Category Archives for Hyper-Essay

» HOW I LIVED MY LIFE IN THE YEAR 2010: Ran Yunfei (冉云飞)

Earlier I posted about outspoken Chinese writer Ran Yunfei (冉云飞), who was detained by police for “suspicion of subversion” earlier this month in Chengdu, in Sichuan Province. In recent weeks, spooked by the seemingly sudden revolts in the Middle East and North Africa, the Chinese government has rounded up, detained and arrested hundreds of activists and “subversives.”

In the previous LOUDCANARY post, I reprinted a piece by Ran Yunfei, “Where Will the Fear End? A Talk that Could Not Be Delivered,” and in this one I’m posting a translation of another, more recent of Ran’s pieces, “How I Lived My Life in 2010.”

How I Lived My Life in the Year 2010
by Ran Yunfei (冉云飞)

I have the habit of writing a diary and a blog every day. It is how I record everything and practice my writing. What I write on my blog isn’t just for my own benefit. I also hope that it can also help society in some small way. I have no great political ambitions, my attitude towards politics is that of Mr. Hu Shi — “I don’t have any interest in being interested in politics.” I don’t have any moral scruples against getting involved in politics. I am just not interested in it personally. I don’t believe that politics is dirtier than other fields of human endeavor, assuming that the political system is a fairly good one.

In other words, what I like best is to read books, write, travel, drink wine, and enjoying myself — as I said once in an interview with a Danish television station, what I really want to be doing is not criticizing the government. In a free country I would happily spend my life in the library doing research. But I live in a country where I cannot in good conscience merely live such a a life. I feel that I have no alternative. I have to voice my criticisms of our messed up social reality. Otherwise I would be uneasy. I would not be able to sleep well. I would feel that I was not paying my dues.

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» ART & FREEDOMS: Half a Day with Chinese People’s Historian Liao Yiwu (廖亦武)

[This is a continuation of my post, "The Corpse Walker: Liao Yiwu's Notes from China's Underclass" To read my long-form profile of Liao, “Drift to Live,” click here. To read recent (July 2011) updates about Liao’s departure from China and his subsequent asylum in Germany, click here.]

Excerpts from “Massacre” (by Liao Yiwu, translated by Wen Huang)

Dedicated to those who were killed on June 4, 1989 in and around Tiananmen Square in Beijing.

A massacre is happening
In this nation of Utopia
Where the Prime Minister catches a cold
The masses have to sneeze to follow
Martial law is declared and enforced
The aging toothless state machine is rolling over
Those who dare to resist and refuse to sneeze
Fallen by the thousands are the barehanded and unarmed
Armored assassins are swimming in blood
Setting fire to houses with windows and doors locked
Polish your military boots with the skirt of a slain girl
Boot owners don’t even tremble
Robots without hearts never tremble
Their brain is programmed with one process
A flawed command
Represent the nation to dismember the constitution
Represent the constitution to slaughter justice…

Liao Yiwu, 2010. Photo by Brian Awehali

[Earlier this year] we joined Liao and two writer friends he’d shared imprisonment with for tea. Liao was sturdy and bald, his skin ruddy with black rimmed glasses, wore flowing linen pants and navy flip flops which displayed several blackened toenails, and he walked with a limp. I’ll call the other two PB and RG: PB, who said he had eaten much more bitterness in his life than Liao and suffered much more greatly than him, had a typical black bowl cut, glasses, pasty white skin and a shirt tucked into a belt that said “Playboy” on it over the bunny icon. He said that he wrote about his stories of being in prison every day, and that altogether he had been in for seven years. The other one, RG, who said that it was hard to describe what he writes about, had longer hair down to his ears, was pudgy with rimless glasses and wore a plaid shirt. Of the three, RG smiled the most and spoke the least.

We talked about things like Twitter in China. You can say a lot more in 120 Chinese characters than you can in 120 English characters, and Twitter is used for more overtly political purposes in China, to get around the Great Firewall, and less for inane things about where someone’s eating or what someone’s wearing. We also talked about the difficulties of publishing in China. PB had written many stories about his prison experiences, but was resigned to just sharing them with friends and family because he didn’t think he would ever find a publisher; Liao is only published by overseas presses.

At one point Liao said that Chinese view the government as the police. When I asked about Chinese anarchists, Liao replied that all smart Chinese were anarchists (“no government people”) because the government just took their money and land and enforced rules and laws. They were just the police, and didn’t care if the people were hungry or not. I asked about this because I was just then reading Yale Agrarian Studies professor James C. Scott’s excellent book, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland East Asia, which details how between 80 and 100 million people in East Asia fled the Han Chinese state and took to the hills (“shatter zones”) to be self-determining over the past few centuries. This includes Tibetans, the Wa, the Kachin, the Lahu and a staggering range of other East Asian “hill peoples.” I’m not positive, but given our linguistic challenges, Liao was probably characterizing “smart Chinese” as more anti-authoritarian than anarchist, but was nonetheless making a deeper point about power than can be got at by conceiving of things in terms of so-called “capitalism” or “communism.”

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» THE CORPSE WALKER: Conversations with China’s Lower Strata

This is the first of several posts on LOUDCANARY about Liao Yiwu. To read my long-form profile of Liao, “Drift to Live,” click here. To read recent (July 2011) updates about Liao’s departure from China and his subsequent asylum in Germany, click here. 

When we arrived by cab at the train station, as instructed, Liao Yiwu (廖亦武) met us in a black car driven by a friend and took us to a riverside tea house, where several of his friends were already drinking tea and eating fried Sichuan peppers. We talked for hours, then ate and drank for several more before the musical instruments came out…

Liao Yiwu may be China’s most important literary figure, and not because of anything he says, but because of the people whose stories he collects, and the vivid history he chronicles in a country seemingly so eager to forget its past. Many college students do not know about the June 4 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, to take one prime example of this willful (and highly orchestrated) amnesiac tendency. In his work, Liao focuses on the diceng (底层）or “bottom rung of society,” a concept hated by both supporters of Mao’s “communist” revolution and the current PRC, as well as by many Chinese people for whom the concept of “face” (mianzi, or 面子) — looking good and having status and, in this case, not making China look bad to the laowai (老外, or foreigners) — is all-important. In an only theoretically classless society, people are reluctant to speak of beggars, thieves, drug addicts or those in poverty, even if their presence is glaringly obvious.

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» TRICKIER DICK DEPARTS: An Obituary for Dick Cheney

The obituaries of most famous public figures are written well before the figure’s actual death, and there are surely hundreds or thousands of Richard Bruce “Dick” Cheney folders in the files of obituarists around the world, just waiting for their appointed hour. Upon hearing about Cheney’s most recent heart attack, and the news that Halliburton is at least partially responsible for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and will also likely profit from clean-up operations, I just grew impatient…

Richard Bruce “Dick” Cheney
January 30, 1941- 2010

“Principle is OK up to a certain point, but principle doesn’t do you any good if you lose,” Richard Bruce “Dick” Cheney, first appointed to office by Richard Nixon, told journalist Tim Russert in 1976. And it could be argued that until his final heart attack late yesterday afternoon at his Wyoming ranch, Cheney never did truly lose, despite bringing scandal, ethics investigations, and eventual doom to every administration he worked for. By demonstrating his loyalty to an aggressive and frequently extra-legal realpolitik intentionally divorced from the realm of ethics–and getting away with it–this avid chili lover, “stump” of a high school football player from Wyoming, who dropped out of Yale, was twice nabbed for drunk driving, and who shot rabbits, birds, a hunting partner, and other animals in his free time, became a grimacingly enduring icon of American business and politics.

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» THE U.S.-CHINESE MINING RACKET IN AFGHANISTAN

On a recent trip to Mongolia, I found the place filthy with miners. I rarely come into contact with people in the mining industry, but I often read about their exploits, usually in the Wall St. Journal, The New York Times, and The Economist. So much of global politics is about competition for resources that I’ve always thought it was wise to pay attention to the aims and strategies of those tasked with acquiring and processing them. I definitely want to know what a mining executive thinks about political and economic realities, for the same reason I read the business press.

On the flight into Ulaanbaatar, I sat next to a Canadian miner employed by an Australian company, who was in the Gobi helping to set up a copper mine. He told me lots of interesting things about transnational mining companies doing business in the region. It’s mostly Chinese, Russian, Korean and French companies, and selling what’s under the ground is basically the only real business in Mongolia, though they’ll be happy to sell you a cashmere sweater or a variety of felted wool products as well:

On my flight out, I sat next to an American mining executive on his way from gold mining in Mongolia to an oil drilling gig in Kazakhstan. This second executive talked a lot about the backstory of the mining business, about corruption and bribery, and he claimed that “risk averse” U.S. and European mining companies were losing out in the resource wars. He spoke of some sordid realities of the mining business and shared stories about Nigeria, Mexico and… Afghanistan.

Afghanistan? Did the U.S. have mining operations in Afghanistan? Not exactly. But were we in the mining business in Afghanistan? Absolutely, in a manner of speaking.

“Oh yeah,” the mining executive said, leaning in confidingly: “The Chinese just won the largest copper mining bid in the world after bribing a bunch of Afghan officials, but that’s not even the worst part.” He paused for dramatic effect, then continued: “The worst part is that it’s the U.S. providing military protection for the Chinese to do it!”

Interesting. Once I got back, I started looking into U.S-China-Afghanistan relations, and found that this guy was basically speaking the truth:

“China is in the process of sinking $3.5 billion into Afghanistan to exploit one of the last remaining copper reserves on the planet. And how many deaths in Afghanistan for the People’s Liberation Army? Zero. Will China step in to protect the largest single foreign investment in Afghanistan’s history? You bet — but only after fighting the Taliban to the very last American soldier it could muster.

Feel ripped off? On a gut level, you should. “

- “Is Obama’s Afghanistan Strategy Ripping Off America?,” Thomas P.M. Barnett, Esquire magazine, December 2009

Afghanistan. The Soviet Union’s own Vietnam, the alleged base for Al Qaeda, where the U.S. first gave money and training to Osama bin Laden in the name of fighting so-called “communism,” homeland of the Taliban and various warlords, and Obama and the U.S.’s costly, escalating ($940 billion and counting) second war front, where General Stanley A. McChrystal, top U.S. man in Afghanistan, just undertook an epic foot-in-mouth routine in a series of high-profile interviews for Rolling Stone magazine.

Many people who root for U.S. military and business interests can understand the basic problem of a respect and strategy gap between a general and his commander-in-chief. Quite a few people can also understand the dubious logic of a protracted military occupation in a country posing unprecedented logistical challenges at a time when the U.S. is having difficulty meeting its domestic responsibilities.

But how many people know that the 100,000+ U.S. and NATO soldiers in Aghanistan are effectively providing stabilization and armed security forces for Chinese mining interests? And how many people know that while China ratchets up the world’s largest copper mining operation in Afghanistan, they will be committing not a single member of their own military forces to protect their business in the region? A December 2009 New York Times article explained the situation thusly:

Two years ago, the China Metallurgical Group Corporation, a Chinese state-owned conglomerate, bid $3.4 billion — $1 billion more than any of its competitors from Canada, Europe, Russia, the United States and Kazakhstan — for the rights to mine deposits near the village of Aynak. Over the next 25 years, it plans to extract about 11 million tons of copper — an amount equal to one-third of all the known copper reserves in China.

While the United States spends hundreds of billions of dollars fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda here, China is securing raw material for its voracious economy. The world’s superpower is focused on security. Its fastest rising competitor concentrates on commerce…

S. Frederick Starr, the chairman of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, an independent research organization in Washington, said that skeptics might wonder whether Washington and NATO had conducted “an unacknowledged preparatory phase for the Chinese economic penetration of Afghanistan.”

“We do the heavy lifting,” he said. “And they pick the fruit.”

The reality is more complicated than that… [but] the conclusion is inescapable: American troops have helped make Afghanistan safe for Chinese investment. And there is no sense that either government objects to that reality. As diplomats and soldiers alike stress, the war in Afghanistan was never motivated by commercial prospects. Had an American company won Aynak, some Afghans noted wryly, critics inevitably would have accused the United States of waging war to seize the country’s mineral wealth. Moreover, if China succeeds in developing Aynak and generating revenue for the Kabul government, that helps achieve an American goal.

With government money and backing behind them, China’s state-run giants take risks in places that even the largest private behemoths will not tolerate, and they can add sweeteners — from railroads to mosques — that ordinary mining firms are ill equipped to provide.

“The Chinese have sort of raised the bar. They’ve taken it beyond the scope of just an extractive operation,” the Western official said. “The Chinese are willing to step up and take a long-term strategic approach. If it takes 5 or 10 years, at least they have a beachhead.”

China is also gearing up to put this business-friendly set of affairs in Afghanistan to even more profitable use, mining Afghanistan’s recently discovered deposits of lithium. Lithium is used in rechargeable fuel cell technology, and is expected to play a major role in the rapidly growing electric vehicle industry. As one industry publication reports:

Even though we’ve tried to help kill the phrase “the Saudi Arabia of [insert industry here],” we’re going to bring it back one last time. According to an article in the New York Times this weekend, Afghanistan could be the new “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” after analysis from the Pentagon has emerged that suggests that Afghanistan could have lithium deposits as big as those of Bolivia, which currently has the world’s largest.

“China wants to be the leader in the lithium ion battery market, and I’m sure they’re very interested in getting their hands on Afghanistan’s reserves, particularly given how close they are to it,” says Lux Research analyst Jacob Grose. China’s own domestic lithium reserves — which stands at 1,100,000 tons in its reserve base, and delivers about 3,000 usable tons onto the market each year, according to the United States Geological Services’ Mineral Resources Department — are mostly extracted with conventional mining techniques. That means Chinese lithium can be more expensive to mine than lithium found within salt lakes, which can be processed with evaporation, and are found in South America — and now Afghanistan.

As if this was not all cause enough for concern and intense questioning, I also discovered credible reports that U.S. operations in Afghanistan are creating, not reducing, the influence of warlords, and that taxpayer money has been funneled, in some cases directly, to Al Qaeda. A 79-page House of Representatives study entitled “Warlord, Inc.: Extortion and Corruption Along the U.S. Supply Chain in Afghanistan” details how local warlords and Al Qaeda operatives are paid-off, for protection and various other reasons. It details how much of the work for the U.S. supply chain is provided by a company called Host Nation Trucking, whose practices are questioned pointedly in the report. One quote from the report that I’ll share here had me on the verge of tears and laughter at the same time:

Actions speak louder than words, and the locals see these drugged-out thugs [HNT employees] with guns and trucks with “The United States” painted on them shoot without reason… Many of the gunmen have little or no training, and many are also high on heroin or hashish… U.S. Lieutenant Colonel Dave Abrahams said he has tried to tell locals that he understands their plight, but he is consistently undermined by the wild shooting.

Yeah, I could see how the locals might not feel you understand their concerns when the drugged-out goons and warlords you give money to keep shooting them.

Several years ago I wrote an article (“New World Disorder”) about how, in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration had responded by jettisoning arms control regulations and selling a flood of weapons to governments and regimes once considered off-limits because of instability or human rights violations. Nothing says “safety” like “massive arms deals to unstable regimes.” Toward the end of the article, I quoted a line from President Coolidge circa 1925, that “The business of America is business,” and then asked if it wasn’t better said, given observable reality, that “The business of America is the business of war.”

The official line is that the U.S. is in Afghanistan to fight terrorism and reduce the threat of Islamist extremism. But how credible is this claim, when the U.S. is funneling money to the very people it calls the enemy, and while it works hand-in-hand with the Chinese to make Afghanistan safe for business? And how many more people need die before the operation is considered a success?

War is a racket. General Smedley Butler (“The Fighting Quaker”), a decorated pre-World War II military hero who recanted and became an outspoken critic of U.S. military policy, defined a war racket as:

“Something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about, and it is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.”

Smedley continued:

“I wouldn’t go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket…

It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”

Addendum: in the latter part of July, 2010, Wikileaks released 90,000 pages of confidential U.S. military documents that served to further underscore that something is indeed rotten in Afghanistan.

» PLAY GO! (玩 围棋!)

“{It is} something unearthly . . . If there are sentient beings on other planets, then they play Go.” — Emanuel Lasker, international Chess Master

First things first: No, outside of there being white and black pieces placed in alternating turns, it’s nothing like Othello. And it was invented by the Chinese, but is most often referred to by its spiffy Japanese name: Go.

Go, or wéiqí, was created by Chinese emperor Yao about 4000 years ago and was allegedly invented to help a stupid son learn to think better. Or it was invented by Chinese tribal warlords as a strategy aid. Or it began as a fortune-telling medium.

The reality of the game is more interesting than the lore:  Go (碁 in Japanese), baduk (바둑 in Korean), and wéiqí (围棋 in the original Chinese), is a game with true majesty for those who devote themselves to it. For its devotees and for mathematicians in almost equal measure, the game inspires reverence and awe. Due to its extremely open-ended play and staggering mathematical possibilities for variation, the game is by far the hardest to teach computers. That fact, along with the clip below, from Darren Aronofsky’s film, π (or Pi) sealed it: Go was the game for me.

“Listen to me. The possibilities of game play are endless. They say that no two Go games have ever been alike. Just like snowflakes. So, the Go board actually represents an extremely complex and chaotic universe. That is the truth of our world…there is no simple pattern. — From π, or Pi

Until recently, Go resisted a high level of mastery by computer intelligence, but advances in artificial intelligence and computing power appear to be making lamentable headway. I’d like to think maybe it was just human beings manipulating things behind the scenes that led to this breakthrough. Call me a human sentimentalist and anti-silicon bigot if you like, but I’m just not into the idea of carbon-based people being bested or replaced by our silicon-based creations. I interviewed a Carnegie Mellon robotics expert, Hans Moravec, several years ago, about a book he’d published arguing that people like me are just squeamish and failing to see that robots and machines are simply “children of our minds.” And I can see his point, in a way. If I were someone who spent all of my time with machines and mostly tinkered away happily in my basement, sans human contact, I might find the ineffable qualities of human experience trivial as well. I might mistake a program for a child.

Speaking of children: Watch out for them and do not take them lightly when playing Go! Many are much better than your calcified adult mind might think. When a friend and I took a dawn train from San Francisco to Palo Alto last year to play at a “qualifying” tournament (to become official card-carrying members of the American Go Association), we faced mostly skilled Korean and Japanese teenagers. And in Chengdu, in the Sichuan province, where I’m presently staying and receiving instruction from an 8-dan master, I lost to one of his many students, a 12-year-old kid dressed very oddly like an American Boy Scout.

Earlier today (late-March), I had lunch at a Buddhist temple in Chengdu with my wéiqí teacher and five Russian business students (one from Siberia, the rest from Moscow). Before meeting them, I had fancy visions in my head of meeting some Serious Russian Go Players, but Svetlana, Alexandra, Dmitrii, Anzhela, and another woman who was too cool to offer up a card, turned out to be newbies who were drawn to the game more for its reputation than for anything more substantive. I learned during our meal that they had contacted my teacher to learn more about the game because they thought the principles of Go might be useful if applied to business. They wanted to know: what competitive edge might Go-playing give to aspiring businesspeople?

During the lunch, I wondered if I might have offended any of the Russians when I said that Go had ruined me for chess. “Why?” asked Dmitrii pointedly. “Well,” I explained, wary of giving offense to a game that many Russians revere and are quite skillful at, “chess is mechanistic and deterministic, whereas Go is more open-ended, with many more possible plays and patterns to understand. That’s why it’s easier to teach a computer to play chess than Go. In some ways I think it rewards creativity more than memorization.”

One odd footnote to this meeting was that while writing this post, I thought to hop over and email the Russians about some of the questions they’d had, about travel Go sets, about good Go tutorial books, and about online servers for Go players. (Several of them offered “visiting help” if I made good on my plan to take the Trans-Siberian train back to Moscow before returning to the U.S.) Every single email address bounced and came up as “invalid.” So either they were traveling with bogus business cards for reasons you could speculate endlessly over, Gmail was being blocked by Russia, or the internet or IT department at the school that issued their cards (Skolkovo Moscow School of Management, a real institution) was having a particularly bad day.

Whatever the case, they paid for a bunch of delicious food and I do believe I was the most ravenous of the eaters present.

But I digress. Play Go. Immerse yourself: Start watching Hikaru No-Go, a highly addictive Japanese manga series credited with reviving the popularity of Go in Japan. Then check out Sensei’s Library and learn about the theory, practice, and culture of Go. Learn the ABC’s through an interactive tutorial at The Interactive Way To Go. Solve ranked and categorized problems at Goproblems.com. Then log-on to one of the two major online Go servers: KGS or IGS. Both are free and allow records of games for review. KGS tends to be friendlier and new players can often find helpful instruction and tutorial games with other members.

Then, for a game, email me or come find me on KGS, username: loudcanary.

» TEA, GLUTTONY & FREEDOM IN TAIWAN

I was taken on a lovely tour of the fog-wreathed high mountain tea country in Nantou County, in the central and only landlocked part of Taiwan. It’s easy to see why the Portuguese dubbed this place “formosa,” which means “beautiful island.” Butterflies and lush vegetation abound.


Among the many interesting natural sites, I also saw the “bamboo house” that Nationalist (KMT) leader Lord Chiang would retreat to in the years after he lost his struggle against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and was forced to flee mainland China. I’m not sure if he went here before or after he contracted from his concubines the gonorrhea that would eventually sterilize him and leave him with only one biological son, but it was definitely before the “White Terror,” during which he imprisoned or executed upwards of 140,000 people, including a fair number of the Taiwanese intellectual and social elite, for opposing the Nationalist KMT government in Taiwan.

The issue of Taiwanese independence remains complicated today. A significant portion of Taiwanese, especially “mainlanders” of the business class who lament the economic limitations of being a small island economy with “only” 23 million people, favor re-unification with China. One of my partner’s uncles, a businessman who supplies shoes and handbags to high-end retailers, spoke bluntly of wanting unification: “Taiwan is too small,” he said. “To grow, we must unify.” He did not seem concerned, as a member of the upwardly mobile business class, of what freedoms he might lose were Taiwan to unify with China. Others, especially those of native Taiwanese descent, like the farmer I would cut bamboo with several days after photographing the bamboo house, above, feel differently: “In China,” he said, “the government owns everything and you own nothing. In Taiwan,” he enthused, “we own everything, and we have freedom: you can go to 7-11 for something any time of the day or night.”

It’s hard to know, given my own lack of command of Chinese or Taiwanese, and his far better, yet still limited English, if this was truly how he saw the issue of democratic freedom — as a consumer — or if it was simply the way he could explain it in English. It could very well also have a lot to do with the fact that there may be more 7-11′s in Taiwan than there are Taiwanese.

After my tour of the mountains, I was invited to visit a local tea aficionado to learn more about the history, process, art, and etiquette of Taiwan’s second-most-acclaimed product (the first being the creation and modern defense of a functioning democratic Chinese society and government).

We entered and began the tasting: Spring and Winter varieties of Rose Oolong, Jasmine and Black teas were in the offing, and it was surprising just how distinct the flavor of each season’s tea was. I learned that the best tea is grown at the highest altitudes, where it takes the longest to mature. Winter tea is the most prized, and most expensive, though I personally favor the spring tea for its greener, and more precisely chlorophyllic aroma and color.

[I found a visually compelling personal video about one Taipei man's journey of self-discovery to tea country in Taiwan that's worth checking out, though it doesn't teach you much about the actual tea-making process. If you're curious about the actual process, check out this video.]

I am a mostly unapologetic hedonist, and I often have as much trouble limiting my enjoyment of something pleasurable or delicious as I do stopping an interesting conversation, or leaving a beautiful place. So I kept accepting one cup of fine tea after another as my host offered them. I was at this tasting with my partner F. and her parents, and courtesy dictated that if I accepted more, more would be served. I was having a grand and fabulously caffeinated time, completely engrossed in asking as many questions as came to mind while everyone translated for me. What was the difference between black tea, green tea and oolong? (They’re all from the Camellia Senesis plant, but black tea is fully fermented/oxidized, oolong to a lesser extent, and green tea not at all). Why was the first short steeping of the tea always discarded? (To “wake” the tea and to wash away any residue on the leaves before drinking). Why were there so many steeps of each tea, and why such tiny cups? (We were performing a ceremonial method called gongfucha, and the exacting chemistry and temperature of the ceremony dictates smaller cups with hotter water). Would a person get fat from eating so many of these delicious biscuits, peanuts, and cookies between each serving of tea? (“Not as long as they’re consumed with tea!,” chirped my comfortably stout host.)

I also learned just how intensive the human labor of tea (especially oolong) is. The vast majority of it is picked by hand, a pound of tea requires tens to hundreds of thousands of leaves, and pay is generally very low. Taking this into consideration, the slower and more deliberate consumption of tea makes perfect sense.

It was not until many hours and maybe 50 cups of tea (small ones, but really: 50) that I realized just how very much tea had been consumed. I was tea drunk. When we finally tore ourselves away, my obviously great love of tea led our host to offer me a very fine traveling tea set and some lovely spring tea to take with me on my travels. Score!

That night, I worked merrily through the night while F. and her parents complained bitterly the next morning about insomnia and bad sleep.

It is not simply national chauvinism when the Taiwanese tell you, as they often do, that the very best tea is from Taiwan. Much of the choicest tea they produce is bought up by men doing business in mainland China, who use it as prized gifts with which to grease the wheels of commerce. This is so common, I was told by a merchant for one of Taiwan’s largest tea producers, that it’s sometimes hard for the average Taiwanese to get any of their prized winter tea. I noticed that the Wikipedia entry on oolong tea does not mention this fact. Then again, as great as Wikipedia is, you can’t be too trusting of anything you read online…



» THE CHEMISTRY OF LOVE

The first time you kiss somebody, you may well be caught up in romance and various libidinal tides, but your brain and olfactory system are hard at work, gathering information to decide whether to take it to the “next level.” At least that’s how the assembled sex-starved panelists and journalists at this year’s American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago saw the process.

“You’re not just kissing,” said one scientist suggestively, “you are likely absorbing information about your partner’s immune system, looking for a good match should you two procreate.”

Other scientists in attendance copiously supported their colleague’s assertion by noting findings in related studies. “A similar tendency has also been found,” asserted one postdoctoral researcher in the Berkeley Olfactory Research Program, “in some rather interesting tests where women sniffing male armpit sweat chose those indicating immune systems complementary–not similar–to their own.”

Certainly there exist women for whom the idea of a long session of male armpit huffing evokes an unseemly dark thrill. You might hope that one or more such women were among those who signed up for this study. But when pondering this (absolutely true) armpit-sniffing story, one must consider the long tour of ignominies visited upon countless women that led up to this particular moment in scientific history, and the moment in which each woman in the study was bade: Choose the best armpit.

(Alternately, the study may not have involved live male armpits at all, but rather the sniffing of previously collected male armpit sweat. Either way, it’s an odd study. It also provides me a rare opportunity to link to an only slightly related Old Spice commercial about armpits, men, manliness, and frenching):

Anyway.

Even if you don’t want to have kids or sniff anyone’s armpits, scientists say, the kiss is still crucial: it can help you chemically decide whether you will have fun dating. At least that’s the assumption you could make from research results indicating that people clicked with others based on levels of hormones present in saliva. Testosterone and oxytocin–a hormone involved in maternal bonding with offspring–are among the many hormones expressed in saliva.

(In a thankfully totally separate yet related experiment, virgin sheep injected with oxytocin began to mother unrelated lambs, which they wouldn’t have done otherwise, and which they were surely confused about afterward. Other oxytocin studies reveal even more interesting things).

Those with average-to-poor dental hygiene can take some heart from these recent studies: Even with all the advertising focus on minty fresh sterile mouths, oral hygiene or the lack thereof doesn’t obscure these chemical clues, researchers say. Sloppy kissers who aren’t lesbians can take heart as well: Men apparently like more drool in a kiss, perhaps because they tend to have worse senses of smell and taste and hence need more to work with.

–with reporting by Kari Lydersen

» “AVERAGE AMERICAN LIFE” NOT WHAT IT USED TO BE: Low Points in Economic Understanding

In July of 2008, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) did something unprecedented in its history: It lowered its official estimated value of an “average American life”, from $8.04 million to $7.22 million.

Why?

Mostly because the EPA performs a cost-benefit analysis when evaluating and creating policy and regulation. To do this, they have to agree on the value of a human life and weigh that value against the cost of regulation. The less a life is worth, the less statistical need exists for regulation.

This and other Bush administration EPA calculations have rubbed some people the wrong way before. Like in 2002, when the EPA decided the value of people over 70 was worth 38% less than those under 70.

The application of seemingly logical economic principles can often make patently absurd or offensive ideas seem, well, logical. Take, for example, an infamous (and shockingly guileless) memo from former chief economist for the World Bank (and current economic adviser to President Obama), Lawrence Summers, in which he says:

“I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that”

(It’s an aside to the topic of the value of life, but in 2005, Summers went on to display more of his mastery of impeccable logic when, as President of Harvard University, speaking at a conference on Diversifying The Science and Engineering Workforce, he suggested that “men’s higher variance in relevant innate abilities” might be a partial explanation for why there were more men than women in high-end science and engineering fields. Outrage ensued, and Summers was forced to step down as President.)

Ill-conceived, false, and harmful suppositions riddle the history of economic theory. Go back to Friedrich August von Hayek, an Austrian-British economist and major influence on free market ideology in the 20th century who was formative for John Maynard Keynes, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and most of the modern neoconservative movement.

Hayek developed a philosophical defense of free market capitalism based purely on individual expressions of self-interest, and with no mechanism or place for altruism or collective problem solving. Hayek’s theories have been used for many things, including the framing of government and “public interest” programs as merely the selfish machinations of governing bureaucrats. Thatcher’s “public choice theory” in England, and later Reagan’s economic policies in the U.S. both relied heavily on Hayek’s rationale.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen explains the pathology of Hayek’s ideas in the form of the following scenario:

“Can you direct me to the railway station?” asks the stranger.

“Certainly,” says the local, pointing in the opposite direction, towards the post office, “and would you post this letter for me on your way?”

“Certainly,” says the stranger, resolving to open it to see if it contains anything worth stealing.

Everyone acting selfishly in order to establish a harmonious social equilibrium. That’s the kernel of Hayek’s thinking. Once considered ludicrous and imbalanced, it won influence in the climate of the Cold War era, alongside other paranoid formulations of human nature and strategems for manipulating it.

Game Theory, developed by clinically certified paranoid schizophrenic mathematician John Nash, is most easily exemplified by a logic problem called The Prisoner’s Dilemma. The game basically demonstrates that selfishness and betrayal, rather than cooperation, are always winning strategies for self-advancement.

Nash won a Nobel Prize for his development of Game Theory and the benefits of a perfectly selfish social equilibrium. Problematically, the theory did not work when tested on real people. In one superb example of this, when the RAND Corporation (a think tank, where much of this was developed) ran several game theory scenarios with the company’s own secretaries, the secretary’s tendency to cooperate with each other, rather than acting selfishly, made results wildly unpredictable and destroyed Nash’s theoretical “equilibrium.”

Of course, you can trace wrongheaded economic logic all the way back to the world’s first actual economist, Thomas Malthus.

Iain Boal, an author and social critic, describes Malthusian logic thusly:

“It’s to subscribe to the view that the fundamental problems humanity faces have their roots in the scarcity of the resources that sustain life, because the world is finite and we are exhausting those resources…Notice how this mirrors the basic assumption of modern economics – choice under scarcity. In his notorious essay “On the Principle of Population,” published in 1798, Malthus asserted that population growth, especially of poor bastards, would inevitably outrun food supply, unless the propertyless were restrained from breeding. He advocated that poor people be crowded together in unhealthy housing, as a way of checking the growth of population. Remember, this is the world’s very first economist we’re talking about here…”

In the linked interview above (on Counterpunch, but originally published in LiP magazine), Boal explains that the scarcities asserted as natural law by Malthus (and many environmentalists today) are, in fact, artificial scarcities created by capitalism. The logic introduced by Malthus formed the basis for a move from a world of common land to an absolutization of private property during the expansion of the British Empire in the 1800s. [That's a lot in one sentence; don't take my word for it, tho': read the link above.]

Malthus’s essay was a direct counter-revolutionary response to an essay by William Godwin entitled “An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice.” The essay was an early anarchist critique of the state and an exploration of viable alternatives to competitive, coercive state power. Malthus, who would eventually become the world’s first paid economist, had apparently once been part of the same radical circles as Godwin. However, Malthus the “disillusioned disciple,” predicted impending doom because of a geometrically rising world-wide population and arithmetically increasing food supply. State economic power, control, and regulation were necessary to stave off disaster for the working and monied classes.

As Godwin pointed out in an eventual rebuttal, for Malthus’s figures to be true, it would require every family to produce an unlikely eight children…

My point with this scattershot exploration of low points in economic theory and practice is to demonstrate how egregiously wrong and abstracted economic theories and valuations can often be. I suppose I also want to illustrate how such theories, sallied forth as theories to describe existing phenomena or so-called “human nature” are often used in a generative fashion, to actually shape and manufacture human thought and behavior.

Thomas Malthus’s theories provided a framework and justification for the global enclosure of the commons based on the seemingly rational idea that there simply wasn’t enough to go around, and that the ever-breeding poor, left unrestrained, would devour us all, and that this was only a rational response to the excesses of “human nature.” Further economic rationales for selfishness were advanced by theorists like Hayek and Nash, despite the fact that their theories did not correlate to actual observable, measurable human nature. (Recall the example of the RAND secretaries.)

Accurately correlating to observable behavior is supposed to be one of the truer measures of the validity of any scientific theory. Yet in the case of Nash’s Nobel prize-winning work with game theory, this basic measure was apparently not necessary. Nor was such a basic measure of validity needed, by extension, for an entire way of thinking about and conceiving of so-called “human nature” to be used as the justification for an entire raft of economic policies.

Thus, manifest illogic can seem impeccably logical to the likes of economic policy-setters like Lawrence Summers, trapped as they are within abstracted market-defined notions of value. It must seem only logical to some people in the Bush Administration and the EPA that a human life has a certain measurable monetary value, and that certain policy implications unfold from that value.

John Maynard Keynes, the founder of modern macroeconomics (and a big advocate of eugenics), got to the heart of the matter with a telling statement about the logic of capitalism, which is essentially what we’re talking about in all of this:

“Capitalism,” Keynes wrote, “is the astounding belief that the wickedest of men will do the wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.”

» CHAOS: OF STRANGE ATTRACTORS & THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT

When Edward Lorenz gave a talk in 1972 entitled “Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?,” he distilled the main essence of his thoughts on predictability, interdependence and “chaos theory” in one pithy question.

Lorenz was a mathemetician and a meteorologist who, in the early 1960s, discovered that weather simulation models he was developing were exhibiting chaotic, non-predictive behavior, despite a fixed set of variables and no apparent equipment malfunction. Two identical weather simulation machines, side-by-side, given the same variables to process. Wildly different results. How?

Lorenz eventually concluded that it was a “dependence on initial conditions” — in this case, the fact of computers rounding variables to decimal points: 3.12879 expressed as 3.13, etc. Even extending the number of decimal points in the simulators did not produce matching results from the weather machines. Minute variations gave rise to wildly different chains of events.

Lorenz also advanced work on what came to be known as the Lorenz Attractor, or Strange Attractor, which describes the behavior of chaotic flow in lasers, dynamos, and water wheels. The mathematical expression of Lorenz’s Strange Attractor is (seemingly coincidentally) shaped like a butterfly, and some Java programmer in Japan was kind enough to create an animated demonstration of it.

Contrary to some popular misconceptions about chaos theory, it doesn’t mean randomness prevails. Rather, it means that things occur in a non-linear, but deterministic fashion, with an extreme sensitivity to initial conditions. Fractal geometry in nature, as well as Mandelbrot sets, illustrate the mathematics of chaos theory.

French mathematician Henry Poincaré is really the “father” of chaos theory; Lorenz mostly re-popularized an idea that had merely fallen from the limelight. At the end of the 19th century, Poincaré, encouraged by an award offered by King Oscar II of Sweden, looked into how to explain the erratic orbit of Neptune and the broader question, is the solar system stable? (Poincaré’s eventual conclusion was no, but the preceding link provides a far more satisfying overview of his voyage to that conclusion.)

I was first exposed to chaos theory through James Gleick’s excellent book, Chaos: The Making of a New Science. The notion of a greater complexity and deeper order underlying the observable surface of things is great on many levels beyond the scholarly realm. Chaos theory is a rich metaphor for our present moment, which promises to impress upon quite a few people, in ways both small and large, pleasant and unpleasant, that everything is connected and even, to some extent, interdependent. And, apropos of our time in my opinion, this understanding now raises far more questions than it provides answers.