A Name to Remember: Gao Zhisheng

Gao Zhisheng is an astonishingly courageous man, a lawyer who has stood up to defend "Falun Gong practitioners, “house church” activists, and other targeted citizens." Doing this, of course, he painted a bullseye on himself and has been imprisoned and brutally tortured. Since encouraging his wife and children to flee the country for the U.S., he has been "disappeared". Jay Nordlinger makes some poignant remarks on the letter his wife has sent the U.S. Congress:

My friends tell me that this great nation of the United States, which regards human rights as a cornerstone of its foreign policy, would never just sit and watch my husband suffer and do nothing.

I’m afraid her friends are wrong: terribly, grievously wrong.

More:

Thus they encouraged and advised me to write to you to seek help. I remember that, when my husband was still free, whenever major human rights cases arose in China, he would always look towards the United States. He always said: The United States is the cornerstone of world freedom, human rights and social order; the United States would not tolerate despotic rule and the wanton abuse of the weak and the masses.

Does the United States deserve such beliefs about it, such faith in it?

Does it? Do we? After all the times people standing against tyranny have looked to us, only to see us wipe our hands and walk away?

I pray that the Congress will take a stand. I know there's precious little that can be done against a Chinese government that holds all the cards. In the meantime, we can remember the name of Gao Zhisheng.

On Pigs and Panic

While the WHO raises the H1N1 situation to level 5 of 6, signifying that a pandemic is imminent, others blow it all off as a media-driven panic. And then there's the guy who argues that panic is precisely the right response.

It's an interesting argument. Panic is a negative word because in most scenarios, panic causes a person to make foolish and possibly dangerous decisions. In the case of epidemic disease, however, panic is precisely the correct response. Everything an irrational fear of disease leads us to do -- avoid personal contact and close quarters, practice extreme personal hygeine, and avoid public places in general -- are all actually effective at preventing the spread of disease. Besides, people don't change their behavior very easily. The overwhelming majority of Americans are responding to this story, if at all, by washing their hands more. This is, of course, precisely what they ought to be doing, and exactly what they wouldn't be doing if all they'd heard was a calm and reasonable statement from the CDC. Even the small percentage who are truly panicked about swine flu are maybe going to pull the kids of school for a week, avoid unnecessary trips, and wear surgical masks in public. The opportunity cost of a disease panic is pretty small, and it pales compared to the cost of a serious pandemic.

Time for the flip side. You've noticed that I'm agreeing that panic on the part of individuals doesn't hurt, and could actually help a lot if the pandemic turns out to be severe. Panic on the part of governments, on the other hand, produces exactly the sort of results one could expect. Egypt has enraged their Christian population by declaring a complete cull of the nation's swine herd, despite assurance from the WHO that swine flu has nothing to do with pigs. Other governments have recommended against travel to the New World and some are mulling full travel bans. See, influenza's a nasty disease, and one of the nastiest things about it is that it's most highly contagious well before it shows any symptoms, making quarantine of the sick pointless. Complete quarantine is the only surefire protection, but such a move could, if the SARS epidemic is any guide, be devastating to a world economy already struggling.

Black Carbon

Black carbon. As opposed to what, diamonds? Anyway, I'm intrigued by this story that climate researchers have only recently begun to address the effects of "black carbon", i.e. soot, which darkens and warms the ground where it settles, particularly when it settles on otherwise reflective snow and ice. The study quoted suggests black carbon could be responsible for fully half of recorded Arctic warming in the last century. I have no doubt that this effect could be significant; I've seen it firsthand in the Cascades, the windward slopes of which are visibly besmirched with soot blown clear across the Pacific from China. It also seems like this could also help explain the discrepancy of glaciers and ice receding even in areas without measurable warming.

It does make one wonder exactly how the climate gurus are going to incorporate a vast and heretofore overlooked climate mechanism into their vaunted models. See, before they settle out of the atmosphere, particulate aerosols including soot also have a shielding effect that cools the Earth, though only temporarily, (as in the extreme case of the "year without a summer" that followed the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora). So this is me suspecting that precisely modeling the effect of airborne soot that shades the earth and seeds reflective clouds versus glacier-darkening soot that raises ground temperatures is probably a lot more difficult than they're going to make it seem.

That aside, it's a no-brainer that less soot would be a good thing. It's unhealthy and unsightly. I guess that's why nations tend to take care of their heavy soot problems as they get rich enough to afford to, with or without particularly environmentalist motives. Yet another argument that pressuring third-world countries into adopting misguided "green" policies would not only be profoundly immoral, it would also likely fail to achieve the intended "green" objectives.

Start Your Morning With Some Childlike Glee

The Sticky-Note Experiment!


EepyBird's Sticky Note experiment from Eepybird on Vimeo.

On Orthography

The People's Republic of China is has announced they will make changes to Simplified Chinese characters to make them easier to understand. By making them more complicated.

Some characters will have more strokes added and thus be brought closer to their earlier, more complicated forms. But officials insist the move does not mark the start of a campaign to scrap simplified characters. China, they say, need not move back toward the traditional forms, nor further along the path of simplification. It simply needs to “standardise” things.

An expat, Jacob von Bisterfeld, argues in the Shanghai Daily News for Mao's linguistic goal, the alphabetization of Chinese. He raises a valid point: the switch to simplified characters has already relegated all pre-20th century texts solely to the purview of scholars and the elderly, so Chinese might as well become alphabetic.

Not so fast. Alphabets do offer considerable advantages. They're shockingly easy to learn and teach, comprehensible to foreigners, and compatible with technology. They also enforce linguistic homogeneity, which I'm sure had something to do with Mao's enthusiasm. I'll illustrate by comparison with "Arabic", which like "Chinese" is a political construct rather than a language. Politics aside, we'd talk about "the Chinese languages" and "the Arabic languages" the same way we talk about "the Romance languages" or "the Germanic languages", but historical, cultural, and political forces have shaped the idea of the unity of "Arabic" and "Chinese" as something distinct. Both cases exhibit diglossia, in which educated speakers function in both a standardized archaic form of the language (Modern Standard Arabic and Standard Mandarin) and their own native language. Modern Standard Arabic "works" precisely because it is fully artificial; it is nobody's native language. Spelling is standardized and predictable because "proper" pronunciation is universally recognized and strictly taught in school. Moreover, the fact that MSA is heavily modeled on Koranic Arabic gives it remarkable cultural authority. Arabs use their alphabet to write their dialects phonetically in comic books and text messages, but nobody's arguing this should expand beyond those uses. The usefulness of MSA is self-evident.

Chinese is a very different story simply because Mandarin is a first language for many Chinese. But while they might have a slight leg up on learning Standard Written Mandarin, speakers of other dialects aren't really disadvantaged. The logographic writing system works just as well for every different regional pronunciation as it does for the "standard" pronunciations. In a gross oversimplification, most of the world recognizes that 8 means 8, whether we call it eight, acht, ocho, huit, thamanya, or whatever. The logogram signifies a great diversity of spoken words, which you simply can't do with an alphabet. Switching to a phonological alphabet for Chinese would require designating a prestige dialect as the model, which would certainly be spoken Mandarin. Where would that leave the other languages? Do they come up with their own orthographies, precipitating the breakup of Chinese the way Medieval Latin broke into the Romance languages? Or do they continue to read the same Mandarin words and pronounce them in their own language, doing what they've always done just with the added confusion that the written language is expressly Mandarin?

If you haven't gathered already, I think that Chinese characters seem to work pretty well for writing Chinese. The technological difficulties quite evidently aren't insuperable. Even the education argument, that it's just too difficult to teach all those characters, doesn't seem well-supported. Literacy in Chinese doesn't seem to be any harder to achieve than anywhere else. Non-mainland Chinese in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Chinatowns worldwide certainly don't seem to have any particular trouble. I've also read good arguments that the logographic system has a much longer but far flatter and more forgiving learning curve than an alphabet, in which learning to read tends to involve a "Eureka!" moment that far too many people never reach. In every other case in history, logographic writing systems were replaced by alphabets within a few generations of exposure to the concept. The anomalous survival of Chinese suggests this is a writing system supremely well-suited to its language. As to the announced de-simplification: the characters have been simplified, standardized, de-simplificated, and recomplified for three millenia. I suspect they'll survive.

So, if all this talk about logograms and phonology has you thinking I might have some thoughts about the way we write and speak English, you'd be correct. But that's a topic for a whole 'nother post.

*This breaks down a bit when we're talking true logograms: the use of 8 in "have a gr8 day!" is only comprehensible to English speakers. Apparently Chinese does quite a lot of this sort of internal punning, so that dialect speakers do at least need familiarity with spoken Mandarin to fully parse the written language. An alphabet would still make the situation worse.

American Stonehenge

Okay, I've already 'fessed up that I'm a sucker for the totally random roadside monuments that add a delightful quirkiness to these United States. SPAM Museum? Been there. Wall Drug? I know it well. World's Largest Ball of Twine? It's on the list. So I'm appalled, appalled to find out that I have lived my life in blithe ignorance of the Georgia Guidestones. Five sixteen-foot granite steles, inscribed with vaguely creepy multilingual New Age advice to the survivors of civilizations' collapse, towering over the hills of northeast Georgia. Built for the psseudonymous client R.C. Christian, a transparent reference to Christian Rosenkreuz, the founder of the mysterious Rosicrucians. How did I not know this existed?? Well, my ignorance has been remedied, and unless something far more compelling comes up (unlikely!), I'll be driving up to Elberton next weekend to see these in person. I'll post some pictures.

To get a bit more serious, what really excites me about this monument are the multilingual inscriptions in granite. No matter the zaniness of the text, these could be very useful to future archeologists. I just wish they had chosen a broader spread of linguistic families for the main text. English, Spanish, Swahili, Hindi, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, and Russian break down to just four language families. I do like the touch of incorporating the ancient scripts as well, although a longer and less abstract text would really be a favor to the Michael Ventrises of the future.

Maybe I'll make a lifelong hobby out of engraving multi-lingual texts on stone and burying them for the benefit of future classicists. Hey, there are sillier hobbies out there.

UPDATE: Really, considering my previous post, I can't believe I didn't draw the connection. I guess I'm just in an apocalyptic end-of-civilization sort of mood. My griping post on the misuse of the word "apocalypse" will wait for another day.

There's Bad News...

... and more bad news. What a depressing news day. If you believe there's a glimmer of hope for the economy, you're not just hopelessly wrong, you're probably making it even worse. The Taliban are within striking distance of Islamabad, and Pakistanis just can't bring themselves to care. Oh yeah, and the swine flu will surely kill us all. On the off chance it doesn't, of course, worldwide food riots and geomagnetic storms should do their part in the next few years to help ensure the end of civilization. Good riddance.

On Schadenfreude

I posted recently that there's a reason the word sabotage is from the French. Apparently, it's also no accident that the word schadenfreude is from the German.

Whose Interest?

President Obama has continued to spin his decision to declassify and release the Department of Justice "torture memos" as a decision based on the national interest, even on national security. It certainly doesn't have anything to do with a continued campaign against the Bush administration. Because of course, the Obama administration is about "post-partisanship".

Right. The Washington post publishes an account of the 11th-hour deliberations over the memos' release, in which the President compelled his staff to participate in an academic-style debate. Those supporting the release of the memos argued it would "focus public attention on the coldness and sterility of the legal justifications for abusive techniques" and "demonstrate that the nation lost its "moral bearings" in the Bush years" Those arguing to keep the memos secret, on the other hand, feared their release "would spark a national security debate with conservatives that could undermine Obama's broader agenda." So the debate was entirely about which course of action would be more beneficial to the administration; the national interest never came up. Or, on the other hand, it was the center of the debate, since the administration's interest is the national interest as far as these people are concerned.

UPDATE: (HT PowerLine) Stephen Hayes comments in the Weekly Standard on the selective redaction of the details on the intelligence value of the controversial interrogations, as well as the suspicious editing of Admiral Blair's statement on the matter:

It is possible, I suppose, that a series of fortunate coincidences has resulted in the public disclosure of only that information that will be politically helpful to the Obama administration. It is also possible that Dick Cheney has taken up synchronized swimming in his retirement.

Grab A Roller, Let's Get Started

So painting roofs and parking lots white has immediate cooling effects by reflecting sunlight while also reducing the amount of energy used for air conditioning, both directly in the affected buildings, and indirectly by reducing the urban "heat island" effect. Pretty cool (no pun intended). So why aren't we doing this yet? If we're going to be throwing money around at labor-intensive projects in the name of stimulus (and it's quite clear we're going to be doing quite a bit of that), we can at least lobby for comparatively commonsensical projects. Painting a roof white is a lot cheaper than installing solar panels, for instance. I'd be curious to find out how the energy produced by a solar roof stacks up against that saved simply by a white one.

Ahh, France!

It's no historical coincidence that the word sabotage comes from the original French. It's a culture addicted to the strike, and if a work stoppage intended to show how invaluable and undercompensated you are falls a bit flat when nobody really notices that you're not doing your job, then you just make darn sure they do notice. The union's representative:

"We’ve been on strike for three weeks but at first no one paid any attention at all. It was only when some of the guys started cutting the electricity and gas that things got moving."

I'm sure. So what are the workers' demands? Bread and circuses, mostly. More money and de-privatization.

"Now is the moment to push back the capitalist logic which has crept into the company."

Yes, that evil capitalist logic, always asserting that money has to come from somewhere before it can be given to someone. A les barricades!

Two Quotes

"I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman. Now, for me as a Christian, it's also a sacred union. You know, God's in the mix."

"I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anybody there, but that's how I was raised and that's how I think it should be — between a man and a woman."

Two nearly identical responses to a question on the definition of marriage. Carrie Prejean has of course been reviled for her response and lost the Miss America pageant because of it, while Barack Obama's answer was broadly ignored by his supporters, and he remains beloved of gay-marriage advocates. How can they hate Prejean's statement and shrug off Obama's identical assertion? Quite simple: they know he's lying.

I Want One: Fluorescent Puppy

South Korean scientists have bred a beagle puppy with genes from a sea anemone that cause it to produce fluorescent proteins in its skin that glow red under a blacklight. Now he can chase around that fluorescent cat.

Credit Where Credit Is Due: President Obama Pushes Colombian Trade Agreement

One of the things I promised myself this past election night was that I would do my level best to give President Obama credit where credit is due. His announced commitment to champion the long-stalled free trade deal with Colombia, along with his promise to visit Colombia and his offer of a state visit for President Uribe are by far the most substantive fruit of his otherwise ill-starred visit to the Summit of the Americas. His warm embrace of Hugo Chavez and abdication of American history before Daniel Ortega still grate, but further extending the long geopolitical alliance with Colombia into the economic realm is a poke in the eye to both leftists, and sound policy besides. Bravo, Mr. President.

Who Said That?

The point of death is that Christ took the sins of the world, so that what we put out did not come back to us, and that our sinful nature does not reap the obvious death. It’s not our own good works that get us through the gates of Heaven.

That, my friends, was Bono, interviewed in Rolling Stone, no less (via Strange Herring). Now, I'm as cynical as they come when it comes to celebrity opinionating. Perhaps a bit too cynical, as I'm proven to be when some global celebrity goes and shares this theologically sound Christian witness.

Best Thing Ever (Yet): Laser Cannon Dreadnought

Well, probably not. It still makes for a pretty awesome story, even if it is just the usual defense-contractor "just pretend you want to do this so what you've been planning to do the whole time will seem more reasonable" proposal. And it really does make a lot of sense. The first really effective laser cannon will be huge and power-hungry, so it makes a lot of sense to put it on a destroyer that has a) plenty of room and b) megawatts of power to spare. That actually makes so much sense that I'm really starting to wonder who first had the idea to mount the thing in an airplane.

Kids and the Environment

Nowhere in American society is "green" orthodoxy pushed more stridently than in our schools. Green activists have admitted that indoctrinating children to hector their parents about environmental issues is a key plank in their plan to mold an envirorthodox society. We see the result now in a survey that shows a third of American preteens fear an "environmental apocalypse" and over half believe they will grow up to a world less healthy than they enjoy now. (I'm sure the parents of the remaining sixth will be getting concerned phone calls any day now). The survey's a bit hard to read much into, as the article on TreeHugger.com doesn't break down the actual questions or responses. It's still clear that America's youngsters are fully indoctrinated into the Left-environmentalist dogma that we're on a downward ecological spiral. The irony, of course, is that the environment of North America and Europe has been getting cleaner and healthier for decades, and even carbon emissions per person have been more or less level. There's a simple reason, too: we've gotten richer. John Tierney argues in the New York Times that in light of the historical evidence showing that societies inevitably get greener as they get richer, the best thing we can do for the world is to help poor countries develop faster. I couldn't agree more. Nations pass through stages of development that simply cannot be skipped. One of those stages is pretty dirty, and half the world's population is at or just about to enter that stage. Nothing is going to keep them from digging up and using the cheap energy at their disposal. Even if it were feasible -- and it isn't -- deceiving or strongarming the world's poor into pursuing some rich man's vision of "green development" will only trap them longer in poverty and its attendant environmental consequences.

Bravo

I don't know which makes me happier, seeing 20 world leaders and diplomats walk out of the room, or hearing the thunderous applause when they did.

The Lost Symbol

Anthony Sacramone has somehow gotten his hands on an advance copy of Dan Brown's just-announced DaVinci Code sequel and kindly shares a summary:

The Catholic Church has a rogue monk/priest/canon lawyer/legion of Mary tractarian out to kill a select group of Masons who possess the key that unlocks the code that reveals the secret of the ancient riddle that solves the mystery that will uncover the conspiracy that hid the truth about the cabal that obscured the meaning of the cryptic script that when deciphered will unveil the face of the man who died to protect the arcanum embedded in the Masonic symbols, which, if made public, will shake the very foundations of the Catholic Church, rendering the papacy a spent force and reduce several hundred million Catholic laypeople to mainline-Protestant status.

Of course, they've already got the movie deal.

Just Sayin'

You know, there was a time not too long ago when strategists contemplating a strike on declared enemies of the U.S. would not have had to concern themselves overly much that the killing of treasonous American citizens who had joined them would cause a "political nightmare". Just sayin'.