Recommended reading: The Spirit of the Place

Stephen Bergman is a writer and Harvard Medical School professor who, under the pen name Samuel Shem, had huge best-seller success in the 1970s with his medical novel The House of God. The book was a precursor to TV series like ER and today's House; and while it wasn't the first book to dramatize the human element in high-stakes medical care, it did a particularly rich and distinguished job. In an introduction to a re-issued version of the book, John Updike said that "it does for medical training what Catch-22 did for the military life-displays it as farce, a melee of blunderers laboring to murky purpose under corrupt and platitudinous superiors." Bergman/Shem wrote the later, popular medical novels Mount Misery and Fine.

Now he has written a very different book, The Spirit of the Place, which I have recently finished and expect to remember for a long time.

 

Xobni's side of the story

In response to this report of problems that my colleague Corby Kummer encountered when installing the Outlook-indexing program Xobni, the CEO of Xobni, Jeff Bonforte, sent me a note. I post it here with his permission.

Thank you for your posts about Xobni. We were disappointed to read about Corby Kummer's bad experience with our product. We take performance and stability of our software very seriously and have spent over 5 months working out bugs and optimizing speed prior to releasing the product from beta. After 2M+ downloads, we are unaware of any user that has experienced Corby's issue.

We have reached out to Corby directly, but in the meantime we have begun researching the issue. At this point we don't believe that Xobni itself caused his issue. Instead, we believe when he installed Xobni (any software in this case), it triggered a rare Windows bug or registry corruption. Of course, we don't rule out the issue is with Xobni, but it seems likely it is a Windows bug similar to this Window's RSL (registry size limit) issue (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/189119).

Regardless, it is a bad issue, and even if Xobni is uninstalled, we want to make sure it is fully resolved. We will coordinate with Microsoft support. Though Corby had a bad experience, I hope you will give the new Xobni a try, like thousands of new users each day.

You are welcome to reach out to us, even on Twitter (@Xobni), to tell us about your experiences. We have had incredibly positive feedback so far like that from your colleague Barry Simon. If any of your readers encounter a dramatic issue, please feel free to have them contact Xobni support or me directly.

Thanks again,
Jeff Bonforte
jeff at xobni dot com
CEO, Xobni
PS: You can also tell Barry we are working on some more advanced search options that should please him.

While waiting for Corby and the Xobni people to get to the bottom of this issue, I have to say that the prompt, helpful, and, in the circumstances, very good natured response by a CEO is impressive. (And is the opposite of the blustering defensiveness I often marvel at in China.) When I'm able to download the program, I'll know more about how it works for me.

More on Chinese cyber-spying

Following this report earlier today.

 Last summer, Mr. Sane Thinking About All Things Security Related, Bruce Schneier, offered this perspective on electronic attacks originating in China. His view rings completely true to what I have seen of Chinese tech culture. Highlights:

These hacker groups seem not to be working for the Chinese government. They don't seem to be coordinated by the Chinese military. They're basically young, male, patriotic Chinese citizens, trying to demonstrate that they're just as good as everyone else. As well as the American networks the media likes to talk about, their targets also include pro-Tibet, pro-Taiwan, Falun Gong and pro-Uyghur sites.

The hackers are in this for two reasons: fame and glory, and an attempt to make a living. The fame and glory comes from their nationalistic goals. Some of these hackers are heroes in China....And the money comes from several sources. The groups sell owned computers, malware services, and data they steal on the black market. They sell hacker tools and videos to others wanting to play. They even sell T-shirts, hats and other merchandise on their Web sites.

Schneier points out that the probably non-governmental origin of this threat should moderate fear of a concentrated Chinese military plot  -- but doesn't make the objective situation any better:

If anything, the fact that these groups aren't being run by the Chinese government makes the problem worse. Without central political coordination, they're likely to take more risks, do more stupid things and generally ignore the political fallout of their actions.

Schneier also has an update on the current controversy at his main site. For the strongest albeit circumstantial argument that the government or military might have been involved, see this post on Ars Technica. Its main point is that the list of sites known to have been attacked seems more selective and strategically chosen than one would suspect from a bunch of hackers. That's possible. But for now, the evidence still seems to me to support the hacker hypothesis.  (Also: this site from the US Air Force's Air University has a number of useful links about US and foreign approaches to electronic info-warfare.)
 

What should we make of this Chinese cyber-spy story?

Yesterday's story in the New York Times about "GhostNet," the Chinese-based computer spying network that has apparently penetrated some 1,295 computers in more than 100 countries around the world, obviously raises this big question: Was the Chinese government behind it, or not? Three of the four servers that hosted GhostNet were apparently inside China (the fourth was in California), and many of the targets were involved one way or another in Free-Tibet activities or other causes opposed by the Chinese government. Wouldn't it have to have been the ChiComs?

Maybe, maybe not. I've now read (thanks to a stop-by at free WiFi site masquerading as a McDonald's) the 53-page report from the University of Toronto team that used clever reverse-engineering tools to penetrate "GhostNet" and monitor it from within. The report, in the Scribd format that deserves discussion itself some other time, is available here.

The U Toronto researchers are, in my view, properly agnostic about who is ultimately responsible for this malware operation. On the one hand, they point out that "China is actively developing an operational capacity in cyberspace.... Chinese cyber warfare doctrine is well developed, and significant resources have been invested by the People's Liberation Army and security services in developing defensive and offensive capabilities." But on the other hand,

"Attributing all Chinese malware to deliberate or targeted intelligence gathering operations by the Chinese state is wrong and misleading... The most significant actors in cyberspace are not states.... In China, the authorities most likely perceive individual attackers [ie, teenagers in internet cafes] as convenient instruments of national power."

For anyone technically inclined, the report is full of fascinating crime-procedural type details about the way the investigation unfolded and what the GhostNet system revealed once the moles from Toronto had made their way inside. 

My guess is that the "convenient instruments" hypothesis will eventually prove to be true (versus the "centrally controlled plot" scenario), if the "truth" of the case is ever fully determined. For reasons the Toronto report lays out, the episode looks more like the effort of groups of clever young hackers than a concentrated project of the People Liberation Army cyberwar division. But no one knows for certain, and further information about the case is definitely worth following. As are this new report on "The Snooping Dragon" by computer scientists at the Cambridge University in England and the University of Illinois, and this very good Wired blog item.   One more thing to worry about be interested in.

Outflanking the cheese beagles

Barring some truly startling new development, this will be the final dispatch about the beagle-enhanced war on cheese that Chinese customs and immigration officials are waging at the spiffy new Terminal Three of Beijing's Capital Airport. For the early chronicles of this war, start here.

A frequent and experienced visitor to China, who prefers to remain anonymous, has found a way to avoid the hostilities. The secret is to come into Beijing aboard Northwest, Continental, Korean, Aeroflot, or one of the other airlines whose international flights land not at Terminal Three but at PEK's plain old unmodernized Terminal Two. My travel expert reports:

I just flew into Beijing on the evening Northwest flight Monday night. They still use the old terminal, and there were no dogs nor, for that matter, anyone looking at luggage, just a guard at the door to keep the people outside from coming in to meet their friends.

So at least for now, that's probably the way to bring in your contraband.

The writer is a distinguished academic. Good to see book-learnin' being put to practical use.

Xobni: the magazine titans speak!

Yesterday I mentioned that Xobni, an Outlook add-on that I'd tried and abandoned last year, was out in a new and reportedly much much faster version. Quickly I heard from two magazine-world big shots about their varying experiences with the program.

Below, a reaction from Barry Simon, who has reviewed software for years in PC Magazine and is author of several volumes in the "Mother of all Windows Books" series. Then, and continued after the jump, a highly cautionary tale from my Atlantic colleague Corby Kummer, known to the world as director of the Atlantic's new Food Channel (and perennial favorite for the James Beard Award) and to me as my editor and fellow software enthusiast. Read; judge for yourself; see my "what it all means" comments at the end.

Barry Simon:

For whatever it is worth, I only started using Xobni in November, 2008. I have 1.6 GB main .pst and a total of 5 GBs of pst in my main outlook directory (going back to 2002). Xobni has indexed them all even the ones not loaded into Outlook and I've had no performance issues with it. It is a tool I rely on heavily although its limitations drive me crazy.

The biggest limitation is the inability to do any kind of real Boolean search. You can search for single words or phrases across all mail and can search mail to/from one person for subjects but I've yet to find a way to search for given words in the body of all messages to/from person x.

Corby Kummer:

I downloaded and installed [Xobni], and waited for it to index everything, during which it slowed everything to molasses. I assumed it was the initial indexing that was making everything so slow...

Continue reading "Xobni: the magazine titans speak!" »

Update on Xobni, Lou Pai (updated!)

These topics have nothing in common apart from a sort of odd orthographic cousinhood.

Xobni is a highly-touted system for managing Outlook mail and contacts that I initially liked when I tried it last year. But as soon as I applied it to some large, real-world size Outlook .PST files, it ground to a halt and dragged the rest of my computer down with it. I immediately took it off my machine and later heard from the Xobni designers that, yes, they were having a few "performance" issues with the program. (In software land, "performance" basically means how fast a program runs.)

Now a new version is out, which at least claims to have addressed this problem. From the press announcement I received:

Xobni Is Ready For You! Massive Performance Upgrade

After using Xobni's beta product, you asked us to inform you when Xobni's performance had improved.

After months of work and user feedback, today, for the first time ever, Xobni is available without the beta label. Xobni is ready for prime time.

For the next few days I am in a remote area with trickle-speed internet connections and so can't download the file. But, ever hopeful about software updates, I will give it a try when I can.

Lou Pai, is, again, the man who got out of Enron with more cash than anyone else, even after allowing for the $31.5 million fine and settlement he paid to the SEC over insider-trading charges. When I mentioned him recently, it was to wonder what had happened since he bought an entire mountain in Colorado and established a kind of John Galt stronghold there.

Thanks to readers for this 2006 update from the NY Times, reporting that he had sold his mountain and moved to the Houston suburb of Sugar Land with his wife, whom the Times identifies as an "exotic dancer." Last year Natural Gas Weekly, which is not available online, carried an update on Pai's payment of the $31.5 million fine and his re-invention as a green tech guy, making markets in emission-reduction credits. Someone who gets Natural Gas Weekly sent me the story; after the jump, a few fair-use quotes from the story.  More

Continue reading "Update on Xobni, Lou Pai (updated!)" »

"When you're done talking, stop"

More on the uses of silence, previously here, here, and here.

Starting with Shaun FitzPatrick, Major USMC.

In the "media training" I underwent before I went to Iraq with 8th Marines, they addressed this technique in our interview practice sessions. Basically we were told, when you're done talking, stop, and don't let that pause goad you into say something stupid.

Also, we were told to watch for this especially with print reporters. With TV crews, the reporters generally try to fill the air with noise. Silence stands out uncomfortably on TV and it's the journalist's job to fill the air. You don't have that problem.

By the way toughest interviews I ever did were on NPR, not because of harsh treatment or anything like that, but because the radio reporter asks you to describe in detail for listeners who can't see what you're talking about. It's tougher than I thought it would be.

When I asked FitzPatrick if I could use his name, he said: "I was taught in The Basic School that only cowards submit anonymous reviews. Everything I ever send or say is on the record." In that admirable spirit, three real-name accounts after the jump involving sales and journalism.
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Continue reading ""When you're done talking, stop"" »

The elusive Lou Pai

I mentioned last week, after watching the excellent Enron documentary The Smartest Guys in the Room, that one of the questions it provokes is whatever became of Lou Pai. He is the lesser-known comrade of the now infamous Skilling, Lay, and Fastow, who (apparently) took more cash out of the company than anyone else.

This long, fascinating investigative piece about Pai by Alan Prendergast, in Denver's Westword, can't completely answer that question, since it was published in 2002, before the ramifications of the Enron debacle had fully played out. But it tells me a lot more than I had known before. It is also the source of the illustration to the left, by Jay Bevenour. It concludes with reports on the efforts of Ken Salazar -- then Colorado Attorney General, now Secretary of the Interior -- to make peace between Pai and the neighbors around his hermit-like mountain stronghold.  Thanks to Alf Hickey.

One last point about teleprompters, Obama, and speaking

Following this and this.

Obama's opening statement at this evening's press conference, delivered no doubt with the help of a teleprompter, sounded smoother and more polished than his real-time answers through the rest of the event.

The same is true for any public figure who has learned to use a teleprompter (harder than it seems) and whose teleprompter-ready material suits his or her natural speaking style. It sounds smoother than extemporized speech because it should be smoother. People don't naturally speak in parsed and polished sentences, even eloquent people. When we are listening to what we know is spontaneous rather than scripted speech, we listen in a different way -- we listen past grammatical glitches, repetitions, and other things that would be "flaws" on a printed page or in a formal oration. If you don't believe me, look back for any extemporized performance that was judged to be riveting by audiences in real time. (A campaign rally, a TV interview, a debate, the closing argument in a trial.) If you then read a word-by-word transcript, it will look like a mess.

The important point with Obama is that the content, command of fact and concept, and overall intelligence of his extemporized answers matched that of the scripted presentation. That could not have been so if he were teleprompter-dependent. For example: by the end of his term, George W. Bush had become quite effective in delivering a formal speech. His interview- and press conference performance if anything deteriorated through his time in office.

The whole "Obama can't talk on his own" concept is bizarre, given his performance through two years of stump speeches and debates during the campaign. But it seems to have gotten so much credence in the right-wing world that it is worth addressing head on.

A fourth point about the Obama press conference

Following these three.

4) Boy, if some of the questions from reporters were examined as mercilessly for their logic, factual basis, clarity, coherence, emotional tone, etc as Obama's answers were....  I know, they're not the most powerful people on earth with the might of the presidency behind them. But unlike him, the reporters are not reacting on the fly but instead have hours and hours to think of exactly the way they want to make their point. Just an observation.

Three-sentence instant reaction to Obama press conference

1) After seeing a session like this, it is hard to understand how right-wingers can keep up their "Obama can't talk without his teleprompter" theory -- although it's hard to know, given his campaign-debate performance etc, how anyone could have advanced this view in the first place.

2) All successful politicians know how to turn a question to the answer they want to give  ("The real point is..."), but Obama showed several times exactly how that should be done -- eg, when asked about changing tax rules for charitable deduction, he brushed that aside and said "what does affect charitable giving is the economy, and..."

3) Explicitly, in his closing comments about being in it for the long haul "even though" he had not brought peace to the Middle East or solved the economic problem in his first 60 days, and implicitly in his manner, he conveyed the same, steady, 'let's keep plugging along and we'll make it' message that had run through his presentations through the campaign.

OK, those are very long and ungainly sentences, but there are only three of them.

Springtime comes to Beijing.... (updated)

... and the barbed wire is in bloom!

In the Sanlitun embassy district all along Dongzhimenwai Dajie, teams of PLA soldiers spent Tuesday afternoon augmenting drab, old, rusty single-strand barbed wire with generous loops of bright new green protective strands. In photo below, the old barbed wire is the lonely brownish line at top, with the new wire coiling below it. 






Yes, yes, I know that the embassy area in* much of Washington DC is more fortress-like than this. No pictures of PLA troops actually installing the wires, since I have learned the hard way that pointing a camera at people in green PLA uniforms is a poor idea.

By the way, are there any little cozy street scenes in Beijing, like those I recently mentioned seeing in Shanghai? Yes indeed, and this embassy area -- protected from development, full of trees and low-rise buildings -- has many of them. Looking east on Dongzhimenwai Daijie toward the Agricultural Exhibit Center (with the flags).



On the other hand, when you get down to where those flags are, this is what you see.

 

More to come on the urban architecture issue shortly. Thanks to many dozens of readers for thoughtful replies.
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* Update: this was imprecise. What I meant to note was that Washington DC itself has become unrecognizably fortress-like over the past eight years -- a point worth remembering when mentioning fortifications anywhere else. The embassy district itself along Mass Ave in DC is not particularly embunkered, though.

Montana Tragedy Update

The causes of this crash seem more mysterious with the passage of a day.

For the record, the human aspects have been clarified. The airplane was owned by a prominent dentist and businessman from Redlands, California. Nine of the people killed were his family members: two daughters, their husbands, and the two families' total of five small children -- the owner's grandchildren. The other five people aboard were the pilot and another young family. (Fourteen people in all, not 17 as in some early reports.)

Again with the caveat that no one knows what happened, the fact that there were so many people aboard magnifies the tragedy but would not seem to have caused a crash. If an airplane is too heavy or has the weight misallocated between the front and rear of the plane, that problem usually shows up on takeoff or early in the flight. (As, for instance, in the crash that killed the singer Aaliyah and eight others in 2001, when the plane was too heavy and its center-of-gravity was too far aft. ) Too much weight can affect the way an airplane handles in turns and increase the risk that while turning it would "stall," or fall out of the sky. But with so little information, any such train of thought is pure speculation.

Deepest sympathies to the families and communities affected by this tragedy.

It's not just the Chinese

Recently I mentioned the near-universal modern Chinese belief that a mobile phone, when ringing, should take precedence over anything else that might be going on -- in particular, the person you are talking or dining with at that moment. From a reader, the cross-cultural angle:

The mobile phone versus face-to-face thing is the norm in India as well, and again, is not considered rude or even unusual by the locals. I attended a family wedding in New Delhi a couple of years ago, and the priest took several calls during the ceremony. Taking our cue from the bride's parents, everybody paused while he took each call, and then resumed as if [nothing had happened]. Apparently another priest had failed to show up at a wedding across town, and that family were ringing round all the possibles...

This is one of the few India-China similarities I have come across.

I feel like an idiot, but... [UPDATED]

... can some Beijing person tell me what on earth this thing is?



I see it from time to time in the Beijing subway. (This picture is from the Tuanjiehu station on line 10 today.) It's about three feet tall and has the general look of a bomb-disposal robot. Today was the first time I had a camera on hand and didn't see any subway officials around, and so felt free to take some pictures. Side view:



Free Atlantic subscription for the first person to send me an (accurate) answer. Sorry, there are so many things that leave me puzzled.

UPDATE: Contest over and problem solved! Thanks to two near-simultaneous entries, each of them a winner, I now understand that this is indeed an anti-explosive device! In the words of one winner, "The big blue iron ball-like thing you saw in the subway is an anti-explosion device - when the police find explosives, they can put them inside this ball-thing. It's designed to keep the explosion safely inside." I feel safer already.  Thanks to all.   (One of the winners was the famous Chinese blogger Isaac Mao; the other, source of the description, is Harvard-bound Beijing area university student Ella Shengru Zhou.)
 

About this tragic plane crash in Montana

Obviously little is known for sure, except that it looks like a terrible tragedy involving a large number of children. Condolences to all affected. Three quick points.

1) The airplane in question, a Pilatus PC12, is a well-known, reliable, admired, sturdy craft. I have a friend who flew his family all around the world in one. I have flown several times in his airplane and once in another PC12. Picture below of a PC12 is from a European site;  a picture of the airplane that reportedly crashed, N128CM, is on FlightAware.com, here.
  

Things everyone in China knows, but...

... that few people outside have really taken in. Here I'm talking strictly about the communications-and-internet front. They were neatly summarized by Andrew Lih, in a recent SXSW panel that was in turn reported on CNReviews.com. His principles, with my marginalia [in brackets like this] below:

•  No one uses voicemail. When some one calls you on your mobile phone, you generally pick it up. Mobile calls take precedence over face-to-face conversation, which is generally interrupted by a call. [Too many times to count, I have seen people take mobile-phone calls while giving a speech or presiding at a meeting. It's the norm, not something rude.]
  
  
• China uses SMS more intensively. SMS may have become entrenched because of the low cost of sending text messages. The first thing Chinese do in the morning is check their IM first, not their email. [Though, this assumes they turned off the phone at night!]
  
  
• Instant messaging, combined with SMS, is a hugely popular means of communication. China's leading IM platform, QQ (Company: Tencent (HK:0700)), has 350 mm users-over 50 times the audience of Twitter! [Two days ago on the Beijing subway, I counted 25 people in the same car as me all typing out or reading text messages and only two actually talking on the phone. Also, you're never out of mobile-phone coverage in China -- on subways, in elevators, wherever. Discussion of reasons some other time.]
  
  
• Only 56% of all Chinese internet users have email addresses. [If you want to reach a busy American, you send email to the Blackberry. That gets you nowhere here.]
  
  
• Ownership of PCs is much lower, especially in 2nd and 3rd tier cities, where heavy PC usage is at Internet cafes.
  
  
• Unlike the West, where e-commerce was Web 1.0 and social media is Web 2.0, China's internet usage started as a social phenomenon first and is just now moving to more utilitarian purposes.

Lih is a friend in Beijing; was a major guide/informant for the Atlantic piece I wrote about the Great Firewall; and is author of a much-anticipated book The Wikipedia Revolution, which I have ordered and look forward to reading.

Uses of silence, #2

Previously here and here.

I've heard from people in a surprisingly wide array of professional and personal roles about the usefulness of sitting mum and making the other person talk. To start off, one about TV interviewing style, from a 2006 episode of Brothers & Sisters written by Molly Newman. After the jump, illustrations from deal-making, medicine, sales, and religion. More to come.

 
(Given that it's Sunday, see if anyone dares apply this approach on the Sunday Talk Shows.)
 

Continue reading "Uses of silence, #2" »

Another view on nukes, bombs, and Iran

Earlier today I cited yet another study discussing the real-world folly of contemplating preemptive aerial attacks on Iran's nuclear-development sites, whether those attacks were carried out by the Israelis or the United States.

Quickly I heard from a long-time friend who was raised in Europe, has lived around the world, and is deeply familiar with and fond of American habits and life. He said he had grown exasperated with discussions of practicality and impracticality and thought there should be more emphasis on whether such an attack could be "right." After the jump, most of his argument, followed by my view on the "right and wrong" point. He begins:

I wonder: why does everybody continue missing the point about Iran, particularly in the US?

The fact that Iranians, as a whole, love Americans is beyond dispute: I verified it directly and through many conversations with foreign observers during my two immensely pleasant visits there (I suggest you should go too, actually, when you get a chance). [I have been there once, long ago.] This is partly because Americans are not Arabs (who brought an unwelcome creed there), nor Brits (seen as scheming and unreliable rats)...

Continue reading "Another view on nukes, bombs, and Iran" »

What if the Israelis bomb Iran?

Watching Barack Obama's address to the Iranian public from outside the United States, though obviously not from inside Iran, I don't share Andrew Sullivan's concern that it will come off as patronizing. Instead I think it will seem, for those able to watch, startlingly and disarmingly respectful. After all, this is the President of the United States, not denouncing or lecturing an "enemy" audience but addressing them in friendly and supportive terms. Therefore I think it is part of a shrewd long-term play for rapprochement with an Iranian public that by all reports is potentially far more pro-Western than its current zealot leadership. Of course the same people who disagreed with Obama in 2002 about the wisdom of invading Iraq are certain to denounce him now for being too soft.

But clearly this approach does not solve the short-term problem of curbing the Iranian leadership's nuclear ambitions. Unfortunately, and for fuller discussion another time, no other approach immediately solves that problem either. For now it is worth considering this extensive analysis from CSIS, by the indefatigable Anthony Cordesman and Abdullah Toukan, of the ever-tempting "Osirak" option: allowing / encouraging / condoning / watching Israeli warplanes as they attack nuclear facilities in Iran.

The report is more than 100 pages long and tries to assess the feasibility of an attack from every angle. (A 2006 assessment by Cordesman of all options for dealing with Iran is here. The results of a 2004 Atlantic-sponsored "war game" involving Iran are here.) In its examination of second- and third- order effects, it strongly reminds me of the reports I read and wrote about in 2002, emphasizing that the conquest of Iraq was likely to be far more complex, costly, and likely to backfire than its boosters assumed. Many of the same boosters are again willing to assume away the practicalities in urging a military showdown with Iran.

After the jump, a few of the summary points. But you should look at the whole report.
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Continue reading "What if the Israelis bomb Iran?" »

On Google sync tools

I keep meaning to write a full wrap-up on this topic, but that will never happen. So this summary judgment for now:

Google's Calendar sync utilities are, in my experience, amazingly robust and dependable. There are three different places in which I enter or change calendar info, and on which I want to view it: In Outlook's calendar; online with the Google calendar; and on my Blackberry. Two Google sync apps -- this one for Outlook <-> Google Calendar, and this one for Blackberry <-> Google Calendar -- have been, for me, bulletproof. I enter, change, or delete appointments in any of the three locations, and the results show up correctly on the other two. This is a huge plus. Apparently there's a similar iPhone sync app, but I don't know how well it works.

Offline Gmail is, in my experience, far from bulletproof but still useful in a "better than nothing" way. Without this utility, if you weren't online you couldn't do anything whatsoever with the messages and info in your Gmail account. Now, if things go right, you can search and read messages while offline, like on an airplane -- and can write replies or new messages that will be sent the next time you log on. In its early version, offline Gmail seems to get confused easily about whether it's off- or on-line and to have other small glitches. For now I've disabled it except when I know I have a long airplane ride ahead. But that it works at all is something.

Bonus Gmail point: A new "panic-button" app, just released, which allows you to un-send a message within five seconds, if you have an instant case of sender's-remorse. I can think of times when this would have been useful.

Harmonic convergence! Two of my obsessions in one place!

At last, my interests in (a) innovative small-airplane technology, and (b) the evolution of China's economy, come together in one bit of news.

According to Aero-News.Net, in this dispatch, the next owner of the assets, technology, designs, etc of the defunct Eclipse Aviation company could be -- the Chinese government. Rather, the state-run Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China, CACC, which is in charge of the country's ambitions to have a counterpart to Boeing and Airbus.

Now, if we could only work in a beer, boiled-frog, or USB-related angle, I would have the world's most completely satisfying news item. And even with just the China+aviation elements, it's fascinating in its implications.
 

Also on the brighter side: better news on Chinese cheese

No, not that the beagle-enhanced war on cheese has been called off.

Rather, a reminder of one valuable inside-the-country source, Yellow Valley Cheese. When we lived in Shanghai we often bought wheels of Yellow Valley's Gouda-style cheeses, like those depicted on the company's web site, below. Indeed the picture on the left, with all the cheeses lined up, very closely resembles what we saw in our store in Shanghai.

Shanghai, Beijing, and the face of Chinese cities

This is an incomplete, opening entry on a subject that's increasingly on my mind: who is responsible for the look and feel of today's enormous, expanding Chinese cities, and who is happy and unhappy about their emerging character.

Two reasons it's on my mind at the moment:
 - Spent several days again in Shanghai, my former home, after being away for eight months;
 - Recently went to the top of Beijing's first true skyscraper, the newly-opened Park Hyatt hotel, and saw the city from an entirely different perspective while on the building's 65th floor.

This is not a "which do you like better?" discussion, which I've learned to finesse in a way that is both politic and true. Having now spent an equal amount of time based in each city, my wife and I have learned to appreciate the virtues of both. Their virtues are different, as Chicago's are from LA's, but are both real. (In short: we've learned more from being in Beijing, and we enjoyed the texture of daily life more in Shanghai. We feel fortunate to have lived in each place.)

Rather the question is why the look and feel of Beijing seem so clearly to represent the direction Chinese cities are heading. To oversimplify what this means: although Shanghai probably contains more people than Beijing, it feels smaller. The roads are narrower, they're more likely to bend or twist, the city unfolds on a smaller scale of neighborhoods and courtyards and little houses. Beijing is bigger and squarer and broader and more grandly imposing. To illustrate: a photo of the intersection outside our building in Beijing, followed by a place we were walking ten days ago in Shanghai.

Crossing the street at the Guomao intersection, as I do when leaving my apartment each day in Beijing:
 


Looking across a street in the French Concession district of Shanghai:

Yes, yes, I could have chosen pictures of each city that looked more like the other -- a little hutong in Beijing, an elevated highway in Shanghai. But anybody who has been in both cities recognizes the difference in tone and scale. This view southward from the Park Hyatt's 65th floor China Bar -- which really is the first time this view of Beijing has ever been available (since airplanes almost never fly overhead) -- gives more of the idea.

 

A few more pictures, and the question they suggest to me, after the jump.

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Continue reading "Shanghai, Beijing, and the face of Chinese cities" »

On the brighter side: some positive aviation news

I have a long queue of airplane-related items to work through - latest excesses of Security Theater, the still-toppling dominoes of Eclipse Aviation, etc -- but right at the moment, here is a sign of undeterred innovators in action.

A flying car! Or, a drivable airplane! Either way, earlier this month the Terrafugia "Transition" took its first flight.

 

YouTube footage of the first flight below. [UPDATE: Video has apparently been pulled.] Below that, a surreal "formation flight" shot. I like being in China because it's today's land of excitement, but it is good to see some excitement brewing back home.

 

Sounds of silence, part 1

I noted recently that you could go surprisingly far as an interviewer simply by sitting quietly and forcing the other person to break the silence. (Yes, I do realize that this is at odds with my previous endorsement of the Jon Stewart / David Frost interview approach. Different circumstances, different styles.) A very large number of very interesting replies have come in, most to the effect of, "You don't know the half of it!"

I will parcel them out from time to time. This initial installment has two. The first is from a former college professor of mine who later had a senior Congressional staff role. Then, discreetly after the jump, a dispatch from Tony Comstock, director of erotic films.

My former professor:

[This is] a very good point about interviewing techniques. People want to fill the void, often by digging themselves deeper in the process. I've also seen it work when politicians are in meetings with supplicants. Time and again, one or more of my Senate bosses would let the guests talk, nodding at appropriate points, and time would run out before they ever reached the key question, "Will you support/will you make a call/ will you act now...?" Many often seemed afraid to ask directly for what they wanted. And we avoided premature commitments in the process.

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The film director:

Continue reading "Sounds of silence, part 1" »

Correction: Chinese coal mine deaths

In my story about the Chinese economy in the latest Atlantic, I say, "You never know which statistics to believe in China, but in January a local official in Dongguan told me..."  The never-know problem is a real challenge here, and a reason to view any number concerning China with skepticism.

Part of the problem arises from what we might call a "transparency" issue. The government has committed itself to a growth rate of at least 8 per cent this year. Whatever else happens, it is safe to assume that at year's end the reported growth rate will be about 8 per cent. Part of the problem is the sheer impossibility of really knowing what is going on in so vast a country containing such geographic, economic, and social extremes. Is China's population closer to 1.3 billion -- or 1.4 billion? It's a difference of 100 million, and I don't think anyone knows for sure.

And for foreigners there's a particular problem of having your usual standards of judgment mismatched to China's scale. I have been in cities that looked middling-size. Based on the street grid and downtown area, I would have estimated the population at maybe 100,000 -- then I'm told that two million people live there. (True? I don't know.) Every reporter in China knows about the government statistics reporting 60,000 to 70,000 mass disturbances throughout the country each year. Could that possibly be true? Two hundred a day? It doesn't seem plausible, but I see the figure quoted all the time.

Very late in the process of writing my latest article, I saw a release from the government-controlled Xinhua news agency, saying that coal mining fatalities had declined to a total of over 90,000 in 2008. Could that possibly be true? Two hundred and fifty people per day? So I double-checked with Xinhua, and so did our fact-checker, and that was the number the government was officially putting out. As a result, one passage in my story said:

So if China's rise is not undone by the risks that have been evident for years--pollution, water shortage, corruption, the widening rich-poor social gap, safety standards so primitive that on average more than 250 people die each day in coal-mine accidents--might China prove vulnerable to Soviet-style discontent born of a slowing economy?...
My guess is No. [And on to the main argument of the article.]

Twelve days later, Xinhua put out this correction.
 


In the corrected version, ninety thousand people had died in accidents of all sorts in China last year, not just in coal mines. The coal mine fatality rate was more like nine per day, not 250. I was out of China when this correction was posted, and I didn't see it until just now. (You don't routinely go back to sources you've already checked, to see if they've happened to change their figures.) If I'd seen it immediately we could have made a change just before our issue went to the printer, but I probably wouldn't have seen it even if I were sitting in Beijing.

I regret the error, though I am glad for the differential 240 coal miners per day, and wanted to take the initiative in putting the revised number on the record. The larger points about workplace safety -- and the resilience of the Chinese economy, and the shakiness of statistics -- remain.

First signs of an upturn?

As I've mentioned several times (eg here and here), the air in Beijing has seemed much better in the six months since the Olympics ended than in the incredibly murky six months before. Seasonal difference? Probably. Unusual prevalence of strong, cleansing winds from the northwest? Important too. Residual effect of some Olympic-caused restrictions on pollution sites and traffic? Perhaps.

But the general slowdown in factory and powerplant activity during those same six months has to have played a part. So, is the economy picking up again? View out the window, Guomao area of Beijing looking south, on March 18, 2009, at noon China time, a relatively balmy day:
 


For a different kind of discussion about when and whether things will turn around for China, I have this story in the current issue of the magazine.

Cheese-beagle update

Apparently I had more to worry about than I thought. The man who sat beside me on the flight from San Francisco to Beijing had to wait a little longer than I did for his bags to appear. While I was thinking "Drat! No Chinese customs agency baggage-sniffing beagles! I could have sneaked in some cheese and other stuff" he was observing things I couldn't see. From his email just now:

Apropos the cheese beagle...no more than 2 minutes after you left baggage claim yesterday the little fellow came sniffing up your track... he left carousel 40 with a rather hang-dog look! No fun at flight 889 for him!

I believe this marks the end of my cheese-beagle chronicles. To commemorate this moment, a LA Times picture of some American sniffer-beagles. The Chinese ones look pretty similar but don't wear the little nylon coats, which remind me of the windbreakers saying "FBI" or "SHERIFF" that you see on cops in TV reality shows.

Interviewing tips from a novelist

Apropos of nothing, I was struck by this passage from Lisa See's The Interior: A Red Princess Mystery, which I was reading this morning on Beijing's subway Line 1. See's novels, like the "Inspector Chen" series by Qiu Xiaolong, are meant to convey the texture of modern China via crime procedurals. From my perspective, great excuse to do "research" while enjoying noir fiction.

In this passage, See's protagonist, inspector Liu Hulan, has gone back to the rural village where she spent the Cultural Revolution years to investigate a suspicious death. In civvies and without identifying herself as a cop, she interrogates a village couple. The young man had been the fiancee of Miaoshan, the woman who has recently died; he is accompanied by his new love interest, a hot number named Siang. The investigator taunts Siang about her cozying up so quickly to the young man:

"I'm sure that Miaoshan's mother will be comforted to hear of your grief and that you have come to offer solace to her daughter's fiance."

Siang's cheeks reddened, but she said nothing.

Hulan [the cop] let the silence stretch out. She was in no hurry, and the longer she kept quiet, the sooner these two would wish to fill the void. Siang noiselessly etched a groove in the dirt with the edge of her tennis shoe, while Tsai Bing [the man] looked around nervously. Finally he said, 'I didn't see Miaoshan so much anymore...'"

The "let the silence stretch out" approach, which is not discussed as often as it should be, can be a surprisingly valuable interviewing technique. The truth is that most people who are being interviewed would like to think that they are providing you with "interesting" information, which reflects well on their knowledge, insight, sense of humor, general bonhomie, etc. People want to be liked and to feel as if they're holding up their end of the conversation. Obviously this doesn't apply in a 60 Minutes-style hostile interrogation, but in most non-adversarial interviews, the subject wants to feel that he is holding the interest of the questioner.

Thus informal body-language signs that you're getting bored or disappointed usually prompt an interviewee to try harder and say more. The strategic use of silence can send such a signal, since people become uncomfortable and think that the silence is their fault. You can't do it very often, but every now and then it works great.

In only one circumstance have I found the "I'm getting bored" approach to be ineffective. That is when interviewing Japanese corporate or political officials. If I act as if they're telling me what I've heard a million times before, generally they've seemed more satisfied than uncomfortable. If someone's goal is to stay On Message no matter how it makes him look -- think, Scott McClellan handling questions about Scooter Libby in the late Bush years -- these psycho-warfare tricks will be futile. But for you aspiring young interviewers: remember to give strategic-silence a try.

Well, this is weirdly annoying! (cheese-and-beagles dept)

I was so intimidated by the mounting reports of a crackdown on cheese-smugglers at Chinese airports that I decided not to risk it on today's SFO-PEK flight. Even though it will be three or four months before my wife and I next visit a cheese-producing land. No point getting on the officials' radar.

So just now, I collect my bags at Beijing Capital Airport, relieved not to have torrents of smuggler-sweat pouring down my face out of worry that the sniffer-beagles will detect outlaw cheese, and..... there are no damned dogs in sight! And hardly a customs inspector. Come on! If I had known this, think of the kilos of Gruyere and Caerphilly and Ricotta Salata and various blue cheeses and Mozarella and you name it I could be lugging home right now. 

My friend Eamonn Fingleton has often emphasized the importance of "selective enforcement" in the Chinese government's management of internal affairs. If you never know when a certain rule will be enforced, you self-protectively act as if it might be enforced, just to be safe. There are countless examples (previous discussion here). Will a certain kind of protest be tolerated this week -- or punished? Since you don't know, you don't take the risk. Are copyright laws being enforced today? What about tax laws -- or visa rules? "Selective" enforcement suggests that the authorities turn the enforcement on and off strategically to regulate behavior. "Sporadic" enforcement suggests random ups and downs, Brownian Motion-style, depending on regional variation and individual mood and sheer chance. My default explanation for most things here is randomness and individual whim, but the result is the same.

Several readers offered hypotheses for the anti-cheese crackdown -- when it's in effect. Here's a strong contender:

Perhaps the ban on cheese is in retaliation against some nations that banned import of Chinese milk products during the melamine scandal. It doesn't hurt anybody much because the Chinese people find cheese revolting (I am told) so they don't miss it, and the cheese exporting nations don't export much to China anyway, so they don't get hurt either. Only the cheese eating, beer quaffing expats get hurt unless they can thwart the beagle.

For the Netflix list: 'Smartest Guys in the Room'

In case you missed this the first time around (as I did), highly recommended: Alex Gibney's 2005 documentary on Enron, The Smartest Guys in the Room. Apart from its original, intrinsic interest in telling the sordid tale of Skilling, Fastow, Lay, et al, the film has surprising new resonance now.

On the one hand, the sums involved in this previous-world-record-scandal now seem quaintly small. Enron was a $60 billion (or whatever) corporation that went bust. Ooooooohh, say it isn't so!  That is practically a rounding-error financial disaster now, except when achieved by a single person like Madoff.

But the fundamental dynamics of the fraud are very, very similar to what we've heard about from a dozen other institutions in the past year. And -- the part that really got my attention -- the second-tier villains in the Enron story, the enablers and blind-eye-turners for the active fraud Enron had underway, included many that have emerged in full villainy since then, Merrill Lynch, Citibank, and boosterish business journalists prominent among them. Also: if you happened to be living in California during the Enron-intensifiedinduced rolling blackouts of nearly a decade ago, as I was, you will find yourself wishing that mob justice could have been applied to the Enron team. You'll also wonder why a guy named Lou Pai is not as notorious as the rest of them -- and how he escaped with his fortune mainly intact (and accompanied by what the film refers to as his "stripper girlfriend").

Worth seeing a first time -- or a second or third, with the new eyes of 2009. Alex Gibney, the director, is known to the world as last-year's Oscar winner for  Taxi to the Dark Side and within the Atlantic as the brother of our colleague James Gibney.

The war against cheese is on

Yesterday I mentioned rumors of a new anti-cheese crackdown at China's ports of entry. Now this chilling confirmation from a reader:

I also live in Beijing, and, like you, I tend to bring back cheese with me from my trips out of the country. But recently, while traveling back from Spain right after Chinese New Year, I, too, encountered the beagle brigade. Having never seen them before we weren't sure if they were after drugs or food, but when one came to our cart as we waited for our luggage at the carousel and sat down, we knew it was a "food beagle". The agent asked us if we had "food", to which I ventured a meek "yes, a bit", and he asked to see our bag. As it happens, all that we had at that point was our carry on baggage and one suitcase, with our remaining suitcase--the one containing several kilos of ham, chorizo, and cheese--revolved around the carousel, but among our carry ons was a duty free bad from Barcelona airport that contained one wheel of cheese and some turron. The agent confiscated the cheese without a word of explanation, and then asked if there was anything else. We volunteered the turron, but that was not an issue, and then he asked me to open my camera bag. When that proved to have no contraband they moved on, we grabbed the remaining suitcase off the carousel and high-tailed it out of there. But before we got too far, a Chinese guy who had seen the episode told us that there is now a ban on importing dairy products, though why that was the case--and why the agent did not explain it to us--is a mystery.

I have heard stories about other people bringing cheese who had their kids play with the beagle to distract it, and I know of someone else who managed to bring in quite a bit of NZ cheese a few weeks ago, so implementation of the new rule is--surprise!!--sporadic.

The crucial word here is of course "mystery." (Second-crucial word is "sporadic.") Maybe China could be cracking down on imported dairy products because of its own recent tainted-milk scandals. Except, that would make no sense at all. (So, your own country's milk supply is questionable, and the rest of the world makes this stuff in abundance and without quality problems; plus, you have a gigantic trade surplus. So.... suddenly it's important to keep foreign cheese out??) In any case, I will scratch off "load up on cheese!" from the last-minute list of items to cram into the suitcase on my way to the airport. Coffee is still on the list, though. And if only good beer came in freeze-dried form....

This actually is suprising (Cramer/Stewart followup)

If you had been through the treatment that Jon Stewart administered to Jim Cramer last night, try to imagine what your next day's program would be like. I will confess to being surprised by the approach Cramer actually took -- not necessarily the initial "joke" but what follows it, in the second half of this short clip. Wow.

One theory is that Cramer looked uncomfortable on Stewart's show because he knew he had something to answer for. This clip suggests that we need some other theory, since it's hard to find anything resembling the contrite. (Thanks to Terry M.)

Contraband cheese and other random jet-lagged notes from the road

1) In addition to the other advertised virtues of a three-day visit to San Francisco -- interesting conference, successful visa renewal, family-reunification, etc -- also got to see this evening a special screening of Kevin Rafferty's fabulous documentary movie, "Harvard Beats Yale, 29-29." Rafferty previously made very good political documentaries like Feed and Atomic Cafe. Even if you have no interest whatsoever in the subject matter -- no interest in Harvard, no interest in Yale, no interest in football, no interest in the year 1968 when the game was played - I predict that you will find this narrative gripping. Really high-class story telling and human portraiture. Among other benefits: fodder for wondering whether Tommy Lee Jones (lineman on the Harvard team) is poetic or merely hostile/aphasic. Also: the name Michael Bouscaren will not leave your mind once you have seen this film. Similarly J.P. Goldsmith -- but in his case, in a good way.

2) Huzzah and welcome to the Atlantic Food Channel! It is produced by the renowned Corby Kummer, known to the world as an expert food-and-living writer but known to me as the person who has edited my articles at the Atlantic lo these last 25+ years.  A fascinating array of articles for its launch -- and I say this as the most non-foodie member of the Atlantic's staff.

3) First impression of the vaunted Kindle 2: it needs a cover, and (unlike the Kindle Classic) it doesn't come with one. ("Needs" = to keep the screen from being scratched when you're toting it around.) I ordered the cheapest one available and will report back on all things Kindle-related.

4) Latest China-related travel tip: Word from the home office in Beijing is that the customs authorites at PEK airport have launched a new crackdown on contraband.... cheese. My wife and I always lug cheese back when we're coming to China from any other country, because practically everywhere else there is a better, cheaper selection. But now, apparently, the luggage-sniffing beagles at the airport are trying to sniff out any cheese secreted in a suitcase, and vacuum-packs or triple-plastic-bag wrapping are no protection. WTF!?!? But there is no point tempting fate. So we'll go cheeseless for another while, and hope that the beagles are not looking for ground coffee.

5) Media notes: interview this morning with KQED here, and on All Things Considered here. That is all.

It's true: Jon Stewart has become Edward R. Murrow (updated)

Through karmic guidance, I sprang awake at the exact moment Jon Stewart was beginning his merciless demolition of interview with Jim Cramer of CNBC's "Mad Money."

Yes, it is cliched to praise Stewart as the "true" voice of news; and, yes, it is too pinata-like to join the smacking of CNBC. If you want to feel sorry for me, CNBC = 25% of the English-language TV news offerings available in China, the others being CNN, BBC, and the Chinese government's own CCTV-9.

But I found this -- the Stewart/Cramer slaughter -- incredible. (Updated update: Previously had links here, but they kept going bad. I assume anyone who wants it can find it by now.)


 

Although, improbably, I share a journalistic background with Cramer*, I thought Stewart, without excessive showboating, did the journalistic sensibility proud.

Just before leaving China -- ie, two days ago -- I saw with my wife the pirate-video version of Frost/Nixon, showing how difficult it is in real time to ask the kind of questions Stewart did. I know, Frost was dealing with a former president. Still, it couldn't have been easy to do what Stewart just did. Seeing this interview justified the three-day trip in itself.
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* At different times each of us was editor of the same college paper.

In local news...

As mentioned recently:

- Got my Chinese visa renewed! These things are never a gimme, and the outcome isn't always easy to predict by what we might call logical factors. Eg: last summer's rash of visa denials at just the time Beijing was "inviting the world" for the Olympics. Tale of my original visa woes included in this article. Lesson of experience: if you're applying in the US, stick with the LA and San Francisco consulates. Hyper-busy, which has its drawbacks (bring a book! bring two!) but means that the questioning when you get to the window often boils down to "will you pay extra for rush processing?" Suggested answer: yes.

- For those in the KQED/SF listening area, I will be on the "Forum" show tomorrow (Friday, March 13) morning from 9am-10am PDT, talking about this new Atlantic article about China's economic travails.

- When I have regained come closer to sanity, which thanks to the PEK-SFO flight is likely to be around 3am local time, I will try properly to register the excitement at the array of interesting software on display at the David Allen / GTD Summit, plus some architectural compare-and-contrast thoughts about the three cities I've seen in the past four days: Shanghai, Beijing, and SF. That's for later. Now, zzzzzzzzzzzzz.....
 

Technology as friend of tradition! (Chinese language dept.)

People inside China already know about this, and people outside may not care. But because there are points of general intellectual interest involved, a word about discussions within China about possibly changing its system for writing Chinese characters.

No, not getting rid of them altogether and instead using an alphabet -- a pipedream for reformers from time to time, and something with too many complex implications to get into right now.

Rather, undoing one of the big "reforms" rammed through under Chairman Mao: the replacement of many hundreds of characters with streamlined, "simplified" forms. Joel Martinsen of Danwei.org has an excellent primer on the whole subject here. (Other Wikipedia history here and here.) To illustrate what the difference looks like, here is the simple word "telephone" (dianhua in Mandarin) as written first in "traditional" and then in "simplified" forms. In each case it is written with the character for "electricity" followed by the one for "talk," so a telephone is "electric talk," as a computer is "electric brain" (diannao).

Here is "telephone" as written in traditional characters -- which are still used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and some other parts of the Chinese-speaking world outside of the mainland:


And here is the same word, with the "same" characters, in the simplified form used on the mainlaind:


The argument for simplified writing is analogous to various crusades to "rationalize" English spelling -- so u can rite in a kwik and e-z way The simplified versions are obviously simpler to write, with fewer strokes. But there are many objections, enumerated at astonishing length here, which boil down to:

1) The new characters violate tradition. Written English had been in very great flux until the standardization of printing about two centuries ago. (We can barely read Chaucer, and students require glosses for Shakespeare.) Written, traditional Chinese characters had been the great element of continuity for a much longer time -- at least for the people who could read them. Now they've been upturned -- although partisans of simplified characters claim that they're based on a time-honored hand-written form.

2) The new characters are graceless and ugly.  The characters below mean the same thing, guangchang, or "Square," as in People's Square, Tomorrow Square, or Tiananmen Square -- a name I dare use because it's on the street maps in Beijng. Those on left are traditional. On the right, streamlined and simplified. It's like the difference between "through" and "thru."  
(old to the left, new to the right)   

In fairness...

... After learning something about the now-resigned Chas Freeman, I came to disagree with, and think tendentious, Jon Chait's opening salvo against Freeman in the Washington Post. And I have received enough pro-Freeman letters from his working associates in the last two days to make we wonder: is there anyone who actually dealt with the man who considered him a crackpot, an anti-Semite, a menace -- terms thrown around by his critics? Obviously Dennis Blair -- Naval Academy graduate, Rhodes scholar, former CINCPAC, Asia/China expert, no one's idea of a nut -- thought Freeman's irreverent perspective so valuable that he sought it out. Personal knowledge isn't everything, but it is dramatic to me that people who have known Freeman seem so solid in support for him, in contrast to those who don't. It's all moot now.

Still, in fairness: Chait's take-down of the absurd Amity Shlaes interpretation of the Great Depression and the New Deal is both important in its own right and a model of the systematic demolition of a flawed though alluring argument. Among the admirable aspects of this essay is that it it painlessly conveys some of the Ec 101 principles that somehow have been assumed out of existence in day by day political discussion.* This is very well done; worth reading; and worth learning from. I look forward to more from Chait in this area.
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* Eg that critics of a stimulus bill can denounce it because it means "more spending" suggests that they don't understand anything that has been written about economics in the last 70+ years. The point of a stimulus bill is to spend extra money and therefore bring total economic output to a higher level than it would otherwise attain. Even having to mention this point is like having to explain the connection between caloric intake and body weight, or the role of gravity.  But Chait nicely and non-condescendingly lays it out in his article:

Prior to Keynes, the economy was held to be self-correcting. The only cure for a recession was to let wages and prices fall to their natural level. The prevailing attitude, as Paul Krugman writes in his recently re-issued book The Return of Depression Economics, was "a sort of moralistic fatalism." Keynes upended the orthodoxy in a way that was every bit as dramatic as Galileo challenging geocentrism. He insisted that recessions are not a natural process, or the invisible hand's righteous judgment against our sins, but a simple failure of consumer demand.

When people worry about losing their jobs, they sensibly cut back on their spending. But that decision, in turn, reduces demand for goods and services, which results in reduced income or lost jobs for other workers. Keynes called this phenomenon "the paradox of thrift": what makes sense for individuals turns into a disaster for society as a whole. The recession was therefore a failure of collective action that required government action. Government needed to encourage spending by reducing interest rates or, failing that, to inject spending into the economy directly by deliberately running temporary budget deficits.

If you're in San Francisco tomorrow....

... improbably enough, I will be there too.

Reason for 3-day trip from Beijing: Historic GTD Summit, held by my guru and friend David Allen (2004 Atlantic article about him here, plus this followup). It's a first-time-ever gathering of the worldwide tribe, believers in the GTD* Way, and I promised long ago to attend.

The Leader:


Side benefit of a 3-day trip to from Beijing: Seeing my son and his new wife; rolling the dice and trying to get my Chinese visa renewed one more time. If not, may be more than a very brief stay...
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* GTD = "Getting Things Done," more at the links above and here.

Kids and Kindle

My wife is only days away from receiving her exciting new new-to-her Kindle, which is to say that I expect soon to get my hands on a Kindle 2. Meanwhile this note from a good friend about the machine's effect in his household:

An (unreported?) Kindle phenomenon: 11-year old girl, drove parents crazy by not reading books because totally addicted to electronics, has now transferred total addiction to Kindle 2 - and now does nothing, ever, but read books, one after another. In bed, in the car, while eating - while crossing streets!

[My wife] says, "Let's buy Amazon stock. In six months, the world will have discovered this particular phenomenon." (She is the one who had the sudden insight that this might work for [our daughter].)

Ah, this explains the trajectory of my financial life. On hearing the story, my first instinct was not, "Hey, let's act on the potential market-moving nature of this news" but rather "Hey, maybe this is a new answer to all those old laments about American kids refusing to read." Either way, good news for Amazon, good news for the family in question -- and not even bad news for those who have most reason to fear the coming of Kindle, book-store owners, since it sounds as if this new enthusiast was not spending that much time in book stores anyway.

The end for Freeman

As I mentioned originally, I had no intention of getting into the Chas Freeman matter. It has ended in an ugly way -- Freeman's departure statement is intemperate, but even calmer people might sound testy if they had been accused of "hostility toward Jews generally" without, to my knowledge, any evidence for that claim.

I want to think carefully before saying much more about this episode. For the moment my sentiments are closest to those expressed by David Rothkopf, friend and stalwart supporter of Freeman, in this post at the Foreign Policy blog:

The genesis of that crisis is that we have lost perspective on what the criteria for selecting and approving government officials ought to be. Financial trivia, minutiae from people's personal lives and political litmus tests have grown in importance while character, experience, intelligence, creativity and wisdom have fallen by the wayside. Ridiculous threshold obstacles stand alongside obscene ones and when taken with the relentless personal attacks associated with high level jobs in Washington -- the low pay, and the extreme difficulty of getting anything done -- we are seeing even those selected for senior jobs turn away in droves. We are at a moment of not one but an extraordinary array of great crises and challenges for America and we are effectively keeping the people we need most out of the positions we most need filled. 

Emphasis mine. The friend I quoted when I first raised this topic said that, in his view, the controversy over Freeman's appointment amounted to the "self-lobotomization" of the US policy-making apparatus. He was talking just about Freeman, but the problem is clearly broader, as Rothkopf points out. Thought experiment: Steven Chu, our new Secretary of Energy, was previously director of the UC-run Lawrence-Berkeley Lab. The Lab receives a tremendous amount of funding from the US government, largely through the DOE. Chu himself is recused from being involved in such deals for a ceratin period. Suppose instead that this background had been considered a "conflict" that would bar him from office. You could imagine people making the argument, if Chu's reputation were less bullet-proof or if he had offended some interest group.

One other point. Rothkopf ends his post this way:

The result [of problems described above] is not a government of people without conflicts of interest or troubling ties, rather it is a government full of people whose conflicts and ties are with groups powerful enough to protect them. This among other reasons is why I, as a Jew with a memory, was so opposed to the attacks on Freeman. But for the record, the most compelling reason I found for believing Chas Freeman would have been a superb Chairman of the National Intelligence Council was one that seldom came up in all the articles I read. I actually know him.

As I initially pointed out, I do not know Freeman and had never paid attention to him before this controversy. But it turns out that nearly twenty people I know well enough to respect and trust have themselves known and worked with Freeman. Every one of them supported his nomination. And -- as it is unfortunately relevant to point out in these circumstances  -- most of them are Jewish.

We'll all think about this episode for a while.

Two brief media notes about Tibet

Like most other people, I don't know for sure what is going on in Tibet, and in ethnic-Tibetan regions in nearby provinces (Sichuan, Gansu, Qinghai, etc) right now. It does look ominous. For the moment, here are two semi-surprising media notes, as of Wednesday morning, March 11, Beijing time:

1) CNN and BBC are just now running extensive reports on crackdowns and extra Chinese troops being set to Tibet and Tibetan ethnic areas. Plus, historical footage of Chinese soldiers "liberating" Tibet 50 years ago. The surprising aspect: the transmissions are not being blocked or cut off, as happened routinely last year with far less sensitive material. Even footage of an old interview with the Dalai Lama is coming right across the airwaves. Oversight? New strategy? Just too busy? Don't care what people hear in English? Impossible to say.

2) The official Chinese media usually take the sledgehammer approach when explaining China's Tibet policy to the outside world. "Jackal in a Buddhist monk's robes" as an epithet for the Dalai Lama, etc. But yesterday's editorial in my favorite newspaper, the China Daily, instead tried... the light touch! The editorial, in the form of an open letter to the D.L, was mock reverent (rather than blusteringly condemnatory), consistently addressing him as "Your Holiness" and asking him if he would be so kind as to explain various mysteries and problems. It began this way:

Two more on Chas Freeman and China

I realize that there's no point in getting into an endless endorsement-competition to see how many authorities can be lined up for and against the embattled Chas Freeman, nominee-apparent as head of the National Intelligence Council.

But anyone who has seen a Washington scandal get rolling understands the almost unstoppable momentum when one "revelation" follows another and you wait breathlessly to see what the next one will be -- and when the "embattled" victim will finally give in. That is very much how it looked for Freeman when -- on top of the original complaints about his views on Israel -- apparently-damaging new information about his views on China popped up.

To put a brake on the momentum, and to give a chance for deliberation about a man's reputation and a president's ability to get the range of advice he wants, I think it is worth reinforcing the idea that the people who know Freeman and China policy best think the complaints about him on this front are a crock. That was the point of the previous post with the views of Sidney Rittenberg and Jerome A. Cohen. Here, the views of the China scholar John Frankenstein of Brooklyn College, and the Beijing-based blogger and writer (and rock musician) Kaiser Kuo:

John Frankenstein:

I have known Chas Freeman ever since we were next door neighbors at the State Dept's Chinese language School in Taiwan over 35 years ago. (At the time he was studying Hong Lou Meng; most of us were struggling with Hong Qi) He's damn smart, speaks his mind, dedicated to the best interests of the United States, and has little tolerance for bullshit.  I cannot think of a better choice for NIC chairman than Chas.

Kaiser Kuo, in an entry two years ago from his Ich Bin Ein Beijinger blog, reported details from a speech Freeman gave on the importance of independent-minded intelligence analysis, especially as it applied to China.  According to the transcript Kuo quoted, Freeman said:

To deal effectively with China, Americans need to understand it in terms of its own complexities and authentic aspirations. This is unlikely to be achieved by officials engaged in writing narrowly focused and highly tendentious reports mandated by Congress to justify the single-issue agendas of our military-industrial complex or, for that matter, our humanitarian-industrial complex. Nor can it be accomplished by analysts stir-frying intelligence to suit the political appetites of those they work for....

Predictions about China based on a priori reasoning, ideologically induced delusions, hearsay, conjecture, or mirror-imaging have been frequent and numerous. They have racked up a remarkable record of unreliability. To cite a few relevant examples: contrary to repeated forecasts, the many imperfections of China's legal system have neither prevented it from developing a vigorous market economy nor inhibited foreign investment -- of which China continues to attract more than any other country, including our own. China's failure to democratize and its continuing censorship of its media, including the Internet, have not stifled its economic progress or capacity to innovate, which are increasingly impressive. China's perverse practices with respect to human rights have not cost China's Communist Party or its government their legitimacy. On the contrary, polling data suggests that Chinese have a very much higher regard for their political leaders and government than Americans currently do for ours.

The second paragraph, with Freeman's observations of China, rings almost all* true to me -- based on living here for nearly three years. The first paragraph, about the importance of truly independent-minded intelligence analysis, commends him for the job rather than disqualifies him. So let's slow down, stop the stampede, and -- since we're talking about a "non-confirmable" post that is presumably within the president's discretion -- look for actual proof that Freeman's views on other topics are so extreme, deep-held, and unreasonable that he should be banned from further service as a bigot or pariah. It doesn't look to me as if such proof is there.
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* Exception, for later discussion: I think there is more tension/contradiction between the Chinese government's determination to control the media and public discussion, on the one hand, and its desire to foster an innovative economy, on the other, than Freeman suggests here. Also, his comments about the relative popularity of US and Chinese officials was made during the late GW Bush era, not Obama's time. But all that is for another time -- and is certainly not a reason to think he should be banned from public office.

Chas Freeman and China

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Own worst enemy, Tomorrow Square edition

I've mentioned once or twice, or maybe fifty times, my wonderment at the contrast between the sophistication with which Chinese officialdom can address domestic audiences and sensitivities, and the comic-if-it-weren't tragic cluelessness of many official efforts to explain China's views and "feelings" to the outside, non-Chinese-speaking world.

I don't have time for a full presentation-and-gloss at the moment, but see if this recent item, which I found while leafing through back copies of my favorite newspaper, the China Daily, rings any bells. It was about the nomination of Gary Locke, former governor of Washington, as US Commerce Secretary, and it  featured "inside" analysis from an experienced Chinese diplomat:

Story as it looked on the page, showing the local Chinese angle:



Near the end, the experts step in, displaying their perfect ear for the nuances of the way race is lived and discussed in Obama-era USA. Analytical conclusion of the story, from someone with that indispensable on-the-ground knowledge of America:
 


Ah, the talents with the yellow skin. In a similar development, the new issue of the local That's Shanghai magazine has a rundown of events for the Shanghai International Literary Festival, including a talk I'm giving at 3pm today. Most of the items list the writer and the name of his or her most recent book. In my case, that proved to be awkward -- since the title, Postcards from Tomorrow Square, includes the now-sensitive word "Square," which officials feel might stir up emotions about unpleasant events that happened twenty years ago this June in another Square. I am not kidding (and I'm also not just guessing about this). A friend has suggested that perhaps the Tomorrow Square building, 明天广场, in central Shanghai -- right on People's Square, as it happens -- will have to have its nameplate removed during the sensitive period ahead. It is sometimes unbelievable but never dull here.

The building formerly known as Tomorrow Square. Maybe everyone will agree not to notice it:

A fight I didn't intend to get into: Chas Freeman

I have never met Chas Freeman, the man whose reported selection as head of the National Intelligence Council has drawn such criticism, including from my colleague Jeffrey Goldberg. Not having had a chance to assess him first hand, and not having put in time studying his views, I have not felt comfortable weighing in on the dispute about whether his outlook was unacceptably extreme. Here's the gist of the argument against him: that he is too close to the Saudis (as a former US Ambassador to the Kingdom, and now head of a think tank that has received Saudi funding); too tolerant of repression in China (because of comments saying the Chinese regime had no choice but to crack down in Tiananmen Square); and too deaf to the moral claims of Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East.

But very recently I met with a friend who had worked years ago with Freeman  -- on China, not the Middle East -- and was upset about what he called the "self-lobotimization" of US foreign policy that the campaign to discredit Freeman represented. As I've looked into it, I've come to agree.

His first point was that Freeman was being proposed for a post within the president's discretionary appointment power, like one of his White House aides, and therefore didn't have to reflect the Senate's sense of who should be in the job. The more important point, he said, was that Freeman's longstanding contrarian inclination to challenge conventional wisdom of any sort, far from being an embarrassing liability, was exactly what a president needed from the person in this job.

A president's Secretary of State had to represent the country's policies soberly and predictably around the world. His National Security Advisor had to coordinate and evenhandedly present the views of the various agencies. His White House press secretary had to take great care in expressing the official line to the world's media each day. His Director of National Intelligence had to give him the most sober and responsible precis of what was known and unknown about potential threats.

For any of those roles, a man like Freeman might not be the prudent choice. But as head of the National Intelligence Council, my friend said, he would be exactly right. While he would have no line-operational responsibilities or powers, he would be able to raise provocative questions, to ask "What if everybody's wrong?", to force attention to the doubts, possibilities, and alternatives that normally get sanded out of the deliberative process through the magic known as "groupthink." As Dan Froomkin of NiemanWatch wrote in an item that called Freeman "A One-Man Destroyer of Groupthink,"

He has... spent a goodly part of the last 10 years raising questions that otherwise might never get answered -- or even asked -- because they're too embarrassing, awkward, or difficult.
For him to be put in charge of what [Laura Rozen of Foreign Policy] calls "the intelligence community's primary big-think shop and the lead body in producing national intelligence estimates" is about the most emphatic statement the Obama Administration could possibly make that it won't succumb to the kind of submissive intelligence-community groupthink that preceded the war in Iraq. 

Again, I don't know Freeman personally. I don't know whether the Saudi funding for his organization has been entirely seemly (like that for most Presidential libraries), which is now the subject of inspector-general investigation. If there's a problem there, there's a problem.

But I do know something about the role of contrarians in organizational life. I have hired such people, have worked alongside them, have often been annoyed at them, but ultimately have viewed them as indispensable. Sometimes the annoying people, who will occasionally say "irresponsible" things, are the only ones who will point out problems that everyone else is trying to ignore. A president needs as many such inconvenient boat-rockers as he can find -- as long as they're not in the main operational jobs. Seriously: anyone who has worked in an organization knows how hard it is, but how vital, to find intelligent people who genuinely are willing to say inconvenient things even when everyone around them is getting impatient or annoyed. The truth is, you don't like them when they do that. You may not like them much at all. But without them, you're cooked.

So to the extent this argument is shaping up as a banishment of Freeman for rash or unorthodox views, I instinctively take Freeman's side -- even when I disagree with him on specifics. This job calls for originality, and originality brings risks. Chas Freeman is not going to have his finger on any button. He is going to help raise all the questions that the person with his finger on the button should be aware of.

Read carefully this NiemanWatch Q-and-A with Freeman from 2006 (or read any of Freeman's recent policy articles here) and ask yourself two questions: do these sound like the views of an unacceptable kook? And, would you rather have had more of this sensibility, or less, applied to U.S. policy in recent years?

Frankie Jose / "Damaged Culture" link update

In an item yesterday about the distinguished Filipino novelist F. Sionil "Frankie" Jose, I mentioned that I'd taken a road trip with him to the northern reaches of Luzon and written about it in the Atlantic in 1991. Thanks to our web team, especially Cotton Codinha, that article is now online, here.

I hadn't looked at the article in a very long time and was disconcerted to find that the comparison I used yesterday to describe Jose's gusto was the very same one that came to mind 18 years ago. I hope that this unintended self-plagiarism says as much about the rightness of the comparison as it does about the limits of my imagination. It comes at the end of this part of the original article:

José is a short, plump, nearly bald man of sixty-six, who would not look out of place wearing the baggy shorts and basketball-style undershirt of the typical Chinese shopkeeper in Southeast Asia. When I see him, I am reminded of a little boy--in the way he carries his body, in his quick and unconcealed switches from desolation to glee. On our five-day trip last summer, when he was driving me and a young Soviet academic to see the sights of his youth, we passed a railroad siding where the teenage José had been held by Japanese soldiers during the Second World War. "I was so scared," he said, his face clouding like a ten-year-old's. "I was so little and skinny then--ho ho ho!" he roared, slapping his round belly. We stopped every few miles so that José could see whether the cane-sugar sweets, or the little roasted birds, or the other regional delicacies were as tasty as he recalled. When he was not planning the next meal, he sat watching women with a blissful look. "Ah, I tell you, Jim, the eye never dulls!" he said in a restaurant after four stunning young women walked by our table "Only the flesh becomes weak--ho ho ho!"

Eventually I asked him how his wife, Tessie, whom he married forty-two years ago, after both had been students at the University of Santo Tomas, in Manila, feels about the adoring descriptions of young women that fill his work. "She knows I am devoted to her," he said, serious for a moment. "And she forgives me my pecadeeeeyos!" A rich roar of laughter. This, I thought, is what it must have been like to be on the road with Rabelais.

Because Frankie Jose has been so centrally involved in debates about the effects of Philippine culture on the country's political and economic destiny, for the record I include a link to my 1987 article "A Damaged Culture," which also cites Jose's works. This article generated a lot of heat, and some support, in the Philippines. From what I can tell similar debates still rage.

More on Newt and airplanes

If you'd like to hear more about Newt Gingrich's plan to "reform" air-traffic control from someone who really knows the subject, I heartily recommend this entry from Don Brown's generally admirable Get the Flick site. Brown is a retired air-traffic controller with a knack for explaining technical matters clearly - and with an attitude, which makes reading his accounts fun. I think he is closer to Andrew Sullivan's original mockery of Newt than to my more respectful reference. In any case, definitely worth considering if you care about the topic.

Frankie Jose

For the next few days I am back in Shanghai, my original home town in China, but earlier this week, while away from the internet, was in the Philippines. There the happiest discovery was that F. Sionil Jose, the writer and political theorist universally known as "Frankie," is still in fine,  feisty shape. This picture makes him look more torpid, and less jovial, than he really is. Click for larger, including detail of the poster on the window of his bookstore.

 

Frankie Jose is the main reason I watch the Nobel Prize lists each fall: I'm waiting to see if the Literature panel has gotten around to giving him his award. For decades he has been his country's leading novelist, renowned especially for his "Rosales" series of novels, which depict much of the Phillipines' troubled 20th century history. To compare him to Solzhenitsyn would be misleading, in that Jose rarely goes more than thirty seconds in conversation without breaking out into a guffaw. (This picture is in one of the atypically sober-looking moments.) In his life and in his writing, he has a large dose of Rabelais. If Bill Clinton were a major novelist, he might be a model.

Every time I've met Jose over the last 20-plus years, he's said, "Jim, I am getting so much fatter!" -- with a big laugh, because he loves food (among other pleasures) so much. But Jose has a deadly-serious claim to being the conscience of his nation - at legal and physical risk during the Marcos years and as a sobering voice in the years since then. An article in Time last week emphasized his impact and role.

Back in 1991 I wrote* about a trip with Jose through his native Ilocos region of the Philippines. It is not yet on line in our archives. (If our web team can put it up, tThe link will go is here. For now, you can find an expanded version only in Looking at the Sun.) What was remarkable, I thought and still think, was his management of contradictions: his dark view of the Philippines' predicament and his sunnyness as a person; his role as intellectual and artiste with connections around the world, but also as locally-rooted political activist -- and practical-minded businessman and entrepreneur, with his renowned publishing house and bookstore called Solidaridad.

 

Solidaridad is in the same site I remember, on Padre Faura avenue in the old Ermita section of Manila. Its stock of books from around the world is better than I remembered, and more extensive than anything I have seen in China.

If you haven't read any of Jose's books, you have a treat ahead. And Nobel committee: get cracking! Frankie is full of vigor and witticism now, at 84, just as he was in his early 60s when I first met him. At this rate, he could go for decades. But why wait to give him his due?

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With his wife Teresita, to whom his latest novel, Sherds, is dedicated, and his recent visitor:


* "The Ilocos: A Philippine Discovery'' The Atlantic MonthlyMay 1991

Better news out of the midwest: Mischke back in business

Previous bad news entries reported the dethronement of St. Paul's own Tommy Mischke as a radio talk-show host. My profile of Mischke from eight years ago in the Atlantic is here; it included this photo of the artist at work:



As reported in MinnPost.com and Czerniec.com, Mischke is back in business -- as of today. Details of the first webcast, which will be weekdays from 2pm to 4pm Central time starting March 4, are in the two previous links plus at CityPages.com, which will host the show. Enjoy.

Tom Geoghegan comes in 7th

Congratulations to Cook County Commissioner Mike Quigley, who came in first, with 22% of the vote, and gets the Democratic nomination (in an overwhelmingly Democratic district) to succeed Rahm Emanuel as Representative from the 5th District of Illinois.

Tom Geoghegan, often mentioned here, finished in 7th place with 6% of the vote. After the jump, the email he just sent out to supporters.

As I've said all along, I don't know the politics of the district but I do know that Geoghegan is an outstanding voice and thinker in contemporary politics. If his run for Congress, unsuccessful at this stage, call more attention to his books and outlook, it will have done some good. And having some idea of how hard it is to run for any political office, my heart is with just about anyone who gives it a try. (Just about....)
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Let a thousand-and-one flowers bloom at the Atlantic!

(Following the previous thousand blooming flowers, here.)

I hear via my aviation grapevine that my colleague Andrew Sullivan is making fun of Newt Gingrich in general, and in specific for this idea about modernizing the US air-traffic control system:

[Newt says:] "One of the projects I'm going to launch -- we don't have a name for it yet -- is an air-traffic modernization project... You can do a space-based air-traffic-control system with half the current number of air-traffic controllers, increase the amount of air traffic in the northeast by 40 percent, allow point-to-point flights without the controllers having to have highways in the sky, and reduce the amount of aviation fuel by 10 percent."
[Andrew asks:] Why would I be even more terrified to get on a plane after that "reform"?

As for making fun of Newt in general, have at it! But on this idea, he turns out to be saying something smart.

To play the role of Mr. Gradgrind for a moment, if you're terrified getting on a plane, it has to be for reasons beyond the realm of the statistical or the "reality-based," since on average this is about the safest way you can spend your time. Often entire years pass without a single death from a crash on US airlines - something that can't be said of riding in a car, walking down the street, taking a bath, lying in your own bed, etc. Yes, when things go wrong, they're grisly, but traffic deaths, random murders, bathtub drownings, etc are also bad ways to go.  (And yes, yes, I realize that Andrew is exaggerating for effect.)

Still, there are risks both real and perceived in flying. The system Gingrich is talking about is designed to reduce at least the real ones.

What he has in mind is no doubt a variant of what is called "NextGen," for Next Generation Transportation. It involves a satellite-based navigation system (think: GPS) called ADS-B. Not everyone agrees on every detail of these new systems. But the approach as a whole constitutes a mature, vetted, sensible, picked-over-for-years proposal that has most everything going for it except the long, slow process of getting it accepted and implemented. I described its potential back in 2001 in this Atlantic cover story and the related book Free Flight. More available here, here, here, and here.

As for why this system is more modern: Today's air traffic control system is essentially like a telephone network in which you must ring up a central switchboard and ask an operator's help in placing each call. The new system would allow a lot more automated routing - with less needless, switchboard-operator-type human intervention but (as with anything in aviation) human and automated safety measures piled on triple-depth.

As for why it could be more efficient and ultimately safer: Today's system funnels a great deal of traffic through a small number of specified routes - which therefore become the only crowded places in the sky. A newer system would allow more planes to take a variety of courses, staying out of each other's way. (It doesn't solve the problem of too many airplanes wanting to land at the same few over-crowded airports, but as a side effect it is designed to make smaller, under-used airports more attractive and practical.) In a sense it's like the difference between cars, which can take a variety of routes through town, and trolleys, which go where the tracks are laid and nowhere else. I am oversimplifying, but there actually is something to Gingrich's plan. It's part of what is good about him, not what's bad.

Should this be the basis of the GOP's new program? They could do a lot worse -- and, as I'm sure Andrew agrees, they probably will.

New hope for Bobby Jindal

Still in the internet twilight zone, but happened to pass a TV that was, improbably enough, replaying Bobby Jindal's "response" speech from last week. I am the last person to say this, but let me confirm the prevailing view: Wow.

One way to think of this is: It's been a mixed week for the Rhodes Scholar tribe. Nancy-Ann Min DeParle, known in RS parlance as being of "Tennessee and Balliol College," has just been named the new White House health-reform czar(ina?), and Dominic Barton ("British Columbia and Brasenose College") was chosen capo di tutti capi of McKinsey & Co. Congratulations! On the other hand, we have .... that speech, by Gov. Jindal ("Louisiana and New College.") Maybe they can revoke these things for excessive public embarrassment? This could be called the Mel Reynolds provision? ("Illinois and Lincoln College, plus federal prison.")

Actually there is both precedent and hope for Gov. Jindal. His speech was no more humiliating a flop than was the 1988 Democratic convention speech by that other boy-wonder southern governor then making his debut on the national stage, Bill Clinton ("Arkansas and University College.") Clinton very quickly figured out that if everyone was laughing at him, the only way to come out ahead was to join in and ultimately lead the hilarity. So within a week he was on the Tonight show trading barbs with Johnny Carson about just how terrible his speech had been. Politicians' self-deprecation can never be 100% sincere, but that doesn't matter. We appreciate the gesture.

This pirouette is a little trickier for Jindal, because in addition to making fun (as Clinton did) of his ridiculous stage presence he'd probably also have to mock what he actually said, which was more or less the straight Limbaughesque anti-government line. If he's as smart as everyone thought until last week thinks, he'll figure out a way to show that he understands why people would snicker at a governor of Louisiana saying, "Who needs the federal government? Who needs warnings of natural disasters?" while recovery from Katrina is nowhere near complete. Turning the situation in his favor would be an act of Clintonlike dexterity, and would ideally happen under the auspices of today's Johnny Carson, Jon Stewart.

Daily Show bookers, throw this man a lifeline! Gov. Bobby, follow the trail that Gov. Bill has blazed! And act soon. Self-deprecation delayed is self-deprecation that just makes things worse. I'd love to hear Clinton counsel Jindal on this one.