for a moment this good time would never end; you and me, you and me

“Free Tibet” flags made in China (BBC)

Police in southern China have discovered a factory manufacturing Free Tibet flags, media reports say.

The factory in Guangdong had been completing overseas orders for the flag of the Tibetan government-in-exile.

Workers said they thought they were just making colourful flags and did not realise their meaning.

But then some of them saw TV images of protesters holding the emblem and they alerted the authorities, according to Hong Kong’s Ming Pao newspaper.

I never limit myself to one meaning when I can encompass two or more, so take away the following from this story:

1. Globalization commands a lot of power;
   
2. You can find irony anywhere if you know where to look, and;
   
3. Propaganda permeates the civilized mind in ways outsiders can’t comprehend. The police didn’t uproot this factory in an undercover sting - workers voluntarily turned themselves and their employer in. Tibet never did anything to harm these guys, but they so thoroughly believe the Chinese government’s gospel of Tibet As Guerilla Radical that they went out of their way to make the State’s job easier. Fortunately, in the free and enlightened West we don’t have that problem.

Speaking of, how goes the campaign to nuke Iran, Senator Clinton?

Got it - thanks!

Meanwhile, black males took a bump down to Junior-Level Citizenship in New York on Monday, when three NYPD detectives were acquitted of killing an unarmed black man whom they “feared” might be threatening them. Fifty shots it took, which places the 18- to 35-year-old Black Male somewhere between a charging African Rhino and Wolverine of the X-Men in the Scared White Guy Hierarchy of Indestructability. Remember, black people: you don’t have an inherent right to life as such while in the city of New York. You exist on the sufferance of every paranoid cop.

Kai Wright talks a little more about the Sean Bell shooting here, and also sheds some light on the mystery of New York’s falling crime rate over the last decade. If you believe that Giuliani’s “broken windows” theory of Better Living through Petty Harassment reeks of bullshit - as I always have - then the drop in crime looks like a mystery. But Wright points out the following:

[B]lacks accounted for 66 percent of those killed by New York City police between 2000 and 2007 (New York is a perennial leader in police fatalities, averaging 12 a year over those years). And while the violent crime rate plunged to historically low levels in that time period, the number of people killed by police has not budged—indeed, the number of cop bullets fired has skyrocketed. And it’s happened with impunity. Out of 88 fatal shootings, including at least 12 in which victims were unarmed, in only one instance was an officer convicted of criminal wrongdoing.

So Giuliani didn’t reduce violence so much as outsource it to the NYPD. Juking the numbers, if you will.

In other news, rice continues to get more expensive - and more scarce, which really means the same thing - all around the world. Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution offers his take on why in the New York Times:

The damage that trade restrictions cause is probably most evident in the case of rice. Although rice is the major foodstuff for about half of the world, it is highly protected and regulated. Only about 5 to 7 percent of the world’s rice production is traded across borders; that’s unusually low for an agricultural commodity.

So when the price goes up — indeed, many varieties of rice have roughly doubled in price since 2007 — this highly segmented market means that the trade in rice doesn’t flow to the places of highest demand.

Poor rice yields are not the major problem. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that global rice production increased by 1 percent last year and says that it is expected to increase 1.8 percent this year. That’s not impressive, but it shouldn’t cause starvation.

The more telling figure is that over the next year, international trade in rice is expected to decline more than 3 percent, when it should be expanding. The decline is attributable mainly to recent restrictions on rice exports in rice-producing countries like India, Indonesia, Vietnam, China, Cambodia and Egypt.

Tariffs and export restrictions choke off valuable goods and services. You can’t call arguments for free trade a trivial academic debate anymore, like whether a country profits more from cheaper cars or more domestic jobs. Open trade across borders will save the Third World from starvation. Fortunately, in the free and enlightened West we don’t have that problem.

Speaking of, how goes the effort to dismantle NAFTA, Senator Obama?

Got it - thanks!

As continuing proof of the ancient assertion that no one has ever drafted a law so noble that it can’t be misused, local British councils have started using surveillance cameras to nab litterers and dogs shitting in public. And a student who photographed some cops ticketing other civilians earned himself a $628 ticket for “sitting on a park ledge.”

Finally, on a somewhat upbeat note, Clay Shirky (author of Here Comes Everybody) talks about the growing wealth of a globalizing economy, the surplus of free time that results, and how we spend that time:

I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus–”How should we characterize this change in Pluto’s status?” And a little bit at a time they move the article–fighting offstage all the while–from, “Pluto is the ninth planet,” to “Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system.”

So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, “Okay, we’re going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever.” That wasn’t her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn’t know what to do with it at first–hence the gin, hence the sitcoms. Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, then it wouldn’t be a surplus, would it? It’s precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society.

I have always measured wealth in units of Time I Can Spend Doing What Makes Me Happy. It pleases me to see that that calculation works on a social level as well.

don’t worry, be happy was the number one jam

Sorry to disagree with you, everyone on the Internet, but I wasn’t impressed with Barack Obama’s big speech on Tuesday.

Obama took the pulpit today to denounce some speeches made by his pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, over the last six years. Apparently, Rev. Wright suggested that “the United States brought the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on itself and say blacks continue to be mistreated by whites.”

Here we have a problem with proper nouns. The “United States” can refer to a number of different things. It can refer to:

1. a particular region of land defined on a map;
   
2. the people living within its borders - you, me, that guy sitting next to you, the people on the street, etc;
   
3. a set of shared historical and cultural ideals - truth, justice, the American way, democracy, etc;
   
4. the policy of the governing body that claims a monopoly of force over the aforementioned region - the laws passed by Congress, the actions ordered by the President and the movement of armed forces carrying the U.S. flag.

Osama bin Laden had a particular grievance with the United States (4), in the presence of troops in Saudi Arabia and Somalia. Because of his radical religious beliefs, he also has issues with the United States (3). So he recruited a number of sleeper agents to infiltrate the United States (1) and carry out attacks on the United States (2).

The outrage comes because citizens of the United States (2) tend to connect, implicitly or openly, the ideals of the United States (3) with its actions abroad (4). They also identify strongly with those actions in their own selves (2), seeing them as a reflection of their democratic voice. However, #1, 2, 3 and 4 are entirely different entities which can - and usually do - contradict. Witness Bush declaring, “We do not torture.” Witness leftists declaring, “Bush is not our President.” To believe either of those statements, you have to ignore - or even worse, embrace - the contradictions between the U.S.’s citizens, culture and elected officials.

So it is with the Rev. Wright’s statement. To believe that the U.S. brought the attacks of September 11th “on itself,” you have to believe that #2, #3 and #4 are one and the same - that every action the U.S. takes abroad, from funding anti-Sandinista rebels in Nicaragua to bombing Cambodia to sending CIA agents to Cuba to firebombing Dresden to occupying the Philippines - reflects the will and culture of the people living in Delacroix, Denver and Des Moines. You call yourself a U.S. citizen so, apparently, every dead Iraqi baby is all your fault. Oops.

To reject the Reverend’s notion, you have to reject the idea that democracy does what it says on the tin - that it creates a government responsive to the explicit desires of the civilians it governs. Sometimes people who ran in open elections start secret wars. Sometimes the U.S. lends its name to torturers and thugs. But if you accept that you are ruled by forces out of your control, it’s not an issue.

One or the other. Take your pick.

Obama, of course, doesn’t take his pick. He doesn’t cling to the balm of the democratic process and say that yes, you voted for Nixon and Carter and Reagan and Bush and Clinton and Bush again, and therefore those dead Vietnamese and Cambodians and Laotians and Grenadians and Iraqis are on your head. And of course he doesn’t say, “Sure, vote for whoever makes you feel good, but the U.S. will continue to conduct extraordinary renditions and cover operations and bombing campaigns all over the world.”

Rather, he embraces the contradiction. He says that the Reverend Wright’s comments are “not only wrong but divisive.” Really? Not only wrong but divisive? Being wrong isn’t sufficient? If the Reverend’s comments were right but divisive, would you object? If they were wrong but unifying, would you stay silent? Is divisiveness not an inherently wrong thing, such that you have to call it out?

You can accuse me of nitpicking over word choice, but if I have to accept this man on the quality of his rhetoric - as so many other people are - then I’m going to take my time double-checking it. Barack Obama said that the Reverend Wright’s statements about America are wrong. He doesn’t say in what way. Barack Obama said that the Reverend Wright’s statements about race were divisive. He doesn’t say what would unify. Barack Obama takes the controversial maverick stance of saying, “I disagree with this person you don’t like,” puts a little more wear on some platitudes about investing in schools and rebuilding the economy, and people get giddy!

Update: Yes, I read the part about “binding our particular grievances to the larger aspirations of all Americans.” And about “providing this generation with ladders of opportunity.” What do those words mean?

Reverend Wright may be wrong. That doesn’t make Barack Obama right.