(Image taken from http://www.ador.ro/lucrari/campania_print-categorie.html )

Who controls the past? Who controls the future?

What is history but a story we tell ourselves?

Where’s Mao? Chinese Revise History Books

NY Times
By JOSEPH KAHN
Published: September 1, 2006

BEIJING, Aug. 31 — When high school students in Shanghai crack their history textbooks this fall they may be in for a surprise. The new standard world history text drops wars, dynasties and Communist revolutions in favor of colorful tutorials on economics, technology, social customs and globalization.

Socialism has been reduced to a single, short chapter in the senior high school history course. Chinese Communism before the economic reform that began in 1979 is covered in a sentence. The text mentions Mao only once — in a chapter on etiquette.

Nearly overnight the country’s most prosperous schools have shelved the Marxist template that had dominated standard history texts since the 1950’s. The changes passed high-level scrutiny, the authors say, and are part of a broader effort to promote a more stable, less violent view of Chinese history that serves today’s economic and political goals.

It reminds me of a poem I wrote in high school:

the hundreth hand of the past glides by

broken

never to be seen through the same pane again

the hands of the future write the past

The Obama-Coburn transparency-in-spending database bill aims to create “a searchable database of government contracts, grants, insurance, loans and financial assistance, worth $2.5 trillion last year.”

Ironically, this revolutionary bi-partisan government transparency bill was apparently blocked by being placed on indefinite “secret hold” by a senator who didn’t like its provisions, and wanted to remain anonymous.

“Under Senate rules, unless the senator who placed the hold decides to lift it, the bill will not be brought up for a vote.”

Article here:
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/nation/4137637.html

Well, according to an anonymous spokesperson, the story at TPMmuckraker says that the unidentified secret holder may end up being none other than favorite of the internets, Senator Ted “Tubes” Stevens.

I guess he didn’t like the idea that someone would peek under the hood of his “truck” (which is definitely ok to load up with all kinds of heavy earmarks) with their all-seeing tubes.

I saw this (the quote below, not the art above, the art above is a Yoshitomo Nara painting, done in 1995). . . I can’t remember where– I think it was on a bumper sticker on the way to the grocery store:

At any moment you have to be ready to give up who you are today for who you could be tomorrow.

I thought that was pretty nice. But perhaps it could be edited to say:

At every moment we must give up our self-concept in order to actually be present.

Or even.:

Not constellating our identity around a self-concept is true freedom.

This is from the Wall Street Journal’s Op-Ed page, an article by Arthur Brooks, full text here.

Simply put, liberals have a big baby problem: They’re not having enough of them, they haven’t for a long time, and their pool of potential new voters is suffering as a result. According to the 2004 General Social Survey, if you picked 100 unrelated politically liberal adults at random, you would find that they had, between them, 147 children. If you picked 100 conservatives, you would find 208 kids. That’s a “fertility gap” of 41%. Given that about 80% of people with an identifiable party preference grow up to vote the same way as their parents, this gap translates into lots more little Republicans than little Democrats to vote in future elections. Over the past 30 years this gap has not been below 20%–explaining, to a large extent, the current ineffectiveness of liberal youth voter campaigns today.

This got me to thinking– is it possible that, if we allow for a possibility briefly, that there is, in vague broad strokes, with many exceptions, a Right Wing fascination with the “blue meme” and the “blue/orange meme” and a left wing fascination with the “orange/green” and “green” memes.

If this is something that has some truth to it, in general patterns, certainly with exceptions, could it be that, part of the reason that there is this fertility gap is that left wing people take longer to feel like they are finished “growing up,” as there is a more complex cultural ideal of adult, and therefore they wait longer to have children, and additionally, they may have fewer children, because there is a more complex consciousness project that they must undertake in order to create children who become “fully grown up” (green or more complex).

It reminds me of how elephants take longer to gestate than (most?) any other mammal because they are larger. Perhaps similarly, it takes longer to “gestate” the consciousness of that who would become a “green-meme” left-winger, so there would naturally be a kind of gap that would emerge– it takes less effort and attention to raise a less complex being, so with a scarcity of time that is created, with women not feeling “adult” until their 30’s, and children taking longer to raise, all in service of a more complex emergence of consciousness, we see results such as the above. . .

Via Best Exam Answer Ever.

More here.

Matt Smith, of Shockstone.com, left this thoughtful comment in response to my post on Zbigniew’s views of the Middle East Conflict.

Yes, Hezbollah exists because there is resistance. But perhaps the Necon goal is not to crush it, but to fuel it. Fueling it means more shipments of arms to Israel, more shipments of arms to Isreal means greater corporate profits for the defense industry. General instability in the middle east results in restricted oil supplies, a la Iraq. Restricted oil supplies result in higher Oil Company profits – just take a look at Exxon. Crushing Hezbollah is just a cover story.

I’m not quite willing to be so cynical (though perhaps I should be). I think something else is going on. And the analogy that I’ll make is to a legislative challenge going on in New Zealand right now. There is a parliamentary committee considering repealing a section of the law that currently makes spanking legal. (Americans: read “smacking” as “spanking.”) Bear with me.

Here’s an excerpt from an article in the Sydney Morning Herald by Anna Chalmers and Mathew Torbit.

A New Zealand Christian group urging parents to smack their children, using discipline sessions lasting up to 15 minutes, has been accused of promoting what amounts to child abuse.

Family Integrity has produced a controversial eight-page booklet on how to use physical punishment under the present law.

Parents are told that smacking can be a “10-to-15-minute process” and that if a child reacts angrily, such as by slamming doors or “pouting”, they should be smacked again.

“Smacking is meant to drive the foolishness, the sinful manifestations, out of the child’s personality so that they do not become permanent fixtures,” it says.

Smacking is justified because children younger than age eight “do not think straight” and lack a developed sense of fair play and duty.

The Family Integrity booklet, written by Craig Smith, says the Bible and section 59 of the New Zealand Crimes Act allow parents to use reasonable force to discipline their children.

Family Integrity says it is an informal group of families and individuals independent of any political party or church. The group believes “it is right and wise to bring our children up with loving corporal correction” and is opposed to “unjustifiable government interference” in family life.

Children’s Commissioner Cindy Kiro said Family Integrity’s suggestion of a 10-15-minute discipline session was “completely off the wall”.

“The idea that children are sinful and that they need to be beaten in order to be moral beings is fundamentally wrong.”

The Christian Group is trying to throw it’s weight behind opposing the repeal of a law “Section 59” which makes domestic abuse legal in certain circumstances. It has apparently been used to justify the use of bamboo canes and riding crops in alleged child abuse court cases.

I see a strong parallel in the way that the Israeli leadership and the Bush administration are viewing this conflict: they believe that Hezbollah is evil, and they may drive the evil out of Hezbollah by spanking it out of them.

I really felt like Zbigniew’s view of the current crisis going on in the middle east is spot-on. He apparently had a conversation with Nathan Gardels (posted on The Huffington Post), from which this is an excerpt:

Nathan Gardels: Israel beat the big Arab states in six days of war, but it wasn’t able to defeat Hezbollah after more than a decade of occupation before it withdrew in 2000; and it hasn’t been able to stop missile strikes now after three weeks of intensive air and artillery pounding, plus special operations on the ground. Does that mean Hezbollah has “won” by standing up to Israel, damaging the Israeli deterrent by revealing it is not invincible?

Zbigniew Brzezinski: It is important to recognize that Israel defeated formal armies led in most cases by inefficient and often corrupt regimes. Hezbollah is waging “asymmetrical” warfare against Israel based on increasingly radicalized and even fanaticized mass support. So, yes, Israel will have much more difficulty in coping effectively with this latter in contrast to the former.

Gardels: Over the years, Israeli hardliners like Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu have argued that Israel lives in a “tough neighborhood” where its enemies only listen to force. The American neocons argued the same — that going into Iraq unilaterally would provide “a demonstration effect” of overwhelming U.S. might that would scare the “tough neighborhood” into compliance with U.S. goals.

Hasn’t this turned out to be wrong? Doesn’t military superiority as a blunt instrument lead to eternal enmity, not security? Touring the devastation of towns across southern Lebanon after Sharon’s invasion in 1982, one could predict that something like Hezbollah’s hatred of Israel would emerge years later.

Brzezinski: These neocon prescriptions, of which Israel has its equivalents, are fatal for America and ultimately for Israel. They will totally turn the overwhelming majority of the Middle East’s population against the United States. The lessons of Iraq speak for themselves. Eventually, if neocon policies continue to be pursued, the United States will be expelled from the region and that will be the beginning of the end for Israel as well.

Brzezinski: The new element today is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to separate the Israeli-Palestinian problem, the Iraq problem and Iran from each other. Neither the United States nor Israel has the capacity to impose a unilateral solution in the Middle East. There may be people who deceive themselves into believing that.

The solution can only come in the Israel-Palestinian issue if there is serious international involvement that supports the moderates from both sides, however numerous or few they are, but also creates the situation in which it becomes of greater interest to the warring parties to accommodate than to resist, both because of the incentives and the capacity of the external intervention to impose costs.

While the Iranian nuclear problem is serious, and while the Iranians are marginally involved in Lebanon, the fact of the matter is that the challenge they pose is not imminent. And because it isn’t imminent, there is time to deal with it.

Sometimes in international politics, the better part of wisdom is to defer dangers rather than try to eliminate them altogether instantly. To do that produces intense counter-reactions that are destructive. We have time to deal with Iran, provided the process is launched, dealing with the nuclear energy problem, which can then be extended to involve also security talks about the region.

In the final analysis, Iran is a serious country; it’s not Iraq. It’s going to be there. It’s going to be a player. And in the longer historical term, it has all of the preconditions for a constructive internal evolution if you measure it by rates of literacy, access to higher education and the role of women in society.

The mullahs are part of the past in Iran, not its future. But change in Iran will come through engagement, not through confrontation.

If we pursue these policies, we can perhaps avert the worst. But if we do not, I fear that the region will explode. In the long run, Israel would be in great jeopardy.

I really just don’t get how Israel (and by extension, the US) actually thinks that it can crush Hezbollah so that it no longer exists. It exists because there is resistance. The greater the resistance placed on Hezbollah, the more fighters, resources, and sympathizer Hezbollah will attract. Comparisons between this war and the elimination of the tyranny of the Nazi regime are not apt. There is no end to this madness.

In the long term, the only way out is “up” in the sense of a broadening of concerns beyond the brutishly ethnocentric and martial, but in the near term, this is certainly the worst way to get a good long term result.

Rwanda is implementing an ambitious plan for leapfrogging to become a technological hub in Africa.

Article here, by Xan Rice, in the UK’s Guardian.

It’s an interesting, and potentially inspirational project– 5 young graduates of technology masters programs who studied abroad, in India, France, and South Africa are leading the government efforts.

It will be a fascinating space to watch, and the whole world will be cheering for their success. If it can be done there with the vision of just a handful of visionaries, that speaks well to how quickly we can make rapid changes, if the right people are in charge.

“Rwanda is to some extent doing with technology what Britain did with mechanisation during the industrial revolution,” said Calestous Juma, professor of international development at Harvard University, who believes the plan can serve as an inspiration for Africa.

Donor countries are more cautious. Two-thirds of Rwandans live below the poverty line, half are illiterate and four in five live in rural areas. Aids and the 1994 genocide have created tens of thousands of orphans. Technology is not the main priority, they say.

But government officials insist that not only is their plan viable, but that there is no alternative. As one of Africa’s most densely populated countries, large-scale farming is impossible. There are few valuable minerals or oil deposits. The country is landlocked.

“We are at a huge competitive disadvantage to our neighbours,” Albert Butare, the minister of communications and energy, told the Guardian. “Our people are the one resource we have, and we must develop them.”

Progress has been slower than hoped – only 26% of targets have been met on time so far – but still significant.

When the ICT plan was launched in 2000 only one school in the country had a computer, there was a single internet cafe and a handful of science graduates, and fewer than 100,000 of 8 million people had mobile or fixed-line phones.

Today half of the 2,300 primary schools have at least one computer. There are 30 internet cafes in the leading cities and there will be 30 more in even the most remote rural areas by 2007. Telecoms companies hawk broadband internet for home use. More than 300,000 people have mobiles. If a plan to assemble phones locally, and sell them for the equivalent of £19 with six months to pay, comes to fruition the growth will be even faster.