Somehow I must have deleted by mistake an entire post praising Zona Europa (ESWN) for his translation of Chapter 30 0f the Chinese Peasant Survey. (If someone can remind me how to retrieve an old post via google’s cache, I’d appreciate it.)

Whether I can recover it or not, please be sure to see his translation. It reminds us that there are true reformers in China, though whether they have any clout to create meaningful change is certainly anyone’s guess. (Especially after the book was banned — a fairly meaningless gesture in terms of the book’s availability, but not a good sign for those delighted at the government’s original endorsement.)

Thinking of Wen’s efforts to make a real difference for China’s rural poor made me recall someting I wrote in a post not that long ago:

I believe now that the CCP is not monolithically evil. I know there’s a number of CCP members who truly hold a vision of a free and democratic China. Such reform-minded individuals have always been a part of the CCP. Unfortunately, they are up against a formidable entourage of party dinosaurs who cannot simply be swept under the carpet. Nice guys in the CCP always seem to finish last.

That’s what I kept thinking as I read ESWN’s great translation: The decent reformers are there, at least in terms of economics, but so often it seems the reform itself doesn’t materialize. (As far as political reform, I’ve given up for now; as we know, it’s either stalled or moving backwards, with Jiang Yanyong’s arrest just the latest painful example.)

Okay, later. Really bummed that I lost that entire post.

I’m serious — these book reviews are wildly funny. There’s a couple of stupid ones, but there are several gems. I’d go soon, because Amazon is certainly going to delete these as soon as they find out.

The author sure owes Michael Moore a debt of gratitude for searing the book’s title on the psyche of the nation.

UPDATE: As predicted, Amazon has deleted them all. Three new ones are up, but they’ll surely be zapped shortly.

UPDATE 2: As the commenters have poionted out, all the reviews have been archived here.

Tim Blair seems ready to dismiss the story that emerged yesterday of Iraq’s new PM Allawi shooting 6 prisoners to death as nothing more than a silly rumor. And it may be.

However, The Age is sticking to its story, and if they aren’t telling outright lies, I have to believe the story is credible (not certifiably true, but definitely worth learning more about). Is the following an outright lie?

The witnesses did not perceive themselves as whistle-blowers. In interviews with The Age they enthusiastically supported Dr Allawi for the killings. One justified the alleged killings and said: “These criminals were terrorists. They are the ones who plant the bombs. Allawi said they deserved worse than death; that they didn’t need to be sent to court.”

The two witnesses were independently and separately found by The Age; neither approached the newspaper. Nor were they put forward by, or through, others. They were interviewed on different days in a private home in Baghdad, without being told that the other had spoken.

A condition of the co-operation of each man was that no personal information would be published, but others known to The Age have vouched for their credibility. Both interviews lasted more than 90 minutes and were conducted through an interpreter – with another journalist in the room for one of the meetings. The witnesses were not paid for the interviews.

….

Neither witness could give a specific date for the killings. But the number of days that each said had lapsed since the shootings narrowed the time frame to on or around the third weekend in June – about a week before the rushed handover of power in Iraq and more than three weeks after Dr Allawi was named interim Prime Minister.

They said that as many as five of the dead were Iraqis, two of whom came from Samarra, a volatile town to the north of the capital, where an insurgency attack on the home of the Interior Minister had killed four of Mr Naqib’s bodyguards on June 19.

I really don’t know. It’s certainly very specific, but it may turn out ot be a well-orchestrated deception. But the question I need to ask is this:

How come some conservative bloggers seem so eager to swallow Blair’s explanation and write it all off as a rumor, while just yesterday they were standing up and declaring Annie Jacobsen a national hero for telling her “frightening story” of watching possible Syrian hijackers/bombers as they….went to the toilet? If any story qualifies for the rumor award, it’s Annie’s.

InstaPunidt posted an email he received from a pilot that provides some clarity:

There are a lot of details in the article such as those involving crew actions that are either flat out wrong or that she couldn’t possibly have known enough about to assess things as she did. Based on subsequent news (like Malkin’s confirmation of some aspects of the incident), I’ll accept that the gist of her story is valid but embellished with uninformed speculation and conventional wisdom.

And it was the many speculations that made the story so maddening.

Maybe it says something about our willingness to accept what we want to and reject what we don’t. But it seemed so flat-out obvious to me that the Jacobsen story was fishy, I was dumbfounded that it gained so much traction. The Allawi story may turn out also to be an invention, but it at least appeared to provide enough evidence to make the story believable. Whether that evidence was all a hoax remains to be seen.

There’s a story ripping through the blogosphere today (fueled by the noxious Michelle Malkin) about a woman’s awful plight whilst on a NWA flight. Insty and Lileks and all the usual suspects are abuzz over what appears to be a very slender and somewhat silly story that underscores yet again our hysteria over “terrorism,” real or perceived. Yes, we need to be concerned and vigilant and cautious. But hysteria is stupid — and dangerous.

Anyway, World O’Crap does a marvelous job fisking the crap out of this non-story. Here’s her conclusion.

So, to summarize: a woman and her hubby are scared because they see a group of Arabic men exchanging glances, and making frequent trips to the rest room. There are air marshals on board. The plane lands safely. The men are questioned, everything checks out, and the men are released — they were merely musicians. BUT there was a report in the press saying that terrorists can assemble bombs in restrooms during a flight, and NOBODY DID ANYTHING ABOUT KEEPING THOSE ARABS FROM USING THE TOILET! She talks to federal officials, who tell her confidential stuff about their policies and procedures for handling terrorists, and give her information about the Arabs’ upcoming flight plans. Thus, we should all be really, really scared, and violate the civil liberties of swarthy men, or just go ahead and start the internment camps. Just in case.

Be sure to read the entire post before you get sucked into the hype and the BS of the original non-story. Very, very funny and sharp as a stiletto.

Oh, and don’t miss all the hysterical, racist comments to Michelle’s post.

Vodkapundit says he may change his earlier opinion that China won’t attack Taiwan. This is the article that’s making him nervous:

The tone of Beijing’s rhetoric has changed, notes Richard Baum, a leading China specialist at the University of California in Los Angeles. The decibel-level of harsh anti-Chen polemic has subsided, replaced by a mood of “grim determination”, Baum said in a Yale Review article. “Before a tiger attacks, it remains calm and quiet,” one Chinese scholar told Baum.

Numerous US analysts believe that China’s military is close to reaching the capability it sees as necessary for an attack om special forces in Taiwan before the US Navy could execute its 30-day “surge” of massive reinforcements to the region – a Chinese version of US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s “shock and awe”.

The decisive moment could come even as early as Taiwan’s elections for its legislature this December, when Chen’s Democratic Progressive Party is expected to sweep out many of the conservative Kuomintang (KMT, Chinese Nationalist) oppositionists who have so far protected the existing constitution that sees Taiwan as part of China.

In another story, the occasionally reliable Washington Times reports China has developed a new type of submarine that’s diesel-powered and ideal for attacking Taiwan.

The new boat, which appears to be a combination of indigenous Chinese hardware and Russian weapons, suggests that China is building up its submarine forces in preparation for a conflict over Taiwan, defense analysts say.

The Washington Times is owned by Commie-hating Reverend Moon, and this entire article is a thinly veiled plea to the US to sell diesel-powered subs to Taiwan. It quotes Richard Fisher throughout, a Heritage Foundation/Jamestown Foundation expert on weapons who is always warning about the military threat posed by China. He may be right this time, and it’s an interesting read, if not a little scary.

I guess it’s time we just accept it: Iraq’s not going to be a democracy as we know it (or anything even close) anytime soon. This is wild, and makes me wonder whether Allawi’s going to be much better than Saddam Hussein.

Iyad Allawi, the new Prime Minister of Iraq, pulled a pistol and executed as many as six suspected insurgents at a Baghdad police station, just days before Washington handed control of the country to his interim government, according to two people who allege they witnessed the killings.

They say the prisoners – handcuffed and blindfolded – were lined up against a wall in a courtyard adjacent to the maximum-security cell block in which they were held at the Al-Amariyah security centre, in the city’s south-western suburbs.

They say Dr Allawi told onlookers the victims had each killed as many as 50 Iraqis and they “deserved worse than death”.

The Prime Minister’s office has denied the entirety of the witness accounts in a written statement to the Herald, saying Dr Allawi had never visited the centre and he did not carry a gun.

But the informants told the Herald that Dr Allawi shot each young man in the head as about a dozen Iraqi policemen and four Americans from the Prime Minister’s personal security team watched in stunned silence.

Iraq’s Interior Minister, Falah al-Naqib, is said to have looked on and congratulated him when the job was done. Mr al-Naqib’s office has issued a verbal denial….

One of the witnesses claimed that before killing the prisoners Dr Allawi had told those around him that he wanted to send a clear message to the police on how to deal with insurgents.

Maybe the whole thing’s a hoax, so I’ll reserve final judgement. But there’s enough detail to the witnesses’ story to make me inclined to believe them. And it sounds consistent with the way justice has traditionally been administered in Iraq. The more things change….

Via Kevin Drum.

Today I received writing assignments from three separate companies, so I can’t imagine finding any time to post. Tomorrow will be kind of hectic as well, but hopefully I’ll be able to swing back into action. Meanwhile, go read about how, as one of my fellow bloggers insists, there’s no censorship to speak of in China.

As the article says, China’s much-publicized vows of greater assistance to AIDS victims often fail to mean anything in real life.

Chinese police have detained four HIV infected villagers in the AIDS-ravaged province of Henan after they tried to draw the attention of higher authorities to their plight, an activist said on Wednesday.

Beijing has pledged in recent months to give more treatment and help to afflicted citizens and their families, but these promises often ring hollow on the ground. Many people are still deprived of medicine and schooling.

Two of those detained, husband Wang Guofeng and wife Li Suzhi, were rounded up by police on Monday as they were making their way to the railway station in Shangqiu city to catch a train to Beijing, AIDS activist Li Dan told Reuters.

“They were planning to travel to Beijing to petition the health department. They are very unhappy that the promises that Beijing made were never kept,” Li said.

“They are angry at how their childrens’ school was shut and how they have not been given all the help that has been promised to them,” Li said by telephone from Beijing.

Last week, authorities in Shangqiu city shut the Orchid School that Li managed after he told them that he was going to Bangkok to join other activists in rallies and protests at the 15th International AIDS Conference in the Thai capital.

Li started the school late last year for children who were orphaned by AIDS or who had parents suffering from the disease.

Pardon me? Shut down his school because he was going to a conference? What’s going on?

The two others were arrested at a hospital where they were hoping to petition Hu Jintao, who they thought was visiting. Wang’s daughter tried to call the local police, but they claimed to have no knowledge of the case. Right.

Henan province, the original breeding ground for the Chinese AIDS epidemic thanks to its infamous blood-selling scandal, has quite a history when it comes to treating its AIDS victims like animals. This and past horror stories can be attributed to the local Communist authorities, though it would be reassuring to see those at the top intervene, even a little bit, to demonstrate that their promises to AIDS victims mean something. I’m not counting on it, as they’ve got more important things to do, like deciding what books to ban and which mobile phone text messages to censor.

(And yes, I know they do a lot more than that. But why can’t they put their money where their mouth is when it comes to a problem of this magnitude?)

A new milestone for boy george, and a sign of profound desperation:

Opponents of John Kerry have hired a Dallas-area private investigator to gather information aimed at discrediting his military service, say several veterans who served with the Massachusetts Democrat in Vietnam.

Several veterans who have been contacted in recent days accused the private investigator, Tom Rupprath of Rockwall, of twisting their words to produce misleading and inaccurate accounts that call into doubt the medals Mr. Kerry received for his service.

“They’re just distorting things,” said Jim Wasser, who served with Mr. Kerry. “They have nothing to go after John Kerry for, so now they’re trying to discredit him.”

Mr. Rupprath was hired by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth on the recommendation of Merrie Spaeth, a Dallas public relations executive assisting the anti-Kerry group.

“Read the whole thing” to see just how slimy this is. The tactics the PI is using redefine poilitical sleaze.

By the way, hiring public relations experts to slime one’s enemies is an old dirty trick of the bush family. In order to get Americans all psyched about invading Iraq in the first Gulf War, GHWB hired the PR agency Hill & Knowlton, which had a 15-year-old Iraqi girl named “Nayirah” testify to a stunned Congress on how Saddam’s evil soldiers went through a Kuwaiti hospital and tore hundreds of premature babies off their incubators, killing them. Only problem was, “Nayirah” turned out to be the daughter of Kuwait’s ambassador to the US and the whole things was a lie concocted by H & K. You can read all about it in Kevin Phillips’ American Dynasty.

Update: Interesting — a little research on Merrie Spaeth, PR consultant for the fraudulent “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth,” shows she managed PR for President Reagan and is a regular donor to the Bush campaign. I have to wonder, is she really working for the Swift Boat clowns (could they possibly afford her fees, which would be in the 6-digit range?), or is the whole thing a big PR spectacle being paid for by Karl Rove? I don’t know, but I’d bet my house that the whole thing was concocted and paid for by Rove and the bush campaign.

The exposee of Fox News is now the No. 1 best-selling DVD at Amazon.com, according to a very interesting site, CableNewser. I’m ordering my copy today.

Anyone interested in the slimy machinations over at Fox shouldmust check out CableNewser today. What a great site.