I’m watching the carnage live on the BBC. All British targets, five separate explosions, at least one caused by the usual car packed with explosives and driven by a suicide driver, Al Qaeda-style….

So where are we going with the War on Terror — down the same road we travelled with the War on Drugs? Is it another great big black hole? How can we really “win” when the enemy is so eager to sacrifice his own life?

I don’t mean to sound hopeless, but looking at the chaos and the death right now, I don’t see how we can cause a tectonic shift in the mindset of the monsters who are willing to do this sort of thing.

Update: My god, they just showed amatuer video footage, someone taping his/her family just as the explosion at the HSBC is about to go off — incredible. Such horror.

I don’t often write about or even allude to sports in my blog. In fact, I never do. But this article on how sports writers make a whole lot of idiotic noise about nothing in regard to steroid abuse is one of the funniest (in the very darkest of ways), best-written, intelligent pieces I’ve seen in a long time. The idiocy all goes back to one event, the writer contends: the death of Len Bias.

Len Bias would have been 40 years old in November had he not celebrated by putting the Cali Cartel up his nose on the very night in 1986 that he’d been drafted by the defending champion Boston Celtics. The tragedy was put to immediate use by a bipartisan passel of opportunistic hysterics led by then-Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, who demanded a tough new law to placate the angry and mournful Celtics fans among his constituents. (You think I made that part up? Dan Baum limns the whoopin’ and hollerin’ splendidly in his history of the drug wars, Smoke and Mirrors.)

That October, President Ronald Reagan signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which was sort of the drug war’s Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and which visited upon ourselves a whole number of really fine ideas, including the mandatory minimum sentences so beloved these days by so many judges. Of course, we learned almost nothing from the whole Bias saga and certainly nothing about the perils of making policy by letting the hottest heads prevail.

It gets much funnier. Link via Andrew Sullivan, who also never writes about sports.

There’s not much I can add to this. It sounds too depressing to be true:

A retired worker from Shanghai will be tried on subversion charges for publishing Internet articles promoting democracy in China, a human rights organisation said yesterday.

One of 61-year-old Sang Jiancheng’s articles appealed to the Communist Party to protect the interests of retired workers and said corrupt officials needed to be eliminated from the system, the Hong Kong-based Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy said.

This kind of thing, like the arrest of “stainless steel butterfly” Liu Di, is self-destructive. It does little to enhance the image of the New China the CCP is striving for, an image of a more enlightened, fairer and reform-minded country.

That sure didn’t take long. Already, yesterday’s ruling in Massachusetts seems poised to bring change to my home state. If only Barry Goldwater (a true liberal on this subject) could be here to see it.

UPDATE: Sullivan has updated his site since I posted this. He addressed the point I was trying to make, and I give him credit for it.

I’m not sure if it’s propoer blog etiquette, but I’m deleting my post. I don’t want there to be any misunderstandings.

How ironic, that as China is doing everything it can to break free of the curse that Mao imposed on it, Hu is now planning a Mao-a-thon of truly epic proportions:

There can be nothing more incongruous in fast-modernizing China than a gargantuan effort to celebrate Chairman Mao Zedong, famous for his self-sufficient, ultra-conservative theories.

Right after it has put a man in orbit and signaled large-scale privatization of state enterprises, however, the administration of President Hu Jintao is readying marathon festivities to mark the Great Helmsman’s 110th birthday next month.

Aside from galas, lectures and conferences, there are plans to launch commemorative stamps, TV and film shows as well as revolutionary opera performances.

The article suggests, however, that this burst of Mao worship is inspired less by Hu’s love of the Great Helmsman than by a will to assert his own leadership, and to step out of Jiang Zemin’s shadow:

While neither Hu nor Wen will roll back China’s open-door policy or quasi-capitalistic practices, their apparent championship of Mao’s serve-the-masses philosophy will serve to pacify sectors such as the unemployed which have suffered setbacks due to the country’s embrace of the marketplace.

For Hu, a cunning refurling of Maoist standards has the extra effect of putting ex-president Jiang in his place.

In a variant of the time-tested ploy called “hoisting the red flag to counter another red flag,” Hu has used the Helmsman’s “be close to the masses” dictums to marginalize Jiang’s much-ballyhooed Theory of the Three Represents (that the party represents the most advanced productivity and culture as well as the masses’ interests.)

So there’s to be no end in sight to the ongoing lovefest over the long-dead Chairman. It’s going to be a big chapter in my book, this anomaly, this need we have for heroes, and how, in the absence of such heroes, we cling to old myths even though we know they are myths.

I just started reading Jasper Becker’s book The Chinese, which begins by sifting through the damage caused by Mao in the countryside, the catastrophe Mao meant for so many of China’s poor, and it is so heartbreaking. After reading just the first 50 pages, I can only wonder how the Chinese can bear to see Mao’s face anywhere, let alone everywhere. And this reminds me of how different my own mind works; I can talk with my Chinese friends, I can spend time with them, but I cannot think as they think, I can’t get inside and know how they process Mao’s image, what they feel when they see it…. It’s one of the things I am determined to understand before I pack up and go home to America.

The lead story of today’s ST tells us the local economy has “soared 17.3 percent” over the last quarter, exactly as our wise and magnanimous leaders told us it would:

SINGAPORE’S third-quarter economic figures more than lived up to the hints given earlier by Deputy Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. In fact, they showed the fastest growth in eight years.

The July-to-September quarter posted a blistering 17.3 per cent expansion compared to the quarter before – definitely ‘not bad’ – the tantalising description used by Mr Lee before yesterday’s figures were announced.

The rah-rah feel-good wording that permeates the article brought back my memories of China Daily, where the good shepherds always knew what would happen, and their predictions always came true. And the news was always suffocatingly cheerful.

This is a very, very bad time in Singapore. It is the topic of just about every conversation. It was just announced, for example, that new teachers’ salaries are being cut, and retrenchment is still the word of the day.

I speak not just as an observer, but as an active participant in the Singapore business world. This is about as tough as anyone here can remember, and no one seems to believe it is going away anytime soon. Unlike Hong Kong, Singapore has no China to pull it up from the quicksand.

On the surface, the city is functioning just fine. But it will take more than rosy headlines and cheerful chirping about how great things are before Singapore snaps out of its deep funk. Maybe things really did “soar” last quarter. But if so, it made little difference to the man on the street. The best we can say right now is that retrenchment levels have stabilized, and fewer workers are being laid off than before. In other words, things are less bad, but they are no where near being good yet.

I don’t like Bush, but to see the Mayor of London Ken Livingstone referring to him as “the greatest living threat to life on the planet” makes me cringe with embarrassment.

Livingstone throws so many idiotic charges at Bush that he damages the cause of those who want to see Bush unelected. He damages our own credibility by justifying all those complaints out there about irrational Bush hatred.

Livingstone rants against Bush in regard to genetically modified foods (another topic on which many in Europe appear to be deranged), Bush’s stealing the last election, and the evil “American agenda.” There are some kernels of truth in his rant, but by foaming at the mouth like this, Livingstone makes a total ass of himself.

If we want to see Bush deposed unelected, this is exactly the type of brainless, self-destructive tact we need to avoid.

I am going to presume that Hailey Xie is a young Chinese blogger who most likely lives not too far from Beijing. Her recent post on the 21-year-old AIDS activist who’s been accompanying Bill Clinton is a beautiful display of tolerance and compassion.

I am not sure why she writes in English and not Chinese; whatever the reason, I am grateful for it.

A friend sent me an email pointing out a post that she recently wrote about my own site, and I have to say she is one perceptive lady.

Please check out her site, not for what she says about me (although it’s fine if you read that, too) but to see what is going on in the life and in the mind of a young Chinese citizen experiencing life in the PRC during these amazing times. Whatever you do, don’t miss the post on AIDS.

[To read a complete interview with Liu Di, go here.]

]Liu Di, the 23-year-old student whose arrest as a cyber-dissident in China has showered the CCP with bad publicity, appears on the verge of release:

A 23-year-old “cyber dissident” detained last year for criticising the Chinese government may be released soon, family members say.

Four officials from the Beijing Public Security Bureau visited Liu Di’s home last week to convey the news, her grandmother said on Monday.

Liu Di, a former psychology major at Beijing Normal University who wrote under the screen name “Stainless Steel Mouse”, became a high-profile symbol for democracy and free speech in China since her detention in November 2002.

Liu’s case comes during a crackdown on Internet content — from politics to pornography — and as the government struggles to gain control over a new and popular medium.

Liu’s heinous crimes were satirizing the CCP online and calling for the release of other “cyber-dissidents.” Her arrest was simply too indefensible, and it ignited a flurry of worldwide media protest.

Such pressure apparently works. There are many others serving hard time for similar crimes against the state, some hit with sentences up to 10 years. Each and every one should be let go, and the international media should not muffle its outcry now that the most famous one appears to be going free.

Update, from the BBC —

It was unclear whether her [Liu Di’s] release would have any bearing on other people arrested at the same time for posting critical material on the internet.

China’s authorities have been keen to promote the commercial potential of the internet, but are anxious to control its political content.

The campaign group Reporters Without Borders estimates that China employs 30,000 people to watch what its people are doing online.

UPDATE: She is free!