99 days to go!

May Day, 2008, 10am, view out our window in downtown Beijing. Opening Ceremony for the Olympics now 99 days away. Getting excited!

Update: Reader Paul Camp makes the reasonable suggestion that, in any future photos, I should include the front page from that day's newspaper somewhere in the frame, in the fashion of a kidnap-ransom photo. This is to eliminate the suspicion that I am using the same bleak picture again and again.

"Stupidest policy ever" contest update

Thanks to all for many good entries in the search for the stupidest moment of bi-partisan policy in the last 50 years. The search was of course inspired by this moment's stupidest idea, the John McCain/Hillary Clinton support for a temporary gasoline tax "holiday" during the summer driving season.

Update points:

- Remember, the 50-year cutoff excludes some otherwise deserving suggestions, like Prohibition, or slavery.

- Most popular nominee so far is the mandate for Ethanol use plugged into last year's energy bill, just before the Iowa caucus. But also remember that, as with the Electoral College and the Democratic primary process, mere popularity does not ensure victory.

- Results tomorrow; still time to vote.

- And while I'm at it, what happened to the usually-skillful Don Gonyea of NPR, in his treatment of this question just now on All Things Considered??? He took the traditional "one side claims, the other side responds" approach -- as if there were any identifiable economist or energy expert, from any political camp, who thought that the "tax holiday" proposal made sense. Maybe he missed the previous night's All Things Considered broadcast, which contained a very good segment about the pointlessness of the plan? And he presented the whole issue as a matter of campaign tactics: the Hillary Clinton campaign had been hitting Obama hard with a crisp attack ad about his refusal to give American motorists "the help they need," while Obama had come back only with a woolier, more "complicated" reply about why the plan was mad. Yes, this episode shows us something about the two campaigns, but it's not mainly about their relative skill in attacking each other.

For the record: stupidest moment in policy ever?

Usually I see no reason to chime in on an issue that many other people have discussed. But, perhaps because I've just come back to China, I feel obliged to register a view for the record about destructive nuttiness in my homeland:

The pandering and ignorance-across-party-lines represented by the John McCain-Hillary Clinton united front for a temporary reduction in the gasoline tax should make Americans hold their heads in their hands and moan. No one who has thought about this issue thinks that it will actually reduce prices or -- more important -- help the the people disproportionately hurt by $100+/barrel oil and $4 gasoline. And to the extent it has any effect on America's long-term approach to energy policy, transportation, oil dependence, and climate change, the effect will be perverse.

I can imagine that John McCain, who boasts about his sketchy command of economics, might consider this a good idea. But the master of policy, Hillary Clinton??

Please. This is embarrassing. It makes me long for the good old days of debating about flag pins on the lapel. And I wonder: has there been bipartisan agreement to stupider effect in, say, the last fifty years? The US Senate's 88-2 vote in favor of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964 doesn't count: they didn't know what lay ahead. Hillary Clinton, at least, knows why what she is saying is wrong. I will pay for a year's subscription to the Atlantic for anyone who can come up with a more foolishly destructive bipartisan example.

Update: The 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force vote that paved the way for war in Iraq doesn't count either. That vote reflected terrible judgment, in my view, but not outright stupidity or, as with the current gas-tax charade, certain foreknowledge that the policy being recommended would do no good.

"Clippy" update -- now, with organizational anthropology!

As mentioned yesterday, my personal crusade during my 6-month spell as a Microsoft Word team member, waged from my stronghold in Building 17 on the main "campus" in Redmond, was an effort to get "Clippy" removed from Word and other programs.

There's an aspect to the struggle that suggests that big organizations anywhere share certain traits, whether their product is "national security" (the Pentagon), a "harmonious society" (the Chinese Communist Party), or "great software" (Microsoft). One such trait is the effort of people up and down a bureaucratic hierarchy to guess at what the boss would "really" like, and do that -- even if the boss has never said so, and even if it's might not be what the boss actually has in mind.

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The bright side #3: Reinforcements in the frog wars

Stumbling just now into my apartment in Beijing, some 24 hours after pre-dawn checkout from the airport hotel at LAX, I discover that my Atlantic colleague Jeffrey Goldberg has volunteered for the noblest of efforts. This is the long, twilight struggle to mock politicians, journalists, raconteurs, etc who repeat the stupid, cruel, hackneyed, and unscientific boiled-frog cliche, so that eventually people will stop saying it. I knew I'd find an ally some day.

We all pick our causes. During my brief and enjoyable stint at Microsoft long ago, I worked on various big-think projects. But my claim to have changed the world may rest on my all-out war against "Clippy," the moronic "help" feature that popped up to say "Hey, you seem to be writing a letter!" each time you typed "Dear ..." I don't want to overstate things, but before I arrived, Word came with Clippy turned on by default. Now it's turned off by default. Judge for yourself.

So may it someday be concerning the frogs, thanks to their new defender Mr. Goldberg. And I actually have frog news, which at some point after I get some sleep I may share.

Most important item in Sunday's NYT

This Sunday's New York Times -- fat, varied, making me wonder how I got anything done on the weekends in America when I routinely had all this to read -- had lots of interesting stuff in it. But the most important item was the op-ed by Elizabeth Edwards called "Bowling 1, Health Care 0."

It's one of the rare expressions in print of a sentiment anyone who has covered politics has heard expressed privately countless times. Or at least that I've heard repeatedly when interviewing politicians about how they do their work. This is the politician's frustration with the behavior of the campaign press -- but not for the obvious reason.

The obvious complaint, easily dismissed by reporters, is that press coverage is biased against or "too tough on" this or that candidate. Reporters tell themselves: Hey, we're tough on everybody. You're not strong enough to take it, maybe you should find a different line of work.

The more heartfelt and bitter complaint is about the way press coverage seems biased not against any particular candidate but against the entire process of politics, in the sense that politics includes the public effort to resolve difficult issues. (Medical care, climate change, banking crises, military priorities, etc.) For twenty years I have heard this from frustrated politicians -- Gary Hart, Newt Gingrich, Jimmy Carter, Dick Gephardt, Bill Clinton, they may not share a lot of views but they are as one in this frustration. What galls all of them is the way that the incentives created by most coverage bring out the very worst in most politicians, and discourage them from even bothering to try the harder, more "responsible" path. No one says that press incentives turn potential Abraham Lincolns into real-world Tom DeLays. But the incentives push in that direction rather than the reverse.

Active politicians rarely dare say this in public, since they know the same reporters and commentators will be there to talk about them tomorrow and the next day and from then on. For reasons personal (health) and political (husband out of the race), Elizabeth Edwards no longer has to hold anything back. After the jump, a sample of what she said:

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Looking on the bright side #2: Offline Google Docs

As a reminder: The big plus of cloud computing is that you can get to your information from any computer any place, as long as you have an internet connection. The big minus is that you can't do much of anything if you're not on the internet. For instance: I conduct most of my email life through a variety of Gmail accounts. But unless I download and store the messages on Outlook (or Thunderbird or Mac Mail or something else), I can't read or answer them when I'm on a plane, visiting an office building, or generally wondering how I will ever dig out of the email hole I have created for myself in a month away from the computer.

Six weeks ago, Google introduced one useful tool for dealing with this "what about when I'm offline?" problem. This was an unobtrusive, elegant, and so far (for me) bulletproof way of keeping an online Google Calendar synchronized with a calendar file in Microsoft Outlook. I find this surprisingly useful. I can enter -- or change, or delete -- a datebook item either at my "real" computer, when using Outlook, or on the Google calendar if I'm using someone else's machine, in full confidence that the changes will ripple through all versions of my calendar information. Including the version I can get from any mobile phone via SMS if i send a text message asking for details on the next place I'm supposed to go or number I'm supposed to call.

Over the last four weeks, Google has been slowly rolling out another tool that potentially can make cloud-computing more usable. This is the "Offline" version of Google Docs, which in turn relies on a utility called Google Gears.

It works this way:

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Looking on the bright side #1: SECDEF Gates

Issues have come and gone over this last month, and they'll have to enter history without my imprimatur. But I will try in the next while to work back through a few of them, using the "if you can't say something nice..." standard*. I intend to mention a few technological, political, and other developments that deserve more attention or praise than they seem to have received.

As a start: the two speeches early this week by the Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, about what he thinks is wrong with the culture of the professional military.

Gates starts out miles ahead simply by not being the man he replaced at the Pentagon, the odious Donald Rumsfeld. And even though Gates has implemented essentially the same Administration policy and administered the same gigantic budget that Rumsfeld left him, he has defended and explained his policies in ways suggesting that he has noticed, thought about, and attempted to address opposing views. This is in contrast to the haughty sneering-away of opposition so familiar from the Rumsfeld days.

In back-to-back speeches this Monday to the Air Force leadership at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama and then to the Army leadership at West Point, Gates revived what had always been the best part of Rumsfeld's approach in the Pentagon. This was a willingness to challenge the cautious, yes-man aspects of today's professional military culture. Rumsfeld gave all such questioning a bad name by his contemptuous disregard for professional military judgment in the runup to the Iraq war. But Gates still had a point -- and he made it in a surprising way.

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Two airplane-related items

1) My article from the May Atlantic, about Day Jet, is now up at the web site. Narrated slide-show available here. This is kind of a high-concept narration, in that what I'm talking about doesn't have all that much to do with the pictures displayed. But maybe you can look at the pictures with one half of your brain and listen to the words with the other.

2) Last month I mentioned that the first microbrewery in Redlands, California would soon open -- and right at the local small airport! Now I can attest first-hand that the Hangar 24 craft brewery is up and running and making very good Pale Ale and Orange Wheat Beer indeed. Its output is still mainly for restaurants or bars or a few local retailers, but on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday afternoons it offers on-site tours and tastings. Next events: Air Show/Beer fest on May 10; formal Grand Opening on May 31. I expect to miss them, but think of me if you attend.

The brew vats:

The beer taps, operated by Jessica Cook, wife of brewmaster Ben Cook:

Two rhetorical missteps by Team Obama....

.... in the Pittsburgh election-eve rally ongoing as I type:

1) Michelle Obama, comparing her husband to his crucial Pennsylvania supporter, Sen. Bob Casey. "They both have households full of bright, beautiful young girls." Fine; charming. "And they both married brilliant, accomplished, and beautiful women." What??? The husband says "I married up." The wife doesn't make that point.

2) Barack himself, talking about his new approach to politics, points out that he discussed energy efficiency in front of an auto-industry audience in Detroit, discussed progressive taxation in front of fat cats on Wall Street, and generally believed in telling truths the hard but honest way. I was waiting to hear how he'd work in "and I discussed the biases of small-town Pennsylvania losers before rich donors in the Bay Area." But he just kind of slid to a different topic. Probably wiser not to have started down this rhetorical road to begin with -- not in the Keystone State. (Addendum: not meaning to hype the importance of "bittergate" here, just saying this is a rare instance of Obama not addressing a "Hey, wait a minute" point that would be on many Pennsylvania listeners' minds.)

I blame the fatigue (a theme close to my heart these days). Get out the vote, Pennsylvanians! And let these candidates get some sleep.

My two home towns

Redlands, California (view out the window from my dad's house, orange groves across the street)

Beijing, China (view out the window from our apartment, just before I left)

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This horrible "debate"

As mentioned earlier, family concerns (my father) have trumped other concerns for quite a while. Among various consequences, and in the cosmic sense a trivial one, is the list of items building up that I am looking for a chance to weigh in on -- should that chance coincide with my being near an internet connection.

Future items range from U.S. policy toward the Beijing Olympics, to Windows Vista and Mac and Google news, to frog-related and air taxi-related developments, to other themes. Concerning a potential US boycott of part or all of the Olympics, I'm looking for the chance to explain why Jimmy Carter, GW Bush, and WJ Clinton are right on this issue, and John McCain, Barack Obama, and HR Clinton are wrong. Off-hand I can't think of any other controversial issue in which you can place Bush and Carter on the same side.

And some day I will at least look at the couple thousand emails now backed up in the system. Sorry if one of them is yours.

I want to use this moment at the computer to address the unspeakable ABC bear-baiting debate last night. I haven't read what anyone has said about this -- except for Tom Shales of the Washington Post. He said that what Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos did last night was "shoddy and despicable." I completely agree and add only these grace notes:

--- From the often-harrumphing Gibson, this is no big surprise. But from Stephanopoulos??? Who earlier in his career was a message/press/legislative man for Dick Gephardt and of course played a more visible version of that role during Bill Clinton's rise - what the hell is this????

I like and respect Stephanopoulos, and part of what I respect about him is the way he usually conducts his TV interviews. But I also remember dealing with him back in the early Clinton days, he in his role as campaign guy and me in my role as reporter. He understands thoroughly and in his bones what is wrong with the kind of mindless, substance-free gotcha questioning he and Gibson wasted their time on last night. I know he understands it because I've heard him shame journalists who were applying the same tactics to Bill Clinton back in the day. What was he thinking? What kind of pressure had been applied to him?

--- After the jump, a passage from my 1996 Atlantic article "Why Americans Hate the Media," itself excerpted from my book Breaking the News, which bears on exactly this kind of mindless "what about the flag pin?" haranguing. To summarize what this passage says: Political reporters think they are being "tough" when they take a borderline-impolite (or worse) tone and try to trap people in some provable if ultimately-meaningless contradiction. But while members of the electorate often find these gaffes diverting in a pro-wrestling sense, whenever they have their own chance to ask "tough" questions they ask the candidates about things that will affect the voters' lives. These are generally questions of war, peace, economics, etc. Again, George S. lived through the phenomenon the excerpt below describes, though he was on the other side. That he would now be in gotcha mode is depressing, to put it mildly.

--- Whatever else happens the next time we choose a president, there has got to be a better way to see candidates operate under pressure than the grotesque system that has metastasized during this electoral cycle. It makes candidates into mere props for bullying anchormen-narcissists. It does no one except the anchormen any good. I mentioned earlier the oddity of Jimmy Carter and GW Bush finding common cause about China policy. Maybe the RNC and the DNC can join hands in freeing political debate from the destructive grip of the networks. And if they can't do that, maybe we should just go all the way and have the candidates compete eating pails full of maggots on Fear Factor. That's the logical extension of where we're headed.

Article except after the jump. Then, again off line for a while.
________

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'Sexy Beijing' on American TV tonight (updated)

I will confess that I have never actually seen Sex and the City on American TV. (I know, that's a shocker.) In fact, we didn't have HBO in America, so we saw the Sopranos, Curb Your Enthusiasm, etc, via the video store. (And king of them all, The Wire, via pirate-video store in China.) But because I had never seen the Sex and the City opening credits, I didn't realize what Danwei.org's Sexy Beijing was making fun of.

Even so, I knew that it was very funny -- and the star Sufei, aka Anna Sophie Lowenberg, is all the more charming when you think of her playing off Sarah Jessica Parker. A sample is below (the subtitling is great). I mention it now because apparently an episode is going to be on the PBS show Global Watch on the night of April 9. Check it out.

Update: 1) I hear from Luke Mines of SexyBeijingTV that tonight's episode is "Beijing Caucus," in which Beijingers talk to the star, Sufei, about Hillary, Barack, Chuck Norris, and so on. Clip here on SBTV's site or here on YouTube. 2) I also hear that SBTV is no longer part of Danwei.org.
.

Hiatus update, and a China comment

Thanks to many people who wrote with kind inquiries about my terse "going offline" note of several days ago. I had meant merely to be private, rather than willfully cryptic. To be somewhat less cryptic but still discreet: for a while I am out of China and in California, with my father.

Let me mention only one point I would have mentioned earlier, if it hadn't happened just when I was scrambling to arrange a trip from Beijing to Los Angeles: the sentencing of Hu Jia to three and a half years in prison is serious and dismaying news.

Hu is best known for his work advancing the rights of people with AIDS and HIV in China. He was arrested early this year on charges of "inciting subversion of state power," because of quotes and articles on his blog and in foreign papers, and was convicted and sentenced a few days ago. Rob Gifford's book China Road, mentioned here earlier, includes some descriptions of Hu and his work. Except by the Chinese security services, he is widely admired and respected and considered a "reformer" rather than a rebel directly challenging the legitimacy of the Chinese regime.

Here is the one and only mention of his sentencing that I see in the China Daily, official voice of the government to the outside world. That is worth comparing with the statement from the U.S. State Department, hardly a source of rabble-rousing observations about China. Or with this, from Rebbeca MacKinnon. Or this posting by Simon Elegant, of Time. Elegant is writing about Tibet rather than Hu Jia, but he explains the perverse logic, which applies in both instances, by which internal Chinese repression and controls are very likely to be tightened just as the world turns its attention to the country for the Olympic Games, rather than relaxed -- as normal PR instincts would dictate and as the regime promised years ago when China was bidding for the Games. The paradox, as discussed earlier here and elsewhere, is that much of real, daily Chinese life is fairly free-wheeling and uncontrolled. But what the Chinese regime is showing is the most repressive side of its nature, at the time the world's attention is directed there.

Hu Jia's case is on a scale different from the events in Tibet, but in its way it is as disturbing.

With that, again going dark for a while.

Hiatus

For personal/family reasons, there may be no entries here for a while. Good wishes to all.

More on poverty and superpower status

Several people have written asking whether, in posting a quick note about the school girls of Ningxia who wore the same school uniform every day for three years, I meant that the modest circumstances of many average Chinese people proved that China posed no problems for the rest of the world.

Of course not, as I said at the time. To spell it out: countries can support powerful and threatening military establishments even if their overall economy is faltering (the old Soviet Union). They can create problems for the world even if they are extremely poor (North Korea). Sometimes economic dislocation itself can make aggression more likely (post-Weimar rise of the Nazis). Often the attempt to escape poverty can cause environmental disaster. And so on.

What I was trying to convey is how different, both intellectually and emotionally, the phenomenon of "China's unstoppable rise" looks if you're actually here seeing the people in the middle of the process, versus how it must sound if you just hear about it from afar.

(Young boy helping bring in the harvest, Gansu Province, last September)

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Just a little data point

I have been planning on making a quick trip to Russia, which for reasons unrelated to my comments here will not occur. But in preparing to apply for my visa at the Russian embassy in Beijing, I was just adjusting to the quite amazingly thorough visa form ("List every educational institution you have ever attended... Give name, supervisor, and supervisor's telephone number for everywhere you have worked for the last XX years...") when I encountered the real problem. US cash!

Depending on how quickly I needed the visa, the fee would be $150 (for five-day service) or $300 (same-day). But the fee had to be in cash, U.S. greenbacks, and not just any old dollars but "new bills with the watermark and large portrait." Hmmm.

Since I have about $28 in US cash with me in China, I was asking American friends for help ... when I recently learned that the policy has changed. No more Yankee dollars! Only Chinese RMB accepted -- no word on required newness. And at a punitive exchange rate too. (The rapidly-sinking dollar is worth just about 7 Chinese RMB now, so $300 would be 2100RMB. But the Russians are multiplying it at the rate that applied more than a year ago, 7.8 to 1. So the "$300" visa now costs 2340RMB, or about $334.)

Of course the exchange rate is not the issue. It's the "your money is no good here" aspect that I found interesting. Another round in the Bush-Putin war of nerves? Just a scheme to profit on exchange rate arbitrage? A sign of respect to their local Chinese hosts? Or maybe the Russians are reading the U.S. financial pages too?