A blogger looks on in disbelief as Bush requests huge increases in military spending, slashing healthcare for the poor and other such liberal nightmares to make up for it. This is so eloquent.

Lights are out at The White House. Apparently, the national power grid isn’t connected to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. With that loss of power at the White House also goes the pulse of the people of the nation. Our President is off the grid and going Gorilla with his nation’s budget by cutting social programs to fund his last breath effort on terrorism with his latest budget.

This elected oxymoron is attacking social programs because America voted against his party and his own political mental head games. While he lined the pockets of all of his buddies and the Vice President’s close friends our kids that are truly serving our nation in the United States military are getting killed for the sake of a lie. This lie to the nation is coming out in the Scooter Libby trial and the nation will finally have enough of ‘Surge W. Bush’ and his corrupt administration. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are all about the money and it is right there in print every single day. Every single thing they do is for the money. Show me the money! There is where you will find our president.

Then it gets even angrier. I’m now so depressed about Iraq and the Bush administration’s other fuck-ups and scandals, I can barely post about them any more. Everyone knows the story, it’s all there in the headlines, and yet somehow he presses on, like you-know-who ordering the troops to stand fast in Stalingrad.

Both Tim Johnson at China Rises and Michael Turton at The View from Taiwan have posts on the recent statements by Jim Mann to a government panel on US-China Relations. Before the panel, the veteran China watcher and journalist testified last Thursday:

The notion that China’s political system will inevitably move towards liberalization and democracy is what I call the Soothing Scenario for China’s future. It is the one that dominates our official discourse. But it is really only one of three possibilities for where China is headed. Let me sketch out the others.

The second possibility for China’s future is what can be called the Upheaval Scenario. The Upheaval Scenario predicts that China is headed for some sort of major disaster, such as an economic collapse or political disintegration, because it won’t be able to maintain political stability while continuing on its current course. On behalf of the Upheaval Scenario, one might point to the numerous reports of political unrest in China these days – the proliferation of labor strikes, farmers’ protests, riots over environmental degradation and ethnic strife. There are also broader developments, such as the ever-growing disparity between rich and poor or the continuing prevalence of corruption in China, and the fragility of China’s banking system.

The Upheaval Scenario for China gets a reasonable amount of attention in the United States. Lots of people spend quite a bit of time trying to figure out how much instability there is in China and what its impact will be, and there are lots of interesting arguments on all sides. My own belief is that the Chinese regime is ultimately strong enough to withstand these internal pressures – that there will be no “coming collapse of China,” to quote the title of one book on the subject. China is a huge country, and it is particularly hard to draw conclusions about the overall political situation from what is happening in any one place or region. Labor strikes may spread through all of Northeast China; or political demonstrations may sweep through many of its leading cities; still, in the end such events don’t determine the future direction of China.

The possibilities for China’s future are not confined to these two scenarios, the Soothing Scenario or Upheaval. There is still another possibility: a Third Scenario. It is one that few people talk about or think about these days, at least not in the United States. It is this: What if China manages to continue on its current economic path and yet its political system does not change in any fundamental way? What if, twenty-five or thirty years from now, a wealthier, more powerful China continues to be run by a one-party regime that continues to repress organized political dissent much as it does today; and yet at the same time China is also open to the outside world and, indeed, is deeply intertwined with the rest of the world through trade, investment and other economic ties? Everyone assumes that the Chinese political system is going to open up – but what if it doesn’t?

In one way or another, the essentials of the current political system would remain intact: there would be no significant political opposition. There would be an active security apparatus to forestall organized political dissent. In other words, China, while growing stronger and richer, wouldn’t change its political system in any fundamental way. It would continue along the same political course it is on today. Why do we Americans believe that, with advancing prosperity, China will automatically come to have a political system like ours? Is it simply because the Chinese now eat at McDonald’s and wear blue jeans?

Positions #1 & 2 have been debated back and forth on this blog and in other spaces in the China blogosphere for some time now. But what of #3? Is it really possible for China to maintain the current status-quo indefinitely? Can China solve the problems of environmental degradation, endemic corruption, and widespread social imbalances without ultimately changing the political system? Or are these problems not nearly as severe as the jeremiads of the Western media would have us believe?

I encourage everyone to read the full text of Mann’s testimony which can be found here (html) and here (pdf).

Watch out! It is an established fact that listening to certain pop music, created with lascivious and lecherous intentions, can turn you into a homosexual. Really. Thank God for sites like this one, which provides us with handy lists of which bands will make you gay and which bands will help keep you on the straight and narrow as God intended. (Don’t ask me how Cindy Lauper, the sex-worshipping satanist behind Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, got onto the list of “safe bands.”)

These people are totally nuts, no?

Sure the Chinese government likes to grumble as a group about Bush administration policies, but it’s not all that often we see a Chinese official call out a US President by name. The New York Times this morning reports on a piece in the People’s Daily in which the director of China’s State Bureau of Religious Affairs, Ye Xiaowen, takes the US President out behind the woodshed:

In a front-page article in the overseas edition of The People’s Daily [Ye writes] that Mr. Bushs past references to a ‘crusade’ and to ‘Islamic fascism’ were verbal gaffes that revealed his effort to turn the fight against terrorism into a religious war.

Partly as a result, he said, the United States had lost support for the war in Iraq and had frittered away the good will Americans gained after the 9/11 attacks.

‘The more they oppose terrorism, the more terror they produce,’ Mr. Ye said in the article. ‘How many more troops will they send to die in the meat grinder’ of Iraq.

Mr. Ye wrote that Mr. Bush had effectively ‘hijacked’ one religion, Christianity, to engage in a battle against another one, Islam. That has strengthened Islamic fundamentalists and made the war unwinnable, he contended.

‘Unilateralism and terrorism breed each other, but neither can overcome the other,’ he wrote.

Every word true, but doesn’t being lectured by the Chinese religious affairs bureau on how to preserve international goodwill towards one’s policies measure a blip or three on the old “Irony Meter”? I suppose, as Richard’s post below eloquently and sadly demonstrates, not nearly as much as it once might have.

This is now my favorite blog on US politics. These guys are geniuses, and this takedown of Michelle Malkin had me laughing for two days – the list of Michelle’s contortions as she tries to convince readers the moon is made of cheese is among the best satire I’ve ever read. Not to be read while drinking milk with a straw.

Thanks to the brilliant leadership of our boy president, America appears hopelessly hypocritical and stuck in a time warp when it attempts to criticize China over human rights, military spending and pollution. Now, I know there are some serious differences between America’s and China’s transgressions in these areas. However, under Bush these differences have become vaguer, and the similarities sharper. “No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

Which brings us to a great post over at one of my favorite blogs, by a former Iraq war supporter who like all former Iraq war supporters with an IQ above room temperature is now one of its most fervent critics. You all need to go over there and read his analysis of this article from the Financial Times as well as the comments to the post.

(more…)

I’m going to keep this brief because, really, I shouldn’t have to supply lots of information. Just read the article:

Humans blamed for climate change

Global climate change is “very likely” to have a human cause, an influential group of scientists has concluded. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said temperatures were probably going to increase by 1.8-4C (3.2-7.2F) by the end of the century. It also projected that sea levels were most likely to rise by 28-43cm, and global warming was likely to influence the intensity of tropical storms.

If you really want to get technical, read the report:

IPCC report

I have a nasty feeling that the naysayers will dismiss this as “propaganda” by the evil, global Green-“conspiracy”, even more powerful that the evil, global Zionist-“conspiracy”. My response is this:

Is it worth taking our childrens’ future to Vegas, just so we don’t have to make a few sacrifices? I don’t even have kids yet, but I know I’d put my life on the line for them in the future. So why do so many people refuse to even consider living more conservatively? I can understand that many don’t really understand the real danger of climate change and would only respond to an immediate threat. But really, we are now being presented with an overwhelming amount of information that should iron out any misunderstandings – we can’t keep polluting like this.

Anyone who reads this report should know they have to change their lifestyles if they haven’t already. No “buts”, no “whys”, no “it’s not fairs”. We have a responsibility not to strip-mine this planet and then hand a wasteland over to future generations. People who are in denial about global warming are not parents or responsible adults – they’re parasites.

I see that the Shanghaiist has linked to the youtube edition of a “documentary” on the Rape of Nanking, one of the most evil and depraved aberrations of the 20th Century. It happened, it was unforgivable and if my own family had been one of the victims, it would be a source of outrage my entire life, as the Holocaust is to me today.

This video, however, is nothing but a piece of embarrassingly obvious propaganda that, with the very first voiceover, betrays its agenda and prejudices. It is designed to incite a desired reaction, which of course it does – go the the comments to feel some of the love:

Gooddevil123 (21 hours ago)
apanese soldiers tear out the eyes of children, gang-rape women then set them on fire, bury people alive or use them for bayonet practice…beheading women, children, old men….and torturing people for fun…and then laughing hysterically as victims, who have been set on fire, run screaming through the night…

stsbchu (22 hours ago)
no jab has common sense so there is no commonsense in japan i knpw the reason japs are not human beings yes thier forfathers are devils you chinese guys plz dont expect for japs to be human beings

Plenty more where those came from. And yes, this is the same cynical video that created a bit of a firestorm here a few months ago. Before the usual suspects whine that I don’t understand China and hate them and don’t know how bad the Japanese were, read through the earlier thread. I know, I sympathize, I reject the revisionists in Japan who would rewrite the awful story, and I have read Iris Chang’s book. I know. I also hate propaganda and the manipulation of the masses with images and slogans designed to appeal to man’s basest instincts, and attempts to titillate and incite with a never-ending stream of graphic photos of dismembered women and children, clearly attempting to fan the flames so the hatred burns as intensely now as 60+ years ago. Tell the story of the Rape of Nanking and the Holocaust and show us the photos. Show us the videos of the innocents beheaded in Iraq. But do it in a manner that educates and informs, as opposed to titillating with vulgarity and lewdness.

One more link Shanghaiist provides takes us to another interesting look at the Nanjing Massacre that I think comes to a reasonable conclusion: both sides have shown a lot of irrationality and willingness to obfuscate when it comes to this topic, knowing they can appeal to people’s emotional rather than critical faculties and thus steer them in the desired direction. The video on youtube is a glowing example.

No reasonable discussion is possible, of course, because like abortion and Taiwan and Social Security this is a third-rail topic that turns normally sane people into shrieking, whining, bursting-with-outrage automatons basking in the full glory of victimhood, which is exactly where the CCP has traditionally wanted them to be, focused on Japan’s evil of 60+ years ago as opposed to its own more recent transgressions. That post from Japundit above may indicate the CCP is getting more mature about this – I hope so. But God knows they’ve used the victim card for years to keep many of its people foaming at the mouth and incapable of reason, which is just what any good dictator strives for – get the people to hate someone else with such intense blind rage they can’t see what’s happening right in front of their faces.

Bush is the master of this technique, as Muslims around the world are painfully aware. Check out some of the nutter sites like Hot Air and Michelle and LGF – there are some fascinating parallels with the youtube comments. Blind rage against the perceived enemy, and an automatic reaction to anyone who questions it: simply questioning Bush makes you one of the enemy. Simply questioning the rationale behind the bustling exploitation of the Nanjing Massacre for political gain make you as bad as the Japanese perpetrators.

If your father was the secretive dictator of a pariah state, where would you go? Well, first you might try Disneyland and if that doesn’t work….why not hang with your buddies in Macau? Tim Johnson at China Rises has a great account of Kim Jong-il’s son Kim Jong-nam as the latter parties in the Asian gambling mecca. Apparently the 35-year old Jong-nam is on the outs with the family Kim back in Pyongyang and has also had a little recent financial trouble with some Hong Kong banks. Seoul newspapers report that now Kim Jong-nam has “hooked up with Chinese ”princelings,’ or offspring of Communist Party bigwigs, namely former President Jiang Zemin, in business deals. The group is colloquially called Taizidang, or the ‘princeling’s’ clique.'” Now that’s a KTV party, pass the cognac and kimchi.

photo courtesy of xjohnpaulx in West Philly

This is my indirect response to Jeremiah’s recent post LAT: “Was 9/11 really that bad?”.

For those of you who don’t know, the following facts:

1) There is a cartoon show about, well, a talking Happy Meal living in New Jersey called Aqua Teen Hunger Force.
2) A guerrilla marketing firm was hired by Cartoon Network (Turner Broadcasting) to put little Lite-Brite style ads of one the characters (named “Err”, a “Mooninite”).
3) The Boston PD crapped their pants and even detonated one of the ads as a possible bomb threat.

Now I can see how mysterious electronic devices around bridges and tunnels could be alarming to the police. But consider these statements:

Prosecutor Grossman explained the reason Boston reacted as it did is because bomb cops are trained to examine foreign objects for a power source and a circuit board and both were present in the Sullivan Square Mooninite, as well as duct tape attached to a red wire.
“They believed it was very possibly a bomb,” Grossman said, adding that an obscene cartoon leering back at them did little to throw them off.
“Someone with a nefarious intent would do that on top of a bomb,” he said.

Yes, I clearly remember the giant middle finger the 9-11 hijackers graffitied across United 93. Perhaps this is related to that old Bert – Bin Laden connection?

This reminds me of how a recent US cyber wargaming exercise, Cyberstorm, targeted the Birkenstock crowd. Not, oh, I don’t know, um… terrorists. Something has gone horribly wrong, hasn’t it?

Over the course of several hours yesterday, police also dismantled Mooninites at Fenway Park [map], the Boston University Bridge, Downtown Crossing and in the Theater District. The Mooninites have reportedly been up for weeks.

Shouldn’t this be a more important issue than wanting to throw the book at some
dreadlocked, unemployed pranking Dirty White Boy? Weeks?!?

Our man Assistant AG Grossman continues:

”It’s clear the intent was to get attention by causing fear and unrest that there was a bomb in that location,” Assistant Attorney General John Grossman said at their arraignment.

This is ridiculous. It’s a cartoon show. In those weeks that these devices were hanging (and still hanging in West Philly, apparently) around Boston, law enforcement did nothing to examine these “suspicious devices”. And moreover, it’s not the pranksters fault that anyone can put an electronic device on a bridge, nor is it their fault that the whole thing will cost Masschusetts well over a million dollars. It’s the fault of a fear-baiting, incompetent government. One that appears to think “duct tape + red wire” equals bomb, and now feels a need to deploy CYA measures. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you another thrilling episode of Security Theater.

Meanwhile, Bush flat out lied in his SOTU. The Congressional Budget Office concludes we’re really sending 48,000, not 21,000 more troops to Iraq and it’ll cost as much as 5 times as much as Bush said a mere three weeks ago.

But that’s nothing compared to the power of Ignignokt’s Foreigner Belt. Remember the true menace is on the Moon. (so that’s why Bush wanted to go there!)