…please read the comments to this post, which offer some solutions. Also, remember you can post your comments on the Duck Pond, which is back with a vengeance.

Living up to his richly earned reputation as a platitude-regurgitating, self-deluded and absolutely shameless liar, my president made these remarks on the South Lawn of the White House yesterday.

This morning I had a phone call with our ambassador to Iraq. And the ambassador informed me of the progress that the Iraqis are making in forming a unity government. I encouraged the Iraqi leaders to continue to work hard to get this government up and running. The Iraqi people voted for democracy last December; 75 percent of the eligible citizens went to the polls to vote. Now the Iraqi leaders are working together to enact a government that reflects the will of the people. I’m encouraged by the progress. The ambassador was encouraged by it.

I’m sorry. Am I the only one who thinks we deserve a better, more honest assessment than this drivel? Am I the only one who finds it painful to read such meaningless fluff? Many of those who most stridently supported the war conced we are losing and that we are right on the brink of disaster.

Yesterday, in a much-quoted column, conservative George Will, for example, wrote,

[M]ore than any presidency in living memory, George W. Bush’s will be judged by a single problem — Iraq, where on May 30 the war will be twice as long as was U.S. involvement in World War I. Today the impotence of Iraq’s quasi-government is prompting ethnic recleansing: The government is too weak to prevent private groups from pursuing coercive reversals of Saddam Hussein’s various ethnic cleansings. And in the absence of law and order, Iraqis seek safety in sectarian clustering.

As we all know, our first choice for PM in Iraq, Allawi, yesterday said flatly that Iraq is already in a civil war. Will said so, too, in so many words, on TV yesterday. Pro-Bush, anti-Baath blogger Iraq the Model is sounding similarly gloomy nowadays:

Today in Baghdad death crept in silence…

There were no car-bombs, huge explosions or clashes yet more than 80 bodies were found scattered in various districts of the capital and the number is increasing while I’m typing these words. The most disturbing finding is that some of the victims were strangled and others were found hanging from lampposts with the word ‘traitor’ written on the bodies and this makes one think the 4 victims in this particular case were from Sadr city itself because ‘traitor’ is used to describe someone from your own but who turned against you and it makes no sense to use it on strangers.

I think we all get the point. Everyone gets the point. So why are Bush and Rumsfeld parroting the same saccharine phrases about liberation and freedom and peace? How much more of this rubbish can we take before we seriously start considering impeachin our president? At what point does it simply become too much?

Update: This was from last week, but still painfully relevant. Al Sistani, the “moderate” cleric in whom the US has placed all its hope and faith, has called for the slow, painful death of all gays. Your tax dollars at work. Is this what we went to war for? Remember all the talk of a Western-style democracy, a beacon of liberation and tolerance? Anyone still saying that anymore? Conrad? Simon? Sam? FSN9?

When I lived in Hong Kong in 2000-1, air pollution was a sensitive topic. It was getting so bad there was talk of replacing the beautiful photos of the pristing blue skies and gorgeous HK harbour skyline used by the tourist bureau with more realistic renditions to avoid charges of false advertising. Apparently the situation has been going continuously downhill.

“Hong Kong’s lucrative tourism business, its international image and its citizens’ health are at risk from the pollution in this city,” said Edwin Lau, Friends of the Earth Hong Kong coordinator.

“Matters have got to a terrible state in a very quick time,” Lau added, citing an study that found Hong Kong Airport recorded one day of smog-related poor visibility in every 3.5 days last year, up from one in eight in 2002.

Last week smog levels rose to such dangerously high levels that the government was forced to warn people with breathing or heart problems to stay indoors. Visibility also plummeted, blocking out the city’s famous high-rise views and reducing visibility in the busy harbour to less than a kilometer.

The government has said most of the pollution rolls in from mainland China’s heavily industrialised Pearl River delta region, which has seen huge economic growth in the past decade. However, Friends of the Earth Hong Kong and local campaigners Clear the Air say local power producers are also major culprits.

“The pollution is not ‘coming down from China’,” said Annelise Connell, chairperson of Clear The Air, in a statement. “The sulphur dioxide levels are really bad … which shows that our own power plants are involved in regional pollution,” she added.

I remember walking through Causeway Bay on the weekends as scores of idling buses sat there endlessly, emitting bluish-black fumes, and wondering how long it would take for Hong Kong to become another Bangkok or Beijing in terms of air quality. Soundsl ike they’re almost there. (I’ll be in HK myself in about two weeks and will come back with a first-hand report.)

A rather startling claim from Paul Krugman: Bush isn’t really a big spender! Krugman says that meme is a myth created by Republicans who need an excuse to distance themselves from their leader. I think Krugman’s going to face a lot of criticism for this. I mean, the guy did get us into a half-trillion-dollar war and doled out a seemingly endless stream of goodies to defense contractors and the other pigs at the trough, all while slashing the taxes required to pay for the windfall.

Bogus Bush Bashing
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: March 20, 2006

“The single word most frequently associated with George W. Bush today is ‘incompetent,’ and close behind are two other increasingly mentioned descriptors: ‘idiot’ and ‘liar.’ ” So says the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, whose most recent poll found that only 33 percent of the public approves of the job President Bush is doing.

(more…)

Deepest apologies that our 900 posts were zapped – it will never happen again. The new Duck Pond is now open and, as you’ll see, it looks way better than ever. Again, I’m really sorry we have to start over, but I now have the protections in place to keep things stable. That’s the one small consolation I have for all the IT woes of the past two weeks.

Major, major props to the proprietor of this site, who was kind enough to set up the new and improved forum.

It’s too complex and bizarre a story for me to tell you all right now. Let’s just say that yesterday I was all set to shut down this blog for good because I was told all the old files with their comments had been corrupted. Luckily, this blog’s original designer, Sekimori, politely informed me that this was incorrect, and promptly helped me restore things to normal. Unfortunately, the Duck Pond was apparently zapped and I think we’re going to have to start over on that one. All my posts from the past 20 days or so are gone, but I wasn’t posting much anyway so I can deal with that. The thought of my having lost three years of work, with all those links I have out there, gone up in smoke… Suffice it to say I feel as if I’ve been to hell and back this week.

Meanwhile, it looks like I’ve been saved, and the site will survive. And to those who liked the wordpress site that was up for a few days, all I can say is that it wasn’t me. I had no inclination to post there, I felt no inspiration. You have no idea how close I was to pulling the plug on the entire thing.

Sekimori is upgrading this site and putting in the spam controls to keep it going. I can’t thank them enough for their responsiveness and professionalism. I still have the flu and things won’t be back in full swing for a little while longer. I’ll try to get the Duck Pond up and running again soon, but we’ll have to start it from scratch. This site will also have its own comment registration system, so I’m afraid you’ll have to re-register. Meanwhile, I’m trying to figure out how this system works, and it might take a day or two for comments to be back up and running. (Working now.)

Thanks for bearing with me. After a full week of no posting and no activity, I’m proud to say my site traffic is at the lowest level of the past two years. Let’s hope we can build it up again.

We’ve read and talked about China’s angry, űber-patriotic youth before, especially in the light of their uncontrolled fury toward Japan, which blossomed into a front-page intertnational story last April. This massive new article offers a good primer on the topic.

From a tidy apartment crammed with canvases, paintbrushes and his all-important computer, Wang Lei is a foot soldier in the fight for China’s glory.

Online, this soft-spoken art instructor becomes a hard-line patriot. He savages Japan for growing “militarism.” He urges his national leaders to actively confront foes. And he chides the U.S. for its “hostile” policy toward China.

Wang is part of an increasingly influential slice of Chinese society known as the fenqing, or angry youth. Depending on who is talking, the title can mean “striving youth” or “idiotic youth,” underscoring a deepening divide over this unpredictable ingredient in today’s China.

Young activists have a mythic political history in China, from anti-Japanese protesters of 1919 to Red Guard zealots of the Cultural Revolution and democracy advocates who filled Tiananmen Square in 1989. Indeed, these new nationalists–who subvert the stereotype of Chinese youth as a uniformly liberal force–are shaping how leaders tackle sensitive issues.

“Some people think we are just talking about China and Japan’s past,” Wang said of his nationalist writings, “but I try to make people understand that this is about the future.”

The young activists led anti-Japan protests last year that drew thousands into the streets, until authorities, worried the protests could veer into domestic issues, silenced them. This year they became caught up in the government side of censorship, when authorities cited nationalists’ criticism of a liberal essay as a reason to shut down its publisher, one of China’s most outspoken investigative journals.

Equal parts pawns and provocateurs, they have buttressed some hard-line Chinese policies at home and abroad, as leaders seek to defuse domestic tension and define a new global profile. In foreign affairs, China has responded to nationalists by drawing a sharper line against Japan, helping to drag China-Japan relations to the lowest point in years.

But this was my favorite part:

The art professor, Wang, 36, knows the government is wary of group activism, so he vents his politics through his art. For one recent piece, he erected a wooden statue of Japanese Emperor Hirohito and invited Chinese passersby to whip it with a chain. After spending nearly $3,000 on his political pieces, he hopes a gallery will pick up the tab for his dream project: creating bronze statues of Japanese politicians and then melting them with a blowtorch.

“In my analysis Japan is a lot like Germany before World War II, so we must oppose that,” he said. “Otherwise Japan could engage other countries and start a war. This is very dangerous.”

And this guy is a profesor. No wonder so many emerge from the school system brainwashed and crazed. At least on the topic of Japan.

Via CDT.

…and I were anywhere in the vicinity of this woman when she did what she did, I’d seriously have considered shooting her. Well, maybe not shooting her to death, but just wounding her, enough so that it really hurt. [WARNING: Extremely graphic, disturbing and disgusting.] This is from ESWN, who points out the site is blocked in China, and writes,

Is that good or bad [the blocking of the site]? A further question: If I host this on my website, it will probably get hundreds of thousands of hits per day. But what is the purpose (beyond accumulating hits)? Well, I have decided that I don’t want those hits. How about you? Do you want to host these photographs if you know that you can get hundreds of thousand of hits?)

Well, I won’t host this slime on my site either, despite the potential site traffic. But just because there are fools and monsters on this planet posting sickening stuff doesn’t mean censorship is a good thing. The CCP won’t let you see these revolting pictures, but they won’t let you see the BBC, either.