Last word on "two-class" ownership structure

At least the last word here -- at least unless something new and interesting turns up. It's not just newspapers, or Google, or the Ford Motor Company, or a slew of other firms where a family or group of founders want to retain disproportionate control. After the jump, details from a reader in Ohio about a successful real estate firm in Cleveland and its use of the technique.

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"Two-class" corporate ownership structure: not just for media dinosaurs any more!

Several readers have pointed out something I am aware of and should have mentioned: The "two-class" system of share ownership that I claim is crucial to the quality of America's best newspapers (and that is at the heart of the struggle for control of the Wall Street Journal), is not unique to battered old news organizations.

It also is built into the structure of America's shiniest new corporate champion: Google,* which of course has played more than a small role in making newspapers as battered as they are.** The shares Google sells the public are "Class A" common stock, with one vote per share. Google's founders and other executives hold "Class B" stock, with 10 votes per share, which of course gives them disproportionate control over the company's policies.

In fact, the "Letter from the Founders" that Larry Page and Sergey Brin issued before the Google IPO three years ago has a fascinating passage on just this point. Full text after the jump, one significant highlight here:

The New York Times Company, The Washington Post Company and Dow Jones, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, all have similar dual class ownership structures . Media observers have pointed out that dual class ownership has allowed these companies to concentrate on their core, long term interest in serious news coverage, despite fluctuations in quarterly results. Berkshire Hathaway has implemented a dual class structure for similar reasons. From the point of view of long term success in advancing a company's core values, we believe this structure has clearly been an advantage... [Emphasis added]

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The eternal verities of press criticism

My thanks to my Atlantic-blog colleague Matthew Yglesias (plus others) for referring back to my 1996 cover story in the Atlantic, Why Americans Hate the Media. Three pentimenti:

* The related American Prospect piece that M. Yglesias also mentions, which is oddly listed on the Prospect site as having come out in 2002, was in fact published in March, 1999 -- while Bill Clinton's enemies were still smiting him about (his idiocy involving) Monica Lewinsky. I remember so clearly because I wrote it during "personal time" while working on the Word product-design team at Microsoft in the first half of 1999.

* On evergreenness in general: several times I have considered revisiting the whole what's-wrong-with-the-press question and have instead plugged on with other topics -- Iraq policy, China -- for reasons that boil down to: what's the point? The problems with the media are the same as I tried to describe 11 years ago -- just worse, and with new technology. But there's always tomorrow...

* That Atlantic cover story was in fact an excerpt from my book Breaking the News. And anyone who would like to read the pitch in its full glory need only click here.

Moving the Bancroft/Murdoch choice to the moral level

The fundamental problem with today's American press is a mismatch between its economic basis and its public function.

As laid out here at length, and as is obvious as soon as you think about it, the press has cultural, social, and political effects beyond the purely commercial. But its managers are being forced to make decisions on the same focused quarterly-returns basis that guides choices at Merrill Lynch or General Motors. Sometimes those pressures for maximized return (and rising stock price) make news organizations more efficient. But in general they weaken or destroy the parts of news systems that affect people in any role other than as shareholders - that is, as readers, viewers, voters, citizens.

The point is not to rehash that argument. It is to say that the "two-class" shareholding structure that undergirds America's three best newspapers (the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal) was explicitly designed to permit decisions to be made for non-economic reasons. If you want management to concentrate strictly on raising the share price, you don't need any special ownership structure. Financial markets will insist on that anyway. The only justification for "Class B" shares giving special voting power to the Sulzberger family at the Times, the Graham family at the Post, and the Bancroft family at the Journal is the assumption that the families will weigh other factors in deciding how the news operation should be run.

Thus the future of these news organization rests on the hope that the later generations who inherit controlling shares will acknowledge the concept of "enough" money. If they want the most money possible out of their inheritance, they'll eventually view the newspaper as just another asset -- and destroy it. (See the tragedies of the Chandler family of Los Angeles, the Bingham family of Louisville, etc.) If no amount of money can be "enough" -- if, to be plain, people who are already rich are greedy to be richer still -- they debase institutions on which the rest of us depend.

All this is prelude to recommending a very strong post earlier this month from Dean Starkman, a former WSJ reporter who now writes "The Audit" for the Columbia Journalism Review. He is moralistic, in a convincing way, about "What the Bancrofts Owe Dow Jones."

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OK, I'm a sucker for "productivity" gimmicks, but here's an idea for dealing with email

Three years ago in the Atlantic, i wrote about the productivity expert David Allen, who offers both a high-road philosophy and a lot of nitty-gritty tips for "getting things done."

One of the latter is Allen's "two minute rule": if a task comes up that you think you're ever going to do (write a thank-you note, look up a reference, make a call), and if doing it will take less than two minutes, then you should always do it now. The rationale is that keeping track of it to do it later would take much more time than those initial two minutes, and delaying it will cause you mental friction in the meantime. If it's more than a two-minute task, then it's worth treating it as part of a longer-term system (which Allen also lays out) for keeping track of what to do when.

No kidding, Allen's book Getting Things Done is very much worth the money it costs to buy and the time it takes to read.

Now another useful-gimmick in the same vein: a way not to go crazy in dealing with email. The policy ls laid out here (and I learned about it here). Like the two-minute rule, it probably is impossible to observe in all circumstances all the time. And applying the hard-core version of this productivity strategy, laid out here, would probably make people think you are crazy. But the general idea makes good sense.

Now 377 days to the Olympics

To the obvious question -- how could you possibly have a major athletic competition in conditions like these?? -- there are four main answers from people in Beijing:

(Central Business District, Beijing, 3pm, July 27, 2007 )

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Beijing Olympics countdown: air quality dept

The countdown clock on the highway in from Beijing Capital Airport says 379 days before the 2008 Olympics opening ceremony. Or maybe 378. In any case, just over a year to deal with situations like this:

View to the south, July 26, 8:30am, from apartment building in the Chaoyang Park neighborhood of Beijing. The obscured buildings in the "distance" are perhaps 100 yards away.

Another View From My Window {tm} shot after the jump.

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Biting the bullet on Windows Vista: back to XP

(Edited to bring the main point up top: I've had enough of Vista, for now, and am "downgrading" to Windows XP. Here are the reasons.)

I've been using personal computers for nearly 30 years, and writing about them for more than 25. Yes, I know that some things I wrote back at the dawn of the Reagan administration now look fairly droll. Ooooh, you type and words appear on the screen! Aaah, the power of a full 48k of RAM!

In fact, I feel pretty good about the shelf-life of what I said back before either Windows or the Macintosh existed (and when Barack Obama was in college and Rudy Giuliani was a Washington bureaucrat). I'll put it this way: I challenge anyone to sit down and write something about the tech environment of this moment (the impact of broadband, of mobile devices, of social software, whatever) that will stand up as well in 2032!

But in what I've written about technology through this time I have made two important bad calls. Until recently, only one.

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Sane thinking about airborne threats (updated)

The pattern is too strong to be ignored: traditional conservatives (Heritage) and libertarians (Cato) have done a better job of of thinking about how a free society can defend itself without giving up its freedom than the Democratic or Republican establishment has. Unlike Democrats, they're not so worried about looking "weak" that they have to posture about every conceivable threat. Unlike the Administration -- well, they're sane.

Two well-known examples: Cato, for sponsoring the work of John Mueller, of Ohio State. (His influential 2004 essay, "A False Sense of Insecurity," is here in a large PDF file.) And, oddly enough, AEI, which apparently harbors an actual conservative among its neo-cons and "surge" enthusiasts. This is Veronique de Rugy, who has looked very critically at the homeland-security- industrial complex. I won't even get into Ron Paul....

A recent entry in the honor roll: James Jay Carafano, a West Point graduate who works at Heritage. His new essay, concerning the potential terrorist threat from small airplanes, is the first I've seen that both acknowledges there is some threat and proposes reasonable, proportionate steps to deal with it. Perhaps I'm biased because Carafano calls for elimination of the stupidest "homeland security" measure of all: the creation of a Potemkin air-defense zone called ADIZ, covering thousands of square miles around Washington. Even beyond my bias, this is a very good analysis.

Update: Ah, now this makes more sense. Veronique de Rugy is no longer at AEI but instead at a non-neocon, "classical liberal" plus libertarian stronghold, George Mason University's Mercatus Center. Phew!

The two Benjamin Friedmans: sequel

As mentioned earlier, Cambridge MA is barely big enough to contain two public-affairs academics of different specialties and generations but the same name: the battling Ben Friedmans of Harvard and MIT. "Battling" just a jazzy epithet here; I assume they're on good terms.

Ben the Younger, of MIT, reports:

Once I got invited to Harvard to speak to a small group. Beforehand I was introduced to an elderly gentleman who told me that he was very excited to hear me speak because he really liked Day of Reckoning (copyright 1988, when I turned 10). I was tempted to tell him that it was very hard writing a book about the national debt with only a fourth grade education, and that I had to skip a lot of recess.

This Friedman reports that the codger (maybe in his 40s? just guessing) politely stayed and enjoyed the speech, even though it concerned why America had become too obsessed with terrorism.

'No End in Sight': Definitely, see this movie

Next week Charles Ferguson's documentary No End in Sight opens in DC and New York, followed in August by "select other cities." It is worth making time to see this film.

The trailer can be viewed on YouTube here. (At least for me, in China, this loads much faster than the same trailer at the movie's official site).

It gives a taste of the film's energy and overwhelming accumulation of fact. Also, many people will be tempted, as I was, to pause the trailer 16 seconds in, to stare in shock at how George W. Bush looked before this war began. That clip, from his 2003 State of the Union address on the eve of war, shows a man who could be the carefree young nephew of our current haggard president.

Biases to disclose: I know, like, and admire the film's creator, Charles Ferguson. I talked with him when he was planning the film, and I have a tiny cameo role as one of his interviewees.

My deeper bias might seem to work against the film. It covers almost exactly the same terrain, including many of the same sources and anecdotes, as did my book Blind Into Baghdad. But rarely have I seen a clearer demonstration of how much more powerful the combination of pictures, sound, music, real-people-talking, etc can be than words on a page. (Update: I'm not denigrating print, to which I've devoted my professional life -- and which, indeed, is the medium through which big ideas about the world are generally changed. But there are times when the experience of seeing, for instance, chaos on the streets of Baghdad transcends any mere verbal description of it.)

I don't know whether the highly-publicized Sicko is any good: hasn't shown up in the pirate-video stores here yet. But if you're looking for an auteur-produced, both intellectually and emotionally powerful, public-affairs-related documentary film, I say: try this one first.

Why we love the (English language) Chinese media

Today's reason: no confusing mixed messages!

Hmmm, what would be the right word for a rate of economic growth so fast that it's almost unsafe, so fast... .that it might even damage your skin? What is that word I'm looking for..

The two Benjamin Friedmans of Cambridge, Mass.

It's important to keep your Benjamin Friedmans straight.

Benjamin M. Friedman, who must be in his early 60s, is an eminent professor of economics at Harvard and a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and, yes, the Atlantic. He has helped lead us to clear thinking about economics and related political/cultural matters.

Benjamin H. Friedman, who must be in his late 20s, is a PhD candidate at MIT who has done some very valuable work at a tender age. An essay three years ago in MIT's publication "Breakthroughs" was one of the earliest attempts, anywhere, to say: wait a minute, how much are we willing to give away or throw away in the name of being "safe"? (The essay is "Leap before you look" and is on page 29 of this 6MB PDF file.) The logic is now familiar: just as a person can avoid many "risks" by never leaving the house or answering the phone, so a society can be "secure" by keeping everyone under scrutiny all the time. The only problem is, what makes life worth living disappears. Again, many people say this now: fewer did in 2004.

As far as I know, the two Benjamins are not related.

Benjamin "MIT" Friedman has recently pointed out another "leap before you look" step in the quest for security:the impending Congressional mandate, reported here by our sister publication Government Executive, to require the government to scan all cargo containers before they are shipped to the United States.

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Battle to the death: Windows Vista vs my hard drive

The struggle goes on (as recounted here and in these subsequent posts):

• 105 gigabytes: size of my ThinkPad T60 hard disk when I got it (sorry, said 110 before):
• 52 gigabytes: the total of all "known" files, programs, indexes, music, photos, etc, on the disk --and that is counting a 10-gig recover-and-reinstall partition;
• 831 megabytes -- ie, less than 1 gigabyte: free disk space as of this morning; which leaves...
• 50+ gigabytes: the remaining dark matter somehow consumed by Vista

Fifty gigabytes here, fifty gigabytes there, pretty soon you're talking about real disk space!

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On the etymology of "New Jesus"

It turns out that there is a reason I wasn't sure whether it was James Thurber, in The Years with Ross. or Brendan Gill, in Here at the New Yorker, who had discussed the origins of the "New Jesus" label at the New Yorker magazine. (New Jesus is the role in which Gen. David Petraeus is now being cast.) They both did, in different ways. Thurber described how Harold Ross, the founding editor, had seized on each promising new hotshot as the new Genius who would save them all. By the time Brendan Gill got to the magazine, the term had been converted to the new Jesus. Gill says:

I sensed that, young and old, many a writer had sat in the cubicle before me and had vanished forever into that Sheol where all Ross's failed "Jesuses" might be imagined as dwelling... ("Jesus" was the office corruption of "genius," the epithet that Ross applied to every promising reporter he discovered in the early days of the magazine and upon whom he would immediately thrust the fugitive honor of the managing editorship.)

Here at the Atlantic, of course, we speak of hotshot arrivals as the "New Ralph Waldo Emerson," he being one of our founders 150 years ago...

David Petraeus and the "New Jesus" problem

One memoir of life at the New Yorker under its founding editor, Harold Ross -- maybe it was James Thurber's The Years with Ross, maybe Brendan Gill's Here at the New Yorker -- described the concept of the "New Jesus." Everyone who has ever worked in an office will recognize the idea. The New Jesus is the guy the boss has just brought in to solve the problems that the slackers and idiots already on the staff cannot handle. Of course sooner or later the New Jesus himself turns into a slacker or idiot, and the search for the next Jesus begins.

As has been widely noted, Gen. David Petraeus is getting the full New Jesus treatment. It's underway to an extent I can barely remember happening before. OK, maybe one exception: When Coach Joe Gibbs was brought back to "save" the Washington Redskins three years ago, under their lamentable owner, Dan Snyder. The subsequent travails of Coach Gibbs illustrate the standard New Jesus cycle.

Petraeus is a serious man, but the expectations being heaped on him are simply laughable, and it's worth noting the proportions this phenomenon has taken on.

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Why can't Murdoch just buy (and dismantle) the WSJ ed page?

I hate to say anything bad about the Wall Street Journal on the day when, it appears, the Bancroft family has decided to view one of the world's great newspapers as "just another asset" to be liquidated to Rupert Murdoch.

So perhaps the Journal's editorial page is trying to soften the blow and prevent golden-age nostalgia by reminding us that it has no standards at all.

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An important point, concisely made

This from Christina Larson, author of a very good piece in the current Washington Monthly (about environmentalism in China), on the Monthly's blog site:

Reporting this spring in China, I became convinced that the western impression of Big Brother Beijing needs serious revision. Yes, China can at times crack down with terrible ferocity. But when it comes to routine maintenance and oversight, the ordinary business of running a government (read: ensuring Beijing's laws are followed in the hinterlands), the central government often stumbles.

This touches on one of the ways in which day-by-day experience in China differs most substantially from the general impression in America. Parts of daily life here are thoroughly, and if need be brutally, controlled. There is to be no political challenge to the Communist Party. Each year tens of thousands of protests, mainly in the countryside, are put down by force. Recently the government has squashed protests over environmental disasters and the one-child policy.

But that is not how it looks or seems for most people most of the time. (No, I haven't seen "most" of China. But I have been a lot of places in the last year and this impression is consistent.) To the extent Americans imagine something like Stalin's Soviet Union, or the old East Germany, or Hitler's Germany in the 1930s, or Orwell's 1984. it just is not like that day by day. The world has never before seen quite this combination of repression and laissez faire, even chaos. Its full implications, good and bad, will take a long time to understand. The main point is: it's different from what most Americans think.

Free Flight update #3: Bruce Holmes to DayJet

A hero of my book Free Flight was a civil servant named Bruce Holmes. He was a career pilot – he’d paid his way through graduate school at the University of Kansas by flying cropdusters for a commuter airline, towing banners, hauling caskets for funeral homes, etc – and a career civil servant, for NASA. For at least two decades he has prided himself on being an “entrepreneurial bureaucrat.” In effect this meant that he put existing big companies in touch with little startups, and both of them with government regulators, in hopes of fostering the growth of a new small-airplane industry. I often think of him as a counterpart to Tim Berners-Lee* – the man who, by creating standards for the World Wide Web, helped countless other people to become filthy rich.

Here is Bruce Holmes, in a more-bureaucratic-than -entrepreneurial-looking NASA portrait:

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More on Chertoff's folly

The more I think about it, the more I marvel (as in previous item) at Sec. Chertoff's "gut feeling" comment. It's very much in the spirit of the wonderful "Demotivational" posters offered by Despair.com:

Think if Sec. Chertoff had been on hand at other big moments in history:

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'Weekend Edition Sunday' interview / Chertoff's folly

Audio here from my interview yesterday (from Shanghai) with Liane Hansen of NPR, looking back on my Sept 2006 Atlantic article arguing that the best way to hold down the threat and consequences of terrorism was to declare the "War on Terrorism" over. (Original article here; related Atlantic material here and here.) The question arose, of course, in light of Michael Chertoff's "gut feeling" that another strike might be imminent.

I didn't think to put it this bluntly over the radio, but Sec. Chertoff's comment ran about as contrary to all prevailing thought on dealing with terrorism (except, perhaps, the thoughts of GW Bush and RB Cheney) as is possible to do.

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Growth in Chinese internet use, from PRI's 'The World'

Audio here from a story this week on the public radio show "The World." The story is about the rapid growth of internet use in China and the implications thereof. It draws on a new study from the Pew Internet Project and includes an interview with the study's author and Pew's China bureau chief, Deborah Fallows, who is in the other room as I type.

Clash of the titans: finale (I think)

As previously mentioned here, here, and here, my new ThinkPad T60 has had a rocky relationship with the new Windows Vista operating system that came pre-installed. (Plot summary: Vista seemed mysteriously to gobble 50 to 60 gigabytes of the hard disk's capacity, leaving barely enough for the computer to function well.)

Thanks to all who wrote in with suggestions. It turns out that the problem was not a big traffic jam in TEMP directories (which I'd cleaned out long ago); nor a CHKDSK-style issue of corrupted or misallocated file space; nor some formatting oversight that had left much of the disk unavailable for storage. It seems not even to be related to space claimed by Vista's built-in indexer. I think I have now fully turned that feature off (which is not easy), but at worst its index files accounted for "only" a gig or two of lost space.

So what was going on?

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Free Flight update #2: Bring on the Dreamliner

This week Boeing unveiled its "Dreamliner," the 787, to bulging order books and widespread acclaim.

Yes, it could seem strange to include a $160-million-per-copy airliner as part of the revolution that may lead to more convenient air travel via smaller, less expensive airplanes. But the Dreamliner qualifies as an honorary part of the "Free Flight" movement in two ways:

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Class all the way! Qingdao Beer Festival mascot

Courtesy of CRI English.com, a look at the mascot for the upcoming 17th Qingdao International Beer Festival:

A sign of my own progress toward sadder-but-wiser status: last year, I was gung-ho to get up to see Qingdao and sample Chinese beer at its finest. Qingdao itself is very interesting. But as for the festival, now I realize that.... it's the same old Chinese beer, just in larger volume and in somewhat cheesier surroundings than normal:

But who knows -- everything is changing and "improving" so rapidly here in the New China, I may just have to give it another chance.

(Yes, I know that the signs are for Budweiser -- not technically Chinese but, in context, perfectly at home amid watery Chinese beers.)

More on clash of the titans: Windows Vista vs my hard drive

Noting with sympathy the plight I described recently -- a 110-gigabyte hard drive drying up like the Aral Sea with each hour's use of Windows Vista -- several readers helpfully wrote to suggest utilities that might solve the problem.

Two in particular: SequoiaView, and TreeSize Professional. Both offer free demos; both are quick and easy to install; both look elegantly designed.

But, no dice.

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Hey you whippersnappers! More on computing ca. 1980

Various representatives of America's Youth have written in with reactions boiling down to "Doh!" to my having observed, 25 years ago, that computers could be, you know, useful.

Here is the missing part of the story: this was a highly controversial view at the time. It was even brave!

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I was tempting the gods (Windows Vista dept)...

... when I said yesterday that so far I had had no blue-screen-of-death system crashes under Windows Vista.

Of course I had one just now -- this morning Shanghai time, the first time I'd restarted the computer since posting that Vista item. Coincidence??? Yeah, that's what They'd like you to think....

Restart time after the blue-screen crash, various CHKDSK routines included: seven minutes, forty-five seconds. And oh, yes, post-crash there are now 7.13 gigs "free" on my 110-gig hard disk. Just reporting data here. And whining a little bit.

Donnez moi un break: Bush press conference

It is hard to know what is the most contemptible part of President Bush's press conference (ongoing as I write -- and as I listen to it, on a Cspan internet feed, in Shanghai). But it's going to be hard to top what he just uttered: the most blatant attempt so far to blame everything that went wrong in Iraq on the advice of the military.

Don't have the transcript in front of me now, but the point was: Hey, I asked Tommy Franks if he was ready to go -- including the postwar phase; and he said Sure, no problem. So (says the President), Don't blame me! I was listening to the experts!

Yes, as Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz so notably listened to Gen. Eric Shinseki. And yes, the president's laser-like assessment of Gen. Franks' shortcomings must have lain behind his decision to give him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Talk about "personal accountability" and "supporting the troops." (Franks does deserve a good share of the blame, and so do other military commanders -- but not for reasons the President apparently even grasps.)

Close second in the most-contemptible derby, half way through the press conference: Catechism-like repetition of the idea that we have to "fight them in Iraq so we don't fight them here." I wonder if anyone has ever dared challenge the logic of this to the President's face. (Ie, what are you talking about??? Why should people bother to plant bombs in Baghdad if they thought they had a chance of planting them in DC?) My oh my.

You can't easily imagine how odd it is....

... to see resurrected, on the Atlantic's home page at the moment, an article written at the dawn of the personal computer age, when simple things like not having to hit the return key while typing seemed like miracles.

(Note from the century before: the "return key," like the "carriage return," was something you used when you got to the end of a line of type with a typewriter, so you could move down to the next line. A "typewriter" was...)

In retrospect one thing I should explain about the article is its opening paragraph. My office was then in the basement of our house. I was trying to finish the article on a very hot Washington day, and an unscreened window to our back yard was wide open. Through it my older son -- then 5 years old, now 30 -- called for me to come see the treasure he had just found. It was a long-dead and apparently mummified cat, which he and his friend Nina had discovered under a rock (or someplace) and excitedly hauled over to the window to share with me. For a minute, I thought, Oh no... But at least it gave me an idea of how to begin the article:

I 'd sell my computer before I'd sell my children. But the kids better watch their step. When have the children helped me meet a deadline? When has the computer dragged in a dead cat it found in the back yard?

Is Windows Vista the monster that's eating my hard drive?

This spring I bought a new laptop, as I end up doing every two years or so. By that time, the older one is showing its road wear, after being hammered on and toted around all day, every day. Defective pixels start to pock the screen. Half the keys on the keyboard have had their lettering worn off, the N always first to go. (Research project: paint or decals for keys that doesn't abrade off so quickly.) And by that time, what's available in the new models -- bigger disks, faster processors, better screens -- is worth the shift.

This time I got a ThinkPad T60, maybe the dozenth ThinkPad I've bought over the decades and the first with a Lenovo label. I am loyal to ThinkPads despite what I learned early this year while reporting my article on Shenzhen -- that virtually all the laptop computers in the world, whether they are sold as Dells or Sonys or HPs or ThinkPads, come from the same handful of no-name Taiwanese factories based in southern China. (Details at end of this post, after the jump.) I like the ThinkPad keyboard, even when the lettering is gone; ThinkPads have rarely done me wrong; I illustrate brand loyalty.

And -- practicing what I preached in the Atlantic last year -- I waited to buy this ThinkPad until I could get it pre-installed with Windows Vista, Microsoft's latest operating system. Why not just stick with WinXP, by now a tried, true, and stable platform? With the other laptops scattered around the house, that's what I've done. But within the lifetime of this newest machine, I expect that I'll be forced or tempted to move to Vista, for compatibility reasons. So I'd rather start out with it installed, despite the inevitable bugs in early release, than later have to install Vista myself.

(Why don't I just use a Mac? I do. I've always had one around, currently an iBook.)

But really, there seems to be something basically wrong with Vista.

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More on Gary Hart, Lynne Cheney, and war with China

Several days ago I recounted a story Gary Hart had told about Lynne Cheney, who was chomping at the bit to confront China militarily early in 2001 -- before her husband and his president had their attention directed elsewhere later that year. As Hart said in concluding the story, "I am convinced that if it had not been for 9/11, we would be in a military showdown with China today."

Various voices in blog-world have complained that there's nothing new here: Of course the neo-cons were raring for a confrontation with China. And of course that is true. Anyone who was paying attention to defense debates knew that during the "monopower" era of the late 1990s, when the familiar old Soviet enemy had gone away and the new enemy of Islamic extremism had not clearly announced itself, the long-term Chinese threat was what military thinkers were thinking about. The notoriety of a translated Chinese military text, known in English as Unrestricted War: China's Master Plan to Destroy America, is a subtle little clue that some people have been working this theme for a long time.

The point of the Lynne Cheney story is not that it confounded all previous understanding. It is that it confirmed what we already suspected. It would be like finding a recording of a conversation between Paul Wolfowitz and his mentor Donald Rumsfeld in the late 1990s, saying something like: You know, if we ever have the chance, we have to do whatever it takes to get rid of that damned Saddam. The details would be important even if the main theme was less than a dumbfounding surprise.

After Gary Hart told me about Lynne Cheney's petulance, I asked him: has this ever been publicized? He said, No (but he had no objection to people knowing about it now). That is the point of the story: new and interesting details in a tragedy whose central plot line we already know.

The other side of the Bose story

A reader who says he used to work in the retail side of the audio industry writes in truth-squad mode about my recent hymn of praise to Bose customer service. His comments are long and detailed, and they appear below the jump. He stresses that his comments are "personal opinions and observations, not allegations of fact" -- sounds just right for the blog world! -- and he asks not to be named.

Heart of his commentary: that Bose is a triumph of marketing rather than technology. Thus:

Bose® is one of the ultimate exemplars of so much that is right, and so much that is wrong, about the way our “free market” works... Among the real audiophile community, Bose products were not only never really accepted, they were universally scorned... The upshot is a speaker renowned, among serious audiophiles, for its utter inability to perform its intended function (among audiophiles, that is) -- the most pristine and accurate reproduction of the musical experience possible.

I'm no audiophile.I'm simply a guy who wanted to preserve some hearing despite sitting a few feet away from a roaring engine in a little propeller plane, and who also wants to preserve some peace of mind on commercial flights.

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The making of loyal Bose customer (unsolicited plug)

Product plug: It's hardly novel to sing the praises of active noise-reduction headsets for airplane travel. I first learned about them in my piloting days, when the Lightspeed 20K headset made the difference between retaining at least some hearing and having to yell "Whaaat????" "Say that again..." for the rest of my life because of the literally deafening engine noise inside most small-airplane cockpits.

I didn't buy Bose aviation headsets because they cost twice as much as the Lightspeeds or other models, but the Bose "Quiet Comfort 2" model for airline passengers is a much better deal -- and not only because I got it as a Christmas present from one of my sons. I almost never see Chinese passengers wearing these on Shanghai Air or China Eastern flights (which, by the way, have much better meal service than most US lines -- topic for another day). But among American and European passengers on domestic or international flights they are of course more and more common:

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What I wanted to ask Bill Clinton

(Resurrected from Aspen blog site)

A year ago, I had the chance to interview Bill Clinton on stage at the Aspen Ideas festival. (Description of the oddity of the whole situation here; video archive here.) This year Rick Stengel of Time magazine ably played that role. During the time for audience questions, I queued up to ask Clinton about something he had said. But as the clock ticked down at the end of the session, Stengel announced that there was time for one more question -- and the turn belong to a woman just ahead of me (and, to be fair about it, I'd already had more than my chance to pose questions to Clinton).

Here is what I wanted to ask. Sometime I would love to hear an answer:

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One other Aspen/China session

This also resurrected from previous post on (somewhat-insiderish) Aspen blog site:

There have been so many discussions about China that I can't keep track even of those I've been involved in. But I managed to take notes at one involving Li Cheng, a Shanghai native now at the Brookings Institution, who in a very droll way (under questioning by Orville Schell) made a number of interesting points.

Li's stated Big Idea theme was "China's Future: A paradox of hope and fear." I won't try to convey the arguments there, but here were a few of the apercus:

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Free Flight update (kicking off a series)

The book I had most fun writing was Free Flight, which came out six years ago. At the time, the hub-and-spoke nature of the airline system was driving passengers crazy with inconvenience and delay. Also at the time, a variety of entrepreneurs and innovators -- some in little garage-scale businesses, some within the federal government itself -- were dreaming up a system of decentralized, flexible, point-to-point air travel based on radically more efficient and less expensive small aircraft.

For a while after the 9/11 attacks, some people thought that nothing other than air-marshal-laden airliners would ever again be allowed in the sky. But the innovation continued, and the crowding, hassle, and inconvenience of the hub-and-spoke system have become worse than ever. Many of the projects that were gleams in the eye when I wrote the book are now going enterprises: for instance, Cirrus Design, which was then a little family operation, is now by far the most popular maker of small piston-engine planes in the world. (Disclosure: I bought one of Cirrus's earliest planes, at list price, after writing the book -- and sold it, for not that much less than I paid, on the used market when I moved to China last year. As reported earlier, my one experience in flying a plane in China was so chastening that I will not try that again.)

A whole string of other updates awaits. To begin with: the news last week that this same Cirrus company has entered the "personal jet" market with a new model of its own. More details from Cirrus here and from AVWeb here. Official portrait below:

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Interesting China discussion (from Aspen)

(This item resurrected from original posting on somewhat-insiderish Aspen Ideas Festival blog site.)

As noted earlier today, a very interesting panel discussion on prospects for the Chinese economy featured a moment of unbelievable crudity from an audience member. Back to the high road now: a mention of some of the points that made it interesting in a more wholesome way.

Panelists were Minxin Pei, of the Carnegie Endowment (and the recent book China's Trapped Transition); David Dollar, director of the World Bank's Beijing office; and Clive Crook, of my own Atlantic Monthly magazine. Moderator was David Bradley, again of my own -- technically, his own -- Atlantic Monthly. Terms of the discussion were: for Pei to make the skeptic's case about China's economic future; Dollar to make the more optimistic case; and Crook to talk about the state of US-China relations.

Highlights (as opposed to summary of the discussion):

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Video link: Lehrer News Hour interview about Shenzhen

Just before leaving China last month, I showed up in the pre-dawn haze (referring to my state of mind, not the weather) at the Shanghai Media Group TV studios for an interview with Jeff Brown, of the Lehrer News Hour, about the nature of Chinese factory life. Streaming video is here; RealAudio here; MP3 here; transcript here.

Gary Hart, Lynne Cheney, and War with China

I mentioned this yesterday in the (somewhat-insiderish) realm of the Atlantic's "Aspen Ideas Festival" blog, but the point seemed worth repeating in this marginally more public venue. The item appears after the jump, or at this link. It concerns the war that some public officials tried to prevent, and the war that at least one official tried to foment:

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Atlantic blogging team back to full strength

Ten-plus days away from internet-land should be mentally soothing, and on the whole it is. But there's a certain background nervousness -- where can I look up that movie name I'm trying to remember? Is there any money left in my checking account? -- whose implications I should explore some other day. Probably some day when I haven't been up round the clock getting from the other side of the world to the Rocky Mountain region.

Speaking of the Rockies, for the next week or so the locus of much Atlantic blog activity will be this "Aspen Ideas Festival" site. If I can stay up long enough, I'll go post some unexpected news linking Aspen and my previous home-away-from home, the Chinese factory world of Shenzhen.