But too swamped in work to even think about blogging. It may take several more days before I can get back into things. Bear with me….

See Cal Pundit’s Liars List and check out the comments. Funny, but also not funny.

I leave today and won’t be back until Thursday morning. I may not be able to post at all until then, though I’ll certainly try.

After reading through a number of pieces on L. Jean Lewis’ appointment to chief of staff of the Defense Department’s inspector general office I am in awe yet again at the Bush administration’s sheer audacity and sliminess.

Lewis is a known liar, fraudster and schemer. She helped orchestrate the noise about Whitewater, then perjured herself over an illegal tape recording. Ken Starr then protected her and hushed it all up.

Her appointment was made in silence. Her salary will be $118,000. She has no qualifications. Her appointment to an office overseeing fraud is such an irony it defies belief.

Orcinus chronicles her entire ugly history with his usual thoroughness. After detailing her crimes he observes:

Lewis remained under wraps until now. Clearly, there is abundant evidence that Lewis committed all these crimes. Instead, she has faced no consequences.

The really germane question is this: How exactly did L. Jean Lewis rise suddenly from the ranks of minor RTC investigator to the overseer of a massive Defense Department bureau? What exactly were her qualifications? The ones she put on display for the RTC: Namely, ginning up scandals against Democrats, and covering up scandals against Republicans.

If a firestorm of protest doesn’t arise from this I’m going to lose all hope.

I just read an agonizing story in the Baltimore Sun about impoverished Chinese workers who rushed at the opportunity to make money mining gold.

Thanks to the lack of safety measures, they are now dying a slow death caused by breathing in the dust as they mined. For the poor village it is a tragedy from which it can never recover; one woman interviewed is going to lose all her sons and grandsons (7 men in all). And the disease is preventable with fairly simple safety procedures.

As always, it was the officials who ended up rich, while those they are supposed to represent were sent to die.

In time, the gold rush in this community of 14,500 in Jiangxi province became a tragic microcosm of the economic free-for-all under way in China, where the winners are well-connected, the losers have little recourse, and, often, no one is held accountable.

The article closes with a wail of hopelessness; the mine is closed, and there is no work for the survivors. One of most troubling and depressing pieces on China I’ve seen to date.

A frightening story by John Pomfret explores China’s policy of evicting poor citizens from their shacks or small homes to make way for development.

On Aug. 22, Weng Biao was preparing to buy a lunch of steamed fish and pickled vegetables for his wife when officials from the government Office of Demolition showed up at his family’s two-room shack in a small field slated to become a shopping mall and ordered him to come with them.

A 39-year-old part-time laborer with a bad leg, Weng limped to the office 200 yards away. Minutes later, several other officials barged into Weng’s house, took a jerrycan of gasoline and forced his wife, 11-year-old son and 74-year-old father outside. A bulldozer arrived and knocked down the house even though local residents had been given until Aug. 30 to leave the area, witnesses and Chinese reporters said.

It gets worse. Weng is somehow doused in gasoline, lit on fire (apparently accidentally; several officials with him were burned as well) and killed.

Pomfret delves into how peasants who protest their evictions are imprisoned, as are their lawyers. As always in China, there is a single root of all evil:

Widespread corruption is the main factor fueling the real estate war in China. Local government officials, factory bosses and other Chinese in positions of power sell the rights to use chunks of land to developers for a low price plus a hefty kickback. They then collude with gangs to oust villagers or urban residents of the area. The compensation paid to those residents, if any, is often a fraction of what the property is really worth.

When the Party is the government, the courts, the media and the police, there’s no where to turn, and corruption becomes the norm. There’s a lot of glitzy new malls and office buildings in nearly every city in China. It’s intriguing to learn the dark side of how these splendid creations came to be.

Update: Another article on a very similar theme just came out, equally depressing.

An official for the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention says at least 1,000 flu patients in Beijing have been misdiagnosed as having Sars so far this year.

Which leads me to ask, if 1,000 people in Beijing have been diagnosed with SARS (wrongly or rightly) now that flu season is here, how come we haven’t heard about it until now? One lab worker in Singapore is diagnosed with SARS, and the country goes into overdrive, with talk of bringing back temperature checks and closing schools. [Correction: The article apparently refers only to January through June of this year, when the last case of SARS in Beijing was announced. Thanks for poiinting this out Adam.]

Odd, by the way, how the story of the lab worker here has totally vanished from the Singapore media, with no update or anything. It’s like he vaporized.
[Update: Now there’s a kind-of sequel to his story, though it doesn’t really tell us about his present condition.]

This is the best article I’ve read yet on Sinagpore’s metamorphosis from rigid, no-nonsense dictatorship to gay-friendly, gum-chewing (with a doctor’s prescription), bar-dancing oasis of liberal pleasures.

I didn’t know, for example, that the recent decision by the government to hire gays came about “after officials discovered a study showing that America’s most gay-friendly cities were also the most creative and affluent.” (Are you listening, Republicans?)

This is at the heart of Singapore’s radical new course:

“If we want our people to make more decisions for themselves, and if we are to encourage a derring-do society, we must allow risk taking, and a little excitement,” [PM] Goh has said. His remarks and the relaxation of petty rules were, however, born not of generosity but necessity. Singapore is in trouble and in need of re-invention.

The article drives home the point that many don’t want to acknowledge — Singapore is in deep, deep trouble and the government has to do everything it can to get out of the iceberg’s way.

Easier said than done. Singaporeans are still too scared to get up on the bar and dance, the reporters says, so the new freedoms probably won’t change things very much, at least in the short-term.

After 40 years of being firmly guided in what education and career to follow, and even whom to marry, Singaporeans are being told to alter their character radically.

The government is now encouraging everyone to be a “bold thinker” and entrepreneur. It’s too bad they waited until now to see the light, when it really may be too late.

[Edited at 17.00, Sept. 13]

There’s a brief but interesting article on a new book by a photographer who managed to photograph some of the Cultural Revolution’s most terrible scenes, especially in the countryside.

Mr Li’s black and white pictures show mass rallies, ritual humiliations, beatings, executions and passionate revolutionary enthusiasm….

“It’s not only you who are shocked by the pictures. I hope if the book is published in China, my compatriots will be shocked too. I want to tell the true story of the Cultural Revolution, to serve a purpose.”

I’m not sure how easy it will be to get a book like this published in China; it would sure be a wonderful thing.

Intelligent analysis of the Pico Iyer article I discussed yesterday over at Big Hominid.

I tried to be “balanced” in my own initial analysis, mainly because I hold the author in such high esteem and couldn’t imagine he would write anything blatantly stupid. (After I discovered his article on the Tiananmen tank man back in May I must have gone back 20 times to re-read it.) As Hominid says, I was “too kind,” and he gets right to the point:

I fucking hate the relentless attempt to paint America as irrevocably juvenile. Yeah, there’s plenty that’s juvenile about American culture, but we’ve gone places other countries can’t go because we’re not quite so shackled to the goddamn past, where tradition leads to inertia. I don’t see how a modern Europe that allows the ethnic cleansing of moderate Muslims (anybody remembering this?) and appeases its burgeoning fundie Muslim minority (France, Germany) contains any special wisdom from which we should learn. The same is true of so much Asian “wisdom,” when it comes under scrutiny.

These are valid points. It still leaves me wondering whether there is anything America can do, ever, to shift world opinion of us as an oafish teenager using the world for one giant night on the town.

Now, this perception may be entirely wrong, but the fact that it’s become so ingrained is a problem we cannot simply dismiss with a “Fuck you, world!”, which only makes things worse. In practical terms, it can make cooperation with the rest of the world a nightmare and it’s simply unhealthy. The unhealthiness may be on their side, but it can mean serious probelms over on our side.

Big Hominid is an interesting site, by the way, with a focus on Korea. I’m adding it to my prestigious Pearls of Asia list now.