James Fallows: February 2009 Archives

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Am in the boondocks where internet connection is either nonexistent or nearly so. (Essay topic for advanced students: The world is not as knit-together as people think. Discuss!) So I am the one politically-interested American who has heard about but not actually seen either Pres. Obama's State of the Union Address-manque or the now-legendary response by Gov. Bobby Jindal. Just another illustration of the stoicism of plucky foreign correspondent as they roam around to bring you the news! Storing up responses on all these fronts, plus others, for early next week.

Interesting little tool to use during tonight's speech

Speechwars.com, which lets you see how often presidents have used any given word in State of the Union addresses over the years. For instance, here are the varying uses of "freedom" and "liberty" since the earliest days:

Lots of surprising results available. For instance, here is China-v-India:

Try it for yourself to see how much is old and how much new in tonight's speech. (I'll be traveling while it happens so can't play along myself.) Hint: no S.O.U. address has yet contained the word "nationalization."

美国欢迎您!

Or, more simply, "America welcomes you!" The China Daily, beloved staple of my life in China these last few years, has just opened its US edition! Huzzah!

Where, in today's downcast news environment, are we going to find headlines like this except in the China Daily?

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To understand why I love this paper so much, see here, here, here, here, here, here, and passim. Or put down that copy of The Onion and see for yourself. Welcome!

Book Report

Books I've meant to mention individually, but which I'll never get to if I wait for time to do that. From the left in this first shot:

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Two Kinds of Time, by Graham Peck, introduction by Robert Kapp. Riveting and hilarious accounts of travels through WW II-era China by an American diplomat (and litterateur and artist), fascinating in their own right and all the more rewarding because of their resonance with the superficially-different China of 60+ years later.

Typhoon, by Charles Cumming, previously mentioned here and elsewhere. I now have a sense of why this conceivably might have been detained by Chinese authorities when I ordered it before. It is largely about a CIA plot to destabilize the Chinese regime by working with Muslim/Uighur nationalists in Xinjiang region. If you're looking for an action-and-romance driven spy novel, as opposed to one mainly about mood and psychology, check it out.

Beijing Coma, by the exiled Chinese writer Ma Jian. You want dark, about the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen? This will give you very, very dark. Hint: the coma in the title is not simply figurative.

Still on the China beat: Global Shanghai, by Jeffrey Wasserstrom, very interesting historical/ intellectual / cultural analysis of the ways my former home town has been perceived as both a Chinese and a non-Chinese city.

Finally, for Something Different: A Romance on Three Legs, by Katie Hafner. The author is a good friend, but even if she weren't I would find this a masterful demonstration of how to make a subject you didn't know you were interested in page-turning reading from beginning to end. The description of how the "action" of a piano actually works will stand as an example of how to explain complex processes lucidly.

Read up!

For the record, a review I'm very grateful for

In Blogcritics, by Xujun Eberlein, about Postcards from Tomorrow Square, a review whose first two or three paragraphs capture what I've been trying to do. I know it's not seemly to point out one's own good reviews, but this one meant a lot to me and I note it for the record. (Reprinted in China Beat here.) In the same vein, gratitude to Fareed Zakaria for a generous mention of the book on yesterday's GPS show.

And while I'm at it, I'll be doing appearances for the book at the Shanghai Literary Festival on March 7 and 8 and the Beijing Literary Festival on March 19.

Ok, I've got this out of my system now. Back to the F-22 etc.

F-22 fiesta

A few days ago I said that I greatly enjoyed my colleague Mark Bowden's article about fighter aces but disagreed with his implication that the F-22 was the way to go for the Air Force or the country.

I have heard from many readers since then -- a few supporting the F-22, most against it. I'll start here with one representative "pro" comment. After the jump, a number of the meatier anti-F-22 arguments.

To be clear about a potentially awkward intramural point: although I disagree with Mark's conclusion, I am, as I said the first time, grateful for his engrossing article itself and for the opportunity it's created to air a range of opinion about a very important upcoming choice. He also has been extremely (and typically) mensch-like about the debate that his piece has inspired.
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Pro comment -- rather, anti-anti -- from someone whose email address identifies him as an employee of a major defense contractor:

Excuse me, but you seem to be caught up in the propaganda of the F-15 mafia. The F-15 mafia and others have successfully reduced the numbers of F-22 production to the point where economies of scale are no longer possible.* Unfortunately, those who really know the issues and the data, are not going to engage in a debate, because the result is to trash our country and our capability. Because of freedom of speech, you are allowed too participate in a debate that has not helped our country. No complex aircraft is without problems, but maintainers have never had an aircraft which provided so much capability on day one...

The per unit cost isn't even the whole picture, the total life cycle cost is. And cost is relative. Do you have the numbers for all alternatives? Anyway, you don't have the numbers, no one in the unclassifed media does.

* A major "anti" argument, as originally laid out by Chuck Spinney in 1991, was of course that economies of scale would never have been possible for this airplane, because the cost estimates used for the initial "buy-in" were implausibly low.

More after the jump:
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Continue reading "F-22 fiesta" »

Chinese viewers' guide to the Oscars! (updated)

In my earlier report, I should have noted that it's for the benefit of the billion-strong local viewership that the Chinese broadcast of the Academy Awards is being tape-delayed some 12 hours, until airtime 10:30 tonight on CCTV-6. Bigger home audience than if it were shown live during the working day! And, of course, it takes a little while to add the Chinese subtitles and... how do we put this ... to harmonize* the program for domestic tastes.

It would be unfair and surprise-spoiling to use my crystal ball (aka The Internets) to predict the Best Actor-etc winners. But I confidently make this prediction about harmonization:

In the version of the Oscars shown in the US a few hours ago, Steven Spielberg got a lot of face time announcing the nominees and winners in the Best Picture category. This is the same Spielberg who one year ago very publicly backed out of planning the opening ceremony for the Beijing Olympics, in protest of China's policies in Darfur. ("I find that my conscience will not allow me to continue business as usual.") The eventual opening ceremony, under China's own Zhang Yimou, hardly lacked in spectacle -- but people here remember! My prediction: whatever CGI magic can be applied to make a presenter disappear from a presentation ceremony will be employed on Mr. Spielberg. This gives me an excuse to stay up tonight and find out if I am right.

(From Reuters: the face they won't see)

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* "Harmonization" = in local lingo, closing down or censoring web sites, publications, or broadcasts to avoid the spread of unwelcome views. Especially important for Oscar ceremonies, because who knows what these crazy Hollywood people will say.

Update: I'll never know. Wasn't at a place that had CCTV-6 during the show.
Update #2: According to Nathan Jackson of Shanghai,

My wife and I watched the Oscars on CCTV6 last night and Spielberg indeed had his entire appearance cut. You can hear his voice for about 1 second, but the whole introduction of nominees is very crudely cut out of the show. Sean Penn also had a few cuts to his speech

Even more on US-China climate cooperation

It can seem odd when something you've been expecting for years actually starts to occur.* Since practically the first discussion I had in China in mid-2006, I've been hearing that the US and China "had to" or "would soon" work together to deal with energy/environment issues, given that they are now the two most-polluting countries in the world. With the change of Administration in the US, it does indeed seem to be happening. At least, talk about it is happening -- including from Hillary Clinton, on her visit here this weekend -- with specifics on what the countries should do next.

(Subtle reminder of why this would be useful: a recent view of Beijing:)

I've previously mentioned the Asia Society/Pew and Brookings proposals for US-Chinese cooperation. Here is another one, from the National Resources Defense Council, which has been doing environmental work in and with China for a long time. As a bonus, here is the summary of its 9-point action plan:

1. Engage in serious bilateral meetings on climate change and address the key sticking
points to reaching meaningful agreement in Copenhagen in December 2009
2. Establish a US-China forum on climate change strategies that promote green jobs and
economic recovery
3. Mobilize the untapped potential of energy efficiency
4. Assist in the deployment of renewable energy sources and technologies
5. Promote low-carbon, high-efficiency vehicles, fuels, transportation systems, and
community development
6. Expand research and investment on carbon capture and storage technology
7. Improve greenhouse gas emissions monitoring and data transparency
8. Conduct co-benefit analysis on GHG [Greenhouse Gas] emissions controls
9. Invest in regular exchanges and sharing of expertise to improve enforcement of
environmental law and energy efficiency standards.

The full report spells out steps toward each of these goals. Like the others, worth reading and putting into action sometime soon.
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* And I'm not even talking about the long-predicted current financial meltdown.

If they really want the Oscars to have a bigger audience....

... maybe they could work out a way to have them carried here in China, where there are a whole bunch of CCTV networks available and a lot of potential eyeballs. Just a thought.*

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* Yes, yes, I know there are a lot of doughy issues involved here, from Hollywood's grudge about the ubiquity of pirate videos in China to the ridiculously starchy Chinese policy of allowing only a handful of foreign films to be shown in legit movie houses here. For another time. Right now I'm just pouting about finding yet another anti-Japanese historical drama, plus another inter-city Chinese soccer game, on the government networks rather than getting to see Jerry Lewis and whomever else I'm missing on-screen. (And, yes, I am being catty about Jerry Lewis, but there are a lot of the other folk I'd actually like to see. Ah, the sacrifices of foreign-correspondentry.)
By the way, CCTV = "China Central TV," not closed-circuit TV.
UPDATE: And of course I'm pouting because last year I was actually on the Oscar show, and now....
I'm still big. It's the Oscars that got small.
Update 2: I should have specified "carry them live." Readers have helpfully pointed out that they'll be on later tonight on CCTV6! Never mind, I am just pouting.

Two tech followups: Real Alternative, HerdictWeb (updated)

Working through the lists of things I've meant to get to for a while:

1) Last month I mentioned a BBC interview with my friend Liam Casey, "Mr China" from Shenzhen, which unfortunately could be heard only with Real Player. That is unfortunate because the installation routine for Real Player is so aggressive that it can easily load your computer with ads and all kinds of other junk you don't want.

Many people wrote in to ask why I wasn't instead using Real Alternative, a free browser plug-in that plays files that have standard Real Audio formats. (.ra, .rpm, and others -- details and download links here). The reason I wasn't using it is that I didn't know about it. Now I use it and like it. According to the site-meter, Real Alternative has been downloaded more than 21 million times, so if there were some major problem we presumably would have heard. I'm sorry that Real Player has become so obnoxious to use, but this is a great... alternative. Another download site here.

2) Two months ago, I suddenly found that I couldn't reach the main New York Times web site from my apartment in Beijing. Was it some problem with my computer or router? With the ever-shaky local ISP? Some transitory problem in Beijing? With the Times site itself? Part of the genius of Chinese internet control, as I have pointed out countless times starting with this article, is its haziness. You don't run into notices saying "The site has been censored." Connections just time out, and you're never sure why.

In that case, I asked readers in mainland China if they too were having trouble getting to the NYT. Enough people wrote in from enough corners of the country to suggest it was affecting people from Xinjiang to Guangdong (like "from Seattle to Miami") all at the same time. A few days later, the problem cleared up everywhere in China all at once.

Now a group from Harvard's Berkman Center has put together an ingenious and systematic way to collect real-time info on where and how web sites are being blocked around the world. The tool is called HerdictWeb, an (unattractive-sounding, IMHO) compound of "Herd" and "Verdict." Via a main web site or a browser plug-in, it allows users around the world to send in quick, easy reports of any web site they can't reach. Then, if it works as planned, it will agglomerate those into a "crowdsourced" dashboard of web accessibility worldwide. Here's how the (groan) "herdometer" looks now:

The site has gone up only recently and few people are using it. As far as I can tell, ~~no one but~~ only one person other than me has yet weighed in from China. (Hint: I'm not the one reporting the blockage of sex.com) But if it becomes popular and can handle large-scale traffic, this could be interesting and useful.
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UPDATE: I finally realized why the name "Herdict" bothers me. Two reasons. First, no one really likes to be thought of as part of a "herd." A crowd, maybe (as in "crowdsourcing.") Even a throng or a mob. But a herd? Second, the logo for the site includes pictures of sheep but none of cows. Cows make a herd; a group of sheep is a flock. FWIW.

Interesting Tom Geoghegan interview re single-payer health care

For reasons explained several times in the past six weeks (here, here, and here), I really hope my long-time friend Tom Geoghegan can win next month's special election for the Congressional seat from the Fifth District of Illinois. This is no slight on any of the other candidates in the race. I know very little about them or the politics of the district. But I know enough about Geoghegan, based on decades of friendship starting when we were teenagers, to be 100% sure that he would bring an unusual level of honesty, intelligence, humor, and again honesty to national politics. I am saying honesty twice because I mean both the personal-probity and the plain-speaking variety.

Anecdote I just remembered: the first time I heard the name "Barack Obama" was from Geoghegan. He was visiting our house in Washington in the early 2000s, after Obama had made it into the Illinois State Senate and then lost his 2000 race for Congress against Bobby Rush, and before (I think) Obama's anti-Iraq-war speech of late 2002. "Watch this guy," Tom told my wife and me. He knew Obama from labor-organizing work on the South Side, since Geoghegan had spent much of his career representing dislocated workers in that area. "He can be our Lincoln." I thought: Yeah, yeah.

Now, back to Tom Geoghegan's honesty: His recent half-hour TV interview with Jeff Berkowitz, available on Geoghegan's campaign web site here and shown below, is a good illustration. You don't want to miss the host's unintentionally campy welcome to the program, 56 seconds into the clip. "Berkowitz is my name. Politics is our game." But the part worth studying is from 2:15 through about minute 10, when Geoghegan unashamedly argues in favor of a single-payer health coverage plan. And after that, he argues with similar directness for "soak the rich" progressive income-tax rates and nationalizing the failed banks -- or "the Greenspan plan," as we now know it.

If I were on Geoghegan's policy team, I'd be suggesting that when making the case for single-payer, he spend less time talking about Europeans and more talking about the success of VA hospitals in the US. (Phillip Longman's classic article on the VA as health-care model is here, and subsequent book here. For another time, my own recent experience with an extremely top-of-the-the-line doctor who told me how much simpler his practice would be if he could handle all his patients with the minimum of paperwork, bureaucracy, and insurance-driven hassle of his practice at the VA.) Still, it's impressive to watch a politician clearly explain why it would be cheaper and better to get rid of the massive insurance-company bureaucracy.

So whether you're interested in Chicago politics, health-care policy, or the process of making "daring" points on TV, this interview has its rewards. More about this interview, plus general campaign info, from one of Geoghegan's neighbors and supporters at the GSpot blog, here.

More on China-US climate issues, more on F-22

- About China and the US cooperating on environmental/climate issues:

Yesterday I mentioned this detailed and valuable report from the Asia Society and Pew. It turns out that Brookings has just done something similar. Summary here, with links to PDF versions in both English and Chinese. Transcript of event unveiling the report here. I haven't studied the report carefully, but anything in this vein has to be a plus.

- About Mark Bowden and the F-22:

Yesterday I said that I enjoyed Mark Bowden's current article but disagreed with its implied endorsement of the F-22 fighter plane. It turns out that Sam Roggeveen, of the Lowy Institute's "The Interpreter" site in Sydney, has already taken up this topic and gotten a reply from Mark. Roggeveen's initial critique here; Mark Bowden's response here. I should note that, like Roggeveen, I did a double-take at the sentence in the original article saying that at least five other countries were now flying planes that matched or bettered the F-15. For context on that point, it's worth looking here. Also, this Reuters story from three months ago talks about the real-world difficulties in maintaining the "stealth" systems for radar-evasion that are supposed to be one of the F-22's main virtues.

Let a thousand flowers bloom, Atlantic-style (F-22 dept)

My Atlantic colleague Mark Bowden has produced another of his riveting narratives in the new issue of the magazine. His article is about the former US Air Force fighter pilot who is among the last to have encountered -- and beaten -- enemy airplanes in action. As Bowden points out, American pilots rarely have a chance to demonstrate their prowess any more, because no one is crazy enough to challenge them.

As a narrative and portrait of fascinating characters, this story is great. But for the record, I disagree with its implication that if the US doesn't build more F-22 fighter planes, it will pay the price in pilots' blood. Mark's case for the plane is more sophisticated than what the Air Force has typically claimed. His story doesn't say that if we don't build the F-22 we can't defend the nation. He says it's a choice between paying the price for defense in money -- or in pilots' lives.

Perhaps. I'm glad Mark wrote the story, because what to do about the F-22 is one of the next big defense decisions the Obama Administration must make. But as you consider his argument, you might also consider some of the material below, which offers other ways to think about the trade-offs this airplane represents.

Extra reading possibilities:

- In "Uncle Sam Buys an Airplane," in the Atlantic in 2002, I described the genesis of the "Joint Strike Fighter," now known as the F-35. Its whole rationale was the fear that the F-22 would become so expensive that the U.S. would never be able to buy and field more than a tiny force. The F-35 has had problems of its own since then, and the contract officer at the center of my story has since been jailed for corruption on an unrelated matter, but the economic questions remain. (Excerpt after the jump.)

- In "F-22, Fact vs Fiction," published in 2000, the fighter pilot and aircraft designer Everest Riccioni assessed the F-22's abilities relative to the F-15's and other planes and argued that in the real circumstances of air combat, it would offer few advantages to pilots that would justify its costs -- and that the excessive cost of the airplane jeopardized pilots, since it meant too small a fighting force. The link above opens his paper as a Word document.

- In "Three Reasons Why the ATF Should Not be Approved for Engineering and Manufacturing Development," an internal Pentagon paper written in 1991, the defense analyst Chuck Spinney warned that the F-22 (then called the ATF) would inevitably become too expensive to buy in adequate numbers and would therefore leave the Air Force in a weakened situation. Most of the problems he foresaw have in fact materialized.

- in "Preying on the Taxpayer," published in 2006, the Project on Government Oversight analyzed budgetary and performance questions about the F-22.

- In the new book "America's Defense Meltdown" (described here, no longer available for free download but in bookstores shortly -- and ready now for Kindle) Pierre M. Sprey and Robert Dilger argue that the US could best guarantee air superiority by canceling further F-22 purchases and instead choosing a radically less expensive alternative, which they describe in detail. Excerpts after the jump.

- And just as a bonus, if you've ever wondered what it is like to sit in an F-15 during an hour-long aerial combat drill, well, wonder no longer.

Please do read Mark Bowden's article, which you'll enjoy. Read these others too. Discuss and decide. That's why we're here!

UPDATE: Please see followup posts here and here.
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Continue reading "Let a thousand flowers bloom, Atlantic-style (F-22 dept)" »

One more possibility in the Buffalo crash: "tailplane stall"

Let me start with the same caution as in yesterday's item about this sad incident: it can take months or years to get the full explanation of an airplane crash, sometimes the real answer is never known, and any hypotheses now are tentative.

So my purpose yesterday was not to say definitively what had happened in the crash but instead simply to explain what a "stall" means in aviation, since the implications are so different from the normal sense of that term. And my purpose now is to explain the possibly complicating factor of a "tailplane stall," which is emerging in recent stories about the incident.

The "horizontal stabilizer," or tailplane, is the flat part of an airplane's empennage, or tail. (If this is not clear, check the NASA diagram here.) Like the wings of an airplane, the horizontal stabilizer is an aerodynamic surface, which provides lift. In essence, it is a wing mounted upside down. The curved, airfoil surface is on the bottom of the horizontal stabilizer, not the top as with a wing. The "lift" it provides is downward -- the purpose of which is to raise the nose of the plane. You can think of this like a see-saw: downward pressure at the back of the plane pushes the nose upward. This is necessary for reasons I won't get into, having to do with the center-of-gravity and center-of-lift of most airplanes.

When an airplane stalls, it is usually because the wings, which lift the aircraft as a whole, can no longer do so (as explained yesterday). This is a "wing stall," and when it happens the airplane stops flying and starts falling to the ground.

In an "tailplane stall," the upside-down wing at the back of the airplane can no longer do its job of "lifting" the tail down and thereby pulling the nose up. This usually happens because the tail becomes covered with ice. When it does, the airplane's nose suddenly pitches down. The airplane is still flying (since the wings still work) but is heading for the ground. This 23-minute video produced by NASA does a superb job of explaining the theory and practicalities of the problem. Also, it's a nice sample of the tone and approach of a lot of aviation-training material. (Other discussion of the video here and here.)

Here's why this matters. The WSJ report mentioned yesterday says that in the Buffalo flight's final seconds, the air crew pulled the plane's nose up as hard as they could. In "normal" stalling situations, this is exactly and catastrophically the wrong thing to do -- as every pilot knows through repetitive training. But in a tailplane stall, as the NASA video shows, pulling up is the right first thing to do. So if the pilots thought they were facing a tailplane stall, they could have -- mistakenly -- reacted in a way that made a normal, wing stall worse.

Other reports (including yesterday's in the NYT) suggest that tailplane icing is not normally a problem in the plane involved in this crash, a Dash-8, but that it is more common in the model in which the pilot had previously flown, a Saab 340. If this is true, it might suggest why the crew (may have) reacted in the wrong way for these circumstances. But here we enter the realm of speculation, subject to the caveats with which I began. It is a tragedy, which stalls in some form will probably help explain.

The US, China, and saving the world

Anyone who has looked seriously into China's environmental and energy-use emergencies ends up thinking, saying, or merely hoping that the US and China will work together urgently on these fronts. That would be good for China because it needs all the help it can get to avoid poisoning its own people. It would be good for America and everyone else because China's approach to carbon-emissions control will largely determine whether the world has any chance of dealing with climate problems.

Or to put things in a cheerier way, precisely because so many Chinese farms, factories, power plants, and buildings are now so inefficiently run*, there are more opportunities to make big environmental improvements here than practically anywhere else. (My contribution to this school of thought in this article.)

Everybody understands this point in the abstract. Now there's a useful new guide to what it might mean in very particular detail. For many months a scientific/technical task force run jointly by the Asia Society's Center on the US-China Relations and the Pew Center on Global Climate Change has worked on specific recommendations, which were unveiled last week. Press release is here; overview here; PDF of the report in English here; in Chinese here. Introductory video, with overview rather than specifics, below.

Promising Kremlinology note: the co-chair of the project was Steven Chu, who stepped down from that role only because he had been nominated (and now confirmed) as the new US Secretary of Energy. The report is very much worth checking out -- and, in my view, worth supporting and implementing.

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* Chinese farms and factories "inefficient"? Yes, very much so -- as I explain at length in my Atlantic article. Their output is often inexpensive, mainly because Chinese labor rates have been so cheap. But, as is typical for developing countries, they tend to be wasteful in their use of energy and other inputs. Chinese office buildings take much more energy to heat and cool than Western ones, because the insulation is so poor. Farmers often use more water and chemicals per bushel of yield than in advanced countries. Out-of-date Chinese factories use more fuel and create more pollution per unit of output than in Europe, Japan, or the US. This profligacy helps explains why the air is so murky in China, but it also illustrates the opportunity for big, relatively easy gains through efficiency here.

Alison Des Forges

Every person who died in the Buffalo airplane crash leaves behind grieving friends and family. I was saddened to learn of the loss of one person whom I knew only by reputation: Alison Des Forges, of Human Rights Watch, who had been a leading international figure in calling attention to the Rwandan genocide. This is old news to the world, but I learned it just now.

In 2001, the Atlantic ran Samantha Power's "Bystanders to Genocide." This passage describes Des Forges's reaction when she heard about the event in 1994 that touched off slaughter in Rwanda: the death of president Juvenal Habyarimana in, as it happens, an airplane crash:

America's best-informed Rwanda observer was not a government official but a private citizen, Alison Des Forges, a historian and a board member of Human Rights Watch, who lived in Buffalo, New York. Des Forges had been visiting Rwanda since 1963. She had received a Ph.D. from Yale in African history, specializing in Rwanda, and she could speak the Rwandan language, Kinyarwanda. Half an hour after the plane crash Des Forges got a phone call from a close friend in Kigali, the human-rights activist Monique Mujawamariya. Des Forges had been worried about Mujawamariya for weeks, because the Hutu extremist radio station, Radio Mille Collines, had branded her "a bad patriot who deserves to die." Mujawamariya had sent Human Rights Watch a chilling warning a week earlier: "For the last two weeks, all of Kigali has lived under the threat of an instantaneous, carefully prepared operation to eliminate all those who give trouble to President Habyarimana."
Now Habyarimana was dead, and Mujawamariya knew instantly that the hard-line Hutu would use the crash as a pretext to begin mass killing. "This is it," she told Des Forges on the phone. For the next twenty-four hours Des Forges called her friend's home every half hour. With each conversation Des Forges could hear the gunfire grow louder as the militia drew closer. Finally the gunmen entered Mujawamariya's home. "I don't want you to hear this," Mujawamariya said softly. "Take care of my children." She hung up the phone.

The significance of new WSJ info about the Buffalo crash

In yesterday's Wall Street Journal, J. Lynn Lunsford and Andy Pasztor reported that investigators looking into the Colgan commuter-plane crash in Buffalo were beginning to think that the pilots' handling of the situation, rather than the intrinsic perils of "airframe icing" conditions, may have been the immediate cause of the tragedy. (Previously here; also, valuable posts here by Miles O'Brien and here by Patrick "Ask the Pilot" Smith of Salon.) The WSJ article, titled "Pilot Action May Have Led to Crash," quoted unnamed "people familiar with the situation" to this effect:

The commuter plane slowed to an unsafe speed as it approached the airport, causing an automatic stall warning, these people said. The pilot pulled back sharply on the plane's controls and added power instead of following the proper procedure of pushing forward to lower the plane's nose to regain speed, they said. He held the controls there, locking the airplane into a deadly stall, they added.

With all the usual caveats -- that it can take months or years to find out the real cause of airplane disasters, that sometimes the real cause is never known, that these unnamed sources might prove to be wrong, etc -- here is why this information could be significant. What follows is an Aerodynamics 101 explanation that would be obvious to people in the flying world but perhaps not so evident to the general reading public:

"Stall" is a very important word in aviation, but it means something entirely different from what most readers (or passengers) would assume. It has nothing to do with the operation of the power plant. That is, an airplane stall has nothing in common with an automotive stall. A car stalls when something goes wrong with the engine. An airplane stalls when something goes wrong with the flow of air over the wings. When birds flew into both engines of a USAir jet last month, the engines lost power and stopped -- but the airplane didn't "stall."

The crucial point about aerodynamic stalls is that they occur when the wing's "angle of attack" into the air is too high. That is, the wing is angled so sharply into the oncoming wind that the air can no longer flow smoothly over the wing's top surface to generate lift. When the wings stop generating lift, the airplane becomes dead weight and falls right out of the sky.* A Wikipedia primer on the whole topic is here; a passage on "How a Wing is Flown" from Wolfgang Langewiesche's unsurpassed 1944 classic on airmanship, Stick and Rudder, can be found here, via Google Books. (Yes, Wolfgang L. was the father of William Langewiesche, now of Vanity Fair but for many years my Atlantic colleague and flying mentor.)

For the pilot of any airplane, large or small, the practical implications of a stall center on whether you are pulling the airplane's nose up (by pulling the control wheel or stick backwards, toward your body) or pushing the nose down (by pushing the stick forward, away from you). Everyone who has ever flown an airplane has gone through stall-recovery drills. These involve climbing to a safe altitude; pulling the stick back more and more until you raise the nose so high and make the angle of attack so great that the airplane stalls and begins falling toward the earth; and then immediately pushing the stick forward as the very first step in getting the airplane under control and flying again.

There are other parts of the recovery process, but "nose down," which means stick forward, is something you drill so many times that it's meant to become 100% reflexive. It is mildly unnatural -- when the plane is falling, the first thing you do is make sure the nose is pointing down -- but it is the only way to reduce the angle of attack, allow air to flow over the wings again, and turn what is a plummeting brick back into a flying machine. Think of the comparison with the "turn into the skid" advice that drivers get for handling a problem on icy roads. Everyone has heard this in driver's ed; a significant number of people have experienced it; virtually no one ever practices it. Even amateur pilots have practiced stall-recovery drills, starting with the all-important "nose down" step, many many times. The point is to make "nose down" second nature.

So if these reports stand up over time, and if the evidence ultimately shows that whoever was controlling the plane reacted in exactly the wrong way, it will be the rare case of a professional air crew, out of panic or for whatever reason, forgetting an elementary procedure that they certainly knew. After the USAir water-landing in the Hudson, many people observed that the casualty-free outcome was both an individual and a collective achievement. Individually, the air crew (pilot, copilot, attendants) reacted with supreme competence. Collectively, everyone involved did exactly what they had been trained to do. If what the WSJ says turns out to be what really happened, the Colgan-Buffalo crash will be a startling case of individual failure, which in turn will raise questions of how a professional air crew could have reacted this way.
_____
* This Wikipedia graph gives an idea of how a stall develops -- and how it feels, when you're deliberately stalling an airplane in training drills.

As the angle of attack increases, the lift provided by the wings increases too. That is, as you pull the stick back, raising the nose of the plane and increasing the wings' angle of attack into the air, the airplane climbs. The further you pull the stick back, the greater the lift and the steeper the ascent -- up to a point.
For the airfoil charted here, that point is an angle of attack of about 18 degrees. Beyond that critical stall angle, if you pull back further on the stick, the wind no longer flows smoothly over the wings. They suddenly stop developing lift, and the airplane simply falls. I've done that many times in training. Apparently in Buffalo it happened for real.

Update: After posting this, I saw an item from the WSJ's Scott McCartney making a similar point about the contrast between the airmanship on display in the USAir and Colgan episodes.

Winter wonderland Beijing

Back "home" after quite a long trip away. The city has a new look for our arrival. 北京欢迎我们! * Many backed-up items to touch on in the next day or so.

____

* "Beijing welcomes us!" Anyone who has been within 500 miles of the city during the past Olympic year has heard the song and slogan 北京欢迎你, Beijing huanying ni, "Beijing welcomes you." YouTube video of the official welcoming song here. The ever-so-familiar signature refrain begins about 1:15 into this 6:50 video, presented initially with the song stylings of Jackie Chan. The whole thing is actually worth watching as a time capsule of the super-confident, everything's-great atmosphere that prevailed here only six months ago. Yes, this is a government happy-talk presentation but at the time it didn't seem so distant from the general public mood.

A proud father notes, #2

Lizzy Bennett, Tom Fallows:

15BENNETT.190.jpg

Married yesterday, February 15, 2009, Kamalame Cay, the Bahamas.

Previously in the "Proud Father" series: Annie Kaufman and Tad Fallows. This has been, ups and downs, an eventful year.

The happy couple is heading off on a honeymoon. The bedraggled parents of the groom leaving at 4am for the Miami-Chicago-Beijing long haul, and return to "normal" lfe.

On the Buffalo airplane crash

For connectivity reasons, I am not in a position to write much about this tragedy. Thanks to this comprehensive post by Miles O'Brien, there's no need to. The analysis laid out here seems very, very convincing -- and does an artful job of balancing the necessary "it's too soon to be sure" caveats with the compelling "evidence strongly points in one direction" argument.

Many people know O'Brien from his CNN reports; though I don't know him personally, I think of him as a fellow Cirrus pilot -- he flies the same kind of small airplane I used to back in the US. Very much worth reading.

(Thanks to Jay Brodsky.)

Further points on McCaughey

Following this post earlier today:

1) It turns out that the Senate Finance Committee has put out a set of FAQs addressing some of the problems E. McCaughey "discovered" in the fine print of the deal. It specifically knocks down the central Big Brother claim McCaughey makes -- namely, that federal health bureaucrats will use new electronic records to monitor your doctor's decisions about your care, and then penalize any doctors who deviate from federally-defined standard practice. The FAQ says:

Q: Will the health IT director have any influence on the decisions doctors and patients can make together about tests and treatment?
A: Absolutely not. This position's function is to make sure that doctors and other health care providers use good, secure technologies as they change their record-keeping systems from paper to computers.

And

Actually, the Office of the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology is not even new. President George W. Bush created the office by Executive Order a number of years ago. The bill simply codifies the office and gives it a specific job.

There are a bunch more, all in "absolutely not" or "actually" spirit. In fairness to McCaughey, she couldn't have seen this FAQ before she wrote. It came out on Tuesday of this week, after her column on Monday. But it makes you wonder: Did she bother to call anyone to check out her claims and inferences? Did she consult anything apart from her own imagination?

2) As numerous readers have written in to remind me, there is an in-house Atlantic angle to all of this. My current Atlantic colleague Andrew Sullivan was the editor of The New Republic in 1994, when the original McCaughey story came out. I like Andrew very much personally; I am very glad he's on the Atlantic team; I agree with him on most issues and disagree on some, including whether this article should ever have been published. Notwithstanding all or any of that, my beef here is with McCaughey, not with him.

I understand enough about both the editor's and the writer's role to understand that at a certain point, an editor has to trust the writer's basic honesty and operational competence. Good magazines have good fact-checking departments -- and our magazine has a great one. But you can't "check" a reporter's basic honesty. There is a difference between re-confirming facts to be sure the writer didn't miss something and having to treat a reporter like a defendant, whose every motive, claim, and observation is subject to doubt. When a publication -- or any organization -- gets into that position, as the New Republic eventually did with Stephen Glass, the normal precautions do no good. To put it differently, the 10% of an article you can check rests on faith that the other 90% you can't check, starting with the author's claim to be reading evidence honestly, is also true. If that faith is misplaced, you can easily get burned.

So: this is explicitly not an invitation to revisit the merits of publishing the original article 15 years ago. My complaint is with people who would believe or repeat similar claims from the same source (McCaughey) now.

Also: I see now that Rick Ungar, of Culture11.com, put out a line-by-line demolition of McCaughey's claims immediately after her column ran, here.

Thanks also to Neil Mackenzie for a lead. (And, for the final awkwardly-timed installment of my family-duties saga of recent weeks, I am about to leave internet range for another four days. At least this final duty is a pleasant one; next posting here likely to be in the wedding-announcement category.)

Let's stop this before it goes any further

The award for "Most destructive effect on public discourse by a single person" for the 2000s, so far, goes to Dick "no doubt" Cheney. ("Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." Cheney, speech to national VFW Convention, August 26, 2002. Of course, this is a career-achievement award, not limited to this one event.)

My nominee for the winner in the 1990s would be Elizabeth "Betsy" McCaughey. At various stages in her career she has been a banker, a Republican politician, and a staffer at conservative think tanks, but she entered the public stage in the mid-1990s in the guise of a dispassionate, independent researcher who considered it her duty to inform the American public about the dire threats it faced. Come to think of it, that is more or less the guise Cheney took in warning about the threat from Iraq.

In McCaughey's case, the equivalent of weapons of mass destruction was the original Clinton Health Reform plan. In 1994 she wrote a cover story in the New Republic "revealing" a number of hidden dangers in the Clinton plan that less careful analysts had somehow missed. Unfortunately for McCaughey, most of what she wrote was false. Unfortunately for the Clintons, most of what she claimed was echoed uncritically and became part of the conventional wisdom of why the bill couldn't pass.

After the jump, a passage from my 1995 Atlantic article "A Triumph of Misinformation" about McCaughey's article and its effects. More on this topic in my 1996 book Breaking the News -- and especially about why sloppy press coverage did as much to thwart health-care reform under the Clintons as it did to bring on the Iraq war under Cheney and Bush.

Why bring this up now? Because McCaughey has sprung up again to "reveal" another hidden danger in another Democratic administration's plans. Buried inside the new stimulus bill, she has discovered, are new big-brother tactics similar to those she warned against years ago. In a recent Bloomberg.com opinion column she wrote:

One new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective....Hospitals and doctors that are not "meaningful users" of the new system will face penalties. "Meaningful user" isn't defined in the bill. That will be left to the HHS secretary, who will be empowered to impose "more stringent measures of meaningful use over time" (511, 518, 540-541)

For what is wrong with her "analysis" this time, check out this in The Washington Monthly, which also has a chronology of how the (right wing) press -- led by Fox, Limbaugh, and Drudge -- is again picking up flatly disprovable lies. (Eg, the "new" bureaucracy she warns about already exists, and was established under GW Bush.)

Seriously, every one of McCaughey's statements about public policy from this day forward should be subjected to the "Oh yes, and how did it turn out last time?" test. We are in OJ territory here. Stop this new claim before it gets real traction.
___

Continue reading "Let's stop this before it goes any further" »

Just to round out the CCTV fire theme

As mentioned earlier, the devastating fire in Beijing two days ago was indeed caused by fireworks and firecrackers on the final night of the Spring Festival / Chinese New Year celebrations. For positional reference, the building that burned down is behind, and mostly obscured by, the distinctive asymmetrical CCTV tower in the two shots below:

On a nice day last fall (edge of hotel barely visible behind left leg of CCTV tower):

On the second day of the Olympics (hotel just visible behind and to the left of CCTV tower; this was before the air cleared up on the following day, thanks to a powerful cold front that moved through from Mongolia):

Night of the fire, photo from UK Telegraph (this view from east; others from the south):

People in and interested in China already know this, but for those who don't: Danwei.org has one-stop shopping for links and explanations about the cause of the fire, and coverage inside China, here. Similarly with the current set of links and headlines on EastSouthWestNorth, here.

Apart from the disaster/tragedy itself, the interesting aspects are: that the perils of the fireworks and firecrackers are more than a joke (it might be hard to believe that they set off a major building fire if you haven't seen how much ordnance is set off; it's all too plausible if you have); that people responsible appear to have been CCTV employees; and that the whole subsequent matter of investigating, publicizing, making sense of, and drawing omens from an unignorable spectacle involving the country's leading propaganda/communication outlet and the city's most distinctive new landmark will say a lot about the emotional and political state of China right now. (Update: interesting LA Times story, which I see before me in paper version here in the LAX airport, here.)

Leaving home photo album, #2

-- From my dad's driveway, a vista I will think of not only in Beijing but eventually in Washington and anywhere else. The San Bernardino mountains, where my dad often rode horses, as they looked this morning after the past few days' big storms.

http://i142.photobucket.com/albums/r96/jfallows/IMG_6296.jpg

-- From the photo archives, a picture I had never seen until it was discovered and digitized by my brother-in-law Bryan. My mother and father in Philadelphia General Hospital, one day after I was born there. He was 24 and just beginning his service as an intern at the hospital. She was 21, one year out of Tufts, one year into what would be her 55 years of married life.

http://i142.photobucket.com/albums/r96/jfallows/FallowsMackenzie055B.jpg

We'll think of them too. End of this theme.

Leaving home photo album, #1

We all do it, many times. As mentioned earlier here, background here, for me this appears to be the last time. My wife and I have followed my sisters and brother in sorting through and unavoidably thinking about all the objects, collections, projects, mementos, treasures, and other miscellany of our parents' lives.

Discoveries, not necessarily in order of importance:

- From my brother's high school year book, a reminder of why the Redlands High School Terriers were often so good in football. Check out our All-Citrus Belt League quarterback:

http://i142.photobucket.com/albums/r96/jfallows/IMG_6246A.jpg

- From my dad's book case, a reminder that The Atlantic has always been ahead of the news. My dad was a toddler himself when this issue came out 80 years ago. Although he and my mom subscribed to the magazine when we were little children, he got this one later from a collector. The January, 1929 cover evokes a different world in some ways (click for larger) -- but check the evergreen story above the banner:

http://i142.photobucket.com/albums/r96/jfallows/IMG_6191A.jpg

http://i142.photobucket.com/albums/r96/jfallows/IMG_6191B.jpg

Continue reading "Leaving home photo album, #1" »

Spam is making me smarter

From the company spam filter for my email account just now (click for larger):

Evidently spammers recognize that I am a man widely traveled and with broad linguistic skills.* I'll take respect wherever I can get it.
___
*Or maybe it shows only that spam filters are more mature for dealing with English-language influx than with this other stuff. No, I think it's a sign of respect.

Good video of Tom Geoghegan in action

Last month I mentioned, here and here, my enthusiasm about and support for Tom Geoghegan's candidacy to succeed Rahm Emanuel (and before him Rod Blagojevich and Dan Rostenkowski) as Congressman from the Fifth District of Illinois.

The campaign actually has a professional-looking web site now. Its latest entry is a 22-minute video of Tom on a local interview show, called "The Interview Show." It is worth watching both to get a sense of Tom's personality, wryness and all, and to be reminded how it can sound when a public figure talks clearly and non-patronizingly about public problems. We're getting used to it from Obama, for example with the press conference last night. This is another illustration. Donation page is here.

Placeholder on recent news

As mentioned recently, for me this has been a period of extraordinary family and personal complication, ongoing for a few more days. Items for the web-site to do list, perhaps tomorrow:

* The fire at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in China: if we'd been in our apartment in Beijing last night, we would have in fact been outside the apartment, watching what was happening a quarter-mile up the street near the new CCTV tower. Last year, on the final night of Chinese New Year, my wife remarked that it was a miracle that the city hadn't gone up in flame. (To explain: this fire happened on the final night of this year's CNY.)

* Obama's first press conference, which I thought extremely accomplished in ways obvious and subtle. The answer that most repays careful study is the response to an economic question from our former Atlantic colleague Chuck Todd (transcript here, search for "Chuck.") Impressive aspect, about which more later: the premise of the question was -- no offense, Chuck -- somewhat confused. Obama addresses the confusion in the first paragraph of response and then has a conciliatory loopback to make an additional useful point.

* Introduction of Kindle 2. I think my wife will enjoy the Kindle 1 that is about to be hers.

* This NYT story about a change in emphasis at Newsweek, based on the recognition that weekly news magazines simply cannot compete in delivering "breaking news" to their readers.

The venerable newsweekly's ingrained role of obligatory coverage of the week's big events will be abandoned once and for all, executives say.
"There's a phrase in the culture, 'we need to take note of,' 'we need to weigh in on,' " said Newsweek's editor, Jon Meacham. "That's going away. If we don't have something original to say, we won't. The drill of chasing the week's news to add a couple of hard-fought new details is not sustainable."

Ah, the battles over exactly that principle ten+ years ago at the weakest of the news magazines, US News. More later on this too.

* An impressively brave post by my friend Steve Clemons about a quite startling change in the leadership of the Japan Society of New York. Twenty-plus years ago, when I first went on a Japan Society fellowship for a stay in Japan (as many journalists have done since then), it would have been inconceivable that a just-retired Japanese government official (and former Mitsubishi exec) would be in charge of this American organization, for reasons that Steve Clemons clearly lays out. Although the Japan Society is not quite the same lobbying organization that AIPAC is, it would be like having an Israeli government official head that organization. This is truly startling.

* And, later, a wrapup on the real action for me of the last few days: final visit for family reasons to my home town. The moving vans arrive tomorrow to take the last shipment from my parents' house. Onward.

I'm not so sure about the timing of this business concept....

From the e-mail inbox:

Hello,
You have been invited by Xxxxx Xxxxx to join Affluence.org.
Affluence.org is an exclusive community of affluent people dedicated to making life better for both themselves and others.
As a member of Affluence.org you will have the ability to find and interact with other affluent people from around the world, evaluate and contribute to your favorite charities, and gain access to exclusive lifestyle guides to luxury living, travel and the latest trends.Within this elite community you will be provided with access to a dedicated Affluence Concierge, receive priority access to the world's most exclusive premieres, nightclubs, parties, hotels, events and much more.
To accept the invitation to our exclusive network, please follow the link below. XXXXXXXX.

Best Regards,
Affluence.org Administration

It appears to be a legit operation. Anyone who joins, let me know how it goes.

UPDATE: I see I'm not the first to be asked.

Most shocking thing I've heard on TV (today)

Mickey Rourke, just now on Larry King Live, talking about his early days: "So, I had this role in Body Heat..."

Larry King, ever prepared: "You were in Body Heat?"

You were in Body Heat????

The 29-year old Rourke's unforgettable (I thought) debut as Teddy the arsonist in Body Heat, with the 31-year-old William Hurt, just before Diner:

Leonardo diC: "So I had this role in Titanic...
LK: "You were in Titanic?"

Sic transit gloria Body-Heati. Now back to work.

Update on Chinese coverage of dam/earthquake connection

Last night I mentioned the NYT story suggesting that a dam recently built near a major fault line in China could possibly have triggered the devastating Sichuan earthquake last May. I said I would like to see how -- if at all -- the story was being covered and interpreted inside China. (I'm still away.)

One fascinating early answer comes from the Mutant Palm site in this post. The headline of the Chinese press report it quotes (and translates) gives the general idea:

Foreign Media Stir Up Trouble, Speculate "Sichuan Earthquake was Man-Made"

Original version of that headline:

Full Chinese report (in Chinese) here. Even from afar it will be interesting to watch this develop.

I wish I were in China at this moment...

... to see first-hand how this story is being covered and reacted to:

QuakeDam,jpg.jpg

The suffering after the Sichuan earthquake was so widespread and horrific, and the impression of rapid, heroic, all-out response was so important to the government, that the episode really had a "9/11"-style role in popular imagination. The Chinese people standing as one to help the victims of Wenchuan and other devastated cities; premier Wen Jiabao flying directly to the disaster site that very afternoon to oversee recovery efforts; People's Liberation Army detachments flooding in from every province to haul rubble out of school yards and pull survivors to safety -- this is what the Chinese public heard, saw, and was reminded of after the earthquake and ever since.*

The idea that the disaster could somehow have been induced, invited, or worsened by governmental action -- well, no one knows how this idea will be debated or allowed to spread in China, but the consequences could be profound. This is a placeholder note to say: watch this story carefully.
____
* A new chapter in Postcards from Tomorrow Square, called "After the Earthquake," is about the different ways the disaster affected several villages in Sichuan province.

Meet Mr. China!

Several times I've written in the Atlantic about the Irish businessman Liam Casey, who in the past few years has built an outsourcing empire in the southern Chinese manufacturing center of Shenzhen. (Original Atlantic article here. Slideshow including snapshots of Casey here.)

In these articles I gave Casey the jokey honorific "Mr. China," derived from Tim Clissold's hilarious book of the same name. The title is a campy way of indicating the person most in touch with the Chinese trends of this exact moment.

BBC Radio 4 has just posted a 28-minute interview with Casey, called "The Remarkable Mr. China." They make you work to get at the interview: at least from outside the UK, you have to listen within the next seven days, before it disappears, and it is compatible only with RealPlayer.* Nonetheless, if you've been asking yourself, "Hmmm, I wonder what it would be like to talk with Mr. China down in Shenzhen," you now have a chance to satisfy your curiosity. Thanks to Hillel Schwartz for tip.

UPDATE: Here is a better link, plus a podcast.

Mr. China (right) shopping for art in Shenzhen's famed Dafen factory art district last year:

http://i142.photobucket.com/albums/r96/jfallows/DSCN0043.jpg

* You can download RealPlayer free from links at the BBC site, but as anyone who has tried it knows, its installation is very aggressive and can easily make RP more of an in-your-face presence in your life than you intend. With careful configuration you can tame it and hear this interview.

Edging back into connectivity: Kennedy Library Forum

Ten days ago, in what seems a different lifetime, I was at the JFK Presidential Library in Boston for one of its "Kennedy Library Forum" presentations. Dr. Lincoln Chen, founder of Harvard's Global Equity Initiative, led an hour-long discussion about China and America (just before he went to the airport for a trip to China himself), followed by half an hour of Q-and-A from the audience.

I enjoyed his questions a lot, plus the general direction the discussion took. Minnesota Public Radio has a webcast of the program here. I believe that Boston's own WBUR will eventually do so here as well. FWIW.

February 2009 Archives

February 27, 2009

Placeholder

February 24, 2009

Interesting little tool to use during tonight's speech

美国欢迎您!

Book Report

For the record, a review I'm very grateful for

February 23, 2009

F-22 fiesta

Chinese viewers' guide to the Oscars! (updated)

Even more on US-China climate cooperation

February 22, 2009

If they really want the Oscars to have a bigger audience....

Two tech followups: Real Alternative, HerdictWeb (updated)

Interesting Tom Geoghegan interview re single-payer health care

February 20, 2009

More on China-US climate issues, more on F-22

Let a thousand flowers bloom, Atlantic-style (F-22 dept)

One more possibility in the Buffalo crash: "tailplane stall"

February 19, 2009

The US, China, and saving the world

Alison Des Forges

The significance of new WSJ info about the Buffalo crash

February 18, 2009

Winter wonderland Beijing

February 16, 2009

A proud father notes, #2

February 13, 2009

On the Buffalo airplane crash

February 12, 2009

Further points on McCaughey

Let's stop this before it goes any further

February 11, 2009

Just to round out the CCTV fire theme

Leaving home photo album, #2

Leaving home photo album, #1

February 10, 2009

Spam is making me smarter

Good video of Tom Geoghegan in action

Placeholder on recent news

February 8, 2009

I'm not so sure about the timing of this business concept....

February 7, 2009

Most shocking thing I've heard on TV (today)

February 6, 2009

Update on Chinese coverage of dam/earthquake connection

I wish I were in China at this moment...

Meet Mr. China!

February 5, 2009

Edging back into connectivity: Kennedy Library Forum

Today's Headlines From The Atlantic

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Doing Business in China: Legalese (updated)

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