Pages

7:02 PM

Master Feed : The Atlantic

Master Feed : The Atlantic

Bo Xilai Has Been Indicted. Now What?

Posted: 25 Jul 2013 02:58 PM PDT

bxltrialbanner.jpgFormer Chongqing Party Chief Bo Xilai, photographed here in 2010, likely faces a lengthy prison sentence after being indicted today. (Jason Lee/Reuters)

The penny has dropped for Bo Xilai. The one-time Chongqing Party Secretary, held in limbo since March 2012, was indicted today for bribery, corruption, and abuse of power stemming from his previous stint as the top official in Dalian. Bo's long-awaited trial will mark the culmination of China's most serious political scandal in a generation, one that began with the poisoning death of British businessman Neil Haywood in Chongqing in November 2011.

To tease out some of the implications of the Bo Xilai issue, I spoke to Jacques DeLisle, a law professor and Director at the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. The following is a transcript of our remarks, edited for length and clarity.


Now that Bo Xilai has been indicted, when will his trial be held? 

There's been a lot of speculation about that already, and of course nobody knows for sure. But I suspect the trial won't be too far into the future because the government has sat on this issue for so long. It's hard to imagine what the motivation would be for indicting him and then letting the indictment sit for a long time. 

Another reason that the trial will likely happen sooner rather than later is the arrival of two major events on the Chinese political calendar. The first is the traditional summer retreat of the Communist Party elite to Beidaihe, a beach resort near Beijing, where the country's top leaders go to set the agenda for the coming year. The second is the coming third plenum of the National People's Congress early this fall, an event where policies will be set. This time, the third plenum will be particularly important because it comes after the installation of a new president [Xi Jinping], something that happens in China only once every 10 years.

So is there any chance that Bo will be acquitted?

(Laughs) You'd have to get really, really big odds to cover that bet. If he were acquitted it'd be shocking -- totally out of the ordinary. But what's interesting to me is what they're charging him with.

Why is that?

Well, the main focus of the Bo Xilai controversy was what he did in his last post as the Party Secretary of Chongqing, including the unpardonable sin of campaigning publicly for a spot in the Standing Committee of the Politburo [China's highes decision-making body]. China has a fairly secretive and managed successor process, but Bo tried to subvert this by invoking his own personal standing and his ability to cultivate grass-roots support. That was a huge infraction on his part.

If you look more broadly at what the public saw in Bo, you see someone who ran a brutal dictatorship in Chongqing. There was some genuine support for his anti-crime crackdown, of course, but its brutality, and disregard of legal restrictions and procedures, were  problematic. Bo tried to shake down local business interests in the city, and angered China's "rule of law" types by going after a defense lawyer named Li Zhuang, who was defending someone caught up in one of Bo's "anti-mafia" cases.

But the indictment, insofar as we know, just has to do with the crimes of embezzlement and abuse of power that focused on his earlier tenure as the Party Secretary of Dalian, in northeastern China, and has nothing to do with what he did in Chongqing.

Why would Beijing handle it this way? Why not go after him for his Chongqing crimes, and, if his Dalian crimes merited arrest, why didn't they arrest him years ago?

Almost every official at Bo's level in China has skeletons in the closet, so if they had gone after him when he was running Dalian -- his crimes there were not uncommon for Chinese leaders -- then you'd give the impression that members of the elite would be vulnerable to criminal prosecution. 

So had the Wang Lijun incident [the Police Chief who fled to the U.S. Embassy in February 2012] not occurred in Chongqing, would Bo have even run into trouble?

The Wang Lijun case made it easy to go after Bo; there's something terribly embarrassing when your top aide tries to defect to the United States and then hands over a bunch of information in the process. And there were other revelations that hurt him, such as tapping the phones of [former President] Hu Jintao when he was visiting Chongqing. 

But in general, Bo was playing a high-stakes, high-risk game. He was going outside the usual channels in a bid for higher office by cultivating a populist power base, and that's just a big no-no in Chinese politics. He also stood for a particular model of governance that was at odds with the broadly reformist bloc that runs the country. Bo's vision of Chongqing was in having the state play a big role and to avoid any big market reforms, and he was a good deal more contemptuous and dismissive of "rule of law" values than even the mainstream elite -- which is saying something. His populist, almost neo-Maoist approach was in tension with the reformist, market-oriented model favored by the likes of [former Guangdong Party Chief and current Vice Premier] Wang Yang. 

Bo Xilai attracted genuine grassroots support as Chongqing's boss. Will they come out to rally during his trial?

A few years ago this would have been totally unthinkable in China, but with the rise in protests recently people do seem to feel more free to take to the streets. That said, most of the protesters seem more concerned with local economic or environmental issues than anything broadly political.

So will we see a lot of people out in the streets for Bo Xilai? I doubt it. It'd be a risky thing to do, I think, going out and expressing support for someone accused of doing some pretty terrible things. But what's interesting in this: the trial is being held not in Chongqing or Dalian but in Jinan, capital of Shandong Province, which is an area with which Bo has no ties. This might suggest some concern to avoid some embarrassing, if not actually threatening, protests. 

What will Bo's sentence be?

I'd guess it'll be somewhere been many years and a suspended death sentence, the latter of which in China usually means life in prison. The odds of him being executed is practically nil -- it just doesn't happen to top leaders in China, not to [Mao Zedong's last wife and Gang of Four member] Jiang Qing, nor people nearer to Bo like his wife Gu Kailai, who was convicted in the murder of Neil Haywood. Chen Liangyu, the Shanghai Party Chief convicted for corruption in 2008, is probably the closest comparison, and he didn't even get a suspended death sentence.

What lesson does Bo's case teach existing Chinese officials?

I don't think it teaches them anything they don't already know. That is to say -- if you engage in corrupt or abusive behavior in these high positions (Party secretary, provincial governor, etc.) you might end up with your political enemies wanting to take your down. Lots of people of course get away with a lot of stuff -- but even for people like Bo in the upper tier of elite, there is that risk of getting caught.






    

Larry Summers Should Absolutely Not Be the Next Fed Chair

Posted: 25 Jul 2013 02:14 PM PDT

LarrySummersWhoa.png
Reuters

It was supposed to be a fait accompli. Janet Yellen was going to be the next Fed Chair, and anyone who said otherwise was some combination of trolling, wrong, and wrong. Betting markets certainly thought so: Yellen started out as a 1-to-5 favorite to get the gig. But a not-so-funny thing happened on the way to our first female Fed Chair -- Ezra Klein reports that Larry Summers is actually the frontrunner for the job now.

Why?

It's not an easy question to answer. It's not that Summers isn't a brilliant economist -- he most certainly is -- but rather that he doesn't have, well, any of Yellen's central banking expertise. She's spent much of the past 20 years at the Fed. He's barely said anything about monetary policy. Now, he might be as good as we know she would be, but that's the thing: We know she would be good. Very, very good. 

After serving as a Fed governor from 1994 to 1997, as president of the San Francisco Fed from 2004 to 2010, and as Fed Vice-Chair for the past three years, Yellen has emerged as one of the central bank's intellectual leaders. She talked Alan Greenspan out of targeting zero percent inflation, because it would have increased the odds of falling into a liquidity trap (like we have now), back in 1996. She was one of the first to warn about the risk of the shadow banking blowup and housing slump setting off a credit crunch back in 2007. And she's been one of the architects of the Fed's unconventional policies today.

It hasn't gotten a lot of attention, but Yellen is something of a quiet revolutionary. Now, I prefer Christina Romer's approach of, if not yelling, at least speaking loudly from the rooftops that the Fed needs to do more (it's a scandal that she hasn't gotten real consideration for Fed Chair). But Yellen has cautiously moved the Fed in that direction. As Cardiff Garcia of FT Alphaville points out, her idea of "optimal control" policy looks an awful lot like NGDP targeting. In plain English, she thinks the Fed should let inflation go higher than it likes for a little while to bring unemployment down faster. Not that this is a new idea for her. It's what she said the Fed should do at a policy meeting in 1995 (page 43):

Fortunately, the goals of price stability and output stability are often in harmony, but when the goals conflict and it comes to calling for tough trade-offs, to me, a wise and humane policy is occasionally to let inflation rise even when inflation is running above target.

As a colleague noted, she was all but endorsing NGDP targeting, which she then agreed was a "sensible rule." And it's even more sensible when interest rates are at zero.

It isn't clear what Larry Summers actually thinks about monetary policy. He probably wants to keep rates low for a long time, but that's about all we know. He hasn't been a central banker. And he hasn't written much about it. But the few things he has said aren't encouraging. For one, he doesn't think much of quantitative easing. As Robin Harding of the Financial Times reports, Summers recently said that he thinks "QE is less efficacious for the real economy than most people suppose." But more than that, Summers seems to share the Wall Street view that more bond-buying might just risk another bubble or mal-investment -- at least that's what he suggested a year ago:

Many in both the U.S. and Europe are arguing for further quantitative easing to bring down longer-term interest rates. This may be appropriate given that there is a much greater danger from policy inaction to current economic weakness than to overreacting. 
However, one has to wonder how much investment businesses are unwilling to undertake at extraordinarily low interest rates that they would be willing to undertake with rates reduced by yet another 25 or 50 basis points. It is also worth querying the quality of projects that businesses judge unprofitable at a -60 basis point real interest rate but choose to undertake at a still more negative real interest rate. There is also the question of whether extremely low safe real interest rates promote bubbles of various kinds.

In other words, he thinks the Fed pushing down real interest rates might only push companies to make bad investments they otherwise wouldn't make. It's a very Austrian view of things -- the idea that pushing interest rates "artificially" low makes businesses make mistakes.

This is not good. Now, there are plenty of people who think QE is going to turn us into Zimbabwe or inflate the mother-of-all-bubbles or just bail out the banks, but none of those people should be running the Fed. The reality is QE has been a net positive, though it's not clear how much. For one, as Paul Krugman points out, the Fed's bond-buying signals that the Fed really doesn't intend to raise rates anytime soon. Of course, the Fed has said it won't anyways, but there's nothing to stop it from going back on its word if inflation ticks up. QE makes this promise to be irresponsible more credible.That's clear enough from the way interest rates and expectations of future interest rates jumped after the Fed said it might soon slow the pace of its bond-buying. For another, QE has reduced our indebtedness. Now, it's true that QE shortens the maturity of our debt -- a point Summers has worried about -- but the way it pushes down interest rates and pushes up growth are fiscal pluses. Joseph Gagnon, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute and a former Fed official, estimates that QE might have reduced our debt-to-GDP ratio by 12 percentage points the past four years.

Monetary policy isn't exactly the sexiest topic, but the next Fed Chair is the most important economic decision Obama will make for the rest of his term. Whoever it is will face the tricky task of eventually exiting the Fed's unconventional policies without losing the recovery. The question is how eventual that eventually will be. Now, even with core inflation at an all-time low, there's a growing chorus calling on the Fed to tighten, and tighten now, to head off a potential bubble. We know Janet Yellen would ignore them, and focus on jobs. 

Would somebody else focus even more on jobs? I've already said I think Christina Romer would be better, because she's more likely to fight to do more than the consensus-building Yellen -- which is the same argument for Summers. His infamous disregard for social niceties might make him more likely to push the committee in a more aggressive direction. But there's no evidence he would want to. His almost certainly strategic silence on most matters Fed-related means there aren't many tea leaves to read. But the ones we can read suggest he isn't quite as dovish as Yellen. And he might even buy into the bubble fears. That should be more than enough to disqualify him against someone who clearly has the right ideas and the right experience.

And besides, consensus-building might be underrated. Fed Chairs come and go, but the Fed is forever. (Sorry, Ron Paul). Getting the rest of the committee on board with a decision makes that decision more durable -- which makes it more credible, too. In other words, trying to browbeat the rest of the Fed into doing something might backfire. Yellen's familiarity with the rest of the committee could just as easily make her more likely to (quietly) cajole them in a more aggressive direction than anyone else could.

Of course, it doesn't hurt that Yellen would be a history-making pick as the first female Fed Chair. But that has nothing to do with why she should get the job. She should get the job, because she's the best person for it out of all the contenders.

Sometimes, things are simple.

    

Senators Really Don't Want You to Know How They're Reforming Taxes

Posted: 25 Jul 2013 02:03 PM PDT

"Now this is just between us, right, Max?" "Of course, Orrin." (Reuters)

The Senate is engaging in a tax-reform process with a witness-protection-like level of secrecy. For 50 years, no one, except 10 staffers, will know what breaks and deductions each senator decided to excise from the tax code. It's lawmaking of the opaquest sort, but it is easy to see why tax-code suggestions are mired in such risk for lawmakers.

Lobbying is an enormously powerful and profitable business. In 2012, interests groups spent $3.3 billion telling their lawmakers how the law can better work for them -- and not just on tax issues. That sounds like a lot, but for industry, it is definitely worth it. For every dollar an interest group invests in lobbying, it can expect a return of $220 in tax breaks, according to researchers at the University of Kansas. That's a 22,000 percent return on investment on an of aggregate of 90 firms in the sample.

So how would those lobbying firms feel if Congress swept out from under them the breaks that they paid so effectively for? Enter the witness protection.

Senators, led by Democrat Max Baucus and Republican Orrin Hatch, want to rework the nation's tax code. They have opted for a "blank slate," which means they want to redesign the tax structure from the bottom up. The goal is to pass a tax overhaul by the end of the year. Senators have until the end of this week to submit their proposals laying out what they think should remain in the tax code. 

With the weight held by the special interests, this is dangerous work for senators. So dangerous, indeed, that their decisions will be locked away for 50 years and kept in total secrecy. The Hill reports that "each submission will also be given its own ID number and be kept on password-protected servers, with printed versions kept in locked safes."

The senators will make decisions that some interests groups are sure to hate. And it's easy to understand why they want cover, lest they give perfect fodder for industry-fueled attack ads come campaign season.

"The letter was done at the request of offices to provide some assurance that the committee would not make their submissions public," an aide told The Hill. "Senators Baucus and Hatch are going out of their way to assure their colleagues they will keep the submissions in confidence."

The youngest senator is 39. There's virtually no chance that the Senate's tax decisions this week will come back to haunt even him. And by the time the National Archives releases the records, surely no one will care. (We will, however, try to update this story at that time.)

    

NASA's Newest Space Telescope Sends Back Its First Images of the Sun, and They're Gorgeous

Posted: 25 Jul 2013 12:12 PM PDT

hires.jpg

Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics/NASA

Last month, NASA launched a new telescope, known as IRIS, into space to study the sun. Today we got our first glimpse of what IRIS is seeing, and ... wow.

Even NASA's press release bubbled with excitement:

The moment when a telescope first opens its doors represents the culmination of years of work and planning -- while simultaneously laying the groundwork for a wealth of research and answers yet to come. It is a moment of excitement and perhaps even a little uncertainty. On July 17, 2013, the international team of scientists and engineers who supported and built NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, all lived through that moment. As the spacecraft orbited around Earth, the door of the telescope opened to view the mysterious lowest layers of the sun's atmosphere and the results thus far are nothing short of amazing. The data is crisp and clear, showing unprecedented detail of this little-observed region.

The region of the sun IRIS is observing, the lower atmosphere, and how it powers the sun's scorching upper atmosphere, known as the coronoa, is not well understood. Jay M. Pasachoff, an astronomy professor at Williams College called it "one of the important unsolved problems of astrophysics." As Alexis explained when IRIS launched:

The sun is powered by fusion reactions at its core in which hydrogen atoms fuse together into helium, releasing tremendous energy in the process. That energy moves out from the core to the surface of the sun, called the photosphere. The temperature there is about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

As you continue to move out from the sun, we cross upwards into the corona, where a very strange thing happens: the temperature jumps to a million degrees. That is to say, the atmosphere of the sun is thousands of times hotter than its surface.

To consider how weird this is, imagine you light your stove and the area farther away from the heat source is actually hotter than the regions closer in. That's not normally how heat flows. And yet, on the sun, that is exactly how it works, and scientists just aren't sure why.

Scientists are hoping that what they see in the IRIS data will help them understand those mechanics.

The picture from IRIS captures the activity in a region marked by two sunspots (seen as dark patches at the upper left and lower right). NASA additionally released a video showing the early IRIS images in motion, slowed 40 percent (and looped four times):

For a sense of what we've been able to see of that region until now, take a look at this picture from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (a bit more zoomed out):

hires (1).jpg



H/t @jtotheizzoe

    

The Data Economy Is Much, Much Bigger Than You (and the Government) Think

Posted: 25 Jul 2013 12:09 PM PDT

Servers_Reuters.jpg
Reuters

It's become conventional wisdom among pundits that the tech and data boom is generating lots of wealth, but not much in the way of jobs or economic growth. The skeptics point to lack of job gains in the "information" sector, as defined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and to the country's sub-2 percent GDP growth figures.

But as the U.S. shifts to a data-driven economy, the benefits of fixed and mobile broadband are showing up in ways that are not counted by traditional statistics. For just one example, take the number of jobs generated by the development and deployment of mobile apps. According to a new calculation by the Progressive Policy Institute, employment in the App Economy now comes to 752,000 jobs, up roughly 40% over the past year. This is a conservative estimate, based on tracking online help-wanted ads.

Auto companies are hiring software developers and testers to turn their vehicles into highly connected data platforms. Drugstores are going online to let their customers know when prescriptions are ready. Hospitals are ramping up their employment of clinical data managers to help handle the shift to electronic health records. Bed and breakfasts have shifted their entire booking operations online, driven by digital ads.

More broadly, demand for tech workers in the New York City region outstrips every other metro area, including San Francisco and San Jose, according to figures from The Conference Board. That reflects demand in finance, advertising, and media.

The data-driven economy is built on several pillars: Broadband providers, mobile phone operators, and other communications companies are investing almost $100 billion annually to vastly improve their networks. Makers of smartphones, routers, sensors, wireless medical gear, and the like are upgrading and extending the capabilities of their equipment. Meanwhile new applications and uses are coming out of app developers, online game and entertainment companies, web companies like Facebook and Google, content providers, electronic health record providers, and "Internet of Everything" companies that connect the physical world with the data world. Tableau Software, a Seattle-based data visualization company that just went public, increased its full-time employees from 188 to 749 from the end of 2010 to the end of 2012.

What's more, data is also the fastest-growing component of trade. Consider the United States and Europe: telecom providers have doubled transatlantic cable capacity over the past five years, according to figures from Telegeography. Meanwhile imports and exports of goods and services between the U.S. and Europe are barely above pre-recession peaks.

These flows of data do not show up in the monthly trade report released by the Census Bureau and the BEA. Indeed, most of the growth of data domestically is not counted in the economic statistics either. For example, fixed broadband traffic in North America rose by 39% in the first half of 2013 over a year earlier, according to Sandvine, a Canadian-based network management company. This number does not show up in any official measures.

Will all this growth continue? People still remember the tech bust of the early 2000s, when the unemployment rate in Silicon Valley surged to over 9 percent. This time, though, the surge in data-related jobs is not likely to stop soon. A 2010 policy brief from the Progressive Policy Institute showed that the jobs and industries that grow during a recession are the ones that lead the expansion, and that's exactly what is happening here.

Before the financial crisis, the housing and debt boom made the U.S. economy look better than it really was, especially housing construction is very visible and easy to measure. By contrast, we may be in the opposite situation now. Data is intangible and difficult to count, so the benefits of the tech and data boom may be underestimated.

    

Is This the Dawn of the New Golden Age of World Soccer?

Posted: 25 Jul 2013 12:07 PM PDT

golden age soccer banner.jpg
AP / Daniel Ochoa de Olza, Moises-Castillo, Karel-Navarro.

Until recently, the list of association football's greatest players has been lengthy but linear. In other words, the world's most popular game has witnessed its share of greatness at all points throughout its history, with the geographically and stylistically disparate dots forming a straight line in time -- from Alfredo Di Stefano to Pele, from Pele to Johan Cruyff and from Cruyff to Diego Maradona.

In the current day, however, a number of transcendent talents have emerged simultaneously, suggesting a new golden era is dawning. Two players -- Lionel Messi of Barcelona and Argentina, and Cristiano Ronaldo of Real Madrid and Portugal -- have already risen to greatness. A third, Barcelona's new Brazilian import Neymar, appears to be on track after leading the Seleçao to a stirring triumph over Spain in this year's FIFA Confederations Cup.

Over the next year, all three will challenge for glory at the highest levels of both the club and international game. With their combination of skills, talents and enormous potential, and with historically strong opponents awaiting them, the coming year could become a classic period of the modern game.

AP-DanielOchoadeOlza.jpg
AP / Daniel Ochoa de Olza

The Established Rivals
The 2012 FIFA Ballon d'Or Gala, held in January 2013 in Zurich, served as the latest setting for the unfolding and ever-escalating rivalry between Messi and Ronaldo. Messi claimed more than 41 percent of the vote. Ronaldo, who was the last player not named Messi to win the award (in 2008) received less than 24 percent.

And so Messi, still only 25 at the time, won the award for the fourth straight time, a record that cemented his position as the world's best player and a legend in his own time. BBC Sport Phil McNulty wondered aloud whether Messi was already the best player ever. Meanwhile, the The Telegraph's Paul Hayward left no doubt that Messi had no equal:

Xavi is the world's best metronomic passer. There are other good ones but Xavi is the best. Iniesta is the best roving midfielder. Starting on the left, he floats and drifts with lethal cunning. At gliding pace he lacerates defences and sets up colleagues. Ronaldo, whose talent is more spectacular, more obviously ingenious, is also No. 1 in his class of elusive sprinters.

But Messi has no category in which to be better than all the rest. He is his own genre. No rival can match his array of skills or claim to be a lesser version of him. This is what elevates him to the level of genius.

Perhaps not surprisingly, one of Messi's teammates said that the diminutive Argentinean is already the best of all time. Speaking at a press conference shortly after the gala (h/t Goal.com), Barcelona forward Pedro said: "I have shared many years and seasons with him here; I have won many titles by his side and it is a great joy to havegained a new Ballon d'Or. He is the best player ever."

Messi himself reacted with humility that bordered on sheepishness. "To tell you the truth this is really quite unbelievable," Messi said, per The Guardian. "The fourth award that I have had is just too great for words."

But Messi's unbelievable 2012 -- in which he scored a world-record 91 goals -- was worthy of the acclaim. It also provided ample reason to snub a player of Ronaldo's caliber. The Portuguese was a phenomenon as well, scoring 60 goals in all competitions during 2011-12 as Real Madrid wrestled the La Liga title from Barcelona.

Indeed, Ronaldo, 28, likely would be in the advanced stages of building his own case as one of the best players of all time if not for Messi's contemporary presence. Having won league titles in two of the world's best leagues and the UEFA Champions League title with Manchester United in 2008, Ronaldo already boasts a sterling resume.

Real Madrid president Florentino Perez, whose club bought Ronaldo for a world-record £80 million transfer fee in 2009 (a figure in the $120 millions), believes Ronaldo is the best in the world -- and potentially the best ever.

"He is the face of the team and the best player in the world," Perez told Gol Caracol recently, as per ESPN. "... We are yet to see the best of him. He can be the best of all time."

The rivalry will continue into the new club season, where Barca and Real figure to dominate domestically once again. For all their escalating success, though, both Messi and Ronaldo to this point have been unable to win the biggest prize of all, the FIFA World Cup.

Both should have another chance next year in Brazil, which is coincidentally the home country of another rising star, one who is threatening to make the rivalry a three-headed affair.

neymarinpost.jpg
AP / Natacha Pisarenko

The New Kid on the Block
The hype, as it turned out, was entirely warranted.

After years of receiving resounding endorsements from high-profile sources, Neymar lived up to his star billing in this year's FIFA Confederations Cup. Held in his native Brazil, the tournament was an opportunity for both country and player.

Neymar, who had only just made the transition from wearing No. 11 to the national team's iconic No. 10 shirt, dominated all comers.

The 21-year-old started with a flourish, scoring the tournament's opening goal, a stunner against Japan, in the third minute of the opening game. He followed up with a deft volley and jaw-dropping assist against Mexico and added another goal, this one from a free kick, against Italy.

Brazil then dominated Spain in the final as Neymar scored again. After five comprehensive performances, Neymar finished the tournament with four goals and rightfully earned the Golden Ball as its best player.

With the tournament still in progress, Brazil manager Luiz Felipe Scolari nearly burst with praise for Neymar, suggesting that Neymar was already a "genius" andincluding him among the world's top three players. Scolari knows something about world-class talent. In his first stint as Brazil's manager, he led the team to its most recent World Cup triumph in 2002.

Not that Neymar has reached the level of Messi and Ronaldo quite yet.

The Confederations Cup is obviously not the World Cup, and Neymar still has not played a European season. But after signing with Barcelona this summer, the latter will no longer be valid in the coming months. What's more, he had already hinted at greatness with the goal that won him the 2011 FIFA Puskas Award. And with the World Cup less than a year away, he'll have his crack at the former as well, and on home soil.

So while Neymar has some way to go before matching Messi and Ronaldo, he has already entered their realm with a rousing, coming-of-age performance for his country. And over the next year, he'll have the chance to top himself with both club and country.

doloresochoa.jpg
AP / Dolores Ochoa

Worthy Competition
It's worth noting that none of these players feature for the two teams currently atop the club or international levels. Rather than being a negative, however, that can be a positive for all three.

Spain, despite losing the Confederations Cup final to Brazil, won the World Cup in 2010, as well as the last two European titles. German giants Bayern Munich claimed a historic treble last season, winning the UEFA Champions League and German league and cup in a record-breaking season.

That means Messi, Ronaldo and Neymar will face fierce competition over the next year in their continuing quest for greatness. To be the best, it's necessary to beat the best, and all three will certainly have formidable obstacles in their path.

All in all, that makes for a potentially fascinating year ahead, one that could easily come to be seen as a golden era in soccer. The game has rarely had so many transcendent talents grouped together in space and time, and with prestigious competitions and fearsome opponents lying in wait, the stage could hardly be set any better.

    

Just Another Night in This Town

Posted: 25 Jul 2013 11:28 AM PDT

Tim Serge/Flickr; The Atlantic

"Can you fucking believe this?" Mark Leibovich says with a smirk when I finally get through the crowd to him. He is referring to the party that has been convened in his honor at a cavernous mansion in the Adams Morgan neighborhood. Leibovich's mildly hostile send-up of D.C.'s incestuous ways, This Town, came out last week, an arrival that slightly upset the kibitzers of the capital, much the way a fresh zebra corpse might slightly upset the vulture habitat.

The author, whose book it is possible to see as an extended exercise in Jewish guilt, agonized over his book party. How do you throw a party for a book about the ridiculousness of Washington parties? Whom do you invite? What kind of canapes do you serve? The layers of irony threatened to engulf the master ironist, seen here in a black V-neck tee and casual blazer.

In the event, the party was co-hosted by seven of Leibovich's closest Washington friends, two of whom are big shots at the New York Times, like him, and three of whom, I should disclose, are affiliated with The Atlantic (one of them being editor in chief James Bennet). If a bomb went off in here, the New York Times Washington bureau would pretty much cease to exist; I am not one of the people who thinks that would be good for America. The hors d'oeuvres are on a table in the back, not passed around by waiters, and are far below the standard of the swanky Washington parties described in the book. One platter holds what appear to be meatballs skewered with cinnamon sticks.

Wendy Davis, the Texas state senator, is here. She tells me she is in town to meet with Emily's List, but declines to say whether that means she's going to run for governor of Texas.

Carl Hulse, the jolly, mop-haired Washington editor of the Times, is roaming around with a yellow plastic maraca. Why does Carl Hulse have a maraca?

"Do you know someone named Kurt?" my husband asks. My husband, a youthful-looking Japanese-American who does not work in politics, has twice been mistaken for Kurt Bardella, the Korean-American congressional staffer who plays a major role in This Town. The hosts solved the invitation dilemma by inviting everybody, but I do not see Kurt here. I also do not see Bob (Barnett) or Mikey (Allen) or Tammy (Haddad), some of the book's other dubious characters. Washington values being a good sport about things, but Kurt and Bob and Mikey and Tammy are maybe still a little sore. Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, comes off in the book as an antidote to all the phoniness, endearingly crusty and weird. He is not here, but I hear he has read the book and wants to meet Bardella.

I strike up a conversation with a doctor who is here with another journalist. A civilian! What do they think of us? He has not read This Town, but he read the excerpt (about Kurt Bardella) in the Times Magazine, and he did not find it infuriating or repulsive or sad; he found it funny. This is perhaps the scariest prospect to the rapacious climbers of this town -- that we lack even the power to piss anybody off. I feel obligated to remind the doctor that there are taxpayer dollars at stake.

I am talking to Karen Tumulty of the Washington Post on the front porch when Sally Quinn approaches, wearing large and very sparkly earrings. Portrayed in the book as the doyenne of a declining Washington social scene, Quinn once wrote a column in the Post about the scheduling of her son's wedding. She wants to talk to Tumulty about Anthony Weiner, whom she finds "totally appalling." Impressively, despite her long tenure in the capital, Sally Quinn retains the ability to be shocked.

Tumulty has lots of meticulously reported gossip about how the Weiner thing is going over in Clintonworld, all of which will be in the morning's Post. I try to contribute to the conversation, but Quinn does not turn toward me even once, and continues to converse with Tumulty as though I were not there.

Word goes around that the author is going to make remarks. (Not "speak," like a normal person might say, but "make remarks," which is what staffers say when a politician is about to make a speech.) Everybody is sweating in the under-air-conditioned room. Peter Baker, the Times White House correspondent, says, "Thank you all for coming to Mark's acting-out of his book." Everybody laughs.

David Leonhardt, the Times' Washington bureau chief, says Leibovich was moved to write the book by the "vaguely late-Roman character of our current prosperity, even as the country is suffering." He plugs a collection to which he and Leibovich both contributed. David Plotz, the editor of Slate, discloses that he and his wife and Leibovich and his wife have daughters who are best friends, and that the two families share a minivan. "This book is about deplorable people doing deplorable things, and it is never not a pleasure," he says.

Leibovich, who is burly and bald with a craggy face, says, "This is the point of the evening where I become everything I mocked." He plugs Baker's forthcoming book and Dan Balz's book. He allows a brief, sincere paean to print journalism: "There's a lot that's good about Washington, D.C., in this room right now." And he solves the Carl Hulse mystery: Hulse is in a band called the Native Makers, and they have written a song called "This Town."

Hulse's bandmate plays guitar while Hulse, a drummer without a drumset, shakes his maraca. "They'll talk you up, then cut you down, and you might never know -- in this town." It is pretty awful, but of course I will tell Hulse it was terrific, and so will everybody else.

    

'This Did Something Powerful to Me': Authors' Favorite First Lines of Books

Posted: 25 Jul 2013 11:23 AM PDT

first lines authors.jpg
AP and Library of Congress.

When I interviewed Stephen King for the By Heart series, he told me about some of his favorite opening lines in literature. Then, the author had an off-the-cuff idea.

"You could go around and ask people about their favorite first lines," he said. "I think you'll find that most of them, right away, establish the sense of voice we talked about. Why not do it? I'd love to know, like, Jonathan Franzen's favorite first line."

So I reached out to Franzen and 21 other writers. In honor of King's new novel Joyland and its nouveau-pulp publisher Hard Case Crime, there are a good number of crime writers featured in this list. Other writers I spoke to don't write crime fiction at all, preferring to focus on other brands of human mystery. Collected below, the opening lines they picked range widely in tone and execution--but in each, you can almost feel the reader's mind beginning to listen, hear the inward swing of some inviting door.

dashiellhammett-ap-2.jpg
Dashiell Hammett (AP)

Megan Abbott (Dare Me, The End of Everything)

I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. --Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest
raymondchandler-ap.jpg
Raymond Chandler (AP)

Charles Ardai (Editor, Hard Case Crime; author of Fifty-to-One)

The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of the Dancers. --Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
hermanmelville-congress.jpg
Herman Mellville (Library of Congress)

Margaret Atwood (Oryx and Crake, The Blind Assassin)

David Gilbert (& Sons, The Normals)

Call me Ishmael. --Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

Yes, yes, perhaps not the most original choice, but the power of those three words still to this day excite my blood like no other. It is both command and entreaty, a rechristening by way of pen scratching into paper. A second before this person was likely a John or a Philip, a Henry. A strange kind of pause lingers. An end before the beginning.

vsnaipaul-reuters.png
V.S. Naipaul (Reuters)

Peter Blauner (Slipping Into Darkness, Slow Motion Riot)

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it. --V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River
donaldEwestlake-ap-louislanzano.jpg
Donald E. Westlake (AP / Louis Lanzano)

Lawrence Block (A Drop of the Hard Stuff, When the Sacred Ginmill Closes)

When the car stopped rolling, Parker kicked out the windshield and crawled through onto the wrinkled hood, Glock first. --Richard Stark, Backflash

When the guy with asthma finally came in from the fire escape, Parker rabbit-punched him and took his gun away. --Richard Stark, The Mourner

When the woman screamed, Parker awoke and rolled off the bed. --Richard Stark, The Outfit

When the bandages came off, Parker looked in the mirror at a stranger. --Richard Stark, the Man with the Getaway Face

When the knock came at the door, Parker was just turning to the obituary page. --Richard Stark, The Jugger

All five of these are opening lines from the Parker novels, by Donald E. Westlake writing as Richard Stark.

They're all my favorites.

johncheever-ap.jpg
John Cheever (AP)

Ethan Canin (America America, The Palace Thief)

This is being written in another seaside cottage on another coast. Gin and whiskey have bitten rings in the table where I sit. --John Cheever, A Vision of the World

I know that's TWO sentences. But pretend there's a semi-colon in there.

When I was in college, this particular opening did something powerful to me. I remember reading it aloud to a friend, marveling at the ennui of the first sentence and the dark draw of the second. It comes fairly late in Cheever's opus, and I think he was growing grim by then. I can see those rings.

Anyway, it may not be the opening of 100 Years of Solitude, but it sure meant a lot to me when I was just becoming interested in writing.

ernesthemingway-ap.jpg
Ernest Hemingway (AP)

Ron Carlson (Oakpine, The Signal)

My choice is a famous sentence, that opening of Hemingway's The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber. It reads:

It was now lunch time and they were all sitting under the double green fly of the dining tent pretending that nothing had happened.

Years ago, I relished it as a reader, but since I've come to admire it as a story writer. He was so smart to put so much in the bank with that sentence. It suggests the inventory that he'll draw from as the tale unfolds. He's rich. I also like that detail of the "double green fly of the dining tent," offering us the specific place, a real thing, the beginning of the grounding credibility which was so often the earmark and method of his work.

mickeyspillane-ap.jpg
Mickey Spillane (AP)

Max Allan Collins (Road to Perdition, Ask Not)

Below is my favorite passage from Mickey Spillane, the much derided bestselling author who was attacked in the 1950s in The Atlantic and elsewhere. From One Lonely Night:

Nobody ever walked across the bridge, not on a night like this. The rain was misty enough to be almost foglike, a cold gray curtain that separated me from the pale ovals of white that were faces locked behind the steamed-up windows of the cars that hissed by. Even the brilliance that was Manhattan by night was reduced to a few sleepy, yellow lights off in the distance.
jamesjoyce-ap-1.png
James Joyce (AP)

Lydia Davis (The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis; translator, Marcel Proust's Swann's Way)

There's no such thing as favorite, since it depends on the mood that day.

But two of my favorites are the first sentence of James Joyce's Ulysses:

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

And the first four lines of Shakespeare's "Sonnet LXXIII":

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

The sounds and image in the first example, the interesting order of the second line in the second example.

Mona Simpson (My Hollywood, Anywhere But Here)

"Call me Ishmael" comes to mind. Or the first line of Tristram Shandy or David Copperfield. Maybe really my favorite first line is the first line of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which, for me, is the best line in the book, the way the best line of Ulysses is the last:

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. . . --James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist of Young Man
Kafka-Zenodot-Verlagsgesellschaft-mbH.png
Franz Kafka (Zenodot-Verlagsgesellschaft-mbH)

Jonathan Franzen (Freedom, The Corrections)

Someone must have slandered Josef K., because one morning, without his having done anything bad, he was arrested. --Franz Kafka, The Trial (Franzen's translation)

The method of the whole novel is here in a nutshell. You think you're being introduced to the persecution of an innocent man, but if you read the chapter that follows carefully, you see that Josef K. is in fact doing all sorts of bad things in his life. If you then go back and reread the first sentence, it becomes significant that the very first impulse of the narrator (who is aligned with Josef K.'s point of view) is to blame somebody else.

chabon-ap-seth-wenig.jpg
Michael Chabon (AP / Seth Wenig)

Roxane Gay (Ayiti)

My favorite first line varies but today it's from Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay:

In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier's greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini.

I love this sentence because it does so much work. The sentence is a story in and of itself and reveals Chabon's amazing talent for long, meandering sentences that are satisfying in both sound and substance.

EB_White-White Literary LLC.png
E.B. White (White Literary LLC)

Andrew Sean Greer (The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells, The Confessions of Max Tivoli)

"Where's Papa going with that axe?" said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast. --E B White, Charlotte's Web

Not the way you'd think a children's book about a pig would open, and it instantly sets the central fear at the heart of this story: death.

thomas-mann-AP-2.jpg
Thomas Mann (AP)

Paul Harding (Tinkers)

At the moment, the sentence would be the opening of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain:

An ordinary young man was on his way from his hometown of Hamburg to Davos-Platz in the Canton of Graubünden.

What an unassuming, declarative sentence to begin one of the greatest novels. It is deliberate and embodies from the start the ideal stated in the foreword that the story shall be told, "at length, in precise and thorough detail"--for when was a story short on diversion or long on boredom simply because of the time and space required for the telling?

Thomas once chided his brother Hermann for chasing after "mere effect." With an opening sentence like this, and 700 pages to follow, how can the reader help but trust that the substance and delight of the story will be in the telling?

jamescrumley-ap-bill-wittliff.jpg
James Crumley (AP / Bill Wittliff)

Jason Starr (The Pack, Cold Caller)

When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon. --James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss

Laura Lippmann (The Girl in the Green Raincoat, What the Dead Know)

There's no accounting for laws. Or the changes wrought by men and time. --James Crumley, The Wrong Case

Everyone else chooses The Last Good Kiss, with the gorgeous run-on sentence about Abraham Trahearne and the alcoholic bulldog. But this is my favorite. There's a simplicity to it, a snap. Also an echo of Marjorie Morningstar, which is probably coincidental, but I knew Jim Crumley just well enough to venture a guess that he probably read Marjorie Morningstar. Heck, it was probably under the mattress where his aunt hid her Mickey Spillane novels.

Jm-coatzee-AP.jpg
J.M. Coatzee (AP)

Anthony Marra (A Constellation of Vital Phenomena)

I have never seen anything like it: two little discs of glass suspended in front of his eyes in loops of wire. --J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians
carson-mccullers-ap.jpg
Carson McCullers (AP)

Ayana Mathis (The Twelve Tribes of Hattie)

I couldn't choose only one, so here are two.

Up from the skeleton stone walls, up from the rotting floor boards and the solid hand-hewn beams of oak of the pre-war cotton factory, dusk came. --Jean Toomer, "Blood-Burning Moon," from Cane

And

In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together. --Carson McCullers, The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter
johngregorydunne-MDC-archives.jpg
John Gregory Dunne (MDC Archives)

S.J. Rozan (Ghost Hero, The Shanghai Moon)

My favorite line is from John Gregory Dunne's True Confessions, a bleak, dark story about how you can't keep pretending:

None of the merry-go-rounds seem to work anymore.
vladimir-nabokov.jpg
Vladimir Nabokov (AP)

Jonathan Santofler (The Murder Notebook, The Death Artist)

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.

From, of course, Nabokov's Lolita, one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, and a line that practically sums up the entire novel that follows. The novel is one of the examples I always use when someone says they do not read crime fiction, only literary fiction. "Oh," I say, "So you have never read Crime & Punishment or An American Tragedy or Lolita? The first about a brutal senseless murder, the second about a social climbing murder and the last, Lolita, a jailhouse memoir written by a pedophile and a murderer." That usually shuts them up.

joeb_photo.jpg
Joe Brainard (Penguin Books / Wren de Antonio)

Justin Torres (We the Animals)

I remember the first time I got a letter that said "After Five Days Return To" on the envelope, and I thought that after I had kept the letter for five days I was supposed to return it to the sender.

Joe Brainard wrote an entire book of first lines, each a miniature story unto itself and each beginning with the two words of the title, I Remember. The first sentence is such a shot of language--so playfully inviting, so rhythmic, so balanced, so damn charming--that you instantly thirst for another, and you take it, and another, until you've finished off the bottle, and you're drunk on the man's soul.

    

Kidnapped and Sold: Inside the Dark World of Child Trafficking in China

Posted: 25 Jul 2013 11:02 AM PDT

childbanner.jpg
Wang Bangyin, a local farmer, holds his rescued son after the pair were reunited at Guiyang Welfare Centre for Children in Guiyang, Guizhou province. (Reuters)

In March 2011, Rose Candis had the worst lunch of her life. Sitting at a restaurant in Shaoguan, a small city in South China, the American mother tried hard not to vomit while her traveling companion translated what the man they were eating with had just explained: her adopted Chinese daughter Erica had been purchased, and then essentially resold to her for profit. The papers the Chinese orphanage had shown her documenting how her daughter had been abandoned by the side of a road were fakes. The tin of earth the orphanage had given her so that her daughter could always keep a piece of her home with her as she grew up in the U.S. was a fraud, a pile of dirt from the place her daughter's paperwork was forged, not where she was born. Candis had flown thousands of miles to answer her daughter Erica's question -- who are my birth parents? -- but now she was further from the answer than ever.

Almost exactly a year earlier, Liu Liqin had the worst day of his life. He was out on a temporary construction job, looking forward to lunch and his next cigarette break, when his wife called to tell him that their two-year-old son Liu Jingjun was missing. Liu rushed home and began a frantic but fruitless search for the boy. He and his wife called relatives, ran to the local police station to report Jingjun missing, and then fanned out through their city neighborhood calling the boy's name and asking passers-by if they had seen anything. The police told him they couldn't take the case because not enough time had passed since the boy had disappeared. Finally, late in the evening, Liu thought to check the footage from a surveillance camera at a building on the street outside his family's apartment. Sure enough, when the video footage was queued up, in a small corner of the frame, Liu could see a man, face obscured, carrying little Jingjun down the narrow alley where the Liu family lives. I met Liu for the first time in that same alley; he had agreed to become the first subject of a documentary film I was making about kidnapped children in China. "Watching the man in the footage taking him away, I just..." Liu trailed off. "There's really no way to describe that feeling."

"It was touted as the most stable program, the most above-board program," Candis says of the way the agency she worked with. "Certainly they never ever mentioned trafficking."

Rose Candis and Liu Liqin's backgrounds could not be more different, but both parents have spent the past couple of years searching in China for the truth about their children. Both will do almost anything to get at it. And both have been stymied at almost every turn.

Child trafficking and its relationship to adoption in China is a serious problem, but also a deeply opaque one. It is a taboo topic for the Chinese government, which acknowledges the problem exists but also does not make public statistics about the number of children kidnapped or the number of children sold into adoption. Because of the implications for the tens of thousands of families in the United States and elsewhere in the West who have adopted children from China -- Americans alone adopted nearly 3000 Chinese children in 2012 -- the topic is often taboo outside of China's borders, too.

Neither child trafficking nor baby buying in Chinese international adoptions are widely studied. No one can say for certain how many children are kidnapped in China each year, or what percentage of them end up being put up for adoption domestically or internationally. But the problem is a lot more serious than most people know, as I have come to learn over the last few years. In the process of making a documentary film on the subject, my wife and I have spoken to dozens of parents of kidnapped Chinese children and adoptive parents in the U.S. who have come to believe their children were sold into adoption.

* * *

When Candis, an Ohio-based therapist (who asked that I use her pen name to protect the privacy of her daughter), decided to adopt a child, she chose China both because adopting from China can be a bit cheaper than adopting from other countries such as South Korea, and also because she thought the adopted Chinese kids she saw around the U.S. looked cute. "It was touted as the most stable program, the most above-board program," Candis says of the way the agency she worked with advertised its Hague-certified process, developed over twenty years to connect dozens of children with new parents annually. "Certainly they never ever mentioned trafficking."

Adopting a child from any country can feel like an endless process, especially for someone like Candis who at age thirty-six was extremely eager to become a parent. But when adoption day finally came, Candis didn't see anything to raise suspicion. She felt an instant connection to her new daughter, and everyone at the orphanage seemed friendly and warm. It was, quite literally, a dream come true. "They really know how to put on a show," she says. "The [orphanage] director took us to this lovely lunch and he stood up and talked and had tears in his eyes. He did a beautiful job." Candis and her daughter went home ready to start their new life together.

Rose Candis says that at first, things went smoothly -- at least, as smoothly as they can for a new parent of a young child. But at four years old, Erica began saying that she missed her birth mother. Then she asked, "Can you find her?" Candis genuinely didn't know, so she started looking online, and found an organization called Research-China.org that helps parents look into the origins of their adopted Chinese children.

Brian H. Stuy, a father of three adopted daughters and the founder of Research China, looked at Erica's documentation and gave Candis bad news: there seemed to be a good chance that Erica's adoption was connected to a kidnapping scandal in Hunan province. The story rocked the U.S. adoption community in November 2005 when Chinese journalists reported that infants from Hunan and several other provinces were being sold to several major orphanages in China, and that the orphanages then lied about the children's origins to adoptive parents. Looking at the numbers of adoptions coming from Erica's orphanage, the Qujiang Social Welfare Institute, in Shaoguan's Qujiang district, Stuy saw that adoptions dropped precipitously after news of the scandal broke and the government moved in to shut the trafficking down -- a sign that the orphanage had been involved. He sent Candis a link to a news story about it. "I started freaking," she said.

Most parents, Stuy says, stop there. But Candis wasn't willing to give up: "I needed to know," she told me. So she kept searching. She hired a researcher in China to put up posters in the area surrounding her daughter's orphanage asking for information. Nothing came back, but Candis couldn't stop. "I just kept calling Brian and Lan (Stuy's wife and Research China's researcher) every month," she told me, laughing in retrospect at how single-minded she must have seemed. After nearly two years of persistence, Lan agreed to travel with Candis to China to see what they could dig up about Erica's origin.

* * *

In the Shanxi city of Taiyuan, Liu Liqin was searching, too. The first week after Jingjun's kidnapping, he and his wife barely slept. "We couldn't tell day from night," he said, "We really couldn't tell the difference." But days of scouring the streets and alleys near their house while relatives combed public transportation hubs throughout the city, produced nothing. The police offered little help. When Jingjun first went missing, police came but they told Liu and his wife, the boy would likely turn up at a relative or friend's house and that they shold just search on their own. After Liu discovered the surveillance footage, the police took the case, but they failed to uncover any leads. Like most parents of kidnapped children, Liu has been told by local police to share any clues he finds during his own search with them, but in the absence of those clues, it is apparent to him the police will not do anything. Three years since he was kidnapped, Jingjun's case remains open, but Liu says no one on the force is actively investigating it. (I called the local police station but the officer who answered refused to comment or transfer us to somebody who could).

As time went on, tensions began to pull at the Liu household. Liu and his wife had an older daughter, but their son was gone. They could not have any additional children; local family planning officials had asked Liu to undergo sterilization surgery after Jingjun's birth. Having a son is of great importance in traditional Chinese culture, and the loss of the Liu's only chance to pass on the family name hit hard. Friends and relatives began to urge Liu to leave his wife, whom they blamed for Jingjun's loss, saying she wasn't watching him carefully enough. "I tell them that's not possible," Liu says. "Did she want to lose our son? Of course not."

Together with their seven-year-old daughter, a feisty girl named Jing, they have done nearly everything they can to get the word out about Jingjun's kidnapping. They have been in local newspapers, on the local radio, and on television. The little boy is listed on dozens of missing children websites (non-profit sites run by parents and volunteers and funded mostly via donations), and his face is plastered on banners and posters that Liu and his family post around Taiyuan and other cities where their search leads them. When they hear about traffickers being arrested on television, Liqin often travels to wherever the men were arrested to speak with local police and see if he can find news about Jingjun. He links up with other local parents whose kids are missing to organize street rallies and impromptu gatherings where they hand out flyers and try to enlist the help of passers-by.

At one such rally I attended in Taiyuan, the parents simply parked the "ChildSearch Car" -- a small truck covered with the images of scores of missing children and information about their cases -- on a sidewalk near a busy intersection. It was an unusually clear day for Taiyuan -- the city is generally buried under a thick haze of smog -- and a weekend, so pedestrians were out in force. The families spread canvas banners with their children's photos and stories on the sidewalk around the truck, and then stood behind them to answer questions and hand out flyers as passers-by began to stop to see what the fuss was about. At first, people seemed puzzled by the display, but the crowd grew. Liu and the parents walked around, chatting with people who had questions and passing out information. Even Liu's young daughter was working, smiling and handing out flyers about her kidnapped little brother to pedestrians. "She remembers, even now she does," said Liu of his daughter. "When she wakes up she says 'Dad, I dreamed of my brother last night,' and things like that. When we hear that, it's devastating." But on this day, she was all smiles, darting around the truck with another youngster other parents had brought to the event, taking advantage of the rare blue-sky day.

He was supposed to have come across her abandoned on Sheng Li Road in Shaoguan and turned her over to the orphanage. He agreed to have lunch with them and then, to Rose's shock and horror, admitted candidly that he had never found any child.

I bounced around the impromptu demonstration, taking photos and video while trying to keep a low profile so as to not to get any of the parents in trouble. Eventually, several police officers arrived at the rally and pulled a few of the parents aside. I figured the jig was up -- and it was -- but the police were friendly about it. There was no strong-arming, but the families did not have a permit for their activity, and like most local police in China, the authorities were sensitive to how street rallies like this look to outsiders. The police didn't say anything to me, but my presence at the rally with a camera may have been part of the reason they stepped in and shut it down. In fact, the next day, police visited Liu at his apartment to ask why there was a foreigner at the event. Liu told them that I was just a tourist who happened to be passing through, and the officers left.

* * *

After Candis arrived in China with Lan, they traveled to Shaoguan and tracked down He Zaolin, the man who is listed on Erica's paperwork as her "finder." He was supposed to have come across the abandoned child on Sheng Li Road in Shaoguan and turned her over to the orphanage. He agreed to have lunch with them and then, to Candis' shock and horror, admitted candidly that he had never found any child. He was simply friends with one of the Qujiang orphanage's directors -- at the time, he said, he was the Director of the Civil Affairs Bureau in Qujiang District -- so his name was used on the paperwork. The children, he said, were purchased in Hunan. He called his friend, the orphanage director, on the phone, and the director seemed to confirm this because then Mr. He repeated it: We bought these babies.

In a surreal twist, after lunch Mr. He took them to a local Buddhist temple, perhaps hoping that Candis would find some peace there. She spent the time wandering the grounds looking at statues of Guanyin -- a Buddhist spirit often called the Goddess of Mercy -- and wondering what she was going to tell her daughter. Then Lan suggested they go to the orphanage to see if they could discover anything further.

When they arrived at the orphanage, Candis immediately spotted one of the directors; not the man who had apparently just admitted buying her child over the phone, but the orphanage's other director. Not knowing that Candis was aware of the truth, the director greeted her and offered to take her on a tour to the place where her daughter was found. "I wanted to fucking belt him," she said, "But I wasn't interested in going to jail, so I told him, 'That won't be necessary.'" He asked twice more, and Candis says she came inches from exploding and telling him she knew the truth. But still hoping that she might uncover more information, instead she quietly refused. So he invited them to dinner instead. She kept pushing for more information but by the end of the night, Candis was spent, and she and Lan hadn't been able to uncover anything further about her daughter. "I went home that night and just sobbed," she said.

Over the next few days, Candis tried everything, including trying to bribe some of the orphanage's workers, to uncover more about her daughter's origins. She talked with workers at the orphanage and even offered to pay one of them for more information, but nothing new came to light. She tried to pry more information out of He Zaolin, but he stopped answering her calls. Erica had been sold to the orphanage: that much was clear. But where she came from before, that was anyone's guess.

The worst moment of the trip came later, in a Skype video chat conversation with Erica back in the U.S. 'We're not going to be able to find your birth mother,' Candis told her. Her daughter's face fell. "She just looked so dejected, and she just said, 'Oh.'" Then Erica started crying. "It was just heart-wrenching that I could not be there with her. It was one of the worst things I've ever had to do. Really, really awful."

* * *

In China, parents of kidnapped children like Jingjun soon discover that their missing child opens them up to a whole new world of problems. According to every parent we spoke to, police generally offer little more than cursory help when children disappear. Like Liu, most parents are told to look for their kids on their own. Many Chinese police stations won't even consider accepting a missing person's case until the child has been missing for a full 24 hours, according to the Shi Richeng, Lei Yong and several parents of kidnapped children we interviewed for our film. Unfortunately, in many documented trafficking cases, 24 hours after the abduction, the child is already hundreds of miles away. In Liu's case and many others, halfhearted initial investigations quickly give way to apathy.

So, of course, parents conduct their searches and try to raise awareness by themselves, but often this puts them at odds with local law enforcement officials eager to put a muzzle on almost anyone who expresses discontent in public. Shi Richeng and Wang Yeye, two other parents of missing children from the Taiyuan area, both have been searching for their children for much longer than Liu Liqin, and both have been subject to extreme levels of police interference. Wang told us that police sometimes knocked on her door in the middle of the night, citing bogus phoned-in complaints of domestic abuse, asking her where she'd traveled recently, and telling her not to go anywhere without their prior approval. They also ordered her not to go to Beijing to appeal to higher authorities for help with her case. She went anyway, but found no help there.

Shi, a middle-aged worker from China's central Shanxi province whose son has been missing for more than five years already, has also been to Beijing. There, he was detained by police for a full day. "I was left hungry until 5:30 in the afternoon; they didn't give us anything to eat," he says. He was released in the evening, but he returned home no closer to finding his son than when he left, and more frustrated than ever about the police who were supposed to be helping him. "They're using their energy to track parents," he said, "if they spent that energy on solving the cases, what case couldn't they solve?"

Unfortunately, the police are not the only people who aren't helping. Liu says that, like most parents of missing children, he gets frequent messages from scammers trying to get him to pay large sums of money for information about his child's whereabouts, information that ends up being fake. "They try to swindle you," he says. "Sometimes they put your kid's face on [a photo of] another kid's body and say 'This is your kid, I know where they are,' but they're actually just tricking you for money. There are many of these people." And Liu knows that even if someone who comes across his son learns the boy has been kidnapped, they probably won't say anything:

He'll never know he was kidnapped and purchased, sold to others by human traffickers. It's not possible. In our hometown when people buy wives, no one says anything. No one will say, 'This one was purchased from here," right? No one talks. And our child was so young, he won't understand that it's all fake.

Even when the child knows, it often doesn't help. When Wang Qingshun, a Hangzhou vehicle salesman who was kidnapped and sold as a child, was handed over to his new "adoptive" family in Zhejiang, he went around telling everyone in the neighborhood that it wasn't his real home, and that Wang Qingshun wasn't his real name. He spoke with a different accent than the locals, to the point that he was difficult for his new family to understand. "Everyone knew I wasn't from there," he says, "Adults generally didn't talk about it, but the children would talk about me, saying, 'Oh, that kid was purchased,' and things like that. When I was in kindergarten, I was suspended by the teacher multiple times. Why? It was not actually because I was naughty, it was because the other kids made fun of me and cursed me [for being purchased], so I would retaliate and hit them,  and sometimes I'd take things and break them over their heads."

Wang says that everyone in his village knew that he was purchased, and yet not a single person reported the crime to police until over a decade later, when it was probably far too late to do anything about it. Sadly, his story is not uncommon. Parents of kidnapped children explain that part of the problem is that many people who might have information about trafficking don't report it to police for fear that it can only result in trouble for themselves, and could potentially even invite retribution from local trafficking gangs.

* * *

When Candis returned to the United States, she knew she had to do something but she wasn't entirely sure what. As her daughter continued to grieve what seems likely to be the permanent loss of her birth parents, Candis pondered what she could do to spread the word about fraud and trafficking in international adoptions from China. A family friend suggested that she contact her local congressman.

Erica had been sold to the orphanage: that much was clear. But where she came from before, that was anyone's guess.

She did, but "he was not much help." So she contacted another, but "they didn't care." She kept pushing, and eventually came across an organization that was pushing for Congress to broaden the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) to include sale for adoption in the U.S. government's definition of trafficking.

Part of the problem is that, as things stand now, Candis' child was not trafficked, at least not according to U.S. law. Erica fits the first two conditions of a trafficked child laid out in the TVPRA (she was transported, and fraud and deception were involved) but not the third (the purpose of the deception was not to sell her into slavery, prostitution, indentured servitude or pornography). Some international organizations, including the United Nations, define trafficking more broadly. But for the U.S., a child could be kidnapped, transported, sold to an orphanage, and put up for adoption with false papers, and none of that would be defined as trafficking. A U.S. State Department official explained:

We believe the best available protections against the abduction and sale of children for purposes of intercountry adoption, bribery, fraud, and inappropriate financial gains are offered by the Hague Adoption Convention. China is a party to the Hague Adoption Convention.

For all Convention adoptions, a U.S. consular officer must first review all pre-adoptive steps before a family can adopt or seek custody of a child in the Country of Origin. After the adoption is completed, consular officers must certify that all steps in the intercountry adoption process were done in accordance with the Convention and the Intercountry Adoption Act before a child may immigrate to the United States.

Fraudulent intercountry adoptions are sometimes mislabeled as "child trafficking" because of varying international definitions related to the two phenomena. Children made eligible for intercountry adoption may fall victim to bad actors engaged in criminal practices and questionable procedures. In the majority of these cases, however, the persons committing the fraud do not intend to exploit the child for purposes of commercial sex or forced labor and, consequently, do not meet the defining characteristics of human trafficking under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act.

Candis and others feel U.S. obligations under the Hague Convention are insufficient to combat the kind of scheme that lead to Erica's adoption. So she has joined in the fight to amend the TVPRA to include "children bought for the purposes of adoption" to the legal definition of trafficking. For months, she spoke with congressional researchers and aides, trying to wrangle a public hearing with Representative Chris Smith (R-New Jersey) and Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), the co-chairs of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC). Despite a series of meetings with aides, hearings failed to materialize, and eventually Candis was told to wait until after the 2012 election was over.

"Part of me is like, 'ugh, should I give up?'" Candis said. "But I'm not going to do that ... I'm not going to give up." In late February, she returned to Washington, D.C. for the third time in nine months. She showed our film to representatives of the CECC, and also met with representatives from the offices of Senator Mary Landrieu (D-Louisiana) and Representative Steve Chabot (R-Ohio). She came back from the meetings without any tangible results but still optimistic that if she keeps pushing, eventually the TVPRA could be changed. "I plan on continuing to work on the hill and with the commission until the children who were victims of buying and selling get the support and validation they need," she said.

At the same time, like the Liu family in China, she has struggled to spread the word to a community that, usually, simply isn't interested in hearing about how their children might have been trafficked. A Yahoo adoption discussion group she was a part of "did not want to hear it," she said. "There was a lot of dissension. Some would say, "Jesus wanted us to have [the children]; it doesn't matter, they're ours now." Others sided with Candis, and the divide eventually became so wide that the group, which used to meet up in the real world at least once a year, hasn't met in person in the more than 24 months since Candis returned from China. A local adoptive parent group didn't want to hear about it either. Candis reached out to the national organization Families with Children from China (FCC), which has well over one hundred local chapters nationwide, and offered to share information with any parents who were interested. "Two people out of the entire FCC emailed me back," she said.

"My friends who don't have adopted children are way more supportive than my friends with adopted children," Candis says. From time to time, the issue becomes very personal. After her return from China, one couple told Candis they didn't want their daughter to play with Erica for a while "because they didn't want [their daughter] asking questions." The real issue, Candis said, is that many parents are terrified that a thorough investigation into this issue could end in their losing their children. But she does not see that as a legitimate reason for rejecting what she believes is in the children's best interests. "I felt scapegoated," she said.

* * *

It is true that many in America's adoption community do not want to talk about trafficking in China. I contacted nearly a dozen American adoption agencies that specialize in China adoptions for this story; all but one of them refused to comment or ignored the request entirely. The one person who did respond was Lisa Prather, executive director of A Helping Hand Adoption Agency, who said that "the term trafficking should never be used in the description of an adoption [and by using this term] the media is perpetuating erroneous propaganda," since adoptions don't meet the TVPRA definition of the term.

Of course, another reason the issue isn't widely discussed is money. U.S.-China adoption is big business; U.S. Adoption agencies make thousands -- Candis said it cost her nearly $20,000, and many adoption agencies publicly list prices in this range -- for each child adopted from China, and Chinese orphanages generally receive a donation of at least $5,000 from the adoptive parents; Candis paid $3,000, but the mandatory fee has since been raised to $5,000 nationwide. On the American side, shutting down the China adoption program would lead to a big drop in revenue for many adoption agencies, and would shut down others completely. In China, orphanages make money for each child placed with adoptive parents, and since trafficked children often cost an orphanage around $500 to purchase, a quick overseas adoption can bring in a tidy profit.

In part because it is such an unpopular and sensitive issue in both countries, and in part because there are very few people doing serious research, it is extremely difficult to say with certainty to what extent Liu Liqin's story overlaps directly with Rose Candis'. The U.S. State Department estimates that every year, around 20,000 children are kidnapped in China, and some independent estimates are much higher. Tens of thousands of resolved cases, and the fact that many of those kidnapped are boys who are seldom adopted internationally, indicate that many of those children are sold into domestic adoption. But we know that at least a few of them do end up getting adopted internationally. We know that of the children adopted internationally, many of them (like Erica Candis) may arrive overseas with doctored paperwork or origins that are otherwise unclear.

"I would say that fraud or trafficking is involved in more than three-quarters of all adoptions from China," says Brian Stuy. Stuy is a controversial figure in the adoption field -- parents have accused him of having an agenda (they think he wants the China adoption program shut down), and Research China does produce paid reports on the background of adopted children whose parents are interested in looking into it and have $50 (the average research fee) to spare. But he is also one of the only people who has done extensive statistical analysis and investigative fieldwork within China to determine which orphanages are involved in baby-buying, and to what extent. Stuy says cases like Candis' are quite common, and that despite China's proclamations in official media that it has dealt with the problem behind the trafficking in Hunan and other high profile scandals, baby buying and selling continues. In mid-January, a Chinese whistleblower posted shocking allegations about an orphanage in Guixi, Jiangxi province in Southeast China, that places many children internationally, accusing it of corruption, baby buying, and abuse. The case is still under investigation and it is not yet clear whether the allegations are true, but Susan Morgan, a mother to two adopted children from China including one who came from the Guixi orphanage, was still saddened when she read the news. "I've known for years that corruption is rampant in international adoption," Morgan said, "[But] suddenly being faced with an anonymous whistle blower who cites corruption in your own child's orphanage is still shocking, especially when you've met some of the people accused."

But Morgan fears interest in the story will peter out before long, in part because there are a lot of people who simply don't want to hear it. "Most adoptive families, I feel sure, do not understand how serious the issue of baby buying is in China, and the ties it can have to child trafficking and kidnapping," Susan said. "Of course, this is an issue that most adoptive parents do not want to explore, for obvious reasons." They fear losing their children, and they fear the nightmarish legal battle their children could be dragged through if it was ever discovered that their children had biological parents who hadn't truly given them up and actually wanted them back. That fear is both understandable and warranted -- no one really seems to be sure what would happen in such a case if both sets of parents were unflinching in demanding the child stay with them -- but American adoptive parents' general disinterest in investigating corruption and baby buying in Chinese orphanages may be part of the reason why Chinese parents like Liu Liqin are still losing their children at a rate of dozens per day.

Although news of the Guixi scandal had yet to break when I spoke with Stuy, he made it clear that these kinds of scandals are small enough that they can be explained away by the adoption community as isolated incidents. "These little fires can be put out so easily," he says, "what we need is for somebody to show that the whole country is burning."

This post first appeared at ChinaFile, an Atlantic partner site.

    

Why Do Women Disapprove of Drone Strikes So Much More Than Men Do?

Posted: 25 Jul 2013 10:53 AM PDT

womendontlikedrones.jpg

Pew's out with an international poll that shows, across countries and overall levels of support, a striking gender gap exists on support for American drone strikes.

Women were much less likely to approve of "the United States conducting missile strikes from pilotless aircraft called drones to target extremists in countries such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia."

genderdivide.jpg

In Japan, for example, support for drone strikes was 30 percentage points lower than their male counterparts. The smallest gaps -- in France, South Korea, and Uganda -- were 14, 14, and 13 percentage points, respectively. On average, there was a 22-point gap between male and female support for drone strikes, and it didn't matter if there was considerable overall support for strikes or not.

"Gender gaps are also often seen in global surveys over the use of military force, with women far less likely than men to say that force is sometimes necessary in the pursuit of justice," wrote Bruce Stokes, Director of Global Economic Attitudes at the Pew Research Center's Global Attitudes Project, in introducing the data. "But the gender difference over drone strikes is unusually large."

The most directly comparable poll we could find focused on conflict in the Persian Gulf in the early 90s. Researchers asked whether respondents would support US military action if the embargo in Iraq failed. On average, men supported the option more than women by 7 percentage points. But there was considerably more geographic variation. Women in Ankara (the researchers surveyed by city rather than country) showed more support for the intervention than men there. Musocvites were roughly even, too. The differences were small in Lagos and Rome; largest in Stuttgart (-17), Tokyo (-15), and Mexico City (-15). The drone data, by contrast, shows a much more consistent pattern.

In 2003, Tufts University's Richard C. Eichenberg conducted a meta-analysis of polling on gender differences in the United States related to war. He found that what he called "baseline average foreign policy restraint" differed between men and women by an average of 12 percentage points. That is to say, women were less likely to support military action by an average of 12 percent. 

But he also showed that the polling language could create big changes in how much support men and women were willing to give the use of force. Here's his original table:

genderandwar.jpg

Fascinatingly, the closest corollary to a drone strike -- air or missile strikes -- did not remarkably change the gender difference numbers. In fact, none of the *methods* of military intervention seemed to change the numbers very much in Eichenberg's study. 

Which means, perhaps strangely, that drones really do seem to be different. They're a way of waging a war that men support far more than women. One reason might be that, as Eichenberg summarizes earlier research, "women were far more sensitive -- and negative -- about the prospects of civilian and military casualties in the war." 

So much of the discourse over drones has focused on the possibility and reality of civilian casualties that perhaps this has tinted the subject for women across the globe. 

Another might be that men just really *like* drones and the prospect of troop-less war. 

Perhaps there are other, more technologically specific reasons that have not been tested by previous research. 

Pew's study is important and broad, but people's attitudes about drones are only beginning to form. The prospect of killing with semi-autonomous airplanes remains a new phenomenon in our world.

    

'Friend,' as a Verb, Is 800 Years Old

Posted: 25 Jul 2013 10:15 AM PDT

[IMAGE DESCRIPTION]
"Greetings, will ye friende me?" (Shutterstock/Igor Bulgarin)

"Disorder, that hath spoil'd us, friend us now!" 

That was Shakespeare. Writing in Henry V. In 1599.

Mark Zuckerberg, in other words, was not the first guy in history to use "friend" as a verb. And neither, for that matter, was Shakespeare. In a list of 16 words that are much older than they seem, the good people of Mental Floss have pointed out that "friend" is indeed much, much older than we tend to give it credit for. See, for example, this note: "Reports came that the King would friend Lauderdale." That was written by William Row in the 17th century.

While Mental Floss dates the oldest friend-as-verb usage to the 14th century, the law professor and medievalist Sasha Volokh* has found examples that are even older than that. The earliest instance he came across? It dates to the early 13th century. Yes. Which would make that seemingly contemporary usage, the action-based use of "friend" made newly famous by Facebook, at least 800 years old.

Below, per this post, are some instances of friending dating from the BZ (Before Zuckerberg) era:

  • "Make no purses, for to friend yourself therewith." -- the Guide for Anchoresses, early 13th century

  • "Charity is love, and love is charity. God grant us all therein to be friended." -- Thomas Usk, in the last sentences of his Testament of Love, c. 1387

  • "And after soon friended were the King David of Scotland and Stephen, king then of England." -- Andrew of Wyntoun, Chronicles, c. 1425

  • "Friend they any, that flatter many?" -- John Heywood, Proverbs and Epigrams, 1562

  • "Thou shall never get regeneration before God be friended with thee: thou is his enemy, thou must be friended with him." -- Robert Rollock, in a sermon, late 16th century

  • "They had undertaken the warre upon king Philip, because he had friended and aided the Carthaginians." -- Philemon Holland, translation of Livy, 1600

  • "But friended with the flood the barons hold their strength." -- Michael Drayton, Poly-Olbion, 1622

  • "There the street is narrow, and may friend our purpose well." -- Thomas Southerne, The Spartan Dame, 1721

  • "That germ of kindness, in the womb / Of mercy caught, did not expire; / Outlives my guilt, outlives my doom, / And friends me in the pit of fire." -- Matthew Arnold's St. Brandan, 1867

*I updated this post to reflect the fact that Sasha Volokh, not his brother Eugene, was the author of the post in question. Apologies to both brothers!

    

Why Earthquakes in China Are So Damaging

Posted: 25 Jul 2013 09:30 AM PDT

chinaearthquakebanner.jpgAn injured woman receives treatment at a hospital after a 6.6 magnitude earthquake hit Minxian county, Dingxi, Gansu province July 23, 2013. (Reuters)

China's unfortunate streak of major earthquakes has continued. On Monday, a tremor measuring 6.6 on the Richter scale struck near the city of Dingxi, a mid-sized city (by Chinese standards -- it still has 2.7 million people) in impoverished Gansu Province. As of this writing, 94 people have lost their lives in the quake, and more than 1,000 are injured. The quake has affected over 120,000 people and will undoubtedly cost millions of dollars in reconstruction fees.

Devastating earthquakes are a global phenomenon, as anyone in Indonesia, Haiti, or Japan can tell you. But China has experienced more than its fair share of earthquake tragedy; according to this list of the world's 10 deadliest earthquakes, the two highest-casualty ones of all time -- and three overall -- happened in China. Given the immutable laws of plate tectonics, the chances that an earthquake will again inflict China in the near future is high. What, then, are the reasons for China's high number of fatalities -- and, more importantly, what does the government have to do to minimize this number in the future?

The first reason has to with some simple, irreversible facts: China has a lot of people -- and a lot of earthquakes.  But in addition to being the most populous country in the world, China also is extremely dense -- at least 90 percent of the country's 1.3 billion people live in the eastern half of the country, and the coastal provinces are especially crowded.

popdensitypost.jpgWikimedia Commons

Fortunately for China, the area of most seismic activity overlaps with a less populous part of the country: the southwest. This map plots Asian earthquakes, by magnitude, since 1964, and shows a concentration of mega-quakes in Sichuan, Yunnan, Gansu, Qinghai, Tibet, and Xinjiang: none ranking among China's most crowded provinces.

seismicmap.jpgCalifornia Institute of Technology

The flip side, however, is this: The areas of heightened seismic activity also overlap with remote, mountainous parts of China, where poor transportation infrastructure makes recovery efforts difficult. For this challenge, at least, China is well-equipped: According to Kit Miyamoto, the president and CEO of the earthquake research firm Miyamoto International, China's dispatch of almost 100,000 well-organized soldiers to Beichuan within hours of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake was "highly impressive given the challenging conditions." Beijing received considerable praise for its recovery effort, especially in respect to how badly the government botched a quake that struck the city of Tangshan in 1976, a calamity that killed a quarter of a million people while China refused offers for assistance.

Yet for China's skill in implementing rescue and recovery operations, its record in pre-empting excess casualties is more problematic. 

Much of the infrastructure damage in earthquakes is simply unavoidable, and in hilly areas landslides cause tremendous loss of life long after the earth stops shaking. But in China, the prevalence of low-quality buildings -- many constructed in violation of building codes -- has exacerbated the damage and caused a political headache in Beijing.  Following the 2008 Sichuan quake, relatives of the victims wondered aloud why the town's schools had collapsed while the sturdier government buildings remained standing. The uproar -- soon squelched by the government -- touched upon a number of broader controversies in China: government privilege, official corruption, and the yawning gap between rich and poor.

Prior to the onset of economic reforms, the quality of Chinese construction was poor; as in many rural, developing countries, most structures were made from adobe or watered-down concrete and thus were ill-equipped to survive earthquakes. But in the years since, China's improvement in this regard has been striking: major cities boast modern, steel high-rises, and a far higher percentage of the population lives in earthquake-proof structures. Building codes in China are well-defined and up to international standard. 

Enforcement of these codes, though, is a problem. As Miyamoto told me, "You need more than just good building codes. You also need good engineers to implement the code, and good contractors to implement the engineers' vision." And along the way, a lot can go wrong: Contractors feel pressure to complete projects ahead of schedule and cut corners. Builders substitute cheap materials in order to cut costs. And then, you have the omnipresent specter of bribery and corruption.

As a result, for a country whose defining structure is an enormous ancient wall, modern Chinese structures have an surprisingly short half-life. New buildings in the country are expected to stand for 25 to 30 years -- a far cry from the U.S. expectation of 70 to 75 years. This difference is partly explained through economics -- China's binge in fixed-asset investment encourages major construction projects, least of all to keep workers employed, and one by-product of all this construction is a huge raise in living standards. But from an earthquake prevention standpoint, the new buildings remain worrisome.

After the 2008 quake devastated the town of Beichuan, local authorities resettled approximately 40,000 people into a new city called Yongchang located 10 or so miles from the epicenter. The new town is clean and picturesque and is, at first glance, a worthy tribute to the victims of the earthquake. But, as this piece by NPR's Louisa Lim describes, there's trouble in paradise: Cracks have appeared in the brand new homes, and a local official has been detained for accepting bribes. Residents have complained of corruption, and when one man attempted to organize them, he was arrested and thrown in jail.

The subject of earthquake damage prevention symbolizes one of the central challenges of contemporary Chinese governance. At the federal level, China has good building codes, the willingness to invest in safe housing, and the means to respond quickly and effectively when tragedy strikes. But at the local level, where the country's population actually interacts with its government, difficulties with corruption and law enforcement mean that subsequent earthquakes will be more tragic than necessary.
    

What the Delhi Rape Trials Mean for India's Women

Posted: 25 Jul 2013 09:00 AM PDT

indiabanner.jpg
Dozens of activists protested against a recent gang rape and murder of a 20-year-old college student at Barasat area on the outskirts of Kolkata. (Rupak De Chowdhuri/Reuters)

Today the Juvenile Justice Board in Delhi, India was supposed to deliver the verdict against the youngest of the six men accused of gang-raping a 23-year old physiotherapy student while she was riding on a bus on December 16, 2012. The accused was 17 at the time of the rape and turned 18 last month. Police reports indicate that the defendant was allegedly the most brutal of the men involved. However, according to the provisions of India's Juvenile Justice Act, the maximum sentence possible for a minor is three years in custody, including time already served. In a dramatic turn, India's Supreme Court is now considering changing the legal definition of a juvenile in response to this case. The verdict has been delayed until August 5 of this year.

The rapists transformed a bus -- a symbol of the city's infrastructure and modernity -- into a place of unimaginable savagery.

This news sets the stage for the rest of the Delhi rape trials and suggests that the five remaining adult defendants will receive harsh sentences from the courts. The Indian government is keenly aware that this particular case is being scrutinized by the entire world. In fact, the Delhi High Court has allowed foreign media to cover the court proceedings. But while the judicial system is moving swiftly and heavy-handedly to mete out justice in this case, it is unclear what these verdicts will mean for the future of women's rights in India in cases that garner less international attention. Meaningful change in India would require a sustained commitment to reforming the dysfunctional criminal justice system that allows this type of sexual violence to occur in the first place.

Brutal rapes happen every day in Indian villages and cities. Looking back, it is unclear why this rape in particular sparked such unprecedented international media coverage. Perhaps it is because this victim did not look very different from women in any other modern metropolis. She came from a middle class family that had made sacrifices so that she could go to college. As a student in Delhi, she enjoyed doing things that Western audiences can relate to, like going to a mall with a friend to watch Life of Pi.

Perhaps it was the public nature of this crime that caught the world's attention: The rapists brazenly attacked the victim on a bus moving through their bustling city. Once the victim was on the bus, five men knocked her friend unconscious and then took her to the back to rape her. In doing so, the rapists transformed a bus -- a symbol of the city's infrastructure and modernity -- into a place of unimaginable savagery.

Perhaps it was simply the sheer barbarity of this act that made us pause in disbelief during the lull before the holiday season. On December 23, 2012, it was hard to ignore the news that the victim had died of her injuries. The doctors say that the rapists penetrated her so brutally, at times with an iron rod, that only 5 percent of her intestines remained inside her abdomen afterward.

While the world rightly watched in horror as the details of this case unfolded, the more disturbing reality is that this rape represents a much larger problem in India. In the months after her death, stories trickled in of dozens of other women and girls who have been raped under similar conditions. Reports of rape are going up in Delhi. Many of these other cases involve the rape of villagers and children: women and girls who have not elicited as much empathy or attention from the international community. More alarmingly, the crimes perpetrated against these women and children are not routinely brought to justice within the Indian courts.

The media frenzy surrounding this rape resulted in the mobilization of the entire Indian government, from the Delhi police to the prime minister. The prosecution of the rapists proceeded with unheard-of speed and efficiency. Meanwhile, the hundreds of other rape cases that come pouring in every year are mired in legal bureaucracy. Most cases take years to resolve, and victims' testimonies are often not deemed credible. Of the 600 rape cases reported in Delhi in 2012, only one led to a conviction. With figures like these, it's no wonder that rapists have not learned to fear reprisal or prosecution.

After the widespread protests that took place after the victim's death in December, the Indian Parliament responded by passing an anti-rape bill that amends India's penal code and laws of criminal procedure and evidence. The laws impose harsher punishments for rape, including, in some cases, the death penalty. It has also outlawed stalking, sexual harassment, acid attacks, and the forced disrobing of women.

While these new provisions reveal that the Indian government is finally taking violence against women seriously, the problem with women's rights in India has always come down to the enforcement of laws, rather than the laws themselves. Rape has been a criminal offense in India since 1860, but it has been very difficult for rape victims to seek justice. Legal experts assert that stereotyping based on characteristics such as whether the victim is a virgin or married have historically resulted in few convictions.

Ever since the alleged rapists were taken into custody, they too have become victims of India's faulty criminal justice system. Each defendant has complained of abuse from prison guards and other prisoners, a common occurrence for prisoners accused of sexual offenses in India. Most notably, Ram Singh, the oldest of the six and the purported ringleader, was found hanging in his cell. His family asserts that he could not have created the noose himself, since both of his hands were wounded in an earlier accident. His post-mortem report revealed that he was battered prior to his death and that his body was returned to his family without having been stitched up, a serious breach of protocol and human dignity, even for an accused rapist.

Paradoxically, the maltreatment of the six accused rapists while in government custody also has an impact on women and their safety. The fact that the defendants have faced vigilante justice at the hands of the police and other prisoners reveals an underlying lack of faith in Indian courts. It exposes a pervasive belief that rapists will not be brought to justice within the court system and must therefore be punished through unofficial means. Yet, women cannot rely on this rogue retribution in order to feel secure.

For Indian women to feel safe in their country, they need the assurance of reliable and effective institutions that will work to protect them. They need to feel comfortable reporting rape and must believe that their complaints will be recorded and addressed. While the verdicts in the Delhi rape trials are likely to be duly harsh in reaction to the public outcry, what matters is whether the Indian criminal justice and law enforcement systems routinely treat rape seriously, even when cases are not in the media spotlight. Until this happens, rapists will not be deterred and the Indian government will continue to send the message that the most vulnerable members of society can be brutalized with impunity.

    

California's New Pot Growers: Not at All Earth-Friendly

Posted: 25 Jul 2013 08:09 AM PDT

marijuanahumboldt1.jpg
The landscape and pot industry of Humboldt County (Alexandria Sage/Reuters)

On a warm summer afternoon three years ago, Scott Bauer was hiking near the redwoods in Northern California when he came upon a clearing in the forest. As a scientist with the state's department of fish and wildlife, Bauer had heard about marijuana farms in national parks, but he had never seen one up close. The scale of destruction surprised him. Towering pines and Douglas firs, some over a century old, had been leveled, and a bulldozer had dumped several tons of sediment into a nearby creek, choking it off.

As Bauer got closer he found piles of burnt trash, half empty sacks of toxic pesticides seeping into the soil, and the withering stalks of hundreds of marijuana plants spread out over five acres of denuded landscape.

"The growers had split," Bauer says. "But it was clear they had little regard for the damage they were causing."

Since that afternoon in 2010, Bauer has stumbled across dozens of similar sites and found the same kind of environmental devastation in each place: water illegally diverted from cold mountain streams, lethal bait used to poison endangered animals, and massive greenhouses sucking up electricity.

This is the ugly secret of California's Green Rush, the medical marijuana boom that has turned Humboldt, Mendocino and Trinity counties (often referred to as the Emerald Triangle) in to the Napa Valley of high-grade pot production in the United States. Over the last two years, speculators hoping to cash in on what has become a multi-billion dollar industry have flooded the area, says Bauer. They've radically transformed its culture and doubled the acreage under cultivation.

"When we fly above the forests, we see greenhouses and clearings popping up everywhere," Bauer says. "They'll grow it in rows, like an orchard. It used to be that growers tried to hide what they're doing, but now it's right out in the open."

In two watersheds Bauer studies the numbers of grow-ops have exploded, from 550 sites two years ago to over 1,100 today, taxing a water table already in peril after years of drought. Bauer estimates that over 18 million gallons of water were diverted from one watershed alone last year, drying up creeks where the endangered Coho salmon spawn. Growers typically take the most water during the hot and dry summer months, Bauer says, and often from headwaters that feed fish habitat further down the slopes.

The situation may be even worse in national parks like Yosemite and the Redwoods, says Maurad Gabriel, a scientist with the University of California at Davis. The grow-ops in the forests are typically much bigger than the ones Bauer studies on private lands, meaning they use more water and are often run by Mexican drug cartels, which spray pesticides so toxic they're illegal in the US. Like Bauer, Gabriel has found pesticides lining the banks of streams, as well as open latrines leaking in to creeks.

While Bauer is primarily concerned with the fate of salmon, Gabriel worries about the future of the Pacific fisher, a weasel-like mammal that feeds on fish, and other endangered animals further up the food chain, like the spotted owl. Gabriel says he's come across scores of dead animals that ate pesticides or bait, which is set out for marijuana-eating mice. He's also found dead songbirds, which accidently fly in to the barbed-wire fences growers use to dry marijuana after harvest.

The irony to all of this is that for much of its history the Emerald Triangle has been synonymous with environmental conservation. In fact, the first growers who came to the area, known locally as homesteaders, were hippies and ecologically conscious back-to-the-landers that grew their pot organically under the sun, transforming timber country in to a pothead's Shangri-la. "They viewed marijuana as a sacrament of the earth," says Tony Silvaggio, an environmental sociologist at Humboldt State University. "For them, it wasn't a business. They may have sold a little on the side to get by, but it was more of a way of life."

While those hippie outlaws are still around the Emerald Triangle, come harvest time you're just as likely to see a new breed of grower around town, standing on the side of the road holding cardboard signs looking for work "clipping and bagging" marijuana plants, or parked in front of hydroponic stores in a brand new pick up buying grow lamps or plant food. "In the winter, they take off for Costa Rica and Honduras to live the good life," Bauer says. "And then next spring, they're back. They're here to make money and then leave."

When California voters passed Proposition 215 (which allows for the possession and cultivation of medical marijuana) the new breed of growers who flooded the Emerald Triangle mostly opted for indoor growing, or large-scale farms on private and public forest land, known as trespass grows. Today, at least one third of the marijuana grown in the state is produced indoors, which accounts for nine percent of California's annual electricity use. "Each time there's a new initiative to legalize marijuana for recreational use it just gets worse," says Tyce Frasier, a second-generation grower. "More people move here, or people expand the size of their operation to cash in before it becomes legal and regulated."

If there is a solution to these trends, it may come from the growers themselves. While California has regulations that govern agriculture, requiring permits from everything from water usage to the grading of dirt roads, they are mostly ignored in the Emerald Triangle. "I get growers who come to me and say, 'I'd like to work with the county to make sure I'm getting all the right permits, but what I'm doing is illegal according to federal law, and I don't want to put a big target on my back,'" Silvaggio says.

Environmentally conscious growers are instead taking matters in to their own hands, targeting trespass grows and what they call "pollution pot." A group called Grow It in the Sun ran ads on local radio urging newcomers to stop growing indoors, and another group called the Emerald Growers Association has created a "best practices guide," to encourage organic farming. One non-profit, called Sanctuary Forest, has even begun helping farmers buy tanks to store water for the dry summer months.

"For a long time there was a code of silence, because even if you saw something you didn't like, you were doing something illegal yourself and you didn't want the attention to blow back on you," Silvaggio says. "Now that's changing. It's got bad enough that growers are starting to speak up, pointing out there's a sustainable way to do this."

The implications extend beyond the Emerald Triangle or even California. To date, 15 states allow some form of cultivation, including Colorado and Washington, which just legalized marijuana for recreational use. "We have a market that's going to expand exponentially," Silvaggio says. "And yet most of these states that are legalizing aren't even thinking some of the things we're seeing here. The environmental impact is only going to increase in frequency and scale. It's a moral test for this community."

As for Bauer, finding hope is hard. Not long ago he returned to that first site he visited years ago. Little had changed. There was still sediment in the creek. And then he noticed something that alarmed him: sacks of pesticides that hadn't been there more than a few weeks. The growers were back, expanding their operation.

    

Maurice Sendak, Mao Zedong, and the Man Who Collects Them

Posted: 25 Jul 2013 08:00 AM PDT

Left: Schiller's gallery. Right: Maurice Sendak: A Celebration of the Artist and His Work, an exhibition at the Society of Illustrators.

What do children's book pioneer Maurice Sendak and Communist party chairman Mao Zedong have in common? The likely answer is "very little other than Justin Schiller." For those who do not know the name: Schiller almost single-handedly raised kid's book illustration from ephemeral to collectible art and, at the same time, has had a big hand in documenting Chinese revolutionary propaganda. Why? Some people are just born to collect.  

Schiller's personal collection of children's books and illustrations is beyond expansive--it is one of the largest private holdings of first editions, original drawings, and paintings. A small but important part of his treasure is on view in Maurice Sendak: A Celebration of the Artist and His Work, an exhibition at the Society of Illustrators (through August 17) in New York, for which he was co-curator. It contains more than 250 original gems, just a small sampling of Schiller's huge passion that began when he was a child and still growing.

At age eight Schiller began collecting rare books, including L. Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz series. By 12, he says, he was "the youngest lender of rare books to Columbia University Libraries in its 200-year history." The year was 1956. Columbia was celebrating the centenary of Baum's birth with a major exhibition, but lacked a few necessary pieces that, as it happened, Schiller had acquired from the used bookstores on lower Fourth Avenue, once the epicenter of second-hand volumes. That same year MGM's Wizard of Oz starring Judy Garland premiered nationwide on CBS television with some fanfare. CBS wanted to borrow a copy of the first edition of the The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Chicago 1900) and Schiller supplied the copy. As a reward, he was anonymously included on the telecast, along with 10-year-old Liza Minnelli, as the show's guest introducer, Bert Lahr (the Cowardly Lion) read to them from the book.

 

Schiller worked his way through college buying and selling old books. After leaving graduate school in 1966, he was accepted for membership in the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America (ABAA), founded in 1949 to encourage appreciation of old and rare books. Although Schiller issued catalogs from his dorm, his big splash as a broker of significant rarities came in 1967 when  he created a catalog of rare children's books from the 18th century onwards: American, British, and Continental. From then on he specialized in children's books, manuscripts, and artwork.

His association with Sendak developed after he helped him find vintage German "mechanical books" by Lothar Meggendorfer, known for intricate pop-ups that required precise paper engineering. Years later, after they acquired the original watercolor manuscripts by Meggendorfer for these same books, Sendak wrote a "splendid introduction" to their 1975 Meggendorfer catalog, Schiller told me. After opening a children's-centric bookshop in a New York City brownstone in February 1970 (on East 61st Street between Park and Madison Avenues), Schiller began mounting book-signing parties for Sendak, beginning with In The Night Kitchen (1970). "We also handled the sale of original drawings that Maurice wanted to sell, along with artwork by Beatrix Potter, Kate Greenaway, Randolph Caldecott, and Walter Crane," Schiller said. "In those days there was no venue for selling contemporary illustration art, and other artist clients also sold drawings through our gallery: Arnold Lobel, Tomi Ungerer, Uri Shulevitz, and others. It was a period when nothing was especially expensive and artists were glad that there were collectors who wanted to own their originals."

During the 1970s and 1980s, Sendak sold pictures that Schiller now wished he had kept. "It was not until the late 1980s that I really fell in love with his artistry, and our friendship also became closer," he said, recalling the time he and his partner Dennis M.V. David began seriously collecting Sendak originals. "Over the years we purchased back many drawings that we had earlier sold, often from five to 10 times what had previously been paid for them. As I helped Maurice build his personal collections of Herman Melville and William Blake, he likewise encouraged my interest in collecting his own pictures and he also taught me a lot about appreciating art that I would have never known otherwise. Both Dennis and I have come to understand and appreciate his genius in ways I never saw before."

"Maurice was quite amused by this juxtaposition," Schiller said, "and referred to it as "the Mao and Mo show."

Schiller intends to keep the original drawings together and "possibly find a museum of American art or at least a philanthropist who can appreciate the unique talent that Sendak represents and might be interested in purchasing from us the entire collection to establish a permanent home."

But Sendak is not Schiller's sole passion. He is also the arbiter of art for children's narrative books, including those by Chris Van Allsburg, who had four solo exhibitions at the former Schiller-Wapner Gallery (on Fifth Avenue), including all the finished artwork for The Polar Express. Schiller also handles original pictures from the estates of Arnold Lobel, Leonard Weisgard, and Beni Montresor. His major current project is to inventory and sell an important collection of drawings and first editions by Randolph Caldecott (the namesake for the prestigious Caldecott Medal given annually by the American Library Association).

But not everything in his collection is for or about children. Since 1996, Schiller and David have had a deep interest in Chinese propaganda produced under Mao Zedong (mid-1930s through 1970s); they've been buying examples from leading dealers as well as private collectors in China.  "We were the first dealers to be able to identify and introduce the first editions of the Little Red Book by Mao to western collectors and have now developed a remarkable inventory of vintage textiles, prints, posters, fine art, sculptures, and handicraft," Schiller said. Their current gallery in Kingston, New York, is divided literally down the middle with Mao Zedong on one side and Maurice Sendak on the other. "Maurice was quite amused by this juxtaposition," Schiller said, "and referred to it as "the Mao and Mo show."

    

Anthony Weiner and Liberal Morality

Posted: 25 Jul 2013 07:57 AM PDT

Andrew Sullivan offers a defense of Anthony Weiner, who has recently been shown to have continued his online affairs even after he resigned from Congress:

No one outside a marriage can fully know what's in it, or what makes it work. For my part, I favor maximal privacy for all married couples in navigating the shoals of sex and life online and off. Monogamous, monogamish, and open relationships are all up to the couples themselves and all have risks and advantages. But ultimately it is up to the spouse to decide if there has been a transgression or not, and whether to forgive and move forward or not. The truly awful spectacle yesterday was seeing Huma Abedin being forced to undergo another public humiliation as the price for her husband's public career. But she clearly stated she was not abandoning her husband. And for me, as for us, that should close the matter.

And let's be clear, there is no victim here. A flirty, horny 22-year-old who talks a great sex game is not a victim. She's a player - and good for her. This nonsense about her being "immature" and Weiner being "predatory" is belied by the facts. She knew he was married when she sexted him and he returned the favors. The only salient question is whether, having lied in the first place about sexting, Weiner was caught deceiving the public again by claiming he had stopped sexting and re-built his marriage, while the compulsion was clearly not over. That's a question of public trust, and there's little doubt that Weiner has squandered it. On the question of lying, the NYT's harrumph this morning is a valid one. Once a politician has deceived people, he gets a second chance. When he deceives them a second time on the same issue, he loses whatever public trust he might have hoped for.

But I see no reason why that trust should not be tested where it should be: at the ballot box. Weiner should not, er, withdraw prematurely. He should do us all a favor, if his wife agrees, and plow on until we can all smoke a collective cigarette. In this new Internet Age someone has to be the person who makes sexting not an excludable characteristic for public office. If it becomes one, then the range of representatives we can choose from in the future and present will be very, very different in experience and background than the people they are supposed to represent.

There's a lot here that I agree with, but I don't get many opportunities to get to the right of Andrew. In all seriousness, I think there are two separate issues. The first is the idea that there is something wrong with online sex. We can dispatch that fairly easily: There isn't. The second is that the mere act of infidelity makes you unfit for public office. I don't think there's much ground for that argument either.

But the problem that I suspect a lot of people have with Anthony Weiner is not that he had an affair, but that he does not seem particularly good at the job of politics. Part of being good at politics is being good at pitching your arguments. Part of pitching your arguments is your public image. We know this. Those of us who are partisans do not examine "favorable and unfavorable" ratings in our polls simply for amusement. We examine them to see who might make the best pitch for the policies we endorse. The actual reasons why some people are viewed favorably and others are not may not always strike us as intelligent. But they are real. Politicians know this and thus guard their image accordingly.

Anthony Weiner is a politician who relished antagonizing the opposition. His appeal was singular and tribal -- in an age of seemingly vacillating, gun-shy Democrats, Weiner took on whoever may come. You never once got the feeling that he was ashamed to be a liberal. He must have known that this made him a target for conservative activists. A wise man in Weiner's position would be watchful. But Weiner is not a wise man. It is not his desire to get off that offends, it is the thick-wittedness of sending nude selfies on Twitter. It is the incomprehensible silliness of handing your opponents a gun and saying, "Please shoot me." Repeatedly. It is wholly sensible that those of us who believe the liberal project is about more than embarrassing Republicans would not want Anthony Weiner as a pitchman.

There is something else at work here also -- a lack of compassion. Here is where I differ with many of my liberal and libertarian friends. I believe that how you treat people matters. It is folly to embarrass your pregnant wife before an entire nation. To do the same thing again is cruelty. And there is the promise of more to come. One argument holds that what happens between Weiner and his wife is between them. I agree with this argument. But cruelty is not abolished by the phrase "consenting adults." And the fact that the immoral is not, and should not be, illegal does not make morality meaningless. Huma Abedin has one choice. We have another. The choice should be made by voters -- there should be no sense that if not for the powerful editorial pages Weiner would have won. As a city we deserve to see who we are, and what we actually care about.

I don't think it is wrong to care about how people treat each others, which is another way of saying I believe that morality is important. I find the argument for same-sex marriage compelling not in spite of morality, but because of it. I think public office is an honored, and honorable, position. I do not think it is wrong to ask that our officers be compassionate. I do not believe it is wrong to ask that our officers be wise. I do not believe that it is the fate of all men to send dick pics hurtling through cyberspace. And I do not believe that Anthony Weiner is the best we can expect from maledom, to say nothing of New York liberals.

    

Late-Night Comedy Roundup: Live From Moscow, It's Edward Snowden

Posted: 25 Jul 2013 07:24 AM PDT



Texas governor and one-time presidential candidate Rick Perry will be visiting the Middle East in preparation for another possible presidential run. That news has prompted The Tonight Show's Jay Leno to joke about Perry's intelligence, playing on the word "bank" in regards to the West Bank Wednesday evening.

In royal-baby news, Stephen Colbert invoked the American revolution in discussing the decision to name the child George. The Daily Show's John Oliver mentioned the possibility that he could be the next king in a long shot comparison to the United States' recent history of racial dialogue.

On The Late Show, David Letterman spent a segment talking to "Edward Snowden" as the National Security Agency leaker waits to leave Moscow's Sheremetyevo International Airport. As Letterman tried to press him on national security and logistical questions, "Snowden" ogled flight attendants and ate a giant pretzel.

Fast forward to 1:50 to see Letterman and "Snowden" talk.

Read more from Government Executive.

    

On Spying, Obama Just Isn't That Into the Democratic Coalition

Posted: 25 Jul 2013 07:09 AM PDT

Obama Boehner talks - Getty - banner.jpg
Reuters

"People who understand how representative government works," Matt Yglesias recently argued, "are going to remain fundamentally comfortable with our basic partisan commitments and there's nothing even a little bit hypocritical about it." Is he correct? I don't believe that partisan commitments are hypocritical or that Yglesias is a hypocrite. Lots of people try to change their party as best they can, but support it as the lesser of two evils even when they fail.

But Yglesias and Robert Farley miss something important about coalition politics and how change happens. They're savvy, informed observers, and often change occurs exactly as they understand it. But they write as if U.S. politics always pits a Democratic coalition against a GOP coalition.

On many vital issues that isn't true.

What few liberals want to acknowledge or grapple with is the fact that, on issues like drone strikes abroad and surveillance in the United States, President Obama is not actually in a coalition with fellow Democrats. Rather, the coalition that sustains his ability to kill U.S. citizens without trial and to spy on the phone calls of all Americans is composed largely of Republicans. GOP legislators disproportionately support these policies, former Bush officials staff the apparatus, and it's all grounded in neo-conservative theories of executive power. It is all irredeemably illiberal.

Wednesday's vote on NSA phone surveillance exposed one of Obama's coalitions for all to see.

The Obama Administration put together a winning majority of surveillance state apologists. It included establishment Democrats, like Nancy Pelosi, who joined far-right conservatives like Michele Bachmann. Overall, Obama's position prevailed with 134 Republicans supporting it and 94 opposed. 111 Democrats voted against the president's position, with just 83 for it.

As I said, coalition politics isn't as simple as Republicans versus Democrats. But if it were, Obama would effectively be part of the Republican coalition on surveillance issues, sharing more in common with the positions of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney than a majority of his fellow Democrats. And Justin Amash and Rand Paul would be joining a majority Democratic coalition. People "who understand how representative government works" and regard challenging the surveillance state as a top priority know an alliance that transcends party lines is the most likely way to succeed. And they know that tribal partisan forces* are trying to stop that alliance.

Says Glenn Greenwald:

What one sees in this debate is not Democrat versus Republican or left versus right. One sees authoritarianism versus individualism, fealty to The National Security State versus a belief in the need to constrain and check it, insider Washington loyalty versus outsider independence.

And he's basically right.

The notion that American politics is reducible to the Democratic coalition and the Republican coalition is a pernicious illusion. That isn't to say that those coalitions aren't extremely important or that it's irrational to ally with one. But on issues like drones, comfort with law-enforcement brass who favor ethnic profiling, or warrantless surveillance on Americans, I don't know what it means for a Democrat to say that he or she is fundamentally comfortable with his or her basic partisan commitments. The party itself is, in fact, irrevocably divided.

Either you're comfortable with drone strikes or the position taken by an influential faction in the Democratic Party makes you uncomfortable. Either you're comfortable with NSA surveillance or the position taken by an influential faction in the Democratic Party makes you uncomfortable.

If you possess the beliefs of Jonathan Chait, there might not be anything uncomfortable about any of that. But many liberal Democrats ought to be less comfortable with their basic partisan commitments than they are, given their beliefs. That isn't to say that they should sever them -- just that, rather than reveling in their own savvy at having chosen what they regard as the obviously more moral and enlightened coalition, while casting aspersions on the coalition they regard as hopelessly retrograde, they should grasp how frequently their tribe and the tribe they abhor collude.

There are all sorts of creepy, indefensible things about both major political coalitions in America, which isn't to say they're equivalents, or that it makes sense for large numbers of people to switch -- just that reflexive comfort within either is unjustified and is more tribal than rational.
 
__
*I am very opposed to political tribalism, and there may be times when that bias skews my judgment.
    

'Calm Down': The Best Advice for Parents, or the Worst?

Posted: 25 Jul 2013 07:06 AM PDT

vastateparksstaff/flickr

Twice a month, a panel of dads discusses a topic of the moment. For today's conversation, they talk about a new philosophy that tells moms and dads to chill out.

Ross: Every so often, I get the sense that the world doesn't love me and my kids quite as much as we deserve. Walking the streets of Park Slope, Brooklyn, my son and daughter sprint-weaving in the vanguard, bowling over little old ladies, menacing small dogs, and visibly irking the hipsters who conspire with us married folks to drive up real estate prices, I suspect some people genuinely don't find us irresistibly cute. Just a feeling.           

Another example. Earlier this summer, my wife, Tomoko, and I took the kids on an international flight to Japan, where her father lives. It's a long way to go with young ones, and at the last minute, Tomoko decided to upgrade our seats to business class. It was expensive, but we'd have ample legroom, and the chairs recline all the way back, like beds, so the children would be able to sleep. Made sense. Once onboard, though, the stylishly dressed Japanese businessman seated next to us immediately summoned a flight attendant and arranged to move. Again, just a feeling, but I think he didn't want to sit next to us.

I mention all this in the context of a story I came across on Jezebel last week called "The CTFD Method is the Greatest of All Parenting Trends," by David Vienna from the website, TheDaddyComplex. Here's a sampling of the wisdom:

●Worried your friend's child has mastered the alphabet quicker than your child? Calm the fuck down.

●Scared you're not imparting the wisdom your child will need to survive in school and beyond? Calm the fuck down.

●Concerned that you're not the type of parent you thought you'd be? Calm the fuck down.

●Upset that your child doesn't show interest in certain areas of learning? Calm the fuck down.

●Stressed that your child exhibits behavior in public you find embarrassing? Calm the fuck down.

What strikes me about Vienna's humorous take on parenting is how focused it is on externalities. The parent in need of the CTFD method wants young Johnny to learn the alphabet not because he's anxious about the child's intelligence per se--though there was that incident at nine months where he fell off the bed--but because he's concerned that some other budding Mensa at the daycare has already done so. Wisdom-imparting? Most parents don't feel they've failed in the Leave it to Beaver aspects of childrearing; no one believes in wisdom anymore, even parents, so there's nothing at which to fail. The concern comes from knowing that if your kids are unwise, or even foolish, everyone knows where to apportion the blame. That would be you.

CTFD, then, funny as it might be, has nothing to do with the actual concerns that roil parents' bellies in the middle of the night or when we check our bank balance. It's just that no one wants to look bad.

More seriously, though, the anxiety that Vienna skewers is real: a byproduct of the tension-filled life of America's YOYO (You're on your own) parenting world. It may take a village, but only if we're talking about one with barbed wire fencing encircling the huts, crappy afterschool care, astronomical college costs, and no one to mind the goats in the afternoon.

We parents worry, in short, because we understand that resources are limited. It isn't just ego or the pursuit of success through our offspring. It is the certainty that in an overcrowded classroom (28 in my son's first-grade class) only so many kids will be educated properly. If yours won't or can't hit the tenor notes on those ABCs, someone else's will.

The perturbation stems from the sense that no one will take care of your child but you. There is no help, no safety net, no community, and if these things ever existed, they don't today, at least not in the world in which we live. I know that I can depend on my direct relatives, the money my wife and I earn, my love for the children, and that's it. Faced with this apprehension, you shouldn't calm the fuck down. You should look both ways when you cross the street, and be afraid.

So, if, in the midst of all this agita, one of my children happens to bump you in the street, or if I seem nervous about their preschool or orthodontia or whatever laughably "breeder" thing I might be doing at any given moment, well, why don't you CTFD. Or just KMA. Or GFY. And I'll let you figure out what those stand for. 

Gross: When I came home from work the other night, it was late, and the kids were already asleep. The older one, my wife, Jean, informed me, was sick: Sasha had complained of a headache at her preschool, and was running a slight fever. For a split second, I wondered if this meant she'd hit her head hard, or had contracted some fatal bacterium. But then that split-second passed, and I did what any responsible parent would do: I went to sleep.

Perhaps this was because it was after midnight, and I'd spent the last six hours at a rather, um, indulgent work party in the wilds of Brooklyn. But it was also because, in the four and a half years since Sasha was born, I've managed to completely internalize the CTFD philosophy. Kid fall down, go boom? Eh. Kid too shy to take the Gifted and Talented test? Whatever--we'll try next year. Kid throwing a tantrum in the restaurant/playground/subway/country club/volcano rim? Just ignore her--it'll end faster that way.

As CTFD makes the rounds as the latest liberal parenting philosophy, however, I can't help but notice that it bears conspicuous similarity to another, older, far-from-liberal parenting approach--that of the Distant Old-School Father.

This is how fathering was done way back when, right? Dad, in a prior incarnation, always stood back from the action, allowing disasters to unspool however they might. Knees were skinned, heads bonked, taunts delivered, and where was Dad? Involved in something else more pressing, like, I don't know, fixing a carburetor or consuming his third Scotch and soda of the morning. To Distant Old-School Father, the accidents and failures of his children were challenges they needed to overcome all on their own, without his having to helicopter in and help out--or, ideally, without his having to know about them at all.

Did Old-School Dad really have it right? Or rather, was his standoffish attitude worth the later-in-life wails of millions of Baby Boomers who were injured by his distance and inability to express emotions?

Well, maybe. Which is where we parents of today have an advantage: The trick now is to maintain Old-School Dad's nonchalance while simultaneously showing our progeny that we're ignoring them because we care, and not just because, Jesus Christ, can't you see I'm busy refreshing the new Digg RSS reader, hoping it will one day update as fast as the old Google one?

In fact, the more I accept this new-old philosophy, the manlier I feel. In fact, I'm beginning to wonder why I'm even spending so much time discussing the subject, when there are so many more important things I could be doing in the other room, like mixing a Manhattan or simply grunting. CTFD is a fine way to parent, but honestly, if I'm going to adhere to it properly, I have to say I don't give a damn how you parent. And besides, the game is on. We'll talk about this later.

    

NSA Spying Rankles Privacy-Loving Germans

Posted: 25 Jul 2013 07:00 AM PDT

germanbanner.jpg
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and U.S. President Barack Obama raise their glasses in a toast during a dinner at the Chralottenburg Castle in Berlin. (Reuters)

As President Barack Obama delivered a speech at Brandenburg Gate a few weeks ago, dozens of protesters voiced outrage over the U.S. government's global surveillance program, holding signs reading, "Yes We Scan."

And since then, things have gone from bad to worse -- especially given revelations that Germany's intelligence services have been working in close cooperation with their American counterparts throughout the NSA's vast spying system.

Amid a deepening scandal, Chancellor Angela Merkel's government has watched the growing furor with dismay over the past month, as the demands for answers have reached a fever pitch.

"The German government has a duty under international and German law to protect their citizens against such schemes, and they have to make clear that they're actually doing that on an international level," said Alexander Dix, the Berlin Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information.

The controversy swirling around Merkel has boiled down to a fundamental question: who knew what, and when. As news broke in early June that the NSA is tapping into millions of phone calls, emails, and text messages, and that Germany is one of the agency's targets, Berlin responded with measured surprise, promising to investigate the extent of the NSA's activities on German soil.

But as was reported last weekend, Der Spiegel magazine found that the country's federal intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, or BND, used software provided by the NSA and even flew representatives to Washington in April for guidance and advice from a specialized unit there.

At her final press conference before heading into the summer break last Friday, Merkel stuck to her claim that she first learned of Prism's reach in Germany through media reports. She said her coalition government still didn't have all the details it needed on the affair.

"It's not my job to familiarize myself with Prism," she said flatly, adding that Germany is "not a surveillance state."

But the BND is directly subordinated to the chancellery, and Merkel's line of defense is wearing thin.

"I can't believe that the chancellor, six weeks after the first revelations, still has not looked into what the federal intelligence services actually do," Thomas Oppermann from the opposition Social Democrats told German media.

"I'm the boss. I know nothing" said a headline in the national daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung.

Hans - Christian Stroebele, a parliamentarian from Germany's Green Party, said the government's reaction makes it clear that there was knowledge of Prism before media reports broke.

"With such a dramatic case of espionage, where even diplomatic representatives are affected, the government would have reacted in a much more dramatic and intense way than it has," he said.

The plot continues to thicken for Merkel. Her interior minister, Hans-Peter Friedrich, was roundly panned in the media and public after returning from high-level meetings in Washington -- intended to clarify the Prism program -- empty-handed. Instead he praised the American intelligence services, arguing that safety is a "super right," with priority over privacy.

"It was just window dressing," said Stroebele of the visit. "Mr. Friedrich acted as if he couldn't work up the courage to ask his American counterparts hard-hitting questions."

During President Obama's visit to Berlin in June, he argued that Prism has helped thwart numerous terrorist attacks and keep Americans and Germans safe -- something Merkel has echoed. But that approach has done little to soothe the fears of the public.

"I'd really like them to show us exactly which terrorist plots were actually stopped because of this," said Kathrin Holighaus, a photographer and graphic designer in Berlin. "The majority of the time, (spying) ends up implicating innocent people who are under suspicion even though they've done nothing."

That is a sentiment many Germans share. From the gestapo to communist East Germany, many Germans share painful memories of just how data can be abused, and they have a deep aversion of surveillance of any sort. Germans in then-West Germany were the first in the world to enact a national data protection law in the 1970s.

Part of the problem with Prism, say analysts, is that the scale and the methods the NSU used simply don't comply with German law, even though the spying included German citizens. The BND, meanwhile, could not employ similar methods if it wanted to.

Under German data protection law, the BND is not allowed register and store communications data on a wide scale, or randomly tap phone conversations. Instead, they have to use sensors and look for keywords within phone and email conversations -- but even there, they are only allowed to scan 10 percent of international communication.

"That may sound quantitatively different, but it's also a qualitative difference because the German intelligence service are not allowed to store it all," said Alexander Dix.

Merkel, herself a child of communist East Germany, is well aware of Germans' concern over data privacy, and she for the first time pushed back at Washington last week, calling on her American counterparts to respect German data privacy law on German soil.

But analysts say Merkel may have stopped short of saying more -- of demanding that Washington shut down any surveillance involving Germans or Europeans -- because she knows her counterparts across the Atlantic won't heed her calls.

"Since the Americans aren't going to come up with some great political gestures, the German government is careful to not demand things it is not going to get, which would be embarrassing in an election year," said Henning Riecke, a specialist in transatlantic affairs at the German Council on Foreign Relations. "The Americans don't feel bad about this. They don't feel caught in something they shouldn't have done, there's no feeling of having done something unlawful."

Dubbed the "Teflon chancellor," Merkel has enjoyed impressive poll numbers throughout her first two terms in office, even despite the European debt crisis and unpopular international bailouts. Yet with elections looming in September and a third term at stake, it seems the Prism scandal has finally managed to chip away at the chancellor's steely armor.

In a recent poll conducted by Infratest Dimap for German public broadcaster ARD, more than two-thirds of Germans say they are unsatisfied with the government's handling of the scandal.

That is why Merkel is refocusing her efforts on her European counterparts, pushing for an EU-wide defense of data privacy. The union is already working on a draft regulation to defend against private companies using Europeans' data, but the Prism revelations have prompted calls for even greater protections.

However, Germany itself has had only marginal success trying to get companies like Google and Facebook to adhere to privacy rules. Varied legislation across states within Europe has meant data protection harbors being set up where it is weakest.

In April, a court ruled that German data protection could not apply to Facebook because it is based in Ireland and has no data processing taking place on German soil. Both Google and Facebook were criticized for their "uncooperative attitude" in May by the German interior minister.

Merkel and her European allies do have one trump card, though. The Obama administration is keen to push ahead with the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Pact, or TTIP, a deal the president announced during his most recent State of the Union address. But with the NSA scandal brewing, some EU officials are calling for a halt on negotiations in the wake of the Prism scandal -- especially as rumors of possible business espionage swirl.

"People want to rest assured that there is a level playing field when they come to the table in terms of negotiations because they fear that maybe all of their patents and R and D have already been tapped into," says Sudha David-Wilp, a senior program officer at the German Marshall Fund of the U.S.

Meanwhile, in Germany some are coming to the realization that, with Google and Facebook already accessing their data, there is little that can be done when it comes to a sweeping international surveillance program like Prism.

"It's hard to build a wall around Germany because this a global society; information sharing is a globalized affair," said David-Wilp. "Germans can and should demand a level of privacy, but there is a certain balance between privacy and security, and the intelligence services cooperate on a worldwide basis."

    

The Unprecedented, Contemptible GOP Quest to Sabotage Obamacare

Posted: 25 Jul 2013 06:13 AM PDT

John Cornyn and John Thune, the Nos. 2 and 3 Republicans in the Senate. (Hyungwon Kang/Reuters)

When Mike Lee pledges to try to shut down the government unless President Obama knuckles under and defunds Obamacare entirely, it is not news -- it is par for the course for the take-no-prisoners extremist senator from Utah. When the Senate Republicans' No. 2 and No. 3 leaders, John Cornyn and John Thune, sign on to the blackmail plan, it is news -- of the most depressing variety.

I am not the only one who has written about House and Senate Republicans' monomaniacal focus on sabotaging the implementation of Obamacare -- Greg Sargent, Steve Benen, Jon Chait, Jon Bernstein, Ezra Klein, and many others have written powerful pieces. But it is now spinning out of control.

It is important to emphasize that this set of moves is simply unprecedented. The clear comparison is the Medicare prescription-drug plan. When it passed Congress in 2003, Democrats had many reasons to be furious. The initial partnership between President Bush and Senator Edward Kennedy had resulted in an admirably bipartisan bill -- it passed the Senate with 74 votes. Republicans then pulled a bait and switch, taking out all of the provisions that Kennedy had put in to bring along Senate Democrats, jamming the resulting bill through the House in a three-hour late-night vote marathon that blatantly violated House rules and included something close to outright bribery on the House floor, and then passing the bill through the Senate with just 54 votes -- while along the way excluding the duly elected conferees, Tom Daschle (the Democratic leader!) and Jay Rockefeller, from the conference-committee deliberations.

The implementation of that bill was a huge challenge, and had many rocky moments. It required educating millions of seniors, most not computer-literate, about the often complicated choices they had to create or change their prescription coverage. Imagine if Democrats had gone all out to block or disrupt the implementation -- using filibusters to deny funding, sending threatening letters to companies or outside interests who mobilized to educate Medicare recipients, putting on major campaigns to convince seniors that this was a plot to deny them Medicare, comparing it to the ill-fated Medicare reform plan that passed in 1989 and, after a revolt by seniors, was repealed the next year.

Almost certainly, Democrats could have tarnished one of George W. Bush's signature achievements, causing Republicans major heartburn in the 2004 presidential and congressional elections -- and in the process hurting millions of Medicare recipients and their families. Instead, Democrats worked with Republicans, and with Mark McClellan, the Bush Administration official in charge of implementation, to smooth out the process and make it work -- and it has been a smashing success.

Contrast that with Obamacare. For three years, Republicans in the Senate refused to confirm anybody to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the post that McClellan had held in 2003-04 -- in order to damage the possibility of a smooth rollout of the health reform plan. Guerrilla efforts to cut off funding, dozens of votes to repeal, abusive comments by leaders, attempts to discourage states from participating in Medicaid expansion or crafting exchanges, threatening letters to associations that might publicize the availability of insurance on exchanges, and now a new set of threats -- to have a government shutdown, or to refuse to raise the debt ceiling, unless the president agrees to stop all funding for implementation of the plan.

I remember being shocked when some congressional Democrats appeared to be rooting for the surge in troops in Iraq to fail -- which would mean more casualties among Americans and Iraqis, but a huge embarrassment for Bush, and vindication of their skepticism. But of course they did not try to sabotage the surge by disrupting funding or interfering in the negotiations in Iraq with competing Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish power centers. To do so would have been close to treasonous.

What is going on now to sabotage Obamacare is not treasonous -- just sharply beneath any reasonable standards of elected officials with the fiduciary responsibility of governing. A good example is the letter Senate Republican Leaders Mitch McConnell and Cornyn sent to the NFL, demanding that it not cooperate with the Obama administration in a public-education campaign to tell their fans about what benefits would be available to them and how the plan would work—a letter that clearly implied deleterious consequences if the league went ahead anyhow. McConnell and Cornyn got their desired result. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell quickly capitulated. (When I came to Washington in 1969-70, one of my great pleasures was meeting and getting to know Charles Goodell, the courageous Republican senator from New York who took on his own president on Vietnam and was quietly courageous on many other controversial issues. Roger Goodell is his son -- although you would not know it from this craven action.)

When a law is enacted, representatives who opposed it have some choices (which are not mutually exclusive). They can try to repeal it, which is perfectly acceptable -- unless it becomes an effort at grandstanding so overdone that it detracts from other basic responsibilities of governing. They can try to amend it to make it work better -- not just perfectly acceptable but desirable, if the goal is to improve a cumbersome law to work better for the betterment of the society and its people. They can strive to make sure that the law does the most for Americans it is intended to serve, including their own constituents, while doing the least damage to the society and the economy. Or they can step aside and leave the burden of implementation to those who supported the law and got it enacted in the first place.

But to do everything possible to undercut and destroy its implementation -- which in this case means finding ways to deny coverage to many who lack any health insurance; to keep millions who might be able to get better and cheaper coverage in the dark about their new options; to create disruption for the health providers who are trying to implement the law, including insurers, hospitals, and physicians; to threaten the even greater disruption via a government shutdown or breach of the debt limit in order to blackmail the president into abandoning the law; and to hope to benefit politically from all the resulting turmoil -- is simply unacceptable, even contemptible. One might expect this kind of behavior from a few grenade-throwing firebrands. That the effort is spearheaded by the Republican leaders of the House and Senate -- even if Speaker John Boehner is motivated by fear of his caucus, and McConnell and Cornyn by fear of Kentucky and Texas Republican activists -- takes one's breath away.

    

A Gay-Themed Children's Book in a Country That's Outlawed Gay-Themed Children's Books

Posted: 25 Jul 2013 06:00 AM PDT

russiagayprotest-banner.jpg
An anti-gay protester clashes with gay rights activists during a Gay Pride event in St. Petersburg on June 29, 2013. (Alexander Demianchuk/Reuters)

Anti-gay activists threw eggs and rocks at gay rights demonstrators in St. Petersburg last month, shouting "Sodomy will not pass." The patriarch of the Russian Orthodox church recently called gay marriage "apocalyptic." And in June, the Russian government outlawed discussing LGBT issues with minors by officially prohibiting "homosexual propaganda" and making the distribution of gay-rights material punishable by fines and jail time.

In the midst of Russia's crackdown on gay rights, one Russian author has published a children's book that prominently features a homosexual character and his struggle to find acceptance in the country. jesterscap.jpg

Daria Wilke, the author of the new book, The Jester's Cap, emigrated from Moscow 13 years ago and is now a Russian professor at the University of Vienna in Austria. Her novel centers on a boy named Grisha, a 14-year-old who lives and works in a puppet theater with his family and an older friend, Sam, who is gay.

For the setting, Wilke drew inspiration from her own childhood, which she spent predominantly in the Moscow puppet theater where her parents both worked. There, she would spend evenings doing homework among the props and chatting with its eclectic crew.

There's this saying in Russia, it's left over from Soviet times: "The laws may be harsh, but at least we don't enforce them."

Wilke encountered several gay actors at the theater, and homosexuality, to her, was a normal part of life -- so, it became a part of her book, as well.

At one point in The Jester's Cap, Sam decides to leave Russia for the Netherlands because he finds the homophobia in his home country too difficult to endure. Meanwhile, Grisha realizes he's different from other boys -- more emotional, less macho -- and struggles to find himself while being urged by adults around him to live up to a more traditional idea of manhood.

Wilke said that she didn't intend for the book to become known for discussing homosexuality, but since the anti-gay law passed, that has become its most talked-about aspect -- both in positive and negative ways.

I spoke with Wilke recently about the book and what impact she thinks it might have on a nation that's taken a decidedly anti-gay turn. A translated and edited transcript of our conversation follows.

How did you come up with this plot, specifically?

A writer writes about their life, and life is multifaceted -- it contains many things, including homosexuality. For that reason, I didn't see a need to not write about it.

The puppet theater where this takes place is a sort of safe space for the protagonist -- in the theater, he can be himself. The gay actors there can say they're gay. The book starts with the fact that the protagonist's best friend and mentor, Sam, the most talented actor in the theater, must leave to go to Holland -- it's too hard for him to live in Russia because he's gay.

From there, the main character, Grisha, must decide whether to follow societal stereotypes or to be himself. Other than his parents, he has his granddad, who is quite totalitarian and homophobic. The grandfather is disgusted by Sam. Grisha must decide whether he wants to be free or to follow the stringent societal rules that adults have set for him. It's about the dichotomy of the free world within the theater walls and the less-free one outside of them.

In what way was homosexuality a part of your childhood?

For me growing up, homosexuality was totally normal. No one hid it. It was only among adults that I realized that there were people who thought homosexuality was a problem.

Why did you choose to release the book now?

I wrote it a year and a half ago, and the publisher was weighing when to release it. But when these strange laws were being released -- first the local anti-gay laws in various cities, then the broader one that passed just last month -- eventually the publisher realized that if we didn't release the book now, we might never be able to release it. Because of these laws, in many bookstores, it has an "18+" stamp, even though in my view, I think it's suitable for 12-year-olds.

In my view, this is a pretty brave step on the part of the publisher. I don't know that many publishers who would choose to release a book like this for young people at this time.

What did you think when you read the news about these new anti-gay measures?

I was totally shocked. I saw that at first they were passing local anti-gay laws in St. Petersburg and other places, and I thought, "Well, maybe they'll last a year or two, and then they'll repeal them."

We didn't believe that they would be enacted on the federal level. These types of laws, in my opinion, foster fascist tendencies in society -- it's very dangerous to create these kinds of divisions of good and bad, of who can speak and who can't.

My only hope is that it will be too hard to enforce. It's very vague, so there's a chance it might be too hard to realize in reality. There's this saying in Russia, it's left over from Soviet times: "The laws may be harsh, but at least we don't enforce them."

Have bookstores pushed back against accepting this book?

That was a surprise for me -- I was afraid that bookstores would not take it. Usually they really are skeptical about taking on these difficult topics. It was a pleasant surprise that most stores took it, though some put an "18+" stamp, even though it's a young adult novel.

Have you received any negative reactions from readers or the government?

There was a presentation about my book at the Moscow Book Fair in June, and when the presentation was reported on a web site, there were some very nasty comments on that story. There have also been some reports from libraries and bookstores from people saying, "why would you write about homosexuality in a children's book? We have so many other problems."

But that criticism is weird to me. Writers write about what's important to them, not about what's most important to society. The fact that people think writers should only write about "useful" topics is another sign of illiberalism in a society.

I haven't had any bad reactions from the government, but then again, the book has only been out for a month. Young-adult novels aren't really the first order of things that the government scrutinizes.

Why do people in Russia often say, "We have bigger problems. Why talk about homosexuality?"

I run into this a lot, but in my view the conversation about homosexuality is one of tolerance, and the conversation over tolerance should continue over many parallels, including homosexuality.

Why would you say, "We want our kids to be nice to everyone," but simultaneously prohibit accepting certain categories of people. It's a little absurd.

Would you ever go back to Russia?

My ideal is to split time between Austria and Russia. But these laws, we can't regard them passively. The fact that I wrote this book and they're talking about it now, that's my contribution to the idea that people should be more tolerant of those who aren't like them.

I feel like if I say that Austria is the only country for me, it's condoning what's going on in Russia. Russia is my country, and I feel like I'm capable of changing things there.

Do you think this book will help change any minds over there?

Books that are about taboos are always hard to accept, but eventually their existence helps to change things.

Have you gotten any positive reactions from readers?

Yes, and it's always touching -- one boy wrote to me and said, "when I read this book, I understood that it was about me." If a person read it and saw himself in it, nothing can be better than that for an author.

    

The Search for Life in Outer Space

Posted: 25 Jul 2013 06:00 AM PDT

Magi.jpg

Hieronymus Bosch, The Adoration of the Magi. (Museo Del Prado.)

Continuing our conversation around learning and understanding, one of my favorite passages on the life of the autodidact comes from the great George L. Ruffin's description of Frederick Douglass's odyssey from downtrodden American slave to premier American intellectual:

His range of reading has been wide and extensive. He has been a hard student. In every sense of the word, he is a self-made man. By dint of hard study he has educated himself, and to-day it may be said he has a well-trained intellect. He has surmounted the disadvantage of not having a university education, by application and well-directed effort.

He seems to have realized the fact, that to one who is anxious to become educated and is really in earnest, it is not positively necessary to go to college, and that information may be had outside of college walks; books may be obtained and read elsewhere. They are not chained to desks in college libraries, as they were in early times at Oxford.

Professors' lectures may be bought already printed, learned doctors may be listened to in the lyceum, and the printing-press has made it easy and cheap to get information on every subject and topic that is discussed and taught in the university. Douglass never made the mistake (a common one) of considering that his education was finished. He has continued to study, he studies now, and is a growing man, and at this present moment he is a stronger man intellectually than ever before.

There is a wonderful, if problematic, tradition in the black community of intellectual pursuit as a "macho" activity. Book learning was something that "they" did not want us to have and in seizing it we were, somehow, claiming our manhood. The tradition is problematic--or perhaps anachronistic--because manhood doesn't have the same meaning today. In fact I am not sure if it has, or ultimately will have, any meaning at all. What happens to categories born out of power after power is dislodged? No one goes around talking about "property-owners" in relation to voting rights today.

In his autobiography, Malcolm X does not claim his manhood through an act of vengeful violence, or by sexual access to white women but through the reclamation of his intellect. Douglass becomes a "man" when he physically subdues the slave-driver Covey, but his mastery of literacy is at least as influential and ultimately more enduring.

I think we can substitute "humanity" for the word "manhood" today and see that this idea of reaching a level of consciousness makes us feel more human, more in touch with the world swirling around us. In becoming intellectually aware, Frederick Douglass began to ask questions and confront problems that never had occurred to him before. It was in following the intellectual questions that slavery and abolition raised about humanity that Douglass found himself to be a "woman's rights man." His last public act, indeed his last thoughts evidently, were not on the boundaries of color, but of gender.

I feel that expansion constantly here--new questions constantly popping up around me. The other day we sat in a very nice restaurant near the Canal St. Martin. I took courage and drank a lot of red wine. Then I ordered a blood sausage--in direct violation of every law of the black nationalist kosher code. It was incredible. It was not so much a sausage as a savory chocolate pudding. There was a party beside us. Within that party there was a woman with blond hair wearing a pink dress. She stared at us for fully half of our meal. When we left I saw the people around us staring. Perhaps it was because I'd said "Bienvenue" when we walked in the door. Or perhaps it was because we were black. I couldn't know. I didn't care.

We walked outside and there were people all along the canal. They were drinking from open bottles and eating dinner. They were seated with their legs dangling over the edge into the water. A young white girl sat on the lap of a black boy. They looked at us and yelled "BON SOIR! BON SOIR! BON SOIR!" And did not stop until I turned and yelled "BON SOIR!"

I have an experience like that at least every day. Something bizarre and incomprehensible hovering at the limits of my dim understanding. The panhandlers here are largely Roma. They sit on the streets with their children, or they humbly approach those holding forth in the outdoor cafes. And every time I see them I am shocked by their whiteness, shocked that one need not be black to be someone's nigger, and that says nothing about them and everything about me.

Are the Roma a "race?" No. I am a prisoner of my own vocabulary and addled understanding. Race is an invention of racism. I know this. I have written this. I know that Europeans interacted with Africans for hundreds of years, and only after the slave trade did they conclude that by dint of our skin, we were dumb, bestial and sexually profligate. I have known this since my days in Howard's history department. Racism without power has no actual history and no discernible meaning. I have always known the facts of this, but I have not always understood it.

It is the manner in which I come to my French class. I can drill myself on the rules of conjugation. I can force myself to remember the difference between tenses of the future and past. But to feel it like instinct, to feel it like religion, to run The French No Huddle, is somewhere beyond "knowing" and closer to understanding. I once used a particular future tense while talking to someone. It was, according to the rules, correct. But the person said to me, "We just wouldn't say it that way, it sounds ugly." That was knowledge beyond the rules; it was understanding.

How do we cultivate this in our children? How do we stress the importance of rules, and the equal importance of their irrelevance? How do we stress the necessity of rote memorization, while at the same time stressing the need to not end there? Many of us "know" geometry, but do we understand how it is actually used? Can we walk down the street and point out its effects? Should we even look to a public education system to teach such things? Or is understanding a private act, something best left to intellectual entrepreneurs, hard students and those who, for whatever reason, burn to know?

I can't call it. But I think about Frederick Douglass a lot these days. And I think that as much as he understood the import of justice, he must have also understood the import of death. Once you get the great effort it takes to go from "knowing" to "understanding" you get how little you will ever truly apprehend. Whole lives surround you. Whole ways are distant from you. Entire streets, ancient cultures , beautiful people are all shooting by. And there is sadness in this because truly we know that there is life in outer space, that there is life in the Parisian streets, that there is life in those West Baltimore streets, that there is life in these worlds around me, life in these blue worlds so close, though light years away.

    

Phil Mickelson Isn't 'This Generation's Arnold Palmer'—Tiger Woods Is

Posted: 25 Jul 2013 04:23 AM PDT

golf-cover-two.jpg
AP / Gerald Herbet, Scott Heppell, David Goldman

After Phil Mickelson pulled off one the great final-round comebacks in golf history to win the British Open on Sunday, he basked in the adulation of an overjoyed crowd at the Muirfield course in Scotland. Spectators had abandoned their fervent support of a hometown hero, Englishman Lee Westwood, to back Lefty down the stretch.

In those moments, Mickelson reminded many fans--and sportswriters--of a similarly winsome "people's champion" who reigned at the British Open more than half a century ago.

"Mickelson has been this generation's Arnold Palmer: exciting, daring to the point of self-destruction, charismatic, fan-friendly, and flawed," former Sports Illustrated veteran E.M. Swift wrote in a blog post. A New York Times article on the victory referred to Mickelson and Tiger Woods as "the Arnold Palmer and [Jack] Nicklaus of their day," and even the most casual golf fan knows that "Mickelson = Palmer" in the Times' analogy.

The comparison is easy enough to make. Both men played a high-risk style of golf, taking big gambles on key shots in search of even greater rewards. Both were overshadowed by a less emotionally available but more successful golfer. And both had overwhelming fan support, perhaps because of their image as wholesome, all-American family men.

But is Mickelson really the 21st-century Palmer? A closer look at their careers and lives suggests that while their golfing styles were of a piece, Palmer's massive celebrity appeal and effect on the sport make him more like Mickelson's chief rival, Tiger.

On the course, Mickelson reminds many golf fans--especially those from the Boomer generation--of Palmer. The King, as Palmer was known, attacked every hole of every round with the same fervor, whether he was five behind, five ahead, or tied. The defining Palmer moment may have been his final round at Colorado's Cherry Hills Country Club in the 1960 U.S. Open: Starting seven shots back of third-round leader Mick Souchak, Palmer drove the green on the par-4 first hole and birdied six of his first seven holes on his way to a final-round 65 and the victory. Palmer's lowest career moment was the flip side of that coin: Up seven strokes with just nine holes left in the 1966 U.S. Open, he refused to play it safe and finished four over par on his final nine, eventually losing a 18-hole playoff to Billy Casper.

Mickelson's career highlights--and lowlights--have followed a similar pattern. The defining shot for Lefty is probably his six-iron off the pine straw at Augusta National's par-5 13th hole in the 2010 Masters, where he scoffed at laying up and proceeded to drill a shot under a pine tree, over a creek, and onto the green five feet from the hole. Commentators had a field day at the British Open last week when Mickelson declared that "a smart shot is not having the guts to go for the big shot," and Mickelson's 310-yard three-wood shot off the fairway on the 71st hole was emblematic of that philosophy.

Mickelson's greatest heartbreak came at the 2006 U.S. Open, where he didn't have the brains to go for the "smart shot" with a one-stroke lead on the 18th tee on Sunday. Playing it safe wasn't in Arnold Palmer's DNA 40 years before, and it wasn't in Mickelson's that day, either: He ended up double-bogeying the hole when a simple par would have been good enough to win.

After that brutal loss, Mickelson said of his aggressive play on the final hole, "I'm an idiot." One can imagine Palmer making that statement to his buddies, with the same rueful grin, after blowing his seven-shot lead at the '66 Open. Palmer wouldn't win any more majors for the rest of his career, and Mickelson still has never won the U.S. Open. (It's now the only tournament he needs to win to complete the career Grand Slam. He has finished second a staggering six times.)

The swashbuckling style of both men endeared them to on-course crowds and TV viewers alike. Palmer was the most popular athlete in the world (with the possible exception of Pele) between 1958 and 1964; he was ruggedly handsome with a boyish excitement for golf that was on display every time he bounded down the fairway towards his ball after a particularly good shot. Mickelson, with his omnipresent smile and candid personality, has always been a crowd favorite, and his public struggle to play on after his wife and mother were diagnosed with breast cancer in 2009 cemented his reputation as an All-American family man. Earlier this year, he skipped practice rounds at the U.S. Open to attend his daughter's eighth-grade graduation.

But as popular as Mickelson is, he does not enjoy the universal adulation that Palmer had. The King had Arnie's Army, one of the most rabid fan bases devoted to an individual athlete in sports history. He was the first client of Mark McCormack's International Management Group, now IMG, which became one of the most sought-after sports agencies in the world on Palmer's broad shoulders. And he stands alongside child star Shirley Temple in a tiny, exclusive club as historical figures with a popular, mass-produced drink named after them.

Mickelson, while popular, cannot measure up to those public accolades. He is--and has been for the bulk of his career--the perpetual sideshow to Woods, both on and off the course. And though Nicklaus's career accomplishments outshone Palmer's, the King was second to none in public acclaim.

Mickelson's popularity may never live up to Palmer's in part because he's unlucky enough to be playing in the all-knowing Information Age. When Mickelson complained that state taxes in his home state of California were too high and suggested he might leave for greener income-tax pastures (perhaps joining Woods and many other golfers in Florida), he was excoriated by many for being out of touch with the problems of ordinary Americans. But if Palmer had made similarly tone-deaf remarks at a pre-tournament press conference, the world at large would never have known about it. And rumors--like those about Mickelson's purported degenerate gambling--would never have gained traction with the public, simply because knowledge was not the universally available commodity it is today.

Palmer's effect on golf's popularity also far surpasses Mickelson's--and is actually more similar to the mini-boom Tiger created when he burst onto the scene in the late 1990s. Palmer's popularity crested as televisions were becoming readily available--the 1958 Masters (Palmer's first win at Augusta) featured television coverage for the first time. With his go-for-broke style, rugged good looks, and legion of on-course fans, Arnie and his Army took golf out of the country clubs and onto the national stage. The resulting increase in popularity (and purses) was massive.

Palmer's effect on golf's popularity far surpasses Mickelson's--and is actually more similar to the mini-boom Tiger created when he burst onto the scene in the late 1990s. Arnie and his Army took golf out of the country clubs and onto the national stage.

Woods brought about a similar groundswell of popularity in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when his trademark fist-pumps, iconic Nike ad, and overall dominance of the sport brought the game to the Millennial generation. Though Mickelson was popular then and is more so now, his presence in a tournament would never affect TV ratings or attendance the way a Tiger Woods appearance would.

To put it simply, Woods has been superior to Mickelson in the last decade or so both in trophy count and in overall popularity. Palmer, meanwhile, had the fan advantage while Nicklaus won more titles and majors in their rivalry. So even though Palmer's on-course style mirrored Mickelson's, his legacy in terms of spreading the popularity of the game is Tiger-esque.

Mickelson, though, has an opportunity to do something Arnie Palmer never could: craft a legacy in the twilight of his career. Palmer won his last major at 34, coming up short several more times over the next five years before his putter let him down for good. Mickelson, meanwhile, has won four of his five majors since turning 35. With a win at the U.S. Open, Mickelson would complete the career Grand Slam that eluded Palmer (who could never win the PGA Championship).

But even if Mickelson wins the U.S. Open or captures another Masters title to equal Palmer and Woods at four, he will never have the ineffable magnetism of the King.

    

Privacy Buffs vs. Surveillance Statists: A House of Representatives Divided

Posted: 25 Jul 2013 03:18 AM PDT

NSAdishes.banner.reuters.jpg.jpg
Reuters

On Tuesday, a bipartisan alliance of civil liberty-minded Republicans and Democrats in the House of Representatives declared their opposition to the surveillance state as it currently operates.

Two hundred and five members of Congress voted to stop the NSA from indiscriminately collecting data on all phone calls made by everyone in the U.S. Their efforts fell short by a 12-vote margin. "The raucous and passionate debate exposed deep divisions in Congress over the propriety of the surveillance, contrary to assertions by the Obama administration and its allies that Congress had already granted its approval for the effort before it became public," Spencer Ackerman writes. "The Obama administration, the intelligence agencies and their allies in Congress made an all-out push to quash the amendment after it unexpectedly made it past the House rules committee."

The New York Times reports:

Conservative Republicans leery of what they see as Obama administration abuses of power teamed up with liberal Democrats long opposed to intrusive intelligence programs. The Obama administration made common cause with the House Republican leadership to try to block it.

Surveillance statists Nancy Pelosi and Michele Bachmann even voted together.

Although the amendment dealt only with collection of phone metadata, it's fair to think of the vote as a proxy for an even larger question: Is it prudent, legal or necessary for the federal government to collect sensitive information from everyone -- even tens of millions of innocent Americans suspected of nothing -- in order to thwart terrorists? The fight over that question will remain among the biggest and most consequential of our era. Technology now makes it possible for the government to track almost everything about the lives of hundreds of millions of people: who they call, text, and email; everyone who writes them by post; their physical location; where they spend money when using credit or debit cards; where they drive, at least in their own vehicle; the contours of their face, with enough specificity to be recognized by a camera; the structure of their DNA; and perhaps more that we don't know about. Surveillance drones have already taken to domestic skies, too.

Is it appropriate in a free society for government to hoover up and store as much information on everyone as possible? Or should government only spy on Americans reasonably suspected of wrongdoing? Thanks to Tuesday's vote, which wouldn't have happened without Edward Snowden's leaks, voters now have their elected representatives on record about where they stand. 

That is a vital thing in a democracy! Don't like the position they've taken? The next election is coming up in 2014. Personally, I'd like to see every last elected official who voted against this attempted reform ousted from office. I don't care if they're beat by primary challengers or in a general election. It seems to me that the American people should send a message to the NSA apologists: The U.S. has managed to flourish for decades without spying on all its citizens, and it should continue to do so.

Who are these NSA supporters who think it's okay to hoover and store phone data about all Americans? Here's the list (with Democrats in boldface). Find your representative here if you don't know who it is.

***

Aderholt, Alexander, Andrews, Bachmann, Barber, Barr, Barrow (GA), Benishek, Bera (CA), Bilirakis, Bishop (GA), Bishop (NY), Boehner, Bonner, Boustany, Brady (TX), Brooks (AL), Brooks (IN), Brown (FL), Brownley (CA), Bucshon, Butterfield, Calvert, Camp, Cantor, Capito, Carney, Carter, Castor (FL), Castro (TX), Cole, Collins (GA), Collins (NY), Conaway, Cook, Cooper, Costa, Cotton, Crawford, Crenshaw, Cuellar, Culberson, Davis (CA), Delaney, Denham, Dent, Diaz-Balart, Duckworth, Ellmers, Engel, Enyart, Esty, Flores, Forbes, Fortenberry, Foster, Foxx, Frankel (FL), Franks (AZ), Frelinghuysen, Gallego, Garcia, Gerlach, Gibbs, Gingrey (GA), Goodlatte, Granger, Graves (MO), Green A., Grimm, Guthrie, Gutiérrez, Hanabusa, Hanna, Harper, Hartzler, Hastings (WA), Heck (NV), Heck (WA), Hensarling, Higgins, Himes, Hinojosa, Holding, Hoyer, Hudson, Hunter, Hurt, Israel, Issa, Lee Jackson, Johnson (GA), Johnson EB, Johnson S, Joyce, Kaptur, Kelly (IL), Kelly (PA), Kennedy, Kilmer, Kind, King (IA), King (NY), Kinzinger (IL), Kirkpatrick, Kline, Kuster, Lance, Langevin, Lankford, Larsen (WA), Latham, Latta, Levin, Lipinski, LoBiondo, Long, Lowey, Lucas, Luetkemeyer, Sean Maloney, Marino, Matheson, McCarthy (CA), McCaul, McIntyre, McKeon, McKinley, McNerney, Meehan, Meeks, Meng, Messer, Miller (FL), Miller (MI), Murphy (FL), Murphy (PA), Neugebauer, Noem, Nunes, Nunnelee, Olson, Palazzo, Paulsen, Payne, Pelosi, Peters (CA), Peters (MI), Peterson, Pittenger, Pitts, Pompeo, Price (NC), Quigley, Reed, Reichert, Renacci, Rigell, Roby, Rogers (AL), Rogers (KY), Rogers (MI), Rooney, Ros-Lehtinen, Roskam, Royce, Ruiz, Runyan, Ruppersberger, Ryan (OH), Ryan (WI), Schakowsky, Schneider, Schwartz, Scott A, Scott D, Sessions, Sewell (AL), Shimkus, Shuster, Simpson, Sinema, Sires, Slaughter, Smith (NE), Smith (TX), Smith (WA), Stivers, Stutzman, Terry, Thompson (CA), Thornberry, Tiberi, Titus, Turner, Upton, Valadao, Van Hollen, Vargas, Veasey, Visclosky, Wagner, Walberg, Walden, Walorski, Wasserman Schultz, Webster (FL), Wenstrup, Westmoreland, Whitfield, Wilson (FL), Wittman, Wolf, Womack, Woodall, Young (FL), Young (IN)

    
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)