National Pastime

I'm sitting on the couch, listening to the San Diego Padres play the Pittsburgh Pirates. I love baseball — football too, I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit. I have a few friends who wonder why I like sports, why I participate in the American sports culture, with its overpaid, entitled athletes and crass commercialism, when there are so many other ways to use one's time, so many better causes for which the resources sucked up by professional sports could conceivably be used.

I could talk about what a beautiful game baseball is, the strategy and athleticism of it. I could talk about how going to a ballpark makes me happy, the green grass, the atmosphere, how almost everyone in the crowd seems happy too. There were the games I used to go to when I was a kid, my mom, my sister and I, when baseball was cheap entertainment, something a divorced mother could afford. I remember my mom and me, lying on her bed, listening to the Padres on scratchy AM radio, with announcer Jerry Coleman (who still calls about half the games) and his malapropisms, his humor and signature shout of "Oh, doctor!" when the team did something good.

On a night like tonight, I think I love baseball for its escapism as much as anything else.

The so-called "dissident" G.O.P. senators made their deal on the "terrorism detention bill" with Bush. As predicted by Digby, who called the negotiations "an elaborate Kabuki," the whole exercise seemed suspiciously choreographed, with Bush getting to look all tough on the terr-ists and that maverick McCain appearing like he has some actual principles, thus reassuring some portion of wavering Republican supporters that things haven't gone too far, that the grownups are in charge, that America the Beautiful still maintains some shred of dignity, of honor, of worthiness.

As for the Democrats, their strategy was to sit the debate out, betting that the GOP "rebels" actually were putting up a real fight, that they would either force the White House to back down or be unable to craft an agreement. Speaking out on torture, the Democratic leadership calculated, was a losing hand, giving the Republican strategists yet another opportunity to paint Democrats as being "weak on terror," untrustworthy with national security. Because of course, we aren't actually talking about torture here, right? Just "alternative techniques." "The program." The one that "keeps America safe from evil-doers."

Though details of the compromise are not fully available, and I'm not the person to provide a comprehensive legal analysis in any case (check out Glenn Greenwald for that kind of heavy-lifting), the consensus at this moment is that the White House got what it wanted — namely, that "the Program" will continue, only now with the legal blessing of federal legislation. Maybe not every aspect of "the Program" — no one is saying yet what "enhanced techniques" will be permitted — but essentially it still seems to be an argument about what kind of torture is okay, and what kind is just a tad too harsh. I'm assuming that the "compromise" also provides the retroactive legal cover desired by the Adminstration — you know, so Bush, Cheney, Rummy and Abu Gonzales don't end up in the dock for war crimes.

It's important to note that this is not a done deal. I heard Congresswoman Jane Harman interviewed on my way into work this AM. Harman is a conservative Democrat, one with whom I frequently disagree. She's also the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee. The gist of her comments was, no Democrat has seen the bill, this thing isn't passing without extensive clarification, including, just what "techniques" are we talking about and why are such "techniques" even necessary (she was very insistent on these points). And also that the bill requires Congressional oversight, that this president in particular(due to his track record) will not be able to just redefine Article 3 by his own interpretation. But she put a particular emphasis on "why do we even need to do these things?" and also, that she did not see it as a blank check to cover all past behavior. She stated that this bill would require extensive discussion before a vote (the implication being that it might not get voted upon until after the recess). She said that it was this Administration's own fault that they and their operatives had put themselves in a position of legal ambiguity by not asking for Congressional oversight/clarification in the first place.

I felt a little better after hearing this. I called my Senators to express my opposition to any legislation that would legalize torture. I said stuff like, "we should just change our name to the Soviet States of America if this thing passes." I was perhaps a little shrill.

(Amnesty International has a campaign in which you can participate. Go here for details)

Who knows if it does any good? I'm really not sure. The mood in Left Blogostan is pretty bleak. There's a lot of excoriating the Democrats for not speaking up, and all the wayyy Lefties are in full-cry, you know, the kind for whom any mainstream political activism is useless appeasement, whose comments are generally about the dark, blood-drenched heart of the American genocidal beast. I got slammed for saying I was still supporting Democrats because this whole attitude that there's no difference between the parties is a big reason Bush is in the White House, and you can't tell me we'd be in Iraq and arguing about whether it's okay to torture prisoners if Al Gore were President.

For this I was told I was "unable to think through the fog," "unserious," and "a namby-pamby Democratic party apologist." Which considering the kinds of flack I've gotten from right-wingers when I've posted on Peking Duck, you know, being a wild-eyed, stupid, naive psuedo-intellectual who doesn't take the grave threat of Islamo-fascist-nazis seriously — well, maybe there is some consensus there. Because I find it hard to take extremists on either side seriously.

Not because I think they're funny. Well, not most of the time. Sometimes the overwrought melodrama of their rhetoric gives me a bit of a giggle, I'll admit (and I'll cop to not being entirely blameless in prompting their scorn of me — sometimes I have to poke 'em a little).

It's the essential unseriousness of extremist philosophies as engines of progress that gets to me. Not that extremists can't accomplish big things, they can and they do, but their programs are almost exclusively destructive, even when their stated aims are for advancing social justice. It's very difficult to get people to willingly go along with extreme change, because face it, most people aren't extreme, and a lot of them won't agree with what's being proposed. You don't typically have a revolution because a bunch of idealists have gotten together with this great utopian program that the masses enthusiastically adopt. Big changes tend to happen quickly when there's some negative cause — chaos, war, economic and social collapse.

I don't know about you, but I'm not real anxious to see that happen here, unlike those who cheer destruction and pray for revolution. Generally the people who end up getting hurt aren't the ones who deserve it the most.

But it's not clear that the political system can be fixed, at this point. Beyond Democratic co-option and weakness, the corruption of corporate money, comes the simple, appalling fact that the Republican Party has so rigged the electoral process that even an extremely unpopular President may not be enough to tip the balance in either House of Congress. Even if the Democrats do take the House or Senate, it's not clear that they will have enough power to turn the tide or stay in control long enough to make a real difference.

Or whether the vision and political will exist for the fight.

But what will it take to change this country for the better? What kind of movement might arise that can help shift us away from this path we're on, this war without end, on other countries, on the planet, on ourselves? Is it even possible, or is it too late?

I'm not an extremist. But my question is not so much, when do you have to make a stand? I'd say the time is now, or very soon.

My question is, what does that stand consist of? What is the action?

What does one do?

I'd really like to know.

Well, the Padres won the game tonight. Chris Young took a no-hitter into the 9th. It would have been the first no-hitter in franchise history, but after one out, Joe Randa hit Young's pitch over the center field wall for a home run. There went the no-hitter. The shut-out too. But the Padres are still in first place in the National League West. The race continues.

Baseball, I'm willing to state, is good.

I'm not so sure about America.

Proud to be a Californian

Well, not always. I mean, it's a little embarrassing to have a fading action hero with orange hair as your Governator. But still. Sometimes California does me proud.

Check out this very long article in the New York Times about California's efforts to reduce greenhouse gases.

In the Rocky Mountain States and the fast-growing desert Southwest, more than 20 power plants, designed to burn coal that is plentiful and cheap, are on the drawing boards. Much of the power, their owners expected, would be destined for the people of California.

But such plants would also be among the country’s most potent producers of carbon dioxide, the king of gases linked to global warming. So California has just delivered a new message to these energy suppliers: If you cannot produce power with the lowest possible emissions of these greenhouse gases, we are not interested.

“When your biggest customer says, ‘I ain’t buying,’ you rethink,” said Hal Harvey, the environment program director at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, in Menlo Park, Calif. “When you have 38 million customers you don’t have access to, you rethink. Selling to Phoenix is nice. Las Vegas is nice. But they aren’t California.”

California’s decision to impose stringent demands on suppliers even outside its borders, broadened by the Legislature on Aug. 31 and awaiting the governor’s signature, is but one example of the state’s wide-ranging effort to remake its energy future.

The Democratic-controlled legislature and the Republican governor also agreed at that time on legislation to reduce industrial carbon dioxide emissions by 25 percent by 2020, a measure that affects not only power plants but also other large producers of carbon dioxide, including oil refineries and cement plants.

The state’s aim is to reduce emissions of climate-changing gases produced by burning coal, oil and gas. Other states, particularly New York, are moving in some of the same directions, but no state is moving as aggressively on as many fronts. No state has been at it longer. No state is putting more at risk.

Whether all this is visionary or deluded depends on one’s perspective. This is the state that in the early 1970’s jump-started the worldwide adoption of catalytic converters, the devices that neutralize most smog-forming chemicals emitted by tailpipes. This is the state whose per capita energy consumption has been almost flat for 30 years, even as per capita consumption has risen 50 percent nationally.

Taking on global warming is a tougher challenge. Though California was second in the nation only to Texas in emissions of carbon dioxide in 2001, and 12th in the world, it produced just 2.5 percent of the world’s total. At best, business leaders asked in a legislative hearing, what difference could California’s cuts make? And at what cost?

California, in fact, is making a huge bet: that it can reduce emissions without wrecking its economy, and therefore inspire other states — and countries — to follow its example on slowing climate change.

I learned a few things that surprised me. California, a state synonymous with car culture, uses less gasoline per capita than all but six states. California, thanks to stringent energy-saving requirements, uses the lowest amount of electricity of any state in the US and has in fact kept its consumption flat since the mid-1970s, when the average American's has gone up by 50%.

California is building solar roofs, mandating renewable energy supplies, capping carbon dioxide emissions. Though some business interests have resisted mightily, others are signing up and making money.

California businesses and investors, public and private, are getting into the act. The state’s huge pension fund, Calpers, is committing just under $1 billion to renewable-energy investments. Among the early incentive-driven ventures in solar power are the homes in the Carsten Crossings subdivision in Rocklin, a Sacramento suburb. In August, Mr. Schwarzenegger signed legislation making solar panels a standard option for new-home buyers by 2012 and ensuring that utilities reduce homeowners’ bills based on the electricity returned to the grid.

Some of those incentives were available when construction started. Now four families have moved in. They see themselves as pragmatists, not crusaders. “This is the next logical step” in construction, said one of the homeowners, Lt. Col. Thomas Sebens, a specialist in drone aircraft at Beale Air Force Base.

Their roofs show how public and private decisions, markets and government, have meshed. T. J. Rodgers, a fiercely anti-regulatory entrepreneur, underwrote the solar cells’ production. The PowerLight Corporation, based near San Francisco, bought the cells from Mr. Rodgers’s company, the SunPower Corporation, and turned them into roof tiles. The tiles ended up on houses built by Grupe Homes, based in Stockton, because state utility regulators established a $5,500 state-financed rebate for builders who install similar systems, which cost $20,000. Federal law gives home buyers a $2,000 tax credit; state law guarantees lower electric bills as utilities buy back power homeowners do not need.

The July utility bills, the new homeowners’ first, were the talk of the neighborhood.

Larry Brittain, an office products salesman with a four-bedroom, 2,400-square-foot home, was the winner at $73.27 for electricity in the month ending July 25 — the hottest July on record. For the last 10 June days in a similar house nearby, his bill was $103.

“This is a bet with a winning hand,” Mr. Brittain said. “You can’t lose.”

There are so many inspiring things in this article – all illustrations of the visionary impulse that has always separated California from the rest of the pack. The idea that the government has a positive role to play — that it can drive industry and technology by imposing certain requirements — is to me the definition of what government can and should do. And if the Bush Administration's America can't lead by example...well, maybe the Governator's Kuh-lee-foe-nee-uh can.

Torturer-In-Chief

Watch this if you have the stomach for it. Bush throws a hissy fit when challenged by reporter David Gregory over his bill which would "clarify" Article 3 of the Geneva Convention. It's another truly stunning performance by an increasingly unhinged man-child.

Though this earlier interview with Matt Lauer certainly is another strong entry in "Bush's Craziest Home Videos." In it, Bush practically jabs Lauer in the chest as Lauer presses him about the "legality" of water-boarding (follow the link to watch - it's worth it):

Matt Lauer: And yet you admitted that there were these CIA secret facilities. OK?

President Bush: So what? Why is that not within the law?

Matt Lauer: The head of Amnesty International says secret sites are against international law.

President Bush: Well, we just disagree with him. Plus, my job is to protect you. And most American people, if I said [to them] that we had who we think is the mastermind of the 9/11, they would say, “Why don’t you see if you can’t get information without torturing him,” which is what we did.

Matt Lauer: I don’t want to let this “within the law issue” slip though. I mean, if, in fact, there was water boarding used with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and for the viewers, that’s basically when you strap someone to a board and you make them feel as if they’re going to drown by putting them underwater, if that was legal and within the law, why couldn’t you do it at Guantanamo? Why did you have to go to a secret location around the world?

President Bush: I’m not going to talk about techniques. And, I’m not going explain to the enemy what we’re doing. All I’m telling you is that you’ve asked me whether or not we’re doing things to protect the American people, and I want the American people to know we are doing so.

Bush is fond of using terms like "techniques" and "alternative set of techniques" to describe the interrogation practices that he wants to legalize. That's typical of torturers:

"Torture develops its own sardonic slang through which to further distance the torturer from the effects of his actions. The parrot.. suspension head down from a broom-handle suspended between two chairs; the telephone...blows with the palms of the hands to both ears at once; the bath..a euphemism for holding the victim's head under water filled with excrement and vomit..

You know, like "waterboarding":

The prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet. Cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner's face and water is poured over him. Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in and a terrifying fear of drowning leads to almost instant pleas to bring the treatment to a halt. According to the sources, CIA officers who subjected themselves to the water boarding technique lasted an average of 14 seconds before caving in.

(before anyone rushes in with a "ticking time bomb scenario" and how useful a 14 second confession might be, here's a reminder that such confessions are notoriously unreliable)

Since it's tough to hear in the video, here's the question from David Gregory that set Bush off:

If a CIA officer, paramilitary or special operations soldier from the United States were captured in Iran or North Korea and they were roughed up and those governments said, "Well, they were interrogated in accordance with our interpretation of the Geneva Conventions," and then they were put on trial and they were convicted based on secret evidence that they were not able to see, how would you react to that as commander in chief?

Bush's reaction? Well, watch the video for the full effect. But he either doesn't understand the potential implications of his own program for captured American soldiers, or he doesn't care. Either way, he wants what he wants, and damn the consequences.

Pandas!!!

Originally uploaded by Other Lisa.

Okay, I'm burned-out. I can't think about Bush's torture regime, about the Chinese government's arbitrary detentions of activists and journalists, about global warming, the destruction of the world's oceans, poverty, exploitation, genocide.

I need pandas, dammit.

Here is a site devoted entirely to pandas. The last update was in August, but there are a lot of pandas here, and panda links, photos, videos.

And if you need more, here is the San Diego Zoo's Panda Cam...

Pandas!

Originally uploaded by Other Lisa.

Pandas!

"How Dare You, Mr. President?"

Keith O.
Originally uploaded by Other Lisa.

I know I've been pushing Keith Olbermann these last two weeks, but as great as his last two commentaries have been, this one left me speechless. I don't know when a mainstream TV journalist has ever called out a US President like this. Go see it right now at Crooks and Liars.

It's come to this...

On a day when we prepare for the broadcast of a piece of Rovian propanda disguised as docudrama, this NY Times article feels like a cold, hard slap to the face:

Abu Zubaydah, the first Osama bin Laden henchman captured by the United States after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was bloodied and feverish when a C.I.A. security team delivered him to a secret safe house in Thailand for interrogation in the early spring of 2002. Bullet fragments had ripped through his abdomen and groin during a firefight in Pakistan several days earlier when he had been captured...

...According to accounts from five former and current government officials who were briefed on the case, F.B.I. agents — accompanied by intelligence officers — initially questioned him using standard interview techniques. They bathed Mr. Zubaydah, changed his bandages, gave him water, urged improved medical care, and spoke with him in Arabic and English, languages in which he is fluent.

To convince him they knew details of his activities, the agents brought a box of blank audiotapes which they said contained recordings of his phone conversations, but were actually empty. As the F.B.I. worked with C.I.A. officers who were present, Mr. Zubaydah soon began to provide intelligence insights into Al Qaeda.Abu Zubaydah, the first Osama bin Laden henchman captured by the United States after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was bloodied and feverish when a C.I.A. security team delivered him to a secret safe house in Thailand for interrogation in the early spring of 2002. Bullet fragments had ripped through his abdomen and groin during a firefight in Pakistan several days earlier when he had been captured.

For the C.I.A., Mr. Zubaydah was a test case for an evolving new role, conceived after Sept. 11, in which the agency was to act as jailer and interrogator for terrorism suspects.

According to accounts by three former intelligence officials, the C.I.A. understood that the legal foundation for its role had been spelled out in a sweeping classified directive signed by Mr. Bush on Sept. 17, 2001. The directive, known as a memorandum of notification, authorized the C.I.A. for the first time to capture, detain and interrogate terrorism suspects, providing the foundation for what became its secret prison system.

That 2001 directive did not spell out specific guidelines for interrogations, however, and senior C.I.A. officials began in late 2001 and early 2002 to draw up a list of aggressive interrogation procedures that might be used against terrorism suspects. They consulted agency psychiatrists and foreign governments to identify effective techniques beyond standard interview practices.

After Mr. Zubaydah’s capture, a C.I.A. interrogation team was dispatched from the agency’s counterterrorism center to take the lead in his questioning, former law enforcement and intelligence officials said, and F.B.I. agents were withdrawn. The group included an agency consultant schooled in the harsher interrogation procedures to which American special forces are subjected in their training. Three former intelligence officials said the techniques had been drawn up on the basis of legal guidance from the Justice Department, but were not yet supported by a formal legal opinion.

In Thailand, the new C.I.A. team concluded that under standard questioning Mr. Zubaydah was revealing only a small fraction of what he knew, and decided that more aggressive techniques were warranted.

At times, Mr. Zubaydah, still weak from his wounds, was stripped and placed in a cell without a bunk or blankets. He stood or lay on the bare floor, sometimes with air-conditioning adjusted so that, one official said, Mr. Zubaydah seemed to turn blue. At other times, the interrogators piped in deafening blasts of music by groups like the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Sometimes, the interrogator would use simpler techniques, entering his cell to ask him to confess.

“You know what I want,” the interrogator would say to him, according to one official’s account, departing leaving Mr. Zubaydah to brood over his answer.

F.B.I. agents on the scene angrily protested the more aggressive approach, arguing that persuasion rather than coercion had succeeded. But leaders of the C.I.A. interrogation team were convinced that tougher tactics were warranted and said that the methods had been authorized by senior lawyers at the White House.

The agents appealed to their superiors but were told that the intelligence agency was in charge, the officials said. One law enforcement official who was aware of events as they occurred reacted with chagrin. “When you rough these guys up, all you do is fulfill their fantasies about what to expect from us,” the official said.

Mr. Bush on Wednesday acknowledged the use of aggressive interview techniques, but only in the most general terms. “We knew that Zubaydah had more information that could save innocent lives, but he stopped talking,” Mr. Bush said. He said the C.I.A. had used “an alternative set of procedures’’ after it became clear that Mr. Zubaydah “had received training on how to resist interrogation.

“These procedures were designed to be safe, to comply with our laws, our Constitution and our treaty obligations,’’ Mr. Bush said. “The Department of Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively and determined them to be lawful.’’

In his early interviews, Mr. Zubaydah had revealed what turned out to be important information, identifying Khalid Shaikh Mohammed — from a photo on a hand-held computer — as the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. Zubaydah also identified Jose Padilla, an American citizen who has been charged with terrorism-related crimes.

But Mr. Zubaydah dismissed Mr. Padilla as a maladroit extremist whose hope to construct a dirty bomb, using conventional explosives to disperse radioactive materials, was far-fetched. He told his questioners that Mr. Padilla was ignorant on the subject of nuclear physics and believed he could separate plutonium from nuclear material by rapidly swinging over his head a bucket filled with fissionable material.

According to a Salon interview with "The One Percent Doctrine" author Ron Suskind, though Zubaydah provided some useful intelligence, he was not the Al Qaeda mastermind the Bush Administration depicted. Moreover, "at least one top FBI analyst considered Zubaydah an "insane, certifiable, split personality" and that he was mainly responsible only for logistics like travel arrangements. According to Suskind's reporting, the interrogation methods used on Zubaydah -- waterboarding and sleep deprivation, among others -- only yielded information about plots that did not exist." Suskind:

I say in the book that we did get some things of value from Abu Zubaydah. We found out that "Muktar" -- the brain, that's what it means in Arabic -- was Khalid Sheik Mohammed. That was valuable for a short period of time for us. We were then able to go through the SIGINT [signal intelligence], the electronic dispatches over the years, and say, "OK, that's who 'Muktar' is." Zubaydah, of course, is showing up on signal intelligence as Zubaydah.

Also, we essentially said, "You've got to give us a body, somebody we can go get," and he gave us [Jose] Padilla. Padilla turned out to not be nearly as valuable as advertised at the start, though, and I think that's been shown in the ensuing years. So that's what we got from Zubaydah.

At the same time, I think we oversold [Zubaydah's] value -- the administration did -- to the American public. That's indisputable. As well, what folks inside the CIA and FBI were realizing, even as the president and others inside the administration were emphasizing the profound malevolence and value strategically to the capture of Zubaydah, is that Zubaydah is psychologically imbalanced, he has multiple personalities. And he was not involved in various events that we thought he was involved in. During various bombings in the late '90s, he was not where we thought he would be. That's shown in the diaries, where he goes through long lists of quotidian, nonsensical details about various people and what they're doing, folks that he's moving around, getting plane tickets for and serving tea to, all in the voices of three different characters; page after page of his diary, filled, including on dates where, I'm trying to think, it was either the Khobar Towers or the Cole, where we thought he was involved in the bombing and he clearly wasn't.

So that's the real story of Zubaydah, more complicated than the administration would like, and maybe more complicated than the president at this point feels comfortable saying in an election season. It's one of the many instances where you could shine a light through this prism and see an awful lot about some of the dilemmas of the war on terror.

In the case of Zubaydah, when it comes to some of the harsh interrogation tactics he was put through, what occurred then was that he started to talk. He said, as people will, anything to make the pain stop. And we essentially followed every word and various uniformed public servants of the United States went running all over the country to various places that Zubaydah said were targets, and were not.

Ultimately, we tortured an insane man and ran screaming at every word he uttered.

So there you have it. George Bush has defended with every breath American's right torture, to detain without trial, to make a mockery of our Constitution and rule of law, for this:

The indefinite detention of a Chicago street punk who thinks you can get weapons-grade plutonium by swinging a bucket over your head, and a schizophrenic Al Qaeda hospitality director's confessions of plots that didn't exist.

KO k.o.'s again

And this time, he clobbers Bush...

Outside/Inside

Sorry for the lack of posts. I've been singularly uninspired, which may have been the function of this sinus/allergy thing which now I'm thinking might be an actual cold (in the summer?! This is just wrong).

Anyway, two friends sent me great New York Times articles which between them are a good illustration of where China finds itself in the world and why.

The first, "The World According To China," is both a lengthy profile of China's ambassador to the United Nations, and an examination of how China sees its role in international relations and in the world at large. The basic arguments presented here — that China regards national sovereignty as an issue that overrides nearly all other concerns, including humanitarian crises, and as an emerging superpower, still "punches below its weight," is not willing to use the full extent of its power on the world stage, strikes me as essentially correct.

Two quotes from the article stood out in particular.

China and the United States are the twin bêtes noires of the U.N.: the U.S. insists on enlisting the organization in its crusades, while China refuses to let any crusade get in the way of national interest. Washington is all blustering moralism; Beijing, all circumspect mercantilism. Both can afford to defy the consensus view.

On my first stay in China I had the sense of China and the US as being opposites engaged in an interdependent dance (although we didn't know it yet), two huge countries that were nothing alike and yet oddly the same, in a way mirror-images of the other.

The second comes in a conversation journalist James Traub comes with Ambassador Wang Guangyu:

Wang told me he believed that blunderbuss diplomacy is the American way “because America is a superpower, so America has a big say.” China would appear to have a big say of its own, but that’s not Wang’s view. At the end of our second conversation, he returned to a favorite theme. “The Americans have muscle and exercise this muscle,” he said. “China has no muscle and has no intention of exercising this muscle.”

I said that, in fact, China had a great deal of muscle but punched below its weight. Wang smiled at the expression and said, “It’s not good?” Well, I said, that depends. And then Wang said something quite startling: “China always regards itself as a weak, small, less powerful country. My feeling is that for the next 30 years, China will remain like this. China likes to punch underweight, as you put it.”

Why was that? Why did China want to punch underweight? Wang spoke of China’s peaceful rise, of the need to reassure all who fear its growing clout. “We don’t,” he said, “want to make anyone feel uncomfortable.”

My hope is that when the Bush Administration slinks out of office in two years, America's "blunderbuss" diplomacy will be replaced by something more nuanced and considerate, and that China may come to see that failed states represent an instability which is to the detriment of all, not just the unfortunate "citizens" perishing under the pretext of national sovereignty.

The second article illustrates the internal instability that Traub feels constrains China's external diplomacy. This is an all too familiar story, where local officials ignored environmental regulations, leading to an entire village being swamped in toxic waste. Reading this same story taking place over and over all across China gives credance to Ambassador Wang's portrayal of China as less than a full-fledged superpower, in spite of the efforts of American militarists to build up China as the next great enemy (a rival state being much better suited to justify the sort of military upon which our defense industry depends).

Of course, we in the US also have a great deal of work to do regarding our own internal stability. Our infrastructure is in tatters, our health care system failing, and the vast majority of wealth created in recent years going to the already richest Americans, with real wages falling for the majority (see here and here). Both Kevin Philips and Chalmers Johnson have written at length about the ominous hollowing of the American economy and its increasing militarization. The problem is that our internal weakness expresses itself in external actions, in the invasion of Iraq, for example. For I do believe there is a global competition for energy resources, and that China is a prime competitor. However, the Chinese have chosen, so far, to conduct the competition on the field of diplomacy.

As I see it, the choice that faces us as nation becomes increasingly stark: a rebuilding from within, a genuine renaissance of American ingenuity to free us from an oil and defense-based economy, a renewal of spirit and community.

Or war without end.

Take your pick.

(hat-tip to my good friends for the articles)

Watch This

KO k.o's Rumsfeld and the not-so-nascent fascists of the Bush Administration.

One step sideways, two steps back

Two closely watched human rights cases with different outcomes:

A blind activist who drew international attention by exposing China's harsh family planning policies was sentenced by a court Thursday to four years and three months in prison, the official New China News Agency reported.

Chen Guangcheng was tried last week, without his own attorney present, on charges of damaging property and "organizing a mob to disturb traffic." He was represented at his two-hour trial by a pair of court-appointed lawyers he had never met...

...The harsh treatment of the self-taught lawyer and a recent slew of incidents involving the arrest or intimidation of attorneys fighting against official abuse suggest that the Communist Party is worried about losing control over an increasingly vocal legal community.

This case is particularly outrageous given the nature of incidents for which Chen was charged:

Chen had slipped into the home of another villager and hidden there for about 20 days. Officials allegedly beat the villager after failing to get him to turn Chen in. In reaction, Chen and about five others attempted to walk to a village official's office. They were followed by up to 60 guards who tried to stop them.

"They charged my brother with blocking traffic, but most of the people doing the blocking were their own men," said Chen's brother, who was one of three family members allowed to attend the trial last week.

The brother said that no one was allowed to speak in Chen's behalf at the trial and that the two court-appointed lawyers didn't object to anything the prosecutors said. Chen, he said, repeatedly tried to protest the validity of the trial and threw up several times in court.

"Our lawyers have received death threats, we've been arrested and accused of theft," said Teng Biao, one of Chen's lawyers. "When we tried to visit the village in July, they turned our car over with two attorneys still inside. The entire village remains sealed off. The phone lines are cut off. They don't want us to meet or speak to any of the relatives. This verdict today has no legal basis whatsoever."

Meanwhile, a case involving a jailed New York Times researcher had a slightly better outcome — in that journalist Zhao Yan was acquitted of the more serious of the two charges facing him, leaking state secrets. Zhao was convicted of fraud, a charge which seems dubious at best:

The New China News Agency said the fraud charge stemmed from an incident in 2001, which was before Zhao was hired by the New York Times. He was convicted of taking money on a false promise of interceding to get a man's sentence thrown out, the agency said. Zhao, his lawyers and his family denied the charge.

"We welcome the court's decision on the first charge, that there was not enough evidence proving Zhao leaked state secrets," said Guan Anping, one of the newspaper's lawyers in the case.

"That shows they did rule according to the law and that rule of law is becoming more established. We're glad to see it," the lawyer said. "But we don't agree with the second [fraud] charge. We maintain Zhao is innocent."

Because Zhao has already been detained for almost two years, he is scheduled for release in September 2007. His legal team said it was considering whether to appeal the decision, given that an appeal could take nearly a year.

Zhao's family also expressed displeasure with the case, which had its share of legal irregularities, even by Chinese standards. At one point it appeared the charges had been dropped, only to be revived.

"I'm not satisfied with the verdict," said Zhao Kun, the researcher's older sister. "I think he's completely innocent."

Many foreign governments and press groups had taken up Zhao's cause, and it's possible that such international pressure may have played a role in Zhao's acquittal of the state secrets charge, for which he could have spent a decade or more in prison.

Chen Guangcheng's lawyers, who had hoped for minimum or no jail time, consider his sentence unexpectedly harsh.

Taken together, the verdicts suggest that China can be marginally swayed by foreign appeals when a case has limited domestic impact, said Xiao Qiang, director of the Berkeley China Internet Project at UC Berkeley. When the state feels its control is challenged, however, Beijing all but ignores foreign opinion, he added.

"In those cases, international pressure means nothing," he said.

Goodbye to the Friendship Store?

When I lived in Beijing the fall and winter of 79-80, China was not exactly the shopping mecca that it is now. In fact, you could buy very little. Many of Beijing's small businesses, its restaurants and shops, had been shuttered during the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, and the shops that were open didn't have much. Clothing was rationed, and we used coupons to get we needed for the winter. At the time, the Friendship Hotel, where most of Bejing's foreign teachers lived, was way the hell out by the 3rd Ring road, surrounded by communes and fields and very little else. Across the street from the compound was a row of tin-roofed stalls, which sold clothing and a few odd sundries. I got my long underwear there, and some Peoples' Liberation Army-green pants baggy enough to wear over the thickest pair. Other than that, my big find was an old erhu (a Chinese violin) and a used PLA snoopy hat lined with brown wool that I picked up at a second hand store.

Much of the winter, Paul and I spent searching for those long green PLA padded overcoats. They're like giant, wearable comforters, which we really could have used in the bitter, cutting cold. We never did manage to score those, though we did find the short, ribbed padded Tianjin workers' jackets. Other than that, we collected posters, which were one of the few things that you could find just about everywhere. I must have hundreds of them, 4 Modernizations posters mostly. I have one up on my wall that features a chubby, rosey-cheeked baby holding up, I'm not sure what it is, a sort of mobile, with flowers, and a lantern and...well, a small rocket with a nuclear atom blossoming from behind it.

One of the few places where we could shop was the Friendship Store in downtown Beijing. At the time, the Friendship Store struck me as an utterly bizarre institution. It was for foreigners only. You could only use foreign exchange certificates. Chinese people couldn't even enter the building — with the exception of high-ranking cadres, distinguished from the masses by their four pocket (as opposed to two) Mao jackets, their expensive fountain pens and their leather shoes (the masses wore cloth).

This system of segregation did not strike me as terribly revolutionary.

In any case, the Friendship Store was still pretty grim. No smiles at the Friendship Store, that's for sure, except for the time that Paul said that he wanted to buy a hat — "mao4" and it came out "mao2," as in the Chairman. The clerks thought that was hilarious.

You could buy Mao there, however — giant black and white cloth hangings of his official portrait, which we called "Chairman Mao beach blankets." These later would form backdrops to many a college party and gig. I was much more thrilled with the smaller Zhou Enlai versions we found. Hunting for Zhou Enlai souvenirs became somewhat of an obsession while I was in China, and those were among the best available. Zhou may have been the Peoples' Premier, and he was certainly popular among the people I met, but his cult of personality generated only a tiny fraction of the memorabilia that Mao's did.

By the time I left China, the winds of change were a-blowin', even through the Friendship Store. One day, next to the Peoples' Personal Cleaning Products counter, manned by short, middle-aged women with blunt-cut hair and square smocks, there appeared an apparition, wearing in a clinging blue knit dress, glittery belt, a fashionable feathered hair-do and purple eye-shadow. It was...a Chanel saleswoman.

In recent visits to Beijing, I generally stopped in at the Friendship Store. Nowadays, they have a wide selection of merchandise, including what a friend who lives in Beijing swore was a great selection of high-quality, reasonably priced cashmere (I've bought a number of sweaters there). There's a nice little grocery store attached that sells foreign goods, and a Starbucks. The sales clerks are friendly, even helpful, and it's one of the few places you can easily cash traveler's checks. Chinese people can shop there now, of course. Compared to the huge malls and shopping plazas of modern-day Beijing, there's something human-scale, almost small-town about the Friendship Store. It's really kind of sweet.

So I have to admit, I was saddened to read about the Friendship Store's impending closure:

Today, the Friendship Store is an anachronism, popular with some tourists but a reminder of a time before China embraced capitalism. At six stories and 108,000 square feet, its size is considered too small, its bottom line insufficient.

Therefore, like nearly everything else that is old and unfashionable in China, the iconic store will be torn down.

A $500 million "Friendship Mansion," 15 times the size of the original, will take its place by early 2009. A joint venture led by Stanley Ho, the Macau casino tycoon, plans to erect a 29-story apartment complex and two office towers atop an eight-story retail podium. Parts of the project may open in time to greet visitors for the 2008 Olympic Games.

"We are intending to turn it into a modern shopping center. High-end stores such as Louis Vuitton or Christian Dior might be able to use this space," said Anthony Chan, managing director of the Hong Kong-based holding company for Ho's firm and an Australian company. "We don't take over the entire building. They can still have the space to run a Friendship Store."

Whether any of the store's nostalgia will be preserved is up to the Beijing Xidan Friendship Group, the other partner in the deal, a state-owned enterprise that supervises the Friendship Store. For now, it remains unclear exactly what will happen, and authorities are hardly forthcoming with details...

..."I was here when the place first opened in 1973. I sold the same things then," said Li Shulan, 56. "After opening and reform . . . we started to see more competition. I feel sad about the decline, but I can do nothing about it."

Tourists can find cheaper versions of the store's cloisonne jewelry, silk embroidery and Chinese calligraphy elsewhere. Organized tours tend to take their flocks to the nearby Silk Market, a multistory mall of 1,500 stalls that, until last year, was nothing more than an outdoor market of counterfeit goods.

Even Chinese customers have more choices these days. Directly opposite the Friendship Store, a gleaming department store called Scitech sells imported wine, espresso makers and fashionable Puma tennis shoes.

Last year, the Friendship Store made a profit of only $9,000, state media reported in July. The year before, the store reported a loss of $370,000.

Now, it's time for a change, though exactly what kind of change not even some employees of the store know.

"Everybody's talking about it, but we don't know when or if they're really going to tear it down," Li said. "I can't believe they will. Old employees like me, we love this store."

A man from the general manager's office, who would only give his surname as Zhang, said he could not speak to the foreign media, because "this is a sensitive topic." A woman from the store's business department, who would only give her surname as Du, insisted the store had made a profit each year.

But Liu Xiuling, general manager of the Xidan Friendship Group, told Chinese reporters last month that the store did not take full advantage of its prime downtown location.

In a statement, the Party Affairs Office of the Xidan Friendship Group said the "old Friendship Store" will continue to operate somewhere in Beijing's central business district.

I did find that PLA overcoat, by the way. Nowadays it's easy. You just go to the Peoples' Liberation Army Surplus Store - there are several in Beijing. Of course, no one wears them any more, not in Beijing. Only unsophisticated migrant workers would be caught in one of those.

Here in California, the few times I've worn it, when it's been cold enough, everyone tells me how cool it is...

An Ordinary Life

I always look forward to articles from the Los Angeles Times' Ching-Ching Ni. Ni is a miniaturist in a sense — she stays away from "big" topics like China's rise and the transformation of its cities and instead focuses on the stories we seldom read about these days - "ordinary" people often left behind by China's economic miracle, whose lives when examined closely are anything but ordinary.

Her piece today is no exception.

Ni tells the story of He Tianwu, born a peasant in 1962, whose journey to survive and care for his family took him from the fields to odd jobs to one of China's wretched coal mines:

China's coal pits are the deadliest on Earth, claiming thousands of lives a year. The nation's insatiable appetite for energy has created a proliferation of illegal mines, whose authorities pay little heed to worker safety or benefits.

He didn't have time to understand that. What he needed was a paycheck. Little did he know that after living expenses and fees were deducted, he would make only a few dollars a month. The meager salary was rarely paid on time.

After the late shift on a hot July day in 1992, He's foreman asked for a volunteer to work overtime to make up for the production delay caused by a disabled coal cart pulley.

"I needed the extra money, so I said, 'I'll do it,' " He recalled.

Around midnight, He was in the pit loading coal when the steel cable that moved the carts to the surface became stuck again. As He pulled on it, it suddenly jerked into action, yanking his arm so hard that his body flew 10 feet into the air before he was slammed back down. He instantly lost consciousness.

When He awoke two days later, he was in a hospital bed. His left arm was gone, amputated from the shoulder down.

Despite the accident, He begged for his job back. In a country where potential employees are passed over for being too short or too ugly, He knew that he would have trouble finding new work as a disabled man. His boss refused, gave him $500 and told him to go.

On the crowded train home, a thief sliced open He's backpack and walked away with half the bills he had hidden there.

While He was at home recovering, a coal-mining accident claimed the life of his younger brother.

"He was only 23, never even got married," He said.

His two other brothers, both farmers-turned-miners, couldn't afford to give up the deadly trade. Falling rocks broke one brother's shinbone. A floorboard collapse crushed the other's ribs.

"Our family gave so much to China's coal mines, but we never got much in return," He said.

But there was no time to sit still. He began practicing digging dirt with one arm. Neighbors watched him fill part of a local riverbed with sand and plant corn that grew so well it became the envy of the village.

Then a flood ruined his harvest.

There's much more family tragedy here, as well as an amazing denoument — spurned by potential employers in Shanghai, turned down even by an organization aiding the disabled, He transfromed himself into a one-armed porter working on one of China's most treacherous peaks:

It takes about seven minutes to ride the cable car up Huashan; on foot, the trip can take more than 10 hours. Some passages are so steep that climbers must get on all fours and cling to a metal chain that rattles against the side of granite cliffs soaring 7,000 feet into the clouds.

For six years, He has scaled Huashan nearly every day, balancing a straw basket loaded with about 100 pounds of supplies for people at the top.

"On my first day I carried about 50 pounds and made $1.80," He said with a proud smile. "Afterward my back and legs were so sore I could hardly move. But they paid me cash right away. That's better than any job I've ever had."

What little money He made he sent home. During a visit, his younger son, He Xihai, 12 at the time, hiked up the mountain and saw how his father earned a living.

"I was on all fours and I was petrified," said He Xihai, now 17. "I asked my father, 'How do you do it?' and he said, 'One step at a time.'

Needless to say, you should go read the rest.

I've posted some of Ni's other stories here, here, and here.

I enjoy being a grrl

I'm sitting here on the couch, my cat sprawled out in her upsidedown, paws crossed position next to me. I have Chinese class tomorrow morning — well, later today — for which I am not prepared. I've accomplished very little tonight, beyond arguing with a pompous asshole on another blog. Which of course raises the question, is that actually an accomplishment?

Mmmm, not so much.

Usually, I'm not particularly argumentative on blogs. I'm generally regarded as the peace-maker, the person who avoids inflammatory language and looks for common ground. But when I took over guest-posting duties on a far more popular blog than this one, I found myself frequently attacked, and almost always on a really personal level. The typical wingnut assaults about being a traitor and all that, but even more so, attacks on my credibility, character and intelligence.

Now, this last insult is probably the most frequent, and I must admit, given my personal history, I find it pretty ironic. I was always the smart kid, the one in the advanced classes, the egghead who didn't fit in to the normal girly scheme of things. In my current job, I'm the person people call to find out information. Whatever weird, esoteric stuff they need to know. I don't always know it, but I know how to find it, and that's what counts the most.

So having men in the blogosphere routinely tell me I'm "not particularly intelligent," or a "stupid cow," is, I dunno, almost refreshing on some weird level. Growing up when I did, it was at times kind of tough being the smart girl. It seemed to mean that you weren't a real girl, somehow. You didn't fit the mold of how you were supposed to be a girl, of how you were supposed to be a woman. If you cared more about books and ideas and accomplishments than shoes and make-up and flirting, there was something wrong with you.

I see some women who seem to have this whole thing figured out much better than I ever did. I guess they didn't grow up with that divided message in their heads, praised for being gifted but that expressing intelligence was somehow incompatible with being "feminine."

Now that I'm officially stoopid, perhaps that makes me a real girl, at long last...

Not England, but an incredible simulation!

Okay, I'm pretty tired. It's been kind of a stressful week, and I just got back from a lovely sushi dinner. Sake was consumed.

So while I'd like to offer up some witty commentary here, I think I'm just going to have to let this Guardian article stand on its own:

Look at those white stucco Regency terraces. This must be Pimlico. Look again. Well, perhaps we are in Bristol; that's the spire of St Mary Redcliffe over there, isn't it? On the other hand, all those black-and-white Tudor shops seem to spell Chester. Right?

Wrong. This is not England, nor even a chim-chiminee Hollywood film set. Welcome to Thames Town, a grotesque, and extremely funny parody of an olde English town seen through Chinese eyes, and built by canny British developers.

Thames Town is one of seven satellite towns nearing completion on the fringe of Shanghai built by the municipal government to re-house 500,000 people. Its six siblings have been designed in equally potty national dresses. Take your pick from architectural styles adopted from Italy, Spain, Canada, Sweden, Holland and Germany.

The German new town, by the way, is the work of Albert Speer. But, no, not that one - his son. Instead of mighty domes and stadiums, Speer junior offers the Chinese volk Hansel and Gretel-style gingerbread homes.

But only Thames Town boasts a chippy, a gothic church, village green and mock-Tudor pub selling real ale. Built from scratch in little over three years, the £200m project encompasses five centuries of British architecture. At its centre are half-timbered Tudor-style buildings. By the waterfront, Victorian redbrick warehouses have been pre-emptively "converted" into shops. The residential area includes gabled Edwardian houses bordered by privet hedges, manicured lawns and leafy roads.

A gingerbread German town, in China, built by Albert Speer Jr.? See, this is the problem with modern society. It makes satire obsolete.

One question: just what is Canadian architectural style?

From our good friends at China Digital Times.

Check out Non-Violent Resistance Blog

I've been meaning to recommend the Non-Violent Resistance Blog (Uleewang on my blogroll), by a Chinese journalist writing in English. He did great on-the-ground reporting about the benzene spill in Harbin. Now he's unleashing his righteous anger and disgust at the government's proposal to sell hunting rights to some of China's rarest species...in order to, well, fund protection for endangered species — and making some important points about the role of "the internet masses" on government decision-making:

This is yet another perfect example of an unbelievably stupid government policy getting ripped into pieces by the Internet masses and on popular media, with the mandarins backing down shame-faced in the end. The difference is, this time around the skepticism and criticism is almost unanimous: At this very moment, CCTV is running an interactive news commentary program, "discussing" but mostly condemning it. Indeed, it's almost a textbook case of bureaucratic incompetence with factors offensive to every actively outspoken group on the Internet:

To environmentalists and animal rights sympathizers: putting up some of our rarest animals to be gunned down, for a price? Are you f****** kidding me? And to be done by the Ministry of Forestry, the governent agency supposed to be protecting them? What kind of a world am I living in?

To nationalists: the bidding is open only to foreigners? What the hell? Like my RMB doesn't smell as sweet as your US dollars even though mine is appreciating, under "international pressure"? Like we are going to tolerate foreigners (Americans, NRA members, probably; oh, and don't even get me started on the Japanese!) with their big guns roaming free on OUR land, slaughtering OUR animals?

To the not rich and cynical: so, if you're filthy rich enough, you can kill whatever you want. And the more you pay, the bigger and rarer the prey. So am I gonna become your game one day if you can pay the price?

To the legal-minded and detail-loving: several natioinal laws and regulations, as well as nobody knows how many local ones, eh, will have to either be amended or broken to accomodate your stupid Chinese safari. What about wild life protection laws providing jail terms for killing exactly those kinds of animals? What about gun control laws strictly forbidding firearms crossing the border? The Ministry says old instead of young, male instead of female animals will be picked in the actual hunting. So what do you do if some schmuck "accidentally" shoots a doe instead of a stag? Ship him right off to prison

To me: like I am gonna pass up this opportunity to vent more venom against shit-for-brains government officials?

OK, enough for the fun part. My point is, as lots of foreigners correctly point out, we Chinese don't have any sense of political correctness (the Sam Adams brand, not our domestic Eight-Honors-Eight-Disgraces brew). We don't have the luxury for that, one might argue, when some government officials can't tell the difference between salary and bribery. But the current government has also proven itself increasingly "sensitive" to, or downright scared of, strong opinions of the Internet masses. To a lot of reform-minded liberals, that's not necessarily a good thing -- there are even conspiry theories that concervatives, disguised as outraged ordinary netizens, use the Internet to foil some of their hardest-gained reform policies. But at least at times like this, the massive outcry helps drill some basic sense into some high-ranking heads, or brutally strips away the veneer of lies by special interest-controlled, corrupt government officials. Common sense is all we want, and sometimes we do get it.

HEE!

Go here for some prime cat-blogging.

HEE!

Good Call...

The US Army yesterday rejected a proposal for a military themepark on a Virginia army base yesterday. The plans called for:

"...rides that allow visitors to "command the latest M-1 tank" and "feel the rush of a paratrooper freefall."

A Florida developer wanted to erect the theme park at Fort Belvoir, a few miles from the nation's capital, in conjunction with plans for a new National Museum of the United States Army scheduled to be built at the base by 2011.

Though the Army is still willing to consider "some type of "visitor destination concept to go with the museum," officials stated that a themepark "would make a mockery of the Army experience."

"How do you handle war? You don't trivialize it. It's the most serious engagement," said Fairfax County Supervisor Gerald Hyland, a retired Air Force colonel whose district includes most of Fort Belvoir. "I kind of hold my breath that you could do that and have it appeal from an entertainment perspective and at the same time respect the history of the Army."

Hard to argue with that. Certainly an Army video game studio is much more dignified...

The (un) eternal sea...

I've been meaning to write about this at length, in the context of some longer "ohmigod the world is going to hell, and I'm panicking" type post, but since I haven't gotten around to that yet, I want to call your attention to an excellent series in the Los Angeles Times about the dire condition of the earth's oceans. This is a five-part series, but a few graphs from the first article should give you an idea of just how serious this is — "sobering" doesn't begin to cover it:

MORETON BAY, AUSTRALIA — The fireweed began each spring as tufts of hairy growth and spread across the seafloor fast enough to cover a football field in an hour.

When fishermen touched it, their skin broke out in searing welts. Their lips blistered and peeled. Their eyes burned and swelled shut. Water that splashed from their nets spread the inflammation to their legs and torsos.

"It comes up like little boils," said Randolph Van Dyk, a fisherman whose powerful legs are pocked with scars. "At nighttime, you can feel them burning. I tried everything to get rid of them. Nothing worked."

As the weed blanketed miles of the bay over the last decade, it stained fishing nets a dark purple and left them coated with a powdery residue. When fishermen tried to shake it off the webbing, their throats constricted and they gasped for air...

...The venomous weed, known to scientists as Lyngbya majuscula, has appeared in at least a dozen other places around the globe. It is one of many symptoms of a virulent pox on the world's oceans.

In many places — the atolls of the Pacific, the shrimp beds of the Eastern Seaboard, the fiords of Norway — some of the most advanced forms of ocean life are struggling to survive while the most primitive are thriving and spreading. Fish, corals and marine mammals are dying while algae, bacteria and jellyfish are growing unchecked. Where this pattern is most pronounced, scientists evoke a scenario of evolution running in reverse, returning to the primeval seas of hundreds of millions of years ago.

Jeremy B.C. Jackson, a marine ecologist and paleontologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, says we are witnessing "the rise of slime."

For many years, it was assumed that the oceans were too vast for humanity to damage in any lasting way. "Man marks the Earth with ruin," wrote the 19th century poet Lord Byron. "His control stops with the shore."

Even in modern times, when oil spills, chemical discharges and other industrial accidents heightened awareness of man's capacity to injure sea life, the damage was often regarded as temporary.

But over time, the accumulation of environmental pressures has altered the basic chemistry of the seas.

The causes are varied, but collectively they have made the ocean more hospitable to primitive organisms by putting too much food into the water.

Industrial society is overdosing the oceans with basic nutrients — the nitrogen, carbon, iron and phosphorous compounds that curl out of smokestacks and tailpipes, wash into the sea from fertilized lawns and cropland, seep out of septic tanks and gush from sewer pipes.

Modern industry and agriculture produce more fixed nitrogen — fertilizer, essentially — than all natural processes on land. Millions of tons of carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxide, produced by burning fossil fuels, enter the ocean every day.

These pollutants feed excessive growth of harmful algae and bacteria.

At the same time, overfishing and destruction of wetlands have diminished the competing sea life and natural buffers that once held the microbes and weeds in check.

The consequences are evident worldwide.

In addition, our ocean waters are becoming increasingly acidic — from the same causes as global warming:

Scientists estimate that nearly 500 billion tons of the gas have been absorbed by the oceans since the start of the Industrial Revolution. That is more than a fourth of all the CO2 that humanity has emitted into the atmosphere. Eventually, 80% of all human-generated carbon dioxide is expected to find its way into the sea.

Carbon dioxide moves freely between air and sea in a process known as molecular diffusion. The exchange occurs in a film of water at the surface. Carbon dioxide travels wherever concentrations are lowest. If levels in the atmosphere are high, the gas goes into the ocean. If they are higher in the sea, as they have been for much of the past, the gas leaves the water and enters the air.

If not for the CO2 pumped into the skies in the last century, more of the gas would leave the sea than would enter it.

"We have reversed that direction," said Ken Caldeira, an expert on ocean chemistry and carbon dioxide at the Carnegie Institution's department of global ecology, based at Stanford University...

...Scientists say the acidification of the oceans won't be arrested unless the output of CO2 from factories, power plants and automobiles is substantially reduced. Even now, the problem may be irreversible.

"One thing we know for certain is it's not going to be a good thing for the ocean," Barry said. "We just don't know how bad it will be."

I've had the sense for some time now that we are balanced on the edge of a precipice, in more ways than one. Poised at the brink of a region-wide Middle Eastern war, of economic collapse, of encroaching fascism, any number of worst-case scenarios, none of which are likely to improve as long as the current regime occupies the White House. But after reading things like this, it's no wonder to me that Al Gore has chosen to forego another presidential run and devote himself to fighting global warming. As horrific as our political and social problems are at present, just about everything tends to pale in the face of severe climate change, mass extinctions and the death of our oceans.

Real solutions will have to arise out of our sadly dysfunctional political systems and global diplomacy — and I don't expect much progress from the US government in the next couple of years (no wonder Ah-nuld's Kuh-lee-phone-eyuh and a number of states are raising their own internal standards and making separate deals with sovereign countries. California Uber Alles, baby!). In the meantime, we can at least spread the word. It's a small thing in the face of such staggering problems, but you have to start somewhere, I guess.

It's either that, or eat your jellyfish.

Teaching English as a Risky Business...

I taught English in Beijing when I was twenty years old, in 1979. At the time, being an American in China was such a novelty that my nationality was pretty much all that was required. Luckily for my students (all of whom were older than I was), I had this weird latent Protestant work/guilt ethic streak, and I felt obligated to do a good job, as much as I was totally in over my head. I went to the parents of my best friend with whom I'd traveled to China, professional teachers, and begged them to help me, to tell me what I needed to do to be a good teacher and help my students. I ended up being dragooned into making language tapes for no money at my school, a branch school of a more famous university. And though I knew I was being taken advantage of, to some extent, I didn't really mind too much. I liked the idea that I was leaving some sort of legacy behind, at the age of 20, that students would be listening to my voice reading these lame essays — lame, but read with decent pronunciation.

In recent years when I've traveled to China, I've had all kinds of job offers to teach English, just by virtue of my showing up and being able to speak some Chinese. I have no formal training in teaching, and I would have thought that by now, there would be enough qualified folks teaching English that someone like me would not be offered a job as I was more or less walking down the street.

Well, not so much.

Here's a cautionary tale that compares teaching English in China to the worst sort of sweatshop labor that immigrants to America have traditionally endured:

Tanya Davis fled Jizhou No. 1 Middle School one winter morning in March before the sun rose over the surrounding cotton fields covered with stubble from last fall's crop.

In the nine months Davis and her boyfriend had taught English at the school in rural north China, they had endured extra work hours, unpaid salaries and frigid temperatures without heating and, on many days, electricity.

Hearts pounding and worried their employer would find a pretext to stop them leaving, the couple lugged their backpacks, suitcase, books and guitar past a sleeping guard and into a taxi.

As they drove away, "the sense of relief was immense," said Davis, a petite, soft-spoken 23-year-old from Wales. "I felt like we had crossed our last hurdle and everything was going to be OK."

It's a new twist on globalization: For decades, Chinese made their way to the West, often illegally, to end up doing dangerous, low-paying jobs in sweatshop conditions. Now some foreigners drawn by China's growth and hunger for English lessons are landing in the schoolhouse version of the sweatshop.

In one case, an American ended up dead. Darren Russell, 35, from Calabasas, Calif., died under mysterious circumstances days after a dispute caused him to quit his teaching job in the southern city of Guangzhou. "I'm so scared. I need to get out of here," Russell said in a message left on his father's cell phone hours before his death in what Chinese authorities said was a traffic accident.

As China opens up to the world, public and private English-language schools are proliferating. While most treat their foreign teachers decently, and wages can run to $1,000 plus board, lodging and even airfare home, complaints about bad experiences in fly-by-night operations are on the rise. The British Embassy in Beijing warns on its Web site about breaches of contracts, unpaid wages and broken promises. The U.S. Embassy says complaints have increased eightfold since 2004 to two a week on average.

Though foreign teachers in South Korea, Japan and other countries have run into similar problems, the number of allegations in China is much higher because "the rule of law is still not firmly in place," said a U.S. Embassy official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

"A number of substandard English language teaching mills have sprung up, seeking to maximize profits while minimizing services," the U.S. House of Representatives International Relations Committee said in a recent report on Russell's case. These institutes have become virtual "'sweatshops' where young, often naive Americans are held as virtual indentured servants."

Davis said officials at her school in Hebei province piled on classes without compensation, dragged their feet on repairing leaks in her apartment and would deduct sums from her $625 monthly salary for random taxes and phone calls that were never made. These ranged from $30 to $85, she said.

She recalled nights without electricity when there was nothing to do but sit in candlelight.

The more "we let them get away with, the more they tried to get away with," said Davis, who now teaches piano in Beijing...

...John Shaff, a graduate from Florida State University, said everything went according to his English-language contract at Joy Language School in the northeastern city of Harbin — until a disagreement over his office hours erupted into a shouting match on the telephone with a school official.

A few hours later, several men led by Joy's handyman showed up at his school-provided apartment, physically threatening him and cursing him in Chinese, said Shaff, 25. About 10 minutes later, they left, and soon, so did Shaff.

"They were all men who would have been formidable to fight," Shaff said in a telephone interview from San Francisco, where he now lives. The manager of the Joy chain did not respond to interview requests.

Like Shaff, Darren Russell had a disagreement with the manager of Decai language school in Guangzhou, where he had been promised 20 hours of classes a week. Instead, Decai had him teaching at two schools, where he put in up to 14 hours a day and oversaw 1,200 students, Russell's mother, Maxine Russell, said in a telephone interview from Calabasas.

The school had troubles with foreign teachers. Two had quit by the time Russell showed up, and a former Decai employee, a Chinese woman who spoke on condition of anonymity, said she left because she was asked to recruit foreign teachers by offering attractive contracts that went unfulfilled.

In April 2005, sick from bronchitis and exhausted from the work hours, Russell told manager Luo Deyi he wanted her to lighten his work load. An argument ensued, Russell resigned and threatened to tell police Luo was operating illegally, the former employee said.

The school then moved him into a low-budget hotel. A week later he was dead. Police told Decai and Russell's mother that Darren had been killed in a hit-and-run traffic accident. The body was shipped to California.

Maxine Russell, however, said Chinese authorities could not provide consistent witnesses and a time of death. According to the congressional report, which was the outcome of a family request to look into the Russell case, a California mortician who handled Russell's body said he had suffered a blow to his head and his body did not have bruises and fractures consistent with a car accident. The mortician, Jerry Marek, is a former coroner.

While Maxine Russell and the former Decai employee say Russell was a beloved teacher, Luo, the manager, insists he was often absent from class and his "teaching methods failed to meet the requirement of the school and fit the students." She said he had been hired on probation, which he failed partly because of a drinking problem.

"It was very strange and irresponsible for them to blame us for their son's death," Luo said in a telephone interview.

So, those of you currently teaching English in China — what are your experiences? Rewarding, life-threatening, or somewhere in-between?