you right there. It’s choppy, and even with my excellent broadband it kept stopping and starting. Watch it anyway; it’s worth it. We really must never forget.

So two readers have emailed me. Maybe it’s a June 4 thing? Whatever it is, I hope that, as usual, it lifts shortly.

No, it seems to have been a server problem, now corrected.

We’ve all heard the hopelessly tragic news of the 24 students, 15 and 16 years old, who were taken off a bus by Iraqi insurgents this week one by one and murdered. No words can express the horror.

GUNMEN have dragged 24 people, mostly teenage students, from their vehicles and shot them dead in the latest wave of violence in Iraq. As Iraqi leaders appeared deadlocked overnight on naming new interior and defence ministers seen as critical to restoring stability, the relentless killings continued.

Police said gunmen manning a makeshift checkpoint near Udhaim, 120km north of Baghdad, stopped cars approaching the small town and killed the passengers. The victims included youths of around 15 and 16 years old, who were on their way to the bigger regional town of Baquba for end of term exams, and also elderly men, they said.

“(The attackers) dragged them one by one from their cars and executed them,” said a police official.

The Belmont Club, famous for being enamored of the war in Iraq from day one, is unhappy that news like this always appears on page one of the newspapers, creating an appearance that the Iraq war has degenerated into a quagmire. (Imagine anyone thinking such a thing.) Why, there’s big news, important news, that should also be on page one! Like, um, the improvement of the Mesopotamian Marshes since Saddam’s ouster. Yes, the Belmont Boys really make this argument, with a straight face. (Check out the post I linked to to see what I mean.)

Look, it’s really great that some schools were built or marshes saved or hospitals erected. But when editors have a choice between the improved marshes and 24 teenagers murdered in cold blood, guess which one they’re going to go with? In every way, this Belmont Club post is specious and misleading. All of the outrage over the neglected marshes stems from the sentence introducing the story: “This story about a real swamp, for example is probably going to wind up on page 54.” And that’s why he’s furious, because the story of this swamp will “probably” wind up on page 54. That’s not where it did end up, as far as we know (I suspect most newspapers will ignore it altogether as not being relevant enough to their readers), but in case it does, Belmont Club has all the anger saved up in advance, ready to explode.

If the Belmont Boys really believe this story is of equal news value as the state of our illegal war in iraq, they are in for a lot of disappointment. No editor in his right mind would look at the state of Iraq today, with constant breaking news of fresh carnage, and decide the page-one story should be the marshes. And check the mean comments. They all see media bias as the bogeyman – we’re only losing in Iraq because of the media, dammit!. Why don’t they get that mass murder is more topical and page-one-worthy than environmental stories, unfair as that may be. Oh, and one question for the Belmont Boys: Not even Fox News or the Wall Street Journal or the Moonie Times picked up the marshes story. Could it be that they, too, are hopelessly biased? Or could it be, just maybe, that they saw it as less newsworthy than the ceaseless acts of violence tearing Iraq apart?

Update: I checked Google News, and as would be expected by most rational people, the story of the marshes has been covered almost exclusively by science publications. What a surprise.