PS ACTUALLY WAIT I hope this doesn't sound like I'm trivializing the scary stuff that went down yesterday, but the more I think about it the more this debate about what we should do about web censorship in China et al seems analogous to concerns that our government/the RIAA is going to stop the sharing of copyrighted music and video over the internet. Despite using - successfully! - all the legal tools at their disposal, shutting down Napster, Grokster et al, and suing a bunch of 12 year olds or whatever, WE ARE SWIMMING IN AN OCEAN OF FREE MUSIC, and the ocean is getting bigger and deeper all the time.

And sharing music, like sharing information, is capital-G Good - as we come to know a wider and weirder variety of people, the more we realize how similar people are. The closer I look at you, the more I see myself, and the more I listen, the more I hear my own voice -

(More in this earlier post on the Grokster ruling and why the majors' strategy can't stop filesharing and, most importantly, why the music industry can shrink in nominal terms while providing increasing amounts of value for music listeners.)

They there's no Chinese word for Martin Luther King Jr.:

A week of protests by villagers in China's southern industrial heartland over government land seizures exploded into violence over the weekend, as thousands of police officers brandishing automatic weapons and electric stun batons moved to suppress the demonstrations, residents of the village said Monday.

The residents of the village, Panlong, in Guangdong Province, said that as many as 60 people were wounded and that at least one person, a 13-year-old girl, was killed by security forces. The police denied any responsibility, saying the girl died of a heart attack.

Villagers said that the police had chased and beaten protesters and bystanders alike, and that villagers had retaliated by smashing police cars and throwing rocks at security forces in hit-and-run attacks.

Residents said Monday that the village had been sealed off, with the police monitoring roads into the area to check identification and bar access to outsiders. News of the violence appears to have been blocked in China.

Heyo, wasn't I just writing about how everything is going to be totally cool with China? Well, no, obviously - reading some civil rights history yesterday was a timely but unpleasant reminder that the US itself only really became a full democracy a few decades ago, and that there was no shortage of awful stuff that went down in the years before that. China is on pace to basically fast-forward through it's own version of the American 20th century experience in about 30 years, and at quadruple the size - it's not going to be pretty.

Not to be overly detached about this or anything, but I think one of the most interesting things to look for in all this is how widely the news travels despite the government's efforts to keep a lid on it. As noted in the article I quoted in my previous post, the Chinese blogosphere in particular and the internet more generally is enabling news about incidents like this to get out:

Two recent contentious events - the toxic benzene spill into the Songhua River in north-eastern China, and the shooting of village protesters at Dongzhou, Guangdong province - have drawn thousands of caustic postings, despite tight censorship.

All internet operators have special teams who do nothing but watch what is posted on blogs and bulletin boards and knock out contentious items, says Berkeley's Professor Xiao. "The hosting service will give a warning: 'We have a business here; you can't do this to us' even before the police take any action.

"That said, you can still write all kinds of things, in the grey area, making fun of things," Professor Xiao adds. For example, in the last few days one key statement coming up again and again again by netizens is: "Wo zhidao - I know."

"It means I know what happened in Dongzhou," Professor Xiao said. "Even if you are deleting all the information, people are asserting: I know. It's part of a statement of protest, that their commentary is being deleted."

Asiapundit's account of the government shutdown of one of the most prominent subversive Chinese blogs - Anti - is similarly interesting. While he's very critical of Microsoft for their complicity with the Chinese government's request, he also note that he's able to host a mirror of the censored site on a server in Singapore, and one of his commenters claims that many other Chinese bloggers have expressed sentiments, and that Anti was only shut down because he had become too prominent. The Party can't stop blogs, they can only hope to contain them. It's kind of like how shutting down Grokster and Kazaa effectively stopped people from sharing copyrighted music IN NO WAY WHATSOEVER

I have a lot of faith in the ability of the many millions of Chinese that are now joined to each other and to the world online to eventually - sooner rather than later is my guess - collectively outsmart any censorship regime the government attempts to impose. I suspect that the 'mere' fact that this was a front page story on the NYT online yesterday is an early indicator that the Chinese government are still, and will continue to lose their ability to control the flow of information inside and outside the country.

And if that turns out to be true, there's every reason to believe that the Party will continue to make more and more concessions to international democratic and civil rights norms in the years to come, even if progress is a bit 'fit and start'y at times. It's no coincidence that the government has been publicizing a host of ambitious environmental initiatives over the past year or two that we've also been reading increasingly-publicized accounts of the environmental problems that have accompanied their rapid modernization (and the accompanying rise of, oh, a couple hundred million people from poverty into the middle class - not a bad deal, really).

There's no doubt that attacks on peaceful protestors, web censorship, and everything in between deserves to be denounced, but the reality is we can't do much beyond politely petitioning them to continue moving towards adopting rich-world norms as fast as they can manage - China is not going to be pushed around, by us or anyone else, again. We should be grateful to see them moving in the right direction, and, looking back at our own rough history, be realistic about the pace. We should also get used to it: China's not the only 'developing' country that will be joining the 'developed' world in the coming decades, and our delicate rich world sensibilities will no doubt be offended many times over. King's ideal of universal equality and civil rights, like true love, travels on a gravel road, and it's still got a long way to go.

HOT PINK COLOR-CHANGE!

Sorry for all the words recently - plz jam out on this Chi-town classic ALL WEEKEND, seriously, let's have some fun out there:

DO OR DIE - CAN U MAKE IT HOT

HAPPY 25TTH DANNY OPP!!!

Sooooo the Edge online intellectual hive mind site does this big annual 'World Question Center' feature where they ask all these really famously smart people (like Brian Greene, and Philip Zimbardo!) a thought-provoking question - according to the BBC, "it's like the crack cocaine of the thinking world," which is an awesomely retarded blurb to have on your site for sure. Last year's was actually kind of like that though, you may remember my enthusiastic BLOGGING of it - the 'question' was "What do you believe in that you cannot prove?," which obviously resulted in a straightforwardly orgiastic swap meet of genuinely interesting half-baked ideas from the best and brightest from both the 'hard' and social sciences (Brian Greene, Philip Zimbardo, etc). This year, I'm not so sure...

"WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA?" The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?

Meh, I haven't read many of the answers, but I'm not particularly excited to, to tell you the truth. The master of systemic doom, John Robb, LOVES it though and picks this interesting, sure-to-be-popular post-Hobbesian/Robbsian answer:

Marx was right: the "state" will evaporate and cease to have useful meaning as a form of human organization.

...As long as technologies of transportation and military force emphasized geographic centralization and concentration of forces, the general or emperor or president in his capital with armies at his beck and call was the most obvious focus of power. Enlightened government constructed mechanisms to restrain and channel such centralized authority, but did not effectively challenge it.

So what advantage is there today to the nation state? Boundaries between states enshrine and exacerbate inequalities and prevent the free movement of peoples. Large and prosperous state and state-related organizations and locations attract the envy and hostility of others and are sitting duck targets for terrorist action. Technologies of communication and transportation now make geographically-defined communities increasingly irrelevant and provide the new elites and new entrepreneurs with ample opportunity to stand outside them. Economies construct themselves in spite of state management and money flees taxation as relentlessly as water follows gravity.

Hey, I love John and his Global Guerillas framework as much as the next guy, just like I love all the other brave futuristic types who have been predicting the imminent irrelevance of the state for the past, oh, couple hundred years or so. They're not exactly wrong, the general trend towards decentralized economic and even military power has been underway for some time, but with all due respect to those pesky global guerillas, no one is close to seriously challenging the state's supremacy in its core competency of military power, nor are any non-state economic entities capable of shaping markets the way that states can. This will probably change more quickly than I think - but I don't think it's happening as quickly as some of these guys think, either.

Evil genius Carl Schmitt makes a terrifyingly more coherent and more fundamental argument for the continued need for the state's existence in his essay "Ethic of State and the Pluralistic State," originally published sometime in the late 1910s or early 20s I think but only translated into English a few years ago for Verso's collection, The Challenge of Carl Schmitt. After tracing similar arguments about the obsolescence of the state first to Aristotle's objections against Plato's political monism and then to their modern origin in the Roman Catholic Church's polemics against the rising 'universal' state of the 17th and 18th centuries, he posits a fundamental flaw in all of them:

The state, in fact, does appear to be largely dependent on social groups, sometimes as sacrifice to, sometimes as a result of, their negotiations - an object of compromise among the powerful social and economic groups, an agglomeration of heterogeneous factors, political parties, combines, unions, churches, and so on, which come to understandings with each other. The state is weakened and relativized in the compromise of social forces - even rendered problematic, because it is difficult to see what independent significance it might have...

An error which mostly goes unnoticed, and thus uncriticized, dominates thinking here and almost everywhere else, including among pluralist social theorists. It is that the political means a particular substance alongside other substances of 'social associations', that it can be given a particular content alongside religion, economy, language, culture, and law, and that consequently the political groups can be set up alongside the other groups... All interpretation and discussion about the nature of the state and the political must run into error as long as the widespread conception dominates which has it that there could be a political sphere with its own substance alongside the other spheres. It is then also easy to lead the state as political unity ad absurdum, and to oppose it root and branch. For what remains of the state as the political unity when all other contents - the religious, the economic, the clutural, and so forth - are removed? Were the political merely the result of such a subtraction, it would in fact amount to absolutely nothing. But here we have the cause of the misunderstanding, for the political, correctly understood, is only the degree of intensity of a unity. Political unity can contain and comprehend different contents. But it always designates the most intensive degree of a unity.

In other words - until a new form of organization produces a more 'intense' political unity, until some international or supranational or subnational organization can effectively unite more people under its aegis, the nation-state will continue to change its content, but it will also continue to survive as a necessary, structural feature of the human world. Until technology advances to the point where larger groups can be brought together - either through super-national aggregations of states or through sub-national networks that cut across states - the nation-state will remain at the top of the pyramid. And despite any hype to the contrary, neither the UN nor the postmodern left's 'multitude' nor Al-Qaeda's vision of a new global caliphate looks like it's anywhere close to successfully encompassing the sheer people-volume that the governments of the US/EU/China/India/etc are capable of, however imperfectly.

ALL THAT SAID, PS, mostly I just wanted to link to some rad anarcho-capitalist lit! David Friedman is the son of OG economist Milton Friedman, and seems to have an insane gift for convincingly applying economic theory to all sorts of non-financial issues, Freakonomicsishly you could say I guess. His blog is a great read, and his homepage links to all sorts of interesting and rather cogent radical libertarian/anarcho capitalist writings, including this very relevant and fascinating thought exercise that looks at security in a world without government - while he only discusses conventional 'domestic', police-enforced security and not 'national', military-enforced security, the core ideas could conceivably scale up in case of any future global anarcho-syndicalist/capitalist revolution:

How, without government, could we settle the disputes that are now settled in courts of law? How could we protect ourselves from criminals?

Consider first the easiest case, the resolution of disputes involving contracts between well-established firms. A large fraction of such disputes are now settled not by government courts but by private arbitration of the sort described in Chapter 18. The firms, when they draw up a contract, specify a procedure for arbitrating any dispute that may arise. Thus they avoid the expense and delay of the courts.

The arbitrator has no police force. His function is to render decisions, not to enforce them. Currently, arbitrated decisions are usually enforceable in the government courts, but that is a recent development; historically, enforcement came from a firm's desire to maintain its reputation. After refusing to accept an arbitrator's judgment, it is hard to persuade anyone else to sign a contract that specifies arbitration; no one wants to play a game of 'heads you win, tails I lose'.

Arbitration arrangements are already widespread. As the courts continue to deteriorate, arbitration will continue to grow. But it only provides for the resolution of disputes over pre-existing contracts. Arbitration, by itself, provides no solution for the man whose car is dented by a careless driver, still less for the victim of theft; in both cases the plaintiff and defendant, having different interests and no prior agreement, are unlikely to find a mutually satisfactory arbitrator. Indeed, the defendant has no reason to accept any arbitration at all; he can only lose--which brings us to the problem of preventing coercion.

Protection from coercion is an economic good. It is presently sold in a variety of forms--Brinks guards, locks, burglar alarms. As the effectiveness of government police declines, these market substitutes for the police, like market substitutes for the courts, become more popular.

Suppose, then, that at some future time there are no government police, but instead private protection agencies. These agencies sell the service of protecting their clients against crime. Perhaps they also guarantee performance by insuring their clients against losses resulting from criminal acts.

How might such protection agencies protect? That would be an economic decision, depending on the'-costs and effectiveness of different alternatives. On the one extreme, they might limit themselves to passive defenses, installing elaborate locks and alarms. Or they might take no preventive action at all, but make great efforts to hunt down criminals guilty of crimes against their clients. They might maintain foot patrols or squad cars, like our present government police, or they might rely on electronic substitutes. In any case, they would be selling a service to their customers and would have a strong incentive to provide as high a quality of service as possible, at the lowest possible cost. It is reasonable to suppose that the quality of service would be higher and the cost lower than with the present governmental system...

There's a lot, lot more, and he convincingly addresses pretty much all the problems I could think of. It's a fascinating view of what the world might look like one day when we finally DO outgrow the nation-state - so don't get me wrong, I know nothing lasts forever, but I seriously doubt that report's of the death of the nation-state will be anything but a great exaggeration any time soon.

Wait, does any of this make sense? My head hurts a little bit, I can't believe I have to go back to school on Tuesday! :/

I'd been meaning to do a post on this for a few minutes at least when I saw this Armed Liberal post over on Winds with some well-intentioned, pro-internet freedom proposals circulating on the Global Voices mailing list of international bloggers. Specifically, they're proposing various penalties for US internet server, search, etc companies that comply with the rule of 'repressive' regimes that censor or surveil the internet, a popular recent complaint against Google, Cisco, Yahoo, Microsoft et al.

Gary Jones noted the short-sightedness of this attitude several months ago -

The issue is being mindlessly spun as U.S. companies assisting Chinese repression. This is rubbish. They either comply with state regulations or they too are banned.

It is far better that the Chinese people have even limited access to major web tools than not have access at all. Yahoo, Google and Microsoft have done the wise thing. The Chinese government deserves all the criticism but in the end this won't matter. Access to the web will undermine them no matter how they censor content because it is the form not the content that is subversive. They aren't stupid. They know this too. Their objective is to slow change rather than prevent it and so avoid collapse.

Gary's perspective here is echoed in a variety of ways throughout recently-oft-cited Tom Barnett's Blueprint for Action. Barnett's (empirically supported) idealism about the virtues of connectivity and globalization is consistently balanced by his realism about the possible pace of change in 'New Core' (China, India, Brazil, et al) as well as Gap states.

The social changes that accompany increased connectivity - urbanization, secularization, increased participation of women in the economy and political life, etc - challenge the very foundations of traditional/patriarchal/religious values, and are bound to be contested by various reactionary forces at every stage in the process. Even here in the US, the OG country of post-industrial, globalized values, various cultural conservatives are still vigorously, unsuccessfully fighting the encroachment of global cosmopolitan culture on our 'American way of life'. As Barnett says, in vaguely Tom Friedman-esque (take that as you will) fashion, that 'the locomotive can't travel faster than the caboose' - while change through increasing global connectivity is inevitable (absent civilizational catastrophe), each society has to make its own path forward, each will travel at its own pace, and each will tend to travel as fast as it can without triggering social collapse - and no faster.

China is obviously a crucial, paradigmatic case, and Barnett is optimistic that it's moving in the right direction:

China's Communist Party is not really in control of much that matters inside the country today. By maintaining significant control over political expression, it pretends that it's actually running China's economic development, which, quite frankly, is so vast that it's beyond anyone's capacity to manage at this point. Imagine a basketball game where the referees' only authority is to prevent players from cursing at one another but virtually anything else is fair play. That's about as close as the Communist Party comes to running this nonstop game called modernization. So to call China's current political system authoritarian gets to be awfully misleading, because so much of economic life there is brutally rapacious and freewheeling. It is a single-party state and, like many states that pursue rapid economic development under these political conditions, this, too, will eventually pass into something more pluralistic, first within the Communist Party itself and then beyond it. And this will happen by 2025.

(One of the fun things about BFA is Barnett's willingness to put his marker down so deliberately, no hedging here - strong moves, very confident!) The key here is the separation of the idea of 'connectivity' into at least two separate streams - economic and political - that, like different segments in society, can flow at different rates, though they tend to flow in the same direction. Similar ideas are used in analyses of the evolution of 'freedom', 'human rights', etc, and here as there, economic empowerment (connectivity, freedom, rights, etc) tends to precede political empowerment (expanding the political franchise, civil liberties, etc) - which only makes sense, right? Politicians yield control only reluctantly, when the proles acquire enough economic power to demand a say. For Barnett, China's rapidly growing info-connectivity as one of six great 'revolutions' going on in China today that the political leadership is desperately attempting to keep pace with:

Fifth, there's the revolutionary passage from being a society largely disconnected from the outside world to one that is rapidly networking with the global economy and encountering all the influences such connectivity brings. What's so odd about all this is how the outside wolrd tends to be so critical about China not changing itself fast enough! For example, China goes from having virtually no one on the Internet ten years ago to having more than 100 million today, but many experts in the West only want to highlight how the government seeks to censor certain politically sensitive sites. Tell me, which process seems more profound: the growth in connectivity or the government's pathetic fear-threat reaction? Which one would you care to bet on winning over the long haul? And if Western information technology companies implicitly collude in these censorship efforts by selling such technologies to the government, does that seem a reasonable price to pay for the resulting connectivity? Or must such connectivity only come about under the same conditions of freedom of speech that we enjoy in the West?

Anecdotes from the frontlines of the Chinese blogosphere seem to reinforce Jones/Barnett's optimism about the future of China's internet-enabled connectivity:

[Chinese blogger] Wang has not been warned about his blog yet. "I know very clearly what I can and cannot write," he said. "But China's control over the internet media is not as tight as foreigners think. Unless you talk directly about some sensitive topic like Falun Gong, ethnic problems or the image of the top leaders, you can say a lot."

Recent topics have included broad criticism of the discredited state of journalism in China, due to extensive censorship and widespread corruption, and on the 60th anniversary of the end of the Pacific War a swipe at the Red Army's record in fighting the Japanese, in which he noted only two of its generals had died in combat, as against more than 100 in the Kuomintang (Nationalist) army.

Professor Xiao says it is also a question of approach. "In general, Dai Sange Biao [Wang's pseudonym] is making fun of things; he's not really taking on somebody, or having a message. He sort of deconstructs the ideological base," he says.

"That kind of thing the authorities can only watch, until he crosses the line - and of course people like Dai Sange Biao are very clever. He will not cross the line. He will push a little then he'll come back."

Zhao Jing - aka Anti - is different. A graduate of Nanjing Normal University, Zhao, 30, is committed to the cause of democracy in China and earns his living interpreting for a big Western newspaper - which earns him monthly cups of tea with his case officer at the Ministry of State Security. "Anti is more direct, he's more active, he's working with a lot of foreign journalists and he also has this little character of being 'subversive'," Professor Xiao says. "He's also clever enough - he knows where is the limit, but he's right on the border. If he crosses he'll get a phone call or he'll be blocked."

...Bloggers like Zhao are also an important input to China's intellectual debate, feeding in news from foreign language websites or external Chinese-language websites run from Taiwan, Hong Kong or the dissident diaspora.

Sure, it's (far) less than ideal, and these rumblings from the leading edge of society will have to be translated into widespread gains in political freedom at some point - but these avenues for quiet dissent are unquestionably an improvement over (quite recently) having none at all, and to deny Chinese internet users such potentially subversive tools as Google because of these relatively minor restrictions seems counterproductive. It's taken generations of largely boring but occasionally violent struggle to achieve our impressive levels of economic and political freedoms in the US, and this has been the case everywhere and always - it's useless or worse to demand that China move even faster than its already incredible-by-historical standards pace.

ALL THAT SAID, PS: I was talking to a(n American) friend last night who's lived in China off and on over the past few years, who has now opened three successful American-style punk rock and rolly bars there, and he bitterly complained about the 'business interest' mentality that dominates SIPA's slant on China which says that 'whatever China does is just fine so long as we can make money there' etc (paraphrasing heavily, it was at a bar, loud, beery, etc). He says political repression is still a huge deal, that people still have to live in fear of arrest or worse if they say the wrong thing, and he doubts that the Party will ever really relinquish control without some kind of potentially catastrophic 'showdown'. I listened!

His anecdotes about the political atmosphere of today's China is obviously capital-I-Important information about understanding the current state of affairs, but I'm not sure I agree with his potentially apocalyptic conclusion about the future. While I don't doubt that Barnett's (and SIPA's) big-picture perspective is business-centric (or private sector-focused, if you want to read a more generously democratic impulse into his views, as I do), and that this kind of perspective is inevitably insensitive to the scary reality of life under authoritarian government, I would again point first to the long and bloody history of the US and Europe and then to the peaceful, slow evolution of post-war Japan towards (first) economic and (then, very slowly) political freedom as a cause for optimism. The push for increasing freedom in China is one of the most important frontlines in the advance of globalism - but it is already underway, powered by irresistible forces of internal modernization, and I doubt that it needs help from well-meaning foreign activists in orchestrating its pace.

More energy-related shenanigans feat P-Wolf over at Winds of Change - while the 'original' New Energy Currents posting will continue to focus on advances in energy technologies in development and on the market, a new Energy Policy and Markets post will gather news related to private sector initiatives, energy markets, energy policies, and international energy-related relations. Highlights from this month's listing include green moves by Wal Mart, booming investments in solar energy, details on the Pataki-led Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, and the usual Kyoto-wrangling -

NATE DAVIS HAS A COMPREHENSIVE NEW WEBSITE:

LANGUAGERECOVERY.ORG

You may know Nate from the intense NOISEsounds known as 'Knifestorm' and/or 'Unchained', you may know him from his stimulating visual creations, you may know him from his questing prose on SAVING and/or professional philosophy discussion boards - AT LANGUAGE RECOVERY DOT ORG YOU CAN KNOW HIM IN ALL OF THESE WAYS, at once. The oeuvre is getting impressive, mang! In addition to 3 albums of original and juicy noise and post-noise JAMS, there's an MP3 mix of awesome '70s psych/prog-folk jams! MERRY CHRISTMAS

RADdendum to the AWK/TLASILA post: Graphical/gadgetal readers, you gotta check out this little RETRIEVR program linked to on the weirdly straightforward To Live and Shave in LA blog. It's kind of a prototype or something, but it allows you to search Flickr (or at least a selection of Flickr images) by DRAWING what you're looking for! Just check it out OK?

Also, this TLASILA post on bird calls, '37 Unsigned Species: Attention Troubleman!' is kind of exhausting yet somewhat informative/clever.

GO NOW:
INCREDIBLE RIFF on ANDREW WK MAJOR LABEL NOISE PROJECT POMO PROMO CONSPIRACY SCANDAL EXPLOSION!!!

Short Version: Online 'advocacy' site Mothers Against Noise' (M.A.N.) is apparently a covert marketing ploy by Universal to promote the forthcoming TO LIVE AND SHAVE IN L.A. (TLASIL) album!!! And it is really fun/funny - check the band watch list!

Further 'research' yields similarly amazing results, obviously the insane pictures on his website were only the beginning of some next-level(ish) major label avant-marketing slash legend-building. Exhibit A: Wikipedia - "STEEV MIKE" CONTROVERSY! Exhibit B, which is much more fun: The Truth About ANDREW WK blog -

The Andrew WK story doesn't start in New York. Nor does it start in Florida, Michigan, or California. The Andrew WK story starts in the mind of the observer approaching Andrew WK for the first time. Meaning: there is no true context within which one can experience Andrew WK correctly, as the very idea of "his" existence is entirely subjective to the individual's own mind. This is due to the nearly overwhelming layers of confusion that course through every dishonest chord in "Andrew WK" the person and the music. While this is the case with the truth about any "object", this is especially the case when dealing with objects with no officially documented origin, such as the performer presented to the public as "Andrew WK"...

"Andrew WK is one big lie. A lie that is said to be true, but even that is a distortion. Most people think he came from some sort of home-grown earnest beginnings, but the other side of the coin shows a past full of dishonesty and pretense. Although many people consider the "ideal" background story to be true, and claim that Andrew WK's popular legend is correct, it is infact almost entirely fabricated in order to present the idealic and romantic background of a completely fabricated "artist". Andrew WK and all the information currently held as "fact" regarding his history, identity, and existence in general are as confusing as you'll ever find in the world of show business. In all my years of following popular music, I've never come across such an example of the remarkably simple masking the unbelievably complex. The only problem is, there is no truth to reach, and the more layers of the "Andrew WK mystery" that one peels away, the more levels of contradictin are found. As the years go by, more and more have been discovering the twisted sub-realities of this rock 'n' roll anomally. Deceptively fun and pure, Andrew WK and his ultimate truths are far darker and unsettling than most can imagine."

This is a great marketing campaign! I'm happy to play a part in the virality, and am siked for major label noise!!!

As if I didn't have enough good reading material for winter break - I really hope I have time to get to and through Marc Lynch's new book, Voices of the New Arab Public before I'm banished to econ and finance textbooks for the next few months. PROFESSOR Lynch also has a great blog, Abu Aardvark, which is pretty much a must-read if you're seriously interested in the advance of freedom, democracy, et al in the Arab world - NOT bloodthirsty neocon babykilling etc manifestos, but a chronicle of the emergence of a genuine Arab public sphere in a space which had previously been dominated by government propaganda and disconnection etc.

I try to read the Aardvark as often as I can, as you should, but it's tough to get into 'big picture' stuff in the blog context, so I'm very happy to have a chance to spelunk at book-length depth in his thought-caves - I'm eager to learn! In the meantime, this longish piece in the Wilson Quarterly is a great introduction and well worth a read:

Al-Jazeera may have never broadcast a beheading video, but it has shown many clips of terrified hostages begging for their lives. It airs lengthy statements by Osama bin Laden and invites extremists on its talk shows. Watching the Egyptian radical Tala’at Ramih rhapsodize over the beheading of Western hostages on one popular talk show, or Americans and Iraqi civilians die bloody deaths, as shown on raw video footage, or ex-Nazi David Duke discuss American politics at the station’s invitation, it’s easy to see why al-Jazeera is such a tempting target.

But these incendiary segments tell only half the story. Al-Jazeera is at the forefront of a revolution in Arab political culture, one whose effects have barely begun to be appreciated. Even as the station complicates the postwar reconstruction of Iraq and offers a platform for anti-American voices, it is providing an unprecedented forum for debate in the Arab world that is eviscerating the legitimacy of the Arab status quo and helping to build a radically new pluralist political culture.

The neoconservative Weekly Standard’s call for America to “find a way to overcome the al-Jazeera effect” gets things exactly wrong. The United States needs to find ways to work constructively with the “al-Jazeera effect.” The station is as witheringly critical of Arab regimes as it is opposed to certain pillars of American foreign policy. In its urgent desire to promote democracy and other reforms in the Arab world, al-Jazeera shares important aspirations with America. Though no friend of U.S. foreign policy, it is perhaps the single most powerful ally America can have in pursuit of the broad goal of democratic change in the Middle East.

Obviously, you are intrigued and want to read the rest yourself. Link via Nadezhda at the Excellent Group Blog Formerly Known As Liberals Against Terrorism, which now goes by the (much better for several reasons) name American Footprints. See also Lynch's recent post on Al-Jazeera and the recent Egyptian elections for an obviously relevant example.

WOW, have you guys heard about Ringling Brothers CEO Ken Feld? HE'S INSANE. READ THIS AMYGDALA POST AT ALL COSTS, it is totally real, or hyperreal, or something:

Pottker starts talking about seeing strange cars lingering on her street and hearing odd noises on her phone line. And how she discovered that many things in her secluded little world were not as they seemed. For years, covert operatives monitored her activities: her book and magazine projects, her travel plans, even her hair appointments...

But who would possibly care about what this utterly normal couple was doing?

Clues lead to Feld Entertainment in Tysons Corner, the headquarters of one of the largest entertainment companies in the world. It is owned by a megamillionare who prides himself on operating a business devoted to family fun and all-American values. He runs the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.

Step right up, folks: It's the weirdest show on Earth.

WOW, this is all so intense that the scarily violated Ms. Pottker uses this metaphor that I don't really understand, yet am moved by -

Pottker describes reading the file as an out-of-body experience: "I felt like I was observing things from the ceiling. The scales fell off my eyes."

Everything started to snap into place: "The car that had been sitting in front of my home, the constant clicks on the phone, all the bad breaks I'd had in publishing. . . .

"And imagine seeing the memos about my life that were sent on a regular basis to Kenneth Feld. Detailed things about my kids, my haircuts, a party I'm giving, the editors I'm talking to."

THE SCALES FELL OFF HER EYES!

Energy news 2006 episode 1 is up over at Winds of Change - hilites include news on solar power for the NJ Meadowlands, Native American wind farms, hydrogen-producing extremophiles, a pebble bed nuclear reactor in South Africa, underwater kite flying, and, yes, beer ethanol and - YES - lots more.

Serious work going on behind the scenes here at chiasm HQ - but I gotta take a minute to bring you THREE important MPFREE links -

(in INCREASING order of importance)

FIRST: Riff Nick, "Download: Kevin Federline's New Single," is, weirdly, not a joke at all, it's kind of a 'command' actually! Nick's outro riff is totally serious: "I'm certainly not disappointed here, maybe even a little excited." He's got links to dude's Myspace page and a rapidshare MP3, which, as promised, is pretty impressively not horrible! I think maybe I'm rooting for him?

SECOND: The first Lemon-Red mix of 2006 is really fresh, some nice new looks for the new year - well done, Paul Devro, I hope that nasty case of pinkeye clears up! Last month's Catchdubs mix is still available and definitely worth a listen to, it is clearly superior to the new Kevin Federline, despite the surprisingly strong showing by the latter (see above, "First").

THIRD: The Smoking Section has posted uploads of - YES - 20 THREE SIX MAFIA ALBUMS. Have I just dreamed the past week, is it Christmas again? Holy shit etc

PS sorry for all the Barnett-related linx, it's just what I'm reading, you know? I mean JUST KIDDING I'm not sorry, I think it's an important paradigm to grasp, for the purposes of reading this blog if not for the more general purpose of understanding the world better (though that too, I hope), and I'm glad to have the time to 'get into it' here for a blogsec.

Anyway - I was just reminded of this fairly long, in-depth interview he did with Worldchanging, the most influential and widely-read green/lefty activist blog on the block, a little over a year ago. This interview is kind of awesome not only because Tom is articulate and clear as always, but because it happened at all - how many other acclaimed military strategists not only a) give a shit about what the US activist community thinks but b) think that their opinion is worth courting with such a direct and aggressive sales pitch? NONE, obviously.

It's a wide ranging discussion, covering the origins and applications of Barnett's Core/Gap analysis across a number of issues, and it really highlights the appeal of this framework to progressive ideals. V v recommended reading for any/all of all you principled/thoughtful lefties reading this (i.e. my friends! Luv ya!).

The New Year/winter break lull is a good time to post on some 'big picture' issues - and do the pictures get any bigger than CHINA? It's HUGE. Thomas Barnett, among others, has argued passionately for our recognition that the continued deepening of our alliance with (and the general continued economic and political 'opening' of) China is a necessary condition for the continued march of peace/prosperity into the Gap (esp Africa) in the 21st century - from BFA -

It is no secret that in a generation's time China's influence over the global economy will rival America's, so it requires no great leap of logic for any strategist to realize that China and America are destined to enjoy a deep strategic partnership if globalization is to conitnue its historical expansion across the twnety-first century. This is not a choice but a reality, for to avoid this outcome is to prevent a future in which all of humanity would benefit from globalization's promise. Few historic ends will ever come close to justifying such a wide array array of means as the stratetgic partnership of the United States and China in coming decades. In this century, this partnership will define global stability just as much as the U.S.-British strategic partnership of the twentieth century did. It will be that important in its execution, that precious in its bond, that profound in its reach. The blueprint for global peace will be a joint Sino-American document. There is no alternative.

Barnett must have felt that his beliefs were supremely and unsurprisingly confirmed by the altogether kindly tone of Chinese Prez Hu's New Year's address, which literally sounds like he (Barnett) ghostwrote it:

Chinese President Hu Jintao reiterated China's strong commitment to peaceful development in his New Year Address broadcast Saturday to domestic and overseas audience via state TV and radio stations.

"Here, I would like to reiterate that China's development is peaceful development, opening development, cooperative development and harmonious development," Hu said.

"The Chinese people will develop ourselves by means of striving for a peaceful international environment, and promote world peace with our own development," Hu said in the address broadcast by China Radio International, China National Radio and China Central Television.

He said the Chinese people are willing to join with peoples of all nations in the world to promote multilateralism, advance the development of economic globalization toward common prosperity, advocate democracy in international relations, respect the diversity of the world and push for the establishment of a new international political and economic order that is just and rational.

He pledged that China will adhere to its fundamental national policy of opening to the outside world, continue to improve the investment environment and open the market, carry out international cooperation in a wide range of areas and seek to attain mutual benefits and win-win results with all countries in the world.

He mentioned in particular that China will do its best to help developing countries accelerate development and help people suffering from war, poverty, illnesses and natural calamities in the world.

Tom - and those, like me, that share his general perspective on this - also must have wanted to slap Taiwan's President Chen for his New Year's fighting words:

In a televised speech that squelched months of speculation he might soon seek to improve relations with Beijing, President Chen Shui-bian said Sunday that Taiwan needed to increase its weapons purchases and warned against greater economic ties to the mainland.
 
...In his New Year's speech, he used a series of politically charged phrases that appeal to independence advocates in Taiwan, but will probably offend Beijing, while calling for legislative approval of his plan to buy more weapons from the United States.
 
Chen was especially emphatic in warning of the risks posed by the rapid modernization of the People's Liberation Army, especially its heavy investments in missiles that can reach Taiwan. "In the face of such imminent and obvious threat, Taiwan must not rest its faith on chance or harbor any illusions," he said in the president's annual New Year's Day address.

Barnett is pretty unequivocal in BFA about the situation in the Taiwan Strait:

Richard Nixon burned Taiwan's ass back in the early seventies when he effectively switched official recognition to the mainland, so the price the island demanded was the continued "defense guarantee" that said we'd always arm Taiwan to the teeth and rush to its rescue whenever China unleashed its million-man-swim of an invasion.

That promise is still on the books (yes, it's actually written down), like some blue law from a bygone era. Does anyone seroiusly think we'd sacrifice tens of thousands of American troops to stop China from reabsorbing Taiwan? Britain signed Hong Kong away, as Portugal did with Macao, but somehow America is going to the mattress on Taiwan in this day and age? Tell me what we get with this principled stand? To say we're standing up to a "Communist" threat with China gets awfully far-fetched as time passes, as does the claim that Taiwan is a lone bastion of democracy in Asia. So even though the rest of Asia, including Japan, is being rapidly sucked into China's economic orbit, somehow the sacredness of Taiwan's self-perceived "independence" from China is worth torching the global economy over?...

Here's the weirdest part of that potential conflict scenario: China's been clearly signaling for years that i'ts perfectly willing to accept the status quo - just so long as Taiwan makes no moves to rule out permanently the possibility of reunification! That's it! China has basically guaranteed Taiwan's continued existence so long as Taipei's government maintains the appearance of remaining open to the possibility of rejoining the mainland someday... China's not even demanding Taiwan's return, just its continued abstinence from any act that suggests it is unwilling to consider political reunification at some point in the future. China is willing to let this issue ride so long as no one makes a move that seems to close the door on this scenario.

China has done its part to keep this issue alive, of course - again, from BFA:

Did China complicate things with its in-Taiwan's-face "antisecession law" in the March 2005 National People's Congress session? Sure. But let's be clear on the motivations for that one, which involved internal politics far more than national security. Hu Jintao was simply buttressing his standing as the new head of the Central Military Commission, the crucial third "hat" he needed to add to his standing as both President of China and Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party to solidify his rule as others had before him. Hu had a hard time wringing that position from third-generation hard-liner Jiang Zemin, who held on to the post - in part - by starting a whispering campaign that said Hu was weak on Taiwan. So Hu throws down his marker first chance he gets in the March session, reminding us that even though China's a one-party state, there's no shortage of political infighting there.

Predictably, President Chen's strong words are likely motivated by domestic political concerns as well:

Chen had said fairly little in the weeks since his Democratic Progressive Party, which seeks greater political independence from the mainland, fared badly in municipal elections on Dec. 3. The Nationalist Party, which favors closer relations with Beijing, did much better in those elections and has been riding a surge in popularity since its then-chairman, Lien Chan, visited the mainland in late spring shortly before his retirement last summer...
 
Philip Yang, director of the Taiwan Security Research Center at National Taiwan University, said Chen's speech seemed to be an effort to shore up the backing of hard-line supporters of independence. The Constitution bars a president from a third term; Chen's term expires in 2008 and there are signs that others are challenging what used to be his near-absolute control over the party. "He tried to prove he is still in control," Yang said.

Ugh, politics is stupid everywhere. Still, I'm optimistic, for no good reason (I'm generally ignorant on the subject of Taiwan's political life), that largely symbolic domestic pissing contests, in this day and age, will not be permitted to ignite World War III/IV/V (depending on how you're keeping count). In many ways, this issue is similar to concerns about Chinese censorship of the internet - will post on that tomorrow, hopefully -

Happy New Year!!! I have been struggling all day between desire and (mostly) fear of going spelunking deep in my personal psychical/emotional abyss-caves in order to evaluate/interpret the events of 2005 and/or make goals/predictions about 2006!

Fear, naturally, has generally won out, although the forces of introspective bravery have been successful enough to establish a basic narrative framework, where 2005 was a year of 'personal transition' and 2006 will be a year of 'personal seriousness'. I am dimly aware on some level that this has ostensibly been the (failed meta-?)'narrative' of my life since I graduated college like 3 years ago (wtf??), so this idea may be so underdeveloped as to be meaningless AT BEST and completely delusional AT WORST, in other words am I actually in a RUT? I refuse to half-heartedly chase my own soul-tail in cyberpublic any further!

In the future, though, I think it's definitely possible that I'll have the time/courage/self-absorbtion necessary to make that personal introspection-voyage, and if/when that time comes I will be hypothetically grateful for this blog. 2005 was my first full calendar year of blogging, which means that this should be a pretty good record, 'indexically' if not in terms of content, of where my 'head' was 'at'. I've never kept a non-internetted journal or anything, so the experience is new/scary/potentially interesting. I'll come back to all this later, much later, maybe.

WHAT I'M TRYING TO SAY IS: Steev and McMuller have BOTH put together awesome year-end Crude Futures 2005 retrospectives! BOTH also opt to only offer highlights from their two co-bloggers, NOT highlights of their own personal composition, which perhaps testifies to the awkwardness/difficulty of going through your own material discussed earlier in this post (aka New Year's Day is just another day of solo blogging HELL). Shower Feelings's conspicuous absence from the proceedings testifies to his steely-eyed, inflexibly forward-looking determination/orientation (respectively)? Just kidding? The year is young yet and I am 'literally' fanning the flames of my hope for a post of 'Ancient Methods' for 2005 cF hilites. ANYWAY I've basically read everything they've written over there and understood at least like 30-40% of it the first time around, so it was unambiguously nice to relive the past year through their verbal-visual kaleidoscope, and to be reminded of amazing posts like this one and this one that I had kind of forgotten about. Luv ya!

New Year's Eve-themed Joe Frank - get ready -

JOE FRANK - AT THE DARK END OF THE BAR (REMIX)

HEY - DON'T call it a festival - but please allow me the honor of re-gifting some more Charlemagne Palestine-style logic - ORGAN SOLO, OH YEAH

CHARLEMAGNE PALESTINE - SCHLINGEN-BLANGEN

(via Aalumnus "DOCTOR" Mike Colin, live from Tel Aviv!  POST-BIRTHDAY BOY!!!)

PLUS awesome re-regifted link from STEEVILLERRRREAL - insane and bitter C.P. 'interviewed' by ALAN LICHT (who does sound at Tonic now, sometimes, I think? apparently?) in SONIC DEATH (ISSUE #7) - also includes stirring account of THE FALL soundchecking - I may have to type this up later as a public service, it's a pretty sweet interview, NATE definitely read this!, everyone should really read it from the PDF, print it out even and pretend like it is actually a zine instead of a PDF -

WAIT can we get a sonically somewhat similar yet epistemologically antithetical 'plus 1' here, Charley?  Full-time BIRTHDAY BOY JUDD sends a link to the yung Columbia computer music guru Luke Dubois's (no dude I did not have him, I 'had' Fei!) recent work, "Billboard",

Billboard allows you to get a birds-eye view of the Billboard Hot 100 by listening to all the #1 singles from 1958 through the millenium using a technique I've been working on for a couple of years called time-lapse phonography .  The 857 songs used to make the piece are analyzed digitally and a spectral average is then derived from the entire song.   Just as a long camera exposure will fuse motion into a single image, spectral averaging allows us to look at the average sonority of a piece of music, however long, giving a sort of average timbre of a piece.  This gives us a sense of the average key and register of the song, as well as some clues about the production values present at the time the record was made; for example, the improvements in home stereo equipment over the past fifty years, as well as the gradual replacement of (relatively low-fidelity) AM radio with FM broadcasting has had an impact on how records are mixed... drums and bass lines gradually become louder as you approach the present, increasing the amount of spectral noise and low tones in our averages.

The spectral average of each song used in Billboard plays for one second for each week it stayed at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100.  Thus we run about 52 seconds per year, for a grand total of a 37 minute sound work.  The video image tells you what song was used to generate the current spectral average.  Note that nothing of the original recording is used in this piece; everything that you hear is derived from a statistical algorithm applied to the original recordings.  If you know the song used in the average, you may be able to sing the first few bars (or the main hook in the chorus)   over the spectral average and find that you are quite in tune with it; in some cases, you may be surprised not to be.

Judd sez "this is like the opposite of the stretched 9th symphony. and it kinda sounds the same!" and he's soooo right - no wonder he doesn't have a blog - where the stretched 9th lets you soak in an infinitely long and hot bubble bath of one of western music's crowning achievements, Luke systematically compacts the past 50 years of 'low' music culture and in the process squishes out all the juicy fun with a statistical steamroller - YET BOTH SOUND PRETTY COOL.  AND, both sound, in general terms, kind of like the Charlemagne Palestine tracks - !!  I love sound!

HAPPY NU YEAR!   UMatt I'm gonna get you tomorrow, LOOKOUT

OK OK calm down and take a deep breath with me and gorge yrselves on two big slices of gorgeous album-length minimality, past and present - plz feel free to FEEL these -

CHARLEMAGNE PALESTINE - STRUMMING MUSIC
KEITH FULLERTON WHITMAN - MULTIPLES

(cool Charlemagne Palestine interview)

y/f
John.

My legs are starting to hurt from NOT being used. I jogged in place in the kitchen for a minute while I waited for soup to (re)heat, it didn't work (for long). I just finished The Bottomless Well, which was pretty fun, especially the surprise ending where (SPOILER ALERT!) they semi-obliquely theologize thermodynamics - God = Maxwell's Demon. Then I used the internet to read a spurt of recent postings on Crude Futures, which in turn led to my reading other hyperlinked pages on blogs that I had never read before, from people that I haven't met, and the whole experience has (suddenly) (naturally) left me in the throes of

** muted existential panic **

Why did I read The Bottomless Well? Why am I still in NJ? What am I doing for New Year's this year?? Who is reading this?!? Do I know you? I feel a strong urge to meet new people for the first time in months, I am curious about the world of others again, and the idea of 'seeing' myself afresh'd in the reflected light of stranger-eyes suddenly seems more or less survivable. But what about the numerous 'old' friends I need to catch up/reconnect with/tunnel into? Is it possible to live a completely sedentary lifestyle but with better circulation in my legs? Is that what I really need right now, or just what I want? Is there a difference? Do I have time for a 'side project'? Do I have time for two? Do I miss college or high school more? Guys can we hang out soon? Like at a party, a good one? Let's start working on all of this - TOMORROW -

As an addendum to the Core/Gap/Barnettishness - check out Gap-trotting Michael Totten's travelogue from Libya, and the absurd/tragic tones of life under Qaddafi's retarded Pan-Arab/socialist totalitarianism. While Libya has been taking baby steps towards opening up to the rest of the world over the past few years, Totten's account makes it clear that daily life is still dominated by Qaddafi- (and secret police-)enforced disconnectedness and fantastic, Orwellian propaganda. Bizarre and moving stuff.