Random thoughts about a variety of subjects from a couple of middle-aged white guys who are not qualified to comment on much. Lack of credentials never stopped us from having a take before, nor will it now.
I have no idea how I wound up on a blog entitled Xinjiang: Far West China, but that is one of the best parts about just random surfing. You find something good/great, but couldn't retrace your steps to save your life.
Well, I don't want to lose this one, and I can think of a few CIT readers who will be interested to tune in. The author is a 20-something American named Josh, who has lived in a large town/small city in Xinjiang for three or four years. He and his American wife teach English, do some travel writing, and, it seems, spend a lot of time traveling the province on their second hand motorcycle, taking pictures, writing, and generally living as big an adventure as seems possible in the 21st Century.
I am fascinated by Xinjiang. It is, to me at least, as far off the beaten path as anywhere on the planet, yet has a history which goes back thousands of years. Josh's blog is a completely different, and very informative, view of this beautiful and remote place.
Go check it out. Drop Josh a note. Tell him CIT sent you!
Thailand has long been as close to democracy as there is in Southeast Asia, and has a proud tradition as the only country in the region to not be dominated by the Euros (or, at least not colonized by said Euros). However, it's certainly no peaceable kingdom. Coups, military governments, and violent protest are nothing new. At least it's easy to figure out which side is which.
I don't pretend to know the details on this one, nor do I have any insight whatsoever regarding who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. However, I do have some built-in skepticism which I feel compelled to voice:
1. Am I the only one who is suspicious of huge popular movements which can rally 100,000 or more poor, illiterate farmers from isolated, rural parts of the country? I know, I know, the US Civil Rights Movement did exactly that in a responsible and productive manner. But seriously, how often has that been repeated on the world stage? Isn't it a bit more common to see someone mobilizing this sort of crowd to benefit themselves? Or am I getting overly cynical in my dodderhood?
2. The former PM, Thaksin Shinawatra, who was ousted in 2006 on charges of corruption and graft, has been in self-imposed exile in Dubai for the past 3 or 4 years. If he were in exile in Laos, or Taiwan, or even Hoboken, I'd be a bit more sympathetic. But Dubai? Really?
3. The red-shirt movement appears to be running out of gas and money. The current wave of protest is seen as the last gasp before irrelevancy. Leaders are promising non-violence, but lets wait on the Nobel Prize for a few days. As the protest sputters to a halt, does the leadership get a bit more desperate?
I try not to be overly cynical, but sometimes, events on the World News page seem to invite it.
Tom, you are my hero (well, you and Big Al). You make so much sense, suggest such brilliant solutions, and generally agree with me on almost everything. I would like to formally submit my application to join the "Tom Friedman Mentoring Society". I may also get a "Tom Freidman is My Hero" t-shirt to go along with the "Al Gore is My Hero" shirt already in my closet.
Not kidding about the t-shirt. The sentiment happens to be true; I am a supporter of We Can Solve It and Repower America, but the shirt itself is a good way to start an argument in good old suburban North Texas.
At any rate, My Other Hero Tom wrote in yesterday's NYT about the current state of the jihad. Did you notice the radical Islamists are losing the War of Terror? Well, they are.
As Tom so deftly points out, everywhere the the Beardy Boys have taken charge (Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan, Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, etc), they have brought with them total economic stagnation (if not outright retreat), lowered standards of living and education, unnecessary and unwanted violence, repression, etc etc etc. And now we're seeing militant Islamists lose elections (Lebanon, Iraq) or steal elections (Iran). The Paki middle class is tired of bombs in the streets of Peshwar and have withdrawn support for the Taliban and foreign rebels causing trouble in the Northwest.
The bad news is that the US' friends in the Arab world, those shining examples of secular, progressive, populist democracy like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, are not really "winning", despite their medieval rivals' decline. This lack of a better idea is what keeps the jihadists in business, albeit in a much more limited capacity.
Go read the op-ed, along with everything Tom Friedman has ever written. The man's a genius.
In case you've been living under a rock for the past 4 or so days, ethnic tensions in the far western Chinese province of Xinjiang have boiled over in the most serious of manners.
Its still down to who you listen to regarding causes and exactly who has done what to whom. However, it's safe to say the indigenous Uighurs (Muslims with ethnic and religious ties to other Central Asians like the Tajiks, Kyrgyz, and Kazakhs) and the relatively-recent immigrant Han (the majority ethnicity in the rest of China), who have been sorta grinding up against each other for years, and not in a good way, have finally blown off a lot of steam. Mob violence seemed to rule the streets of Urumqi, the capital city of the province, earlier in the week. State media reports 150+ killed, thousands arrested, and who-knows-how-much property damage.
The images coming out of Urumqi this week are some of the scariest you will ever see.
This first YouTube clip is not for the faint of heart. Lots of blood and bodies; you get some sort of sense early in the clip of the chaos of the street. I'm not sure where this comes from; the text on the screen looks to be Korean, but I am no Asian language scholar. Anyone with any more info, please chime in:
The Beeb, always the best bet for international news from obscure places, has this bit of reportage from Quentin Sommerville, a good, kilt-wearing, caber-tossing Jock sent off to the far reaches of Asia. If you troll through the BBC site, you'll find a good deal more from wee Quentin and others.
We've mentioned the ethnic situation in Xinjiang here before. It's not at all clear whether ETIM or any of their fellow Muslim travelers are involved here. Certainly, they are in the neighborhood and watching closely, if nothing else. This sure looks spontaneous, but it's impossible to tell anything from 7000 miles away and no access to anything other than general media reports.
The question I've got is how did it start? Perhaps street protests are routine in Urumqi. A name being tossed about by the Chinese as a possible instigator is one Rebiyah Kadeer, a rather vociferous Uighur critic of the Chinese. Ms. Kadeer has spent some time in the Chinese clink, and is currently in exile in the US. Hard to see how she's encouraging mob violence from the other side of the planet, but they said the same thing about Khomenei in the 70s and look how that turned out.
The violence looks like it's been shut down by a massive influx of state security forces - everything from riot-shotgun-toting police to what appears to be platoons of People's Liberation Army infantry. However, the underlying tensions aren't going away any time soon. Given the People's Republic's usual ham-fisted manner with its own civilians, especially the minority groups, along with Xinjiang's importance both as an oil-producer and a buffer against the really scary Muslims in Pakistan, don't expect the Chinese to scale back the influx of Han or yuan any time soon, and don't expect this to be the last time you see violence in the streets of Urumqi.
The official party line from the Chinese government makes all the right noises as far as the domestic audience is concerned, and actually represents a signficant departure from the normal internal and external news blackout we've come to expect from Beijing. Worth a look:
The armed thugs who claim to be the government of Burma are, apparently, about to charge Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, along with her two live-in maids, with harboring a US national secretly in Suu Kyi's lakeside home for two days.
The Golden Land is full of nutty stories, but this is one of the nuttier I can recall.
It seems a John Yettaw, which may be a vaguely Burmese name, although I could be quite wrong on that, who is from the US, swam the lake to reach Suu Kyi's home. He stayed in the home for two days, and has since been arrested, although not charged. US diplomats were able to visit him, but haven't spoken publicly about the case yet.
The 63-year-old Suu Kyi, who has been under detention of one form or another for most of the past 20 years, has been rumored to be in poor health lately. According to her doctor, she suffers from dehydration and low blood pressure. Who knows what that really means.
There's some conjecture by the Beeb that this is an effort to put Suu Kyi away until after next year's "elections", which is as good an explanation as any. Suu Kyi pretty much is the opposition, such as it is, and locking her up where no UN or Western representatives can get a look at her would certainly prevent her from making any public noise.
Still, this represents something of a departure for Than Shwe and his minions. Up until now, they've been treating Suu Kyi with white gloves. They allow her no freedom, but they have resisted the notion of tossing her in the clink or any other drastic actions. They have to know that this is going to make some headlines in the West (not to mention spark the ire of certain bloggers, which I'm sure has them quaking in their Buster Browns), but since when has that stopped them from doing anything? Locking Suu Kyi up this far ahead of the elections makes sense, in their little dinosaur brains, in that it will have faded from attention by the time it matters.
In the pantheon of near-hopeless to hopeless situations, lost causes to causes well on their way to lost, from Zimbabwe to Gaza to GM, Burma has a place of honor: The spot on this little planet of ours furthest from any sort of hope at all.
Interesting (VERY interesting) piece in the Sunday Times (the Times of London, that is) regarding labor unrest in China.
For some time, my impression of China has been that of a huge, and rapidly expanding, middle class, a country on the upswing, a super-hot economy propelled, in large part, by a ridiculously undervalued currency, and a government set to do whatever it needed to maintain a huge trade surplus.
All these things may be true. But they don’t tell the whole story.
According to the Times, the low wages you would expect in China are a LOT lower than we thought, the dreadful working conditions are a LOT more dreadful, and the “worker’s paradise” is far more oppressive and far less secure than the central government would like for you to believe. And, with the slowdown in the world economy, even these awful measures are not enough to prevent huge job losses. The Chinese equivalent of our Holiday Season is just now wrapping up, and a significant number of migrant laborers are going to return to their workplaces to find they no longer have jobs.
This is leading to a great deal of worker unrest, and a great deal of unionization activity. The Chinese central government is no fan of labor unions – it’s the Worker’s Paradise, for God’s sake, why would anyone need a labor union? – and is clamping down on this activity. Hard.
No one is saying its civil war, or that civil war is looming. And no one is saying China is on the road to ruin. It’s just interesting, to me at least, that the Chinese are not immune to this stuff anymore than the West was a hundred years ago. This may very well be the Chinese century, but they are not omnipotent either.
Buried on about page 9 of today's DMN is one heck of a shocking story. Apparently, India has solid proof that "state actors" on the Pakistani side were involved in planning and execution of the recent Mumbai fireworks. Further, the Indian Home Minister will be bringing said proof over with him when he visits the US next week.
India and Pakistan make me more nervous than anyone this side of Iran. Two nuclear-armed countries, one with a barely-in-control central government and a HUGE fundamentalist problem, the other allegedly the "world's largest democracy" with a huge chip on its shoulder; it's surprising they haven't gone to the mat yet.
I stumbled upon this and I have smiled and smiled and smiled and smiled for so long my lips fell off (but they landed in one of the dogs' food bowls which made him smile and smile and smile).
Kiva's mission is to connect people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty.
Kiva is the world's first person-to-person micro-lending website, empowering individuals to lend directly to unique entrepreneurs in the developing world.
The people you see on Kiva's site are real individuals in need of funding - not marketing material. When you browse entrepreneurs' profiles on the site, choose someone to lend to, and then make a loan, you are helping a real person make great strides towards economic independence and improve life for themselves, their family, and their community. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates and track repayments. Then, when you get your loan money back, you can relend to someone else in need. Kiva partners with existing expert microfinance institutions. In doing so, they gain access to outstanding entrepreneurs from impoverished communities world-wide. Their partners are experts in choosing qualified entrepreneurs. That said, they are usually short on funds. Through Kiva, their partners upload their entrepreneur profiles directly to the site so you can lend to them. When you do, not only do you get a unique experience connecting to a specific entrepreneur on the other side of the planet, but our microfinance partners can do more of what they do, more efficiently.
How Kiva Works:
1) Lenders like you browse profiles of entrepreneurs in need, and choose someone to lend to. When they lend, using PayPal or their credit cards, Kiva collects the funds and then passes them along to one of our microfinance partners worldwide.
2) Kiva's microfinance partners distribute the loan funds to the selected entrepreneur. Often, our partners also provide training and other assistance to maximize the entrepreneur's chances of success.
3) Over time, the entrepreneur repays their loan. Repayment and other updates are posted on Kiva and emailed to lenders who wish to receive them.
4) When lenders get their money back, they can re-lend to someone else in need, donate their funds to Kiva (to cover operational expenses), or withdraw their funds.
As all our belts grow tighter and we all get caught up in our own personal misery, sometimes it is good to think of others. For $25, you can change someone's life. Now that should be what the holidays are all about.
Scattershooting while wondering whatever happened to Tony "Thrill" Hill...
- Some poor bastard got "Cincinnatti Who'd" at a Wal-Mart in Valley Stream NY yesterday. Then the crowd got pissed because the store was closing. Suburban NY is not for the faint-of-heart, man.
- Speaking of sorry, sorry humans, those a-holes who shot up Mumbai seem to have finally lost. I guess blasting away in the sub-continent allows Muslim fanatics to check a lot of items off their lists: Jews? Check. Western tourists? Check. Cow-worshipping heathens? Check. Sowing third-world panic? Check. What a bonanza, huh?
- Around the Horn of Africa, Somali pirates are still at it. Most recent victim is a chemical tanker. I just find it hard to believe these characters are as effective as they are. How do a bunch of frickin' goat herders in speedboats capture a super-tanker? Shouldn't the tanker driver be able to floor it and keep going? Boarding a ship in-motion on the high seas is not an easy thing to do, or so I've heard. If said ship is doing 15 knots and throwing up a massive wake, it seems like it would be pretty near impossible, wouldn't it. I guess the threat of an RPG through the windshield is somewhat intimidating, but those things aren't easy to fire from a bobby little speedboad either. Just don't get it.
- In yet more happy Africa news, Nigerians are killing each other yet again. This time it's over which religous-affiliated political party won elections. Good thing the world economy doesn't depend on Nigeria for oil or anything like that. Er, wait a minute...
- On a much lighter note, there's yet ANOTHER monster college football game in the Big 12 tonight. OU vs. Okie State has all sorts of possible ripple effects, and the entire south Plains will be tuned in, including usn's at the CIT Compound. This season, already the greatest ever, just keeps getting better.
Prior to the Olympics, I was wondering about the chess match between Chinese security forces and the whole slew of terror groups who would have like to have made a big, messy splash during the fortnight.
Obviously, the security forces did their job, and did it so effectively that you heard nothing about any sort of credible threat throughout the games. Other than that one nut who killed the father-in-law of the US volleyball coach before topping himself off, you didn't even hear about a purse-snatching.
Running a police state certainly helps maintain public order. Did you happen to see the men's marathon? There was a cop about every 10 feet along the entire 26 miles.
Regardless, the good guys (um, I think they're "good guys" - I don't know what my opinion of the Chinese really is right now) won this round. I worry about Vancouver - the Canadians strike me as pretty laid back, and it is one spiffy little target. I worry a lot about London, but have more faith in the Brits than anyone this side of the Israelis. The simple fact is that every international gathering has a big bulls-eye painted on it, and the boys and girls in the security services have to hustle to stay one step ahead.
Less than a week before the gigantic opening of the massively massive Beijing Summer Olympics, guaranteed to be massively gigantic in every manner possible, and the smog is so thick that you can't see the Olympic Stadium from right outside.
The Chinese say, of course, the smog will blow over and everything will be sparkly good. And massive.
The BBC has been testing air quality in Beijing for the past few weeks, and have found the particulate pollution to be more than 4 times the World Health Organization's guidelines for such things.
I really hope the bad stuff - like smog, terrorists, or brutal repression by the government - doesn't become the story of the Games. I have a baaad feeling one of the first two, at least, will make it's presence felt in some headline-grabbing way before we're done.
I normally have about zero patience for "celebrities with causes". I mean, what the hell does Pam Anderson really know about fur? Do you think Lindsay Lohan knows a frickin' thing about the science behind the global warming debate? C'mon.
Lately, a LOT of celebrities have have spoken about a story I follow closely: Burma. Now, do I really think Sarah Silverman knows anything about the history between the Karen and the Shan? Do I think Will Ferrell knows (or cares) about the role Buddhism has played in the subjugation of the population?
Of course not. They're celebrities. By definition, they don't know what they don't know. In this case, however, it doesn't matter.
Rarely does the real world resemble some random work of fiction. And, by that, I mean rarely is the world really white and black, good vs. evil. In Burma, however, it really is that clear. The "government" of Burma, that paranoid clique of superstitious, narrow-minded, and sociopathic senior military men, is so clearly evil, so clearly the "bad guys", that even empty-headed actors, singers, and other entertainers really can express valid opinions.
There's not much we can do about what's been happening, continues to happen, and will continue to happen in Burma. Keeping it up front, in conversation, in people's minds is really it. Everyone, including celebrities, needs to do his/her part.
The plane has Cambodian flags on it, along with the name, likely of the owning company, "Air Dream". It's been sitting on the tarmac in Hanoi since late 2007, when it arrived from Siem Reap.
The Vietnamese have no idea who "Air Dream" is, and are about to sell the thing off for scrap.
It isn't new or spiffy or anything like that, but an airworthy 727 is worth some dough.
I'm not going to say, "This could only happen in Southeast Asia," but it somehow makes more sense that it did...
I've stayed away from the situation in Burma following Cyclone Nargis with some deeply mixed feelings.
On the one hand, this is one of the worst natural disasters to hit anywhere in recent memory. Millions homeless, tens of thousands dead, an entire heavily-populated region under water - this is as bad as anything that's happened in Bangladesh or Timor or wherever you want to name, certainly the worst natural disaster since the tsunami.
On the other hand, it's so predictable. The fascist thugs who constitute the "government" of Burma are so vile, so completely unconcerned about the welfare of the people they profess to care for, all this is to them is another exercise in clamping down on information, lying to the press and the rest of the world, and an excuse to go shopping in the tons of relief goods stuck in Rangoon warehouses.
See, I've upset myself just writing that one paragraph. This is why I've stayed away from the story. It infuriates me, and there is NOTHING we in the West can do about it.
Maybe, just maybe, the unholy disaster in the south actually causes something to change. Maybe the government has shown it total disregard for the welfare of the people so blatantly and so repugnantly that the population comes to the conclusion (not wrongly, btw) they have nothing to lose in a widespread revolt. It could happen.
While this sounds like a punchline out of Monty Python's Life of Brian, these guys are quite serious. It ain't easy running a domestic terror campaign in a police state, but ETIM has managed to be a minor thorn in the Chinese side for some time now.
Much as the Chinese see the August Olympics as a chance to show their stuff on the world stage, ETIM is apparently gearing up for their own events in the International Terror Games, where most of the records are currently held by the Palestinians of Black September.
This promises to be a most interesting chess match. China has been working towards the Olympics for years, clearly intending for the Games to showcase the new-and-improved People's Republic. A successful Olympic fortnight represents huge (HUGE) political and economic gains for Hu Jintao and company. Similarly, a terrorist event of any kind brings shame and enormous loss of faith for the entire nation, not to mention a ton of instant street cred for whoever pulls of the successful attack.
The reality is, in today's world, any major international gathering, and especially the Olympics, are going to be the highest of high-stakes contests between security services and freedom fighters/terrorists/fanatics of every stripe
The main point of Kristof's column is China's support for the Sudanese government's war on its ethnic African population in Darfur. This support shows up in the form of arms, dough, and political air cover. In return, the Chinese get access to Sudanese oil.
I hope its not a surprise to you all out there that the Chinese are supporting all sorts of rotten behavior around the world in return for access to oil. The West buys the bulk of oil production from the "good guys" (comparatively speaking, of course) in the petro-world - the Saudis, Kuwaitis, and the others who are not actively engaged in napalming villages. That leaves the Chinese, who's super-hot economy is gagging for energy, to buy from the really foul bastards who have stocks of that black poison.
The Chinese are making deals with a variety of devils, and you suspect it will come back to haunt them sooner or later. Of course, being a bit less restrained in how they respond when those devils get rowdy may help keep the lid on for a while. The Chinese are probably a bit harder to pressure than your average Western democracy, and are likely to respond somewhat more violently than we might when pushed.
Still, it's important for us to remember that we are not the only military and economic super-power out there on the world stage.
I'm currently reading David Halberstam's The Coldest Winter (genius book - pick it up), about The Korean War, and enjoying it immensely.
The book starts with the UN forces up around the Yalu and Chongchon Rivers, in far North Korea, thinking the war is over and they'll be home in time for Christmas 1950. Just as MacArthur's command is thinking about victory parades, the Chinese Army shows up and takes the Americans completely by surprise.
Today's YouTube clip is part of a 15-installment series about the war. This one focuses on The Chinese Surprise.
New video from the UK's Channel 4 seems to contradict the official Pakistani version of the Bhutto assassination.
Every bit of video available, along with numerous eyewitness quotes, agree that a gunman fired three shots at Bhutto as she stood in the sunroof of her vehicle. However, the official story is that she was not hit by the shots and was, instead, killed when her head was smashed against the interior of the vehicle when the bomb was triggered.
The Channel 4 video seem to show, pretty clearly, that she was hit by at least one of the shots. Further, there's no indication that her head hit anything inside her bomb-proof vehicle. No one else inside the vehicle was injured.
Now one has to wonder why the Musharraf government is lying about something as seemingly trivial as this. What difference does it make how, exactly, she died? If they're lying about this, what else are they lying about?
If Musharraf can be solidly linked to the killing, there's no telling what happens. Whatever it is that does happen won't be good.
