Leave it to Ms. Maglalang to write a round-up on incidents of untethered rage in 2006 and focus only on the Muslims. No rage to speak of among us Christians and Jews. The irony, of course, is that her site, more than any other popular blog, thrives on one thing and one thing only: perpetual rage. Comb through the site at any time and feel the love. All it is is a non-stop shriek, a hysterical call to arms that eerily imitates those she seeks constantly to attack.

No other “big blog” can match Malkin for sneering outright at anyone urging compassion or anything less than brute force and violence. In one of her most truly deranged moments, she actually attacked a movement to discourage bullying in America’s schools; her “reasoning” is that we need tough, ready-to-fight thugs to go battle the jihadists. I am not exaggerating, and urge you to read this brilliant takedown of Malkin’s infamous bullying post. It makes it all so crystal clear: Malkin wants Americans to be as consumed with rage as possible, ready to react with violence against those jihadists she imagines hiding under your bed. Even if this means thugs terrorize gentler students at schools.

I consider the bullying post Malkin’s very most depraved moment and oh so telling about her vision for America: a vision of the Malkin Youth set loose on America, chomping at the bit to spill a little blood, crushing the nice kids who don’t want to fight in an orgy of unfettered rage. After all, how else can we beat the jihadists if we don’t gleefully kick in the faces of those pusillanimous weaklings in school, the ones who wear glasses?

Again, if any of you feel I’m harsh on Our Lady of the Concentration Camps, go read the above-referenced post. You’ll laugh out loud, but you’ll also see why I consider Malkin a dangerous lady. Shout Godwin’s all you want (first, you’d be wrong; second, I don’t care), but her vision of America is truly on a par with that of Ernst Roehm, whose brownshirts terrorized Jews and Communists and glorified brutality and perpetual rage,

Malkin defines rage, she is rage – she is a walking, talking blast furnace of white rage. Tragically, thanks to her loving army of thugs, this makes her a real menace and no laughing matter.

Don’t sell Malkinwald short – she was instrumental in nixing the museum on human rights at the site of the WTC and in forcing architects to redesign their plan for the memorial at the crash site of UA 93, all because Malkin and her goons thought they could see hints of a “red crescent” formed by the maple trees in the design. (See this Malkin-inspired post to see just how profoundly loony these people are. You won’t believe it, especially the part about the latitude/longitude lines pointing to Mecca!.) No, she’s definitely not just the butt of jokes, but an insidious force to be reckoned with.

Update: Oh well, what the hell? For old times sake:

And for anyone who wants to argue that this post shows I am as full of hate as Michelle, forget about it. I have never once urged my readers to pick up their pitchforks and attack anybody or anything as Michelle does regularly. I have never argued for internment of entire religions or races. Yeah, I hate Malkin and I admit it, just like I admit I hate all racists and all tyrants. But you have to work hard to earn my hate. For Michelle, all it takes is being a Muslim or a liberal. Or being gentle and kind.

Update 2: I see that Michelle’s kissin’ cousin today has taken anti-Muslim bigotry to shocking new heights (or new lows). Disgusting, despicable, vile and deranged. One of my very favorite bloggers appropriately rips Schlusel a new one.

There’s really nothing quite like them. When I write my book, this will be tone of the chapters. Everyone who practices PR in China has a portfolio of press conference anecdotes, some of them very, very strange.

I have three friends who’ve adopted Chinese baby girls. Now it seems the government’s worried there aren’t enough babies to go around, so they’ll be implementing new restrictions:

China plans to tighten rules on foreign adoptions, barring people who are single, obese, older than 50 or who fail to meet certain benchmarks in financial, physical or psychological health from adopting Chinese children, according to adoption agencies in the United States.

The restrictions are in response to an enormous spike in applications by foreigners, which has far exceeded the number of available babies, said leaders of American adoption agencies who were briefed by Chinese officials earlier this month.

The new regulations, which have not yet been formally announced by the government-run China Center of Adoption Affairs, or C.C.A.A., are expected to take effect on May 1, 2007, and have raised concern and anxiety among prospective adoptive parents in this country….

The guidelines include a requirement that applicants have a body-mass index of less than 40, no criminal record, a high school diploma and be free of certain health problems like AIDS and cancer. Couples must have been married for at least two years and have had no more than two divorces between them. If either spouse was previously divorced, the couple cannot apply until they have been married for at least five years.

In addition, adoptive parents must have a net worth of at least $80,000 and income of at least $10,000 per person in the household, including the prospective adoptive child.

I’m going to reserve judgment. According to the article, South Korea has even more stringent adoption requirements for foreigners, and many in the “adoption industry” say the new restrictions won’t make much of a diference. Still, it was sad reading the article’s interviews with mothers who have been rejected, one because she uses a wheelchair. One father was rejected because he takes the antidepressant Zoloft. There’s no question there need to be eligibility requirements, but some of these definitely seem rather random.

Here’s the headline:

Ten Years in Prison for 17-Year-Old Who Had Consensual Oral Sex with 15-Year-Old

The blogger rightly finds this sentence too harsh. What an understatement. It’s frikkin’ insane. Isn’t it time to end all mandatory sentences? Isn’t it time to stop the insanity? We recently had an impassioned thread on the inanities of China’s laws. Looking at this story, I can only say we sacrifice the right to lecture all others when we allow such obscene perversions of justice to take place in America. This is just plain wrong and everyone with a minimal amount of grey matter knows it. Not just wrong, but wicked. Can you imagine, a 17-year-old sentenced to a decade in jail for…for…for nothing. Yeah, he shouldn’t have done it, but he’s still a fucking kid who committed an all but victimless crime with no malice or intent to hurt anybody. What’s wrong with us? What’s wrong with us? Ten years. A life ruined, and for what? God bless America.

Update: And if you have any doubt as to whether this is justice perverted or not, this blogger lays it out clearly. So clearly, you can cry with frustration.

Update 2: I’m having an interesting debate with another blogger about this. Needless to say, I am completely right.

Update 3: Here’s the young man’s website: http://www.wilsonappeal.com/index.php; here’s his online petition.

One bitterly cold morning in Beijing in 2003 I hit a moral low. I was waiting for a taxi outside of my Tuan Jie Hu apartment complex. Usually there’s a small fleet parked over there but on this day the cold was so brutal there were none – everyone was cabbing it. I finally managed to signal a free taxi that was driving by and as he stopped, an amazingly feisty older Chinese lady ran ahead of me and jumped in. The taxi sped off as I shivered helplessly. I decided to walk up the street to scout for other taxis when I saw a young Western couple standing by a parked taxi talking to the driver through his front window, probably asking if he knew how to get to their destination. Like a robot, without thinking and without feeling, I simply walked over, opened the back door, got in and told the driver to go.

This was a landmark for me, someone who is near-obsessive about zero tolerance for line-cutters and those who push ahead of others. I remember sitting there in the taxi feeling absolutely no remorse. I had done what had to be done and I felt eerily proud of myself. This was not a matter of morality, it was a matter of survival. Finally, I had become a true Beijinger, employing the methodology that others had long ago adopted to ensure their survival in a merciless environment where it’s every man for himself and me-first. That soft side of me that would normally be inclined to graciously let the others go first had been thoroughly subjugated, not as an act of consciousness but as part of my survival mechanism. It was kill or be killed, and I suddenly realized I could kill when necessary.

I am not proud of what I did. But I am not ashamed, either, because you really do have to alter your thinking if you want to survive in China. I wouldn’t think of walking across a busy street, going against a red light, in Taipei. In Beijing, it’s simply what you have to do. That was the worst I did; I never cut a line or cheated anybody or pushed anybody – my moral compass wasn’t altogether shut down. But I had employed a Machiavellian way of thinking; I saw an opportunity and I struck, and I kept my emotions out of it. I had done something I would have hitherto thought unimaginable. And I didn’t care.

James Fallows writes about just this phenomenon in his blog today (via ESWN), and I related to every syllable, especially about the fuckers who jump into the elevator and instantly start pushing the “close door” button. (I wrote an entire post about Chinese elevator etiquette a long time ago, before this blog even offered comments.) As Fallows says, it’s intriguing to look at a newbie in China and then watch them evolve over time, succumbing to their natural instinct for survival.

A friend has told me how he loves watching American visitors come into – and later go out from – the Shanghai or Beijing airports. On the way in, when finding they make no progress toward the immigration desk or in the taxi queue because of Chinese people cutting in front of them, they smile in appreciation of raw Chinese energy. On the way out, when someone tries to cut them off, they grab the interloper by the shoulder and fling him back.

That’s the person I am now. When I start hammering at the ‘Close’ button, I’ll know that my transformation is complete.

I think this happen to everyone who lives there, at least to some extent. There isn’t any choice. We all do what we have to do to get through the day, to survive.

Howard French has an article in this morning’s New York Times on middle-class activism in Shenzhen. Two years ago, local residents learned of city plans to build an expressway right through the middle of their neighborhood. But these weren’t your typical, ordinary peasants or hutong dwellers. They were part of China’s new latte set: China’s growing urban middle class. Led by former rocket scientist Qian Shengzeng, local residents organized and protested to the Shenzhen municipal government. Finally, after two years of fighting, authorities agreed to compromise and change the route of the proposed highway and also agreed to design changes that limit the environmental impact of the roadway.

It was no accident that the battle was waged in Shenzhen, a 26-year-old boomtown that was the first city to enjoy the effects of China’s breakneck economic expansion and that has served as a model for cities throughout the country.

Increasingly, though, with its growing pains multiplying, Shenzhen looks like a preview, even a warning, of the limitations of the kind of growth-above-all approach that has gripped much of China.

But Shenzhen may also herald more promising changes. Possibly the greatest force taking shape here is the quiet expansion of the middle class, thicker on the ground here than perhaps anywhere else in China. This middle class is beginning to chafe under authoritarian rule, and over time, the quiet, well-organized challenges of the newly affluent may have the deepest impact on this country’s future.

Since the 1980s, there has been a theory that a growing middle class in China would be the catalyst for change as a new urban elite emerges to challenge the authoritarian rule of the CCP. Supporters of this argument point to similar changes in South Korea and Taiwan in the 1970s and 1980s. The more skeptical would say that this is hogwash and that China’s middle class is too small and too absorbed with making money and economic status to challenge the party. Moreover, the legacies of the Cultural Revolution and the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests left those Chinese with the greatest economic resources, the urban elite between the ages of 35 and 55, with little desire to engage in political dissent.

Whether or not the urban middle class is yet a force for national change is doubtful. But the recent experience of Shenzhen’s Professor Qian and his neighbors show that this new elite can create change at the local level. And when you want to change something big, sometimes it’s best to start small.

So, say you have a government that doesn’t allow any direct political competition but is still in need of a legal system in order to develop a modern, globalized economy. The country’s citizens, having endured many years of arbitrary authority, centuries, in fact, see themselves as having certain rights, and many begin to use this legal system in order to settle disputes and stand up for their rights when they are being abused. Even political protestors have rights according to the country’s constitution, and they too use the developing legal system to defend themselves. This puts the government in somewhat of a quandry. How can they build a rule of law and yet maintain their monopoly on political power?

Well, here’s one way – require defense lawyers to cooperate with the government. A Human Rights Watch report released earlier this week charges that:

the rule of law in China has been sharply curbed by regulations approved in the spring by the All-China Lawyers Assn., which is in effect the nation’s bar association.

The regulations require that lawyers representing political protesters be “helpful to the government,” share otherwise-confidential information about their clients with prosecutors, and be of “good political” quality, generally a euphemism for dedication to the ruling Communist Party.

The new rules are “restricting access to justice, and access to justice is really a make-or-break issue for China today,” said Nicholas Bequelin, the China researcher for Human Rights Watch. “You’re shutting down the pressure release valve that’s very badly needed in a one-party system.”

Bequelin said the so-called Guiding Opinion on Lawyers Handling Mass Cases was approved by the lawyers association March 20 but was only officially published a month later and was all but ignored by the Chinese press…

As described by Human Rights Watch, the Guiding Opinion makes it clear that lawyers’ first responsibility is to society, not their clients. “During these important times,” the rules say, “correct handling of cases of a mass nature is essential to the successful construction of a socialist harmonious society.”

“These regulations,” Bequelin said, “spell out rules that are simply incompatible with carrying out your professional duties as a lawyer.” He said they negated “the principle that is consecrated even in Chinese law, that the lawyer’s duty is to his client.”

Oh, and one more thing:

The rules also warn lawyers not to “stir up the news,” and to take special care with international media.

I know! Talk about the Olympics!

That’s me, flying to the US tonight. Obviously I won’t be posting for a day or two. I fly late tonight, and being incorrigible I will perhaps find time to put up another post or two before take-off.

I’ll be back in Taiwan on January 4 to settle all accounts and pick up my stuff and then leave for good, flying to Beijing on the weekend. A whole new life. Brrrr.

Lke this.

Via Sonagi in the duckpond, this article includes an actual excerpt from the training manual coaching Beijing’s police on how to deal with the foreign media during the Olympics. It’s already a week old but it’s worthy of a mention.

‘Illegal’ news coverage

What follows is the dialog “How to Stop Illegal News Coverage” that appears in a training manual distributed to Beijing policemen learning English in preparation for the 2008 Olympic Games.

P(oliceman): Excuse me, sir. Stop, please.

F(oreign journalist): Why?

P: Are you gathering news here?

F: Yes.

P: About what?

F: About Falun Gong.

P: Show me your press card and your reporter’s permit.

F: Here you are.

P: What news are you permitted to cover?

F: The Olympic Games.

P: Falun Gong has nothing to do with the Games…. You should only cover the Games.

F: But I’m interested in Falun Gong.

P: It’s beyond the limit of your coverage and illegal. As a foreign reporter in China you should obey China law and do nothing against your status.

F: Oh, I see. May I go now?

P: No. Come with us.

F: What for?

P: To clear up this matter.

I love the “Come with us.” This is a sure-fire way to win the hearts and minds of the world’s foreign correspondents. I’d love to know who their PR agency is. They have a challenge in front of them.

Update: The US has some skeletons in its own closet as well when it comes to media relations. This story is a shocker, even if it’s from three-quarters of a century ago.