Lunch = Food

Working into (or, even worse, through) the lunch hour, and having lunch meetings, is an American affliction desperately in need of a cure. Our shoddy eating habits are compounded by our inability to stick to a reasonable eating schedule, and the fact that most situations that require working through lunch are stressful ones certainly doesn't help with digestion.

Personally, I think working into or through lunchtime should be made as socially unacceptable as coming to work in a Nazi SS uniform.

Grow Up

A lot of people I know have been having children lately. Apparently that's what happens when folks get around my age. This has caused Anu and I to consider whether or not we want to be a part of this particular trend. Part of considering this is figuring out just how much it sucks to be a kid, or have one, these days.

When I was a kid, there were plenty of lousy things about being young. Bullies kicking my ass. Girls who wouldn't kiss me. Not being able to drive a car. The fact that the entire planet was not made of pizza and iced cream.

It turns out, however, that being a kid nowadays sucks even more -- and so does being a parent.

When I was a kid, I ran forehead-first into our driveway gate (which I rarely remembered to latch, so it was always swinging in the wind) as I was chasing my beloved kite. I required stitches. I also tried to jump a neighbor's fence on my bicycle, leading me to hit the storm drain, flip the bike, and slam into the fence. I avoided stitches, but I sure looked and felt like a bruised-up moron. Among my many other stupid tricks were: jumping through the branches of a tree the height of our house (washing off blood and sap really sucks), numerous bicycle crashes, punching out walls and windows, building a treehouse that collapsed with me in it, hundreds of dirt clod fights (including ones that turned into fist and/or rock fights), and as I got older, first leaping and eventually riding dirtbikes off a cliff and into a nearby sand and gravel pit.

Friends and I also used to play Star Wars in a nearby bog that looked kind of like Dagobah, and was right next to the four dishes and radio antenna owned by the local cable TV firm. My dad used to bring home fireworks. And skateboards. Sometimes the fireworks and skateboards were deployed at the same time. I also liked to set fires (though generally in safe places), swim in the ocean, and take the train 100 miles into NY City to buy records and go to punk clubs (after I was about 12, I did the latter two unattended).

Many of my stunts resulted in getting yelled at, lectured, or grounded. Were I a kid now, any one of these things might result in my mom getting arrested and/or me and my sisters being taken away from her by Child Protective Services.

So might the fact that I started babysitting my little sisters starting when I was as young as 10 (though not for very long at that age). I was actually paid to babysit other people's kids, and to mow laws with an actual lawnmower, when I was 12. Child labor! Dangerous whirling blades! The horror! The horror!

I even got arrested once as a kid (for graffiti). The judge chastised me for being a snotty young punk, and then chewed-out the cop for wasting his time when the cop should have just dealt with it locally and made me clean up the graffiti and be done with it. Then the judge sentenced me to clean up the graffiti. The idea of arresting my mother for the fact that young people are universally stupid never even occurred to anyone involved.

I left home to go to college at 16. I did incredible amounts of stupid things between 16 and 18 (the age at which my mother was no longer legally burdened with the responsibility for my actions despite being a four and a half hour drive away). And while I was there, a friend of mine was killed in one of the first campus shooting rampages since Charles Whitman.

Was my mom negligent for allowing me to go to college before the age of majority? Based on the culture of paranoia today, I bet a lot of so-called parents today would think so, especially since something actually quite bad did happen on campus. Of course, she couldn't have known. And statistically, the chances of that happening were incredibly small. It was freakish that it happened, not inevitable.

In the neighborhood where I currently live, there is a huge State Park that you can walk to from our house in about 5 minutes. I hardly ever see kids in it. I also hardly ever see kids riding bikes in the neighborhood (once), walking around the neighborhood, or even playing in their own yards. Outside is where bad things are like scrapes and cuts and bullies and the ubiquitous* child abductors.

When I was a kid, my mom was constantly trying to get me to go outside and run around more. She wanted me away from the video games and out in the woods with my friends, not cooped up in the house so I'd be "safe". And she certainly didn't make play dates for me. If I wanted to play, I had to arrange it with other kids myself, like kids have since cavekids dragged each other out by the hair to play a nice game of "hit the tiger with a stick". Parents have become both overprotective, as well as obsessed with the idea of "preparing kids for success" and thus kids' lives have become regimented and contained.

People think they're being responsible with their kids by building these walls around them, and regimenting their lives, but they're really being quite irresponsible. In addition to the fact that sedentary lifestyles encourage kids to get fat and unhealthy, this kind of mollycoddling makes kids lazy, codependent, and spoiled. And it perpetuates the pathetic culture of victimization that has turned America into the land of lawsuits and self help scams. Perhaps, though, this constant monitoring and scheduling is just good parenting after all -- preparing them for constant surveillance and obedience in the post-Patriot-Act police state that many seem to want to turn our country into.

Michael Chabon has written about this. George Carlin ranted about it and accurately named the phenomenon "The Cult of The Child" and "Child Worship". Lenore Skenazy has made combating the insidious forces depriving kids of a real childhood into a cottage industry with her Free Range Kids book and site. And historical fiction author Conn Iggulden achieved international attention for his own Dangerous Book For Boys (which inspired the Daring Book For Girls). All this effort in order to try to inspire, encourage, and occasionally chastise parents into allowing kids to actually have a life.

If raising kids is going to mean getting arrested and sued for trying to let my kids experience the world, I am not so sure I want to do that. At least, not here. When I was in Denmark visiting my sister Katrina and her husband Troels, I saw kids actually riding bicycles and playing in public parks. Maybe in Europe, a kid can still go to the mall without anyone getting arrested.


(* Child abduction is far from ubiquitous. Based on reported statistics, while approximately 1.1% of children are reported missing annually (approx 800,000 missing child reports, out of a child population of approx 73.7m), being reported missing includes runaways, etc. About half that 800,000 number is accounted for by abductions by family members. Only about 7.5% of that 800,000 number is claimed to be stranger abductions, and only 115 (0.01%) were "stereotypical kidnappings". Approximately 99% of kids reported missing are found. So based on these reported statistics, in any given year a kid's chances of going missing with a non-family member is about seven hundredths of a percent (0.07%), and of going missing permanently is approximately one hundredth of a percent (0.01%). Even if you believe the claim that reported statistics are under-reported by a factor of 20x, which seems an absurd claim in our current culture of paranoia, we're talking about 1.4% and 0.2% chances, respectively. According to child violent death statistics, a kid has a 0.01% chance of a violent death (0.004% chance of being murdered). On the other hand, heart disease, which obesity and lack of exercise is a factor in, is responsible for 27% of all U.S. deaths per year.)

Depression Depression

Maybe it's cyclical Christmas blues, or maybe it's the impending economic Depression, but I've been depressed even more than usual the last 3 weeks or so. The Bay Area doesn't have very ambitious weather, and its idea of winter is rain, which I love, so it's not like that's to blame.

I'm going to go with the impending economic Depression theory. I've blogged a bit about the economy over at TFG, but it's getting to me enough that it's interfering with my real life, not just agitating my political braincells, and stepping all over the mental space needed for the things I'd normally write about here.

In fact I've been unable to write anything at all of much value since the week before Thanksgiving, which just makes me angrier. I find myself more worried than excited about anything and everything lately (even more so than usual).

Our house is now likely worth enough less than we paid for it that if we sold it we may not even be able to pay-off our mortgage and wind up making monthly payments on something we don't even own anymore. This means we're stuck here no matter what, for quite a long time.

None of the personal projects I'd hoped to get third party investment for are going to be looked at right now, either. Everything is our lives are in stasis as we slog through these wretched economic times (and meanwhile various CEO types are going around defending bonuses that vastly exceed all the money I've ever earned in my life).

They're even aggressively, preemptively cutting costs at work, something they've never done before. I'm lucky to have a job at all. But I don't want to feel that way. I want to feel excited about my work, and the economic situation is making that very difficult since I feel like there's a gun to my head to work or else (which makes it pretty hard to actually enjoy it).

All in all it's very unsettling to be so excessively -- settled. And yet, while a bad economy makes work start to feel more like a prison, at the same time it makes that security seem so precarious. It's a very aggravating contradiction to feel like the situation both traps you somewhere, and at the same time makes you feel like that place ejected you that you'd be totally lost.

Now I know why they call it a Depression.

Stop The Subprime Bailout

Even CNN has noticed that many taxpayers are far from excited about a government bailout of individual borrowers and institutional lenders involved in the subprime mortgage crisis.

As a responsible homeowner with a non-exotic mortgage, one which is no small burden to maintain given the high prices here in the Bay Area, I do not feel it is right to be asked to shoulder the burden of paying for other peoples' financial mistakes through my tax dollars. Why should the government reward financial irresponsibility on the part of borrowers, and unethical lending practices on the part of lenders (and repackagers)? A bailout encourages these sorts of lenders to keep on making these loans, which are irresponsible at best and criminally predatory at worst, under the assumption that we taxpayers are on the hook.

The housing market has begun a process of correction, and in addition to needing to pay my own mortgage, the loss of value of my home and real wages makes me even less able to pay more taxes to try to redress others' negligent and/or criminal behavior. I'd rather see my tax dollars go towards fundamentally more important things, like health care and education.

Or, if Congress wants to bail people out, don't bail out speculators, charlatans, and the irresponsible. Instead, bail-out young home buyers like me who were pinched by speculation-driven high property values, but who still worked hard, planned right, and spent time researching an "as affordable as possible in our area" home in order to buy under sensible, fixed-rate terms.

Despite my own resultant financial losses from this financial crisis, I do realize that a correction is necessary in order to keep housing values stable in the long-term. Let the market correct so we as a country can achieve stability and begin the process of rebuilding a housing market with sensible practices and realistic, not speculative, pricing.

If you feel the same way, in addition to checking out the Nobailout.org folks, this page can help you write your congresspersons and tell them.

Social Futilities

There are too many social networking sites. Enough that there are emerging, competing standards for a universal login / universal online ID like Open ID and Friend Connect, so that you are have one ID for all the myriad sites that want you to have an ID. I have even tried Gravitar (I don't like it -- the restrictions on nicknames are arbitrary and stupid).

But what is the point of all this divergence and reconvergence and redivergence -- and so on? How many social network utilities does one need? I am already a member of MySpace, Facebook, Linked In, Plaxo, Friendster, Orkut, Tribes, Notch Up, Naymz, Twitter, Flixster, Good Reads, vfxConnection, Digg, Stumble Upon, Del.ici.ous, Flickr, YouTube, Live Journal, and of course Blogger (and probably a dozen others I'm just forgetting about). I was gung-ho about social utilities for a brief period, convinced by friends and the media that they provided good value in terms of fun, meeting people, and career opportunities. However, I quickly realized this was just another "history repeats itself" moment for the Internet -- social utilities are just Web user interfaces slapped on old ideas that have been around since my BBS days. Even Digg and Twitter are just interface updates of the original core concept of the BBS -- a bulletin board. People invite me to join new social utilities at least once a week. I literally can't keep track of them all, and considering how little value they provide, why bother?

I rarely log-in to most of them. I just don't have time to compete with, for example, the seemingly full-time Diggers, in terms of becoming a popular contributor of articles. (And, like being a DJ, I'm unclear as to why merely presenting the creative work of other people earns respect in the first place.) I certainly don't have time to take random stabs at befriending people who happen to like one of the bands I like. Indeed I don't have time to do much of anything online these days except write. My life outside the Internet, the actual physical life of food and wine and travel and art and literature and myriad other interesting things, which we're supposed to be living, takes precedence these days over jostling for virtual position with people who have too much time on their hands. And the irritable idiots who patrol the Internet looking to assert themselves in their self-appointed roles of cybercop (for all manner of "infractions" usually related to their disagreeing with something you think) just aren't worth the bother. When I was a teenager it seemed like grand fun, all this online arguing and jostling for the role of minor digital celebrity or king of some obscure corner of the networks (when I was a teenager, there wasn't a single monolithic Internet -- things like FidoNet and Compuserve were still separate worlds). Nowadays, it's dull as dirt.

I could look at the explosion of these sites as information overload, but the problem is that many of them don't really have much in the way of information. At least, not any that's useful to me. For all the effort some people put into social networking, what rewards do they reap? It's difficult to say. The occasional Internet phenom gets their Warholian 15 minutes and perhaps some cash, but people also still can get their moment in the sun doing decidedly old-school things like writing books -- on paper. What sites to engender success of some kind are the ones which are most focused on having something to say (mostly blogs, art/photo portfolios, and plain old hand-built websites).

The majority of social networking sites, like Facebook, do not facilitate anything but time-wasting. Facebook's stock in trade are games which are actually less fun than the old mail-order, turn-based games of the 80s on which their gameplay style is based. Old promises of the Internet being interactive, and therefore engaging people in new ways, seem to be broken most hypocritically by social utilities, as these sites all promised that their raison d'etre was to revitalize that aspect of the Internet. Most of them serve primarily as engines for passive fandom, combined with the same kind bickering that has been around since BBSes and Usenet. Media stories explaining the necessity of having such a "presence" uniformly fail to explain why, other than that this is the latest fad in herdlike conformity to sweep through the human race. It is very primal, the urges that play out in social networking. Each page is like digital urine on a virtual tree, marking territory and announcing to all sniffers-by that you are the alpha dog of a whole realm of Web pages.

But there are no trees, and the territory is free. It's a safe, non-zero-sum game of territorial conquest. Sure, occasionally the ego-bashing Vandals swarm through your digital space, stabbing at everything they see with all the elegance of a ruptured sewer pipe -- but there's no real territory for them to seize, and anyone with any sense merely ignores these intrusions (or, if you're sufficiently bored, they are generally easy to make sport of as their own egos and IQs are nothing to write home about). The toothless predators are safely ensconced in their mothers' basements, and only those chronically predisposed to being victims are ever victimized by them. But other than the chance at an occasional dull fight with a halfwit, or to waste time deleting spam, what exactly does digital social networking provide its users?

Once upon a time, it was a decent way to expand one's network of actual friends. I've made friends -- the kind I'd at least e-mail off-system, if not get to see in-person -- both on MU*s (Qwest, then Delusions, in particular) and Orkut. But, since then, all this social networking just seems to serve to either amuse or annoy people I already know. Nearly all of my connections on Facebook, for example, are people I know. By force of pure number of users, I have managed to reconnect with old friends through Linked In, Facebook, and MySpace -- so that was a genuine benefit -- but I still immediately try to shunt those conversations to real-space or e-mail rather than use the slow, buggy, clunky and advertising-laden interfaces of any of these sites. And how I'd get to know people I don't already know on Facebook or MySpace is uncertain, because their message boards are either nonexistant, not nearly as active as they once were on Orkut (before exhaustion at dealing with spammers drove most people away), or active but vapid (no creative role-playing, or joke telling, or word games, or exquisite corpses, or even debating science or politics -- just the same boring trolling and arguments about sex and fandom that have been rehashed over and over since at least the early days of Usenet). Sure, MySpace is ok for finding out about bands I'd never heard of before -- but frankly, even though I can hear tracks for free on MySpace, I still think magazines like Maximum Rock N' Roll or review sites like Heathen Harvest do a better job of organizing and presenting information about what bands and albums might be worth hearing.

Blogging (words or photos or videos) has its benefits, in at least it requires thought and activity on the part of the individual to create the material. Much of what is presented is not worth a first look, never mind a second, but I can't criticize people for at least trying. What complaints I do have about blogging will come with more details in a follow-up post some time soon, but let me state that it revolves around the problem of totally devaluing content, and leaving only advertising as a means of compensation for content creators. Eventually there will be nothing left to advertise, because people will come to expect to get everything for free (even physical goods) in return for watching ads.

Even with social utility sites, the cost of all this "benefit" is non-stop advertising (or, in the case of Facebook, invasive datamining and targeted spamming). I'm not opposed to the idea of social networking on-line, indeed I did some pioneering work in this area as a software developer in the 1990s, but before I sign-up for one more social networking site, whoever invites me better be able to explain what conceivable benefit will come to me, and at what cost before I even bother to spend the time necessary to fill-out the sign-up form.

Obnoxious Berkeleyites

I went to Berkeley today to try to buy birthday gifts for my wife. Not only was I mostly unsuccessful, but the visit reminded me of just how much Berkeley annoys me -- at least that part near the University and up in the hills which is overrun with certain people. Those people can ruin the place for everyone else, if you're not careful.

Berkeley should be a paradise for American Liberals since, by its own claims, it is America's most Liberal city. However, I think the Berkeleyites have "Libertine" confused with "Liberal," and "Obnoxious Contrarianism" confused with "Thoughtful Politics."

I'd like to start of by pointing out that "George Bush Sucks" is not really a sophisticated political sentiment. Too many people in Berkeley seem to think that all politics is a matter of popularity of slogan. If it's on a t-shirt, mission accomplished. It's not just that they wear the t-shirts, and plaster the bumper-stickers everywhere, but that when you hear them discussing politics on the streets -- it's in the same vapid terms.

They wear their amazing enlightenment on their sleeves, while their own city is visibly, obviously segregated economically and racially (when a Berkeleyite says "the hills" they mean "rich and white (or east asian)" and when one says "the flatlands" they mean "poor and dark"). I've had more than one Berkeleyite tell me: "You must be so glad to be out of New York, where it's so racist." Excuse me? New York is one of the most racially, ethnically, and economically mixed cities in the world.

Just like New York's East Village, the trash-strewn, piss-soaked streets of Telegraph Avenue near the University are the result of a concentration of stupid college students and bums. And all college students are stupid. When I was a college student, I didn't think I was stupid. That's because I was an ignorant, self-aggrandizing hypocrite, like every college student. Basically, the purpose of college is to use sleep deprivation and drugs to brainwash young adults long enough that when they are unleashed on society their unmitigated, self-righteous arrogance has mellowed enough that there's a less than 90% chance someone will murder them within the first few minutes of their release into greater society.

In Berkeley, however, even the bums are arrogant and self-righteous. Unlike your usual glaze-eyed, gibbering lunatics in places like New York's Washington Square Park, Berkeley's bums are mostly coherent enough that they retain the facility to care whether or not you agree with their rants. When they yell at you for ignoring them, it is more than an autonomous reflex. Some of them even want to debate. And, as usual, the volume of their speech generally inversely correlates with factual accuracy. Your mere existence does not give you the right to tell me everything you've ever thought of, so stop following me.

Gutterpunks, who manage to give regular punks an even worse name, also abound in Berkeley. No, I'm not going to give you $5 for beer or pot. I'm going to buy my own beer, and while I drink it, I'll listen to some Amebix and think "thank Bob I can't smell those blokes." Then I'll eat some food, and sleep in a bed. The funny thing is, since a number of the Gutterpunks in Berkeley (like many of the Hippies) come from wealthy families, that's what they could be doing if they hadn't chosen to dress like a filth-spattered Bundeswehr deserter with PTSD and sit on the sidewalk.

For some inexplicable reason there are also still Hippies in Berkeley. I know they're genuine Hippies because they are old, smell like they haven't bathed since 1968, and have simply replaced Viet Nam with Iraq in everything they yell. And they always yell. There's not a lot more I can really say about Hippies, other than to point out that by and large the 60's generation are the soulless hypocrites who are sucking the wealth out of this nation, squandering its natural resources, and generally causing sociologists to estimate that my generation will be the first to be worse-off than its predecessor.

White guys with dreadlocks also abound in Berkeley, listening to boring Reggae and that one Rage Against The Machine song over and over. Apparently, many of these guys also like marijuana, as evidenced by the forty foot tall marijuana patches on the back of their hempcloth vests.

You'd think that with all these elements, Berkeley wouldn't be one giant shopping mall filled with coiffed, spray-tanned and over-made-up teen bimbos parading around in matching outfits of whatever colors the dye makers needed to throw away this season. You'd think incorrectly. Somehow, these elements fuse perfectly with the mall environment. And in Berekely, even the bimbos wander around saying "gee, George Bush is so dumb," as if that magical incantation will right all that is wrong with our country.

Berkeley is much more anti-Bush than it is pro-Obama -- there's scant Obama sloganeering or imagery compared to mountains of it that are anti-Bush -- and therein lies the rub. Berkeley is all about being against things. I rarely see anyone campaigning FOR something -- the most serious positive causes are always turned-around and turned into an opportunity to complain and inveigh. I'm from New York. Many of my friends are New York Jews. You want complaints and invectives? I've got them right here, buddy.

But Berkeley -- Oi Vey! It's just plain exhausting. And it smells like piss.

If only Amoeba would move to Oakland. At least that city is dilapidated and corrupt in all the usual urban American ways.

(Of course, there are also some very nice people in Berkeley who love their city -- hey, some of my best friends are Berkeleyites -- and this rant is mostly about the Shattuck-Telegraph-Berkeley Hills areas, not so much the working class areas near Oakland.)

Happy 4th of July

Happy Indepdendence Day, fellow Americans. Here's to some day getting our country back to our "long national nightmare of peace and prosperity," to a time where being an American abroad meant being a beacon of freedom and a symbol of self reliance rather than a harbinger of war and messenger of corruption, to those times -- mythical in proportion, and too often unequal in application, but still worth believing in if it allows us to ever live up to those national ideals -- when America was the good guy, the one willing to saunter up to Hitler and sock him in the jaw.

Every day the news is full of stories about economic crisis, a quagmire in Iraq, plans for a new quagmire in Iran, anti-American protests, corruption, political hypocracies, economic disparities, curtailing of civil rights, Chinese ascendency and American decline. Bloated, lazy spendthrifts who have followed the flock away from hard work and self-betterment and into the world of downing big gulps in front of big TVs are celebrated as the real face of proletarian America, while anorexic mental defectives parade their unclothed vaginas in the popular press and are heralded as our new elite. Jesus junkies impede our nation's scientific progress at every chance they get, and our Gini Index is one of the worst in the post-industrialized world as our rich get richer and our middle class gets scared into complacency by speculator-driven economic crises. As a nation, our history also pulls us down as much as it lifts us up. We've still never formally apologized or made reparations to the Native peoples, and the legacy of slavery still tugs at us to this day. There's a lot of work to do, and often it seems like our faddish predelictions and short attention spans are such that we'll never actually get it done.

However, beneath all that there are still people who represent the best of the American character, and perhaps someday America will live up to its own ideals. So, on this 4th of July, celebrate the best of what we can become if we put our minds to it, because we owe it to ourselves to make a go of it.

Little Troubles In Big China

I just finished reading The Corpse Walker by Liao Yiwu. This collection of interviews with Chinese from the bottom heap of society, onto which Liao Yiwu had been flung by his government for being a dissident writer, is such a compelling read that despite coming home at eleven PM on average I barely managed to put it down each night, resulting in my getting about 4 hours of sleep a night for three nights.


The Corpse Walker by Liao Yiwu


The most compelling, and depressing, thing about The Corpse Walker is that each of these harrowing, Kafkaesque tales is true. Each interview reveals a litany of problems which may seem like small or distant problems individually (oddly, particularly to those interviewed), but which add up to a portrait of a society that badly needs real reform, not just an Olympian whitewash. Their little troubles add up to a big problem for Chinese society. Many of the interviewees have resigned themselves to matter-of-fact remembrances of various individual incidents which, to comfortable westerners such as myself, would seem crushing in their own right. Death and privation are discussed and written about in a tone that may seem disturbingly perfunctory to Westerners, but for these people who have experienced so much misery, resignation seems to be the only coping mechanism many of them have left. Most of those who ultimately succumb at all to any admission of their despair, frustration and anger only do so after recounting long stories of repeated abuse, and lives wasted by The Party on misguided ideological crusades.

Liao's status as a pariah gave him first hand access to other, usually less politically motivated pariahs in Chinese society. He has given these people their voice, and it is not always one which will find sympathetic ears in the West. It seems that his purpose in writing this book was both to give ordinary Chinese who aren't participating in the "economic miracle" a platform, and at the same time to put the lie to the global claims that China is a reformed, modern society whose leadership is worthy of praise, even coddling. The picture of China from Mr. Liao's view is quite different. Perhaps tales of The Cultural Revolution and The Great Leap Forward with their utterly devastating effects seem like relics of the past, but in this book you will hear not only of the impact those policies had at the time, but the legacies that still exist in China today. People destroyed by those policies are being forgotten all over again, and at the same time the government still detains people like Mr. Liao. The policies may be somewhat less brutal since Mao, but the underlying theories remain the same: power for the powerful, a dab of hope for those who toe the line, and little left for anyone else.

Human Rights Watch has this to say about the author's backgroud: "Liao Yiwu (China), poet, novelist, film scriptwriter, has been arrested repeatedly over the past fourteen years. He was first arrested in March 1990 while working on a movie about the government´s persecution of persons involved in the June 4th Movement. Over the next four years, he was frequently confined to detention centers and prisons where he was subjected to abusive treatment, once being handcuffed for twenty-three consecutive days causing abscesses in his armpits. He tried to commit suicide twice. In October 1995, police searched his home, confiscated his writings, and held him under house arrest for twenty days. In September 1998, he was arrested because he compiled The Underground Poems of the Seventies in China. The book´s publishers were dismissed from their posts. In January 2001, the publisher of his latest book, Voice From the Lowest Rung of the Society, was ordered to recall copies that were already in the stores. Voice From the Lowest Rung of the Society was then published in Taiwan. In December 2002, Liao Yiwu was detained again after he posted his writings on the Internet and signed a petition to the 16th Party Congress."

Given his status, Mr. Liao had insider access to prisoners (political and otherwise), beggars, and others in Chinese society that had he not fallen from grace with his government, he would probably have never even noticed. The stories he relays are of desperate people trampled by the marche of progress as their country become prosperous either without them, or worse, at their expense. China, in the eyes of Mr. Liao and many of the people he interviews, is a place where life is cheap. The survivors of The Cultural Revolution are a "wasted" generation, malnurtured and discarded. Poor and dissident Chinese of today are little better off. Liao is not always sympathetic to his interviewees, and his stating so often leads to even more revealing responses -- particularly in the cases of unrepentant abusers such as the Human Trafficker who defends the practices of kidnapping and rape, and the former Red Guard who defends torture, murder and the annihilation of China's historical treasures.

The Corpse Walker is a fascinating look at a country that has garnered a lot of attention lately. While you may not find the picture of China that Mr. Liao paints to be very appealing, it is one of the realities of his society and without people like him to remind the world of this fact, there will never be any hope of changing the reality of China to better conform to the public relations image. The only disappointing thing about the book is that there are two other volumes as yet untranslated, a deficiency I hope will be rectified in the not-too-distant future.

This Car Takes Food From The Mouths Of Children

Following on from yesterday's posting, I just read a Time magazine article about the problems of ethanol production with regards to increasing food prices. From my readings on the subject it seems ethanol, corn ethanol especially, is not to be a very efficient source of fuel anyway (in terms of energy put into making it per unit of energy out -- pick your favorite units). Hemp ethanol, because hemp can be grown on "waste" land, would be a better choice.

Conservation, in particular an increased use of mass transit, a return to urban centers, reduction of packaging waste (a lot of packaging uses petroleum derivatives), and a decrease in frivolous / waste spending (fad products, overbuying, etc.) seems a more effective route while less deleterious renewable fuel sources are researched. Part of the problem is a financial system which values short-term stock price over long-term, sustainable production and income.

The environmental issues of our day are directly related to a system of finance which rewards transient and often phantom value (the Internet bubble, and the redux of the Internet bubble in the form of Facebook, YouTube, Google, etc.) over needs-based value (food, housing, etc.), and which requires constant increase -- of market share, of new markets, etc. -- in order to generate value. Rather than competing on the basis of actual long-term value to customers, companies now use various marketing and PR tricks to (sometimes fabricate and) spike short-term markets and then move on. This constant barrage of the new has created an environment in which customers aren't willing to pay for things like maintenance and service that used to provide revenue for companies with a long-term view. Constant newness leads to wastage.

I have a long-term, slow-burn project to write a book about certain issues facing our society from an economic perspective, so responding to these postings is your chance to try to convince me of your perspective on these things.

This Car Runs On Beluga Caviar

We have an awesome mechanic (Art, owner/operator of Auto Point Motors in Point Richmond, CA). He never does unnecessary work, never overcharges, and only once in six years have we had to bring a car back for the same problem twice. I just picked up our Audi today, and he explained to me, somewhat apologetically, why the bill was $600. He thought that was high, and needed to explain it. Since the Audi dealer basically charges $600 for an oil change, I wasn't overly concerned, but glad for the explanation. Essentially, he saved our engine. A prior accident (or the emergency repair shop in LA) had shorn-off all of the fan blades, warped the take-up pulley, and caused a clamp to disappear that let the a coolant hose drift into the fan area. He also fixed our A/C and flushed and replaced all the fluids in the car. About 2/3 of the bill was parts.

Then I went to get gas. At over $4/gallon, my car now basically runs on Beluga caviar and gold bullion (if I lived in LA, it would run on hookers and blow). The amazing thing is, this is still cheaper than gas in many other countries (it's much less than the price of gas in Brazil was last I went there, which was about 5 years ago). It is still cheaper for me to drive to LA than to fly (which is good, since I hate flying), and while I've heard rumors that a train does go between the two cities I've never met someone who has actually seen it.

I like my car, and I don't want to replace it. I can tell myself it's because a lot of resources go into making new cars, so I'd rather run the old one as long as possible, even if it gets half the gas mileage of a Prius. But really it's because my car is comfortable and safe. Since a gasoline powered car can't be converted to biodiesel (and I know of no non-diesel renewable gas substitute, but if you do, post), I suppose I'm stuck paying for earth-destroying, wallet-wrecking, petroleum-derived genuine gasoline. The Bay Area and LA both have pretty bad public transit systems (compared to a real city, like New York or Chicago), so that's no real option unless you just happen to only ever go the few places their trains stop.

I suppose I'm just an autocrackhead. I can't kick my car habit, even though it's killing my wallet, my air quality, and my ability to be a smug, self-congratulatory California pseudoliberal.

Maybe I'll just go club some baby seals or something and then my transition to the dark side will be complete.

What's Wrong With This Picture?

The BBC published results of a regular survey of world opinion about other nations, which involved more than 17,000 respondents in 34 countries. The key statistic reported is views of other countries' influence, in terms of whether or not the respondent thinks that country makes a positive or negative difference in the world. Here is the chart the BBC ran:

Thanks in large part to the Bush administration's adventurism in Iraq and a generally arrogant approach to diplomacy, as well as the waning capability and influence of American propagandists, some very dubious selections bested the United States.

Germany and Japan: These choices aren't dubious today, but sixty years ago their standings would have seemed patently absurd. Apparently the American led reconstruction of these countries after WWII not only bequeathed to them our economic know how, but our moral authority as well.

India: Economic miracle aside, too much of India is still either a kleptocracy or a backwards, bride burning tribal chiefdom (India, to their credit, is trying to tackle those issues head-on). It's also a major polluter and resource sink, and refuses to sign the Nuclear nonproliferation treaty. However, it's not currently invading anyone, and the US still has India beat hands-down in terms of pollution and resource wastage -- so the 7 point win here is not really unjustified.

Russia: Emerging from its post-Communist phase of being a plutocratic ochlocracy, Russia is an increasingly despotic semidemocracy led by a strongman president who releases beefcake photos of himself to impress his subjects. Russia regularly engages in equally destructive adventurism in places like Chechnya, saber rattling against neighbors like Georgia, and economic extortion of anyone that is a purchaser of Russian natural gas. The 2 point edge over us is noise, but we shouldn't be in a statistical dead heat with a closet dictatorship.

China: A politically unreconstructed authoritarian state that is infamous for its crushing of both internal dissent and any of its neighbors that seem weak enough -- that country bests the US by 12 points? Vast numbers of the Chinese people are treated wretchedly by their own leaders (both in government and business), which should be a consideration when judging international influence (especially amongst the most populous nations). Globally, not only is China a major supporter of some of the world's worst regimes (North Korea and Burma especially), it is perpetually involved in other sketchy geopolitical situations of its own making: suppressions of uprisings in annexed Tibet, ongoing saber rattling against Taiwan, a little known ongoing effort to slowly push northward their borders with Russia by ignoring illegal settlements on the Russian side of the line -- and plenty of meddling in the affairs of other states, especially its neighbors and in Africa. China is also on the fast track to at least catch up with the United States in terms of pollution and resource wastage.

North Korea: We are in a statistical dead heat in the "mainly negative" category with a wholly unreconstructed Stalinist dictatorship that is currently playing fast and loose with nuclear arms development, and shooting missiles over neighboring Japan, all while starving its perpetually oppressed population? That is just ridiculous.

Our relative standing versus North Korea, China and Russia in particular is a testament not just to poor planning leading to a widely publicized mess in Iraq (which has been exploited for propaganda purposes by others), but to the generally sorry state of US diplomatic, outreach and propaganda efforts during the last several years. The trouncing in such polls of Israel, a US client state, also partially reflects this situation (the success of antisemitic propaganda highlights a failure on the part of the US, and Israel, to counter it successfully with propaganda -- and effective policy, diplomacy, and outreach -- of our own).

This is a most unfortunate state of affairs, one which I hope our next administration can begin to turn around -- not with empty marketing slogans (the Bush administration already tried that), but with a comprehensive package of diplomacy, outreach, and propaganda. Without policy backing, happy propaganda/marketing slogans aren't going to convince anyone.