Those Islamists and their apologists who argue for “religious toleration” are arrogantly dishonest. They ignore the fact that more than 100 mosques already exist in New York City. Meanwhile, there are no churches or synagogues in all of Saudi Arabia. In fact no Christian or Jew can even enter Mecca.

And they lecture us about tolerance.

First, Gingrich’s use of ‘Islamists and their apologists’ here is what’s truly arrogantly dishonest. Come on Newt. You know you wanted to say ‘liberals’.

Secondly, and more importantly, I find the comparison with Saudi Arabia here baffling. Conservatives are always saying how exceptional the US is, yet here a one of the movement’s prominent voices seems to argue that if the House of Saud refuses to allow religious toleration, then we should by extension follow suit. Whatever happened to the idea of rising above the standards set by countries that we quite rightly think of as backward?

To me, that the mosque has stirred up comparatively little outrage is a sign of the health of the American spirit nine years after 9/11- most people just don’t care and simply will carry on living their lives. Only demagogues like Gingrich- representing the vanguard of conservative ‘thinking’ on religion and politics- are truly out of line here.

Finally, I’ve made it. I can say with certainty that Laos is worth the wait.

First, a little backstory as Laos is still fairly obscure to most Western readers. Laos is a small, landlocked, largely agrarian country on mainland Southeast Asian and was for many years the backwater of French-controlled Indochina. Like its neighbors Cambodia and Vietnam, Laos received its independence in the 1950s from the French but soon thereafter became embroiled in the American war in Indochina. As part of the so-called ‘Ho Chi Minh trail’, Laos was the recipient of a secret bombing campaign ordered by the Nixon administration intending to disrupt supply routes to North Vietnam. To this day, no country on earth has been bombed as much as Laos, and unexploded ordnance still dots much of the eastern part of the country.

Like Vietnam, Laos came under full Communist rule in the mid 1970s and remains a Communist state today. At many monuments I’ve seen signs and plaques pointedly referencing Laos’ friendship with other socialist states, such as its principal benefactor China.

Today, Laos is perhaps the least developed and poorest country in all of East Asia. There are no skyscrapers, modern highways, railroads, or much modern infrastructure anywhere in the entire country. Much of the population still lives in thatched-roof huts in the countryside, practicing subsistence farming. Lao cities are full of crumbling buildings left over from the French colonial days, and the evidence of Chinese investment remains scant.

The Lao people are gentle and kind- even the panhandlers smile and walk away when you reject their advances. Much of the population seems to siesta for about four or five hours a day, a practice that I’ve adopted myself. 

Luang Prabang, where I sit now, is a beautiful colonial town on the banks of the Mekong and one of the most charming places I’ve ever been to in all of Asia. The poverty and lack of development perhaps have not stopped this city from having some of the finest restaurants I’ve been to on the continent, all within a reasonable backpacker’s budget. Two days ago I visited a waterfall park full of Lao and foreign people and encountered a mixed group playing bocce ball together.

That, to me, is what makes this place so nice. Laos seems to have adjusted to tourism better than any of its neighbors by far, and the Lao people seem unperterbed by the masses of large, big-nosed pale-skinned foreigners who descend on their country year after year. If anything, they’re proud and welcoming. And judging by the beauty of their landscape, there’s much to be proud of.  

Granted, Laos ranks very low on most human development indeces, and poverty here remains rife. However, there is a certain immeasureable quality to the life here, one that I suspect will entice travelers, such as this one, to wish to come back.

I have it on good authority that the Chinese government did not deny Bob Dylan permission to play in China. It was the Taiwanese promoter’s outlandish financial requests that made the tour unrealistic.

If there’s anyone I know of who would be in position to know this thing, it’s Zach, so this could well be the case. If so, I’d like to issue a hearty apology to the culture warriors at Zhongnanhai for my insinuation that they were behind this travesty. Who knows? Maybe Hu Jintao was more of a Beatles guy than a Dylan fan.

For all the time I’ve been in China, this is only the second time I haven’t left town for the holiday. During my first two years as a grossly overpaid English teacher living in cold climates, I took the opportunity to leave China for the sunny beaches of Southeast Asia. Last year I hopped on my bicycle and zoomed off the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau for the balmy border town of Hekou. This year, for various reasons, I’ve decided to stay in Kunming.

What has struck me most about the Spring Festival is how, well, dull it is. The explosives seem more suited to breaking up the dull monotony of the holiday rather than actual expressions of joy. With almost all shops, restaurants, and businesses closed most people have little to do but sit around with the family, eating and watching television.

Yet that alone, in China, surely means something. Watching television with the family may sound tedious, but not when you haven’t seen your family for a year or more. A vast number of Chinese live far from their familial homes, and Spring Festival is often the only chance they have to go home. Lest anyone doubt that this is a powerful desire, consider the millions of people traveling in hard-seat class for three days cross-country in an effort to spend just a handful of days at home.

So perhaps Spring Festival isn’t dull at all; merely that the action normally played out on China’s bustling streets, shops, and factories now occurs inside family homes and apartments.

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The other day I met a guy who announced that he had gotten married just two days earlier. “Just before the new year!”, I said, at which point his wife said, “Thank god!”. Apparently there was a surge of weddings in the weeks and months preceding the turn of the year, as Chinese superstition holds that marriages begun in the year of the tiger are doomed. For a country of such pragmatic, atheistic people the Chinese propensity for superstition is staggering.

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What will the year of the tiger bring in China’s relations with the outside world? Already there are signs that Beijing has taken a more confrontational turn; witness the indignant reaction to President Obama’s visit with the Dalai Lama, hints of currency manipulation, and other supposed slights. There are also signs that the Communist Party-engineered police state have ratcheted things up a notch recently with the detention of dissidents and censorship of the Internet.

Rather than a sign of some newfound arrogance on China’s part, I’d say a likelier scenario is that any brinkmanship is designed primarily for domestic political purposes. Beijing is surely concerned that rising income inequality, environmental degradation, and other issues might arouse domestic grievances, and uniting the country through an emphasis on foreign policy is one way to diffuse discontent.

1. Michael Jackson (musician)
2. Barack Obama (politician)
3. Eminem (musician)
4. Lil Wayne (musician)
5. Adolf Hitler (er, politician?)
6. Rihanna (musician)
7. Abraham Lincoln (politician)
8. Lady Gaga (musician)
9. Megan Fox (actress)
10. Martin Luther King (activist)

Odd bedfellows, no?

Further down I don’t know whether it’s good or bad that the porn star Sasha Gray is slotted between Josef Stalin and Prince. And ranked no. 200? Tiger Woods. Something tells me that’s going to change…

I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.
Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not.
So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things.
What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.

And all music is.

Amen.

(via Andrew Sullivan)

Under recommended sites I have added a handful of new blogs I have recently discovered and have discarded a few that are no longer active. There are also sites that while not technically blogs are still useful for the curious reader.

As flattered as I am to have such a well-informed and interesting readership, please do not limit yourself to this site- each of the ones on the right are well worth your perusal.

And yes, I am well aware that a makeover for this site is greatly overdue. The simple aesthetic appealed to me upon this site’s launch in 2007 but now seems about as attractive as empty walls at an art gallery. When time allows I’ll spruce this place up a bit in order to add a bit of style to the substance.

To those too lazy to click on the link, here are my thoughts. Yes, air pollution in China is bad. I notice how clean the air is whenever I go back to the San Francisco Bay Area, where I’m from. Visiting my sister and her family in the Seattle area feels like stepping into a pine forest. I spent 12 hours in Beijing due to a delayed flight in June, and the few minutes I spent outside were absolutely ghastly.

With health, though, it pays to look at the big picture. Casting aside air pollution, living a healthy life in China isn’t as difficult as it seems.

Consider food. Within a ten minute walk from my apartment I have access to fresh vegetable and produce markets, meat markets, and several restaurants that serve freshly cooked food at affordable prices. Unlike in America, it isn’t expensive to eat well in China. With a little more effort and motivation, one could quite easily avoid processed foods altogether. The phenomenon of obesity in China only occurred after the sudden arrival of processed, Western food options such as KFC.

Secondly, the Chinese have invested heavily in promoting public transportation as well as bicycle commuting. In Kunming virtually all major roads have wide lanes for bicycles, and only the annoying habit of Chinese drivers of occupying the lanes during traffic jams disrputs the flow of bicycle traffic in the city. I accomplish mundane tasks like eating and shopping with a bicycle and a backpack rather than a car and a trunk. Healthy!

Basically, for all the talk about pollution health mainly revolves around personal choices. A person who smokes, drinks heavily, eats badly, and doesn’t exercise while living in a place like Sweden or Canada will not be as healthy as the person who avoids smoking, drinks moderately, exercises, and eats well in Taiyuan, Shanxi Province.

Buruma begins the editorial by describing Hu Jintao as a ‘dull’ leader and how, in the context of recent Chinese history, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. He then says that while Hu’s policies may be less harmful than those of Mao, their benefits extend only to a certain class:

This is not the story one might hear from unemployed workers in the rust belts of northeastern China, or from rioting farmers in Guangdong province who have been pushed off the land by greedy developers working in tandem with corrupt party officials. Nor is this view necessarily shared by the brave lawyers willing to take on some of those corrupt officials, or intellectual dissidents who still get arrested for arguing that Chinese should be entitled to basic democratic rights.

But it is the common line taken by people who benefit most from the current wave of fun, fashion and prosperity — the new urban elite, some of whom are pampered children of Communist Party bosses.

Nobody denies that there are several thousand incidents of unrest each year in China, all of which successfully are quashed by the government. Yet to say that only the ‘urban elite’ have benefited from recent Communist Party policies is absurd.

First of all, the numbers of ‘urban elite’ within China has skyrocketed over the past thirty years precisely because of post-Mao economic policies. By conservative estimates nearly 400 million Chinese people have escaped poverty since 1978, and while not all of them have become prosperous city-dwellers a not insignificant sum of them have climbed up the prosperity ladder.

Secondly, while I’m aware that there is a bit of nostalgia every now and then for the Maoist period, few members of China’s rural population would swap their life under the current leadership for the tumultuous days of the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Bear in mind that in the 1950s China’s rural population endured a famine that felled between 30 and 60 million people, the consequence of a misguided economic policy pushed through by Chairman Mao. The Cultural Revolution was hardly better- the numbers of lives ruined by Mao’s crazy schemes cannot be quantified.

Buruma then compares China’s autocracy unfavorably to India’s democracy but fails to make any points associated with economic development. Oddly, he focuses his criticism on the Communist Party on disaster management with the reponse to the Sichuan earthquake as his prime example. By the way, I was in China for the earthquake, and nearly every Chinese person I spoke to about it praised the central government for its response. But I digress.

Even assuming that Buruma’s point about the government’s slow response to the earthquake were true, it still doesn’t have much to do with overall economic development. How about the timely and effective implementation of the economic stimulus package and other development measures? Surely the absence of a parliamentary opposition expedited this piece of vital legislature, no?

I’m hardly an apologist for the CCP. I reject the commonly voiced argument that the Chinese people aren’t ready for media freedom, or elections, or other liberal reforms. There’s a good argument to be made that the Communist Party isn’t the best government for China at present. Buruma just doesn’t make it.