Stop the Madness! (Gail Collins, Hillary Clinton, and Boiled Frogs)

From Gail Collins in Saturday's New York Times:

The Democratic Party seems to be gradually acclimating itself to the idea that Hillary Clinton is going to be the nominee. It’s a little like that frog in a beaker of water that Al Gore talks about in his global warming speech — the one who won’t notice he’s being boiled to death if you turn up the heat ever so gradually.

NO NO NO NO NO!

I'm not talking about the politics of the thing*. I'm talking about the poor frog. Ms. Collins may be off the hook in attributing the frog metaphor to Al Gore -- he used it in An Inconvenient Truth, and he keeps right on using it. But he is flat wrong -- right on Global Warming, wrong on Amphibian Warming -- and so is everybody else who tries to explain things this way.

Summary of the undisputed science on this point: If you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will either die or else be so badly hurt it will wish that it were dead. If you put it in a pot of tepid water and turn on the heat, the frog will climb out -- if it can -- as soon as it gets uncomfortably warm.

Continue reading "Stop the Madness! (Gail Collins, Hillary Clinton, and Boiled Frogs)" »

You really do learn something every single day

It turns out that there is a company that conducts wine tours of China! This is apropos of my recent announcement that I had come across two good Chinese red wines, in a context suggesting that such discoveries should be considered news.

Comes now China Wine Tours, of California, which offers an interesting-looking trip next spring to Chinese cities and vineyards -- including the renowned (as I now think of it) Grace Vineyards of Shanxi province in northern China. Grace's site, in Chinese, is here.

A China Wine Tours representative notes that it is wrong to generalize about wine from China or anyplace else. Fair enough. And while I feel safe in saying that Sichuan food is generally better in Chengdu (Sichuan province) than in, say, Nebraska -- much as wine is generally worse in China than in, say, most of Europe, North America, or Oceania -- I take the point that there are exceptions to any rule. More power to all involved, from Grace, to China Wine Tours, to the other people and companies in China trying to develop and satisfy a market for a much better product. And I will have to save up and try the top-level Grace wine.

Umm, about that "good" Chinese wine...

This is why we have the internets:

- 1. After my report that I had found an "actually good" red wine in Gansu province, a reader in Berkeley wrote to say that this was exactly the same wine he had practically spit out in disgust when he tried it in Gansu. Versus my "actually good," his tasting notes:

Worst wine ever. It was pinot noir, but off-brown colored and tasted like crap. Supposedly the best wine of the gansu province. I think Chinese wine has about 50 million years before it catches up with the rest of the world. It made me end up barfing (well that plus a lot of weak chinese beer).

The explanation for this difference? I think it's not just that my standards have been affected by too much exposure to Great Wall and Changyu. It may be our old friend "quality control in Chinese manufacturing" raising its head once again. What my wife and I had didn't taste like crap and was normal red-wine color rather than brown. Your experience may vary! Caveat potor.

- 2. Fareed Zakaria, oenophile among other distinctions, reports that the "best wine in China" is from Grace Vineyards, in particular the "Chairman's Reserve." I have tried Grace's 60RMB/ $8 Chardonnay, which was OK. Could it be time to spring for the 388RMB / $52 Chairman's Reserve Cabernet? On the one hand, that's only a little more than twice as much as the 188RMB "Pride of Gansu" pinot noir in question. On the other hand, for the same money I could eat street food for two weeks and have change left over for REEB. Decisions....

Yet more on CNN, Burma,and Myanmar

Perhaps I was unfair to single out CNN for its relentless insistence on the name Myanmar rather than Burma. Lamentably, the New York Times is doing the same thing (for instance, here). The Economist is bizarrely schizophrenic on the question. Its latest cover boldly says, "Burma's Saffron Revolution," but in the accompanying lead story all references are to Myanmar. Good for the Washington Post, which on its front page goes unashamedly with Burma, as does virtually all of the British media (BBC, Times, Guardian, Telegraph) except for the inexplicable Economist.

I suppose CNN sticks in my craw because they were the first media outlet in which I'd noticed such ostentatiously PC-sounding Myanmar-ization, especially in their arm's-length treatment of G.W. Bush's speech about "Burma." And just now they nonchalantly introduced comments "on Myanmar" from Archibishop Desmond Tutu, Australian Prime Minister John Howard, a Burmese democracy advocate, and America's own Condoleezza Rice, only to have each of them begin, "The problem in Burma is" or "The people of Burma hope..." Take a hint, CNN and NYT!

One more thought experiment, on the argument that Burma is a "colonial" name: If a country changes its name in the process of becoming independent, no problem. Today's Ghana had been the Gold Coast as a British colony; when it became independent 50 years ago, it became Ghana too. New country; new name. But suppose a junta took over Mexico tomorrow and said that henceforth the world must call the country Atzlan. (Or, to choose a country with a name more obviously traceable to the colonial era, the Dominican Republican, or the Philippines.) It's not a new country; it's just a new regime, and there would be no need to oblige them, just there is no need to dignify the brutal Burmese generals

Query for others behind the Great Firewall: all of Blogspot blocked again?

My experience with the Chinese Great Firewall over the last year-plus has been weirdly variable. Sometimes I can get to almost any site I'm interested in, even without using a proxy server or VPN. Sometimes a large number are blocked. With a proxy server, of course, almost anything works.

For the last few days I've been in circumstances where I can't use my normal proxy server. And here's what I find:
- Wikipedia -- all entries blocked
- Blogspot -- all blogs hosted there blocked
- Blogger -- ditto
- My pre-existing personal site, on WordPress (jamesfallows.com) -- blocked, so I can't put any posts or updates there

Yet BBC.co.uk -- often impossible to reach from within the Great Firewall, today is wide open without problems. And so is the very-frequently-blocked Technorati.

My intuition is that the offs and ons of the Firewall have as much to do with inadvertence and happenstance as with some coordinated master plan. But this is tighter control, or at least more broadly obstructive control, than I've noticed in a while.

Is it due to the Burma upheavals, to diminish awkward discussion of China's role? I don't really think so, because Burma-related sites not on Blogger or Blogspot come through - plus lots of news on the BBC (which forthrightly calls the country "Burma.") Run-up to the 17th Party Congress, which begins in about three weeks, and before which there's been a general attempt to damp down controversy of any kind? For now I don't know the cause, only the effect.

Background only: how Rangoon looked quite recently

For discussion tomorrow: whether China can do what many outsiders hope, and be the deus ex machina in the tragedy of Burma. It's pretty to think so, and to hope that Chinese intervention might spare Burmese monks and civilians from what looks like impending crackdown or massacre from the heavily-armed thugs who rule the country. I fear it's not realistic to think that China can or will play such a role. More later.

For now, street scenes from Rangoon, four months ago:

Rangoon city hall, with its somewhat eerie combination of British-colonial and traditional Burmese design. This appears in the background of many current protest videos. Here is how it looked on a weekday midmorning this May:

Continue reading "Background only: how Rangoon looked quite recently" »

More on Burma v. Myanmar

A reader in Yangon/Rangoon says this about the "Burma" v. "Myanmar" question:

In your article you miss one critical point.

Burma was the name given by the British, and is a corruption of Bamar. The Bamar people are the ethnic majority of the lowland areas of the country, referred to as divisions eg, Yangon Division, Bago Division, Mandalay Division. The other parts of the country are known as States, where other ethnic groups form the majority eg Chin State, Shan State, Karen State each named after majority ethnic group.

Therefore, to insist on calling the country Burma (Bamar) falls into the trap of Bamar nationalism, identifiable not just to Military but to the NLD as well, but always to the exclusion and the expense of the many other ethnic groups.

Unfortunately, Burmese nationalism has been a problem in the country for centuries (and made worse under the British policy of divide and rule), and unless the more inclusive Myanmar is used will continue to be so no matter who is in charge.

If you decide to use this info, please attribute it to ANON in Yangon (the historically correct name for Rangoon), and be assured I am not a stooge, but have friends here from pretty much every community !

Actually we don't disagree. As I said the first time around, within Burma there have been serious arguments for years about what the country should call itself, to reflect the relations among its component ethnic groups. If Burma wants to call itself Myanmar for internal purposes, no outsider should object.

But as for the name outsiders use, here is the plain fact: nearly 20 years ago the brutal SLORC commandos insisted on the change to Myanmar as a way of aggrandizing and legitimizing themselves and of suggesting a Year Zero, history-starts-with-us outlook on the country. There is no reason for outsiders to go along with them, especially now.

Quiet out there. A little too quiet....

This is making me nervous. The usual run of daily-life hassles has so far .... vanished today:

1) Good soaking rain last night in Beijing, with a cold front moving through. Open the hotel windows this morning to see: bright blue skies! Thin high white clouds! Hills and mountains visible miles away in the distance! Gee, I guess the pre-Olympic air-quality campaign is kicking in even faster than planned. (Don't worry, I know this is fluke-not-trend, and a reason to have planned the Olympics for September rather than August.*)

2) Taxi to Beijing Capital Airport, leaving three hours before flight time just to be safe given the morning rush hour. Third Ring Road: at a dead stop for miles into the distance. (Remember: we can see miles into the distance today.) Taxi driver veers recklessly off the entrance ramp, movie chase-scene style, one second before we would have been trapped. Fourth Ring Road: same endless jam, same escape. Out to the Fifth Ring Road: clear sailing! At the airport an hour after we leave the downtown hotel.

3) Time to kill before our scheduled flight to Shanghai. Maybe we could talk our way onto the one leaving an hour earlier -- despite our cheapo-discount tickets, bought with "no change/no transfer" strictures? My wife, the bargainer/negotiator in the family, asks -- and receives!

4) Plane takes off on time, and lands on time. Despite the overall efficiency of Chinese domestic air travel, on-schedule operations into and out of Beijing are still nothing to take for granted. Luggage appears immediately.

5) At Hongqiao Airport in Shanghai, instead of the usual teeming-masses horror of the multi-hundred-person taxi queue, hardly anyone in line! We don't even need to use the trick we'd heard from savvier friends: going back up to the Departures level and jumping in a cab that has just dropped off a passenger. (Thanks to the cartel rules that keep the taxi lines snarled, these cabs aren't supposed to pick anyone up.) We stay in the legit line, step into a cab, cruise downtown to our apartment, and are unpacking at "home" a little more than four hours after we checked out of the hotel in Beijing. Veterans will know, that's a miracle.

Which is why I'm worried. Something bad must be about to happen. I think I'll stay inside the rest of the day.

* The opening ceremonies are of course planned for 8:08pm next August 8, as a bow to the auspciousness of the number eight in China. (08/08/08 -- get it?) Maybe the temperature will be 108F too!

Question for the ages, from the Int'l Herald Tribune

"Why aren't there better beers in Asia?"

In the IHT today Jeff Boda dares ask the question that so often runs through my mind these days. Most often, when I confront the depressing choice among local Tiger, local Carlsberg, local Suntory, local Heineken, and of-course-local Qingdao or Snow in a neighborhood restaurant. Talk about a distinction without a difference! I might as well just have a REEB.

Even the brave Boda is not daring enough to hazard an answer. (My hypothesis: hops are the one expensive ingredient in beer, so the breweries don't use any.) But his story says enough to break my heart:

There's hope brewing in Japan. Thirteen years after it legalized microbreweries, the country has produced craft brewers who can hold their own with the best that the United States and Europe have to offer. Their pale ales are as refreshingly hoppy as Sierra Nevada, the benchmark in the United States.

Where were you, Japanese microbrewers, when I lived in your country? And why aren't you in China now? Just wondering. Crying in my beer, you might say.

I still hate pinyin, but I gave the wrong example

(Updated)
My hatred for pinyin, the convention for rendering Chinese words in Western script, is undiminished. But a little while ago I used the wrong example to make the point. As readers Jake Fleming, Joshua Rosenzweig, James Roy, and others promptly pointed out, the Western spelling Urumqi, for a city's name that most Chinese pronounce approximately wu-lu-mu-chi, illustrates complications other than pinyin-ization.

Urumqi (it turns out!) is the Uighur spelling of the city's Uighur Mongolian* name, the Uighurs being a mainly-Muslim, Central Asian people whose stronghold in China is the Xinjiang "autonomous region." The spelling is a actually good approximation for how they would pronounce the name, with "qi" roughly as "chee."

The four-character Chinese name 乌鲁木齐 is the Chinese attempt to phoneticize the name into Mandarin. Given the phonetics of Mandarin, such renderings are often awkward at best. So, bad example! I apologize!

Why do I still hate pinyin? I think that 99.9% of native English speakers, seeing pinyinizations like deng, men, cai, shi, or zhou are guaranteed to mispronounce them. For instance, dung, rather than deng, might look vaguely embarrassing but would take English speakers closer to the desired result. But I bow to the power of pinyin and struggle along.

By the way, the Xinjiang Suntime Wine is still good.

* Per James Millward of Georgetown University, among others! Now it seems that place names south of Xinjiang's Tian Shan mountains, which run roughly east-west and which were still snow-covered when we saw them in late summer, are indeed mainly Uighur. Those north of the mountains, including Urumqi / Wulumuqi / 乌鲁木齐, are largely Mongolian (or Chinese) in origin. I'm not touching this topic again! Instead I refer all comers to Millward's own recent Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang

Life is full of surprises: good Chinese wine

Another discovery from the west of China: two Chinese-made red wines that can be called "good."

One, from Xinjiang autonomous region (the far northwest frontier of China), is Suntime Red Wine. Its Chinese-language site is here. Suntime comes from what I understand to be the biggest grape-growing operation in China. (Xinjiang, like the central valley of California, is grape paradise. Islamic Uighurs, from Xinjiang, are known among other things for selling grapes and raisins in big Chinese cities.) I've seen the wine only in a store in Urumqi*, biggest city in Xinjiang, where it cost less than $10 per bottle.

The other, more obscure, is Mogao Vineyards Pinot Noir, from Gansu province. I was told in Gansu that Mogao is considered "the home town of grape wine," because of discoveries of ancient winery operations nearby. This wine, below, is actually good. On sale in Gansu for about $24. By Chinese standards, very pricey -- but bottles of lamentable Great Wall wine cost as much.

I leave it to the wine experts from here on out.
-
* "Urumqi" is example #97,408 of Why We Hate Pinyin, the system for rendering Chinese sounds in western script. The town's name is actually pronounced in Chinese more like "Wu-lu-mu-qi," and that is what the four characters in its Chinese name, 乌鲁木齐, amount to. And "Urumqi" is the best pinyin can do? [Update: see next post; there is actually a difference between the Mongolian and Chinese versions of the name. Sorry!] Sure, we understand that the English name "Worcestershire" is not actually pronounced that way, but no one ever advertised English spelling as a way to simplify pronunciation.

For once, I'm with Bush on a language issue: it's Burma, not Myanmar

I'm watching CNN in Beijing, which keeps tut-tutting President Bush for saying "Burma," rather than "Myanmar," in his just-completed UN speech, as if this were merely another of his gaffes.

I'm with Bush. For nearly twenty years, since first visiting the country during the violent protests in 1988, I've followed arguments about the twists and turns of what to call the country in Burmese. The complications mainly involve what the various names say about the relations between the Burmese people proper and other ethnic groups within the nation.

But when it comes to referring to the nation in English, there's little debate. Myanmar is the name invented 18 years ago by the benighted junta, known as SLORC* back then and the State Peace and Development Council now, when it seized power through force. When Westerners say "Myanmar," they're not being culturally respectful to the people of a beautiful but oppressed nation. (We don't call China Zhongguo or Germany Deutschland just because the locals do.) They're bowing to the whims of the generals who still imprison Aung San Suu Kyi.

There is no reason to humor them. Say Burma, as George Bush did. And CNN, grow some backbone when it comes to terminology!
-

* "State Law and Order Restoration Council."

Update: Thanks to my Atlantic colleague Graeme Wood, I learn that I am agreeing here not merely with George W. Bush but, it seems, even with John Derbyshire! Sort of....

318 days to the Olympics: a clear(er) sky day in Beijing!

Two months ago, the skies over Beijing resembled some kind of nuclear disaster. This was the morning view near Chaoyang Park on July 25:

Central Business District, earlier that afternoon:

If this doesn't look like much of an improvement, then the pictures aren't really doing their job.

Mere byproduct of the change of seasons, with Fall usually the least-polluted time of the year? Conceivably an indication of something more? As my wife and I prepare to move here, naturally we hope (as opposed to assume) that this is a pre-Olympic trend rather than just a seasonal fluke.

Brueghel comes to rural China

Village near Yellow Sheep River, Gansu province, western China, 9am today. Harvest time:

In the middle and background: stacks of hay, waiting to be collected in carts drawn by people or cattle. The people in the middle and foreground are threshing the wheat and winnowing it the old-fashioned way, by tossing shovelsful in the air and letting the wind carry off the chaff. The village's houses are built around courtyards, with families and animals living inside each compound's walls. The line running through the picture is fiber for internet connections, which bypass this village but go to a nearby small town.

What I have learned from three visits to Western China

To stop asking where the "natural beauty" of China is:

Central Gansu province, near Maya mountains, September 20, 2007.

What I've also learned: where the people live who are not part of coastal China's economic boom. But that's a different story.

Typhoon Wipha finale

Thanks to all who kindly sent queries or wishes about conditions during the typhoon.

At least in Shanghai, this was, as they put it in the U.S. Midwest, a big nothing. A little windier than normal, but not by much. A little rain, but not as much as yesterday or half the days of the last month.

Three days ago, this was going to be the biggest storm in ten years, the equivalent of a Cat 5 hurricane. Rationally its petering out is a blessing. And yes yes yes, I know the tragedy of Katrina etc. But no red-blooded real person can help but wonder what it would have been like.

Last word on heroes of the Bush administration

I'm declaring the voting closed on people whose reputations are better and place-in-history improved by virtue of service under GW Bush.

Overall winner: Christopher Hill, State Department careerist now in charge of North Korean negotiations. Better known than he was six years ago, and in a good way!

Dark-horse category winner: Sandy Randt, Yale classmate of GW Bush who has been ambassador to China since the beginning of the Administration; lawyer and Mandarin-speaker, unknown to 300 million Americans but respected by 1.3 billion Chinese.

Interesting honorable mentions in their own special categories: Robert Gates (backing down from Donald Rumsfeld); Robert Zoellick (backing down from Paul Wolfowitz); conceivably David Petraeus, depending how the next 18 months goes. Possibly Patrick Fitzgerald, with the ambiguous legacy of his prosecutions? (Bad for the Bush administration; also bad for the press.) Also depending on the next 18 months, Henry Paulson?

Honorary winners (technically disqualified since they're not part of the administration but instead feed off it): Jon Stewart; Stephen Colbert; staff of The Onion.

Shanghai typhoon watch: pretty much still watching

When my wife and I went to bed last night, we expected that through the night we'd hear the ever-more-howling winds of the approaching Typhoon Wipha. Perhaps the tall, skinny building in which we live would itself sway, which we'd watch and feel from the 22nd floor?

So far (10:30am China time), things are still pretty tame. At 8:30 this morning, the pavement was still dry. Now the wind is just beginning to push on the trees, and the skies are starting to drizzle, but not much more.

If this were the U.S., where Doppler Radar is everywhere, we'd watch the storm expand, contract, veer around, go out to sea, etc, and have some idea of whether we should be relaxing or hunkering down. As best I know, no such radar exists for most of China -- and if it does, its results aren't instantly and publicly available as they are on countless web sites and weather stations in the U.S.

So we go about our business, and wait, which maybe is a metaphor for the right way to approach life in general, where you have no idea what really lies ahead.

My Shanghai comrade Adam Minter is doing a Live Typhoon Blog. In a few minutes I'm planning to walk across the town, to get an idea of how the big city looks and feels before the typhoon hits (or perhaps doesn't).

Nanjing Xi Lu and Xinchang Lu, downtown Shanghai, 9am:

Eastward across People's Square, 10am:

Update: people who are glad they went to work for GW Bush

As mentioned yesterday, it's hard to think of people whose reputations have been burnished through service in the GW Bush Administration. Making the opposite list is easy: Eight years ago, Dick Cheney's reputation was as a level-headed foreign policy pro. Same for Donald Rumsfeld. Alberto Gonzales was a rising talent. Scooter Libby, a cosmopolitan lawyer. Paul Bremer, a successful diplomat....

Several people have written me with suggestions, almost all of them people who look better than those around them because they said, Watch out, things are going to hell! Richard Clarke; Lawrence Lindsey; Eric Shinseki; the Abu Ghraib investigator Antonio Taguba, etc. A less obvious but worthy suggestion would be Conrad Crane and Andrew Terrill, principal authors of the Army War College's prescient, and of course overlooked, pre-war handbook on how to run a successful occupation. (The study's history recounted here; subscribers only.) James Baker and Lee Hamilton of the Iraq Study Group?

A very interesting discussion is going on in the comments section of Ezra Klein's blog, here. The interesting part is the way you have to bend definitions to argue that the Administration has made certain people look "better." Eg, John Ashcroft: a better reputation as Attorney General than in his previous political career? Maybe not. A better reputation than what came after him, especially for his apparent sickbed opposition to a surveillance scheme? Maybe so.

But people who will be honored for an unambiguously positive contribution through these years? So far it's a challenging search. We have a John Yoo with his Yoo Theories on torture, but no George Marshall with his Marshall Plan. Any positive suggestions welcomed.

Additional discussion here by Brian Beutler, and some interesting possibilities from Moira Whelan.

Well, this will be interesting: Typhoon Wipha

Landfall south of Shanghai in a few hours. Shanghai is just to the right of the red dot on the map. Raining like mad today. I wonder what real winds will do in a city where there are construction cranes, stacks of metal siding, etc all over the place, not to mention a lot of vulnerable people living in exposed circumstances.

Update: Ahah! It turns out the that graphic below is from a dynamic, updated site rather than a static image. So at this moment, nearly a day after original posting, it shows a green dot near Shanghai, and eventually it will show no dots from this typhoon at all. To find Shanghai on the map, follow the 30-degree latitude line over to the coast of China. Shanghai is just north of the big inlet, which is the mouth of the Yangtze River.

Florida airplane update: bring on the lobbyists!

As mentioned two days ago, the DayJet company of Florida has just carried its first paying passenger on a small-jet "air taxi" trip. The trip was from Boca Raton to Tallahassee.

Dan Hobby, of Coconut Creek, Fl., writes to point out an implication that probably was obvious to those who have more Florida reference points in the brain than I do:

The DayJet from Boca to Tallahassee may be even more viable once the Florida Legislature convenes next year.

During session the direct flights are usually booked up, and one is often forced to fly to Tallahassee through Orlando or Tampa, adding additional time to the flight.

While legislators may be hesitant to be seen taking a DayJet flight, I suspect many lobbyists will make it their first choice.

The "for lobbyists only" image is one the air taxi business would presumably like to avoid -- their goal is to make the fares economically competitive, not Corporate Excess Lite. But the basic point is exactly right: Tallahassee, like Sacramento (an example that springs more readily to my mind) is a place a lot of people have to get to during certain periods, and where normal connections are not so convenient.

I'm still curious about what DayJet will charge in the long run, though presumably this first passenger knows.

Rhetorical question

Would it have made any difference if Colin Powell had said then what he says now, about the follies of what we have undertaken in Iraq?

Or if Alan Greenspan had said clearly* then what he says now, about fiscal folly?

We'll never know. Nor will they. I think that should bother both of them, because those two, unlike the other former Administration supporters who have since recanted, had the stature and influence to have prevented or diminished what they now tell us are very harmful results.

Non-rhetorical question: Who will come out looking better by virtue of his or her service in the G.W. Bush Administration. Will anyone?**

`

* Greenspan's supporters point out that his statements about the Bush tax cuts contained cautions against fiscal recklessness, etc. That's true. But anyone following the Washington politics of the early Bush years knows beyond a doubt that as a practical reality, Greenspan was seen as giving the OK to the cuts. He is sophisticated enough to know that too.

** One possibility that occurs to me: former Army chief of staff Eric Shinseki. Are there any more?

Free Flight update #5: first DayJet flight

Six years ago, I was on the book-tour circuit discussing my book Free Flight, which had just come out. It was about several parallel innovations in the aviation biz -- more efficient engines, cheaper and better ways of building planes, safer ways to navigate and control the planes -- that might together make "air taxis" part of the solution to the misery of hub-and-spoke airline travel.

A standard interview question was: OK, when is any of this going to happen? And my standard answer was: I don't know, maybe the next five to ten years?

Last week -- right on my schedule! -- it happened. The DayJet company of Florida, mentioned here earlier when NASA pioneer Bruce Holmes went to work for them, carried its first paying customer of its first on-demand, priced-per-seat* trip.

In one way, the air-taxi era arrived even sooner than that. For a few years now, companies like SATSair have been offering a much cheaper form of previous air-charter services, using spiffy new propeller planes, mainly the 4-seat Cirrus SR22.

But DayJet's news is significant because it involves air taxis of a form most customers would feel comfortable with: namely small twin-engine jets (Eclipse 500 VLJs, whose evolution, like the Cirrus's, I described in the book).

This first trip was from Boca Raton, Florida, to Tallahassee, and its details show when and how the air-taxi model might work.

Continue reading "Free Flight update #5: first DayJet flight" »

Rorschach test

If you are an American, look at this headline and note your immediate reaction:

`

`

If the reaction is, Poor Shinzo Abe! or Poor Japan!, perhaps you are not actually an American.

If it has to do with parliamentary versus presidential systems.....

The Iraq speeches, Take Two

Five pm Friday China time, 5 am on the US East Coast: I'm ready to sweat away my woes with a trip to the gym. Find CNN to watch on a monitor in the workout room -- and discover that I have my choice of agonies! I can directly face the rigors of an hour on the ergometer,* or I can be distracted from them while rowing by watching President Bush's latest Iraq speech all over again!

Impression the second time around (first take here):

Senator Reed a little better than I had remembered.

President Bush a little worse.

Senators Obama and McCain about the same.

Mayor Giuliani, outrageously worse. Is this how he's been all along? To start with, he doesn't know anything. To be more precise: not a single sentence that he utters suggests any familiarity with what people have been saying and arguing -- about terrorism, Iraq, the situation of the military, security trade-offs, etc -- for the last few years. He's out of date in two ways: He displays the "fashionable in 2003 and 2004" assumption that if you say "nine-eleven, nine-eleven, nine-eleven!!" enough times, you end all debate about military policy. He displays the "fashionable about three weeks ago" assumption that if you say "General Petraeus, General Petraeus, General Petraeus" enough times, you've offered an Iraq policy. And through it all he seems totally self-confident. Hmm, have we seen anything like this combo before?

Senator Edwards: Again I saw, Wow. What a powerful, no-nonsense appearance. In his heyday Bill Clinton could deflate a Newt Gingrich argument by saying: Look, here's what's really going on. Edwards was Clintonesque in that good sense tonight.

Same for Michael Ware of CNN: I can't do his whole statement justice, but essentially he said: We hear from these politicians that there would be chaos in Iraq if we leave? What do they think is happening now! We hear that the Iraqi government will be an ally! What world are they living in? And so on.

That may be all the American TV I can take for a while.

`

* Disclosure! This is a link to a company that one of my sons runs.

Man from Mars perspective on tonight's speeches

Suppose you were interested in American politics and America's policy toward Iraq, but for quite some time you had not seen the major U.S. figures explaining themselves and reacting in real time.

(Why hadn't you seen them? Details below.*)

Suppose that, like most people in China, you had seen none of the countless Rep-Dem U.S. candidate debates of recent months (not on TV here); nor any of the live Petraeus-Crocker hearings (same problem); nor many on-the-stump clips of the major candidates' current presentations. Yes, you've read accounts of what everyone has said, and followed all the post-game analysis. But it's different to see the people.

Just now CNN International did run Bush's latest speech; plus the Larry King followup with candidates Obama, Giuliani, Edwards, and McCain; plus an Anderson Cooper followup from Iraq. So what do you notice if you haven't seen these people in action in a long time?

- Bush: no surprises. At this point you buy the argument or you don't. Simply as performance, this struck me as being in the higher end of Bush's range. No stumblings over words, none of the familiar, maddening habit of emphasizing "hard" words as if proud he had forced them out. Fewer of the insultingly oversimplified versions of his claims -- "we must fight them there so we don't fight them here." Instead, his arguments were phrased as if the Administration had some idea of what the main counter-argument would be. Bush was sobered but looked less rattled than he has in many of his previous "we are at a crucial moment" speeches about Iraq.

- Democrats: How long has John Edwards been sounding like this? Wow!

Continue reading "Man from Mars perspective on tonight's speeches" »

Efficiency secrets from Shanghai Airlines

I am a fan of Chinese domestic air travel. The airplanes, Airbuses or Boeings, are new enough and safe-seeming, unlike the alarming Soviet-made castoffs we rode here in the mid-1980s. The attendants are chipper. It's hard to be sure, but the pilots seem fine. Every flight I’ve been on has offered a hot meal, and by U.S. airline standards the food is great. Buying tickets is easy – you can walk into the airport and pay in cash, or order online through a unique high-tech/low-tech process I’ll describe some other day.* Flights in China are usually late, but they’re late everywhere.

Most amazing of all, the airport experience itself – a phrase that makes you feel bad just hearing it in America – is as low-stress as it can be. Check-in lines move fast – OK, there’s no “line,” but once you get in the spirit you can fight your way up pretty quickly. Getting through security takes five or ten minutes tops.

There's one problematic exception, illustrated by this picture of the 900-person taxi queue, snaking back and forth like the line for U.S. security screening, earlier this evening at Shanghai's Hongqiao airport, but it is an exception, as explained below**:

What’s the trick with things (apart from Shanghai/Hongqiao taxis) moving as well as they do in China? I’m not sure, but this may help: Chinese airlines don’t encourage a lot of fussing around with “do these look like good seats?“ or “is there any space in the exit row?”*** My wife and I saw this in its pure form today when checking in for the five-plus hour flight from Urumqi back to Shanghai.

Continue reading "Efficiency secrets from Shanghai Airlines" »

Update/correction on previous CNN item

For oddball tech reasons, I am unable to update the previous CNN item without breaking all existing links to it. So I'll add the new info this way.

The original item said:

* Michael Ware, usually a very, very tough critic of U.S. policy, narrates a perilous drive through Baghdad and refers maybe 50 times to "al Qaeda" threatening to attack him or Iraqi civilians.

Actually Ware's drive was deep into al Anbar. (Anderson Cooper was narrating the drive to the Baghdad airport -- I'm pretty sure.) Sorry for that misrecollection. The real point concerned Ware's repeated references -- and Cooper's, and those of everyone else during the hour or so of CNN coverage I saw -- to "al Qaeda" (along with Iran) as the adversary in Iraq.

Not "al Qaeda in Iraq," as President Bush himself is typically careful to say. Not "AQI," as the U.S. military typically puts it on its charts and PowerPoints. From CNN it was plain old "al Qaeda."

To U.S. viewers, plain old "al Qaeda" is the organization that attacked America six years ago. I don't see CNN consistently enough to be sure when they began applying this term to fighters within Iraq -- or whether it's a phenomenon of more than this one show. But on the basis of its unvarying use by a number of correspondents on this one show, I would have to assume that the change in terminology reflects a shift in "house style," as we in the media biz call it. Michael Ware himself, whom I don't know but do admire, has been the very opposite of a patsy for the Administration in his reporting from Iraq.

So why the change in CNN labeling? It's a mystery to me.

When did CNN join the Administration's (linguistic) team?

Easing back into the world of TV coverage, from remotest Xinjiang. Re-entry via CNN (after a stint watching TV Monde: just too depressing to see that French, which I have not studied for 35+ years, is still 50x more comprehensible than the Chinese I'm wrestling with now. Same impression with Deutsche TV and RAI Italia, which I've studied only a little. Sigh.)

Ongoing special from Iraq, tied no doubt to the Petraeus-Crocker appearances. And every reference to the adversary in Iraq is to "al Qaeda."

* Michael Gordon, of the NYT, is interviewed and talks about the anti-US troop strategy of "al Qaeda."

* Michael Ware, usually a very, very tough critic of U.S. policy, narrates a perilous drive through Baghdad and refers maybe 50 times to "al Qaeda" threatening to attack him or Iraqi civilians.

* Anderson Cooper himself refers continually to "al Qaeda" as the author of all mayhem in Iraq.

Jeez louise! Even Petraeus's own briefing slides, which I have just seen, refer to "AQI" -- al Qaeda/Iraq, as distinguished from the actual al Qaeda that attacked the American mainland six years ago. Wasn't there a fair amount of fuss a few months ago about the Bush Administration's bait-and-switch trick in pushing the term "al Qaeda in Iraq" as a (bogus) way of stressing a link between Osama bin Laden and whoever is the enemy in Iraq? Why should CNN go along with this -- and improve on it, by dropping the "in Iraq" part? Is it that anxious about shaking its "liberal" image? Just curious.

On Petraeus and Crocker from afar

Central Asia is a difficult place from which to follow the Petraeus / Crocker presentations. As a real-time thinking-out-loud exercise, here are the expectations I bring and assumptions I apply before having seen or read the testimony and questioning or followed the after-action wrapups. More “informed” reaction, or at least more reaction, once I have returned to the land of TV, newspapers, and connections fast enough to support video streaming.

1) This is a bad role for the House of Representatives to play. By “this” I mean conducting an extravaganza-style, live-TV hearing with star political witnesses.

A kind of “culture of poverty” disorder blights the performance of House committees when they are on TV. All politicians feel hungry for live TV coverage; Representatives feel starved. The President is on TV 24/7, and most Senators can get on every week or two if they really try. Most House members go months, years, or their entire careers with no shot at live national TV. Therefore they simply cannot help themselves when they have an opportunity to “question” witnesses before a national audience. They (almost) never ask real questions; they (almost) always burn their time giving little speeches. Every one of them knows that as a result their hearings are ruined as TV presentations, and – more important -- their witnesses are let off the hook. But it’s a tragedy of the commons, which no individual can prevent. I hope the first day’s session with Petraeus has proven me wrong here.

Continue reading "On Petraeus and Crocker from afar" »

In case anyone doesn't know this: new flight sim in Google Earth

From the start Google Earth has been fascinating in its own right. But since its introduction about two years ago, it has been additionally interesting as a "development platform" -- a layman's glimpse at the sophisticated world of "geographic information systems," which are essentially ways of mapping complex data onto a real, visible map. (More info here. Subscribers only.)

The latest and in a way most surprising application to be laid on top of Google Earth is its new, semi-hidden flight simulator. You call it up with Ctl-Alt-A in Windows systems, and Cmd-Opt-A on the Mac. If that doesn't bring up the simulator, you don't have the current release of Google Earth. which you can find here. I haven't played with it enough to know whether it matches the best real flight sims, from Microsoft and X-Plane. Also, any flight simulator, IMHO, requires a joystick rather than control-key operation to be any good. But that it exists at all is interesting, and its connection to the worldwide terrain coverage of Google Earth is a plus.

Nice touch: the two aircraft it offers are the Air Force's F-16, its design influenced by John Boyd and his "fighter mafia" allies; and Cirrus Design's SR-22, its design determined by the Klapmeier brothers and their colleagues in Duluth. More info about the flight sim, which has already been extensively publicized in tech blogs, here and here.

Maybe I was too hasty on this "world is not flat" business?

The debate will go on about whether the world is merely "flattening" in an economic and cultural sense, as everyone would agree it is; or whether it has in any meaningful way become "flat," as Thomas Friedman has so prominently argued. Before a TV appearance with Friedman last year, I calculated that more than a billion pages of his thoughts about the "flat earth" now exist. A big thick book, millions of copies in print, it adds up. Not nearly as many pages as the Harry Potter series, but still.

(And since I'm disagreeing with Friedman on the shape of the world, I should probably say that in his current "geo-green" campaign he is truly doing the Lord's work. On this theme his worldwide audience makes him a force for enormous good.)

On a recent very long, very draining, very interesting Chinese tour-bus trip through Xinjiang Province, China's northwest frontier, with all-Chinese travel companions and all-Mandarin language operations (except for the lessons in how to greet people in Uighur), my wife and I saw evidence on both sides of the flat-world case. I'll leave for another time the many, many, many illustrations of how bumpily different things can be from country to country and city to city. Instead, I'll stick with a heartening reminder of the common heritage that connects the diverse peoples of the modern world.

After trekking for hours across a stark, lunar desert landscape awesome in its harsh beauty, our bus rolled into a former Silk Road waypoint where today's craftsmen still specialize in hand-knotted rugs. We passed through a beaded curtain to see, on the place of honor on the main wall, this:
`

Yes, around the world, people truly are brothers and sisters, united by their love of poker-playing dogs.

(For context, the 4' x 6' rug in its natural setting:)

On the problem of rogue states

Within the last two two weeks, Chinese military hackers reportedly tried to break into secure servers run by the German and U.S. governments. German and U.S. officials have reportedly both complained – for reasons spelled out in this story by David Lague: How can they trust Chinese leaders' assurances of non-threatening intent if they can't be sure the People's Liberation Army sees things the same way? The PLA's successful test of an anti-satellite weapon early this year awakened the same fears.

Yes, having some degree of certainty, of reasonable boundaries, about what a nation might and might not do is an important element of international stability. With that point in mind, think of this: No one on earth can be sure that the U.S. government will not launch an aerial strike or a land invasion of Iran in the next 16 months.

Continue reading "On the problem of rogue states" »

Since I don't know how to contact Tom Hayden directly...

... let me send him a message this way.

He recently wrote a (very polite and respectful) reference to comments I'd made about the need to stick it out in Iraq. He then used this to illustrate the larger problem of people who had opposed the war but were unwilling to face the need to withdraw. The words of mine he quoted were:

I have come to this sobering conclusion. The United States can best train Iraqis, and therefore best help itself leave Iraq, only by making a long-term commitment to stay.

I did write those words. I wrote them two years ago, in an Atlantic article published late in 2005 called "Why Iraq Has No Army."

That's not what I think any more. Here is what I wrote one year after that, nearly a year ago, in explaining why I had come to an even grimmer conclusion about Iraq:

Continue reading "Since I don't know how to contact Tom Hayden directly..." »

Golden Oldies: the world is not flat

This in a sense old news, since the academic review I'm about to mention was officially published a few months ago, and a working version was available a year before that and was discussed at many economic sites. But it is so much worth reading that, on the off chance some people might not have come across the March, 2007 edition of Journal of Economic Literature, let me heartily recommend: "A Flat World, A Level Playing Field, a Small World After All, or None of the Above?" by Edward Leamer of UCLA. (An abstract, from the Journal's subscriber-only site, is here. An authorized full text PDF, from a UCLA site, here.)

Leamer's topic is of course Thomas Friedman's ubiquitous The World Is Flat. I have known and liked Friedman personally for years. As an opinion-shaper, he can only inspire awe -- even, or especially, when you disagree, as I obviously have about Iraq. But the flat-world concept has bothered me from the beginning, since in my view and experience it is so imprecise a version of what is going on economically these days. This would not shock Friedman: I tried to indicate as much when we appeared together on the Charlie Rose show last year.*

But I have not seen anything that put the case against flatness as clearly as Leamer's very, very long review does. Usually I am grateful to be a journalist and not a professor. We can be clear; they have to hem and haw. A paper like this shows what professors are for.**

(Notes and excerpt from the review after the jump.)

Continue reading "Golden Oldies: the world is not flat" »

Why we love the (English language) Chinese media, cont.

I'm feeling more harmonious already. Also, wondering whether The Onion is aware of a source of future talent.

When a theme starts showing up in pop fiction...

... you know that it's moved beyond the realm of Policy Expert Debate.

Here's the Policy Expert version of a certain concept:

Talking about the "global war on terror" and the constant focus on threat Americans face from terrorism has been an unwise strategy. It has magnified any terrorists' influence, by helping them do their work of scaring the public; it has unified rather than divided potential adversaries; it has made it hard to think carefully about where and how the public can most effectively defend itself. At best it has not helped, and at worst it has impeded, the case-by-case surveillance and police effort through which British and now, apparently, Danish and German authorities have thwarted possible plots. (Recall that British officials went out of their way to avoid the term "global war on terror" when talking about their successes in penetrating potential terrorist groups.)

Here is the pop-fiction version of the same concept:

1) Daniel Silva, A Death in Vienna: As in many of Silva's books, the plot turns on the discovery of an elderly Nazi war criminal nestled in comfortable respectability in today's Western Europe. I am spoiling no surprises by saying that in this book, a crack Israeli team nabs the latest aged, hidden malefactor in Austria and is trying to smuggle him out of the country by car. Their nemesis, a (Nazi-sympathizer-at-heart) Austrian police official named Kruz, wonders how to stop them. Suddenly a brilliant idea pops into his mind:

Continue reading "When a theme starts showing up in pop fiction..." »

Throwing like a girl

The most fun I have had (so far) researching a magazine article was 11 years ago, for an Atlantic piece called "Throwing Like a Girl."

It was fun because, as the piece explains: I got to interview the actor John Goodman about how he learned to throw left-handed (to play Babe Ruth in the movie The Babe). I got to watch super slo-mo tapes of Major League pitchers with the sports-science whiz Vic Braden, at whose tennis camp I had previously had my own sporting form slo-mo analyzed (to great dismay). And I got to ask the press secretary to Hillary Clinton, then America's First Lady, where Mrs. Clinton had developed her throwing arm -- and why, ahem, she had unfortunately thrown out an Opening Day pitch at Wrigley Field "like a girl."

In the interests of science I also got to do something that I now recommend to every American male: play catch with your spouse, girlfriend, mother, or other female acquaintance who does not think of herself as having a good arm, using your "off" hand to throw. I explain in the article why this is a good thing to do.

This article has now been excavated from the Atlantic's for-pay archives and is available on a non-firewalled "Pursuits" page here. (Still -- subscribe! Right after you have that left-handed-if-you're-a-righty game of catch.)

1) Body directed straight-on toward the target, rather than turned 90 degrees away;

2) Elbow lower than shoulder as your arm comes forward;

3) Wrist inside elbow (closer to your head) as you release the ball and/or palm facing up, giving a pushing rather than hurling motion. Now you know.

Edward Seidensticker

While flipping through newspapers that had piled up through the last two weeks, I spot a small item just before turning the page*: Edward Seidensticker has died. Actuarially this cannot be a huge shock -- he was born in 1921 -- but it is a loss.

Seidensticker is usually described as one of the great translators of Japanese literature into English. That he certainly was. His translations of Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country and other books were generally credited with helping Kawabata become the first Japanese winner of the Nobel prize for literature. He also did important translations for the man who should have won the prize, Yukio Mishima, including the last volume of Mishima's unforgettable Sea of Fertility four-volume saga. (And, yes, the Tale of Genji and so on.)

I met Seidensticker half a dozen times for meals and drinks in Tokyo in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He was urbane, arch, ever-amused in a cosmopolitan way. That tone comes through in his under-appreciated nonfiction books about Japan itself -- histories of Tokyo like Low City, High City and Tokyo Rising, and an archness-incarnate book about living as a foreigner in Tokyo: This Country Japan.

Although he would be the last person to describe himself as typical of anything, he illustrated two larger trends. He learned Japanese to serve as a Marine Corps translator during World War II, part of an important generation of American scholars, businessmen, journalists, and diplomats who became Japanologists thanks to wartime experience. And, to be careful in phrasing a point he did not publicly discuss, after the war many Western homosexuals found the Japan of the Fifties and onward a more comfortable and attractive environment than their homelands at that time.

He was a talented, honorable, and accomplished man.
-

* This is something that never happens when you're reading newspapers strictly online. Yes, there are many other means of unexpected discovery on the internet, but they're different from the same process with actual newspapers. Subject for another day: why online access is indispensable but in some ways worse than what it is replacing.

Jean Mackenzie Fallows, September 3, 1927

My mother would be 80 years old today. These things should be noted.

In her 20s (minus our sister Katie, born a few years later)

-

In her 70s, at home in California.

Bush on disbanding the Iraqi military

There are so many things to scream about in this NY Times report of George W. Bush's view of his "legacy" that it is hard to know where to start. But I'll start with this, describing Bush's extended recent interviews with the author Robert Draper:

Mr. Bush acknowledged one major failing of the early occupation of Iraq when he said of disbanding the Saddam Hussein-era military, “The policy was to keep the army intact; didn’t happen.”

But when Mr. Draper pointed out that Mr. Bush’s former Iraq administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, had gone ahead and forced the army’s dissolution and then asked Mr. Bush how he reacted to that, Mr. Bush said, “Yeah, I can’t remember, I’m sure I said, ‘This is the policy, what happened?’ ” But, he added, “Again, Hadley’s got notes on all of this stuff,” referring to Stephen J. Hadley, his national security adviser.

Think about this. The dissolution of the Iraq military is one of the six most-criticized and most-often-discussed aspects of the Administration's entire approach to Iraq. (Others: the decision to invade at all; the assessment of WMD; the size of the initial invasion-and-occupation force; the decision not to stop the looting of Baghdad; and the operation of Abu Ghraib.) And the President who has staked the fortunes of his Administration, his party, his place in history, and (come to think of it ) his nation on the success of his Iraq policy cannot remember and even now cannot be bothered to find out how the decision was made.

Continue reading "Bush on disbanding the Iraqi military" »

Now this is just taunting

As mentioned earlier, Chinese authorities do not exactly exhaust themselves cracking down on pirate video and audio DVDs.

But now the pirates are getting cocky. Here is the screen that greeted me as I fired up the latest purchase from Even Better than Movie World in Shanghai (a music video of Chet Baker's final concert, with Elvis Costello and Van Morrison).

-

-

Bottom right hand corner of the screen, in case you missed it:

Tech update #3: last word on Vista...

... until something else comes up.

I am a fan of OfficeWatch, an Australian-based online journal that is a friendly-but-fearless critic of Microsoft's mainstay products. It's friendly because Office and related software are its bread and butter. It's fearless because that is why people read it and not just company brochures.

Its latest issue concentrates on a topic much on my mind recently: the mystifying slowness and incredible resource-hunger of Windows Vista. The article contends that an important cause is a design failure in Vista's new and heavily touted "instant search" feature. According to OW, this new Vista indexer does not "scale" well:

Continue reading "Tech update #3: last word on Vista..." »