How shallow can our public servants be…?

Fashioning Deadly Fiascos
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: November 5, 2005

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Men are simply not biologically suited to hold higher office. The Bush administration has proved that once and for all.

These guys can’t be bothered to run the country. They are too obsessed with frivolous stuff, like fashion and whether they look fat. They are catty, sometimes even sabotaging their closest friends. They are deceitful minxes and malicious gossips.

And heaven knows they’re bad at math. Otherwise, W. would realize that a 60 percent disapproval rating, or worse, means that most

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From Gunpowder to the Next Big Bang
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: November 4, 2005

BEIJING – There is a techie adage that goes like this: In China or Japan the nail that stands up gets hammered, while in Silicon Valley the nail that stands up drives a Ferrari and has stock options. Underlying that adage is a certain American confidence that whatever we lack in preparing our kids with strong fundamentals in math and science, we make up for by encouraging our best students to be independent, creative thinkers.

There is a lot of truth to that. Even the Chinese will tell you that they’ve been good at making the next new thing, and copying the next new thing, but not imagining the next new thing. That may be about to change. Confident that its best K-12 students will usually outperform

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Defending Imperial Nudity
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: November 4, 2005

Hans Christian Andersen understood bad rulers. “The Emperor’s New Suit” doesn’t end with everyone acclaiming the little boy for telling the truth. It ends with the emperor and his officials refusing to admit their mistake.

I’ve laid my hands on additional material, which Andersen failed to publish, describing what happened after the imperial procession was over.

The talk-show host Bill O’Reilly yelled, “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” at the little boy. Calling the boy a nut, he threatened to go to the

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Of all the right-wing sites, Powerline is the most insidious. Time magazine’s “blog of the year” craftily coats its very conscientious half-truths and innuendoes and misrepresentations with a patina of scholarliness. Luckily, I’ve found the perfect antidote. Brilliant.

A true journalist looks at Malkin’s latest, and exposes her for the fraudulent alarmist she is. As if we didn’t know. Still, it’s great to see it documented and proven.

I’m hoping some of you in China were lucky enough last night to see CNN Interational’s report on what goes on in the animal markets in Guangzhou. I’ve been to the markets in Hong Kong where the chickens and other birds are crowded together in cages, and I’ve seen the same in Beijing. I’ve been to the restaurants where you point to the live animals in the cages and the staff dutifully kills and cooks them for you. But I’ve never seen anything like the market they showed in Guangzhou.

They first focused on some sickly, emaciated chickens crammed into a cage. Then the camera panned back to show this was just one of hundreds of cages, all stacked on top of one another, with puddles of blood and shit and God knows what else all over the ground below. A young child squatted in the goo, and young men sat leaning against the cages, smoking cigarettes, looking thoroughly indifferent.

In one cage, sick young dogs with unbelievably sad eyes looked up at the camera. The cage was so small and low, their heads were pressed against their feet. They looked like concentration camp victims, as did the cats in the cage next to them. One bloody dog that seemed to have a chunk of its leg missing was lying on the filthy ground. No one seemed to care or notice.

From the report:

In a bustling market in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, dogs, cats, chickens, frogs, snakes, turtles and palm civets are stacked on top of each other in crates, wire cages and water buckets ready for sale.

Customers peer at the caged animals before choosing their meal of the day. They watch as the butcher cuts up the animal with knives and machetes, spreading blood, guts, faeces and urine all over the market floor.

People from South China believe that eating wild animals is good for their health and vitality, and gulping down such exotic fare as cobra and Asiatic brush tailed porcupine is seen as a symbol of social status.

Indeed, there is a saying in South China that “anything with four legs, except a chair, and anything that flies, except an aeroplane, can be eaten.”

One especially famous dish is the “Dragon-Tiger-Phoenix Soup,” a brew made up of snake, cat and chicken.

South China offers the most exotic fare from all over the globe — by some accounts at least 60 species can be found in any one market –thrusting together microorganisms, animals and humans who normally would never meet.

This thriving trade gives the manufacturing hub that straddles the Pearl River Delta the unenviable title of being the “petri dish” of the world.

“Animals arrive at these markets stressed, diseased, dying and dead,” Animals Asia, a Hong Kong-based charity dedicated to ending cruelty for animals in the region, says on its Web site.

“These animals have no free access to food and water or shelter from the elements and are mixed indiscriminately.”

And we wonder why South China is the world’s breeding grounds for infectious disease.

I don’t know if the censors allowed this to be seen in China (the screen simply goes blank when the media police don’t like CNN stories), but I hope they did. We’re not talking about people’s personal habits or cultural issues or even cruelty to animals (though that’s certainly an issue). We are talking about the fate of millions of people and other animals, since the pathogens that escape from this “petri dish” know no boundaries and could wreak havoc on species around the world.

If people want to buy and sell “exotic” animals, do they have to be warehoused in such sickening, sqalid, disease-breeding conditions?

This book review is a must-read.

“We are losing.

“Four years and two wars after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, America is heading for a repeat of the events of that day, or perhaps something worse. Against our most dangerous foe, our strategic position is weakening.”

So begins Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon’s sobering new book, “The Next Attack.” The authors, two of President Bill Clinton’s counterterrorism aides, draw a persuasive and utterly frightening picture of the current state of America’s war on terror.

They see more and more Muslims, many of whom had no earlier ties to radical organizations, enlisting in the struggle against the West, and they also point out the proliferation of freelance terrorists, self-starters without any formal ties to Al Qaeda or other organized groups. They see local and regional grievances (in places like Saudi Arabia, Chechnya and Southeast Asia) merging into “a pervasive hatred of the United States, its allies, and the international order they uphold.” And they see in the Muslim world traditional social and religious inhibitions against violence and even against the use of weapons of mass destruction weakening as a growing number of radical clerics assume positions of influence.

Like the C.I.A. officer Michael Scheuer, the author (under the pseudonym “Anonymous”) of the 2004 book “Imperial Hubris,” Mr. Benjamin and Mr. Simon regard the American invasion of Iraq as a kind of Christmas present to Osama bin Laden: an unnecessary and ill-judged war of choice that has not only become a recruitment tool for jihadis but that has also affirmed the story line that Al Qaeda leaders have been telling the Muslim world – that America is waging war against Islam and seeking to occupy oil-rich Muslim countries.

The American invasion of Iraq toppled one of the Mideast’s secular dictatorships, the authors write, and produced a country in chaos, a country that could well become what Afghanistan was during the years of Soviet occupation: a magnet for jihadis and would-be jihadis from around the world; a “country-sized training ground” (with an almost limitless supply of arms), where these recruits can train and network before returning home, battle-hardened and further radicalized. The authors add that “the sad irony” of the war is that Iraq now stands as an argument against democratization for many in the Middle East: “the current chaos there confirms the fears of both the rulers and the ruled in the authoritarian states of the region that sudden political change is bound to let slip the dogs of civil war.”

This is serious stuff. It’s time to get real and see this war for what it is, an ill-conceived losing venture, as brilliantly conceived as the nomination of Harriet Miers or the appointment of Mike Brown. This isn’t a matter of hating or liking Bush, but simply a matter of assessing what the situation is: are we winning or losing? Is terrorsim being wiped out or has it been newly energized? Do more people now love us or hate us? Did the deaths of our soldiers and scores of thousands of innocent Iraqis result in a payoff making it all worthwhile? Are we now safer? Read the whole review if you really want to know the answers.

Who says I never post good news about China? This is great news indeed. Here’s the whole thing, which I consider important.

China plans to abolish the legal division between urban and rural residents in 11 provinces to protect the rights of migrants needed for labor in booming cities, though a similar experiment failed four years ago, the official media said Wednesday.

The new policy would drop the decades-old “hukou,” or residence permit, system that has denied millions of rural migrants in Chinese cities the same rights to health care, education and social security as granted to native city dwellers.

The China Daily newspaper said Wednesday that the police had warned that rapid changes to the residency permit system could cause an influx of rural migrants to cities, sparking chaos and crime, an argument questioned by the state-run China Youth Daily.

“In today’s China, many urban ills are not results of opening residency restrictions, they come from migrants being treated unequally once they enter cities,” the China Youth Daily said.

“With this system, city authorities can get all the cheap labor they need and do not have to pay any social benefits,” it said, noting that China was one of three countries, along with North Korea and Benin, that still had strict residency rules.

The reforms would theoretically end the pattern of unfair treatment, including regular denial of payment to migrant workers, who have fueled much of the country’s rapid economic development by providing the work force for its factories and its construction boom.

The moves could also help stem growing unrest over China’s widening wealth gap, the great fear of Communist Party rulers who want to maintain stability in light of recent demonstrations.

Among the provinces considering canceling residency restrictions is booming Guangdong in the south, where migrants make up more than one-quarter of its population of 110 million.

Yet Guangdong needs more workers. The authorities have said they expected to be short one million migrant laborers this year.

In 2001, Zhengzhou, a city in Henan Province in central China, allowed anyone with relatives already living in the city to get a free residence permit.

“Increased pressure on transport, education, health care and a rise in crime forced the city to cancel the measure three years later,” the China Daily quoted Bian Haihong of the Beijing Public Security Department as saying.

China had to solve some of its most serious social problems before it could safely lift residency restrictions, the Business Weekly said in a commentary.

“If urban-rural economic disparities are not closed, if economic differences between regions continue to grow, if there is no way to implement a unified system of social insurance, then the government basically has no choice but enforce some degree of residence management,” it said.

The hukou system always struck me as a form of Apartheid, putting people into a caste system determined by their birthplace. I despise it with a passion because it is so inherently unfair and biased and brutal. The good news is that the CCP is apparently serious about ending it (am I being too optimistic?). But don’t heap praise on them: they’re the ones who came up with this detestable system in the first place, inflicting misery on those unlucky enough not to be born in choice urban areas. So once again, I will give them credit, but not for doing something wonderful, only for reversing their previous loathesome policy.

Torture, brutality and death at America’s secret CIA-run prisons.

Secrets and Shame
By BOB HERBERT
November 3, 2005

Ultimately the whole truth will come out and historians will have their say, and Americans will look in the mirror and be ashamed.

Abraham Lincoln spoke of the “better angels” of our nature. George W. Bush will have none of that. He’s set his sights much, much lower.

The latest story from the Dante-esque depths of this administration was front-page news in The Washington Post yesterday. The reporter, Dana Priest, gave us the best glimpse yet of the extent of the secret network of prisons in which the C.I.A. has been hiding and interrogating terror suspects. The network includes a facility at a

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You never, ever know in China. This is quite a cool article, and makes me wonder (again) whether one or two visitors to this site aren’t on the government payroll. (Frankly I suspect not, or their comments would be a bit more intelligible.)

Like many Chinese twenty-somethings, Lu Ruchao loves to surf the Internet. He often visits a local chat room to sample the neighborhood buzz. One day, Lu noticed that Netizens were complaining that local police often drove down the main street of Suquian with sirens blaring, disturbing half the city. Lu, himself a policeman, jumped into the e-fray. He tapped out a defense of the police, arguing that a cop car sounding its siren is responding to an emergency and shouldn’t be criticized. But Lu isn’t just any cop. He’s one of China’s estimated 30,000 to 40,000 e-police who collectively serve as an Orwellian Big Brother for the country’s nearly 100 million Internet users. “We have to face knives and guns while on duty every day,” Lu explained later to the Chinese publication Southern Weekend. “How can they criticize us?”

Acording to Xiao Qiang, quoted in the article, these pseudo-commenters get about 8 cents per pro-CCP comment. He sees them as a sign of desperation and proof that the party is losing its war to control the Internet. Rebecca MacKinnon, however, comes to the opposite conclusion.

“While the Internet can’t be controlled 100 percent, it’s possible for governments to filter content and discourage people from organizing [MacKinnon said.” Barring a technological breakthrough, she predicts that, as long as there’s a Chinese regime in power that wants to control the Web, “10 years from now it’ll be doing pretty much as it’s doing today.” Big Brother seems to be winning the Chinese Net battle, at least for now.