The White Peril 白禍

Harriet Miers has withdrawn from consideration for the Supreme Court; you'll have heard that already. Right Side of the Rainbow has a good roundup of the reactions from conservatives and libertarians.

Am I glad I'm not on Virginia Postrel's bad side or what:

As regular readers know, I've written an extraordinary amount about Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. Early on, my primary purpose was reportorial--to use my locational advantage to provide information and context for people outside of Dallas. But the more I learned, the more appalled I became.

For whatever reason, the president has picked a woman who not only has no constitutional or judicial experience but even in her business practice has demonstrated no interest in the law as anything other than a source of billable hours. At 60 years old, she appears never to have had a substantive conversation about law or policy with any friend. She comes from a closed and cronyish legal and business culture and appears to have gotten ahead through a combination of networking, nose-to-the-grindstone diligence, and willingness to do her law firm's management, rather than legal, work.

Oof! Bear in mind, Virginia has gone out of her way to be sympathetic toward Miers the person.

She ends her post with a link to Americans for Better Justice and a set of links to her own previous posts about the nomination. Not being able to see as many homegrown news reports as Americans who live at home, I can't assess whether Bush actually seems to be laying the groundwork for a withdrawal of the nomination. By all accounts, the proceedings so far are not doing his trusted friend any favors.

Things seem to have died down a bit, but it's a shame that so many people reflexively decided to see the debate over this nomination in Blue States vs. The Real America terms. Cultural insularity isn't irrelevant here, but it's not the central issue. The BOS-WASH and SAN-SAN population belts deserve to be informed, emphatically and often, that much of what's important in America goes on outside them. Hell, I grew up in Allentown, PA, and I can assure you it may as well have been the moon for all many people in New York (1:45 away), Washington (2:30 away), or even Philadelphia (1:15 away) knew about what life was like there.

However, the big-city power centers are still where most ambitious people go to seek the most viciously competitive environment in which they can test their ideas and competencies. In that sense, the arrogance of seeing yourself as a player in Big Decisions is a good thing. Miers is clearly a fantastic person--for goodness's sake, if she weren't, someone would have said so by now, given the way journalists have been beating the bushes for any opinions about her whatsoever--but there's no evidence that she's tested herself as a thinker or learned to adjust to working in a pressure cooker.

This is the first piece I've seen that defends the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court on the basis of how she's going to do the job. "Why Harriet Miers is the sort of thinker who would make a good justice," as opposed to "Why someone without a Harvard law degree, two decades of publications to her credit, and regular invitations to dine with the Kristols could make a good justice":

It is true that Harriet Miers, in everything she does, gives high attention to detail. And the trait came in handy with drafts of presidential speeches, in which she routinely exposed weak arguments, bogus statistics and claims inconsistent with previous remarks long forgotten by the rest of us. If one speech declared X "our most urgent domestic priority," and another speech seven months earlier had said it was Y, it would be Harriet Miers alone who noted the contradiction.

...

It may be, in fact, that a details person is just what the Supreme Court needs right now. If anyone can be counted on to pause in deliberations over abortion cases, for example, and politely draw attention to small details like the authority of Congress and of state legislatures, or the interests of the child waiting to be born, it will be the court's newest member. As a justice, however, she will command the kind of respect that has nothing to do with being conservative, or liberal, or anything else but a person of wisdom and rectitude.

Okay, so Miers takes texts at face value, has a memory like a steel trap that helps her spot inconsistencies, stays focused on the job at hand, and is more likely to fulfill her job description with self-effacing meticulousness than to try to make a name for herself. You could certainly take issue with Matthew Scully's argument here--I'm not really convinced by it--but it is an argument, with evidence summoned to make a relevant point.

A belated happy 80th birthday to the UK's inimitable former prime minister Margaret Thatcher, which occasioned this week's second gay-shiver-of-pleasure-inducing comment referring to her:

Another guest, actress Joan Collins, said she adored Thatcher.

"She is the 'Iron Lady,' and I want to be just like that when I grow up," Collins said.

[sighs] Oh, and this is a good place to point out that Susanna, a lady of considerable gravitas herself, has written a very thoughtful post about what general patterns in differences between the sexes mean to individuals trying to live as well and happily as they can.

My, things have changed since I was nearing the end of my éphèbe years.

The day after Maria Guevara turned 18, she packed her bags and moved out of her mother's Floral Park home.

She had a strained relationship with her father, who she said physically abused her when she was younger -- a charge he denies -- and she said her mother was too strict, setting an early curfew and denying her money for restaurants and fashionable clothes.

But after she moved into a friend's basement in Bellerose Terrace in March, Guevara did something her mother didn't see coming: She sued her parents for child support in Nassau Family Court.

...

But Maria, who just started her first year at Nassau Community College, argues that her parents should pay for school. She works part-time as a teacher's aide at the John Lewis Childs School in Floral Park, but three hours a day at $12 an hour doesn't pay for her living expenses and tuition, she said.

"I'm 18, but I still need support," she said. "I'm going to college. I don't have time to be working full-time. It's hard for me."

Telling an 18-year-old that she has to be home by 7 p.m. strikes me as a bit neurotic (though there may be part of the story we're not hearing--does Guevara's mother go to work at night and need her daughter to look after her little brother?), but the rest of her complaints? Sheesh. In my day, the standard speech was "Look, buddy, when you're 18, you can move out of this house and make your own rules. But until then, you're living under our roof and what we say goes. IS THAT UNDERSTOOD?" It was understood. I had parents indulgent enough to send me to a hoity-toity private college, but I took a year off after high school and worked full-time and saved, too. Starting college at 19 instead of 18 doesn't seem to have blighted my life much.

Oh, and the reasoning that goes "it's hard; therefore, I shouldn't have to do it"? What is that?

(Via Joanne Jacobs)

A friend e-mailed me about outgoing German Chancellor Schroeder's making a weenie of himself in his farewell speech:

He quickly composed himself, hitting his stride in a passionate defense of a strong German state and lashing out at "Anglo-Saxon" economic policies favoured in Britain and the United States, which he said had "no chance" in Europe.

In an apparent reference to Hurricane Katrina, Schroeder castigated Washington for liberal, hands-off policies that left it exposed in times of crisis. The Bush administration was widely criticised for its response to the devastating storm.

"I do not want to name any catastrophes where you can see what happens if organised state action is absent. I could name countries, but the position I still hold forbids it, but everyone knows I mean America," he said to loud applause.

I like the way Germans are now experts in hurricane management.

BTW, one of yesterday's Nikkei editorials on the subject contained the sort of play on words that diva-loving gay guys live for. I'm sure 1000 suit-and-tie fags on trains into the Marunouchi yesterday morning nearly died. I'll give it to you with the set-up:

The prospects for new Chancellor Merkel present a lot of difficulties. Her major mission will involve treating the country's case of "German Disease," in which high unemployment rates and slow economic growth have become chronic, in order to restore the nation to eminence as a major economic power. No prescription will be effective except structural reform with liberalization of the labor market, finance reform, and deregulation as its pillars.

Could Merkel, as German Chancellor, have what it takes to forge ahead with reform, as the UK's Thatcher did to earn the nickname "the Iron Lady"?

As so often happens, the pivot word is impossible to translate well. Here's the sentence in the original:

英国のサッチャー元首相が「鉄の女」と呼ばれたように、メルケル独首相も国内で大胆に改革のメスを入れることができるのか。

メスを入れる (mesu wo ireru) literally means "plunge the scalpel in"; it's used figuratively the way we would use, say, "bite the bullet" to refer to taking difficult but necessary action. But メス doesn't just mean "scalpel"; it also means "female." The kanji for "female" is 雌, but it's frequently written in kana as it is above. The sense hovering in the above sentence, especially after the Margaret Thatcher reference, is that Merkel may need to thrust the implacable bitchitude of reform into the German economy. I'd love to see that, though the election gave the CDP nothing like a mandate and it's not at all clear whether she has the stuff.

Take a look at this Reuters report on economic dislocations in the PRC. (Links disappear from Reuters fairly quickly, so I'm citing quite a bit):

The leadership in Beijing is deeply concerned there could be a wider backlash, threatening a decade of strong economic growth and the Communist Party's grip on power, says Wenran Jiang, a China expert at the University of Alberta.

"They have come to the conclusion that ... the regime will not survive if they don't address the growing wealth gap, and more importantly, the perception that the government only cares about economic growth and the urban rich," he said.

...

When China's late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping ignited the country's market reforms in the late 1970s, he espoused a trickle-down approach, saying: "Let some people get rich first."

Some have become gloriously rich. Next week, the Hurun Report, which tracks China's wealthy, will issue its 7th annual China Rich List on which the average wealth for the richest top 400 is about $200 million. Seven are billionaires.

To be sure, tens of millions of people have been lifted out of abject poverty since the party came to power 56 years ago. [How's that for setting your time frame conveniently!--SRK]

But the wealthiest 10 percent of China's urban households now own 45 percent of the urban wealth while the poorest 10 percent have less than 1.4 percent, Chinese statistics show.

Reporter John Ruwitch has a strange way of departing from the quotation from the University of Alberta's Jiang. Jiang all but says outright that the CCP is primarily concerned with retaining power and that the benefits of economic growth to the Chinese people are little more than means to that end. Ruwitch makes some vague statements about attempts at relief that, combined with his human-interest portraits of desperately poor people living hard-scrabble lives in the booming coastal cities, make today's PRC regime look like a bunch of well-meaning public servants saddled with unworkable twenty-year-old reforms and trying as hard as they can to patch holes wherever possible. Unfortunately, when you encourage entrepreneurship without providing reliable enforcement of contracts, protection of intellectual property, punishment for corruption, and other niceties of the rule of law, you cannot be surprised when many of the enterprises you're facilitating are exploitative.

BTW, speaking of the rule of law, Simon has been following the case of a group of villagers who entertained the fantasy that elected officials in the New China are supposed to be accountable to their constituents. They know better now. The story's been developing for a while, but it's worth reading from beginning to end.

Virginia Postrel notes some factors that would have affected people's behavior after this weekend's earthquake in South Asia. She indicates yet more ways in which effective response to disasters requires local knowledge:

In L.A., they also tell you to STAY INSIDE, but they also tell you that Central American immigrants are hard to keep inside during quakes, because if you live in a Third World country with bad construction, you're safer outside. After the Northridge quake, which did relatively little damage to houses (CNN showed the same apartment building, which was practically on the epicenter, over and over again), one of the city's big challenges was getting the Guatemalans and Nicaraguans to go back inside rather than camping out in parks.

I wasn't surprised that people living in mud-brick or unreinforced stone houses in poorer areas would be told to--or instinctively know they had to--flee outdoors. What I was curious about was that the collapsed building CNN was showing in Pakistan was part of a complex that was apparently home to many expats. Usually, foreign businesspeople and diplomats in Third World countries get the highest-quality built environments available. I kept straining to see whether there was rebar sticking out of the concrete, but I could never tell whether the visible dark stuff was that or just debris. (Virginia's parenthetical struck me as darkly funny, since anyone who was watching CNN's coverage this weekend saw the exact same footage of the collapsed Islamabad apartment tower again and again and again. Of course, being a 24-hour news network, CNN has to repeat things for those who are just tuning in. Still, every five minutes? It might have been more informative to have, every once in a while, NHK-style CGI of how earthquake waves pass to the surface and how different types of geological structures react to them. A lot of people outside earthquake zones don't know that stuff, having studied s and p waves in eighth grade and promptly forgotten about them. I understand CNN's predilection for human-interest angles, but there really wasn't much pathos in the pile of white concrete they kept showing.)

Of course, rebarred concrete is only one element of earthquake-resistant construction in the First World. Many buildings in Tokyo have a sort of Brutalist-lite style that shows off both the unadorned surface of the concrete and the diagonal metal bracing against shear. There's also ground stability to consider. Atsushi and I are fortunate enough to live in a building that's on relatively high, solid ground, but a lot of Tokyo is built over filled-in river and creek beds.

Being a megalopolis that's engulfed a broad seaside plain, Tokyo isn't really a good analog for northeastern Pakistan. However, Japan did very recently have an earthquake disaster in an area that is, in fact, quite similar: last year's series of strong quakes in Niigata Prefecture (here and here). Niigata, like most of Japan outside the Kanto and Kansai plains, is very craggy, with lots of people living in old-fashioned houses in remote areas accessed by narrow, cliff-hugging roads. The region also had the misfortune to be hit by earthquakes just after a particularly bad typhoon season had left a lot of ground waterlogged and unstable. There were many injuries and considerable property damage, but the final fatality count was, IIRC, below fifty.

Japan not only has better construction standards but also bad-ass fire and rescue teams with high-grade equipment--not to mention educated citizens who know what to do in an earthquake or typhoon. Even though the Niigata quakes hit just after sundown on an autumn night, evacuation and rescue went as smoothly as could be expected. The scale of destruction in Pakistan is much worse than it was in Niigata, and it's no wonder the government is having a hard time keeping up.

On that subject, one final thing to note: Japan pledged aid in the form of equipment and manpower on the day of the quake, along with the US and the various Western European biggies. China, which not only has noisy pretensions to global leadership but is right next door to the affected region, took a full day to offer assistance, if the news outlets were reporting things in real time.

M 7.5 earthquake in Pakistan and India (also felt in eastern Afghanistan). The epicenter was northeast of Rawalpindi, so the quake was perfectly positioned to hit several densely populated metropolitan areas. Apparently, it was strong enough in New Delhi to knock things off tables--that's pretty powerful.

Of course, India and Pakistan both have huge populations anyway, but in cities you have the problem of multi-story buildings that may not be built to code as we would think of it in first world earthquake zones. It looks as if two apartment buildings have collapsed. The preliminary number of deaths is 30-ish; of those, CNN seems to be saying that about 20 were Indian Army personnel. I assume that means that some kind of military facility collapsed, but there appears to be little more information.

A moment of black comedy was provided by one interviewee, a Western journalist who lives in Islamabad. He pointed out that one advantage Pakistan has is that it has a large army and thus was able to call on a high number of trained personnel for rescue. Being locked into mortal enmity with your next-door neighbor occasionally comes in handy, it seems. The same journalist--Danny Kemp of Agence France-Press; he's cited here, too--said that he ran outside with his wife and daughter when their apartment building started shaking. Is that what they tell people to do in Pakistan? We're told in Tokyo that avoiding falling glass, roof materials, and power lines is the highest priority; if you're indoors, stay there unless the building is clearly unsafe.

It's impossible to predict what the final number of casualties will be. The area was relatively lucky, though: the quake struck early-ish on a weekend morning. That probably means that there weren't many cooking fires open yet, and it definitely means that rescue workers had a full cycle of daylight and warm temperatures to look for trapped survivors after the first quake. (Strong aftershocks have been reported.)

I realize there are still a few months left, but I'm giving Alice the award for Best Post Title 2005 for this one. Need I say that the post itself is of heirloom quality also?

The Harriet Miers nomination left me with little to say initially but "Huh?" Well, that and "Good thing I already know the words for cronyism in Japanese, so I can be ready for the inevitable discussions." I reserved judgment at first, under the assumption that more useful information could be forthcoming, as it often is when the Washington press machine suddenly feels the need to educate America about a former unknown.

But we still know little about Miers except that she is, as my Japanese friends would put it, "heartful." As has happened every time Bush has done something incomprehensible, there are those who insist that this is yet another example of his rope-a-dope strategy, the subversive brilliance of which will manifest itself later. Whatever you say. (They are conspicuously few in number this week, it's important to note.)

Probably my favorite take is Rosemary's: "Why didn't he just nominate his mom?" she asks. "At least we know who she is." LOL, girlfriend. I myself derive some small comfort from the fact that our LAST President didn't take it into his head to nominate a woman lawyer of dubious facility with constitutional law to a USSC vacancy just because she happened to be a long-time intimate, because then, you know.... Grateful for small blessings, and all that.

But not too grateful.

Rumor fatigue (as well as a busy-busy-busy Sunday) prevented me from posting about the Bali bombing yesterday. 30 or so deaths is a terrible tragedy, and many of the 127 injured are probably going to have hellish recoveries; but given the initial, speculative news reports, things aren't as bad as feared. Ross at Romeo Mike's Gumption tracked the sensationalizing and subsequent backing and filling. Bali is a major, major tourist destination for Australians and East Asians, so reporters immediately started looking for local angles. Of course, that can obscure the bigger picture:

The Nursing Home News (aka Ten News) has just shown Deegan saying he "wasn't surprised Australians were targeted". He's been "expecting it for some time." Except Aussies weren't targeted, Westerners were. The bombers didn't distinguish, even toward their countrymen.

Most of the bodies that have been identified were of Indonesians.

I have to say that out of all the misinterpretations and distortions and namby-pamby-isms of PC, this stock statement (indirectly quoted in the bold text below) has to be my very least favorite--and I was an undergrad at Penn from '91-'95, honey. I've heard them all:

While the alleged felony of ethnic intimidation that involved a University student urinating on two Asian students continues to enrage student organizations on campus, the suspects and their neighbors say the Ann Arbor Police Department and the media have exaggerated the incident.

...

Stephanie Kao, a Business senior and co-chair of the United Asian American Organizations, said that whether the incident is true or not is beside the point—-it highlights the negative campus climate toward Asians students.

Since it fits our narrative of aggrievement, it's symbolically true, you see. That makes it okay, nay necessary, for us to harp on it.

"A lot of us are angry about these racial slurs — we're so focused on this issue of urination and beer. It's beyond this issue at this point. This incident might have been the catalyst, but we are trying to address why these incidents are possible and what in this University climate makes it possible and acceptable for racial harassment to happen," Kao said.

My question is this: If racial harassment did not, in fact, occur in this case, what could you possibly learn about the actual university climate from acting as if it had? If Michigan hasn't forgotten about such trifles as free speech, the unshackled life of the skeptical mind, and vigorous debate in its rush to embrace pigment-level diversity, then surely the distinction between the threat of physical harm and the possibility that one may occasionally feel insulted should matter.

But the current campus climate is such that the Michigan Daily reporter is duty-bound to proceed with poker-faced speculations about whether it would be possible to pee on passersby below from the balcony in question, based on its layout and dimensions, and about the counter-allegation that the complainants called the accused a "white fat American piggy" and a "bitch."

As always, the infuriating thing is that there's a real issue here. It's hard to argue that anything in American society is keeping Asians down economically--certainly not the stratum that's studying at a public Ivy like Michigan. Nevertheless, prejudice is wrong, and it really is true that there are ignorant people who don't seem to understand that there are people of Asian extraction who were born in America and are as much native members of our society as we with other genes are. As someone who majored in an Asian language and had a lot of Asian friends, I saw it quite a bit. There's nothing wrong with discussing that, though I don't know that there's any policy that will help except the passage of time.

I just wish that every once in a while, these people would get around to acknowledging that Korea, Japan, and China are not exactly beacons of racial inclusiveness themselves. In fact, a lot of the racism in East Asia is codified. Does that make Asia the world HQ of venality or, conversely, excuse racism in America? Of course not. But it behooves people who are going to come on all multi-culti and pro-sensitivity to have a sense of context and proportion. Fake-cosmopolitan college administrators may be cowed by this America-is-egregiously-evil-to-minorities crap, but it looks idiotic to anyone with experience of the wider world.

(Via Erin O'Connor)