phillip.

But for now we are young/ Let us lay in the sun

2010-11-27T06:46:00.000-08:00

And count every beautiful thing we can see

Top Five Favorite Hotels

1. Boddhi Tree Del Gusto in Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Perfect and peaceful afternoon cocktails on the French colonial teak veranda, while dazed and gasping after tours of the S-21 Genocide Prison and Killing Fields.

2. Cheong Fatt Tze Mansion in Penang, Malaysia

In Penang, a strange and fantastic island mix of Indian, Chinese, British colonial and Malay culture, a gorgeous Cantonese ode to color, feng shui, and thunder.

3. Sindu Mertha in Sanur, Bali

Mostly because it's the kind of dream house we'll most likely never afford in the US, but could see ourselves designing conceivably in, say, 2024, when President Clooney names me ambassador to Indonesia. In fact, we spent a full 30 minutes deciding from which rooms our mothers-in-law—confused and frightened after being forced to spend their golden years somewhere on a remote Islamic island (at least until they discovered the joys of kopi luwak mochas)—would knit and bingo away their days. We liked it.

4. The Imms in Chiang Mai and Bangkok, Thailand

We probably spent no less than three total months at these two hotels. Cheap. Nice pools. Air conditioning. Al-Jazeera English on TV. Enthusiastic security guards. Random Sino-Arab-Persian-unicorn decor. Usually ready and welcoming at 6 a.m. when we'd stumble blearily off an all-night bus ride.

5. Naga Hill in Chiang Rai, Thailand

Me: "So do you guys want to get dinner in town or what."

Dad, already in lotus-pose: "I'd hate to leave this feeling that we just arrived in a place of magic."

6. Something Something Guesthouse in Hong Kong

Efficient and thrifty.

Haha! Ha!

Ha!

Ha!

On the plus side, I was nearly mugged walking back there down a dark side street late one night, only escaping by winning a footrace to a (well-lit) 7/11, pretending my iPod was iPhone, and calling in some muscle. Mama grizzly-style. Rawr. Never try to separate a drunk and cornered freelance writer from his computer.

What a beautiful dream/ That could flash on the screen

2010-11-23T11:30:00.000-08:00

In a blink of an eye and be gone from me
Soft and sweet
Let me hold it close and keep it here with me

Two weeks left. I've been instructed to stop being "cold and indifferent" about leaving. Time to start reminiscing then, in list form:

Top Five Cheap Things I'll Miss About Living in Thailand

1. Dinner

I'm not sure when we'll again be able to order appetizers, a fresh-caught grilled fish, a giant bowl of green curry, and two or three beers for the price of a Starbucks mocha.

2. Haircuts

I usually end up looking like Ben Affleck in Good Will Hunting for a few days (cutting thick, curly, caucasian hair is like doing heart surgery here) and I'm invariably told that I'd be handsome if only I'd let them shave my beard. But $6 for a cut, two shampoos and a head massage ain't bad. The transvestites at Gay Cuts in Bangkok soothe my soul.

3. Taxis

Clean, cool, comfortable, and $5 for an hour-long crawl across Bangkok in rush hour traffic. Ideal for naps. No buffaloes, sex, AK-47s, or durian allowed.

4. Costco runs to Burma

Knock-off carnival. On our occasional visa runs to Tachilek, a wild west border town in Myanmar's infamous Golden Triangle region, we always return loaded down with fake Ray-Bans, boardshorts, pocket knives, exotic beers, animist idols, pirated DVDs, samurai swords, and bottles of South African wine. No yaabaa or viagra, please.

5. Massages

Two hours for $6. Massages are my idea of tickle hell, but apparently this is a good deal. I guess.

6. Face Surgeries

Reunification Express

2010-11-15T00:38:00.000-08:00

(a country is adjoined by one ribbon)

I haven't really mentioned how much I loved Vietnam, so I'm going to spend my last three weeks in Thailand talking about it.

Con and I took the train through Vietnam. I love trains. There's ample video of me singing songs about trains as a kid. Trains trains trains.

Con hates trains.

Because monsoon flooding had taken out a bunch of track in Central Vietnam, our train crawled down the coast for most of the night. We arrived in Da Nang five hours behind schedule. The delay made Con and just about everyone else thoroughly grumpy by the time we limped into town. I was exhilarated.

Our cabin had power outlets and leg room and beer (all I want in life are power outlets and leg room. And beer.). I watched Apocalypse Now while rolling through a full-moon DMZ at midnight (too obvious?), and chugged down Vietnamese Big Sur with my head out the window.

It's hard for me to travel like we do without feeling like I should be working all the time—on a beach, atop a boat, in the most beautiful places in the world, etc. But, with no WiFi, there was nothing much to do but watch a country that we once invaded slip by—a country whose history makes my work seem so small—nothing to do but journey, and read books about power and war, and stare at the ocean, and try to begin sorting out what two years worth of these aching, elusive travel experiences have meant on this—likely the last—grasping, hopeful one of them.

I could've ridden for days. Trains trains trains.

Power Couples

2010-11-08T02:35:00.000-08:00

(and yes, our trip cost $100 bazillon per day as well.)

Design Flaw, Revisited

2010-11-04T13:48:00.000-07:00

Ha Noi 1000 Nam Thang Long

2010-10-12T23:55:00.000-07:00

(Happy 1,000th birthday Hanoi)

The city's all buzzing and boozy and full of phở and light. We got there just in time.

Far from home, take the big game down

2010-09-13T08:56:00.000-07:00

Two years here. Three months left. Time again to blog with fury.

Here's to everyday feeling a little bit like this:

volcanoes, cont'd.

2010-05-23T07:03:00.000-07:00

4 a.m. hike up Ganung Batur, Bali, Indonesia

also.. more eyjafjallajokull!

Eyjafjallajökull. Me.

2010-04-23T09:15:00.000-07:00

*Note: All photos, except one or two, by Rick Johnson. Vocals in Sigur Rós video also by Rick Johnson. Jim Wilkins on bells.

Iceland is all hot and bothered about something (you could say it lost its cool). 10 years ago, a ragged group of us tried to climb over that very same volcano, and it sent us scampering back the way we came with our tails between our legs. It's a very stubborn hunk of frozen igneous.

This led my brother-in-law yesterday to make a point: "I like how you have some sort of tie-in with most of the big current events."

Well... yeah. That's the goal.

So—at the expense of flightless travelers everywhere (including my sweet Swiss-stranded sister—tie in!), tulip farmers in Kenya, and the fledgling global economic recovery—check it out!

We did a 10 day trek that we called the Fire and Ice Tour (yes... we made sloganed shirts), because the island is very much just that. It was two weeks of glaciers, snow caves and hot springs... and even a hot rock that melted my pants. Obsidian (volcanic glass) littered the ground. Hardened lava flows from a 1994 eruption had been unhelpfully dumped all over the trail. At one point, we spent a full hour dropping huge ice blocks into a boiling pond, and at another, we spent a full day slogging uphill through what one of our crew referred to as "mile after mile of endless volcanic shit." I want to go back tomorrow.

It's the most visually otherworldly place I've ever been. Like the moon, if the moon wasn't such a freaking fascist. The midnight sun creates these sorts of six-hour-long sunsets. And the whole time we were basically aiming for the middle of these two giant ice caps — one of which was, per my prescient plans, Eyjafjallajokull.

Big white thing in the back:

Eventually we got there, camped right beneath it, and planned a marathon trek over the pass separating the ice caps and back down to the coast on the other side. Something like this:

Sigur Rós - Glósóli from Sigur Rós on Vimeo.

"Don't try if there are clouds on the icecap in the morning," the sweet Icelandic lady at the last campground warned. The next morning there were clouds. Unhappy clouds:

And we went anyway. We thought we could get up and over before the storm hit. I don't know why we thought this. That's frigging absurd. And so we climbed right into the teeth of this spittin' angry whale of a storm. Whale storm!

It actually wasn't so bad until the storm hit about two-thirds of the way up. Then we huddled and stared at the most ice-cappy part of the ice cap for an hour or two, sent a couple of former Army Rangers ahead to scout it out, and got second thoughts when Rangers returned with reports of densing (verb?) visibility, Katrina winds, and flying pebbles. Flying pebbles turned back Hitler at Stalingrad. Pebbles!

So we very literally staggered home. Some of us getting flipped:

All of us losing our pack covers (a giant pack is the last thing you want on your back in that kind of wind). All of us losing our way at one point or another.

All thrilled to see the sweet Icelandic lady waiting sans smirk to mother us into a (thankfully vacant) warm cabin with hot showers. The next day we ate whale or something, drank Spanish wine, and swam here:

Anyway... the point of this story is: I was there, man. Once. When it was silent. Before it was cool to have your travel plans shat on by an Icelandic volcano.

Getting along II

2010-04-14T10:08:00.000-07:00

The scene in Chiang Mai:

Even in Bangkok (well.. sorta..):

Happy Songkran* everyone. Seems like it couldn't come at a better time.

*Thai New Year and water fesitval... and the greatest holiday in the entire world.

Getting along.

2010-04-10T10:00:00.000-07:00

Bangkok finally blew up again today. We're here, and fine. Life seems normal on the streets outside our hotel (except for pickups full of flag-waving redshirts rolling by, cheering as if they won something today). And I thought Shutter Island (watched today while "stuck" in a high-end mall after the redshirt protestors forced the closure of the Skytrain) was pretty decent.

But 21 (and climbing) protestors, police and soldiers died, including one Reuters journalist, and another 900 were treated in hospitals for injuries. Both sides are firing live rounds, and it seems like it will get worse before better. And it's all just sickeningly unnecessary.

I've actually been able to follow the day-to-day aspects of the protests pretty closely (thanks to Twitter and Google Maps, I've realized it's remarkably easy to keep a close eye on where protestors or police are gathering at any specific moment, allowing us to blithely gallivant around town). And, as result, I've gotten steady translations of the rhetoric coming from the leaders of both sides.

So beyond a government willing to use live rounds on its own people, the maddening dynamic—from my limited scope—boils down to this:

It's a lot of people with legitimate fears/grievances (the redshirts have a history of getting democratically screwed), and self-serving idiots with microphones on the protest stages exploiting those fears/grievances with willful distortions of the truth, oversimplified, frenzy-whipping rhetoric, and demonization of those of disagree. Don't educate; inflame. Don't think; yell. For this, they solidify their own statuses as political heroes, media kings (many have talk radio and cable news shows), and reliable minions for the real powers duking it out behind the scenes. The yellowshirt protests a year and a half ago had very much the same drumbeat.

Sound familiar?

Update—Here's some footage:

face surgery

2010-04-09T12:01:00.000-07:00

with an organ. and—inexplicably—constance in the room with a camera.

We'll miss him when he's gone.

2010-04-04T09:26:00.000-07:00

I loved this:

In the rash of window smashings and inexplicable health reform hysteria a couple weeks ago, one of the tea parties published online the address of who they thought was democratic Virginia congressman Tom Perriello, and encouraged followers to "drop by." They screwed up—it actually was Perriello's brother's address, and the brother woke up Wednesday to find the gas line to his house cut.

Because, you know, Perriello supported a fairly conservative, market-based compromise correction of a grossly failed system in our country. Let's blow something up. The same tea partier later referred to the brother as "collateral damage."

Perriello's response to the threats?

"Whatever. I’ve lived in Sierra Leone for two years, where the life expectancy is 34 years old. If the worst thing that happens is that special-interest groups spend millions of dollars against me and my most ardent opponents organize against me, it’s hardly a ‘cry me a river’ moment — as long as people act civil and within the law.”

This seemed entirely in character. Perriello got my attention last year when he won his seat in a massive upset in a historically conservative district. Here's why:

A graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School, Perriello worked to end atrocities in Liberia as well as with child soldiers, amputees, and local pro-democracy groups in Sierra Leone. He became special adviser for the international prosecutor during the showdown that forced Liberian dictator Charles Taylor from power. His work as a security analyst has taken him to Afghanistan and Darfur. Perriello has also been a part of a groundswell of young progressives whose religious faith motivates them to seek social change through public service. One of the most startling aspects of his 2008 campaign was his pledge to tithe 10 percent of his campaign volunteers' time to local charities. Time they could have spent stuffing mailers and phone-banking went to building houses for the poor.

"Ours is a community-service generation," he says. "Our background is in not-for-profits, the netroots, and problem solving. We understand that the big divisions in America are not even about politics; it's a whole new way of thinking that throws traditional politics out the window." Perriello says he was warned not to talk about Darfur in the rural South but did it anyhow.

He helped stop the war in Liberia. The war in Liberia is.. uh.. personal to my family. I like this guy.

He'll probably lose his seat in November for supporting—again—what was really a market-based, conservative-ish healthcare reform bill. That's fine. I think voters—obviously—should be able to happily vote out representatives who don't represent their views.

But I also think both sides of the aisle—in a congress filled with men whose greatest strength is getting elected—would benefit from more of these sorts of level-headed, educated-by-the-wider-world, problems-are-worth-trying-to-solve public servants. And I'll lament it if we lose him.

"Do you see yourself as victims? I want your opinion."

2010-03-03T19:27:00.000-08:00

Here's my Cambodia post. For Joey.

During our February wanderings through killing fields and torture prisons and genocide displays, the thing that stuck out is the staggering totality of what happened there. 20 percent of the nation died in just three years, most from either execution or starvation. Just those three years — not to mention the 15 years of protracted insurgency that followed, and not even to mention the four preceding years where hundreds of thousands of largely innocent people were killed by the American carpet bombings (pause on that a minute for the next time Fox News says the U.S. has nothing ever to apologize for) that also paved the Khmer Rouge path to power. And everyone — everyone — was touched, nay, dignity raped by those three years in one way or another.

For us, now 30ish years later, that meant every taxi driver we met over the age of, say, 38, probably remembers it too well. Imagine (if you're my age) knowing that every one of your friends' parents was once either clinging to life in the work camps, or Khmer Rouge cadres themselves.

I really don't know what you do with these kinds of experiences. I end up standing there, staring at faces or skulls or statistics while trying to make it mean something more productive than a further slide into cynicism and dismay. So the question I kept asking was how, on a society-wide scale, does a nation move on from that? Where is it today? Smiling and working and shrugging off guilt — is that the best hope?

Books and books have been written about the Khmer Rouge's victims. The effect seems to be in part a very myopic and PTSD-molded outlook on life that, among other things, has fueled an enormous sex industry. But I was almost more curious about what happened to the Khmer Rouge soldiers and guards, most of whom we're not, in fact, evil people—many only initially guilty of the common human desire for revolution and a good fight, before seeing that innocence destroyed via commanded acts of terror. Are they victims?

Thankfully, I got three chances to explore just those questions:

1. Landmine Museum

Former Khmer Rouge child soldier planted thousands of landmines around the country, now making it his life mission to clear them (and tell tourists about how landmines kill indiscriminately). Con blogged more about it.

2. S-21 Prison/Genocide Museum

In a small room on the second floor of the S-21 Toul Sleng Genocide Museum — a high school-turned-prison where 17,000 mostly innocent people were held, tortured (waterboarded, actually, among other happy "enhanced" techniques), and forced into confessions before being sent to be executed at the Killing Fields — an exhibit gives voice to 13 former Khmer Rouge cadres (soldiers, prison guards, interrogators, etc).

For each, there's a picture and a small bio from back then, plus a snapshot of their life now, with a single quote revealing how they live and wrestle with those memories.

"This is for justice. I'm not trying to defend myself."
"I did not believe what they taught me, but I could do nothing because we were all under their control. To save our lives, we had to do what they said."
"I didn't feel good about watching people die one after another and the prisoners' miserable lives."
"People still brand me as an S-21 worker."
"People call me pro-Pol Pot. I don't mind because it is true I worked for the Khmer Rouge."
"I had to, otherwise I wouldn't live... There was nothing I could do"
"I didn't want to work there.... If I had refused, they would've killed me."
"They must not hide their own crimes and blame the people. This is unfair."
"They must be prosecuted."
"The murderous regime was created by them, and they must be prosecuted."
"You'd be a fool to listen to them."

3. Documentary—S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine

The third is this simply extraordinary documentary about a former S-21 prisoner interviewing his former guards 20-something years later, with a single, haunting question:

"Do you see yourself as victims? I want your opinion."

It's incredible. Just incredible. A simple exploration of the pure psychological gymnastics needed to live blithely with such scars.

It all centers around a former prisoner named Vann Nath — a reluctant hero of heroes who basically survived because he was an excellent painter, and therefore proved "useful" to the Khmer Rouge by painting portraits of Pol Pot and other leaders. After the KR fell, Nath led the effort to preserve S-21 and educate future generations of Cambodians about what happened there. His paintings of torture and terror hang all over the prison today.

The film opens with a shot of the parents of a former Khmer Rouge prison guard, encouraging him to admit guilt and seek some sort of Buddhist atonement by making an offering to the dead souls of those he tortured or killed. He's defensive, and vocalizes what I imagine is 25 years of rationalization—basically insisting that if he was ordered to kill under threat of being killed, he should not have to live with such guilt. It wasn't his fault.

From there, in the first 30 minutes alone, it's another former prisoner returning with Nath to S-21 (where he lost his wife and kids) for the first time, staggering around and weeping, and reading the forced confession he gave (he wasted too much fabric in a factory) that might have doomed 60 others. It's Nath welcoming a group of former KR guards and gently leading them to embrace the full horror they helped create. It's the guards—just teenagers in the '70s—attempting to do so by talking openly about their roles in the prison (including one surreal scene where they almost cathartically demonstrate how they went about their jobs, like keeping prisoners from killing themselves before properly confessing to their non-crimes). And it just keeps going from there.

It's beautifully shot with almost no narration. Nath is Asian Morgan Freeman. And a hero.

Anyway.. It's long, but I highly, highly recommend checking out at least the first 30 minutes (the second half is here). I watched this on the bus between Phnom Penh and Siem Reap. There were fields after fields after fields, plus life and history and some surviving Khmer Rouge irrigation canals. And these sorts of glimpses into the psyche of then and now help it all... I dunno... exist.

haiti

2010-01-18T10:59:00.000-08:00

i dunno.

woo woo texas woo

2010-01-06T20:17:00.000-08:00

Four years ago I was on TV:

It was the last bit of sportswriting I did, just a few days after graduation, and a few weeks before wandering to New Orleans where everything changed. My roommates and I road tripped to LA in one last hurrah of Hunter S.-inspired christian debauchery, fully understanding, achingly, that we would never again live such a fun period of life.

I blogged about the trip and the game for the Houston Chronicle. And before the game, I {ahem} wrote that "I think Texas will score 40. I think USC might."

Final: Texas 41, USC 38.

Tomorrow? My prediction is that my bootlegged internet feed of the game will be choppy — forcing me to miss at least three critical plays (like the Hunter Lawrence kick in the Nebraska game) — but largely adequate. I'll complain about said choppiness and ignore the miracle of modern technology. I'll wear my lucky sarong. I'll eat green curry for lunch, regardless of the game's outcome, and my planned lychee wine bloody marys will be a hit only with myself.

If we lose, I'll dive into weightier reading about trafficking, North Korean and Tamil refugees reportedly streaming into Thailand, and war, well, just about everywhere — and I'll grumble about all you grown-ass adults who care more about gridiron silliness than shit that matters.

Everything's changed... unless we win.

Then you'll find me spitting and naked and doing a lewd Pecos Bill dance atop the stupa of the Buddhist temple next door. I might even sock a monk out of sheer glee.

jesus-in-cleats commanded it!

Texas (eh...) 23 — Bama (I guess..) 20

publishing news no. 1

2009-12-15T19:51:00.000-08:00

I contributed a bit to this recently published book. Specifically, I helped with the parts about how feminine hygiene is a critical element to community empowerment... because, of course, I'm an expert.

The book profiles and parallels several women leading either Fortune 500 companies or small community projects in rural villages throughout Africa. And it echoes my own growing belief that women do the bulk of the work throughout the world, and as such tend to make more effective community leaders (in other words.. yo soy una feminista.).

The proceeds support the wonderful ngo CARE. So.. you know.. buy.

rock doctor speaks

2009-12-12T02:22:00.000-08:00

I avoided blogging during our two months in the states, because I didn't really have anything to say. And I've avoided blogging since we got back to Thailand a month ago, because my wife usually says everything better.

For my dad's birthday in October, I set up for him a blog. I told him it could be any blog he wants (he's a hell of an unpublished poet), but encouraged him to take on (and work to elevate the discourse of) climate change. A year ago he told me he'd be willing to believe in man-accelerated global warming if the science was there, but that the misbehavior of climate change scientists and the general mindlessness of the media discourse about it was keeping him skeptical.

It's obviously a complicated issue, but one that's generally discussed with the same sense of self-reinforcing sneeriness as Yankees v Red Sox (or, say, anything on Fox News v Huffington Post) — an opinion reinforced with gusto by the recent climategate stuff. I was hoping that the thoughtful, open-minded way he usually describes his own global warming investigations could help.

dave, when he was cool

A month later, his first post is up, and the chosen subject is.. well.. something. But it's entertaining and random, and what we can expect in the future from this reader, thinker, scientist, author and poet.

So welcome to blogland, Dad. And if you can find the time to write, then I should too.

phonstance

2009-08-25T00:16:00.000-07:00

two things happened in may that made me start liking phayao. 1) i got a moto, and 2) the monsoon started (which put out the forest fires and brought back the mountains).

now i can explore sunsets. and jungles. and listen to wilco's summerteeth while riding through the afternoon rice paddies. and okkervil river on moonlight dashes around the lake. and (unreleased) paul banks every other time. and simply indulge every impulse of exotic wander-y adventurism i have.

it really is happiness on wheels. and it was enough to get me back for a second year.

anyway, the point is.. con thinks we look like:

Design Flaw

2009-08-23T21:16:00.001-07:00

Giant Thai Things

2009-08-22T22:00:00.000-07:00

we live in a jungle.

(that's a king cobra)

Where we'll be:

2009-08-22T00:11:00.000-07:00

Aug 30–Sept 3: San Francisco, Sexy Rexy, etc.
Sept 4–8: Yosemite, Death Valley, Vegas, Sedona, Marfa
Sept 9–14: Dallas
Sept 15–Oct 1: Austin
Oct 2-4: Colorado
Oct 5–12: Austin
Oct 13–18: Houston/College Station

Then.. possibly California again, before Thailand No. 2 at the end of October.

We want to see you. Yes, you.

Eight days

2009-08-21T23:26:00.000-07:00

Last week of Thailand Round No. 1.

I haven't blogged in months, so it's time to do so with fury.

Here is a video we made once on the Great Wall of China:

Sexy Rexy!

2009-08-10T06:20:00.000-07:00

Rex David Kilbride. "The Psalmist." I'm an uncle.

Alright Emmy and Justin!

Where's Lorne?

2009-07-19T09:55:00.000-07:00

Lorne (our friend from Texas) is in Thailand, and everyone thinks he's Thai. Odd, since he clearly looks more like a younger Ho Chi Minh. Still, he just blends in, and it's endless fun.

What's this?...

... found him!

Fight Night

2009-07-10T22:20:00.000-07:00

Con (read her more thoughtful account here) declared it our best night in Phayao. Watching 12 year-old kids hit and kick each other—and grown-ass men making rice whiskey-fueled bets on said hitting and kicking kids—I entirely agreed.

Also learned how little we know about the sport...

During the [above] title fight, we assumed red shorts was winning, although probably only because he had a cooler back tattoo. So when—in the fifth and final round—they began dancing and mocking their way around the ring instead of fighting (reminded me of wrestling video games), indicating an inevitable split decision, the extent of my lame ignorance was hammered home. Sure enough:

Tuesday!

2009-07-07T09:05:00.000-07:00

Brooks on Fallows on China

2009-07-03T10:45:00.000-07:00

I admire both the NyTimes' David Brooks and The Atlantic's James Fallows for similar reasons. Both guys seem to enjoy posing questions and exploring ideas more than arguing sides, and both seem to write with humility and openness about their own opinions. Both seem willing to be wrong, and willing to give credit where credit is due. Both are refreshing voices in our current information age gone wrong.

So.. I was happy today to read Brooks about a debate about China featuring Fallows (where he lived for several years, and about which he's written a series of very illuminating stories).

Fallows pointed out that there is no one thing called “China” or “the Chinese,” and that many of the most anti-American statements from Chinese officials are made to blunt domestic anxiety and make further integration possible. That integration, Fallows continued, is deep and will get deeper. Many, many Chinese leaders were educated in the U.S. and admire or at least respect it. If you go to cities like Xian, you find American and European aviation firms fully integrated into the commercial fabric there.

Fallows’s main argument, though, was psychological. When he lived in Japan in the 1980s, he said, he sometimes felt that the Japanese had a chip-on-their-shoulder attitude in which their success was bound to U.S. decline. He says he rarely got that feeling in China. Instead, he has described officials who are thrilled to be integrated in the world. Their mothers had bound feet. They themselves plowed the fields in the Cultural Revolution. Now they get to join the world.

Some of the officials interviewed by Fallows believe the U.S. is following unsustainable fiscal policies that will lead to decline, but they view this with frustration, not joy. Fallows doesn’t know what the future will hold, but he believes that Chinese officials still see the dollar as their least risky investment. Domestically, China will not turn democratic, but individual liberties will expand. He agreed that China and the U.S. will dominate the 21st century, but he painted the picture of a more benign cooperation.

I post this because the biggest question that I went to China with—and I think, one that is going to be asked endlessly in the coming years—is what does China's inevitable rise mean for America? Will America respond out of undue fear or proper caution? Does one superpower's rise require another to fall? To what level will we tangle over resources? Can we commend and encourage the miraculous, rapid evaporation of Chinese poverty without abandoning our own human rights principles?

Seems like it's the geopolitical relationship that will matter more than any other over the next 100 years. Glad I got a glimpse.

Losing Face

2009-06-23T01:23:00.000-07:00

Tienanmen is a sensitive issue here. So we mocked it.

All walls are great if the roof doesn't fall..

2009-06-22T21:23:00.000-07:00

.. (Thom Yorke shouldn't always be taken literally).

The Great Wall "experience" reminded me a bit of the Grand Canyon. I'm always a bit ho-hum about going to super-famous, fanny pack-friendly places I've seen over and over in pictures... and then I'm always pleasantly surprised when the place is pleasantly, surprisingly spectacular. It almost works better that way.

The GW really is that stunning. Geesh it's stunning.

Joyce drafts me into the PLA.

the view from the countryside

2009-06-22T08:59:00.000-07:00

(and... communists make good art).

Beijing is America (and so can you).

2009-06-21T05:46:00.000-07:00

the view from our window

2009-06-20T08:22:00.000-07:00

xuanwumen, beijing, prc

Beijing.

2009-06-19T10:33:00.000-07:00

sucks to your swine flu.

Adam

2009-06-16T05:13:00.000-07:00

Adam is my friend. I've lived on his couch a lot. He's currently one of the leaders in this contest to win a social media job at a winery in Healdsburg, California (the same Healdsburg where my sister and brother-in-law got engaged).

So.. go to this site, watch his video, and then vote for him. Cmon. Cmon.

He's been on the cusp of a spot in the top five almost perpetually, and while most votes doesn't necessarily equal winning, it does show his ability to mobilize the masses.

More Like Boooor-antine.

2009-06-15T12:36:00.000-07:00

We're flying to Beijing on Wednesday, but I'm not sure we're going to get to see much of it. Here's why: I'm fairly (47 percent) certain that we'll be quarantined.

My concern started sometime last week, when swine flu flared up in some of the beach towns in Southern Thailand. I figured that one would soon mean two would soon mean a couple hundred would soon mean (probably) alarmist headlines like this one:

"10,000 Could Catch Swine Flu."

Flying in at the height of Thai flu panic, we'd be obvious targets. So I started looking for stats or stories about how many people were getting whisked away in Beijing. Turns out everyone capable of getting sick is an obvious target these days (although we still have a higher risk of being on the same flight as someone infected)... and turns out a bunch of people have written about it.

Here's a blog from a guy:

It goes something like this: the flight lands, taxis, and stops at the gate. Along the way, passengers are told to remain in their seats and not . A moment or two later, in a scene reminiscent of the opening moments of Star Wars (when stormtroopers burst into the rebel craft, firing lasers, followed by Darth Vader), teams in biohazard suits emerge at the front of the plane, and work the aisles, firing laser thermometers at the foreheads of seated passengers...

Last night, I was seated in 13G. Next to me, in 13F, was a thirty-ish Chinese man. A woman in a biohazard suit fired her laser at my forehead (normal), and then his. “Thirty-seven-point-three,” she announced to the person in the biohazard suit behind her (that’s 99.14° F). ... At this, the two biohazard suits waved at a taller biohazrd suit in the other aisle, and the three parties retreated to the front of the plane....

Meanwhile, I couldn’t help but notice the disdainful and frustrated looks of nearby passengers who couldn’t see 13F, but who could surely see me – Mr. 13G in the aisle seat. All in all, not an entirely pleasant sensation, being mistaken for a Plague Carrier. As for 13F – he wasn’t commenting. I tried.

Mr. 13F apparently didn't have swine flu, because Mr. 13G wrote this atop the Great Wall (or somewhere equally as non-quarantine-y).

But this next guy wasn't so lucky. Someone three rows from him on his flight had it, and after a day or two at a swank Beijing Westin hotel, the state came looking for him. Now, even though he hasn't shown a single flu symptom, he's stuck in quarantine for a week. Luckily, he's stuck with internet access. From his blog (here also is his twitter feed):

"Much like prison, the standard greeting is “how long you been here?” (we’ve dispensed of “what are you in here for”). Another great conversation starter is “so, how’d they find you?”. Otherwise, there’s really not that much else particular to the culture here. Handshakes are not allowed. In fact, greetings, in order of preference, are:

Handshake < high five < fist bump < nod"

Still.. quarantine for him means means a converted 3-star hotel with internet, decent enough food (can even order out to Pizza Hut), and Tai Chi classes—facts I'm glad to learn, because if quarantine means getting strapped down in a hospital bed in some faceless, Soviet-era (uh.. all communism is the same, right?) hospital, then I don't think I could convince Con to take the risk.

But at least he seems to be taking it with a sense of humor about (also read his wickedly funny "7 People You Meet in Quarantine"). Here's a different take from one more—a quarantined (alongside New Orleans/Chocolate City mayor Ray Nagin—Ha!) Chinese-American who considered herself a believer in the great Chinese experiment. Now she ties quarantine back to the dangers, arrogance and slippery slope of an authoritarian state:

Out of frustration, I complained that I was being treated unfairly. I spoke my mind and said that I felt as if my rights were being violated by the Communist government. When I said this, I sent my jailers into a frenzy, "Don't criticize China! Do not criticize China!" Those of you who know me know that in the past, I've always tended to defend the Chinese government. Yes some of their measures were draconian but they were also efficient and effective, I said. And at the time, I truly believed that it was a fair tradeoff. Fewer rights for faster outcomes.

I take all of that back. I rarely get angry but I am so angry now. I've never felt so keenly the disadvantages of living under a government that does not recognize the concept of personal rights. Some of that anger is personal, no one wants to spend most of their vacation alone and enclosed. But the deeper anger is directed at my sense of helplessness. I cannot do anything to extract myself from a nightmare that is out of my control and blown way out of proportion. I have no way of defending myself and have not come up with any logical justifications to soothe my anger. I am being treated courteously by the staff here but it still feels like being in prison.

Since I have infinite time on my hands, I've been watching a lot of Chinese television. The official state media is filled with reports of the dangers of H1N1. Yesterday, an entire talk show was devoted to interviewing a healthy Chinese woman studying abroad who is refusing to visit her family in China this summer because she did not want to risk infecting them with the disease. Reporters and officials in her hometown praised her sense of "civic responsibility" and "patriotism". The piece concluded with words to the effect of, China welcomes and embraces all of her children from around the world.

While this type of blatant propaganda would have amused me even a week back, watching it yesterday made me sick. I've been asked multiple times to provide the names of anyone I came in contact with during my 24 hours of freedom (friends, taxi drivers, cashiers, and waitresses...). I've refused so good luck finding them and the thousands of other people "exposed" to my presence in the city. Call me a horrible person but I refuse to help the "glorious cause".

Although the context is different, the political puppet show that is the H1N1 witch hunt has given me glimpses of the emotions and irrationalities which allowed the CR to happen only 40 years ago. If I had any illusions about what the government of this country will or will not do, I've been disabused of those notions. I feel sorry for the Chinese people who from watching the Chinese news, live in fear of being swamped by a deadly outbreak of H1N1 or other new forms of flu sure to arise in the future. I can no longer defend the actions of this government or look forward to living in a country where the precautionary response to H1N1 is the benign tip of the iceberg.

Anyway.. we'll see. Either way, I'm expecting this trip to be thoroughly enriching. Everyone should wrestle with the bureaucratic tentacles of a communist superstate once in their life, right? (Con loves it when I think like this...).

Somewhere in South Asia...

2009-06-12T18:52:00.000-07:00

.. a year ago.

I promise to do whatever's necessary to help you...

– To see beauty where you otherwise do not.
– To embrace sadness around us.
– To see the art of the design of the world.
– And to grow in the confusion.

I promise to encourage you...

– To embrace transformation.
–To love grace, to think in God's rhythms, to breathe in abundance.
– To... [something surely profound, cept I was nervous and giddy and shaking while writing these on a napkin in the hallway before our wedding (like a true elopement), and couldn't read my own handwriting. It was probably about her hair. I love, love, love her hair. Or maybe her laugh, or her tenacity. Roll that word around on your tongue—her ethereal tenacity. Those words don't even go together, but it's her.]
– To strive hard after that which about us is our best.
– I promise to die every day so that we may live .
— You and me, side by side, knowing that I am more alive with you as my wife. These are my sexy* vows.

*sexy** is the new solemn.
**we made mike say this.

The link.

Somewhere in Middle America..

2009-06-10T08:12:00.000-07:00

The Texas baseball team is going to the College World Series for the 33rd time this weekend (for those counting, that's 10 more appearances than the next closest college, or 8.25 x the Aggies—whichever is easier to understand).

I got to cover Omaha in 2004, and every year around this time I wish I could go back. Beautiful weather. No pro contracts. Fans from eight schools. It really is baseball at its best.

My dad drove up with a friend and watched four games with me, fulfilling a sort of dream we had. The day he arrived, it was 40 degrees and raining. My future wife (I think we had met the day before—she likes to establish her authority quickly) had told me it was silly to pack a sweatshirt in June. She's hot and I "don't get cold," and my dad rescued me with a jacket, fulfilling his own dream of proving that I "still need his advice"... and credit card.

Another writer at my paper drove up with me (who later became one of two writers we had that would get drafted by foreign militaries—he's somewhere near the Korean DMZ). We spent the two weeks there playing golf, doing the best writing of our young careers, draining half (no exaggeration) of our department's travel budget for the year, and playing Hunter S. Thompson in the seedy underworld of Omaha, Nebraska (something involving a skunk, a used car lot, three Koreans, and the Council Bluffs, Iowa police department..).

Texas, meanwhile, steamrolled through to the finals, allowing us to stay long past the opening weekend that had sent most of the SEC fans moping home. The Omaha paper called that Texas team the best it had ever seen. I'd discreetly wear a Texas baseball t-shirt underneath my neutral pressbox yellow, and was planning my victory column well in advance.

But then an amazing thing happened. Texas lost, inexplicably blowing leads to Cal St. Fullerton in two consecutive games despite having the two future first-rounders in the bullpen (including the following year's AL Rookie of the Year). A few unlucky bounces, a few bad pitches, a very, very good Fullerton team (albeit one Texas had pasted earlier in the season)—it just happened. Baseball at its best.

Following the game, Texas failed to show up for the second place trophy ceremony. Apologetic Longhorn coach Augie Garrido attributed it to a communications error (I believed him, and was one of the few people publicly defending Augie in this article). Most of the rest of the media there attributed it to simple, indefensible sore loser-ness.

The team had also wrongfully cut media access short—denying reporters a chance to explore what happened—so the pressbox was left alone to stew and work itself into a tizzy on deadline, throwing unverifiable rumors around with an appalling lack of professionalism and restraint. I might've been naive in my caution, and simply loathe to criticize "my team." But you could feel the press getting angry and vindictive, and sure enough the next day sportswriters from across the nation published columns calling for blood—including one from an uninformed twit at my own paper.

Mob mentality over a sports issue that simply did. not. matter.

Last one in said press box, writing my non-victory column.

Overall, Omaha was everything fantastic about baseball, summertime and college sports—and it convinced me that I really, really didn't want to be watching from the same pressbox ten years later.

And that's how I ended up a career-less (hire me) journalistvagabond in Thailand. Go Horns.

This American Life

2009-06-09T09:01:00.000-07:00

how to cope with the economy: burmese beer and cigarettes.

If you don't already listen, This American Life is this fantastic podcast about (wait—guess first.. yeah. no.. no.. yes.. ok.) America. They do these wonderful stories about random people doing surprisingly interesting, mundane things (in America).

But they also join NPR* now and then to do shows about the economy, cutting through media clutter to make wonkish, complex things you read about in the news jargon-free and easily understandable (and remarkably captivating) via a mix of plain language interviews and anecdotes. The reporters are curious, humble, thorough, non-partisan and appropriately exasperated.

This week's is about the collapse of the regulatory system over the past few years—specifically, the failure of federal regulators with AIG, and the over-reliance and poor design of credit ratings agencies like Standard and Poors.

I feel like I'm a fairly smart guy who reads a lot, but I'd be much much much more confused without these shows. They're simply enriching. You can only download the current week's show for free, so I recommend you do it quickly (they post a new show each Sunday).

*They also have a thrice-weekly NPR podcast called "Planet Money," that does essentially the same thing in shorter, somewhat less-produced shows.

Art and War

2009-05-21T11:03:00.000-07:00

I found this instillation at an art museum in Colombo—several hundred drawings by young Sri Lankans from around the country, depicting (I think, from what one guy there told me) what they hoped the island nation would look like for the new year.

Almost all of them featured some combination of trees and rivers and people holding hands under the sun—cute and uninteresting.

But... there were also just a dozen or so that provided glimpses of life in war, and these I loved. You read a lot about hospitals and rehab centers using art therapy as ways to reach kids, and find out what they're truly experiencing. And in the middle of a war-fueled propaganda battle, these little bits of truth are gold.

A bunch showed life in UN tents—the hope for 2009 is a tent for every refugee?

Some depicted actual fighting—stuff they'd seen? Or just 10 year old boys making similar drawings to ones I did in third grade?

the tamil tigers are an attacking chicken?

A bunch showed life with an enemy:

A Tamil Tiger about to pounce? Maybe.. but that deer looks evil.

And some, I thought, were just intense and beautiful:

I did it?

2009-05-20T08:54:00.000-07:00

the tuktuks rejoice.

"Farther away were the wars of terror, the gunmen in love with the sound of their shells, where the main purpose of war had become war."– Michael Ondaajte, again.

The Sri Lankan government has been fighting the Tamil Tigers for 26 years. I'm 26, and showed up in Colombo last week. The war ended Sunday. I'm just saying...

But no really—what a wonderful and terrible time to be there.

In reality, wars don't truly end until power incentives dictate that peace deals are signed, and this government military victory has done nothing to ease ethnic tensions. The Tigers who escaped the war zone will still probably carry out a protracted terrorism and guerrilla warfare campaign (see the angry reaction from Tamils all over the world—also check out M.I.A.'s happy twitter stream).

And this victory cost of thousands and thousands of innocent lives, and highlighted the dangers of an administration unwilling to work with NGOs and the press (notice the non-Sri Lanka datelines on all NY Times stories, and the non-byline at the bottom of this one). Most of the aid workers I talked to think the island has bigger problems still ahead, and war crimes investigations might re-inflame tensions as atrocities are exposed.

But the end of fighting is good for everyone for now, and more than 60,000 innocents can finally stagger out of the war zone. I think that's worth celebrating.

On Saturday, the president declared victory on Saturday, but things in Colombo still just seemed more tense than anything. I think a lot of people were probably expecting reprisal suicide attacks.

But, on Sunday, when the Tigers announced that they were "laying down our guns," the city erupted into street celebrations. And by Monday and Tuesday, when the rumor that Tigers leader Vellupillai Prabhakaran had been killed had fully spread, things really got fun. Flags on every bus and tuk tuk. Fireworks stopping traffic right and left. Choppers and fighter jets buzzing my 16th floor hotel room.

This sort of tiered unfolding of relief makes sense. A huge part of every war is a protracted propaganda fight, and the Tigers admitting even limited defeat (without threatening immediate retaliation) prolly had a much bigger impact than anything the president declared.

But more so, while war affects everyone in a nation, conventional fighting never took place in the capital. So the main fear was terrorism and assassination, with which the Tigers had given Colombo a lion's share (get the pun?!!). So winning a conventional war in a more distant place itself was probably less important than crippling the terror capabilities of the Tigers and knocking off their messiah-like leader.

Today was declared a national holiday. I wish I could've stayed one more day to see it, even if celebrating a war won with atrocity and a victory that will do little to win peace seems uneasy at best—even if the purpose of celebrating war is to ignore it.

Here's a timeline and a Q&A about it all.

Galle Face Empathy

2009-05-17T00:24:00.000-07:00

"I want you to understand the archaeological surround of a fact. Or you'll be like one of those journalists who files reports about flies and scabs while staying at the Galle Face Hotel. That false empathy and blame." – from this fantastic novel.

I read this while on a veranda overlooking a roaring stretch of Indian Ocean at the Galle Face Hotel.

This is sort of an odd trip. I'm in a place that's dominating the global headlines with a massive unfolding catastrophe, but have no capacity to really understand what's going on or to contribute to any sort of solution. I'm here, essentially then, to sight see–but due to security and scheduling conflicts, I can't really travel to anywhere worth seeing.

So.. I'm just here at a terrible and historic moment, reading novels on the perfect Galle Face veranda, talking to tuk tuk drivers about their families, and having long, late-night conversations with a handful of USAID workers here doing the dirty work. In other words... feigning empathy and blame.

Observations:

– Inside the Colombo airport, there are no less than 35 shops selling washing machines and refrigerators. This says something severe about the culture.. but I'm not sure yet what.

– It's so much of what I loved about India. Technicolored temples. Awkward young men in pants and button-downs cuddling in public places and oppressive heat with young loves. Soldiers holding hands. Head wobbles and sing-song. Color and more color and life. Wonderful food. KFCs on every corner.

– The weather reminds me most of Monrovia. Just a flattening, heavy, salty humidity.

– Huge, huge military presence. Soldiers on every bridge. Checkpoints after checkpoints. Bunkers and anti-aircraft guns all over. It's nothing more than a minor inconvenience for me (I think everything is interesting), but I imagine it's less fun for the 200,000 ethnic Tamils here in the city.
– I've sensed feelings of tension, fear of terrorism, optimism/relief from the ethnic Sinhala, anger/marginalization from the Tamils, embarrassment from all that the country's reputation is getting skewered by the international press. Every westerner I've met describes it differently... and I wonder how much is just what I want to be sensing.

– I've decided, in indulgent over-generalization, that Thais are more polite and less friendly than South Asians. Waiters/shopkeepers/etc here sort of sneer when I walk in, before asking 20 minutes of questions about my love marriage and hair products. I've gotten into almost as many random conversations with strangers in three days here as in seven months in Thailand. I've missed this.

God loves a free and independent press

2009-05-13T23:43:00.000-07:00

From the BBC:

New satellite images appear to show evidence of recent heavy shelling in a government-designated civilian safe zone in Sri Lanka, a rights group says.
The images show crater marks and considerable population displacement between 6 and 10 May.
Human Rights Watch says the images and witness testimony they have gathered contradict troops' claims that they are not using heavy weaponry.

From a newspaper I found here:

Security Forces on the verge of completing the humanitarian operation in the Vanni have confined the LTTE (Tamil Tigers) to one square kilometre in the battlefield.

The fight against terrorism is going on successfully.

In Sri Lanka

2009-05-13T11:57:00.000-07:00

It's actually desperately sad here. And the more I travel the more I sometimes hate the world.

But everything is still beautiful...

How to Shoot Friends and Interrogate People

2009-05-11T19:49:00.000-07:00

I enjoyed this:

Freelancing and Feminine Hygiene

2009-05-08T02:28:00.000-07:00

One of the real joys of freelancing (hire me) is the diverse and delicious number of topics you get to research—especially for wiki-addicts like myself. In the past two months, I've written about (among other topics):

– Seawater air conditioning
– Balinese boutique resorts
– Fuel cell energy storage
– And.. the cold, deadly and cyclically impoverishing effect of misinformation about feminine hygiene in Africa. Fun huh.

From Kristof's blog last week:

Over the last decade or so, it has become increasingly evident that one reason girls in Africa drop out of school is menstruation. They don’t have hygiene supplies, and they’re embarrassed about what might happen during their periods, so they stay home. That leaves them more and more behind, and eventually they drop out.

This is an unmentionable, and so it hasn’t been much discussed and I haven’t seen hard data on it, but I’ve heard it whispered about all across Africa. Some aid groups, such as the Campaign for Female Education, now distribute pads and underwear to girls as part of the effort to increase female attendance in high schools. But pads are expensive and there are issues with disposal of them, partly because of taboos about blood.

Clearly equipped with empathetic expertise, I got to help write a chapter about this very same (female) subject for a book, which will be published this fall in conjunction with the fantastic NGO CARE. It makes sense. I'll post details when it comes out..

It happens in America pt. II

2009-05-08T01:42:00.000-07:00

From Kristof:

Jasmine Caldwell was 14 and selling sex on the streets when an opportunity arose to escape her pimp: an undercover policeman picked her up.

The cop could have rescued her from the pimp, who ran a string of 13 girls and took every cent they earned. If the cop had taken Jasmine to a shelter, she could have resumed her education and tried to put her life back in order.

Instead, the policeman showed her his handcuffs and threatened to send her to prison. Terrified, she cried and pleaded not to be jailed. Then, she said, he offered to release her in exchange for sex.

Afterward, the policeman returned her to the street. Then her pimp beat her up for failing to collect any money.

“That happens a lot,” said Jasmine, who is now 21. “The cops sometimes just want to blackmail you into having sex.”
I’ve often reported on sex trafficking in other countries, and that has made me curious about the situation here in the United States. Prostitution in America isn’t as brutal as it is in, say, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Cambodia and Malaysia (where young girls are routinely kidnapped, imprisoned and tortured by brothel owners, occasionally even killed). But the scene on American streets is still appalling — and it continues largely because neither the authorities nor society as a whole show much interest in 14-year-old girls pimped on the streets.
Americans tend to think of forced prostitution as the plight of Mexican or Asian women trafficked into the United States and locked up in brothels. Such trafficking is indeed a problem, but the far greater scandal and the worst violence involves American teenage girls.
....
Solutions are complicated and involve broader efforts to overcome urban poverty, including improving schools and attempting to shore up the family structure. But a first step is to stop treating these teenagers as criminals and focusing instead on arresting the pimps and the customers — and the corrupt cops.

“The problem isn’t the girls in the streets; it’s the men in the pews,” notes Stephanie Davis, who has worked with Mayor Shirley Franklin to help coordinate a campaign to get teenage prostitutes off the streets.

Great Americans

2009-05-07T01:20:00.000-07:00

Banksy

2009-05-04T05:59:00.000-07:00

My friend Paul, who is good at band and played at my elopement party, got videoed by Athens Soundies (a site I like that makes "soundies" of indie bands worth listening to playing acoustic sets in random places) during SXSW.

Paul Banks: Life for the Charm
by eikonproductions

Paul Banks: The World
by eikonproductions

Paul and his fantastic band (The Carousels) play all over Texas (including Dallas this Thursday), and they just keep getting better and better, so... go see him sometime if they're in your town.

Here is his myspace.

Here is a picture of us when we were still young:

Obama. Complexity. Doing. Etc.

2009-04-30T12:01:00.001-07:00

Following this post the other day about my own muddle-headedness, I re-stumbled across this old David Brooks column about Obama when his candidacy was just getting going.

There are a thousand things to potentially disagree with this administration about. But Obama's ability to "get" or just better express that he "gets" that the U.S. can be both humble and bold about our place in the world—and that the world is complicated and ridiculous and not always a matter of good v. evil—is welcome relief (even if obvious), and why he gets people to listen (especially the enormous audiences abroad—he speaks to them as if they were adults). Brooks, a conservative-ish, certainly gives him the same respect:

Yesterday evening I was interviewing Barack Obama and we were talking about effective foreign aid programs in Africa. His voice was measured and fatigued, and he was taking those little pauses candidates take when they’re afraid of saying something that might hurt them later on.
Out of the blue I asked, “Have you ever read Reinhold Niebuhr?”
Obama’s tone changed. “I love him. He’s one of my favorite philosophers.”
So I asked, What do you take away from him?
“I take away,” Obama answered in a rush of words, “the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away ... the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, and not swinging from naïve idealism to bitter realism.”
My first impression was that for a guy who’s spent the last few months fund-raising, and who was walking off the Senate floor as he spoke, that’s a pretty good off-the-cuff summary of Niebuhr’s “The Irony of American History.” My second impression is that his campaign is an attempt to thread the Niebuhrian needle, and it’s really interesting to watch.
On the one hand, Obama hates, as Niebuhr certainly would have, the grand Bushian rhetoric about ridding the world of evil and tyranny and transforming the Middle East. But he also dislikes liberal muddle-headedness on power politics. In “The Audacity of Hope,” he says liberal objectives like withdrawing from Iraq, stopping AIDS and working more closely with our allies may be laudable, “but they hardly constitute a coherent national security policy.”

At the time, in a failed experiment with my own human nature, I had decided to see if I could truly stay mentally uncommitted to a candidate until the last week of the election. But it was stuff like this that made Obama wildly compelling—and to me made his unconventional youth in places like Indonesia and Pakistan an enormous asset.

Thoughts?

Trafficking

2009-04-28T10:32:00.000-07:00

It.
Happens.
In.
The.
Bible Belt.

Still.. nice to see functioning law enforcement and judicial systems (although.. only 13 years?). Here officials own brothels. I'm trying to figure out how to measure what faith/distrust in the system does for societies.

photos of the sky

2009-04-27T02:40:00.000-07:00

Back in January, a few months into dry season here, every rice farmer/mushroom harvester/trash creator in the north was setting fires. Soon sunsets, mountains and the general existence of color (despite the red/yellow Bangkok protests) were all gone (as I've relentlessly documented/complained about). Then it started raining again earlier this month, jacking up humidity levels but returning the general visual vibrancy that makes this place so livable.

Good story huh.

Pictures!:

Liberia Day (updated)

2009-04-22T09:13:00.000-07:00

Jon Stewart had Liberian president Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf on yesterday. I wish Stewart had let her talk more, but she's a remarkable woman doing an impossible job as Liberia rebuilds after decades of war, and worth listening to (as I got to do each morning on UN radio during my short trip there last year).

She's the first female president in Africa. More and more and more I'm seeing that it's women who are best equipped to lead desperate communities/countries to better futures.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

M - Th 11p / 10c

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Economic Crisis

Political Humor

Here's The Economist on the book she just wrote (plus an update on her performance so far).

Also—looks like a story I wrote about that Liberia trip got picked up by a literary journal. Neat huh? Details soon..

Update: Ha. Also... Former Thai PM/polarizer/"Great Satan" Thaksin Shinawatra is apparently exploring investment opportunities in Liberia this week.

Darfur. Giving. Complexity. Etc.

2009-04-21T11:16:00.001-07:00

Good intentions don't always work with reality (and sometimes make things worse), and I find that fact simply, increasingly, terribly paralyzing.

William Easterly—whose excellent blog I mentioned in this post and who's made a career out of highlighting how aid is often misguided—writes this post about a book about some well-intended NGOs (possibly) making things worse in Sudan:

In brief, he accuses advocacy campaigns like Save Darfur of making the achievement of peace in Darfur more difficult by portraying the conflict simplistically between “bad Arabs” and “good Africans,” and by advocating foreign military intervention.
I’ll repeat just a few points from Mamdani that stuck in my mind, but I encourage you strongly to pick up the book.

The Save Darfur campaign repeatedly ignored and distorted the facts on the ground.

Darfur is an insurgency and an extremely vicious counter-insurgency, but there was never the intent to eliminate any specific group and so the word “genocide” is inappropriate. But the word “genocide” gave the West and the UN a free hand to intervene.

The prospect of foreign military intervention encouraged the rebels to hold out rather than agreeing to a peace deal, while hardening and attracting additional support for the position of the government to “defend national sovereignty.”

There were also terrible atrocities on the “good African” side.

The “good African” side includes one key player, the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), that is an opposition Islamist movement that was previously on the “bad Arab” side in the North-South civil war (note: disconcerting, especially if you've read this book) between “bad Arabs” and “good Africans.”

There was a sharp decrease in violence after 2005 just as the Save Darfur campaign picked up steam.

The ICC is not credible to much of the non-Western world as a judge of war crimes since the US itself does not subject itself to the ICC, and since the ICC seems to selectively prosecute US enemies and turn a blind eye to war crimes by US allies.

The Western pressure based on distorted facts has set back attempts within Sudan and within Africa to reach a peace settlement in Darfur, which is the only way the tragedy will end.

None of this is to deny the enormous human tragedy in Darfur. But Mamdani’s analysis makes one wonder: is it possible that ill-informed outsiders with the threat of military power on their side can make things worse rather than better?

Anyone who knows care to comment?

This nothing new—on all levels of aid—even without getting into military complications. Kipling called the worst forms of it the "White Man's Burden." We've met more than one pastor who steals from his own orphanage, and there's a long sad history of governments creating dependent, depowered (it's a word) poor communities. Most of the beggar kids here have pimps watching nearby.

Seems like the world just exploits the human attraction to good v evil, the tendency to reduce things to that which we can understand and act upon, and really horrible realities on the ground that a still, in fact, dying for assistance.

So... how to help when so much aid is ineffective and some runs the risk of impeding progress?

Nick Kristof, on cue, offers encouragement in a recent column about giving. :

Many people doubt the effectiveness of foreign aid, and a new best-selling book called “Dead Aid” by an African finance expert, Dambisa Moyo, even argues that government-to-government assistance is often harmful to recipient countries. It’s true that aid of all kinds is harder to get right than people usually assume, but the kind that has the best record is grass-roots investment — with strong local buy-in — in health, education, agriculture and microfinance. I’ve repeatedly seen these kinds of programs transform families and communities, from Africa to Afghanistan.

Frankly, this kind of aid is also pretty beneficial to the donor. For my part, I gain far more than $24 a month in psychic value from sponsoring Yuneiris, and my family’s tiny foreign assistance projects also remind my own kids that there is a world out there in which children have needs greater than the latest iPod.

Will my dollars and letters utterly transform Yuneiris’s life? Probably not. Will they make a significant difference? Probably yes. Is it worthwhile? For me, absolutely!

So, I guess... give in faith and obedience and a belief in sovereignty, give with due diligence, give with the right motives, give with realistic expectations about effectiveness, and give in the realization that we're not called to save the world. But... regardless... give, especially where you can't serve (the worst problems in the world, I'm increasingly deciding, are all fueled by and fought with the bottom line).

Thoughts?

Read Con's sorta-similar post (featuring Bono!) here.

Be gentle... I bleed.

2009-04-18T12:38:00.000-07:00

Just curious what everyone did to celebrate World Hemophilia Day on Friday.

*First person to explain the title reference gets a prize (your choice between 49 U.S. Military "Saddam Playing Cards" I bought in Burma... and a severed goat head).

In conclusion..

2009-04-15T11:28:00.000-07:00

.. (for now):

Think I'm going to miss Tony Cheng.

Anyway.. BBC has an extraordinary summation, that also explains a lot of the background better than I ever did. If you're confused and curious, read the whole thing:

Three years of intractable political conflict are taking a debilitating toll on Thailand. Emotions are now very raw.

Some of the ugliest scenes in recent days did not involve the army; they occurred when local residents came out to confront the rampaging red-shirts. Shots were fired, two people died, and some were savagely beaten.

It is difficult to explain why Thailand, a country once seen as a paragon of stability and social harmony, has become so polarised.

The division between Red and Yellow cuts across many lines; it is not simply just rural-versus-urban, or poor-versus-rich. Spend long enough with either group and you meet people from very varied backgrounds.
....
[But...]
Go to a red-shirt rally and you will hear the same mantra; "We are grass-roots people, fighting for democracy, against the ruling class".

Go to a yellow-shirt rally and you will almost inevitably hear a different mantra; "We are educated people, fighting against corrupt politicians who abuse democracy".
There appear to be no towering, Obama-like figures in Thailand, who can win the respect of both camps. Certainly not [Prime Minister] Abhisit, who often looks uncomfortably out of place in the rural, red heartlands of the north and north-east.

How he deals with the leaders of the "red uprising" now - and how that compares with the treatment given to last year's "yellow uprising" - will be an important test of his promise to uphold the rule of law impartially.

So the conflict which erupted so spectacularly in Bangkok and Pattaya over the past week will probably rumble on, steadily eroding the confidence of investors, tourists and the Thai people, in a stable future for their country.

Redshirts jump the shark?

2009-04-14T00:01:00.000-07:00

ny times: people fight back (click for slideshow).

(update: This blog, which I like, says pretty much the same thing, except with a twist — "But, as Abhisit knows better than anyone else, the royal yellow lesson from 2008 is that thuggery, violence and provocation can reap rich political rewards." — and has a bunch of thoughtful comments that disagree.)

I wonder about how much hearts and minds matter here.

Back in October, during the PAD protests, I was skeptical of what the yellow shirts were demanding, but supported their right to protest. Then they became increasingly radicalized, culminating in the airport sieges that crippled the Thai economy, shutting down the tourism industry during the high season and hurting regular people. I heard from several people who quit supporting the PAD (although I don't really know — they could still be wildly popular).

This seemed to put the red shirts in position to take the high road, and — except for a couple minor instances — they did, putting on massive, peaceful protests and then going home after a day or three. Massive changes are coming in Thailand, and eventually there will be elections again, and the red shirts seemed primed to benefit. I think most democracy-minded Americans would at least tepidly agree with the reds' demands.

But then they started crippling Bangkok by abandoning their taxis at traffic choke points, attacking politicians, (literally) crashing the ASEAN summit, hijacking and threatening to blow up gas trucks in residential areas, and then — last night — allegedly attacking a mosque and opening fire on a group of angry citizens at a market, killing two.

So today the headlines have switched from stuff like "Government fires on protesters" to things like "U.S. condemns red shirt mob violence." A shift in popular opinion? A couple of red shirt leaders turned themselves in this morning, after encouraging protesters to disperse. Prime Minister Abhisit seems to be staging a remarkable (didn't think he'd last until the end of the month two days ago) comeback, and the government might just emerge from all this in tact.

The red shirts don't have the backing of the military and other elite, entrenched power centers like the yellows. So it seems like the only way they'll ever regain power is through popular support — and, as such, should be doing everything they can to hold on to it. It's unfair (and the source of their anger/frustration), but reality. Ghandi and MLK knew what they were doing.

Anyway.. I ask the question because I'm very much on the outside of all this, and am curious how this kind of thing looks for regular, unaffiliated Thais. (I'm not Thai and I'll prolly be gone in two years, but—on some level—someone unaffiliated and limited in understanding, albeit curious like me can be a decent gauge for how well a group's PR efforts are working).

Regardless, it's clear that violence breeds violence, and absolutist mob behavior (whether red, yellow or American partisan) is simply a part of human nature.

Thoughts?

--------------

Here are videos from yesterday. Watch the molotov cocktails, and then the taxi crash through the army line in this one:

And two from Al Jazeera — my new favorite news station:

backstory

2009-04-13T11:25:00.000-07:00

Backstory (way way oversimplified, leaving the reasons for each side's protests somewhat out of it):

The reds (more democratically numerous) were in power. The yellows (more powerful) launched a non-violent military coup in 2006 to remove them. The reds (with hints of corruption) democratically regained power at the end of the year-long coup. The yellows started mass protests shortly before we arrived here in September, taking over the government house — essentially the White House without the a residence for the PM. Protests escalated (including the big one where Con got hit), and eventually the (increasingly fanatical and cultish) yellows shut down both Bangkok airports, crippling the Thai economy but making their point. The courts responded by booting out the (almost visibly relieved) red PM (who visited us in the hospital) on corruption charges ushering in a new yellow PM (who seems competent, but obviously gained power under dubious circumstances).

The reds regrouped and started mass protests around New Years. Then, following events I don't really understand, the protests escalated this past week, demanding the removal of the current PM.

There's been like 23 coups since 1900, or something. So this is just the latest in a long complicated history of sorta-instability (would rather have this than what's happening in Burma).

If anyone who knows wants to fill in holes or tell me I'm wrong.. feel free.

Crackdown

2009-04-13T00:01:00.000-07:00

(note: for updates as this all escalates, I'm following this site — support his analysis by visiting his sponsors. And a twitter feed here. And another blog here and here.).

It's sort of amazing. I'm in Chiang Mai, where the Songkran (see second video in previous post) festivities are in full swing. I've never seen so many people smiling at once outside of a sporting event (even if some are red shirts riding around with propoganda on loudspeakers). Everyone gets to be kids for a few days.

Yet...

The police and military finally started pushing back against the Red Shirts late last night in Bangkok, using tear gas and the threat of live rounds shot (only—according to the government) into the air (yeesh...) to disperse protesters from one traffic choke point in Bangkok. The protesters have done their share to incite the violence, driving a bus into a riot line, hurling molotov cocktails and (according to the government) shooting a few of soldiers. They've also started hijacking/parking/threatening to blow up gas trucks (wtf!). Protesters quickly regrouped nearby, proving that this is going to be a long, drawn out mess.

This round of protests is different than the ones in October — more widespread, strategic and unruly. Seems like they are already approaching the height of the PAD's (October yellow shirts) mob mentality. There are groups blocking intersections in several parts of the city, and — now, in response to the crackdown — major highways all over the country.

And the introduction of violence will only cement the zealotry on all sides. I hate group think/mob mentality. People have full rights to protest. And the government needs to be able to control things (see their ridiculous inability to secure the Asean summit). But it seems like there are tipping points...

Also.. Stewart, our BangkokPastor who lives in central-ish Bangkok somewhat close to the action, has a post up showing how a state of emergency in Thailand almost always means life as usual for most people (although they forced the closure of our favorite mall — shame!).

Songkran; States of Emergency

2009-04-12T11:08:00.001-07:00

This was the scene in Bangkok today — Tanks rolling. Coup rumors. Military and police providing strikingly little resistance to the protests:

This was the scene in Chiang Mai today — Same thing really:

Happy Easter everyone.

Protesters Quash Asean Summit

2009-04-11T09:49:00.000-07:00

I can just picture the prime ministers/crowd control gurus of China and Burma sitting there snickering, feeling validated.

About half of the leaders at the meeting were evacuated by helicopter, including those of Vietnam, Myanmar and the Philippines, Thai officials said. Some officials fled by boat.
Abhisit Vejjajiva, the embattled Thai prime minister who has faced a week of large-scale street demonstrations, declared a state of emergency to secure the departure of leaders from Southeast Asia, China, South Korea and Japan. The emergency decree was lifted once the leaders had safely left Pattaya, a resort town about 90 miles east of Bangkok, officials said.
The cancelation of the meeting, involving leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or Asean, was deeply embarrassing for Thailand and a missed opportunity for Asian leaders to discuss the severe economic downturn that is causing some of the region’s export-dependent economies to contract.

The link.

Somaly Mam

2009-04-08T22:40:00.000-07:00

I just finished Somaly Mam's book about the realities of trafficking and prostitution in Cambodia. It's enlightening and terrible. She writes beautifully, and I finished it in a daze.

Here's a Nick Kristof column and video about Somaly and her book back in September.

In the past when I’ve seen Somaly and her team in Cambodia, I frankly didn’t figure that she would survive this long. Gangsters who run the brothels have held a gun to her head, and seeing that they could not intimidate Somaly with their threats, they found another way to hurt her: They kidnapped and brutalized her 14-year-old daughter.

Three years ago, I wrote from Cambodia about a raid Somaly organized on the Chai Hour II brothel where more than 200 girls had been imprisoned. Girls rescued from the brothel were taken to Somaly’s shelter, but the next day gangsters raided the shelter, kidnapped the girls and took them right back to the brothel.

Yet Somaly continued her fight, and, with the help of many others, she has registered real progress. Today, she says, the Chai Hour II brothel is shuttered. In large part, so is the Svay Pak brothel area where 12-year-old girls were openly for sale on my first visit.

“If you want to buy a virgin, it’s not easy now,” notes Somaly, speaking in English — her fifth language.

....

In her book, Somaly recounts how she grew up as an orphan and was “adopted” by a man who sold her to a brothel. Once when Somaly ran away, the police gang-raped her. Then her owner, on recovering his “property,” not only beat and humiliated her but tied her down naked and poured live maggots over her skin and in her mouth.

Yet even after that, Somaly occasionally defied him. Once two new girls, about 14 years old, were brought in to the brothel and left tied up. Somaly untied them and let them run away. For that, she was tortured with electric shocks.

.....

The world’s worst trafficking is in Asia, but teenage runaways in the United States are also routinely brutalized by their pimps. If a white, middle-class blonde goes missing, the authorities issue an Amber Alert and cable TV goes berserk, but neither federal nor local authorities do nearly enough to go after pimps who savagely abuse troubled girls who don’t fit the “missing blonde” narrative. The system is broken.

You can visit Somaly's foundation here.

Fear tactics much?

2009-04-08T20:48:00.000-07:00

Airing in five states:

If anyone has a good argument for how this could affect me, my marriage or my country in any way, I'm really open to listening.

Super Cooks

2009-04-07T22:50:00.000-07:00

I had an idea for a website. It was going to be huge.

Our western (farang food) options are limited in Phayao, but I'm usually happy with some sort of peanut butter, lychee wine, chocolate chip and coffee power shake. Constance disagrees that this either "resourceful" or "tasty," and as such moans a lot about food.

So I was staring at our kitchen, wondering if there was something creative or interesting I could cook for my wife using the limited ingredients we had (plus the 15 or so things I knew we could get at Tesco). Lightbulb! Carl Jung! Recipes for foodies who love cooking but who don't want to go to Whole Foods before dinner, or who can't because they live in a tiny cheese-allergic village in Northern Thailand!

Enter the ingredents you have. Website tells you what you can make.

I'd use it—even if only for idle time wasting and searching for the world's most ridiculous recipes (what could I make with singha beer, ham, deep fried crickets, olive oil and green curry paste?). We'd just need to build a base of content, design and market it well, and eventually thrive off user-generated recipes.

Meet supercook.com. Bastards.

My google-averse father has a long and distinguished history of inventing things that have already been invented. He once received a patent rejection after he couldn't get the 40-45th candles lit on my mother's birthday cake without getting burned, and came up with self-lighting candles with wicks tied together by dental floss. Last year he started laying the groundwork for a global tree-planting initiative that already existed... under the same name.

So I inherited that gene, but at least we try.

But now I don't get the website, and I've lost my excuse for serving my wife mustard fish ball sandwiches.

Live free; Ride hard

2009-04-01T21:56:00.000-07:00

I got this vespa for my birthday two weeks ago:

I was going to join the Black Rabbits, this local motorcycle gang:

The moto came with a pink seat and pink handlebars. But it didn't come with a license plate, and we didn't realize that meant we couldn't ever get a license plate for it — ensuring inevitable confusing, awkward, hand-flapping run-ins with the local bribe-happy cops who care about that sort of thing.

So after riding it just a handful of times (including one long, glorious dash through countryside backroads during which I ran out of gas in the middle of a rice farm), we sold it back yesterday to Dong — the guy with the motorcycle shop in our front yard.

I never even named it. The Black Rabbits approve of my municipal obedience.

Can design save newspapers?

2009-03-31T23:46:00.000-07:00

This guy thinks so..

The world needs good newspapers, but won't notice when good reporting is gone.

Malaysia (no. last one)

2009-03-31T05:00:00.000-07:00

...has Islam.

Featuring—hijab in a parachute:

and... BURQA ON A JETSKI:

Monies

2009-03-30T09:13:00.000-07:00

Great article in SI last week about athlete fiscal incompetence, with a bunch of alarming stats:

"• By the time they have been retired for two years, 78% of former NFL players have gone bankrupt or are under financial stress because of joblessness or divorce.
• Within five years of retirement, an estimated 60% of former NBA players are broke.
• Numerous retired MLB players have been similarly ruined, and the current economic crisis is taking a toll on some active players as well. Last month 10 current and former big leaguers—including outfielders Johnny Damon of the Yankees and Jacoby Ellsbury of the Red Sox and pitchers Mike Pelfrey of the Mets and Scott Eyre of the Phillies—discovered that at least some of their money is tied up in the $8 billion fraud allegedly perpetrated by Texas financier Robert Allen Stanford. Pelfrey told the New York Post that 99% of his fortune is frozen; Eyre admitted last month that he was broke, and the team quickly agreed to advance a portion of his $2 million salary."

And some incredible anecdotes that..well.. explain it:

"A few years ago, Butowsky recalls, he met with a former high-round NFL pick whose adviser, also a former player, said that he couldn't reveal how much he was charging to manage the athlete's tax-exempt municipal bonds "because of the Patriot Act." According to Butowsky, he was taking $146,000 every year."

"About five years ago, Hunter says, he invested almost $70,000 in an invention: an inflatable raft that would sit under furniture. The pitch was that when high-rainfall areas were flooded, consumers could pump up the device, allowing a sofa to float and remain dry."

Malaysia (no. 6)

2009-03-28T23:36:00.000-07:00

... has lanterns.

Malaysia (no. 5)

2009-03-27T09:04:00.000-07:00

... has grown-ass men in sunset water fights (they're just like me!).

More Batu Feringgi pictures here.

Malaysia (no. 4)

2009-03-27T03:31:00.000-07:00

... has stiff penalties.

*also notice the 90 day entry stamp. we came to malaysia to apply and fork over a bunch of money for a 3 month visa back into thailand. malaysia gave us three months just for showing up. we're considering a move...

Malaysia (no. 3)

2009-03-26T00:01:00.000-07:00

... has color.

Malaysia (no. 2)

2009-03-25T19:08:00.000-07:00

... has Chinese hotels that seem haunted when it rains.

Malaysia

2009-03-24T00:01:00.000-07:00

...has the Straits of Melacca.

Siamese Marie (and Dave) No. 3

2009-03-22T21:40:00.000-07:00

They gave us a new camera, which produces huge photos, which take three weeks to upload over Thai internet.

Here's the full slideshow.

Trazzler

2009-03-18T21:03:00.000-07:00

I am an "Editor and Community Manager" for this travel site, started in part by the guys who started twitter. And I am (edit: was until a couple days ago I just noticed) the featured writer this month.

It's a fun site with a different spin on web-based travel guides, and it's been a nice to write just a little bit about a lot of what I've gotten to see/do while running around the world for the past couple years. So.. look around.

The trips I've written are listed here.

Lamborghini dichotomies

2009-03-15T00:23:00.000-07:00

From a development perspective, I've found Thailand to be a great example of both the potential and the problems that come with a high-growth emerging economy.

There's a well-developed infrastructure, good rural roads, consistent power, some social safety nets, a growing middle class and a very-visible high society (featuring all the modern touches — Lamborghinis and Ferraris for sale in a Bangkok mall — that come with them). But there's also a large chunk of the population living on a couple bucks a day, plaguing political turmoil, corruption and mistrust, abhorrent treatment of refugees and minorities and a huge slum in the shadows of the Bangkok high-rises.

It's healthy democracy and capitalism next to Burma, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, but waste and inefficiency next to Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

And it's why the sex trade is so bad here — Thailand is poor enough to make it a "sending" country (poor girls to fuel the trade) but rich enough to have a robust business/expat/tourist "receiving" community (men to buy them).

Our pastor in Bangkok wrote a good post illustrating life on both sides of the divide after an encounter with a Lamborghini:

I pulled up right beside him and passed him. As I went by I looked over my shoulder as if to say "eat my dust".

How you might ask did this happen? He was stuck in traffic on Rama IV road and I was on a motorbike which can (carefully) weave in and out of stopped traffic.

We live in a world where generally the wealthier you are, the faster you go, the higher you climb, the less dust you have to inhale. What surprised me was how satisfying it was to pass the guy.

....

The motorbikes have a kind of camaraderie. There is an unspoken bond over and against the car drivers. Motorbikers of the world unite! Again, what's amazing to me is that I didn't really know about this world until I drove a bike myself.

Jesus over and over again said that one way to "test" the authenticity of our faith is to see how we treat the most vulnerable people around us. (See Matt 25 for example) So I'll take my encounter with the Lamborghini this morning and the feelings it stirred up as a reminder of how different the world looks depending on whether you are on the top (luxury cars), in the middle (Motorbikes) or on the bottom (traveling on foot or by bus).

I'm not ready to say that all Christians need to join the bottom (sell our cars and motorbikes). Although there are stories about Jesus that suggest that wouldn't be such a bad idea. What we are obligated to do though is to pay attention, be sympathetic and offer friendship and help to those who struggle to meet life's basic needs.

Read the whole post here.

Stewart v. Cramer

2009-03-13T09:28:00.000-07:00

Extraordinary interview here with Jon Stewart grilling Jim Cramer, if you don't watch the Daily Show. It's just delicious.

The failure of journalism (especially cable news, which.. I guess.. is journalism) in the current financial crisis is all too similar to its failure in the run up to Iraq, and indicative of a much larger cultural problem. Stewart's genius — and public service — is that he gets this.

Watch the whole thing (un-cut-for-TV) here.

James Fallows, who I respect, describes it this way:

"Yes, it is cliched to praise Stewart as the "true" voice of news; and, yes, it is too pinata-like to join the smacking of CNBC.... But I found this -- the Stewart/Cramer slaughter -- incredible.
I thought Stewart, without excessive showboating, did the journalistic sensibility proud.

Just before leaving China -- ie, two days ago -- I saw with my wife the pirate-video version of Frost/Nixon, showing how difficult it is in real time to ask the kind of questions Stewart did. I know, Frost was dealing with a former president. Still, it couldn't have been easy to do what Stewart just did."

art!; "the weight of glory"

2009-03-03T22:47:00.000-08:00

the butterfly's name is c.s. lewis.

Siamese Marie No. 2

2009-03-03T07:30:00.000-08:00

elephants.

Siamese Marie No. 1

2009-03-02T04:18:00.000-08:00

My mom and dad are in Thailand. Took mom to a market where they slaughter frogs, which scream before getting whomped upside the head by this lady. Something squirted out of one, hitting mom in the eye.

Here she is in a public place, in a foreign land:

David Brooks speaks to Americans as if they were adults*

2009-02-26T12:03:00.000-08:00

I'll read every column David Brooks writes, and this is why:

In the age of Rush and Hannity, here's Brooks explaining his careful opposition to the economic approach currently being taken by Obama, without belittling, demonizing or polarizing those he's criticizing.

These experiences drove me toward the crooked timber school of public philosophy: Michael Oakeshott, Isaiah Berlin, Edward Banfield, Reinhold Niebuhr, Friedrich Hayek, Clinton Rossiter and George Orwell.

These writers - some left, some right - had a sense of epistemological modesty. They knew how little we can know. They understood that we are strangers to ourselves and society is an immeasurably complex organism. They tended to be skeptical of technocratic, rationalist planning and suspicious of schemes to reorganize society from the top down.

...

Readers of this column know that I am a great admirer of Barack Obama and those around him. And yet the gap between my epistemological modesty and their liberal worldviews has been evident over the past few weeks. The people in the administration are surrounded by a galaxy of unknowns, and yet they see this economic crisis as an opportunity to expand their reach, to take bigger risks and, as Obama said on Saturday, to tackle every major problem at once.
...

If Obama is mostly successful, then the epistemological skepticism natural to conservatives will have been discredited. We will know that highly trained government experts are capable of quickly designing and executing top-down transformational change. If they mostly fail, then liberalism will suffer a grievous blow, and conservatives will be called upon to restore order and sanity.

It’ll be interesting to see who’s right. But I can’t even root for my own vindication. The costs are too high. I have to go to the keyboard each morning hoping Barack Obama is going to prove me wrong.

Humble. Introspective. Respectful. Intellectually curious. Willing to be wrong. Aware of the limits of his understanding about the world. THIS IS HOW POLITICAL DISCOURSE SHOULD BE.

Read the whole thing. Thanks to Trey for the link.

*To steal from Jon Stewart. Seriously.. quit watching cable news, folks.

Everything is amazing. Nobody is happy.

2009-02-25T20:02:00.000-08:00

I loved loved when, upon landing in both the Dominican Republic and Liberia, everyone on the planes cheered.

India

2009-02-24T01:47:00.000-08:00

Scott and Jenni, who spent a week with us this month after two weeks playing plumber in India, put up some gorgeous pictures from their trip to the subcontinent (know on this blog as "The Most Interesting Place in the World").

'

Full slideshow here.

Smokes

2009-02-23T00:05:00.000-08:00

Phayao really is a perfectly beautiful place, and I love the mountains around our town. Unfortunately, it hasn't rained since October and there are like a billion forest fires burning throughout the north. Add in that most of the rice farmers (I think) burn their fields around this time of year.. and suddenly the mountains are gone.

September (gorgeous!):

Two weeks ago (gone!):

I spent a lot of time apologizing to both the Japanese and Scott and Jenni (our friends here two weeks ago) and explaining the pyro rice farmer dilemma. I don't think anyone blames me for making the mountains disappear, but I do it anyway.

It's also going to be 100+ all week, which is odd since the lack of rain has all the leaves turning red. So it looks like October and feels like June and smells like camping (it's like a dream!).

So.. sorry Mom and Dad (visiting in less than a week). Actually — they live in Houston but grew up in Northern California, so whether we get smog or mountains, they'll feel right at home.

Moral Hazard

2009-02-22T06:50:00.000-08:00

I think a lot of people have been struggling (myself included) with the "moral hazard" of the gov bailing out of those who either perpetuated the banking crisis and those who took on risky mortgages who had no business doing so. Obviously no one wants to reward mismanagement, stupidity and greed. And no one wants to enable or encourage such repeat behavior with prescedent for future government intervention.

But no one wants the entire system to collapse either, and this isn't an individual economic crisis.

So.. with housing plan and bailout II debates heating up, here are a couple good ones from over the weekend that added a bit of clarity to this.

David Brooks (more or less a conservative) who says dwelling on punishment isn't the answer:

Our moral and economic system is based on individual responsibility. It’s based on the idea that people have to live with the consequences of their decisions. This makes them more careful deciders. This means that society tends toward justice — people get what they deserve as much as possible.

...

Personally, I hate the idea of 10 guys sitting around in the White House trying to redesign huge swaths of the U.S. economy on legal pads.
But at least they seem to be driven by a spirit of moderation and restraint. They seem to be trying to keep as many market structures in place as possible so things can return to normal relatively smoothly.
And they seem to understand the big thing. The nation’s economy is not just the sum of its individuals. It is an interwoven context that we all share. To stabilize that communal landscape, sometimes you have to shower money upon those who have been foolish or self-indulgent. The greedy idiots may be greedy idiots, but they are our countrymen. And at some level, we’re all in this together. If their lives don’t stabilize, then our lives don’t stabilize.

And the New Yorker's James Surowiecki, who says the moral hazard isn't as big a risk as you might think:

Why might the effects of moral hazard be smaller than expected? To begin with, most bailouts aren’t like deposit insurance, which is certain and quick. Financial bailouts are uncertain and messy, and they typically occur only after institutions have already suffered extensive damage. Bear Stearns, for instance, was “saved” only after its shares had fallen almost ninety-five per cent from the previous year, and it seems unlikely that either its laid-off workers or its battered shareholders came out of the experience anxious to engage in more foolhardy behavior.
....
The patchiness of the moral-hazard argument doesn’t mean that we should simply rubber-stamp another bank bailout; that may be both unjust and a poor strategy for whipping the financial sector into shape. But it does mean that the failure of Lehman Brothers was an unnecessary and costly sacrifice to moral-hazard fundamentalism. It also means that we should not sit quietly by because we fear that government action today will lead to reckless market behavior years from now. Moral hazard has its costs. But, so far, our fear of it has proved much more expensive.

Anyway.. discuss.

About time..

2009-02-18T05:08:00.000-08:00

No. No. Not my first haircut since August.

NATIONALIZATION.

Way more exciting. May or may not be the solution, but it shouldn't be a taboo part of the conversation.

Discuss..

I'm all for this

2009-02-16T20:16:00.000-08:00

Measures like this one (more backstory here) and efforts to restrict bottled water in nations that don't need it... even if the punishment seems a bit harsh.

Delhi to outlaw plastic bags

Customers and shopkeepers in India's capital face jail sentence or stiff fine for using polythene bags

Carry a plastic bag in Delhi and you could be imprisoned for five years. Officials in India's capital have decided that the only way to stem the rising tide of polythene is to outlaw the plastic shopping bag.
According to the official note, the "use, storage and sale" of plastic bags of any kind or thickness will be banned. The new guideline means that customers, shopkeepers, hoteliers and hospital staff face a 100,000 rupee fine (£1,370) and a possible jail sentence for using non-biodegradable bags.
Delhi has been quietly filling up with plastic bags in recent years as the economy boomed and western-style shopping malls sprang up in the city. There are no reliable figures for bag use but environmentalists say more than 10m a day are used in the capital every day. Not only are the streets littered with them, but polythene takes hundreds of years to decompose and creates demand for oil, which is used to make plastics.
At first the ban will be lightly implemented, giving people time to switch to jute, cotton, recycled-paper and compostable bags.
Newspapers in India quoted city officials as saying that the authorities did not "want people to be harassed and no prosecution will take place immediately; [once they] understand that by using plastic bags they will be in contempt of court, they will start using other material". The first targets in Delhi will be the industrial units that manufacture the plastic bags in the capital, which officials say will be closed down.
Civil servants said that punitive measures were needed after a law prohibiting all but the thinnest plastic bags – no thicker than 0.04mm – was ignored.
Although the government had originally concluded that plastic bags were too cheap and convenient to be disposed of, the authorities appear to have been swayed by environmentalists who pointed out that used bags were clogging drains and so providing breeding grounds for malaria and dengue fever.

I remember signs discouraging plastic bag use around downtown Delhi. Here in Thailand (relatively clean) they give you a bag and a straw with every bottled coke you buy at a 7/11. It just gets habitual, so in a place like Delhi overflowing with trash — good for them.

Living/traveling through smoggy emerging economies does make me both thankful for a strong environmental lobby in the US, and realize just how much of America's industrial pollution has simply been pushed overseas.

high-five inauguration

2009-02-15T22:54:00.000-08:00

Via Mike..

My Heart is Like a Cabbage

2009-02-15T19:45:00.000-08:00

Happy Valentine's from India..

As a Valentine's Day card smoldered, more than 100 members of the Hindu extremist group Shiv Sena gathered in central New Delhi chanted "Death to Valentine's Day" and "People who celebrate Valentine's Day should be pelted with shoes!"

...

This is a conspiracy to misguide the young people of our country," said Jai Bhagwan Goel, chief of the Shiv Sena's north India branch.

In his hand the card, with its image of a Victorian couple pictured in a tepid peck under a parasol, went up in flames.

"We have come to know that in America, even unmarried girls as young as 11 or 12 years have become mothers ... and every second man there is divorced," Goel told reporters after reducing several greeting cards to a small pile of ash. "This is their culture - it cannot be accepted here."
...
Weather intervened to stop Hindu extremists in the northern city of Lucknow from carrying out their threats to beat couples found kissing, hugging or even holding hands in public. With torrential rains pouring down, young lovers stayed out of the parks where the usually seek privacy.
Still, even if some lovers stayed out of sight, they made their desires known, placing ads on special Valentine's Day pages in newspapers.
"My heart is like a cabbage," declared a man named Manoj to some lucky lady. "Divided into two; the leaves are for others and the heart for you."

Scott and Jenni, world-class canoodlers who just spent a week with us in Thailand, spent Valentine's in Mumbai. Hope they're ok.

"As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God"

2009-02-08T10:13:00.000-08:00

During church in Chiang Mai today, a pastor mentioned this article from The Times of London subtitled "Missionaries, not aid money, are the solution to Africa's biggest problem — the crushing passivity of the people's mindset."

"But travelling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I've been trying to banish all my life, but an observation I've been unable to avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my world view, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God.
Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good."

The author (obviously an atheist) writes from experience throughout southeast Africa about the charitable work done by missionaries, but also (more interestingly) the large-scale psychological affect Christians can have on rural communities.

It's fantastic. I love the way this guy thinks. Read the whole thing, but here's an excerpt:

Anxiety - fear of evil spirits, of ancestors, of nature and the wild, of a tribal hierarchy, of quite everyday things - strikes deep into the whole structure of rural African thought. Every man has his place and, call it fear or respect, a great weight grinds down the individual spirit, stunting curiosity. People won't take the initiative, won't take things into their own hands or on their own shoulders.
How can I, as someone with a foot in both camps, explain? When the philosophical tourist moves from one world view to another he finds - at the very moment of passing into the new - that he loses the language to describe the landscape to the old. But let me try an example: the answer given by Sir Edmund Hillary to the question: Why climb the mountain? “Because it's there,” he said.
To the rural African mind, this is an explanation of why one would not climb the mountain. It's... well, there. Just there. Why interfere? Nothing to be done about it, or with it. Hillary's further explanation - that nobody else had climbed it - would stand as a second reason for passivity.
Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.
Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted.

Once again.. read the whole thing. Here.

Cepilla Los Dientes

2009-02-02T02:47:00.000-08:00

It's not that we don't have a bunch of friends/relationships/kids following us around in Thailand. It's just that with the nature of Con's foundation/my job/the culture here/our speaking Spanish instead of Thai.. well.. ok we don't. And it's definitely not the integrated, dynamic community we had in the Dominican Republic.

So.. with that in mind.. our dear friend Robin, who runs things in the DR, set up some Skype time (her pictures here) with the kids we miss most from last summer.

And Ruben, about whom I will one day publish a short story:

It kills. We hung up and wanted to cry.

Paul Krugman..

2009-01-30T06:12:00.000-08:00

.. on the stimulus after Obama struck out with the GOP :

"Aren’t you glad that Obama watered it down and added ineffective tax cuts, so as to win bipartisan support?"

Anyway.. here's a good back and forth about the stimulus, featuring one of Con's professors.

And David Brooks articulates.. I guess.. how I'm feeling about it.

Throughout 2008, Larry Summers, the Harvard economist, built the case for a big but surgical stimulus package. Summers warned that a “poorly provided fiscal stimulus can have worse side effects than the disease that is to be cured.” So his proposal had three clear guidelines.
First, the stimulus should be timely. The money should go out “almost immediately.” Second, it should be targeted. It should help low- and middle-income people. Third, it should be temporary. Stimulus measures should not raise the deficits “beyond a short horizon of a year or at most two.”
Summers was proposing bold action, but his concept came with safeguards: focus on the task at hand, prevent the usual Washington splurge and limit long-term fiscal damage.
Now Barack Obama is president, and Summers has become a top economic adviser. Yet the stimulus approach that has emerged on Capitol Hill abandoned the Summers parameters.

Updike

2009-01-28T08:32:00.000-08:00

John Updike died yesterday. He wrote with "a journalist’s sociological eye and a poet’s gift for metaphor."

Here's a good poem he wrote about a dog that my dad read to us at dinner once:

Dog's Death

She must have been kicked unseen or brushed by a car.
Too young to know much, she was beginning to learn
To use the newspapers spread on the kitchen floor
And to win, wetting there, the words, "Good dog!
Good dog!"

We thought her shy malaise was a shot reaction.
The autopsy disclosed a rupture in her liver.
As we teased her with play, blood was filling her skin
And her heart was learning to lie down forever.

Monday morning, as the children were noisily fed
And sent to school, she crawled beneath the youngest's bed.
We found her twisted and limp but still alive.
In the car to the vet's, on my lap, she tried

To bite my hand and died. I stroked her warm fur
And my wife called in a voice imperious with tears.
Though surrounded by love that would have upheld her,
Nevertheless she sank and, stiffening, disappeared.

Back home, we found that in the night her frame,
Drawing near to dissolution, had endured the shame
Of diarrhoea and had dragged across the floor
To a newspaper carelessly left there. Good dog.

The [Middle] of Poverty

2009-01-27T22:10:00.001-08:00

The history of foreign aid and charitable giving is riddled with examples of well-intentioned westerners making things worse. NYU economist William Easterly has made a career out of pointing this out, highlighting in two books I've (um.. halfway) read about how giant, top-down, state-based aid pushes that get a ton of attention are lazy, ineffectual and often harmful (he supports grass roots, bottom-up approaches instead).. and are essentially reincarnations of messianic colonial motivations.

And now Easterly has a blog:

Today, I foist a new blog called Aid Watch on the blogosphere. The objective is to be brutally honest when aid is not helping the poor, but also praising it when it is.

...

We fiercely debate domestic spending bills that waste affluent taxpayers’ money with a few millions on a bridge to nowhere, so why should we be NICE when the head of the world’s premier aid agency outlines virtually zero accountability for helping the world’s poorest people?

He's an important voice in an interesting conversation.. and he at least partly makes sense.

It makes people feel good when the UN launches a program to cut poverty in half, or when rock star economists like Columbia's Jeffrey Sachs travel the world with Bono and Angelina Jolie touting books like his famous The End of Poverty. People want to believe in big ideas and pushes, especially if someone else (governments) does the dirty work for them. But it doesn't necessarily mean the big ideas work. Every ten years poverty becomes trendy, someone puts on a big concert, countries pledge big money to meet big goals, and planning starts for the next inevitable big concert ten years down the road.

But Sachs is undeniably a heavyweight, and makes several salient counter-arguments. And the debate touched off an ongoing, somewhat contentious (albeit important) back and forth between the two. Other respectable economists we read in development classes jumped in (Jagdish Bhagwati thinks they're both wrong, Amartya Sen thinks Easterly makes good, but overblown points).

The result, if you follow it casually, is a bit dizzying and dismaying. If the world's smartest people can't agree on clear actions for attacking poverty, and if misguided (even if well-intentioned) action can only make things worse, why try?

But at least the blogosphere is making these debates more accessible and dynamic.. and a lively exchange of ideas seems like the right place to start.

The Bright Side

2009-01-24T03:40:00.000-08:00

From The Bangkok Post..

Council defends circumcision error

The Medical Council of Thailand has come to the defence of a male nurse at a clinic who mistakenly circumcised a boy who wanted to have an abscess in his mouth removed.

On Thursday, Rattanaporn Manaschuen, the mother of the 12-year-old boy, complained to the Public Health Ministry after her son was circumcised at a clinic in Samut Prakan's Phra Pradaeng district on Monday. She said the boy actually went there for treatment of an abscess in his mouth.

Acting Medical Council president Somsak Lohlekha said it was a case of miscommunication.

Dr Somsak said the doctor at the clinic correctly diagnosed the boy with a mouth abscess and did nothing wrong. The doctor wrote "excision" on an order assigning the nurse to perform the operation.

But the male nurse confused "excision" with "circumcision" and proceeded to cut off the boy's foreskin.

Dr Somsak said the mistake was unintentional.

He said the doctor was not to blame, although the matter would go before a council panel on medical ethics.

"Usually, a circumcision is a minor operation and a doctor can assign a nurse to do it," Dr Somsak said. He said looking on the bright side, the accidental circumcision would help the boy keep his genitalia clean and lower the risk of cancer.

Tous les morts-nes forment une armee

2009-01-20T23:19:00.000-08:00

Haiti is a bit of a haunting place. Once while there, we climbed up to a fort atop a mountain to gaze down and try to understand the UN tanks, bribe-hungry cops, colorful culture and charming (if glassy-eyed) people — and to stop and ask what the hell went wrong.

Then I left my camera in a taxi.

Thankfully our friend Chris didn't, and just sent us this picture:

identify please

2009-01-19T22:52:00.001-08:00

found in our bathroom:

there are cobras, vipers and kraits all over northern thailand. it would be a good story to have a pet king cobra living in our bathroom, but, sadly, i don't think this is one of them.

first person to identify gets our pet mongoose when we come home.

me too, bro

2009-01-12T06:15:00.000-08:00

Weekly Kristof

2009-01-12T05:22:00.001-08:00

Nick Kristof on trafficking again, this time with a small bit of good news:

I just returned again to Ms. Khorn’s brothel to interview her, and found something remarkable. It had gone broke and closed, like many of the brothels in Poipet. One lesson is that the business model is more vulnerable than it looks. There are ways we can make enslaving girls more risky and less profitable, so that traffickers give up in disgust.
....
Virgin sales are the profit center for many brothels in Asia (partly because they stitch girls up and resell them as virgins several times over), and thus these sales are their economic vulnerability as well. If we want to undermine sex trafficking, the best way is to pressure governments like Cambodia’s to organize sting operations and arrest both buyers and sellers of virgin girls. Cambodia has shown it is willing to take at least some action, and that is one that would strike at the heart of the business model.
Sexual slavery is like any other business: raise the operating costs, create a risk of jail, and the human traffickers will quite sensibly shift to some other trade. If the Obama administration treats 21st-century slavery as a top priority, we can push many of the traffickers to quit in disgust and switch to stealing motorcycles instead.

Note about nick: He mentions in this column his experience buying and liberating a pair of sex workers (actually when I first remember reading his column). You can read that riveting series of columns starting here.

In my last column, I described the sex trafficking in places like Cambodia as a modern form of slavery, and I believe that. But the scene that unfolded next underscored the moral complexity of a world in which some girls are ambivalent about being rescued and not all brothel owners are monsters. Some brothel owners use beatings and locked rooms to enslave their girls, but most use debts and ostensible kindness to manipulate them -- and the girls are often so naïve, so stigmatized by everyone else and so broken in spirit that this works.