A Boy Named Su

The beginning of another chapter

2010-08-22T10:29:00.003+09:00

My year at home comes to a close. I leave for Wolverine Country. It'll be a worthy endeavor, but likely one fraught with challenge. I wouldn't want it any other way, although I would do well not to repeat my mistakes from first semester of undergrad.

It's always re-assuring knowing that people are counting on you and that you enter knowing that the sum of your experiences have prepared you to treat this endeavor seriously. It's not just school for me; it's a job now.

Preparation and motivation will come together to make for an incredibly productive school year for me. And just like a job, I'll get to all the classes, note any hypos and embrace the ability of just soaking up information left & right. Office hours. Practice exams.

All in the pursuit of excellence, because it pays to be a winner and it sucks to be a loser. One might start out low in the depth chart, or on the totem pole. But that doesn't mean it has to end that way. No no. Plenty of times we've seen those that come in at the top end up dropping out. And those at the bottom, who barely scrape their way in a waitlist, take nothing for granted, and wind up doing just fantastic. Pays to be a winner because the only easy day was yesterday.

Military Taps Social Networking Skills--NY Times

2010-06-21T12:48:00.004+09:00

It's always fascinating to see the application of computer technology to enhancing our capabilities.

June 7, 2010

Military Taps Social Networking Skills

By CHRISTOPHER DREW

BEALE AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. — As a teenager, Jamie Christopher would tap instant messages to make plans with friends, and later she became a Facebook regular.

Now a freckle-faced 25, a first lieutenant and an intelligence officer here, she is using her social networking skills to hunt insurgents and save American lives in Afghanistan.

Hunched over monitors streaming live video from a drone, Lieutenant Christopher and a team of analysts recently popped in and out of several military chatrooms, reaching out more than 7,000 miles to warn Marines about roadside bombs and to track Taliban gunfire.

“2 poss children in fov,” the team flashed as Marines on the ground lined up an air strike, chat lingo for possible innocents within the drone’s field of view. The strike was aborted.

Another message, referring to a Taliban compound, warned: “fire coming from cmpnd.” The Marines responded by strafing the fighters, killing nine of them.

Lieutenant Christopher and her crew might be fighting on distant keypads instead of ducking bullets, but they head into battle just the same every day. They and thousands of other young Air Force analysts are showing how the Facebook generation’s skills are being exploited — and paying dividends — in America’s wars.

The Marines say the analysts, who are mostly in their early to mid-20s, paved the way for them to roll into Marja in southern Afghanistan earlier this year with minimal casualties. And as the analysts quickly pass on the latest data from drones and other spy planes, they are creating the fluid connections needed to hunt small groups of fighters and other fleeting targets, military officials say.

But there can be difficulties in operating from so far away.

Late last month, military authorities in Afghanistan released a report chastising a Predator drone crew in an incident involving a helicopter attack that killed 23 civilians in February. Military officials say analysts in Florida who were monitoring the drone’s video feed cautioned two or three times in a chatroom that children were in the group, but the drone’s pilot failed to relay those warnings to the ground commander.

For the most part, though, the networking has been so productive that senior commanders are sidestepping some of the traditional military hierarchy and giving the analysts leeway in deciding how to use some spy planes.

“If you want to act quickly, you’ve got to flatten things out and engage at the lowest possible levels,” said Lt. Col. Jason M. Brown, who runs the Air Force intelligence squadron at this base near Sacramento.

The connections have been made possible by the growing fleet of remote-controlled planes, like the Predators and Reapers, which send a steady flow of battlefield video to intelligence centers across the globe.

The Central Intelligence Agency and the military use drones to wage long-distance war against insurgents, with pilots in the United States pressing the missile-firing buttons. But as commanders in Afghanistan mass drones and U-2 spy planes over the hottest areas, the networking technology is expanding a homefront that is increasingly relevant to day-to-day warfare.

And the mechanics are simple in this age of satellite relays. Besides viewing video feeds, the analysts scan still images and enemy conversations. As they log the information into chatrooms, the analysts carry on a running dialogue with drone crews and commanders and intelligence specialists in the field, who receive the information on computers and then radio the most urgent bits to troops on patrol.

Marine intelligence officers say that during the Marja offensive in February, the analysts managed to stay a step ahead of the advance, sending alerts about 300 or so possible roadside bombs.

“To be that tapped into the tactical fight from 7,000 to 8,000 miles away was pretty much unheard of before,” said Gunnery Sgt. Sean N. Smothers, a Marine who was stationed here as a liaison to the analysts.

Sergeant Smothers saw how easily the distance could melt away when an analyst, peering at images from a U-2, suddenly stuck up his hand and yelled, “Check!” — the signal for a supervisor to verify a spotting.

Sergeant Smothers said he and two Air Force officers rushed over and confirmed the existence of a roadside bomb. Nearby on a big screen map in the windowless room, they could see a Marine convoy approaching the site.

The group started sending frantic chat messages to their Marine contacts in the area.

As they watched the video feed from a drone, they could see that their messages had been heard: the convoy came to a sudden stop, 500 feet from the bomb.

“To me, this whole operation was like a template for what we should be doing in the future,” Sergeant Smothers said.

Military officials said they are planning to repeat the operation around Kandahar.

The effort is a major turnaround for the Air Force, which had been criticized for taking too long to adjust to different types of threats since 9/11. During the cold war, it focused mostly on fixed targets like Soviet bases. But commanders in Afghanistan and Iraq have often complained that it is hard to get help from spy planes before insurgents slipped away.

Marine and Army officers say that that began to change as more planes were sent to Afghanistan in early 2009 and the Air Force got better at blending the various types of intelligence into a fuller picture.

And the new analysts, who were practically weaned on computers and interactive video games, have been crucial.

While Air Force analysts were once backroom technicians, the latest generation works in camouflage uniforms, complete with combat boots, on open floors, with four computer monitors on each desk. Large screens on the walls display the feeds from drones, and coffee and Red Bull help them get through the 12-hour shifts.

The chatrooms are no-frills boxes on a computer screen with lines of rolling text, and crew leaders keep dozens of them open at once. They may look crude compared to Facebook, but Lieutenant Christopher said they were effective in building rapport.

“When it’s not busy, I’ll be like, ‘Hey, how’s your day going?’ ” she said. “It’s not just, ‘What do you need?’ ”

There is also some old-fashioned interaction.

The Air Force, which has 4,000 analysts at bases like this and is hiring 2,100 more, has sent liaisons to Afghanistan to help understand the priorities on the ground. And some analysts pick up the phone to build closer bonds with soldiers they have never seen.

Andres Morales, a senior airman, said he often talked to a 24-year-old Army lieutenant, helping his battalion find arms caches and track enemy fighters.

But after four of his fellow soldiers were killed, “he didn’t really want to talk about intelligence,” Airman Morales, 27, said. “He wanted to talk, more or less, about how life is in California, and how when he comes back, we’re going to go surfing together.”

Quentin Arnold, 22, another enlisted analyst, said he had been working so closely with the Marines that 15 to 20 had asked to be friends on Facebook. He just collected $1,500 from analysts here to send a care package, including a PlayStation 3 game system and an Xbox 360, to some Marines.

Still, three-quarters of the 350 analysts here have never been to the war zones, so a cultural divide can pop up. Several said they were a bit intimidated when Sergeant Smothers, 36, who has had five tours in Iraq, strode onto the floor here in February.

At the time, the analysts were blending data from the U-2s and the drones to watch the roads into Marja and fields where helicopters might land. But as Sergeant Smothers looked over their shoulders, encouraging them to warn the Marines about even the most tentative threats, the analysts warmed up.

“It was like the shy house cat that wouldn’t talk to you at first and now just won’t stay out of your lap,” he said.

As the operation unfolded, the analysts passed on leads that enabled the Marines to kill at least 15 insurgents planting bombs.

Lieutenant Christopher, who loves to chat on Facebook with her family in Ohio, was so exhausted from overnight shifts during that period that she skipped Facebook and went right to sleep. And sometimes, she said, she ended up dreaming about what she had just seen in the war.

Did Arizona declare war on Mexico?

2010-06-08T14:40:00.005+09:00

With all the drama going on there about enforcing immigration laws v. claims about racial profiling, my head is spinning. Did Arizona declare war on Mexico?

Immigration to the United States, as always, is a tricky issue.

Supporters of the law recently passed in Arizona claim it's time that something be done to stem the tide of illegal immigration. On the other side, vociferous opponents charge it as tantamount to racial profiling on part of a white-majority state.

Both are probably right.

Meanwhile, the Department of Justice claims it'll file a lawsuit challenging what is perceived as an encroachment on federal power.

It's disappointing to see how much money, energy and time is being poured into a pointless law. The law won't really stem the tide of undocumented, who brave the desert, coyote smugglers and all kinds of other hazards to illegally enter our country. Even supporters of the law can see how it's really just a measure reacting to a reality rather than one that prevents the act of illegally crossing into the United States.

We can't ignore illegal immigration. To just open the floodgates, would, in effect, demonstrate our utter inability to police our borders which is a fundamental tenet to national security.

Rather, we should spend our resources on examining and addressing why illegal immigration from Latin America happens. It's a simple line that goes back to the 1992 Presidential campaign.

Then, as now, I submit that it's the economy.

They come here for jobs. Nativists claim illegals steal jobs and add to the crime rate. That's partially true. Crime's certainly an issue. As far as jobs go, it's more like a lot of Americans won't do jobs for the pay given to the undocumented. So if we are to categorize the act of competitive wages as the act of stealing jobs, so be it. Seems pretty "free market" to me, which is a major tenet of the conservative set in America.

If there are better jobs to be had down South, it's probably reasonable to say that it wouldn't be worth the arduous and risky journey to "el Norte," which is what faces most illegals crossing into the United States.

Maybe it would be more helpful to finish up that Drug War that's tearing apart Sinaloa, and start get to the process of bringing about jobs down there. It's probably easier than "declaring war" on Mexico. Already the legal challenges are piling up.

I welcome rational and civil discussion. Sensationalist polemics from Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck followers will be deleted. Those guys are intellectual jokes, anyways.

All the Crazy Shit I Did Tonight

2010-06-08T14:09:00.004+09:00

"All the crazy shit I did tonight

those would be the best memories..."

Kid Cudi and David Guetta are onto something. (They're likely on something as well.) Life's misadventures can lead to the best stories--like one that recently came across my ears:

Four guys--S, B, T and Z--were out in SF for a night of partying. Before going out, the guys all force B, the youngest of the group, to wear a tie. B never wears ties. "Too preppy," he scowls, preferring the fresh and meticulously tousled look of a surfer boy. Deliberate messiness, he proclaims, is the best way to go and to impress women. Nonetheless, for that night, B grudgingly knots his black and blue tie before heading out the door.

Many rounds pass. Location after location; the guys can't remember because the world's spinning; the beer's flowing and the cash is disappearing. Hot girls stroll by in revealing outfits despite the temperature going into the 50s. Closing time rolls around and people filter out into the street. T & Z start macking on these two girls, and successfully retain their interest. In the process, they tell S & B to get lost for a while.

S & B start wandering, and encounter a group of well dressed girls from Mexico. They're living in SF for a few months just because they can (and possibly because of the drug war.) They're rich; they're young and they're looking for some fun. Next thing you know, S finds himself following B into a gleaming Mercedez-Benz driven by one of the girls, Maria. B's decided to chase Maria.

Problem for S though is that he doesn't know where in the city they are. He forgot where the other guys live, as he's visiting from out of town, and he doesn't know how to get anywhere. Never mind that, as S is crammed next to six hot Mexican girls, drunkenly singing loudly as the SUV zooms through the Paris of the Pacific.

Eventually, they stop at an afterparty in some hilly part of SF. (But what part of SF isn't hilly?) It's a ritzy apartment, currently occupied by a Brazilian guy who goes around pouring tequila down everyone's throats. It flows like water; the music blasts out of the speakers and moon shines over the gleaming city.

B moves in on Maria, kissing her like he'll never get to do ever again. As they get swept up in the emotion of things, S realizes he's out of energy. It's 4 am now and he's been up since 5 am the previous day. Time to call it quits. He fishes the keys out of B's pocket and coaxes the address out of him.

Running around the hills, S manages to make it home. The other guys roll in a few hours later, but B's nowhere to be found. Noon the next day, they get a call. B's in a ritzy community, 40 miles north of the bachelor pad. They have to go pick him up. Looks like only B got really lucky last night.

Upon picking B up, they decide to go to the beach, where they realize, somehow, B's jeans were torn up along the inner thigh. Aggressive one, this Maria.

Moral of the story? Ties work and tearing the inside thigh of your jeans is flat out embarrassing.

An Apology

2010-05-18T15:09:00.008+09:00

For the most part, the writing quality of these last couple entries has really fallen off. I've been busy the last few months, chasing down my next dream--law school. Apologies as the admissions process, and other projects have taken over. Life's simply not as photographically-anecdotally exciting compared to when I lived in Korea or HK, my most productive periods of blogging.

This is just one of those times when I'm putting in my dues before moving on up in the world. It's just that this particular set of dues involve a 5:30a to 9:00p schedule.

But that doesn't mean I'm not constantly reading, watching and observing the world around me. Swim season just ended (thank god) so it means I can sleep again. No more rolling out of bed for a cold pool deck or repeatedly reminding kids about their streamline positions (only on a swim deck is it appropriate for a man to make himself look like a clown in a speedo) or agonizing of 0.5 seconds.

That said, there's nothing purer than the thrill of competing.

Phelps v. Cavic, Beijing 2008 is the perfect example.

There's that deafening silence before the sharp beep of the start. You dive in, head down, power those legs through the dolphin kick. Explode up, build that turnover and hit the wall hard. Boom, explode off that wall, head down, stay under while building the legs in order to break the surface.

But the training it takes to be able to do that can be quite long. And that's how I view my situation right now. It's a big training period. Am getting tossed into various cases at Legal Aid, doing research and teaching a new generation of Lancer water polo players and swimmers.

Oh, and a shout out to Ms. Wontons.

A Turning Point

2010-05-03T05:09:00.006+09:00

Last night, I made the decision to drop a friend of whom I thought highly. It's too bad when you think it's a good idea to make the effort to stay on decent terms with someone because you know she's a good person and going to do good in this world. But what do you expect? Some people simply haven't developed the maturity yet. Or perhaps she lacks the fortitude to communicate clearly that either she doesn't want to or does want to keep a friendship. But what happened yesterday more resembled a slap to my face. A friendship is like a living thing; it must be cultivated and maintained. If not, it either enters hibernation or dies off.

Last night, I also saw the opposite of weakness. I found it in the weakened state of a man with cuts all over his body. Every part hurt and plenty of parts were swollen stiff. When I say "swollen stiff," I mean majorly swollen. The volume and intensity of a voluntarily endured five and a half days of sleep deprivation, cold pounding surf and physical labor left his booming voice a whisper; his movements labored and his walk limped. Here stood a man who had pulled through not because of his many physical talents, but mainly because of his pure force of will. It always comes down to matters of the heart. He refused to quit, and now enters Phase 2 of training. This hero could barely hug without a wince. To think that the foundations of his toughness began in the pool with me as a teammate is mind-boggling. Now he plans to eventually qualify as an operator and go save the world.

It's funny, and even appropriate that we went to go watch an action comedy about superheroes that night. Yet a real BAMF sat next to me. Last night was a turning point in the evolution of my understanding of humanity. Most think strength is physical and that heroes are just the stuff of stories to be recounted. They're wrong. Heroes emerge during Hell Week.*

*There's only one real Hell Week--often imitated, but never duplicated. Hooyah.

Picking It Back Up

2010-02-16T15:39:00.002+09:00

Popping back up on the blog space to let out some thoughts into the public sphere. The last few months have been highly introspective into my role as a human in a society such as ours in the US.

I've spent most of my year at home before LS volunteering. It mostly began as a commitment I made to myself during the year in Korea. Simple acts of kindness made such a difference in the lives of people I met, whether it was observed vicariously, or of my own personal experience. There are some things that children do to endear themselves to you that no money or status can overcome. The best thing I ever did was to spend a year in that impoverished community.

Now that I'm back, I see how much suburban kids here take things for granted. And while it might be frustrating to see, I'm buoyed by a deep sense of optimism that things will get better for our us. A great example is all those LS apps and waiting that takes place.

It's so easy to get sucked into a neurotic mindset where a small ranking difference matters and admission into a school is the foremost concern of the day. Every day is an exercise for me to keep perspective, and I have the volunteering to thank for that. At the end of the day, LS is a means to the end of making a positive impact in this world and helping others, as well as yourself, overcome adversity.

In the mean time, I stay optimistic even if no one else takes me. This is just one step along the way.

Standing up for Victimized Students--Philadelphia Inquirer

2009-12-22T06:42:00.003+09:00

This Wei Chen accomplishes something more significant than all those kids I know who study hard and get good grades for one simple reason. His actions are the expression of non-violent bravery. That said, if any of those kids need physical back up and I was around, wish I could be there.

Posted on Sun, Dec. 20, 2009

Standing up for victimized students

By Jeff Gammage and Kristen A. Graham

INQUIRER STAFF WRITERS

The day after 30 Asian students were attacked by a group of mostly African American classmates at South Philadelphia High School, senior Wei Chen stood surrounded by a swarm of TV cameras.

Amid the glare and tussle, Chen assuredly answered reporters' questions, pointing out that many black youths had befriended Asian students, and saying it was school supervisors who had failed. Then he handed out something most teenagers don't carry: his business card.

People wondered: Who is this kid?

The answer: He's a whole lot of things.

Chen, 18, is articulate, smart, and frighteningly organized. He's never on time for meetings - he's there early, to help set up.

He possesses remarkable poise, stony determination, and a more than ample quantity of guts. When many Asian students hid their faces behind protest signs, afraid they would be identified and beaten up, Chen stood front and center.

Mostly, having been swept to the streets of South Philadelphia from the shores of southeast China less than three years ago, he's someone pushing the school district to address long-standing problems of violence. Within a week, starting with that tense Dec. 4 news conference at a Chinatown church, he emerged as a leader.

"He is always calm," said Xu Lin, an organizer with the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corp. who often translates for Chen. "When some of the students were losing their tempers, he'd calm them down."

The Dec. 3 attack sent seven students to hospitals and sparked a contentious, eight-day boycott by about 50 Asian students. Throughout, the youth with the long hair and immaculately laced, deliberately untied NSS sneakers was the most visible. The standoff ended Wednesday after students met with Superintendent Arlene Ackerman.

"It could be dangerous to show my picture in the media, but I have nothing to hide," Chen said in an interview last week. "What I say is from the heart."

Teens who know Chen say he's a steady presence, personable and dependable.

"He's the type of guy who is very mature," said Tatman Chio, 15, who stood with Chen during the boycott although he attends Benjamin Franklin High.

Helen Gym, a board member at Asian Americans United, said she was struck by Chen's composure when he testified before the School Reform Commission on Dec. 9, facing a board of heavyweights.

"At 18, he's doing what people haven't done for a very long time, which is take a stand around youth safety at schools," said Gym, who is among the city's most prominent advocates.

Asked whether she thought Chen would become the next Helen Gym, she said, "Oh, he's going to be light-years beyond me."

Chen performs Chinese opera, writes calligraphy, and works in papercut, the art of snipping plain sheets into magical, see-through images of animals and deities. He wants to learn graffiti art. And hip-hop dance.

Chen grew up in Fujian Province, where the people forever stare out at the sea and wonder what lies across it.

When Chen was 9, his father emigrated to the United States, undertaking that complicated legal process in hopes of assuring his children a brighter future. A job in construction allowed him to send money to his family to build a strong, hurricane-proof house in China.

Seven years passed before Chen saw his father again.

He, his mother, and two sisters arrived here in January 2007. Chen's mother prepared her then-15-year-old son by talking about the American dream, how hard work brought financial reward.

The family settled in South Philadelphia, which during the last 30 years has filled with immigrants from Cambodia, Vietnam, and China. The tight housing market in Chinatown, for more than a century the regional gateway for Asian émigrés, has forced newcomers to settle farther south and north.

For Chen, day-to-day reality was not the lofty aspirations of the American dream, but a school where he struggled to speak the language and where Asians were taunted and punched. Many among the school's Asian minority - the student body is 70 percent African American - are learning English.

Chen realized something else: In the United States, he was permitted to speak up. As a teen in China, he knew protesting against the government could lead to jail. Here, he heard teachers talk about the groups and people who fought for change across more than 200 years of American history.

Around him, Chen saw a school with a sizable Asian population, 18 percent among 927 students, but divided by ethnicity. The Chinese youths were divided even among themselves by language.

Some spoke Mandarin, some Cantonese, others Fujianese, a dialect that's almost a separate language.

Chen wanted to bring them together - and, sadly, violence provided an impetus. In October 2008, five Asian students were chased into the Snyder Avenue subway station and beaten.

Three months later, Chen founded the Chinese American Student Association, and has twice been elected its president.

He told the students to speak Mandarin, the language taught in Chinese schools, so they could communicate. And he told them that if they had a problem, they should call him for help.

"I wanted to help the new students to learn American language and culture," Chen said. "This country will help you address your goals, but not give them to you. You have to be hardworking."

It was the beginning of an organization furthered and connected by QQ, the Chinese instant-messaging service, that eventually coalesced around the boycott.

Chen said the tumult of last week - the walkout, the district's promises of improved safety - were a start, not an end. New student leaders must step forward. He will graduate in June.

His plan is to keep improving his English and head first to a two-year college, then to a major institution. He wants to study communications and social work, and continue to advocate for the Asian community.

"But not only for the Asian community. For different cultures and languages," he said. "The long-term solution should be that people from different backgrounds should communicate."

Contact staff writer Jeff Gammage at 215-854-2415 orjgammage@phillynews.com.

2009-12-14T08:54:00.002+09:00

latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-nobel11-2009dec11,0,3795427.story

latimes.com

Editorial

Obama's faith in diplomacy backed up with firepower

His Nobel acceptance speech should serve as a blueprint to guide international decisions on alleviating conflict, poverty and tyranny.

December 11, 2009

We've said before, and still believe, that awarding President Obama the Nobel Peace Prize after so short a time in office and so few concrete accomplishments was a mistake that diminished the credibility of the honor. But the acceptance speech he delivered Thursday in Oslo almost made it all worthwhile.

By now, we've come to expect intellectually stimulating and emotionally moving speeches from Obama -- it probably wasn't his experience or administrative skills that got him elected. But this address was a blockbuster even by Obama's lofty standards, as much a philosophical treatise on war, peace and human aspirations as a call to action for other world leaders. It should serve as a blueprint to guide international decisions on alleviating conflict, poverty and tyranny.

Moral clarity is often hard to come by in the post-Cold War world. The United States' traditional position as a model of democratic values was badly undermined by President George W. Bush, and unfortunately Obama is continuing some of the same misguided policies on detention and trial of terrorism suspects that turned our last president into a global pariah. Yet even if Obama sometimes has trouble living up to his own values, nobody expresses them better.

The ideas he outlined Thursday for achieving world peace aren't new; they were also articulated by President Kennedy, who called not for a revolutionary change in human nature but "a gradual evolution in human institutions." Toward that end, Obama laid out three key steps: a stronger commitment to meaningful international sanctions against regimes that threaten the peace, unswerving support for human rights and freedom worldwide, and pursuit of economic development in poor countries. We've heard such sentiments many times before, but Obama's special gift is to make them seem achievable by appealing to our higher nature.

"The nonviolence practiced by men like Gandhi and [Martin Luther] King may not have been practical or possible in every circumstance," Obama said, "but the love that they preached -- their fundamental faith in human progress -- that must always be the North Star that guides us on our journey. For if we lose that faith -- if we dismiss it as silly or naive; if we divorce it from the decisions that we make on issues of war and peace -- then we lose what's best about humanity. We lose our sense of possibility. We lose our moral compass."

Obama has far more faith than Bush did in the power of diplomacy and the ability of global institutions to provide peace and stability, but it's a faith backed up with firepower. That's a strong combination.

Understanding China

2009-11-25T04:35:00.002+09:00

latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-jacques22-2009nov22,0,6682428.story

latimes.com

Opinion

Understanding China

The West has gotten it wrong on China for decades -- even as it embraces a market economy, it has shunned Western-style freedoms. And its power is only growing.

By Martin Jacques

November 22, 2009

The dynamics of President Obama's trip to China were markedly different from those evident on visits made by President Clinton and President George W. Bush. This time the Chinese made clear that they were unwilling even to discuss issues such as human rights or free speech. Why? The relationship between the countries has changed: America feels weak and China strong in their bilateral ties. This is not a temporary shift that will reverse itself once the U.S. has escaped from its mountain of debt. Rather, it is the expression of a deep and progressive shift in the balance of power between the two nations, one that is giving the Chinese -- though studiously cautious in their approach -- a rising sense of self-confidence.

Nor should we be surprised by the Chinese response. They may have appeared more conciliatory on previous visits by American leaders, but that was largely decorative. The Chinese have a powerful sense of their identity and worth. They have never behaved toward the West in a supplicant manner, for reasons Westerners persistently fail to understand or grasp.

Ever since the Nixon-Mao rapprochement, and through the various iterations of the Sino-American relationship over the subsequent almost four decades, there has been an overriding belief in the West that eventually China would become like us: that, for example, a market economy would lead to democratization and that a free media was inevitable. This hubristic outlook is deeply flawed, but it still prevails, albeit with small cracks of self-doubt starting to appear.

The issue here is much deeper than Western-style democracy, a free media or human rights. China is simply not like the West and never will be. There has been an underlying assumption that the process of modernization would inevitably lead to Westernization; yet modernization is not just shaped by markets, competition and technology but by history and culture. And Chinese history and culture are very different from that of any Western nation-state.

If we want to understand China, this must be our starting point.

The West's failure to understand the Chinese has repeatedly undermined its ability to anticipate their behavior. Again and again, our predictions and beliefsabout China have proved wrong: that the Chinese Communist Party would fall after 1989, that the country would divide, that its economic growth could not be sustained, that its growth figures were greatly exaggerated, that China was not sincere about its offer of "one country two systems" at the time of the hand-over of Hong Kong from Britain -- and, of course, that it would steadily Westernize. We have a long track record of getting China wrong.

The fundamental reason for our inability to accurately predict China's future is our failure to understand its past. Although China has described itself as a nation-state for the last century, it is in essence a civilization-state. The longest continually existing polity in the world, it dates to 221 BC and the victory of the Qin. Unlike Western nation-states, China's sense of identity comes from its long history as a civilization-state.

Of course, there are many civilizations -- Western civilization is one example -- but China is the only civilization-state. It is defined by its extraordinarily long history and also its huge geographic and demographic scale and diversity. The implications are profound: Unity is its first priority, plurality the condition of its existence (which is why China could offer Hong Kong "one country two systems," a formula alien to a nation-state).

The Chinese state enjoys a very different kind of relationship with society compared with the Western state. It enjoys much greater natural authority, legitimacy and respect, even though not a single vote is cast for the government. The reason is that the state is seen by the Chinese as the guardian, custodian and embodiment of their civilization. The duty of the state is to protect its unity. The legitimacy of the state therefore lies deep in Chinese history. This is utterly different from how the state is seen in Western societies.

If we are to understand China, we must move beyond the compass of Western reality and experience and the body of concepts that has grown up to explain that history. We find this extremely difficult. For 200 years the West, first in the shape of Europe and then the United States, has dominated the world and has not been required to understand others or The Other. If need be it could always bully the latter into submission.

The emergence of China as a global power marks the end of that era. We now have to deal with The Other -- in the form of China -- on increasingly equal terms.

China, moreover, is possessed, like the West, with its own form of universalism. It long believed that it was "the land under heaven," the center of the world, superior to all other cultures. That sense of self, which has engendered a powerful self-confidence, has been persistently evident over the last 40 years, but with China's rise, it is becoming more apparent as the country's sense of achievement and restoration gains pace. Or to put it another way, when the presidents of China and the United States meet in Beijing in 2019, with the Chinese economy fast approaching the size of the American economy, we can be sure that the Chinese sense of hubris will be far stronger than in 2009.

But long before that, we need to try and understand what China is and how it behaves. If we don't, then relations between China and the United States will never move beyond the polite and the formal -- and that will be a bad omen for the future relationship between the two countries.

Martin Jacques is the author of "When China Rules the World: the End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order."

Bitter Lawyer's Interview with an Entertainment Attorney

2009-11-19T07:35:00.002+09:00

http://www.bitterlawyer.com/index.php/interviews/carlos_goodman_a_list_entertainment_partner?entry_id=324

Title and Employer?

Partner in Bloom, Hergott, Diemer, Rosenthal, LaViolette & Feldman, LLP, an entertainment firm in Beverly Hills that specializes in motion pictures and television.

So what does a hotshot entertainment lawyer really do?

Complain about "the business" while eating lunch at a fancy Hollywood restaurant. When not busy doing that, an entertainment lawyer is primarily involved with making deals for "talent"—actors, directors, writers, and producers. This means working in tandem with a client's agent to negotiate the economics and other key points of a deal, typically against the studios' business affairs lawyers. The lawyer then negotiates the written contract. And in Hollywood, as they say, the finished contract is simply the beginning of the negotiation.

What is fun about entertainment law in Hollywood is that it's a fairly small community, and it's very interpersonal. In many instances, you have to use your relationships to accomplish certain things for your clients. You also have lots of opportunities to put together unique, creative deals—whether because you have the leverage with a hot client or because the business is changing as a result of new media—and that can make certain negotiations very dynamic.

Who does your firm represent?

Our firm represents several A-list talents in Hollywood—people like Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp, and many of the top directors and producers in the business.

What law school did you go to?

UCLA.

What was your first job out of law school?

Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in its New York office in the late 1980's.

Practice area?

Litigation. I worked mainly on the Exxon Valdez oil spill litigation, which was an obvious and natural launching pad to get into Hollywood—oily and slick.

How did you make the transition from corporate litigator to entertainment attorney?

Well, what is it they say? Acknowledging the problem is half the struggle. It's not hard to know something is wrong when you bill 250 hours a month, month after month, on matters where you have no connection to the client or any real stake in the outcome personally.

It's fine to work hard, but the law, like any business, is more fun when you can be entrepreneurial and have a direct relationship with your clients. And I didn't get the feeling that I was going to become best friends with any Fortune 500 CEOs anytime soon at the age of 26, especially when my chief social circle was other associates like me eating take-out Chinese food at 10 p.m. every night in the office.

I saw entertainment law as a way of working with individual clients, people who were my age, and with whom I could grow. Looking back on that now, entertainment law gave me that. One of my very first clients was Quentin Tarantino and I worked with him on making "Reservoir Dogs." Quentin and I have worked together for seventeen years, and I just finished closing the deal for his new movie "Inglorious Bastards."

As far as making the transition, I had a friend during law school who had become a music lawyer at a Los Angeles firm that also had a motion picture practice group. She introduced me to some of the lawyers at the firm, and I got a job doing motion picture work. I think the fact that I was young and relatively cheap, and working at a top firm, helped me get the opportunity.

Does being a former litigator help you in your current job negotiating deals for movie stars and A-list directors?

Not really. I do think that working at a good firm straight out of law school helped show me quickly what it meant to be a professional. I always tell young lawyers that it's a good thing to work at the best firm you can, to be exposed for a while to the level of excellence you do find at places like Gibson Dunn. But you have to be careful of the trap at elite firms—they have a way of successfully stroking their good people to distract them from how unfulfilling a lot of that work can be in the long run. And before you know it, you're too senior (or too bitter!) to make a successful transition to something more entrepreneurial or satisfying.

Any advice for bitter lawyers out there looking to change jobs?

When I decided to leave the "mothership" of a big firm, I felt like I was taking a risk. And I did have to pay my dues in that transition, no question. But I think bitter lawyers need to realize they can be taking a greater risk by avoiding change and waiting too long to try to transition into something different. I think it's important when you're in a big firm to look at the people who are four or five years ahead of you and see what their lives are like—and ask yourself, is that the type of career or life you want? Is that pasty-faced, cynical sixth-year associate the type of person you are striving to be? Use those intermediate people as projections of what your future will be. But you don't need to actually live through those extra four or five years yourself! The evidence is right there in front of you.

Redemption...

2009-11-18T12:09:00.002+09:00

I used to work for this man while I was interning at a pro bono law firm in college.

Lawyer finds redemption in helping poor

He used to be one of them. Now an attorney, he's dedicated to helping drug addicts and skid row residents.

By Jessica Garrison, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer|January 01, 2008

Legal aid lawyer Louis Rafti was leading a group of law students on a tour of skid row when he saw it in the corner of a homeless shelter.

The cot. The very one, he could swear it was, that he had slept on during his last night on the row a few years before.

Rafti froze. He didn't say a word, but a sense of wonder overwhelmed him.

Wonder that he did not have a crack pipe in his hand. Or a needle in his arm. That he had a home, a job, a life.

These days, Rafti is a pugnacious housing rights lawyer for the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, known for his take-no-prisoners advocacy on behalf of the poor and disabled.

What many of his clients and colleagues don't know is that until six years ago, Rafti was a homeless cocaine addict. He contracted HIV from dirty needles. He watched friends die. He would get cleaned up, only to relapse and return to the streets.

Now, at age 49, dressed in sensible shoes and a dark polo shirt, he is back on the streets of skid row -- this time as a lawyer for the kind of person he once was.

He's as single-minded about helping the down-and-out as he once was about doing drugs with them.

"I am somewhat obsessive-compulsive," he said. "It's a drug addict thing."

This means that he has at times taken on so many cases that colleagues worried he was overextended. But it also means that Los Angeles' poor have found a passionate new advocate.

Tai Glenn, Legal Aid's director of housing, said she had no idea of the details of Rafti's past until she was told of them by a Times reporter. But she said she had noticed his "special insight into our client community."

"He's the bravest new lawyer I've ever met," said Glenn, who recently hired Rafti away from another public interest job. "He is Mr. Take Action."

A slippery slope

Rafti grew up in the San Fernando Valley, just another suburban kid who "liked to party."

"About the time I became too old for comic books I discovered drugs and alcohol," he wrote in an essay arguing for admission to the State Bar of California despite his guilty plea in a misdemeanor drug case in 1998. Drugs "provided me with an alternative to the coping skills that I sorely lacked."

After high school, Rafti attended UCLA. He thought of going to law school, but got drunk the night before the Law School Admission Test and was sick during the exam. Considering that door closed, he found work in finance -- first as a trader's assistant, then selling securities.

He drank with clients. He drank with colleagues. And he drank with his girlfriend. They went to restaurants, not bars, so her young daughter could come.

Eventually, he was fired.

In 1995, he got a job at Bank of America in San Francisco, a city where he knew no one.

He rented a room at a hotel in the city's Tenderloin district, where his neighbors were prostitutes and drug addicts. He had debts and needed a cheap place.

He settled into a bizarre existence. By day, he worked in the city's gleaming financial district. He had to be at his desk by 4 a.m., giving him little chance to meet people.

After work, he drank. One day, he took a wrong turn after leaving a bar. Near a housing project, a man standing on a corner looked him over.

"Hey white boy, what you need?" Rafti recalled the man asking. Rafti said he had just seen the movie "New Jack City," about the exploits of crack dealers. He asked for a $20 rock.

It was fantastic, he said. Many of his new neighbors in the Tenderloin also used crack and were more than happy to hook him up.

He fell into a routine: work, come home, sleep a few hours, then use crack and later cocaine to brace himself for work.

This went on for almost a year. Realizing that his "life was out of control," Rafti went into rehab for the first time.

Rafti avoids recounting his family history or in-depth psychological explanations for his behavior.

"I think I have bad proclivities," he said. "Some people wind up that way. Some people don't." After a short stint in rehab, he quit his job to avoid being fired. He moved in with his parents in Los Angeles and started selling auto insurance.

Rafti was putting his life back together, it seemed.

Then he began losing weight. He felt run down. His parents arranged for an appointment with a doctor friend. The doctor summoned him back a few weeks later.

"You have HIV," the doctor said.

Rafti looked at the doctor. "What do I do?"

"I don't know," Rafti recalled the doctor saying. "I specialize in geriatrics. I'm seeing you as a favor to your mother."

Later he would learn that back in San Francisco, almost everyone he used to hang out with was dying of AIDS -- or had died already.

After leaving the doctor's office that afternoon in March 1998, he immediately went to buy cocaine. Thus began a three-year cycle of relapse and redemption.

Fed up with his drug problem, Rafti's parents kicked him out. After bouncing between skid row and rehab centers, he ended up at a program in North Hollywood. There, he learned that as a former drug addict with HIV, he was eligible for state-funded vocational training.

Rafti's counselor asked him what he wanted to do. He recalled some friends' advice: Stay away from data entry classes.

"What about law school?" he said. It had been his college dream. And on the streets, he had seen firsthand how people "could have their world destroyed over an administrative error," he said.

Courtesy of the state, Rafti attended Southwestern University School of Law, where tuition this year topped $33,000.

But life wasn't all smooth sailing: Weeks before school started, Rafti had a fight with a girlfriend and made his way back to skid row, where he sold his watch and other jewelry to buy drugs.

After a few days, he called a friend for a ride to a detox center.

Since July 11, 2001, he said, he has been clean.

Looking forward

When Rafti graduated from law school in 2004, the state bar told him it was concerned about his moral character.

He responded with an impassioned letter.

"My life illustrates both the despair caused by addiction, but the possibilities of redemption as well," he wrote. "As part of my commitment to sobriety, I have chosen to dedicate the rest of my days to helping those who face some of the same situations."

He was admitted to the state bar in June 2006.

Almost immediately, he landed a job at Public Counsel, a pro bono public interest law firm in Los Angeles that annually provides more than $65 million in legal services to low-income people. Rafti told the firm about his drug history, firm officials said.

He had volunteered for the organization's legal clinic while still in law school and had impressed the lawyers there with his dedication -- and his eccentricity.

Paul Freese, the firm's interim chief executive, recalled the case of a homeless man who was about to lose his car because of parking tickets.

The man, a former landlord who had lost everything else, was desperate to keep the vehicle. He slept in it and drove it every day to a place where he could shower. It was his last link to his former life.

The lawyers were sympathetic, Freese said, but had to tell the man there was nothing they could do.

Rafti then announced he had a solution, one that he had used when short of cash: Take your car to the County Jail downtown in the middle of the night. Just-sprung prisoners will be desperate for a ride home and will pay well for the service. You'll have enough money to keep your car in no time.

Freese recalled staring at Rafti with both amusement and alarm.

"In the context of a legal clinic, that's the sort of advice we simply cannot give," he said.

Still, Freese said he was impressed with Rafti's savvy.

Rafti threw himself into work at Public Counsel, signing up a long list of new clients.

He worked to get housing and other benefits restored to clients who'd been denied them. He also filed a class-action lawsuit against Los Angeles' housing authority, saying it illegally raised poor people's rent. That case is pending.

Some at the firm worried that he overextended himself.

"He took on a whole bunch of cases . . . and he was getting inundated with demands," Freese said.

Rafti's philosophy is that public interest lawyers should help as many people as they can.

As he put it: "You see a person who is drowning, are you going to not throw them a life preserver because you're late to dinner?" But he acknowledged that he sometimes generated so much work that colleagues, paralegals and clerks chafed at the demands.

In May, Rafti decided to join the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, where he felt he could handle more litigation. Already, with several other nonprofit law firms and a private firm working pro bono, he is suing developers and the Los Angeles redevelopment agency over policies on skid row.

"I feel like I have a debt to pay," he said on a recent afternoon as he hiked up the hot, musty stairs of a single-room occupancy hotel to see clients who don't have phones.

"I've been given a second chance, not only to make up for the harm I've done, but also to have a good time doing it." Helping others, he noted, is part of the 12-step program that helped him get clean and now governs his life.

In September, he led a group of disabled downtown residents to City Council chambers to protest a development deal sought by a landlord they considered hostile to poor people.

He lost the argument but kept debating even after the gavel had sounded.

His passion for his job has only grown with time. His girlfriend, Jackie Bulczak, noted that he gives his personal cellphone number to all his clients -- and answers no matter when it rings.

"Louis works too hard, to the point where I worry about him," she said. At the same time, she knows that his job "keeps him going."

Sitting next to her, Rafti looked both impatient and chagrined. His health is holding for now, he said, although some days are worse than others. He has defied medical convention, casting aside anti-AIDS drugs a few years ago because he said they made him sick. Instead, he eats healthful food and takes nutrition supplements.

When he isn't working, Rafti devotes himself to Bulczakand members of his unorthodox household.

Bulczak is an AIDS activist from the Midwest. She contracted HIV from a transfusion more than two decades ago, and her health is in decline. She met Rafti in Washington, D.C., about seven years ago, when both were pushing for greater AIDS funding. Now he takes care of her.

She lives in the apartment next door. If they lived together, she could lose her federal housing subsidy.

Rafti shares his apartment with Carrie Prado, the daughter of Rafti's ex-girlfriend and former bar companion, the daughter's boyfriend and a baby. Also there is Koko the cat, who used to belong to Rafti's mother.

On a recent evening, Bulczak and Rafti's housemates sat around his eclectically furnished living room, talking.

"We look at life in a different way," Bulczak said of Rafti and herself. "It's living with knowing you have a death sentence."

Rafti sighed, as if the comment made him sad.

"I think it's a good thing," he said. "Every day could be your last. Why worry?"

jessica.garrison@latimes.com

Saturday Night Fever

2009-11-17T08:28:00.002+09:00

Some things just can't be stopped...like that Saturday Night Fever when you see someone good looking at a bar. In this case, it involved a cougar and my friend (21!) K. We were celebrating a friend's birthday and hanging out. Music was bumping; drinks were flowing and the food was delicious. Up comes this woman, from out of nowhere.

Cougar: Hey there.

K: Uh hi. (smiles)

C: Do you like the Grateful Dead?

K: Uh...sure. Yea. ...?

C: Great. I was there for their first concert. Want to dance?

Transcripts of Defeat--NY Times

2009-10-29T19:31:00.002+09:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/29/opinion/29sebestyen.html?pagewanted=print

Re-Connecting

2009-10-24T15:27:00.005+09:00

Having returned to this town I so desperately sought to escape from as a high school senior, I am now in the curious position of running into people from that past life. I was proud of this past life as a Lancer, but only too happy to be out of it. My only regret from high school is not training hard enough.

Some of the people I run into haven't left. They now work in the community. Some haven't gone anywhere with their lives. Others have decided their life's path firmly roots them in the same town in which they grew up. For some, high school may have been the best part of their lives. Maybe it is true that a lot of those who were cool in high school peak early. The nerds certainly move on and thrive.

Part of me can't help but judge them for not going out and exploring the wider world. I can't help but wonder what lays beyond the horizon. I can't imagine my life having not traveled over various continents and learning things that can only be experienced. Maybe it's because I know that I'm always on the move.

But wouldn't it be nice to live out the rest of your life in a community where you were all friends and knew each other? How great it would be if a bunch of my neighbors were college friends.

In any case, this is the last time I'm living in this town. It's time to reach out for those dreams and hit the big leagues. I'm ready.

Kitten Heels

2009-10-24T15:12:00.003+09:00

I bought a pair of heels the other day. They were kittens. Black on black lace, they immediately caught my eye. Got to love that word "kittens." You just think of purring and graceful felines, with not so sharp teeth and claws.

What a curious exercise heel shopping is. You have to find the right fit. You want the right design. You can't run in them. But you have to see how they position your legs and butt. And more often than not, it's really to show off to other girls.

Guys don't care that much about what kind of heels a woman wears. But women, they really care. Why is it that women can be so harsh to each other?

Now, now, before you get any visions of me cross-dressing, the heels were for my sister.

No matter, I'm a dog person anyways. If only I could afford a swimmer dog.

Plugging In

2009-10-24T14:48:00.004+09:00

We owe it to ourselves to plug into communities where we are. One of the biggest things that bothers me about the neighborhood I grew up in is that we don't get to know our neighbors. Sure, people work. They have different schedules. Some have kids; some don't. Some kids go to nearby public schools; some don't. Some of their kids are in high school; some of their kids are toddlers.

But what happened to community?

Life in my part of Fton has been productive since my return. Been helping out with PP. We got some big wins over a certain Boston-based school while the crowd chanted, "Safety school!" They did well at Stanford's NorCal Invite, as the only D3 program there.

Also helping out with SH. Hopefully, the scouting's making a difference. The main idea behind all that I've been doing is to give back to the communities from whence I came--water polo and newspaper.

And yet, there's still that empty feeling that Pomona filled--a sense of residential community. In school, we knew our neighbors. We hung out with them. Not so back at home. It's harder since there's less in common. But the coldness is striking along my street. It's quiet. Too quiet. Perhaps I was really made for the university town setting, where I'd be surrounded by brilliant minds and stacks of books.

Is it possible to actually build a cohesive community in the real world?

Seven days until those apps are done.

The Mad Man has Hope

2009-10-14T17:32:00.005+09:00

One of the most precious moments I've seen captured on film comes from "Mad Men" when protagonist Don Draper comes home late at night and swears an oath to his son. Despite the fact Don's committed so many sins, there's still a heart inside him that draws the line at his son. This love leads him to say "I will never lie to you." And while the boy doesn't understand, it's really not for the boy but for Don to remind himself.

It's touching because sometimes I fear that we can get caught up in the ways of the world. That we can become overly concerned with the materialistic realm, chase only sex and not care about the deeper psychological issues that haunt us and our loved ones. That moment where Draper comes in and swears that simple oath to his son shows that there's hope for him.

While not fully comprehending his father's oath, Draper's son instinctively reaches in for a hug, trusting in the rather evil man before him to protect and guide him. It's moments like this that remind of the importance of understanding how to be a good teacher.

Few things are more touching than a little boy reaching out to hug his father or a student showing instinctive appreciation for his/her mentor. These little gestures can mean so much.

Turning Disappointments on Their Head

2009-09-18T14:01:00.002+09:00

Learning to turn disappointments on their head can be one of the hardest things to do. I feel in my life I've been hit with many of them. Most of them emotional or social.

But once the dust settles, I'll find the gumption to pick myself back up and keep going. Miss a goal, then we go and earn another. Miss the opportunity of a lifetime, then go and build another.

Turning the Corner

2009-08-26T16:18:00.003+09:00

Not sure where this phrase originates, but it seems apt.

Adapting to a lot of things here. Some things haven't changed (LA traffic, In-n-Out, Mexican food, the beach). Other things have become rusty or dormant (friendships, my water polo skills, my Mandarin, cooking). And some things I can't even recognize.

Paula Abdul left "American Idol"?? People are getting hired again? My parents bought a new car? My sister has a driver's license? We're redoing the kitchen? College friends getting engaged?

So much happens in a year. It goes by so fast, and yet so slow.

Will be pretty busy this fall. Begun volunteering with HS paper and water polo team. Will later be involved in alumni interviewing for Pomona. Have my LS apps. Helping sis' college apps. Helping out around the house. Need to figure out a budget! Re-learn finance, Chinese and Spanish.

Lots to do. Who said funemployment was boring?

Mudflats and Post Offices

2009-08-18T08:12:00.003+09:00

Am back home now. Home as in the US and the wonderful sunshine that is in SoCal.

My final weekend in Korea consisted of quality time with the host family--in a post office. They decided to take a trip down to the Boryeong Mud Festival where people bathe in mountains of mud that is healthy for your complexion (supposedly).

Upon arrival in the town, which is beach side, the host father drove towards where we'd be staying for the night.

"We're here," he proclaimed. We pile out of the car eagerly, stretch our legs and breathe in that fresh seaside air. I think, "Cool, a seaside hotel."

I look up and see a sign for the Post Office. Yes, a Post Office. TIK. I suppose it could be comfortable sleeping amongst piles of of mail and boxes...

Apparently, some Post Offices in Korea serve as little motels for employees and we had someone in the family that was. So here I was, about to leave Korea, enjoying the beach at Boryeong and living in a Post Office.

But like any adventure in Korea, it was time well spent.

We swung by the beach, threw some mud on each other and hung out at a Mud Spa. Afterwards, my usually timid host mom decided to hop on a banana boat and a jet ski took us out for a spin.

At night we hit up a concert and enjoyed the fireworks. Photos to come.

Gyomushil Princess

2009-08-18T07:22:00.006+09:00

She sits atop her throne handing out comments like their candy. The Princess, we shall name her, shuffles around in her heels, as if displaying to all the women in the teacher's office that she's too delicate and too high class to walk normally. No one has heels like hers.

No one's elegant like her. (Although it's hard to tell how one can elegantly eat out of metal trays in a cramped and cluttered teacher's office.) No one's wealthy like her. (She likes to talk about her two houses) No one talks as much as her. (Teachers use their voices all day; it's a real feat one can go on long winded monologues like her.)

It got so bad that the teacher sitting next to her resorted to plugging her headpohnes into really loud music. And then after a while, that teacher, whom we'll call Ding, just stopped time in the teacher's office all together. Poor Ms. Ding.

And for some reason, she seemed very insistent of how good everything Korean was. You eat fast? You're good at eating and therefore eat like a Korean. You can hold chopsticks? You're good at holding chopsticks like all Koreans. You eat rice? Wow! You're so Korean!

Needless to say, this woman didn't think for one second that the entire continent of Asia enjoys the staple grain known as rice. Ah, but we forgot the world revolves around the Princess.

The school is her domain and the teacher's office where she holds court. And we--we audience members are but mere peons who must listen to her. It was amazing how someone could be so convinced of their self-importance. She seemed to be under the impression that everyone liked her.

It was really more that they liked making fun of the Princess for her silly attitudes and comments.

What a semester with this lady.

It's interesting to see that this is one of the universal things that connect us all. Groups and outcasts.

US Army Turns to Wikipedia--NY Times

2009-08-14T16:10:00.003+09:00

About time our Army decided to engage in the latest in information sharing--Wikipedia!

Care to Write Army Doctrine? With ID, Log On

By NOAM COHEN

Join the Army, where you can edit all that you can edit.

In July, in a sharp break from tradition, the Army began encouraging its personnel — from the privates to the generals — to go online and collaboratively rewrite seven of the field manuals that give instructions on all aspects of Army life.

The program uses the same software behind the online encyclopedia Wikipedia and could potentially lead to hundreds of Army guides being "wikified." The goal, say the officers behind the effort, is to tap more experience and advice from battle-tested soldiers rather than relying on the specialists within the Army's array of colleges and research centers who have traditionally written the manuals.

"For a couple hundred years, the Army has been writing doctrine in a particular way, and for a couple months, we have been doing it online in this wiki," said Col. Charles J. Burnett, the director of the Army's Battle Command Knowledge System. "The only ones who could write doctrine were the select few. Now, imagine the challenge in accepting that anybody can go on the wiki and make a change — that is a big challenge, culturally."

In recent years, collaborative projects like the Firefox Internet browser or Wikipedia pages have flourished with the growth of the Internet, showing the power of thousands of contributors pulling together.

Not surprisingly, top-down, centralized institutions have resisted such tools, fearing the loss of control that comes with empowering anyone along the chain of command to contribute.

Yet the Army seems willing to accept some loss of control. Under the three-month pilot program, the current version of each guide can be edited by anyone around the world who has been issued the ID card that allows access to the Army Internet system. About 200 other highly practical field manuals that will be renamed Army Tactics, Techniques and Procedures, or A.T.T.P., will be candidates for wikification.

As is true with Wikipedia, those changes will appear immediately on the site, though there is a team assigned to each manual to review new edits. Unlike Wikipedia, however, there will be no anonymous contributors.

Many in the Army have been suspicious about the idea, questioning if each soldier — specialist or not — should have an equal right to create doctrine, Colonel Burnett said.

"We've gotten the whole gamut of responses from black to white," he said, " 'The best thing since sliced bread' to 'the craziest idea I have ever heard.' "

The colonel said that he was hopeful that by reaching out to the 140,000 members of the Army's online forums, he would be tapping the kind of people who would be comfortable collaborating on the Web.

"Our motto is, 'If you ever thought what would I do if the Army let me write doctrine, now is your chance,' " he said.

The idea has support at the highest ranks. Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell, the commander of the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., wrote on the center's blog on July 1, that "by embracing technology, the Army can save money, break down barriers, streamline processes and build a bright future."

The seven guides in the pilot program frequently touch on areas that the rank-and-file soldier has had to master because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including topics like Desert Operations, Army Unmanned Aircraft Systems Operations and the movements of an infantry rifle platoon within a stryker brigade combat team.

For example, on July 7, a staff sergeant added his personal experience in Iraq to a guide for a stryker brigade combat team. Soldiers must understand, the original field manual says, "their vital role as collectors of combat information during the platoon intelligence activities."

The sergeant illustrated the idea with an incident in 2004 where a soldier met "an Iraqi family who was fluent in the Spanish language." An officer investigated and found "no ill will towards the United States or our allies, the goal of the family was to travel through Spanish-speaking nations into Mexico and then enter the United States."

But, the wiki contributor noted, there was a potential for terrorists trying to enter the country, concluding that this encounter demonstrated "the importance of passing along such intelligence to the proper channels."

The introduction of wikis is part of a revamping of the Army's field manual system, which currently has more than 500 different guides that cover crucial, so-called capstone doctrine — like interrogation or counterterrorism — as well as highly specialized guidance on, say, how to stay warm during cold-weather operations.

Under the new plan, 50 or so capstone guides will remain field manuals and will not be open to collaborative editing, said Clinton Ancker, a retired colonel who, as director of the Combined Arms Doctrine Directorate at Fort Leavenworth, is supervising the pilot program. More than 200 other former field guides are likely to be consolidated or even scrapped, he said.

Christopher R. Paparone, an associate professor in the Army Command and General Staff College's Department of Logistics and Resource Operations at Fort Lee, Va., who has been advising the Army to change its hierarchical thinking, wrote in an e-mail message that he was heartened by the Army's willingness to experiment.

"My view (not an official view) is that we have been much too rigid in our doctrine," he wrote. "By using wiki, we begin to challenge dogmatic thinking," adding that wikis made rank "immaterial."

Still, the reaction of the rank and file thus far has been tepid. A visit to the site hosting the seven wikified guides shows that there has been little editing over the first six weeks. In part, this slow acceptance reflects the different priorities between Army theorists and the working Army, according to Mr. Paparone, a retired colonel with a Ph.D. in public administration.

"The field Army is very busy and many who are out there 'operating' do not necessarily see much usefulness in doctrine anyway (except maybe as a start point to improvise from and something taught at our Army schools)," he wrote.

Mr. Ancker said he remained optimistic, however, in part because soldiers, even in an open-source world, still know how to take an order.

"One of the great advantages we have is that we are a disciplined force," he said. "We are hierarchical. When the boss says 'do this,' it tends to get done. Even those who don't like to write will add something."

Those Aren't Fighting Words, Dear

2009-08-07T13:36:00.002+09:00

MODERN LOVE

Those Aren’t Fighting Words, Dear

By LAURA A. MUNSON, NY TIMES

LET’S say you have what you believe to be a healthy marriage. You’re still friends and lovers after spending more than half of your lives together. The dreams you set out to achieve in your 20s — gazing into each other’s eyes in candlelit city bistros when you were single and skinny — have for the most part come true.

Two decades later you have the 20 acres of land, the farmhouse, the children, the dogs and horses. You’re the parents you said you would be, full of love and guidance. You’ve done it all: Disneyland, camping, Hawaii, Mexico, city living, stargazing.

Sure, you have your marital issues, but on the whole you feel so self-satisfied about how things have worked out that you would never, in your wildest nightmares, think you would hear these words from your husband one fine summer day: “I don’t love you anymore. I’m not sure I ever did. I’m moving out. The kids will understand. They’ll want me to be happy.”

But wait. This isn’t the divorce story you think it is. Neither is it a begging-him-to-stay story. It’s a story about hearing your husband say “I don’t love you anymore” and deciding not to believe him. And what can happen as a result.

Here’s a visual: Child throws a temper tantrum. Tries to hit his mother. But the mother doesn’t hit back, lecture or punish. Instead, she ducks. Then she tries to go about her business as if the tantrum isn’t happening. She doesn’t “reward” the tantrum. She simply doesn’t take the tantrum personally because, after all, it’s not about her.

Let me be clear: I’m not saying my husband was throwing a child’s tantrum. No. He was in the grip of something else — a profound and far more troubling meltdown that comes not in childhood but in midlife, when we perceive that our personal trajectory is no longer arcing reliably upward as it once did. But I decided to respond the same way I’d responded to my children’s tantrums. And I kept responding to it that way. For four months.

“I don’t love you anymore. I’m not sure I ever did.”

His words came at me like a speeding fist, like a sucker punch, yet somehow in that moment I was able to duck. And once I recovered and composed myself, I managed to say, “I don’t buy it.” Because I didn’t.

He drew back in surprise. Apparently he’d expected me to burst into tears, to rage at him, to threaten him with a custody battle. Or beg him to change his mind.

So he turned mean. “I don’t like what you’ve become.”

Gut-wrenching pause. How could he say such a thing? That’s when I really wanted to fight. To rage. To cry. But I didn’t.

Instead, a shroud of calm enveloped me, and I repeated those words: “I don’t buy it.”

You see, I’d recently committed to a non-negotiable understanding with myself. I’d committed to “The End of Suffering.” I’d finally managed to exile the voices in my head that told me my personal happiness was only as good as my outward success, rooted in things that were often outside my control. I’d seen the insanity of that equation and decided to take responsibility for my own happiness. And I mean all of it.

My husband hadn’t yet come to this understanding with himself. He had enjoyed many years of hard work, and its rewards had supported our family of four all along. But his new endeavor hadn’t been going so well, and his ability to be the breadwinner was in rapid decline. He’d been miserable about this, felt useless, was losing himself emotionally and letting himself go physically. And now he wanted out of our marriage; to be done with our family.

But I wasn’t buying it.

I said: “It’s not age-appropriate to expect children to be concerned with their parents’ happiness. Not unless you want to create co-dependents who’ll spend their lives in bad relationships and therapy. There are times in every relationship when the parties involved need a break. What can we do to give you the distance you need, without hurting the family?”

“Huh?” he said.

“Go trekking in Nepal. Build a yurt in the back meadow. Turn the garage studio into a man-cave. Get that drum set you’ve always wanted. Anything but hurting the children and me with a reckless move like the one you’re talking about.”

Then I repeated my line, “What can we do to give you the distance you need, without hurting the family?”

“Huh?”

“How can we have a responsible distance?”

“I don’t want distance,” he said. “I want to move out.”

My mind raced. Was it another woman? Drugs? Unconscionable secrets? But I stopped myself. I would not suffer.

Instead, I went to my desk, Googled “responsible separation” and came up with a list. It included things like: Who’s allowed to use what credit cards? Who are the children allowed to see you with in town? Who’s allowed keys to what?

I looked through the list and passed it on to him.

His response: “Keys? We don’t even have keys to our house.”

I remained stoic. I could see pain in his eyes. Pain I recognized.

“Oh, I see what you’re doing,” he said. “You’re going to make me go into therapy. You’re not going to let me move out. You’re going to use the kids against me.”

“I never said that. I just asked: What can we do to give you the distance you need ... ”

“Stop saying that!”

Well, he didn’t move out.

Instead, he spent the summer being unreliable. He stopped coming home at his usual six o’clock. He would stay out late and not call. He blew off our entire Fourth of July — the parade, the barbecue, the fireworks — to go to someone else’s party. When he was at home, he was distant. He wouldn’t look me in the eye. He didn’t even wish me “Happy Birthday.”

But I didn’t play into it. I walked my line. I told the kids: “Daddy’s having a hard time as adults often do. But we’re a family, no matter what.” I was not going to suffer. And neither were they.

MY trusted friends were irate on my behalf. “How can you just stand by and accept this behavior? Kick him out! Get a lawyer!”

I walked my line with them, too. This man was hurting, yet his problem wasn’t mine to solve. In fact, I needed to get out of his way so he could solve it.

I know what you’re thinking: I’m a pushover. I’m weak and scared and would put up with anything to keep the family together. I’m probably one of those women who would endure physical abuse. But I can assure you, I’m not. I load 1,500-pound horses into trailers and gallop through the high country of Montana all summer. I went through Pitocin-induced natural childbirth. And a Caesarean section without follow-up drugs. I am handy with a chain saw.

I simply had come to understand that I was not at the root of my husband’s problem. He was. If he could turn his problem into a marital fight, he could make it about us. I needed to get out of the way so that wouldn’t happen.

Privately, I decided to give him time. Six months.

I had good days, and I had bad days. On the good days, I took the high road. I ignored his lashing out, his merciless jabs. On bad days, I would fester in the August sun while the kids ran through sprinklers, raging at him in my mind. But I never wavered. Although it may sound ridiculous to say “Don’t take it personally” when your husband tells you he no longer loves you, sometimes that’s exactly what you have to do.

Instead of issuing ultimatums, yelling, crying or begging, I presented him with options. I created a summer of fun for our family and welcomed him to share in it, or not — it was up to him. If he chose not to come along, we would miss him, but we would be just fine, thank you very much. And we were.

And, yeah, you can bet I wanted to sit him down and persuade him to stay. To love me. To fight for what we’ve created. You can bet I wanted to.

But I didn’t.

I barbecued. Made lemonade. Set the table for four. Loved him from afar.

And one day, there he was, home from work early, mowing the lawn. A man doesn’t mow his lawn if he’s going to leave it. Not this man. Then he fixed a door that had been broken for eight years. He made a comment about our front porch needing paint. Our front porch. He mentioned needing wood for next winter. The future. Little by little, he started talking about the future.

It was Thanksgiving dinner that sealed it. My husband bowed his head humbly and said, “I’m thankful for my family.”

He was back.

And I saw what had been missing: pride. He’d lost pride in himself. Maybe that’s what happens when our egos take a hit in midlife and we realize we’re not as young and golden anymore.

When life’s knocked us around. And our childhood myths reveal themselves to be just that. The truth feels like the biggest sucker-punch of them all: it’s not a spouse or land or a job or money that brings us happiness. Those achievements, those relationships, can enhance our happiness, yes, but happiness has to start from within. Relying on any other equation can be lethal.

My husband had become lost in the myth. But he found his way out. We’ve since had the hard conversations. In fact, he encouraged me to write about our ordeal. To help other couples who arrive at this juncture in life. People who feel scared and stuck. Who believe their temporary feelings are permanent. Who see an easy out, and think they can escape.

My husband tried to strike a deal. Blame me for his pain. Unload his feelings of personal disgrace onto me.

But I ducked. And I waited. And it worked.

Laura A. Munson is a writer who lives in Whitefish, Mont.

Of Fragrant Harbours and Dim Sum

2009-07-30T15:08:00.002+09:00

Here in my favorite city in Asia--Hong Kong!

Have been eating dim sum, shopping, drinking and getting myself re-acquainted with this remarkable city. It's quite fortunate to know good friends here. And I see myself living and working here in this location that has made a career out of top notch services and efficiency.

Oh I have missed you. What a great way to end my Fulbr*ght grant.

Yet Another Epic Subway Moment

2009-07-24T22:21:00.005+09:00

My friend and very talented writer Misty posted this as her Facebook status.

"just shared a subway bench with what appeared to be a well-dressed, middle-aged businessman. That is, until he vomited on his leg, curled up in the fetal position and passed out. At 10 p.m. Nice."

FAIL

Skip Gates, please sit down

2009-07-24T14:30:00.002+09:00

Skip Gates, please sit down

You are suffering from what I call the "Ivy League Effect"

By a Phantom Negro

Salon.com

Editor's note: This column originally appeared on the Web site "This Week in Blackness," which is maintained by Brooklyn, N.Y., comedian Elon James White. The person who submitted it to "This Week in Blackness" published it under the pseudonym "a Phantom Negro" because "Dr. Henry Louis Gates has reach and influence in the academy."

Jul. 24, 2009 |

The Ivy League is not real life. College in general is not real life, and the Ivy League is a more fantastic version of college. The amenities are better, the rules are flexible, and everyone, student and faculty alike, is well aware that the realities of life as most people know it are merely a peculiar footnote to the day-to-day of campus life. I do not speak out of turn when I say this. I know because I am in and of that world.

As a black Ivy Leaguer, something funny happens as you become ensconced in ivy. You're smart enough to understand that race and racism are a reality you deal with on a daily basis, but you also know that your university ID sets you apart. Does this mean you are kept from hurtful incidents? No, but it is to say that much of the outrage felt at a racial slight is replaced by outrage at a class slight. Sure, we get pissed, knowing we're getting hassled because we're black, but the real indignation comes from being hassled as members of an elite group. How dare you hassle me? I go to school here. I go to work here. That second part of the thought is always present. I go to school here. I go to work here. When the Ivy League Effect is going full tilt, our black compass gets confused; the realities we know to exist become other people's problems.

True story: One night, years ago, many of the black students at school were throwing a party in a dormitory common area when three police officers arrived, flashlights searching the crowd. Nobody moved, nobody left, nobody did anything but keep dancing as three police officers walked through the crowd, flashlights in faces. I didn't run either. In fact, I wondered if they were chasing someone on foot and wondered if the person they were chasing had run into the party.

That could only happen in the Ivy League. Three cops come into a party and nobody, surreptitiously or otherwise, made for an exit? It seems like the beginning of a joke. On one hand, you could argue that this is a sign of progress; a sign that we've moved past the days of fearing police presence. I say that that quasi-luxury is brought on by the muscle backing these students (and, by extension, the faculty) -- the school. All the lessons about dealing with police as a black person seem to have no place in the ivory tower. We can forget those lessons because, more than we're black in America, we're Ivy Leaguers.

Which brings me to Skip Gates. He isn't outraged because he feels he was the victim of racial profiling by the police (that dubious honor goes to his foolish neighbor) [in fact, the woman who called the police is not a neighbor, but works nearby]. He's outraged because he was the victim of class profiling. He didn't resent being identified as black; he resented being identified as that kind of black, the kind of black that can be hassled and pushed around by simpleton cops. How dare you hassle me? I'm Skip Gates: Harvard professor!

Skip has fallen victim to the Ivy League Effect. Check out his articles -- you can definitely go to the Root -- the Web site he is editor in chief of -- if you want to see a repository for the whole masturbatory display. He all but says, "Do I look like that type of (black) person? I was wearing a blazer and a polo shirt!" Gates is Ivy League pissed with a dash of black anger. Not the other way around. Is this to say the police weren't in the wrong? Hardly. As a person who is familiar with the Cambridge/Boston P.D., I can say that the prospect of some procedural malfeasance on their part is entirely believable, if not an abject certainty.

But I'm also sure the good doctor was talking some shit. The Ivy League Effect, when it's potent, wouldn't allow otherwise. It made Gates forget that, no matter what, even when you're right, you don't talk shit to the police. And that's not a matter of manhood or pride; it's a question of survival. Why? Because you're black before you're a Harvard professor. Because, in an extreme case, you can't tell your side of the story if you get shot reaching for your ID. As a black man and a Harvard professor, Gates' thought process should have been: "Wow. I am so thoroughly pissed right now. When this current situation is resolved and I am out of harm's way, I'm going down to the station and I'm going to use my considerable influence to make heads roll. But right now, I need to be the smart one, remember all the details and not give him any reason to escalate this situation." That's what many of my colleagues have done, guns drawn on them at night in the middle of campus by the police. They didn't get loud; they got smart. They defused the situation, then got pissed and did something about it. And, I assure you, they did so with much less juice than Dr. Gates.

I remember when I heard about the story, I couldn't help thinking: Wow, that Ivy League Effect has washed out his healthy fear of the police. Yikes.

Can he be outraged? Absolutely. The circumstance should outrage any person that happened to. But why is he outraged? Because he didn't think the black tax applied to him anymore. In his mind, he was Skip Gates, well-regarded Harvard professor who was being treated poorly in his home by the police. Believe me, if this took place at North Carolina State his sense of indignation would be far different and his ability to garner attention would be much less. And if he was just a working-class stiff? Forget it.

But this didn't happen anywhere else. It happened in Cambridge on Ivy turf and now his story has taken on Paul Bunyan-esque qualities. If you didn't know better, you'd think a lynch mob was waiting outside Gates' door with the rope and the hitching wagon before Ving Rhames came along and saved the day.

Skip Gates thought that he'd worked hard enough, achieved enough, become Harvard enough that this sort of treatment did not apply to him. And now, rather than channel that outrage in a way that is subtle but effective, he's very publicly suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, having "joined the ranks of the million incarcerated black men in America." That's laughable. He does not see those million men as kin and he doesn't, by and large, give a damn about those guys. He's merely annoyed that such an irritation as police misconduct found its way into his home. If he read about this story happening to a plumber in Roxbury, he'd shake his head in disappointment and then go on with his life.

So before we heed the call of racism, let's be mindful of the tower from which that call came. This has something to do with race. But it has a lot more to do with messing with Skip Gates.

The Ivy League Effect, people. The Ivy League Effect.

-- By a Phantom Negro

Well, That Went Well

2009-07-23T16:36:00.004+09:00

They were shocked. The kids definitely were in shock. I was leaving AND I had used Korean to talk to them. During the speech, the switch to Korean sent collective gasps throughout the school.

Bam! Think I got them pretty good.

(Reminds me of Fall 2007. Was leaving a sociology class as a woman was complaining to me about how hard studying Chinese was. Her mistake was to remark that I wouldn't be able to handle Intermediate Chinese as I was a dumb jock.

"Funny," I shot back. "I've finished Advanced Chinese and Modern Lit. And then spent part of my summer translating contracts.")

The letters poured in and there were genuine heartfelt goodbyes. It's good knowing they care. It's a bit scary for me to be leaving because I've come to care about them a lot. Heretofore, most of my years were spent in the single pursuit of what would make us or our parents happy. Work, college, test scores, activities.

Little of that time was spent in service to a community of underprivileged people. Zig Ziglar has a particularly important phrase that states "Duty makes us do things well, but loves makes us do them beautifully."

The students and my colleagues taught me a lot about that this year. Jane suggested a scrapbook to keep everything, and she's right. These simple messages--some elaborately colored, others literally scrawled out in seconds--mean so much.

Some cried. So much of me didn't want to leave, and yet it's time.

And there was no time to just sit around and hang out. As soon as the Farewell Speech was done, it was off to catch a cab to the catch the bus to Chuncheon, where the next class was undergoing Orientation training.

Oh the pace of life here. The rest of my precious few moments here are spent saying my goodbyes. I shall miss them. Many of the friends were so good to me. The students acted as my children. My homestay was a safe space. Won't miss other aspects of life here. But all in all, that went well.

My Final Lesson

2009-07-23T16:16:00.006+09:00

Speech given to school:

"Dear students,

Good morning! How are you? "I'm fine...Thank you...and you?" You know, after a year of hearing that, it surprises me to say that I don't get tired of hearing that. In fact, I've come to enjoy it, because I hear your voices. Sometimes they're excited. Sometimes they're groggy. But they are always your voices. And I love hearing your voices.

저에게는 정말 특별한 일년이었습니다.

제가 한국말을 하니까 놀랍죠?

어쨌든, 사실 저는 큰 기대없이 작년 7월에 한국에 왔었습니다. 제가 오는 곳이 논밭에서 소가 뛰노는 시골인 줄만 알았거든요. “평안한 산”이라는 뜻을 가진 안산에, 작고 아름다운 산들이 많이 있다는게 사실 인가요?

재미있는것은 이런 안산에 있는 원곡중학교는 정말 평안했다는 것입니다. 1년동안 저는 이 학교에 참 익숙해졌습니다. 특히 쉬는시간에 여학생들의 비명소리와 남학생들의 고함소리들과, 장난치는 소리들에 말이죠. 또한 수업을 하면서 학생들을 지도하는 방법과, 학생들이 재미있고 자신감있게 영어를 배우도록 돕는 방법들을 많이 배웠습니다. 또한 여러분 모두는 나에게 지역사회를 위해 봉사하는 것이 어떤것인지를 깨닫게 해주었습니다.

풀브라이트 원어민 영어교사로 한국에 오는 것은 저의 꿈이었습니다. 저는 이곳에 미국의 문화 외교관으로서 왔으며, 그것은 제 삶을 바꾸어 놓았습니다. 저는 5개국 언어를 배웠고, 한국 국가대표 수구팀의 코치로 활동했습니다. 무엇보다 저는 여러분들을 제 친동생들처럼 여겼습니다.

저는 이제 캘리포니아로 돌아갈 준비를 해야 합니다. 이제 제 인생의 다음단계로 전진하기 위해 법학 대학원에 가야 하지만, 여러분들은 항상 제 마음속에 함께 있을 것입니다. 떠나야만 하는 마음이 너무나도 슬프지만, 여러분들도 저와 함께한 시간들이 즐거웠기를 바랍니다.

제가 마지막으로 여러분에게 하고 싶은 말은 “꿈”에 대한 것입니다. 전 미 사무총장이자 노벨평화상 수상자 였던 Kofi Annan은 이렇게 말했습니다. “당신은 항상 당신의 꿈으로부터 모든 일을 시작해야 합니다. 당신의 성을 그 꿈위에 짓고, 기초를 세우십시요. 꿈이 없이는, 당신은 어느 곳에도 갈 수 없습니다.” 더 나은 삶을 꿈꾸기를 두려워 하지 마십시오. 그것이 무엇이든, 꿈을 실현하기 위해서는 용기가 필요합니다. 그렇지만 꼭 기억하세요. “꿈이 없이는 어느 곳에도 갈 수 없다.”

제가 태어난 가족도 고기를 잡고 농사를 짓는 마을에서 살았었습니다. 그렇지만 저희 부모님은 더 나은 삶을 꿈꾸었습니다. 그래서 오늘날 우리 가족은 그 꿈 위에서 살고 있습니다. 저는 그것이 가장 중요하다고 생각합니다. 긍정적인 생각하기를 주저하지 마십시오.

원곡중학교 학생들, 선생님들, 모두 안녕히 계세요."

(English translation)

It's been a special year. Wow! I can speak Korean! Anyways, I came to Korea last July not knowing what to expect. In fact, I was told that I';d be in a farm area, where my neighbor would be a cow, and my backyard a rice paddy. Instead I got Ansan, the "Quiet Mountain." By the way, has anyone noticed that Ansan has a pretty small mountain? The funny part is that Ansan's Wongok Middle School is anything but quiet. Over the course of a year, I became used to the shrieks of the female students, the battlecries of boys play fighting and the general chaos of a school in between periods. Over the course of a year, I learned a lot about controlling a classroom; helping students gain confidence and making learning fun. All of you also taught me what it was to do things in service to a community. It was a dream for me to come to Korea as a Fulbright teacher. I'm here as an official cultural ambassador of the U.S. It's changed my life. I've learned a fifth language; trained with the National Water Polo team; and most importantly, come to see many of you students as my own younger brothers and sisters. I now must prepare for the return to California. I will be preparing to enter law school and to move on to the next phase of my life. But you will always be in my heart. It is sad for me to leave you all, but I hope you have enjoyed our time together.

My last lesson to you is to dream. Former UN Secretary General and Nobel Peace Prize Winner Kofi Annan said, "You first have to start with a dream. Build your castles in the air and give it foundation. Without a dream, you are not going to get anywhere." Do not be afraid to dream of a better life. Whatever it is. It takes courage to make your dreams come true. But remember, "without a dream you are not going to get anywhere."

I say this because my family came from fishing and farming villages. And my parents dreamed of a better life. Today they live out that dream. And that's something that's special. Don't let anyone tell you that you can't do something positive. Goodbye and farewell.

"See You Again"

2009-07-23T15:57:00.005+09:00

My impending departure came as a shock to the kids, even the bad ones. Part of the reason was that I decided to use Korean. Heretofore, I had stuck to deliberately butchering Korean and using English as a means of getting the students to practice.

"Hello students. How are you?"

"I'm fine. Thank you. And you?"

(In Korean) "Well, I'm sad because the next time we meet is our last class. I'm going back to California because I'll be getting ready for graduate school."

"Wowwwwwwwwww!" they clamored. It was more shocking that I was using Korean than that I was leaving? Couldn't tell. And then, "wait. When are you coming back?"

"I don't know."

"Noooo, don't go."

Apparently they had gotten used to me as the American, despite their year long insistence that I had a "Korean face." After getting over the shock, these hoodlums decided to flood me with letters and notes.

It's truly touching to know there'll be an impact after I'm gone. This is what teaching's supposed to be about, right? And even more important as an ET@, one can only hope the impact upon the surrounding community is similar. Maybe a few more kids will think about going to university because of my year here. Maybe a few more kids will try to break the cycle of violence and bullying at the school. Maybe the school culture will change.

One can only hope. But that's what drives me--hope. I see bits and pieces of the changes in various students as I roam the halls. And that keeps my spirits buoyant.

What If Microsoft Had Invented the iPod?

2009-07-10T09:46:00.003+09:00

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=36099539665548298&q=microsoft+ipod

The Long Goodbye

2009-07-07T10:35:00.007+09:00

Hard to believe the way a year passes. A year has never been so long or so fast for me. What a year of stark contrasts.

We had our Final Dinner to celebrate our year of service. We went to Yongsan Base's Dragon Hill Lodge, which is usually open to military personnel and their families. Had an amazing dinner and really sentimental speeches.

Moments like these stay with you. It's hard for me to really go into the experience. I guess the best way to describe it was like the Class Dinner the seniors had the day before graduation from the College. Everyone knew it'd be the last time we'd see some people. At the same time, we were so happy to be together. The Final Dinner was like that, but more emotional. I think after 4 years at Pomona, many of us knew who we'd keep in touch with and that knowledge kept things from being too emotional. Many of us were also a lot more concerned with what we would do next for jobs. Funny, because I know all of my college friends will go on to do really cool things.

As for the Fulbr*ghters, never have I met so diversely talented a group of people who came together for the single mission of the Fulbr*ght ET@. In the span of one year, many of us became close because of our shared experiences. Suffering trials and celebrating triumphs at school or in the homestay. We got to see and do pretty cool things with Embassy types. And after this, I know all of us will go on to do pretty cool things. While I may not see many of these people again, they should know they've forever left their mark upon me. For me, the year has been a long uphill battle to make a difference and to learn. And it has been so very inspiring.

After the dinner we all went out one last time. We drank; we sang; we danced. And it was beautiful. As Vinnie Flores says, "You can take the ET@ out of Korea, but not Korea out of the ET@."

Surely there must be some truth in this as I prepare to return home. Did a lot of growing up this year. And so begins the long goodbye to a place I've come to call home and grown used to.

Richard Won was right. We say many goodbyes in our 20s.

Highlights from MSYDP

2009-07-07T10:34:00.001+09:00

"OK kids, so what is Plan A?" I asked.

"We play nice. We scratch their back; they scratch ours. America must follow this way." Andy chimed.

"Good. And if that doesn't work?"

"Plan B is where we take away their aid."

"Good! You remember."

"But Mr. Su, what happens if Plan B doesn't work?"

Ah, the age old dilemma of what happens when diplomacy breaks down. Well, might as well be honest with the kid. And I make an explosion noise.

"Ah, OK. We'll call that Plan Z."

Fast-forward a few weeks later to MSYDP, where on the first night we have a workshop. The students anonymously write their anxieties and the hopes for the conference.

One boy decides to write, "I'm nervous about what will happen if Israel doesn't play nice. Then we have to use Plan B. But if Gaza get out of control and won't blow up the tunnels, we have to use Plan Z. "

Everyone looks at me. Oh Fail.

Quoteworthy from "Evan Almighty"

2009-07-06T20:24:00.000+09:00

"Let me ask you something. If someone prays for patience, you think God gives them patience? Or does he give them the opportunity to be patient? If he prayed for courage, does God give him courage, or does he give him opportunities to be courageous? If someone prayed for the family to be closer, do you think God zaps them with warm fuzzy feelings, or does he give them opportunities to love each other? "

Goodbye Fred Sontag

2009-06-29T11:42:00.000+09:00

From the Los Angeles Times

OBITUARIES

Frederick E. Sontag dies at 84; Pomona College philosophy professor

The school's longest-serving faculty member, he was a venerated mentor to three generations of students. He also was the author of nearly 30 books.

By Elaine Woo

June 20, 2009

Frederick E. Sontag, a professor of philosophy and venerated mentor to three generations of students at Pomona College, where he made headlines nine years ago for forgiving a mentally ill student who had stabbed him in the neck, died Sunday at Pilgrim Place Health Services Center in Claremont. He was 84.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said his son, Grant.

The college's longest- serving faculty member, Sontag was to retire this month after 57 years of teaching and nearly 30 books on such topics as the problem of evil, the Danish philosopher-theologian Soren Kierkegaard, and trends in American religious culture, including the 1970s rise of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church.

He also was an expert on existentialism whose writings in the 1960s placed him "in the forefront of advancing existential philosophy in the United States and even internationally," said John K. Roth, emeritus professor of philosophy at Claremont McKenna College and a former student of Sontag.

An ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, Sontag never had a pastorate but offered himself as confidant, counselor and mentor to thousands of students and officiated for them at more than 100 weddings. He advised a local fraternity, ate lunch with students in the cafeteria and welcomed them at his office, where he usually arrived about 7 a.m. and stayed until 10 p.m.

"I found that what I had been seeking when I thought I wanted to become a minister is what I now see as teaching," Sontag said in the magazine Works & Conversations in 2002.

He often defended students on academic probation or at risk of expulsion. Sometimes he even bailed them out of jail.

That was the case on Oct. 30, 2000, when he sought the release of Jared Essig, a 22-year-old senior with a history of mental illness who had been arrested on a shoplifting charge.

Sontag was driving Essig from the jail to his dorm when the student became delusional and pulled out a pocketknife, stabbing the professor twice in the neck.

Unaware of how badly he was hurt, Sontag, then 76, drove himself to the hospital -- but only after driving to his office to call the dean of students and leaving her a detailed message about the need to locate Essig before he could harm anyone else. Essig was apprehended a short time later.

By the time Sontag reached the emergency room, he had lost three pints of blood. He could have died from the stab wounds, which had missed his carotid artery by a few millimeters.

Most remarkable, however, was what happened after the assault: Sontag forgave Essig. He also found the young man a defense lawyer and testified on his behalf at the trial. Faced with a charge of attempted murder, Essig was found not guilty by reason of insanity.

"My genes lack something," the philosopher of religion, who recovered from his injuries, told The Times shortly after the attack. "I don't seem to hold grudges."

Sontag was born in Long Beach on Oct. 2, 1924. His father was a Russian Jew who survived the pogroms and became a Baptist after settling in California in the early 1900s.

Sontag's interest in philosophy began at Stanford University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in 1949. At Yale University, he earned a master's in 1951 and a doctorate in 1952, the same year he joined the Pomona College faculty as an assistant professor of philosophy.

In 1966, Sontag spent a sabbatical year teaching at the Pontifical College of San Anselmo in Rome, a rare distinction for a non-Catholic.

In 1977, he published the book "Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church," which was based in part on an unusual, nine-hour interview with the publicity-averse Moon, whose movement was stirring controversy in the United States for its aggressive recruitment and fundraising tactics.

Sontag's scholarly interest was drawn to what he saw as "a deep spiritual side" to the movement. "If ever there was a kind of independent mind who marched to his own drumbeat rather than the drumbeat of others, Fred would be it. Students loved him for that," Roth said.

Alumni showed their affection for the professor by raising funds for the renovation of what in 1997 became the Sontag Greek Theater at Pomona College.

In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife of 59 years, Carol; a daughter, Anne Karch; and three grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held at Pomona College at a later date. Details will be posted at www.pomona.edu /events/news/special/061509 fredsontag.shtml.

elaine.woo@latimes.com

She Finally Has a Home--Harvard (LA Times)

2009-06-25T11:07:00.003+09:00

This woman is absolutely inspiring. It would be an honor to meet Khadijah Williams one day. Why didn't Pomona snag her? Hopefully we can find more people like her and really give them the tools to make a difference in the world.

Few things are as powerful as a motivated person who thirsts for knowledge.

From the Los Angeles Times

She finally has a home: Harvard

Khadijah Williams, 18, overcomes a lifetime in shelters and on skid row.

By Esmeralda Bermudez

11:03 PM PDT, June 19, 2009

Khadijah Williams stepped into chemistry class and instantly tuned out the commotion.

She walked past students laughing, gossiping, napping and combing one another's hair. Past a cellphone blaring rap songs. And past a substitute teacher sitting in a near-daze.

Quietly, the 18-year-old settled into an empty table, flipped open her physics book and focused. Nothing mattered now except homework.

"No wonder you're going to Harvard," a girl teased her.

Around here, Khadijah is known as "Harvard girl," the "smart girl" and the girl with the contagious smile who landed at Jefferson High School only 18 months ago.

What students don't know is that she is also a homeless girl.

As long as she can remember, Khadijah has floated from shelters to motels to armories along the West Coast with her mother. She has attended 12 schools in 12 years; lived out of garbage bags among pimps, prostitutes and drug dealers. Every morning, she upheld her dignity, making sure she didn't smell or look disheveled.

On the streets, she learned how to hunt for their next meal, plot the next bus route and help choose a secure place to sleep -- survival skills she applied with passion to her education.

Only a few mentors and Harvard officials know her background. She never wanted other students to know her secret -- not until her plane left for the East Coast hours after her Friday evening graduation.

"I was so proud of being smart I never wanted people to say, 'You got the easy way out because you're homeless,' " she said. "I never saw it as an excuse."

A drive to succeed

"I have felt the anger at having to catch up in school . . . being bullied because they knew I was poor, different, and read too much," she wrote in her college essays. "I knew that if I wanted to become a smart, successful scholar, I should talk to other smart people."

Khadijah was in third grade when she first realized the power of test scores, placing in the 99th percentile on a state exam. Her teachers marked the 9-year-old as gifted, a special category that Khadijah, even at that early age, vowed to keep.

"I still remember that exact number," Khadijah said. "It meant only 0.01 students tested better than I did."

In the years that followed, her mother, Chantwuan Williams, pulled her out of school eight more times. When shelters closed, money ran out or her mother didn't feel safe, they packed what little they carried and boarded buses to find housing in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Ventura, San Diego, San Bernardino and Orange County, staying for months, at most, in one place.

She finished only half of fourth grade, half of fifth and skipped sixth. Seventh grade was split between Los Angeles and San Diego. Eighth grade consisted of two weeks in San Bernardino.

At every stop, Khadijah pushed to keep herself in each school's gifted program. She read nutrition charts, newspapers and four to five books a month, anything to transport her mind away from the chaos and the sour smell.

At school, she was the outsider. At the shelter, she was often bullied. "You ain't college-bound," the pimps barked. "You live in skid row!"

In 10th grade, Khadijah realized that if she wanted to succeed, she couldn't do it alone. She began to reach out to organizations and mentors: the Upward Bound Program, Higher Edge L.A., Experience Berkeley and South Central Scholars; teachers, counselors and college alumni networks. They helped her enroll in summer community college classes, gave her access to computers and scholarship applications and taught her about networking.

When she enrolled in the fall of her junior year at Jefferson High School, she was determined to stay put, regardless of where her mother moved. Graduation was not far off and she needed strong college letters of recommendation from teachers who were familiar with her work.

This soon meant commuting by bus from an Orange County armory. She awoke at 4 a.m. and returned at 11 p.m., and kept her grade-point average at just below a 4.0 while participating in the Academic Decathlon, the debate team and leading the school's track and field team.

"That's when I was really stressed," she says, at once sighing and laughing.

Khadijah graduated Friday evening with high honors, fourth in her class. She was accepted to more than 20 universities nationwide, including Brown, Columbia, Amherst and Williams. She chose a full scholarship to Harvard and aspires to become an education attorney.

Early adversity

She tried her best; she never smoked or drank, never did drugs, and she never put us in abusive situations. However, that was the best she could do.

There are questions about her mother Khadijah is not ready to ask, answers she is not ready to hear. How did her mother end up on the streets? How come she never found a stable home for her daughters? Why wasn't there family to turn to, no father, no grandparents? And what will become of her little sister?

"I don't know. I don't know," is often her response. Ask personal questions about her mother and the fire in Khadijah's eyes turns dim. She knows when she arrives in Cambridge, Mass., she will need to seek counseling. So much of her life is a blur.

She knows she was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., to a 14-year-old mother. She thinks Chantwuan might have been ostracized from her family. She may have tried to attend school, but the stress of a baby proved too much. When Khadijah was a toddler, they moved to California. A few years later, Jeanine was born.

She has chosen not to criticize her mother. Instead Khadijah said she inspired her to learn. "She would tell me I had a gift, she would call me Oprah."

When her college applications were due in December, James and Patricia London of South Central Scholars invited Khadijah to their home in Rancho Palos Verdes to help her write her essays.

When they went to return her to skid row, her mother and sister were gone.

Khadijah accepted the Londons' invitation to spend the rest of her school year with them.

In their comfortable hilltop home, Khadijah learned a new set of lessons. The orthopedic doctor and nurse taught her table manners, money management and grooming.

She won't be the first homeless student to arrive at Harvard.

Julie Hilden, the Harvard interviewer who met with Khadijah to gauge whether she should be accepted, said it was clear from the start that Khadijah was a top candidate. But school officials had to make sure they could provide what she needed to make the transition successful.

They plan to connect her with faculty mentors and potentially, a host family to check in with every so often. She will also attend a Harvard summer program at Cornell to take college-prep courses.

"I strongly recommended her," Hilden said. "I told them, 'If you don't take her, you might be missing out on the next Michelle Obama. Don't make this mistake.' "

Seeking connections

"I think about how I can convince my peers about the value of education. . . . I have found that after all the teasing, these peers start to respect me . . . . I decided that I could be the one to uplift my peers . . . . My work is far reaching and never finished."

Khadijah expected to feel more connected after nearly two years at Jefferson, to make at least one good friend.

Students flock to the smart girl for help with homework and tests and class questions. She walks through campus tenderly waving and smiling and complimenting everyone she knows.

But when prom pictures arrive, they show her posing alone in a silky black and white dress. In her yearbook, hundreds of familiar faces look back, but the memories are missing.

"It's a nice, glossy, shiny, colorful yearbook," she said. "But it feels like they're all strangers. I'm nowhere in these pages."

In the last six months, she saw her mother only a few times and on Thursday tried to find her. Khadijah headed to a South-Central storage facility where they last stored their belongings.

She found Chantwuan sitting on a garbage bag full of clothes.

"Khadijah's here!" her sister Jeanine yells. Chantwuan's face lit up.

She explained the details of her graduation, the bus route to get there and gave her mother a prom picture. She said she would leave for summer school Friday.

There is no talk of coming home of for Thanksgiving or Christmas.

Proudly, Khadijah modeled her hunter green graduation cap and gown and practiced switching the tassel from right to left as she would during the ceremony.

"Look at you," her mother says. "You're really going to Harvard, huh?"

"Yeah," she says, pausing. "I'm going to Harvard."

esmeralda.bermudez

@latimes.com

Bally's founder Don Wildman speeds up at 76--LA Times

2009-06-25T11:01:00.003+09:00

"I need to start training more." Too bad this guy has all day to work out. And he didn't have to work long hours in an office the same way a typical corporate person will have to.

From the Los Angeles Times

Bally's founder Don Wildman speeds up at 76

As the writer discovered during one grueling workout session, the best you can do is just try to keep up with the 'Circuit' master, surfer and triathlete.

By Roy M. Wallack

June 22, 2009

We're 45 minutes up a forbidding Malibu dirt road that climbs 2,200 feet in four miles, and the Wild Man is ahead. Way ahead. Out-of-sight ahead. And my excuses begin:

"I'm a mountain biker, but I've never ridden right after a grueling, two-hour, all-body weight-room workout before." "It's so hot -- 90 degrees and rising -- that I'm literally blinded in my own sweat." "I'm bonking because I haven't eaten a thing in over three hours."

But, of course, the Wild Man hasn't eaten either. He lifted the same weights I did, probably more. And, amazingly, he hasn't swallowed one sip of water all morning; he didn't even pack a water bottle on his bike. So at the top, when he greets me with his typical upbeat attitude -- "Wow, I'm really getting strong; that's the first time I ever rode this in my middle chain ring" -- I look at the leathery brown face, the slightly stooped shoulders, the washboard abs and bulging biceps, and I face reality: "A 76-year-old man just kicked my butt."

And then: "I better train harder."

Malibu resident Don Wildman, possibly one of the fittest septuagenarians on the planet, has always had that galvanizing effect on people. Founder of the company that became Bally's Total Fitness, the giant health-club chain, Wildman not only made a career out of telling people to get fit, he fit the part himself, packing his life with daily workouts and an endless parade of grand physical challenges -- world-class sailing races against Ted Turner, 90 holes of golf in a day, nine Hawaii Ironman triathlons.

The activities didn't retire when he did 15 years ago. He picked up big-wave surfing, helicopter snowboarding and stand-up paddle boarding, once paddling the length of the Hawaiian Islands. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, he leads "the Circuit," a grueling two-hour weight workout at his gargantuan home gym that has become legendary in Malibu. He rides seven days a week and paddles three. "I don't rest," he says.

And as you read this, he probably isn't sleeping. He'll be racing round the clock across the country on a road bike as part of Team Surfing USA, a four-man team competing in the 3,000-mile, coast-to-coast, Race Across America.

The team portion of the race, known as RAAM and now in its 28th year, began Saturday in Oceanside and will finish in Annapolis, Md., in about a week. Team Surf, which paddled 115 miles from Malibu to the start and will bike and paddle to the Statue of Liberty after the finish, hopes to use the event to raise money and awareness for several causes, including ALS (Augies Quest), autism (Beautiful Son Foundation) and cystic fibrosis (the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation).

A RAAM veteran, Wildman did the race at age 60 on a 1994 team that finished a few back from the winners in five days, 21 hours, and 24 minutes. Today, the father of three grown sons is old enough to be the dad of two of his RAAM teammates -- Tim Commerford, 41, the bassist for the rock group Rage Against the Machine, and 45-year-old Laird Hamilton, the famed big-wave surfer. He could be a grandfather of the third, Jason Winn, 27, owner of Bonk Breaker energy bars.

A day in the life

Entering my 50s and hoping to stay fit, I had wondered if I could hang with Wildman. I'd heard raves about him from tennis great John McEnroe, one of his Malibu riding buddies, during an interview. Hence, the workout and subsequent ride up the hill.

Now, with that pertinent question clearly answered, we coasted back down to his 5-acre cliffside estate and stashed our cycling gear in one of his four garages crammed with bikes and Porsches. Then we hopped in a souped-up golf cart and headed for his one-room beach house on the shore of Malibu's Paradise Cove. Next on the agenda: an hour of stand-up paddle boarding.

Before we wrapped up the nearly five-hour workout -- a normal thing for Wildman -- he jumped up to a bar and reeled off 12 full-hang pull-ups, his lats flaring out like a cobra's hood. I eked out 11; between gasps, I said, "I'll get you on these next time, Don."

"Yeah, but you better do those overhanded," he says. "You know those underhand ones are a lot easier." Of course, he's right. I need to train harder.

Some people keep very fit into their 40s and 50s. Wildman is heading full-speed into his 80s.

Wildman isn't exaggerating when he says that his mountain biking is stronger than ever. "My bike speed is similar to my Ironman days -- and there's a reason for that," he said. "Strength helps cardio. In the last decade, I started to try to keep my strength up. As you get older, the fall-off in strength is greater than the decline in VO2 max [oxygen uptake] -- unless you fight it."

Wildman took his old circuit-training routines and ramped them up into what he calls the Circuit, a now-legendary two-hour blasting session. One wing of his estate looks like a compact version of a Bally's gym, stocked with a couple of dozen machines, free weights and inflatable exercise balls.

Everything gets used.

Wildman usually doesn't work out alone. Joining us were his Team Surf teammates Commerford and Winn. Hamilton is also a frequent workout partner, along with McEnroe, 50, and Detroit Red Wings star Chris Chelios, 47. A pattern emerges: None of them is within a quarter-century of him.

His advice: weights, competition -- and younger friends

Wildman eats healthfully and takes lots of supplements, but the key element to his fitness strategy is younger friends.

"Old guys don't train anymore, so all my buddies are real young," he says. "They're more fun. They push you, and you push them, and you forget how old you are."

Young friends also teach him new games. "When Laird met me in 1996, he saw that I was an aggressive snowboarder -- and thought I'd make a good tow surfer," says Wildman, who often joins Hamilton for surfing and paddle boarding in Hawaii and other big-wave hot spots.

Conversely, he got Hamilton hooked on mountain biking, an obsession since he moved to Malibu in 1983.

Of course, acting like a man 50 years younger carries some risks. Three years ago, Wildman tore his rotator cuff while snowboarding in Argentina. Heli-boarding six months later, he drove his left femur through the end of his tibia, shattering the latter. ("I couldn't walk on it for 12 weeks, but I could cycle with the other leg," he says.) Last winter, he broke his left femur at a right angle when his mountain bike slipped on black ice in Utah. Ten days later, he was doing chin-ups; two months later, snowboarding.

Surfing in Hawaii with Hamilton in September 2008, a barrel slammed Wildman into his board, punctured his lung and broke a rib. A month later, he won three gold and four silver medals in cycling events at the World Senior Games, which he has competed in for the last five years.

"Seeing high-level people your age once in a while is important," he says. "It tells you that you're normal."

If all goes as planned, there will be many more accidents and Senior Games to come, because "the Wildman luck" is genetic too. His dad lived to 88, his mom to 94. He's had no medical problems other than an overactive thyroid 30 years ago. He rarely gets sick.

Wildman likes being a role model but finds it ironic that usually he inspires younger people, not his peers.

"When I met the Wild Man, I was in my late 30s and already starting to think slowing down was natural," Commerford says as Wildman serves us raspberry yogurt at his downtown Malibu yogurt shop, his latest passion. "Then we rode together, and the same thing that happened to you happened to me: I thought, 'What's my excuse? I gotta train more!' "

Adds Wildman: "People my own age say, 'It's too late for me . . . but all kinds of studies show that even nursing home populations can improve with exercise. And you get the reward for it: The endorphins. So pick something that you really like doing -- cycling, trampolining -- and just do it.

"As a kid, you go out and play. As an adult, you want the same fun, the same excitement," he says. "So when people say to me, 'When are you going to grow up?' I always say the same thing back: 'I hope I never do.' "

health@latimes.com

Lawmakers reject budget fix; state could begin isuing IOUs next week--LA Times

2009-06-25T10:07:00.003+09:00

Essentially, California's a sinking ship. The only person I see gaining from this is State Controller John Chiang. He's been warning about this for months, even to the point of challenging the Governator. I wonder what the courts will think of the State of California defaulting.

Will public services stop functioning? Will water and power stop? What about police and fire departments? Granted, fewer people in La Habra and Santa Ana would get shot and killed if the police stopped functioning. There are some trigger happy cops out in those towns. And it only bothers me more when I hear about cops making threats.

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

From the Los Angeles Times

Lawmakers reject budget fix; state could begin issuing IOUs next week

The core piece of a Democrat-backed package designed to fill the $24-billion gap flops. Last-ditch talks between party leaders and Schwarzenegger expected.

By Shane Goldmacher and Patrick McGreevy

5:02 PM PDT, June 24, 2009

Reporting from Sacramento — Lawmakers today rejected the core of a Democrat-backed plan intended to tame California's $24-billion deficit, even as a top state finance official warned that failure to resolve the budget crisis will force him to begin issuing IOUs next week.

Voting on just one of the 20 bills that make up the spending plan, both houses of the Legislature failed to garner the needed two-thirds vote. The measure did not include the tax increases that form the most controversial part of the package.

The rejection is now likely to push the budgetary dance onto a new stage, with leaders from both parties expected to meet behind closed doors in coming days with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in a last-ditch attempt to settle on a solution and keep California from insolvency.

Controller John Chiang applied his own brand of pressure as the two houses met, announcing that he would have to start issuing IOUs instead of checks on July 2 to pay the state's bills if the deficit tug-of-war isn't concluded. Chiang described the state's cash-flow troubles as unlike anything "since the Great Depression," with an expected $2.8-billion shortfall in July that could grow to $6.5 billion by September.

Lawmakers said they were aware of the stakes and the urgency.

"The clock is ticking, and it's ticking fast," declared Assemblywoman Noreen Evans (D-Santa Rosa), chairwoman of the legislative budget panel that crafted the deficit-reduction package.

But leaders from both parties had predicted that the proposal would flop, and the floor debate at times appeared to be little more than a political exercise.

Republicans accused Democrats of ignoring the will of voters by backing a $2-billion tax increase on the oil and tobacco industries. Democrats countered that Republicans had failed to come up with solutions of their own.

Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) told GOP lawmakers they needed to answer a "fundamental question": What's the alternative?

Republicans said their peers across the aisle had gone only part of the way toward closing the yawning budget gap -- and that lawmakers need to go further quickly.

"Everybody's talking about jumping off the cliff," said Sen. Bob Dutton (R-Rancho Cucamonga). "We're already off the cliff."

"I think this is about as good as we can do at the moment," said Sen. Denise Ducheny (D-San Diego). Failing to act quickly, she added, "can make this situation a whole lot worse."

Schwarzenegger has been telling Democrats for weeks that they should drop any hope of tax hikes and instead embrace his plan of deep cuts to education, prisons and the social safety net, including the elimination of some health and welfare programs.

Aaron McLear, the governor's spokesman, said lawmakers' "insistence" on considering the Democrat's budget plan "has cost the state valuable time and pushed us closer to insolvency."

Democrats said their budget plan held the deepest of Schwarzenegger's proposed cuts at bay -- and they intended to stick to that course.

"We don't believe Californians want needy women and children to be begging in the street," said Evans, who headed the joint budget committee that crafted the Democrats' plan.

Republicans railed that they didn't receive complete copies of the 475-page budget document until the end of the workday on Tuesday.

"Do any of you know what you're voting on?" challenged Assemblyman Jim Nielsen (R-Gerber). "How can the people of California have a clue what we're doing here if we don't."

Evans noted that the plan had been crafted in an open hearing after hours of public testimony -- and Nielsen attended those sessions as a panel member.

shane.goldmacher@latimes.com

patrick.mcgreevy@latimes.com

Obama's hitting the exact right note on Iran--LA Times

2009-06-25T10:02:00.002+09:00

From the Los Angeles Times

Opinion

Obama's hitting the exact right note on Iran

Calling for regime change would probably backfire, but condemning the crackdown encourages dissidents while not interfering with internal politics.

By Stuart A. Reid

June 24, 2009

Three days after Iran's disputed presidential election, as protesters took to the streets, President Obama offered a reserved statement: He was "troubled" by the violence but pledged noninterference. On Tuesday, he changed his tone only slightly, condemning the crackdown but neither denouncing the fraudulent election nor openly hoping for regime change.

The administration's muted response has increasingly come under attack. How, critics ask, can the U.S. stand idly by while Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's vote-rigging regime attacks protesters? How could Obama remain lamely on the wrong side of history?

In fact, the critics are wrong and the administration is right.

As Obama has argued, tarring the opposition with U.S. support would only strengthen the regime without helping the protesters. Already, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has blamed the U.S. for backing the dissidents. Why give his false accusations real ammunition? Especially when backing the protesters would neither deter the crackdown nor embolden the opposition.

As Duke University political scientist Timur Kuran has argued, the success of revolutions is a function of the relationship between individuals' private opinions of the government and the level of public support for the opposition. Most people will take to the streets only when they judge public sentiment to be sufficiently aligned against the government. Only then is it safe to act on once-private anti-government preferences. Once enough people collectively make the decision to come out of the closet, a revolution can commence. In Iran, public sentiment has already revealed itself, and Iranians' private sentiments exist independent of the U.S. government's position on their election.

Say Obama did what his critics want. What would happen? Imagine you are a progressive, twentysomething Mir-Hossein Mousavi supporter who hates the regime but has decided -- out of laziness or self-interest -- not to join the protests. You flip on Al Jazeera and see Obama expressing support for the opposition. You may feel grateful. But your decision whether to join your compatriots outside has already been made, and the calculus is unlikely to change. Knowing the U.S. is behind you will not thicken your skull against a Basiji baton.

Furthermore, Obama's words will only inspire those who are pro-American to begin with. But a February 2008 survey by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland found that only 15% of respondents thought "very favorably" of the American people. Even when asked to distinguish between the U.S. government and the U.S. as a country, only 43% of self-described "reformers" held favorable views. Mousavi's ranks are more pro-American than the regime, but they no doubt include many who are not fans of the U.S.

There are critics of Obama's silence who realize all this, who understand that Washington can do little to affect what is essentially a domestic Iranian affair. Still, they want Washington to say something -- anything -- in support of democracy in Iran. Regardless of the outcome in Iran, they argue, the United States simply must stay faithful to its own values. Anything else would be un-American.

There may be a time for harmless and empty pro-democracy rhetoric, a time when it is worth promoting American values and shameful to conceal them. Speaking up for democracy makes sense when there are no costs to doing so: when a country's revolutionary tide has already turned, or when an incumbent regime is strategically irrelevant.

But when it comes to supporting the demonstrators in Iran, words would be, at best, meaningless and, at worst, counterproductive. Smartly, Obama is forsaking concerns about standing on the right side of history in favor of pragmatism. Let's hope he keeps his mouth shut.

Stuart A. Reid is an assistant editor at Foreign Affairs.

US Trade Officials Urge China to Revoke PC Rule--WSJ

2009-06-25T09:53:00.003+09:00

I bet the newly created US Cyber Command [USSC] will be looking for ways to break through the added layer to the firewall.

Looks like once again, our two countries converge economically but diverge even more so politically.

This is not sustainable, especially with tiny and democratic Taiwan on China's doorstep. Meanwhile the People's Liberation Army Navy is gearing up for newer and quieter subs that can threaten our carriers.

Yay.
----------------------------------------------------
US Trade Officials Urge China to Revoke PC Rule

By Loretta Chao
Wall Street Journal

U.S. trade officials called on China to revoke an order for personal computers to be shipped with Web-filtering software, the highest-level U.S. complaint yet against the rule, as the two superpowers spar over a host of trade and security issues.

Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk said in a letter to two Chinese ministries Wednesday that the requirement, which takes effect July 1, could conflict with Beijing's World Trade Organization obligations.

Imaginechine/Agence France-Presse

Chinese students use computers installed with filtering software Green Dam-Youth Escort, at a primary school in Weifang, east China's Shandong province.

"China is putting companies in an untenable position by requiring them, with virtually no public notice, to pre-install software that appears to have broad-based censorship implications and network security issues," Mr. Locke said.

China notified manufacturers of the requirement in May, and made it public two weeks ago.

Wednesday's letter, sent to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, which issued the rule, and the Ministry of Commerce, said the rule raises "fundamental questions regarding regulatory transparency." The MIIT declined to comment. The Ministry of Commerce couldn't be reached to comment.

U.S. officials have expressed concerns privately with Chinese officials about the Web filter, and the letter represents an effort to bring more public pressure on Beijing.

In another developing trade dispute, Beijing defended its curbs on exports of industrial raw materials against complaints by the U.S. and European Union and said Wednesday it has filed a challenge to a U.S. ban on imports of Chinese poultry imposed after a bird flu outbreak in 2004.

The U.S. and EU filed complaints to the WTO Tuesday accusing Beijing of unfairly favoring its steel, chemicals and other industries by restricting foreign access to key materials of which China is a major supplier.

With Wednesday's letter, the U.S. raised the specter of bringing a WTO complaint against China over the Web-filter software, which is called Green Dam-Youth Escort. The prospect of winning such a case is murky, however, since the WTO allows countries to impose regulations to protect public morals, as China says it is doing here.

U.S. officials argue the tight deadline for implementing the software requirement constitutes an unfair trade barrier. PC makers have expressed concerns about being able to meet the July 1 start date.

Foreign and domestic PC makers in China are required to begin shipping computers with the software on July 1, so the U.S. would have to show Chinese manufacturers had more notice or information to meet that deadline for a WTO complaint to succeed.

Wednesday's letter, however, adds to the growing pressure on Beijing over the requirement. Japanese officials met with MIIT officials Wednesday to express their "very big" concerns about Green Dam, according to a Japanese Embassy official.

U.S. officials from the State and Commerce departments, as well as U.S. Trade Representative officials based in Beijing, met Friday with officials from the MIIT and Ministry of Commerce to express concerns that Green Dam would restrict access to the Internet and infringe on "internationally recognized rights to freedom of expression," a U.S. Embassy spokesman said.

Also last week, a group of 18 business groups, including the National Association of Manufacturers, the Business Software Alliance and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, asked Chinese officials to revoke the new policy.

U.S. technology-industry groups say the filtering software could depress sales of PCs in China, the world's second-largest PC market in terms of shipments.

The top U.S. sellers of PCs in China, by market share, are Hewlett-Packard Co. and Dell Inc. Lenovo Group Ltd. of China sells the most PCs in the country. The three companies have said they are looking into the matter. A Lenovo spokesman said "we obey the law and abide by local regulations wherever we do business and we will continue to do so."

A U.S. official familiar with Wednesday's trade letter indicated concerns about the rule have been magnified by Beijing's unwillingness to explain the intent and scope of the new measure. The software, which the government says was designed to filter out pornography and other content inappropriate for children, has been found by researchers to be capable of filtering political content as well. It would add an extra layer to Beijing's wide-reaching methods of regulating Internet use.

The researchers say the software has major security flaws, even after its primary Chinese creator, Jinhui Computer System Engineering Co., made alterations to it last week. They also say parts of the program were copied from software produced in the U.S. -- an allegation Jinhui has denied.

Jinhui's founder, Bryan Zhang, said his company has received more than 1,000 harassing calls, as well as attacks by hackers, since the Green Dam requirement was made public, China's Xinhua news agency reported Wednesday.

Separately, in the first high-level U.S.-China defense talks in 18 months, officials agreed to convene a special meeting of military experts in July to discuss a spate of run-ins between the two sides' navies.

Most encounters involved Chinese ships trying to hinder U.S. surveillance vessels from operating in China's economic zone, which Beijing says is off-limits to intelligence-gathering. A lasting solution will require higher-level discussions, a U.S. official said after the two-day talks concluded in Beijing Wednesday.

—Gao Sen and Ian Johnson contributed to this article.

Dissdent Is Charged As China Cracks Down--WSJ

2009-06-25T09:49:00.002+09:00

Dissident Is Charged As China Cracks Down

By Jason Dean

Wall Street Journal

BEIJING -- The Chinese government formally arrested Liu Xiaobo, one of the nation's most prominent dissidents, in its latest clampdown on dissent in a year of sensitive anniversaries.

Mr. Liu, who has been detained without charges for more than six months, is accused of "agitation activities aimed at subversion of the government and overthrowing of the socialist system," the state-run Xinhua news agency reported, citing the Beijing Public Security Bureau.

Agence France-Presse

Liu Xiaobo in a 2002 photo with his wife, Liu Xia, in Beijing. The Chinese government formally arrested Mr. Liu in its latest clampdown on dissent.

The 53-year-old was detained Dec. 8, ahead of the Internet publication of Charter 08, a manifesto for sweeping political change in China that he helped write and was among the first to sign. Mr. Liu's formal arrest makes it more likely he will be sentenced to prison, Chinese lawyers and human-rights activists said.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the Chinese government's crackdown on the Falun Gong spiritual group, the 20th anniversary of the violent crushing of protests in Tiananmen Square, and, on Oct. 1, the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the People's Republic of China, for which the government is making preparations to celebrate Communist Party rule.

Authorities have tightened security in the capital around the dates and detained some dissidents. The government also declined to renew the licenses of some Chinese human-rights attorneys, which the lawyers say could prevent them from defending dissidents.

In December, an international group of activists and scholars wrote an open letter to Chinese President Hu Jintao protesting Mr. Liu's detention. More than 1,600 people have signed an online petition demanding his release, and Mr. Liu was at the top of a list of 10 dissidents whose release U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi requested in a letter to Mr. Hu last month.

Precisely what triggered Mr. Liu's detention remains unclear. Xinhua alleged that Mr. Liu had used "rumors" and "slander" to incite subversion "in recent years," but didn't elaborate. Most observers of his case believe it is linked to Charter 08, which was signed by more than 300 people and represented one of the boldest challenges to Communist Party rule in China in the recent past.

In China's complicated criminal-justice system, the investigation of Mr. Liu could continue through at least the rest of this year before prosecutors formally indict him and a trial date is set.

—Loretta Chao in Beijing contributed to this article.

Write to Jason Dean at jason.dean@wsj.com

Geeks, Nerds and the President

2009-06-24T13:18:00.003+09:00

Here's a great video clip from the 2009 Radio & TV Correspondants dinner. John Hodgman from the famous Apple "I'm a Mac/I'm a PC" commercials speaks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yW7OPByRGDY

I love that my President's a nerd. Obama flashes a perfect Vulcan salute.

Live Long and Prosper, folks.

Mind Your BlackBerry or Mind Your Manners--NYT

2009-06-23T14:07:00.002+09:00

June 22, 2009

Mind Your BlackBerry or Mind Your Manners

By ALEX WILLIAMS
New York Times

For the first half-hour of the meeting, it was hardly surprising to see a potential client fiddling with his iPhone, said Rowland Hobbs, the chief executive of a marketing firm in Manhattan.

At an hour, it seemed a bit much. And after an hour and a half, Mr. Hobbs and his colleagues wondered what the man could possibly be doing with his phone for the length of a summer blockbuster.

Someone peeked over his shoulder. "He was playing a racing game," Mr. Hobbs said. "He did ask questions, though, peering occasionally over his iPhone."

But, Mr. Hobbs added, "we didn't say anything. We still wanted the business."

As Web-enabled smartphones have become standard on the belts and in the totes of executives, people in meetings are increasingly caving in to temptation to check e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, even (shhh!) ESPN.com.

But a spirited debate about etiquette has broken out. Traditionalists say the use of BlackBerrys and iPhones in meetings is as gauche as ordering out for pizza. Techno-evangelists insist that to ignore real-time text messages in a need-it-yesterday world is to invite peril.

In Hollywood, both the Creative Artists Agency and United Talent Agency ban BlackBerry use at meetings. Tom Golisano, a billionaire and power broker in New York State politics, said last week that he pushed to remove Malcolm A. Smith as the State Senate majority leader after the senator met with him on budget matters in April and spent the time reading e-mail on his BlackBerry.

The phone use has become routine in the corporate and political worlds — and grating to many. A third of more than 5,300 workers polled in May by Yahoo HotJobs, a career research and job listings Web site, said they frequently checked e-mail in meetings. Nearly 20 percent said they had been castigated for poor manners regarding wireless devices.

Despite resistance, the etiquette debate seems to be tilting in the favor of smartphone use, many executives said. Managing directors do it. Summer associates do it. It spans gender and generation, private and public sectors.

A few years ago, only "the investment banker types" would use BlackBerrys in meetings, said Frank Kneller, the chief executive of a company in Elk Grove Village, Ill., that makes water-treatment systems. "Now it's everybody." He said that if he spotted 6 of 10 colleagues tapping away, he knew he had to speed up his presentation.

It is routine for Washington officials to bow heads silently around a conference table — not praying — while others are speaking, said Philippe Reines, a senior adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Although BlackBerrys are banned in certain areas of the State Department headquarters for security reasons, their use is epidemic where they are allowed.

"You'll have half the participants BlackBerrying each other as a submeeting, with a running commentary on the primary meeting," Mr. Reines said. "BlackBerrys have become like cartoon thought bubbles."

Some professionals admitted that they occasionally sent mocking commentary about the proceedings, but most insisted that they used smartphones for legitimate reasons: responding to deadline requests, plumbing the Web for data to illuminate an issue under discussion or simply taking notes.

Still, the practice retains the potential to annoy. Joel I. Klein, the New York City schools chancellor, has gained such a reputation for checking his BlackBerry during public meetings that some parents joke that they might as well send him an e-mail message. Few companies have formal policies about smartphone use in meetings, according to Nancy Flynn, the executive director of the ePolicy Institute, a consulting group in Columbus, Ohio. Ms. Flynn tells clients to encourage employees to turn off all devices.

"People mistakenly think that tapping is not as distracting as talking," she said. "In fact, it can be every bit as much if not more distracting. And it's pretty insulting to the speaker."

Still, business can be won or lost, executives say, depending on how responsive you are to an e-mail message. "Clients assume they can get you anytime, anywhere," said David Brotherton, a media consultant in Seattle. "Consultants who aren't readily available 24/7 tend to languish."

Playful electronic bantering can stimulate creativity in meetings, in the view of Josh Rabinowitz, the director of music at Grey Group in New York, an advertising agency. In pitch meetings, Mr. Rabinowitz said, he often traded messages on his Palm Treo — jokes, ideas, questions — with colleagues, "things that you might not say out loud."

The chatter tends to loosen the proceedings. "It just seems to add to the productive energy," he said.

But business relationships can be jeopardized. Lori Levine, the founder of Flying Television, a talent-booking agency in Manhattan, said that in an effort to be environmentally sensitive she instructed employees to take notes on BlackBerrys instead of paper during client meetings.

"Then I got a call from a client screaming that our vice president spent an hour on his BlackBerry during a huge meeting," Ms. Levine recalled. To soothe the client, Ms. Levine read aloud the notes the vice president had taken.

In Dallas, a college student sunk his chance to have an internship at a hedge fund last summer when he pulled out a BlackBerry to look up a fact to help him make a point during his interview, then lingered — momentarily, but perceptibly — to check a text message a friend had sent, said Trevor Hanger, the head of equity trading at the hedge fund, who was helping conduct the interview.

Very few companies have policies on smartphone use in meetings, which leaves it up to employees to feel their way across uncertain terrain.

To Jason Chan, a digital-strategy consultant in Manhattan, different rules apply for in-house meetings (where checking BlackBerrys seems an expression of informal collegiality) and those with clients, where the habit is likely to offend. There is safety in numbers, he added in an e-mail message: "The acceptability of checking devices is proportional to the number of people attending the meeting. The more people there are, the less noticeable your typing will be."

Beyond practical considerations, there is also the issue of image. In many professional circles, where connections are power, making a show of reaching out to those connections even as co-workers are presenting a spreadsheet presentation seems to have become a kind of workplace boast.

Mr. Brotherton, the consultant, wrote in an e-mail message that it was customary now for professionals to lay BlackBerrys or iPhones on a conference table before a meeting — like gunfighters placing their Colt revolvers on the card tables in a saloon. "It's a not-so-subtle way of signaling 'I'm connected. I'm busy. I'm important. And if this meeting doesn't hold my interest, I've got 10 other things I can do instead.' "

Middle School Youth Diplomacy Program--Day 2

2009-06-21T14:07:00.015+09:00

Four hours of sleep and back at it.

Meg briefing her kids at breakfast.

We hit the main campus of Yonsei Univ. the second day of MSYDP. The sun shone brightly and the kids wore their uniforms. It was very cool seeing them in all the different kinds of uniforms.

Pink uniforms!?

The next event was Q & A sessions with the Yonsei Univ. Model UN Team. They had just returned from a World MUN Conference in NYC where they were crowned the Best Delegate out of 100 plus university teams from around the world.

Our kids were pretty exhausted. What troupers! (No, that's not a typo. Look up "trouper" in a dictionary.)

My star Esther. What a champ. 2 weeks and handled it all pretty well.

After lunch, we had panels with Foreign Service Officers and former Korean Consul-General Chung Sang-ki.
Chung Sang-ki was an Ambassador-level diplomat based in SF.

This woman has translated for high level representatives ranging from the President to the Ambassador. And she's been to North Korea multiple times.

And finally we rolled out the Diplomacy Simulation.

Best Costume Award winners

Sarah: "No girls. Nuking them is not an option. Seriously?"

Our boss.

Turkey: Daniella

Gaza: Anna

France: Danielle

Israel: Sarah

Rosie the Riveter, George Washington and Uncle Sam

UK: Jen

Egypt: Yoojin

Syria: Meg

The Big Bang Theory

2009-06-21T11:29:00.000+09:00

Wolowitz: "I'm a horny engineer, Leonard. I never joke about math or sex."

Awesome. There's nothing like witty writing that makes a show fantastic in its portrayal of otherwise geeky, socially retarded characters.

Embrace the nerdiness!

Army Challenges Older Recruits, and Vice Versa--NYT

2009-06-21T09:51:00.000+09:00

June 18, 2009

Army Challenges Older Recruits, and Vice Versa

By JAMES DAO
The New York Times

FORT SILL, Okla. — Pfc. Shane Dixon is known as Old Dix. Specialist Jason Ness goes by Gramps. Pfc. Christopher Batson's nom de boot camp is Pops. None of them are over 40, but to the 18-year-old soldiers in basic training here, they are as ancient as a first generation Xbox.

Yet in the three years since the Army raised its age limit for enlisting to 42, from 35, a steady stream of older recruits has joined the ranks, pushing creaky muscles through road training, learning to appreciate — or at least endure — Army chow and in some cases deploying to combat zones.

And while the number of such recruits, more than 3,800, is small by Army standards, the pace of over-35 enlistment jumped sharply in the first months of this year. Motives vary, from a yearning for midlife adventure to a desire to serve their country. But rising unemployment is also a major reason, say Army officials, recruiters and training officers.

"It's a guaranteed job, as long as you go to work every day," said Capt. Jared Auchey, company commander of the Army Experience Center in Philadelphia, who estimates that one in 10 of the enlistments at his high-tech marketing office are over 35. "There are no layoffs in the Army."

The Army recruits about 80,000 soldiers a year, and the older recruits are having an impact even on basic training, Army officers say. At classes here, as many as one in seven soldiers are over 35, and many drill sergeants now look to the older soldiers as mentors, or proxy disciplinarians.

Staff Sgt. Arron Barnes, Fort Sill's drill sergeant of the year in 2009, said the older recruits tended to bring technical skills and maturity, were easier to instruct and were often more committed than teenage soldiers.

"They contribute at a higher level because they have no other place to go," Sergeant Barnes, 26, said. "This is their life."

The older recruits are, however, injury prone. Rusty joints, forgotten injuries and slow-to-recover muscles cause the over-35 recruits to wash out of basic training at a somewhat higher rate than younger soldiers, said Lt. Col. Michael S. Patton, commander of a basic-training battalion here.

Specialist John D. Butts, 38, exemplifies the new breed. An aspiring writer who was a house painter outside Philadelphia for two decades, he lost his steady paycheck last November after the housing market crashed.

A part-time job at Blockbuster did not pay his rent, and when his landlord threatened to evict him, his girlfriend (now his wife) and her three teenage children, he decided radical action was required. He called an Army recruiter he had met recently and signed up for a three-year stint.

Despite years as a dedicated beer drinker and smoker, Specialist Butts made it through basic here at Fort Sill and is now training with an artillery unit that may head to South Korea this year. A tour in Afghanistan could be in the cards, he says.

Over the last two months, he has been yelled at by a 24-year-old drill sergeant, forced to inhale choking gas, done more push-ups than he cares to remember and patiently put up with wise-cracking 19-year-olds who forget to flush the toilet. So far, he has made the grade and is even considering a career in the military.

"I've just tried to keep my head down, keep my mouth shut and not wring necks," Specialist Butts said.

The sagging economy, of course, has bolstered military recruiting at all age levels. But the older recruits represent a new, and perhaps more challenging, opportunity for the Army, the only service that accepts recruits over 35. (The maximum age is 35 in the Navy, 28 in the Marine Corps and 27 in the Air Force.)

It is not clear yet how well older soldiers handle the rigors of combat. The Army says it does not segregate older recruits in basic training and does not consider age when deciding where to assign or deploy them. Of the nearly 5,000 military personnel killed in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, about 600 have been over 35, most of them career soldiers. The oldest was 60-year-old Steven Hutchison, who served in Vietnam and retired from the Army in 1988 only to re-enlist in 2007 under a special program for retirees. Major Hutchison was killed last month in a bombing in Iraq.

During a break in marksmanship training at Fort Sill last week, several older soldiers said the economy had not been their only motivation for enlisting. "I didn't want to be 75 and think back, 'I wish I had joined the Army,' " said Pvt. Mark O'Brien, 36, a corrections officer from Portsmouth, N.H. "There's nothing worse than regret."

But for Private Batson, 35, the threat of layoffs was the driving force behind his joining. A mechanical engineer from Utah with five children, he was spared when his company laid off workers last year, but the close call worried him. Deciding he needed a fall-back option, he turned to the National Guard.

Now, if he is laid off and cannot find work, he figures he can go full time with the National Guard or the regular Army. In exchange for that job security, he says there is a good chance he will do a tour in Afghanistan.

"My natural priority is my family," Private Batson said. "I'll do anything I have to do to take care of them."

Along with the rigors of basic training, the older soldiers say the hardest thing is being away from their families for nine weeks. The second hardest thing, they say, is coping with undisciplined, couch-potato soft, video-game-obsessed teenage recruits who are, technically, their peers.

Private Dixon, 38, builds log houses in the Boise area but recently joined the Idaho National Guard in part because he wanted to change careers, perhaps to become a medic. He said he had been chewed out for chewing out youngsters in his platoon for what he considered slacker behavior. He was so tough on one for tromping across a newly waxed floor in his boots that the teenager broke down in tears.

"I should have taken into consideration that it was a 17-year-old kid," Private Dixon said. "It's not a man, not somebody that I could hold to a level of accountability. My son's 17."

"No Comment" Is Not an Option, says Paul Wolfowitz

2009-06-21T00:41:00.006+09:00

This opinion piece appeared in the "Washington Post" today. Paul Wolfowitz has been wrong before, especially with the way he treated former Army Chief of Staff General Shinseki (now Secretary of Veterans Affairs) over the numbers needed to take Iraq.

Here he has an interesting piece about what President Obama should do with regards to Iran's political turmoil. I, for one, think Obama's doing the right thing by holding off on active involvement. Being pro-active on Iran would give hardliners plenty of ammunition to say that the political unrest isn't a domestic issue, but one of American intervention. Nothing like the A word (America) to galvanize the population into a united front.

That said, Wolfowitz makes a point about the power of the Office of the US President and its influence on the political processes in other countries.

Riot on, Iran. Fight fight fight.

'No Comment' Is Not an Option

By Paul Wolfowitz
Friday, June 19, 2009

President Obama's first response to the protests in Iran was silence, followed by a cautious, almost neutral stance designed to avoid "meddling" in Iranian affairs. I am reminded of Ronald Reagan's initially neutral response to the crisis following the Philippine election of 1986, and of George H.W. Bush's initially neutral response to the attempted coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991. Both Reagan and Bush were able to abandon their mistaken neutrality in time to make a difference. It's not too late for Obama to do the same.

In 1986, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos had called a snap election, calculating that a divided opposition would hand him a clear victory that would undercut pressure from the Reagan administration for broad-based reform. Instead, the opposition parties united behind Corazon Aquino, and only massive fraud could produce a "victory" for Marcos.

On Feb. 11, as the votes were still being counted, Reagan announced a neutral position, reminding Americans that it was a "Philippine election" and praising "the extraordinary enthusiasm of Filipinos for the democratic process." Rather than blame Marcos for the fraud, which he called "disturbing," Reagan said that there may have been fraud "on both sides."

At the time, I was working for Secretary of State George Shultz as assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, and I shared Shultz's dismay at the president's comments. For more than two years, with the president's support, we had carefully pressed Marcos for reform. Reagan himself once cited Lord Acton's famous dictum, that "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely," while speaking of Marcos. Nevertheless Reagan's unfortunate comment about fraud on "both sides" threatened to put the United States on the wrong side at a critical moment.

Fortunately, Shultz managed to convince the president that he had made a serious mistake. On Feb. 15, the White House issued a new statement: "The elections were marred by widespread fraud and violence perpetrated largely by the ruling party." The following day, Marcos and Aquino each claimed victory. On Feb. 22, when Marcos ordered the arrest of two key reformers, as many as a million Filipinos poured into EDSA Square in Manila to block the arrests in a dramatic demonstration of "people power."

Reagan's final message to Marcos was delivered two days later, when the president's close friend, Sen. Paul Laxalt, warned that Reagan opposed any use of force against the crowds and urged him "to cut and cut clean." The next day, Marcos left the Philippines.

As an undersecretary of defense in George H.W. Bush's administration, I witnessed a replay of the Philippine scenario on Aug. 19, 1991, when reactionary forces in the Soviet Union attempted a coup against Soviet President Gorbachev and Russian President Boris Yeltsin. Bush was initially very cautious: uncertain about the facts and reluctant to interfere or to alienate a possible successor to Gorbachev.

Responding early that morning, the president refused to condemn the coup, calling it merely "a disturbing development." He expressed only lukewarm support for Gorbachev and even less for Yeltsin, and neither was among the world leaders that he tried to contact about the crisis. He seemed focused on working with the new Soviet team, hoping that their leader, Gennady Yanayev, was committed to "reform."

Although Defense Secretary Dick Cheney had argued consistently for the United States to support the peaceful aspirations of the Russians, Ukrainians and other Soviet peoples, it was Yeltsin -- with a powerful personal letter -- who persuaded Bush to abandon equivocation and oppose the coup. By late afternoon, the White House had reversed course, condemning the coup attempt as "misguided and illegitimate." Bush then called Yeltsin to assure him of his support.

No two situations are identical. But the reform the Iranian demonstrators seek is something that we should be supporting. In such a situation, the United States does not have a "no comment" option. Coming from America, silence is itself a comment -- a comment in support of those holding power and against those protesting the status quo.

It would be a cruel irony if, in an effort to avoid imposing democracy, the United States were to tip the scale toward dictators who impose their will on people struggling for freedom. And if we appear so desperate for negotiations that we will abandon those who support our principles, we weaken our own negotiating hand.

That does not mean that we need to pick sides in an Iranian election or claim to know its result. Obama could send a powerful message simply by placing his enormous personal prestige behind the peaceful conduct of the demonstrators and their demand for reform -- exactly the kind of peaceful, democratic change that he praised in his speech in Cairo.

Like the rest of the world, President Obama must have been surprised by the magnitude of the protests in Iran. Iranians are protesting not just election fraud but also the growing abuses of the Iranian people by a dictatorial regime. Now is not the time for the president to dig in to a neutral posture. It is time to change course.

Paul Wolfowitz, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, was deputy secretary of defense from 2001 to 2005.

Civic-Minded Chinese Find a Voice Online--NYT

2009-06-18T09:53:00.003+09:00

It's always good to see the democratizing power of the Internet take down corrupt officials.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
June 17, 2009

Civic-Minded Chinese Find a Voice Online

By MICHAEL WINES
The New York Times

BEIJING — There was a time when the story of the 21-year-old waitress who fatally stabbed a Communist Party official as he tried to force himself on her would have never left the rural byways of Hubei Province where it took place.

Instead, her arrest last month on suspicion of voluntary manslaughter erupted into an online furor that turned her into a national hero and reverberated all the way to China's capital, where censors ordered incendiary comments banned. Local Hubei officials even restricted television coverage and tried to block travel to the small town where the assault occurred.

On Tuesday, a Hubei court granted the woman, Deng Yujiao, an unexpectedly swift victory, ruling that she had acted in self-defense and freeing her without criminal penalties.

The case of Ms. Deng is only the most recent and prominent of several cases in which the Internet has cracked open a channel for citizens to voice mass displeasure with official conduct, demonstrating its potential as a catalyst for social change.

The government's reactions have raised questions about how much power officials have to control what they call "online mass incidents." China's estimated 300 million Internet users, experts say, are awakening to the idea that, even in authoritarian China, they sometimes can fight City Hall.

"It's about raising the public awareness of democratic ideas — accountability, transparency, citizens' rights to participate, that the government should serve the people," said Xiao Qiang, a journalism professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who tracks China's Internet activity. "Netizens who are now sharing those more democratic values are using these cases, each time making inch-by-inch progress."

China still exerts sweeping and sophisticated control over the Internet, employing thousands of people to monitor Internet traffic for forbidden material and using software to spot key words that hint at subversion. But the system is not infallible, and Internet users frequently find ways to skirt the censors.

Since late last year, online tempests have blown up over a video of an official in Guangdong Province who assaulted a young girl and bragged that he was above punishment, and a Nanjing city official who was spotted wearing a $14,500 Vacheron Constantin watch and smoking $22-a-pack cigarettes, evidence of a lifestyle well beyond his means.

Early this year, an online outcry exposed prison officials' cover-up of the beating death of an inmate. At the moment, outrage is focused on officials in Yunnan Province who battled a rabies outbreak by dispatching "killing teams" that, according to news reports, beat 50,000 dogs to death.

Not all the crusades are entirely civic-minded. In more than a few cases, virtual mobs have harassed offending officials, posting personal information and other details. The nickname for such mobs, "human-flesh search engines," hints at their pitiless nature.

But the Internet campaigns have repeatedly produced results. Six officials were punished or fired in the prison beating. The Nanjing official with the flashy watch was sacked. The Yunnan dog killings have provoked harsh criticism, even in state-run newspapers.

Most such cases, says Mr. Xiao, the Berkeley professor, spawn tens or hundreds of thousands of mentions on Internet blogs and other forums.

But Ms. Deng's case eclipsed them all, racking up four million posts and counting, he said. Her story resonates with millions of Chinese who not only are fed up with low-level corruption but also prize chastity in young women, causes that transcend politics.

"Deng Yujiao is a metaphor for someone who fights back against officials, and of course the officials are those who spend the taxpayers' money, who are so abusive to ordinary citizens and so corrupt," he said. "It's almost a stereotype of the online image of officials. That's why this case becomes so big."

As she described it to a lawyer, Ms. Deng was a waitress in a karaoke parlor in rural Badong County, a Hubei Province backwater along the Yangtze River. Like more than a few such venues, this one offered "special services," or prostitution, in a backroom spa, the only room with hot water.

On the night of May 10, Ms. Deng said, she was in the room washing clothes, when a local official, Huang Weide, came in and demanded that she take a bath with him. She refused, and after a struggle fled to a bathroom.

But Mr. Huang and two companions — including a second official, Deng Guida, who was not related to Ms. Deng — tracked her to the bathroom, then pushed her onto a couch. As they attacked, Ms. Deng said, she took a fruit knife from her purse and stabbed wildly. Mr. Deng fell, mortally wounded.

Ms. Deng was arrested, investigated for involuntary manslaughter and, after the police reportedly found pills in her purse, variously described as sleeping pills and antidepressants, sent her to a mental ward.

But when a blogger, Wu Gan, publicized her case, a cascade of posts crowned her a national hero for resisting official abuse of power and demanded a fair trial.

Under public pressure, Hubei officials freed her on bail. Mr. Wu helped recruit a prominent Beijing law firm to represent Ms. Deng.

On May 22, Beijing censors ordered Web sites to stop reporting on the case. Four days later, television and the Internet were cut off in Yesanguan, the town where the attack occurred. The official explanation for the shutdown was as a "precaution" against lightning strikes.

Spurred by the Internet frenzy, Chinese journalists had converged on Badong County. But after censorship was imposed, local officials began screening outsiders, and some journalists seeking to report there were beaten. Mr. Wu's blog was shut down by censors.

Even Yangtze River boat service to Badong was suspended, ostensibly because the docks needed repair, after protesters vowed to hold a demonstration there.

The two surviving local officials who were involved in the assault have been fired, but no charges were brought against them.

The ruling on Tuesday, widely reported in state media, was a vindication for Ms. Deng and her Internet supporters. But the story may not end there.

Last month, a group of young people abruptly appeared in the middle of downtown Beijing, carrying on their shoulders a woman wearing a mask and wrapped in white cloth. They laid her on the ground and arranged signs around her, then took pictures.

The signs read, "Anyone could be Deng Yujiao."

The photos immediately appeared on the Internet.

Teacher's Day

2009-06-15T23:34:00.008+09:00

May 15.

I received a gift from the students of 3-2 on Teacher's Day. It consisted of a scroll of neon green paper and each student had written a mesasge to me.

Here are some of the good ones:

"Good--SKY"

"Hi teacher? I'm woojoong. You so cute lex~"

"I want kiss--Tae Jin"

"KISS me GooD--ChungHee"

"NICE--minsu"

"Hello teacher. Eenglish you hansom--jae dong"

"Kiss me love mo sex in guy"

"I'm sexy big pig o-ink, o-ink. I'm 3-2 Kim ji hun bye!"

"Hi, Alex~ would you like something to drink? ㄸ... bye~"

"Teacher's Day. Congraturation--Yongho"

"Happ day~:)"

"Hi teacher I was glad to see you. 5/15 is Teacher's Day. I would be glad if you feel happy on that day. Bye"

"Hi Congratuation!! Are you happy? I'm happy!! Bye~ㅋ ㅋEun Young"

Ah yes, the annual Teacher's Day affair. Every teacher in Korea gets a nice flower or some kind of mention of appreciation. It's a nice thing and too bad teachers in America don't get the same kind of recognition. This is a nice aspect to Confucian society.

Here are some photos I snapped.

Blue text is 물귀신 (Water Ghost). The other is "I don't know any English."

They spelled it "L-O-E-V." FAIL.
If you look closely, one wrote "Mother Fucker."

ugh. Most of them love me though.

US Devotes Unit to Afghan War--WSJ

2009-06-12T09:11:00.001+09:00

JUNE 12, 2009

U.S. Devotes Unit to Afghanistan War

By YOCHI J. DREAZEN, Wall Street Journal

WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon is setting up a unit of about 400 officers and senior enlisted personnel devoted to Afghanistan, continuing a broad revamp of how it handles the war there.

The Pakistan Afghanistan Coordination Cell is the creation of Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the Obama administration's nominee to run the Afghan war. Gen. McChrystal says he wants military personnel to accumulate expertise about the war by doing repeated deployments to Afghanistan and continuing to work on the conflict when back in the U.S.

The unit will be headed by Brig. Gen. Scott Miller, a veteran of the military's secretive Special Operations community, who worked for Gen. McChrystal at the Pentagon. The unit is meant to develop personnel with extensive counterinsurgency experience and knowledge of Afghanistan's culture and power structures.

"The biggest complaint we hear from Afghans is that they get to know a new unit, spend a few good months working with them, and then the troops redeploy and are never seen again," a senior military official said. "This is a way of capturing some of that expertise."

The move represents a significant shift from the military's system of rotating troops among assignments in Iraq, Afghanistan, and home bases in the U.S., Japan and Germany.

Personnel in the new unit will rotate between the U.S. and repeated Afghan deployments to the American-led headquarters in Kabul, the U.S. regional command in eastern Afghanistan, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization-led command in the southern part of the country, according to senior military officials.

The Pentagon is working to restructure the U.S.-led war effort and reverse the Taliban's recent gains. In May, Defense Secretary Robert Gates ousted the current commander, Gen. David McKiernan, and announced plans to replace him with Gen. McChrystal.

Gen. McChrystal was confirmed by the Senate Wednesday and should be on the ground in Kabul before the end of the month. A second senior commander, Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez, is being sent to Afghanistan to handle the war day-to-day.

The Obama administration has signed off on sending 21,000 American reinforcements to Afghanistan by the end of the year, pushing U.S. troop levels to their highest point since the start of the war in October 2001.

The Pakistan Afghanistan Coordination Cell grew out of a classified review of U.S. operations in Afghanistan that Gen. McChrystal conducted for Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The unit is modeled on a system Gen. McChrystal put in place in Iraq, where he commanded the Navy Seals and other Special Operations personnel. At his direction, the elite personnel continually returned to the same parts of Iraq, allowing them to build local knowledge and relationships.

Gen. McChrystal signaled the move at his Senate confirmation hearing this month. "We must develop a corps of professionals who possess expertise in the theater, in its languages and culture," he said. "Assigned for repeated tours, remaining focused on Afghanistan when not deployed, these experts can significantly increase the effectiveness of our overall effort."

Gen. Miller himself will deploy to Afghanistan in the coming months, the officials said. When he departs, the unit will be led by another one-star general.

Write to Yochi J. Dreazen at yochi.dreazen@wsj.com

A Lovely FAIL moment

2009-06-11T16:08:00.000+09:00

Me: do i still talk about water polo all the time?
Rachael M: nope
Me: oh good
Rachael M: i just like to ride you for it
Me: THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID

Middle School Youth Diplomacy Program--Day 1

2009-06-10T23:09:00.014+09:00

8 teams. 8 countries. 3 days of field trips, debates, guest panels and lectures.

By the end of the conference, I wanted to drop dead. Hadn't slept much in the two weeks before and certainly didn't sleep much during the week.

But here it is. We got the U.S. Embassy to provide a grant for this program. It would be entirely run by Fulbr*ght ET@s, and we'd choose the teams. There was also a debate portion named the Diplomacy Simulation [DipSim], which draws upon the MUN format of debate. Obviously it would be less complex as the participants were middle school students whose second language was English.

The central focus of the DipSim was the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Matt Kane and Meg McGinley thoroughly mapped out each country's scenario, goals and situation. My school was the USA. The other delegations included Israel, Gaza, France, UK, Turkey, Egypt and Syria.

Upon arrival at the Seoul Youth Hostel in Myeongdong, the students were plunged into guest panels and info sessions.

Photos from the event:

"Gaza: Shut Up & Listen"

ET@s Matt Kane and Meg McGinley explaining the DipSim

ET@s: Meg, Danielle Sclafani, Yoojin Nam, Daniella Kupor

Fulbr*ght Scholar Dr. Helena Meyer-Knapp

With Public Affairs Officer

Esther Kim Dabin: my superstar sub who bravely stepped in with less than 2 weeks to prepare. My main candidate had dropped out in a classic move of overachiever overcommittment. Funny how in HS I knew someone just like that by the same name.

International Debate Education Association Coordinator and former ET@ Liz Humphreys explaining the ins and outs of debate.

Anna!

My team! Han Hapyung (Econ Officer), Esther Kim Dabin (Social Officer) and Andy Kim Taesik (Political Officer). I couldn't stop beaming with pride at them during the conference.

The wonderful Sun-nam An who made so much possible from the U.S. Embassy.

Matt, Sarah and Yoojin.

Reasons why Fulbr*ght Korea is successful

Our Exec. Asst. Nikki (in white) and Liz.

That's my boy!

Foreign Service Officer John Dyson

Hapyung!

Sarah's priceless pose.

Icebreaker: Dance like bacon

Dancing FAIL.

Quack like a duck

When Sleep Leaves You Tired--WSJ

2009-06-10T09:17:00.003+09:00

When Sleep Leaves You Tired

By MELINDA BECK, Wall Street Journal

Ask readers of this newspaper if they're getting adequate sleep, and many would probably say "Ha!"

Twenty percent of Americans sleep less than six hours a night, and nearly one-third have lost sleep worrying about financial concerns, according to the National Sleep Foundation, which recommends that adults get seven to nine hours. "Our society thinks sleep is for slackers," says Darrel Drobnich, the organization's chief program officer.

Millions of Americans aren't getting enough sleep, and even those that are may not be getting the most restful sleep possible. Health columnist Melinda Beck tries out the Zeo, a gadget that monitors and tracks brain waves during the different stages of sleep.

But all that lost sleep is taking an insidious toll. Chronic, inadequate sleep raises the risk of cardiovascular disease, depression, diabetes and obesity. It impairs cognitive function, memory and the immune system and causes more than 100,000 motor-vehicle accidents a year. Sleep deprivation also changes the body's metabolism, making people eat more and feel less satisfied.

Studies presented at the American Association of Sleep Medicine's annual meeting in Seattle this week also found that inadequate sleep is associated with lower GPAs among college students and with elevated levels of visfatin, a hormone secreted by belly fat that is associated with insulin resistance.

What many people don't realize is that even if they log respectable time in bed (known as TIB among sleep researchers), they may be getting poor-quality sleep, with not enough of the restorative phases. REM, the Rapid Eye Movement phase in which dreaming occurs, is crucial for consolidating memories, learning, creativity, problem-solving and emotional balance. Deep, or slow-wave sleep, when the body secretes human growth hormone, is critical for development and physical repair. Both REM and deep sleep decline with age and are highly vulnerable to disruptions, from caffeine and alcohol to anxiety and a variety of sleep disorders.

Are You Sleepy?

One tip-off that you haven't gotten enough restorative sleep is trouble waking up and excessive daytime sleepiness (a condition known as EDS). "People say, 'Oh, I don't have a sleep problem. I can fall asleep anywhere, anytime' -- but that means you are excessively sleepy," says Charles Czeisler, a professor of sleep medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Other symptoms of sleep deprivation include mood changes, difficulty focusing or remembering and a chronic need for caffeine, which can then create a vicious circle of dependence and disruption. That would be me.

Finding out what's going on in your sleep generally requires spending the night in a professional sleep lab hooked up to lots of wires and monitors. But I've been testing a new home-sleep monitor called the Zeo Personal Sleep Coach that lets people track their sleep patterns nightly in their own bedrooms.

You sleep wearing a soft headband with sensors that monitor your brain waves and send signals wirelessly to a device that looks like a sleek clock radio. It displays whether you are awake or in light sleep, deep sleep, or REM sleep, in real time, all through the night.

"If you can measure it, you can manage it," says Stephan Fabregas, one of two recent Brown University graduates who invented the Zeo because they were looking for a way to wake up feeling less groggy after late nights.

Of course, not everyone needs a fancy gadget to tell them whether they are sleeping properly. But I was stunned by my results: The Zeo showed that I woke up numerous times and was awake for long stretches of the night, without having any recollection. (Perception of time is often distorted at night -- many people with insomnia actually sleep more than they think they do.) Even though I was in bed for six or seven hours each night, I was averaging only about four hours of real sleep and very little REM or deep sleep. No wonder I feel so tired!

The Zeo stores the information on a memory card you can upload to a Web site, which helps track your sleep patterns and sends daily coaching tips for getting better sleep. The $399 device comes with six months of daily email coaching, which can be extended at a cost of $99 for each additional six months. (Currently, it's available only online at www.myzeo.com.)

To help you keep track of your sleep, the Zeo also gives you a "ZQ" score every morning, based on the quantity and quality of your sleep the night before. There's no ideal ZQ -- you're comparing your own score from night to night. But the average for people in their 20s is 86; for those in their 40s, it is 74; and for those in their 50s, it is 67, since sleep quality declines with age.

My ZQs bounced from the 40s to a dismal 15 the first week. Switching to decaf after 3 p.m. and making an effort to get to bed earlier helped me bring my score into the 50s the second week. ("Having caffeine even first thing in the morning can induce changes in brain activity during sleep," says Kenneth Wright, director of the Sleep and Chronobiology Lab at the University of Colorado at Boulder and one of Zeo's scientific advisers.) I also noticed that the nights when I had the longest stretches of wakefulness were those when my column was due -- probably a sign that I was still thinking about it long after turning in.

Everybody's sleep and sleep disruptors are different. Todd Johnson, a 40-year-old border-patrol agent in Caribou, Maine, and one of ZEO's early testers, found that reading before he went to bed helped reduce his wake time and bring his ZQ from the 20s into the 60s. "You can try something that night and see the results in the morning," he says. Another early tester, Tim Guirl, who teaches at a community college in Seattle, found that he had more restorative sleep if he didn't exercise too close to bedtime and eliminated a large late-night snack.

Other recommendations from Zeo include reducing noise, light and disruptive influences like pets in the bedroom; having a "power-down" hour before bedtime with no email, no Internet use, no cellphones and no BlackBerrys; and keeping a consistent sleep schedule. And if you find yourself awake and worrying, Zeo recommends getting out of bed and writing down what you're thinking about in a "worry journal."

Zeo says its brain-wave results are similar to those from professional sleep labs -- but only about 140 people have tested it so far. And the Zeo isn't designed to diagnose actual sleep disorders, which plague an estimated 70 million Americans -- you need to see a doctor for that.

To see if something besides drinking coffee and thinking great thoughts was affecting my sleep, I underwent a sleep study at the Sleep Health Center connected with Brigham and Women's Hospital in Brighton, Mass. A polysomnography, as such tests are called, measures brain waves like the Zeo, but also heart rate, respiratory rate, oxygen saturation, body positions and movements. It took about 45 minutes to have all of the sensors and wires attached -- and then a little longer to get comfortable enough to sleep.

To my surprise, the study found that I had a fairly severe case of Periodic Limb Movements, episodes of involuntary muscle movements in the night. About 10% of adults have PLMs. Many don't even notice; sleep partners are often bothered more than the sleepers themselves. But PLMs can be very disruptive if they are accompanied by arousals from sleep. I was averaging 42 arousals per hour. According to David White, another Harvard sleep physician who prescribed the study for me, PLMs can be due to an iron deficiency or medication side effects, and they are often related to "restless-leg syndrome," which causes an irresistible urge to move the legs, day or night. Medications like Requip can minimize the movements; I'm going to give them a try.

The study also showed I had some obstructive sleep apnea, in which the airway narrows, especially when the muscles relax in sleep. People with OSA stop breathing momentarily until a lack of oxygen alerts the brain, which wakes them up with a gasp. These mini arousals can occur as often as 70 times an hour, leaving the sufferer exhausted and at risk for heart disease, stroke and atherosclerosis. An estimated 4% of men and 2% of women have OSA. One telltale sign is having a shirt-collar size larger than 17 inches. Another sign is loud snoring, although I certainly don't do that. ("Women never snore -- they all deny it," says Dr. White.)

The most effective treatment is a Continuous Positive Airway Pressure machine, which blows air through the nose to keep the airway open. My OSA isn't that bad -- yet. Other remedies include a dental appliance that helps prop the airway open and losing weight, which helps reduce the airway blockage.

Dr. White is also chief medical officer for Philips Home Healthcare, which makes a watch-like monitor, called an Actiwatch, that tracks whether the wearer is moving or still, roughly corresponding with sleep. The Actiwatch doesn't show sleep phases; it generally diagnoses problems with jet lag and body clocks. I wore one for a week, and although I'm still a night owl, it showed nothing amiss in that area.

All in all, "there are plenty of ways you can improve your sleep," Jason Donahue, another Zeo founder, tells me cheerily. This week, I'm starting in on Zeo's tips on keeping disturbances in the bedroom to a minimum. The dog may have to find a new place to sleep.

Email HealthJournal@wsj.com

Herding Cats--Day 2

2009-06-09T00:07:00.000+09:00

Day 2 with the Crazies (one month ago)

Merrily we rolled along the highway, the driver of bus #8 taking care not to exceed the speed limit. His GPS constantly reminded him whenever we stepped so much as half a kilometer per hour over said limit.

The kids in the back downed sugar and caffeine as the latest K-pop blasted away. Big Bang, After School, Wondergirls flashed away on the screen located above the driver's seat. It's funny how in Korea, everyone listens to the same entertainers. You notice it on subways as grandmas answer their "Rain" ringtones, and middle aged men debate between Hyori and Son Dambi ringtones.

Not that I protest; I certainly wouldn't mind meeting Son Dambi.

But onto a more surmountable challenge--Mt. Sorak.

The next day we spend the morning hiking up to Ulsanbawi, one of the points of interest near Mt. Sorak. The views were great, and for the most part, they were pretty orderly.

But afterwards, we headed to the beach.

We found 6 boats arranged in neat order. On the boats were printed the words, "Marine Adventure."
Marines?

The students lined up and out of nowhere appeared Marine Drill Instructors who would proceed to whip the rascals into shape over the next 3 hours. I wondered if this was some kind of joke, as the schedule had said "Marine Games" in Korean.

He went drill sergeant on those adults.

As soon we realized what this was, the Drill Sergeants barked out orders for the students to carry the Zodiac boats.

After various failed attempts, the students realized the task required coordination and discipline. Then, the instructors further raised the bar by requiring each class to carry female students in the boats. With each evolution, they would increase the number of students in the boat.

Not a bad idea for teaching my normally out of control students some valuable social lessons. When we read the words "Marine Adventure" on the schedule, no one knew what that meant, save the vice principal. Turns out the normally reserved and quiet VP has a sense of humor.

Maybe I should threaten further misbehaving boys with the Zodiac punishment.

Herding Cats--Day 1

2009-06-08T21:11:00.004+09:00

A month ago....

With the clouds parting way for the sun, our caravan of 13 buses departed Ansan for the eastern edge of South Korea.

This was a field trip with my 8th graders. Now, by definition, a field trip is to educate students by exposing them to things that cannot be brought to the classroom.

But, teachers learn a lot, too. I can now place the skill of "herding cats" on my resume.

Five hundred highly caffeinated and sugared teens will do that to you. The bus was rowdy and the driver kept everyone glued to the TV by playing Big Bang videos the whole ride. In other words, we were a kareoke bus for the whole ride there.

It wasn't so bad on my bus; another bus had kids who smoked. And yet another had a student sneak a knife aboard and slit all the seats. Yes, they are my students.

The first thing the rowdier boys did at a rest stop was to beat the living snot out of a soccer ball machine.

At our pitstop, I happened to run into Marina Brendan, who was also bound for Mt. Sorak with her kids! After that eventful meeting, we parted ways again for a few more hours on the bus.

Eventually, we arrived at Gangneung, which is by the beach. Beautiful day to be at the beach (oh SoCal, I miss you.)

Overlooking the beach area is a cliff, with a giant ship on it.

Apparently, the owner of the land wanted to build a hotel in the shape of a ship. It was strange enough that Michael Jackson stayed here at one point, but not surprising.

Why there are hands here, I do not know.

The smaller kid chose the English name "Stanford."

Meanwhile the students ran amok. They were busy hitting each other and taking in the views, although I'm not sure one can actually do both.

As for me, I could on smile at the beautiful coastline view from the cliff.

Later, we met a beautiful woman. The boys instantly couldn't keep their hands off her. There was a mysterious quality about her, perhaps brought about by her silence and longing gaze towards the sea.

My students are so well mannered..............

Next stop was a cave, where the students lined up and donned safety helmets to do a little exploring inside Korea's underground.

Afterwards, we settled into our hotel for the evening.

(We didn't stay here, but it seemed photo worthy).

The teachers met (and drank) late into the night. I got to know my roommates better too--a PE teacher by the name of Park, a computer science teacher by the name of Yang and a young trainee teacher by the name of Cho.

It's interesting how much one learns through quiet observation.

Fat Bear

2009-06-03T23:53:00.004+09:00

Today it was announced in the South Korean media that North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il has chosen his third son, Kim Jong-woon, to be the next leader. But the guy was born in 1983/4. And in a society very concerned with age, it leaves the young man on shaky ground. In the mean time, KJW's uncle, Jang Seong-taek is supposed to take power, in a Regent Trusteeship sort of way.

In any case, that leaves the question of KJI's first son: Kim Jeong-nam.

In 2001, KJN was detained by Japanese authorities at Tokyo's Narita International Airport. KJN had been trying to enter the country in order to visit Tokyo Disneyland. Reports state he entered the country on a fake Dominican Republic passport bearing the name "Pang Xiong" or "胖熊."

This Chinese name, translated from Mandarin, means "FAT BEAR."

Spock would say, "Fascinating."

Former Activist Questions Legacy of Tiananmen--WSJ

2009-06-03T09:26:00.002+09:00

Former Activist Questions Legacy of Tiananmen

By JASON DEAN

Wall Street Journal

BEIJING -- As Chinese soldiers marched into downtown Beijing on the night of June 3, 1989, Shen Tong was west of Tiananmen Square with a group trying vainly to get the troops to turn back. The 20-year-old Peking University undergraduate, a prominent member of the democracy movement that swept the Chinese capital that spring, narrowly avoided injury. The girl next to him was shot in the face and killed.

The Wall Street Journal

Shen Tong last month in the offices of his company, VFinity, in New York.

Mr. Shen survived, and days later fled to the U.S., where he was hailed as a hero. He co-wrote a book about the Tiananmen protests, and for years worked as a democracy activist.

But Mr. Shen's future didn't go as he had expected. Today he runs a software company in New York that does business in places including China. He has returned to Beijing several times. While still a strong believer in democracy, he has grown increasingly uncertain about the meaning of the events of 1989.

"I'm not sure that we really made the difference that we intended," Mr. Shen says. "We do know it was a tremendously significant event, but we don't know what it really means."

The historical significance of most big events seems to crystallize over time. But the legacy of Tiananmen has, if anything, become less clear in the subsequent two decades.

There is little uncertainty about what happened -- though the details remain shrouded in official secrecy. In April and May of 1989, students, workers and others in Beijing and other Chinese cities held peaceful demonstrations for democracy.

The leaders of the Communist Party, on June 3 sent heavily armed forces into the capital to end the protests. By the time they cleared Tiananmen Square the next day, hundreds of people in the surrounding area were dead, mostly unarmed civilians. No one outside the leadership knows exactly how many.

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See what has happened to some of the major players in the 1989 protests.

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The crackdown put a freeze on major political reform that has yet to thaw. But in the years after Tiananmen, the Communist Party claimed a new legitimacy with a re-energized program of economic development. China's economy is now six times its size in 1989, adjusted for inflation, and could soon surpass Japan as the world's second largest after the U.S.

Development has been uneven -- farmers and factory workers have benefited much less than the urban middle class, and corruption and human-rights abuses are pervasive. But at the same time, economic liberalization and technological change have given many Chinese independence to live as they choose, as long as they don't challenge Communist Party rule.

Within China, the government has largely buried the history of 1989. Most young people know little or nothing about those events. Most of those who do have accepted the government's claim that it was forced to act to prevent chaos. Those who know what happened generally speak of it only among friends or family.

Meanwhile, a world that recoiled at the bloodshed in June 1989 has accepted China's leaders and their central role in global affairs. Some of those most opposed to the Communist Party's practices have felt compelled to deal with it.

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Democracy for China Fund

Mr. Tong in 1991 at a protest in front of the United Nations in New York.

Last week, U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi -- a longtime China critic, who was expelled from the country in 1991 after unfurling a banner in Tiananmen Square memorializing those killed in the crackdown -- returned to Beijing to talk to Chinese leaders about cooperation on climate change.

Those who helped shape Tiananmen also have differing views of its legacy.

Wu'er Kaixi, a student leader in 1989 and No. 2 on the government's most-wanted list after the crackdown, says the democracy movement should be credited with much of China's economic progress in the past 20 years, as the government accelerated economic reforms to regain legitimacy it lost on June 4.

Mr. Wu'er, who now lives in Taiwan and hasn't returned home or seen his parents since he fled China in 1989, feels the movement also helped to bring the end to communism in Eastern Europe.

"The longer the time passes, the more I think of it as a great movement," he says.

Wang Juntao, a veteran democracy activist whom the government labeled one of the "black hands" -- or orchestrators -- in 1989, believes China is closer to democracy now.

The Chinese people have "learned a lesson. They've found that we were right -- without democracy the Chinese government will become more violent and self-interested," says Mr. Wang, now 50, who was imprisoned before being expelled in 1994 to the U.S., where he has lived ever since. "I think I will definitely return to China, and I will be successful. Finally, we will win [China] back."

Other participants have returned to China, or never left. Most lead lives that have nothing to do with politics. "People generally have tremendous difficulty linking that part of their life with their life today -- except the extreme minority who carried on the movement at great cost," Mr. Shen says. For many people in China, he says, June 1989 is "frozen in history."

Mr. Shen first returned to China in 1992. After arriving in the U.S. in 1989, he cowrote "Almost a Revolution," about his involvement in the democracy protests, completed his undergraduate degree at Brandeis University, and started graduate studies at Boston University and Harvard University. He also started a group called the Democracy for China Fund.

In China, he traveled around speaking to other activists. Back in Beijing, the night before a scheduled news conference to announce a local branch of the democracy fund, police arrested him at his mother's apartment. His detention became a cause célèbre in the U.S. He was released after eight weeks and put on a plane back to the U.S., where he vowed to continue the fight for democracy.

Chinese authorities also detained several people who met with Mr. Shen. One wasn't released for nearly two years. Fellow democracy activists criticized Mr. Shen for endangering his collaborators. Mr. Shen said that the others were aware of the risks, and that the authorities told him they would also be released. Still, he says today, "They are on my conscience."

Mr. Shen stayed away from China for nearly a decade. He continued to work for democracy, but his interests broadened. In the mid-1990s, he started businesses in publishing and television production. He stopped his doctoral studies without a degree.

In May 1999, approaching the 10th anniversary of Tiananmen, U.S.-led forces in Yugoslavia bombed China's Embassy in Belgrade, killing three. Washington said the incident was an error, but the bombing triggered protests by college students in Beijing, who pelted the American Embassy with rocks and bricks.

Watching the protests on TV, Mr. Shen was struck by how effective the government had been in replacing the democratic ideals of previous generations with a combination of nationalism and economic growth.

"I felt profound sadness," he says. "What I hadn't realized is that this combination, that rests upon very systematic repression of historical memory, was working. ... The underpinning sentiment of the young university students was very different from 10 or 20 years before."

In 2000, Mr. Shen moved from Boston to New York, and founded a new company, VFinity, which sells software that clients use to manage and search video and other digital content. He married and had two children -- changes that he says also realigned his thinking.

"I realize how much involuntary suffering my family went through" during his initial years of activism and exile, Mr. Shen says. He recalls thinking, "I'm facing arguably the most ruthless and powerful regime in the world. So what am I doing?"

In 2001, Mr. Shen returned to Beijing to visit family. It was the first of about half a dozen return visits -- each requiring agreements in advance with Chinese authorities not to engage in political activities while there. Mr. Shen is closely followed.

As his business developed, China's market beckoned. In 2006, VFinity opened an office in Beijing. Some critics have suggested VFinity's software could be used by Chinese authorities for surveillance purposes. Mr. Shen says VFinity hasn't sold its product to police agencies, though he says it's impossible to ensure they don't ultimately get access to the software.

In 2008, VFinity provided software to one of the organizations in Beijing helping stage the Olympics -- an event many activists outside China were criticizing as a mask over continued human-rights abuses. "VFinity scored big at the Beijing Olympics," the company said in a news release.

Mr. Shen says there is no simple formula to reconcile his feelings about the Chinese government and what it did in 1989 with the practical considerations of doing business there.

"The more distance I have, the more I realize what I don't know," he says. Businesses can choose not to go to China, but "I don't think that needs to be the case," he says.

Overall, he says, the country's economic reform policy, without political change, "is clearly not sufficient, but it's better than the alternative" of no reform at all.

Write to Jason Dean at jason.dean@wsj.com

A Black Disney Princess--NY Times

2009-06-03T09:17:00.002+09:00

May 31, 2009

Her Prince Has Come. Critics, Too.

By BROOKS BARNES

LOS ANGELES

"THE Princess and the Frog" does not open nationwide until December, but the buzz is already breathless: For the first time in Walt Disney animation history, the fairest of them all is black.

Princess Tiana, a hand-drawn throwback to classic Disney characters like Cinderella and Snow White, has a dazzling green gown, a classy upsweep hairdo and a diamond tiara. Like her predecessors, she is a strong-willed songbird (courtesy of the Tony-winning actress Anika Noni Rose) who finds her muscle-bound boyfriend against all odds.

"Finally, here is something that all little girls, especially young black girls, can embrace," Cori Murray, an entertainment director at Essence magazine, recently told CNN.

To the dismay of Disney executives — along with the African-American bloggers and others who side with the company — the film is also attracting chatter of an uglier nature. Is "The Princess and the Frog," set in New Orleans in the 1920s, about to vaporize stereotypes or promote them?

The film, directed by Ron Clements and John Musker, two of the men behind "The Little Mermaid," unfolds against a raucous backdrop of voodoo and jazz. Tiana, a waitress and budding chef who dreams of owning a restaurant, is persuaded to kiss a frog who is really a prince.

The spell backfires and — poof! — she is also an amphibian. Accompanied by a Cajun firefly and a folksy alligator, the couple search for a cure.

After viewing some photographs of merchandise tied to the movie, which is still unfinished, Black Voices, a Web site on AOL dedicated to African-American culture, faulted the prince's relatively light skin color. Prince Naveen hails from the fictional land of Maldonia and is voiced by a Brazilian actor; Disney says that he is not white.

"Disney obviously doesn't think a black man is worthy of the title of prince," Angela Bronner Helm wrote March 19 on the site. "His hair and features are decidedly non-black. This has left many in the community shaking their head in befuddlement and even rage."

Others see insensitivity in the locale.

"Disney should be ashamed," William Blackburn, a former columnist at The Charlotte Observer, told London's Daily Telegraph. "This princess story is set in New Orleans, the setting of one of the most devastating tragedies to beset a black community."

ALSO under scrutiny is Ray the firefly, performed by Jim Cummings (the voice of Winnie the Pooh and Yosemite Sam). Some people think Ray sounds too much like the stereotype of an uneducated Southerner in an early trailer.

Of course, armchair critics have also been complaining about the princess. Disney originally called her Maddy (short for Madeleine). Too much like Mammy and thus racist. A rumor surfaced on the Internet that an early script called for her to be a chambermaid to a white woman, a historically correct profession. Too much like slavery.

And wait: We finally get a black princess and she spends the majority of her time on screen as a frog?

"Because of Disney's history of stereotyping," said Michael D. Baran, a cognitive psychologist and anthropologist who teaches at Harvard and specializes in how children learn about race, "people are really excited to see how Disney will handle her language, her culture, her physical attributes."

Mr. Baran is reserving judgment and encourages others to do the same. But he added that the issue warrants scrutiny because of Disney's outsize impact on children.

"People think that kids don't catch subtle messages about race and gender in movies, but it's quite the opposite," he said.

Donna Farmer, a Los Angeles Web designer who is African-American and has two children, applauded Disney's efforts to add diversity.

"I don't know how important having a black princess is to little girls — my daughter loves Ariel and I see nothing wrong with that — but I think it's important to moms," she said.

"Who knows if Disney will get it right," she added. "They haven't always in the past, but the idea that Disney is not bending over backward to be sensitive is laughable. It wants to sell a whole lot of Tiana dolls and some Tiana paper plates and make people line up to see Tiana at Disney World."

Few people outside the company have seen footage of the movie. Among them are consultants like Oprah Winfrey, whom Disney asked for input on the racial aspects of the film and was cast as Tiana's mother. (Movie theater owners and members of the N.A.A.C.P. have also been shown scenes, and the reactions, according to a Disney spokeswoman, were "extremely positive.")

Rather, fueling the debate are photos of related merchandise taken from a toy industry event, a one-minute teaser trailer and Disney's enormous cultural impact.

The company wants to vanquish once and for all the whispers of racism that linger from stumbles in the past. Yes, "Dumbo" traded in black stereotypes in 1941 with its band of uneducated, pimp-hat-wearing crows. All the animals in "The Jungle Book" from 1967 speak in proper British accents except for the jive-talking monkeys who desperately want to become "real people."

More recently, "Aladdin" ran into trouble in 1993. The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee labeled certain song lyrics defamatory ("Where they cut off your ear/If they don't like your face/It's barbaric, but, hey, it's home").

The company responds that criticism of such well-worn examples — particularly of films from the '60s and earlier — applies a 21st-century morality to movies made in sharply different times. The United States barely had a Civil Rights Act in 1967, much less a black president.

Disney executives think people should stop jumping to conclusions about "The Princess and the Frog."

A producer of the film, Peter Del Vecho, said: "We feel a great responsibility to get this right. Every artistic decision is being carefully thought out."

Ms. Rose, familiar to movie audiences for her role in "Dreamgirls," has also defended Disney.

"There is no reason to get up in arms," she told reporters at a recent Los Angeles Urban League dinner. "If there was something that I thought was disrespectful to me or to my heritage, I would certainly not be a part of it."

Ms. Winfrey declined to comment. A spokesman for the N.A.A.C.P. said the organization had no immediate comment.

Disney often gets criticized no matter how carefully it strives to put together its television shows, theme-park attractions and movies. For years, Disney has been lambasted by some parents for not having a black princess. Now, some of those same voices are taking aim at the company without seeing the finished product. (Officially, the princesses are Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Ariel of "The Little Mermaid," Belle of "Beauty and the Beast" and Jasmine of "Aladdin" — all white except for Jasmine, who is Arabian. The leads from "Mulan" and "Pocahontas" are sometimes sold with the Princess merchandising line.)

Mr. Del Vecho said the idea for a black princess came about organically. The producers wanted to create a fairy tale set in the United States and centered on New Orleans, with its colorful past and deep musical history.

"As we spent time in New Orleans, we realized how truly it is a melting pot, which is how the idea of strongly multicultural characters came about," Mr. Del Vecho said.

He described Tiana as "a resourceful and talented person" and the rare fairy tale heroine "who is not saved by a prince." Once the decision was made to make the lead black, he added, "We wanted her to bear the traits of African-American women and be truly beautiful."

Getting "The Princess and the Frog" right is of enormous importance to Disney. The company needs hits, as evidenced by a recently announced 97 percent drop in quarterly profit. The Disney Princess merchandising line is a $4 billion annual business and the company has plans for Tiana to be everywhere. Get ready for Tiana dresses, elaborate dolls and Halloween costumes.

The movie also marks a return by Disney to traditional hand-drawn animation. A failure could be the final nail in the coffin of an art form pioneered by Walt Disney himself.

In the last 20 years, Disney has made huge strides in depicting race. In 1997, the company's television division presented a live-action version of "Cinderella" with a black actress, the singer Brandy, playing the lead. In 1998, "Mulan" was celebrated as a rare animated feature that depicted Chinese characters with realistic-looking eyes; most animated films (even those from Japan) had Westernized versions of Asian people until that time.

THE debate surrounding "The Princess and the Frog" illustrates how difficult it is to deal with race in animation, experts say. Cartoons by their nature trade in caricatures.

Mainstream producers have largely avoided characters of color for fear of offending minority groups, although black producers have been creating cartoons featuring stereotyped characters since the days of "Fat Albert."

Disney can take some comfort in a backlash to the backlash.

"This is one of those situations where I am ashamed of the black community," Levi Roberts said in a YouTube video. "Are we being racist ourselves by saying this movie shouldn't have a white prince?"

Perhaps the final word — for now — should come from somebody who is African-American and a former Disney animator.

"Overly sensitive people see racial or ethnic slights in every image," wrote Floyd Norman, whose credits span from "Sleeping Beauty" to "Mulan," in a 2007 essay on the Web site Jim Hill Media. "And in their zeal to sanitize and pasteurize everything, they've taken all the fun out of cartoon making."

Reagan Did It--Paul Krugman

2009-06-03T08:49:00.002+09:00

June 1, 2009

Op-Ed Columnist
New York Times

Reagan Did It

By PAUL KRUGMAN

"This bill is the most important legislation for financial institutions in the last 50 years. It provides a long-term solution for troubled thrift institutions. ... All in all, I think we hit the jackpot." So declared Ronald Reagan in 1982, as he signed the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act.

He was, as it happened, wrong about solving the problems of the thrifts. On the contrary, the bill turned the modest-sized troubles of savings-and-loan institutions into an utter catastrophe. But he was right about the legislation's significance. And as for that jackpot — well, it finally came more than 25 years later, in the form of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

For the more one looks into the origins of the current disaster, the clearer it becomes that the key wrong turn — the turn that made crisis inevitable — took place in the early 1980s, during the Reagan years.

Attacks on Reaganomics usually focus on rising inequality and fiscal irresponsibility. Indeed, Reagan ushered in an era in which a small minority grew vastly rich, while working families saw only meager gains. He also broke with longstanding rules of fiscal prudence.

On the latter point: traditionally, the U.S. government ran significant budget deficits only in times of war or economic emergency. Federal debt as a percentage of G.D.P. fell steadily from the end of World War II until 1980. But indebtedness began rising under Reagan; it fell again in the Clinton years, but resumed its rise under the Bush administration, leaving us ill prepared for the emergency now upon us.

The increase in public debt was, however, dwarfed by the rise in private debt, made possible by financial deregulation. The change in America's financial rules was Reagan's biggest legacy. And it's the gift that keeps on taking.

The immediate effect of Garn-St. Germain, as I said, was to turn the thrifts from a problem into a catastrophe. The S.& L. crisis has been written out of the Reagan hagiography, but the fact is that deregulation in effect gave the industry — whose deposits were federally insured — a license to gamble with taxpayers' money, at best, or simply to loot it, at worst. By the time the government closed the books on the affair, taxpayers had lost $130 billion, back when that was a lot of money.

But there was also a longer-term effect. Reagan-era legislative changes essentially ended New Deal restrictions on mortgage lending — restrictions that, in particular, limited the ability of families to buy homes without putting a significant amount of money down.

These restrictions were put in place in the 1930s by political leaders who had just experienced a terrible financial crisis, and were trying to prevent another. But by 1980 the memory of the Depression had faded. Government, declared Reagan, is the problem, not the solution; the magic of the marketplace must be set free. And so the precautionary rules were scrapped.

Together with looser lending standards for other kinds of consumer credit, this led to a radical change in American behavior.

We weren't always a nation of big debts and low savings: in the 1970s Americans saved almost 10 percent of their income, slightly more than in the 1960s. It was only after the Reagan deregulation that thrift gradually disappeared from the American way of life, culminating in the near-zero savings rate that prevailed on the eve of the great crisis. Household debt was only 60 percent of income when Reagan took office, about the same as it was during the Kennedy administration. By 2007 it was up to 119 percent.

All this, we were assured, was a good thing: sure, Americans were piling up debt, and they weren't putting aside any of their income, but their finances looked fine once you took into account the rising values of their houses and their stock portfolios. Oops.

Now, the proximate causes of today's economic crisis lie in events that took place long after Reagan left office — in the global savings glut created by surpluses in China and elsewhere, and in the giant housing bubble that savings glut helped inflate.

But it was the explosion of debt over the previous quarter-century that made the U.S. economy so vulnerable. Overstretched borrowers were bound to start defaulting in large numbers once the housing bubble burst and unemployment began to rise.

These defaults in turn wreaked havoc with a financial system that — also mainly thanks to Reagan-era deregulation — took on too much risk with too little capital.

There's plenty of blame to go around these days. But the prime villains behind the mess we're in were Reagan and his circle of advisers — men who forgot the lessons of America's last great financial crisis, and condemned the rest of us to repeat it.

Supposed to and Not Supposed to

2009-06-02T11:40:00.002+09:00

Class 3-11: Home of the One and Only Baek Sae-bin.

Our lesson today consisted what you're supposed to and not supposed to. According to our resident nutjob (that would be Sae-bin/Baek Saeju), you're supposed to "make out with your mom" at home. And no girlfriends in the library.

I wonder what that means.

The bright side is that he didn't try to flash me today.

And another student, Yoo Seong-yeon, just told me she's decided she'll go to law school at Oxford. That's something kids from this town also aren't supposed to do.

But then again, I was never supposed to be in Korea, never supposed to have survived that 104˚F fever I had at birth or play college ball. Life throws curveballs like that.

Socially Challenged

2009-06-01T22:47:00.003+09:00

Me: why isn't Asperger's Syndrome just considered a mild form of autism?
Mongold: i think its just on the autism spectrum
Mongold: yea
Mongold: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger_syndrome
Me: cuz autistic kids are very socially challenged
Me: yea
Me: i bet there's lots of profs with asperger's
Mongold: haha
Mongold: yes
Me: it's possible at one pt my parents thought i had it too
Me: ahahaha
Mongold: hahaha
Mongold: KEEEEETAL
Mongold: ...i believe it

Oh fail.