Acta non verba

From a Washington Post Article:
"Earlier yesterday, White House spokesman Trent Duffy said the president was confident he could monitor events effectively without returning to Washington or making public statements in Crawford, where he spent part of the day clearing brush and bicycling. Explaining the about-face, a White House official said: "The president wanted to be fully briefed on our efforts. He didn't want to make a symbolic statement about 'We feel your pain.' "

"Many Bush aides believe Clinton was too quick to head for the cameras to hold forth on tragedies with his trademark empathy. 'Actions speak louder than words,' a top Bush aide said, describing the president's view of his appropriate role. "

Hmmmm... Actions speak louder than words... I would definitely agree

Aid for Tsunami victims: $15 million... ok fine, fine... $35 million

Total Bill for upcoming presidential inauguration: $40 million

How much more clearly can you express your own fanatical degree of self-absorbtion? Hey, here's an idea, how about we take the $40 million dollars and throw an innauguration party by helping out Indonesia and making nice with their substantial Muslim population. That could be a triumph of public relations, but alas, it is not to be... how the hell do you spend $40 million on a party, anyway?

Wo you gouzi, Ni you gouzi, Dajia you gouzi

I stood in an elevator last night with a poodle that was dressed in a pink cardigan. The elevator was crowded which forced its owner to hold her precious by its front paws. For the eight floor ascent I stared into the eyes of this highly manicured, pink cardigan-wearing poodle, standing on its hind legs. It had a look of profound confusion in its eyes, as though something were not quite right, but it couldn't quite put its paw on what exactly was off. I shared a moment of empathy with the dog and got off when we reached my floor.
I've been wandering around Beijing more lately, despite its frigidity. Dogs really are popular in this city, a relatively recent phenomenon. Crowds of people over 60 meander about the streets at night doing taichi exercises and talking about their dogs. Gaggles of extremely well-insulated elderly people stand in groups and discuss the relative ferocity of the terrier to the maltese it just tried to hump. Construction is always going on in Beijing on subways and skyscrapers and roads and bridges and new high rise penthouses. Workers come in from the countryside to work on these sites and construction is literally going on 24 hr. a day. They live on site in temporary plastic buildings. There is one bed for every two workers, because one crew is always on. I was standing behind a gent yesterday who is working on the new subway station just outside my apartment. I was overwhelmed by how different our lives are and yet we have such a fundamental, shared humanity. The word for paradox in Chinese is ??(maodun) "mao" means spear, "dun" means shield. The story behind the word is that one day there was a merchant in Beijing who was proclaiming to have the best spear in all the land that could pierce any shield and could never be broken. He also had a shield for sale that could defend its carrier against the blow of any weapon and likewise could never be broken. The business sense of Chinese folks goes back quite a long way.

Audentes fortuna juvat

I'm not sure if folks are looking for Emergency numbers, but I found these on the CNN website:

To contact representatives from India, call +91 11 2309 3054

To reach Thailand, call their emergency hotline at +66 2643 5262 and 2643 5000

For information about local residents in Sri Lanka, call +94 11 536 1938, for tourists the number is +94 11 243 7061

In the Maldives, the government hotline is +44 20 7224 2149

For more information on travelers in the Seychelles, call +248 321 676


In unrelated news, I just listened to a recent Democracy Now! episode that included an incredible speech by Bill Moyers. You can download it from here It was a recent speech he gave in Madison, WI about the threats facing democracy and the free press. Here's a snippet I found particularly astute:

"So, what would happen if the contending giants of big government and big publishing and big broadcasting ever joined hands? Ever saw eye-to-eye in putting the public’s need for news, second to free market economics? That is exactly what is happening now under the banner of deregulation. Giant, mega-media conglomerates that our founders couldn’t have possibly envisioned, finding common cause with the imperial state, a betrothal certain to produce more bastards, and even fewer sons and daughters of liberty than the old arranged marriage of church and state."

There's something about Moyer's speeches that are always rousing. Granted, he tends to use flowery, baroque language and at times can be a bit melodramatic, but hey, we are living in melodramatic times. I think what is so powerful about Moyers' speeches is where he is coming from. He is someone who still believes in the promise of participatory government, who still believes in the possibility of a free and open press and who is willing to fight for these ideals. His enthusiasm is, no doubt, contagious.
So, anyway, give it a listen. The first minute of the file is garbled on my machine, but it's just introductory remarks, so no worries.

requiescat in pace

A rather numbing reality: 26,000 souls lost to the ocean and the number's increasing by the thousands with each report. I'm pretty sure that it's situations like this that caused humans to come up with concept of prayer. When so much suffering takes place and an individual is left powerless to do anything about it, one's psychological situation demands some sort of path for the individual to attempt to connect with the tragedy. Why is that such a common phenomenon, I wonder? Could it be that events such as this suggest a certain meaningless or chaotic nature of the universe, which for many can challenge the existence of an omnipotent, benevolent God? It might remind one of the riddle of Epicurus:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

Perhaps prayer springs from the irrational sense of guilt people commonly feel about freak situations such as this most recent tragedy, i.e. why those people? why not me? etc...
I'm pretty fuzzy on the "why" behind this, but I know that I feel the impulse to pray almost every day. My own personal reasoning behind prayer has proceeded after the fact, rather than prior to the impulse. My understanding of prayer basically follows the standard pop-psychological-quantum physics-chaos theory line, in the sense that intention seems to be a distinct pattern of electrical impulses in the brain. Likewise the universe we occupy is more or less a whole field of Electromagnetic forces. Like with the butterfly effect, which states that small changes in initial conditions lead to large variations in future configurations of certain systems, it seems that generating such a pattern of compassion might lead to the propagation of similar patterns on a larger scale, manifesting in the life of another person, or at the level of a whole community, or even the entire planet.
Then again, this could all be mal-informed sophomoric clap chap. But hell, it makes for an interesting outlook, so I figure I'll stick with it, and likewise with praying. I'd encourage those of you who think prayer is bullshit to put your skepticism to the side just for a moment and just try and send some compassionate thoughts in the direction of the countless people who are suffering right now. What's there to lose really?

I wish I didn't always forget so many things

Beijing's getting colder. The snow is falling steadily. In certain places it piles up into tempting promises of frivolity, in others it dissolves into filth and slush. But such is life, I suppose. Same source, different outcomes.

I don't go shopping for groceries here, because it's actually cheaper to eat at restaurants than it is to cook yourself. Besides, we don't have an oven. Oven's come at extreme premium in Beijing. My co-worker Cathy told me her oven cost as much as her entire kitchen. Nobody seems to know what the explanation for this phenomenon is. I smell a business opportunity baking for someone with a keen wit. I, however, will continue in my present station. It's predictable, insulated and above all else, comfortable. A cubicle lifestyle has the capacity to bleed into the rest of one's existence. Cubicles are uniform, separating and force a person to be single minded about a task they probably wouldn't be interested in naturally. It's been enlightening to see this type of psychology, and realize I want no part of it whatsoever. Indeed, Surya, I believe you are correct in thinking that a corporate lifestyle would change you. I've noticed changes in the way that I think and behave, and I'm grateful for the fact that I will be finished with this in 1 month's time. We're meant to be free, creative entities, not slaves to task lists and flow charts. In such an environment the relevance of life is reduced to the service of corporate interests and increasing the profitability of people for whom you may have compassion for, but certainly don't like. It seems like a good question to ask when we are considering significant life choices is "How is this going to change me?" It takes a special mind to not be influenced by the cultural paradigm one is dropped into. The corporate paradigm definitely has an effect on a person, because at the basis of it, you need people who are obedient. Hence the obsession with people who have college degrees, we've been taught to jump through hoops and we didn't say 'fuck this' mid-training. Hence, there's a bit of a stamp of approval. Again, this is a general observation, and far from any sort of universal rule. There is, of course, that whole acquisition of knowledge that takes place during tertiary education which is valuable. However, the process of socialization that takes place shouldn't be disregarded either. It seems from my college experience, the interest was not in creating free thinkers, but efficient workers.

Regardless, i would suggest traveling the world, working on fishing boats, picking vegetables, working the land, writing novels, spinning fire, eating out of trash bins, riding on cargo trains, painting murals, making sandwiches, building communities, doing what you gotta do to get by, but i would never suggest selling yourself for the comfort of a cubicle. It is fleeting and false.

Approaching rediculous degrees of optimism

An Open Statement from Rep. Ron Paul:

â€In 2002 I asked my House colleagues a rhetorical question with regard to the onslaught of government growth in the post-September 11 th era: Is America becoming a police state?

The question is no longer rhetorical. We are not yet living in a total police state, but it is fast approaching. The seeds of future tyranny have been sown, and many of our basic protections against government have been undermined. The atmosphere since 2001 has permitted Congress to create whole new departments and agencies that purport to make us safer- always at the expense of our liberty. But security and liberty go hand-in-hand. Members of Congress, like too many Americans, don’t understand that a society with no constraints on its government cannot be secure. History proves that societies crumble when their governments become more powerful than the people and private institutions.

Unfortunately, the new intelligence bill passed by Congress two weeks ago moves us closer to an encroaching police state by imposing the precursor to a full-fledged national ID card. Within two years, every American will need a “conforming” ID to deal with any federal agency-- including TSA at the airport.

Undoubtedly many Americans and members of Congress don’t believe America is becoming a police state, which is reasonable enough. They associate the phrase with highly visible symbols of authoritarianism like military patrols, martial law, and summary executions. But we ought to be concerned that we have laid the foundation for tyranny by making the public more docile, more accustomed to government bullying, and more accepting of arbitrary authority- all in the name of security. Our love for liberty above all has been so diminished that we tolerate intrusions into our privacy that would have been abhorred just a few years ago. We tolerate inconveniences and infringements upon our liberties in a manner that reflects poorly on our great national character of rugged individualism. American history, at least in part, is a history of people who don’t like being told what to do. Yet we are increasingly empowering the federal government and its agents to run our lives.

Terror, fear, and crises like 9-11 are used to achieve complacency and obedience, especially when citizens are deluded into believing they are still a free people. The loss of liberty, we are assured, will be minimal, short-lived, and necessary. Many citizens believe that once the war on terror is over, restrictions on their liberties will be reversed. But this war is undeclared and open-ended, with no precise enemy and no expressly stated final goal. Terrorism will never be eradicated completely; does this mean future presidents will assert extraordinary war powers indefinitely?"

To Further beg this point, one of the more unsavory aspects that has emerged from the recently released FBI documents suggests that an Executive Order actually authorized the use of torture on detainees. This email written by an "On scene commander in Baghdad," continually refers to an Executive Order that authorized the use of "sleep deprivation, stress positions, loud music, etc..." Though the White House denies that any such order exists and argues that the agent who wrote the email was mistaken, this kind of thinking is consistent with that of general counsel to the President Alberto Gonzalez, our soon to be Attorney General, who seems to view the Geneva Conventions as a quaint artifact of history and certainly not something that should restrain the movements of Bush or the United States military/intelligence community.

One of the most troubling aspects of all of this is the complete arrogance with which our public officials are conducting business. I found it particularly poignant that Rumsfeld can't be bothered to sign condolence letters to the families of fallen soldiers. What sort of vision are these people connecting with exactly? These people are not pursuing freedom and Democracy as an honorable cause, fighting the specter of tyranny and terrorism. Truth be told, WE ARE THE TERRORISTS! You, me, most likely the person sitting next to you if you're reading this in the United States. We as Americans supplied Israel with $2.16 billion in military aid in 2004, which has gone to the continual destruction of Palestinian homes, and Olive Tree orchards, because olives are obviously a significant security threat. We bought the bombs and bullets and paid the salaries of the occupying force in Iraq, leaving US with the blood of 100,000 Iraqis is on OUR hands. We created Al Qaeda, We made Osama Bin Laden, We supported Saddam, We, as Americans, have been instrumental in creating, or have benefited from the fruits of genocide, brutality, murder, and tyranny. This is our history, and there is nothing you can do about the past other than to learn from it…. Exactly, LEARN FROM IT!

September 11th was a window that we unfortunately missed. It was a moment where we could have re-evaluated our relationship with the rest of the world and realized that there are consequences to our manipulation of the rest of the world. It was an opportunity to realize that if we continue to commit acts of state-sponsored terrorism, we will become the victim of terrorism. It is not due to an irrational hatred of freedom on the part of terrorists that we were attacked and continue to be tartgeted. Bin Laden made a concise statement in the tape that he released just prior to the Presidential election. “If we hate freedom so much, why don’t we attack Sweden?” The evil doers are not nuggets of evil that sprang from the bowels of Satan to challenge us good Christian souls. They are human beings that have come from a particular context, a particular society, and in the case of the Middle East and Afghanistan, a context that has been highly manipulated by the United States for our own interests. I hope I am stating the obvious here for most of the people reading this. If such is the case, I’d like to ask you, “What have you done to save your country from tyranny today?”

Despite my meandering tirades, it seems like it would be a helpful meditation to realize that we are all in this together and that we are all equally to blame for the state of things. Likewise, it’s up to us to change the course of things.

Freedom at any cost

For some lucid reading, one might want to peruse FBI documents recently released to the ACLU
It gives a bit of a glimpse into how the DOD is increasingly using torture to obtain information from detainees. It also makes for some decent surrealist literature. In one email, a member of the FBI that witnessed a Defense Department interrogation states: “I saw [a] detainee sitting on the floor of the interview room with an Israeli flag draped around him, loud music being played and a strobe light flashing. I left the monitoring room immediately after seeing this activity. I did not see any other persons inside the interview room with the Israeli flag draped detainee, but suspect that this was a practice used by DOD DHS . . .”

moraunic

I've been mulling over whether or not to become involved with political organizing lately. Seems it doesn't make sense to keep bitching about the state of things if I don't do anything about it. The dilemma that has arisen for me in this meditation is what role I might be able to serve. Well, I think I've found my inroad:



This is a photo of a recent press conference held by President Bush. I would direct your attention at the spelling of the word "challanges." What better application of a Linguistics degree could there be than that of presidential spell checker? History will remember this day, no doubt.

insanity in Wudaokou

I'm curious if anybody experienced a flood of insanity over the past few days. A lot of people I've been talking with recently have been talking about how they've felt on edge, psychologically. Last night, as I was eating yangrou chuar (meat on a stick, cooked outside over coals on dingy aluminum trays.. best stuff on earth, by the way,) in a predominantly expat district, I became aware of the sounds of fighting breaking out behind me. Glancing over, sure enough, there were three guys in a bit of a tussle. I looked back at my chuar, because meat on a stick is an easier phenomenon to deal with and much less dangerous than human violence. However, the fight was escalating and I finally could not remain entranced with mutton skewers. Turning around I saw an African American gent on the ground and a Chinese girl stooped down and holding him. He started screaming something to the effect of "jesus christ, my knee's broken.” Me and another fella, got him onto his remaining good leg and took him inside a coffee shop to wait for an ambulance to arrive. Apparently it was his first and I can only imagine his last trip to Wudaokou. He was whisked off to the hospital after about a 20 minute wait. The ambulance arrived in 10 minutes, but the bureaucratic nature of this country demanded that the authorities stand around this guy, who was start to show signs of going into shock, and chat about various details of the assault.
Racism is quite rampant in this country. There is the notion that the Han Chinese, who make up the vast majority of the population are somehow entitled to greater benefits. This is validated mythologically through the notion that the Han are the direct descendents of Huang Huangdi, or the Yellow Emperor, who was the fabled first emperor of China and the originator of Chinese culture. Thus, the minority groups here tend to get a bit shafted. There's crazy discrimination against Manchu's, partly because the Han figure the Manchu's screwed up during the Qing Dynasty, when all the imperial powers moved into the middle kingdom. As far as the situation of the Uiguhrs and the Tibetans, is concerned, the government is pursuing a policy of "Hannification" of these groups, basically providing incentives for Han Chinese "settlers" to move into XinJiang and Tibet and develop new infrastructure, along with injecting their view of the universe into these populations. Most all government contracts in these areas are awarded to Han's, providing little in the way of increased opportunities for the local populations. While roads and basic services in these areas have no doubt been improved, it has come at the cost of cultural degeneration. In the case of the Tibetans, alcoholism is becoming rampant, as the Chinese have established bars and made alcohol easily accessible. It seems like someone in the government took some strategies from the American playbook of Western expansion, as the situation looks quite similar to the latter leg of our Native American policy. Despite the distaste for ethnic minorities, the largest portion of racism is reserved for black folks. Why the particular distaste for this group, I've yet to hear an explanation for. Someone mentioned once, in passing, that there is a running debate between where the birthplace of humans is. A number of Chinese continue to maintain that Peking Man is the earliest example of homo sapien, despite the overwhelming evidence that Africa was the cradle of our species' birth. Regardless, there is this notion that there is some resentment amongst Chinese folks for this "dispute."
This is an intensely proud culture. It's no coincidence the Chinese word for China "Zhongguo," means, middle kingdom, or center of the world. This cosmology persisted until the white devils showed up in the 19th century and spoiled the party. Still, this idea of centrality holds sway, and manifests itself in violent ways at times, as I witnessed last night. This, of course, should not be taken as an indication of Chinese people as a whole. There is a strong distaste for conflict, and most Chinese folks will go to just about any length to avoid open confrontation. As a footnote, apparently the same guy that assaulted my new American friend had also beaten up a little girl earlier in the evening. I suppose you have folks like that in any society. Still, there is a tension that seems to be brewing. Apparently, riotous acts increased 15% this year, and this is popping up not just amongst ethnic minorities, but also Han farmers in rural areas who are feeling a bit slighted about the unequal economic growth taking place. It will be interesting to watch how the government chooses to deal with this growing phenomenon. Another Tian'an Men massacre is not feasible, seeing as China is so much more enmeshed in the global community at present, perhaps further fodder for the argument that trade improves the lot of everyone. Time will tell.

Guns of Brixton

So, now that I have a conduit to the rest of the world, I suppose I should start working on becoming interesting. Many friends have written me over the past few weeks inquiring as to why such an oppressive silence has been issuing from my general direction of the universe. There are a number of reasons behind this phenomenon, not least of which is the fact that I have found myself more or less institutionalized within my company here in beijing. It's an interesting process that unfolds as a person becomes more entrenched in a predictable cycle of survival. There is a tendency to begin to attribute most of one's experiences to one's corporate masters. Indeed, such has been my fate of recent, further proving the point that going to interesting places does not necessarily make one more interesting.
Living in Beijing has been a different experience the second time around. All the qualities of the city that caused me to wander about in pie-eyed wonder last time have given way to the sense that things are just as they are. In other words, it would surprise me if things were otherwise, which might suggest that I've been acculturated. No real tellin’.
Ok, let's see. For those of you who had the misfortune of joining my email list, not much has changed since I came back from the Great Wall. America had an election, with a painfully predictable outcome. I went to Hong Kong and had the good fortune of hanging out with Saki and Digs, which was grand. The life and vibrancy of Hong Kong is a stark contrast with Beijing. Beijing in the winter is an awkward place. Recently things finally started to get freezing cold. Today was the first snow of the year. Along with the cold comes the crack-fiend-like burning of coal and an accompanying general fog/smog that tends to enshroud anything further than 50 ft. from a person. Still I must say I have a deep love for the aesthetic of Beijing that can only be described as "gritty." And thus, I remain.
The curtain has been pulled back a bit for me this time around. I've had more opportunities to talk candidly with Chinese folks, and they've been expressing a number of concerns that seem to strike deep at foundation of this society. One of my English students (second job,) is a lady in her mid-thirties. She expressed to me that a number of her friends who are the same age are all extremely successful professionally. They have achieved the culturally dictated apex, but are fundamentally unhappy, because they are lonely. While alienation is not a rare phenomenon in the world, her take was that they are lonely because they sacrificed the pursuit of family and relationships in the name of their careers. It gives one pause to see how the ego-driven necessity for economic dominance tends to eliminate the possibility of substantial human relationships. A tendency, not a law. It reminds me of my chat with Dzogchen Rinpoche last year when he told me that the Buddhism in China is a joke, because everyone is chasing wealth. His conclusion was that he'd just have to be patient and wait for people to realize that material wealth does not beget the satisfaction they originally thought, before the ground would be fertile for people to try and begin approaching questions of benevolence or compassion. Of course, how long of a wait is the question (Exhibit A: Present American Foreign Policy)
So, it seems that we should perhaps stop waiting for things to happen and actively engage the world with the paradigms that we want to see emerge. This has been a flash point lately, as I'm a bit fed up with thinking and talking about how things should be. This seems to be a symptom of the Progressive movement in the United States. In the stead of actually taking direct action, we just seem to have a bunch of rallies to talk about how things shouldn't be. I'm sure we've all been through the checklist before: no more GW, no more GMO, no more WTO, no more globalization, no more closed government, no more war in Iraq, no more drug war, etc.. ad infinitum.
Of course, here’s the paradox. I’m here just writing about it, feeling somewhat powerless sitting here in Beijing to do much about the present state of affairs, which for survival reasons is probably a good idea, seeing as I live in an authoritarian nation. I recently read on Spiegel Online that though there are no firm statistics on the number of executions in China, the estimate is that the number hovers around 10,000 per year. No doubt, the Chinese government kills more people per year than any other nation, so long as the data set is restrained to a country’s own citizens. Unfortunately our own United States has the dubious honor of killing the largest number of people per year… and for what? I’m left wondering.
So, there you have it, a concise summation of three months spent in ponderous, self-indulgent vacuity. I hope it was worth the wait.

You can kill the revolutionary, but you can't kill the revolution

Like a lemming to the sea I am, scuttling over a cliff to a fate much more pleasurable than that usually met by lemmings. Indeed, I have joined the nomadlife community. I haven't felt such feeling of deliverance since my baptism at age .7

Here you will find the various rants, webs of conspiracy, self-indulgent tirades, bouts of magical realist writing, punctuated with interludes in foreign languages, random news tidbits and reports from the ground. Hopefully fnord.nomadlife.org will become a phenomenon. It will be a happening. It will be something more than an annotation to history. I envision this blog along with those of my comrades in arms to be a force that people in the future will point to and think, "wah?" because that's all you can really say when you are faced with such momentum, such visceral power that arises from the delicate combination of chaos and precision that one sees in this community. I believe we have the necessary alchemy to persist in the memetic war for cognitive liberty and a just society. So it is, I raise the Jolly Roger in my corner of cyber space and with a hearty "arrrrrgghh," mark my re-entry into the disinformation war.