Mood Ring Report

I have completed my morning rounds, and I must report to you that there are many, many, very deep bloggers out there, people of substance and compassion and concern and an uncanny ability to break down the walls of fascist bullshit memery that dominate our times and our ether. People writing on critical issues of the day, like Digby, and Rude, and TBogg, and the General, and Sasha (check Sasha out--she just returned from a hiatus with a post on a topic that, if you are a human with a brain, should cause you hives).

I am not one of them. My mood ring is black. I am choked with anger. And besides, I have a lot of work to do today, which is not a small contributor to my propensity toward a need for some form of release.

When the bad blogger is so choked with bile and rage that he turns purple and cannot write posts that tactfully neglect to include the word "queefing," it is time for him to simply post a note of love to his friends and admirers and await another day.

Especially when he's such a douchebag that he's started to refer to himself in the third person. Have a lovely day, beloved minionses.

Your World Today

Settling in for a busy spell (work sucks, mother in town, move coming up, brak brak brak), but by way of affirming my continued respiration:

• Ryan takes over for Auguste at Malkin(s) Watch. I can now safely retreat into having a life.
• Darryl posts for the General on the apparent Michigan gubernatorial candidacy of Ted Nugent, highlighted in a linked article in the Independent, an inexplicably British newspaper. Seems Ted is against "snatch-pursing." I've been trying to get Ilse to purse hers for a long time, but she's just not cooperating.
• Joltin' Joe Lieberman goes on the offensive and Eschaton points us to the fascist "concern trolls" at RCP. Yeah, we're real strongly inclined to take advice from the Republican Party on diversity of opinion. Asshats.
• Eschaton and various others point us to the newsy bit about Joe's choice of marching buddies for a Memorial Day parade in Waterbury: Republican Congresswoman Nancy Johnson. I see. Must be that diversity of opinion thing.
• Gregg Easterbrook officially moves into the realm of wingnut asshattery. Call a seven-man blitz and punt from your opponent's 35. And please attribute my earlier agnosticism on global warming to functional illiteracy; while I don't think Algore is the best spokescritter for focusing attention on the issue, I've now done my homework. But I'm still not going to let you tell me that hurricanes are caused by global warming.
• But the point of the above bullet isn't about me. It's about Gregg Easterbrook being an asshat.
• Have I mentioned that Slate, in addition to being Chris Hitchens' bartender, is Gregg Easterbrook's haberdasher?
• In case you forgot, and lest we forget: Gregg Easterbrook is an asshat.
• Hubris becomes us. I thought my Terps were going to add a FOURTH national title to their 2005-2006 resume. I accept full responsibility for this debacle.
• bDr focuses all of his anger on the U.S. Mens National Team (futbol). bDr has convinced himself that USMNT will lose to the Czechs, the Italians, and the Ghanians in the positively frightening Group E of the upcoming World Cup. He's got two out of three correct, but his strategy of Not Taunting God will still fail, because 1-2 ain't gonna make the finals. However, bDr always does the right thing, so Not Taunting God it is. Amputate Landon Donovan's feet! Put Pablo Mastroeni out to stud! Give Eddie Lewis an overdose of Viagra! Prediction: the comments to this post will include a stinging rebuke from bDr that features a correction of some minor detail in the above, along with the use of the words "pitch" and "kit." (Dood. Seriously. Brian McBride is, like, older than my wife. He's only 10 years younger than us. And you made me walk out the Fulham Road for that?)

Empty

Auguste over at Malkin(s) Watch is hanging it up. He took a break from keeping an eye on Our Lady of the Concentration Camps, which made him realize how much he likes not keeping an eye on her. Someone may take over Malkin(s) Watch, and Auguste, who is very good, will be posting more at Liberal Avenger which could, I think, use more Auguste, who is a pretty level guy who almost never uses the same kind of impactful nouns and adjectives to which I am partial. Looking back over that last sentence, I'm also forced to realize that he uses fewer commas and dependent clauses.

I have a lot of sympathy for this. I certainly don't spend nearly as much time at it as he has, and writing about her has completely poisoned my blogging soul. I've been giving this some thought independent of the changes at Malkin(s) Watch, since my last four posts have all featured poison dumped into Her water supply, and an awfully large proportion of my rantings since I restarted semi-regular posting have featured soul-sucking levels of attention to Her misdeeds. Don't think I don't notice these things.

I feel a sense of loss at Auguste's passing from Malkin(s) Watch. More than once, I've alluded to feeling like that blog relieved me of some perceived burden of having to share my rage at Her in these pages (then proceeded to regularly share it anyway).

I'm going away for the holiday weekend, on my annual gaming pilgrimage to Dixie. I'll work on my perspective and see where I end up. I have a feeling that ending up in a Malkin-free place would be a good thing.

Only A Matter of Time

First on the scene in truth and civility, your correspondent and mine, Our Lady of the Concentration Camps managed to post this morning a really low-quality Photoshop superimposing the face of her apparently fraudulent hero, J-Mac (Invalidator of All Anti-War Sentiment!), over the famous 70s picture of Senator Kerry testifying against the war.

Sigh. Why do you make me keep doing this, Mrs. Malkin? I mean, I'm going to have to start autotexting this shit.

Fuck you, you lying, passive-aggressive, hypocritical, evil, propagandizing, fact-ignoring, racist, ping-pong-ball-queefing blogslut.

What, you want something that's not about Our Lady, but about the issue?

Sure, I'll give it to you. Comparing apparently lying scum like The Invalidator (who, it seems, didn't serve and just likes dressing up in military stuff) to a man who actually served, and won medals for his wounds (shut the fuck up--every lie anyone made up about Senator Kerry's war wounds has been roundly refuted) and for his service under fire (same--just shut the fuck up, liars), is as uncivil, untruthful, and Goebbelsriffic as it gets. The case makes itself, for anyone with a modicum of literacy and an IQ greater than that of wet cardboard.

And that? Was about as much civility as I could manage. Fuck off, Malkin, you cunt.

More Bullet-Blogging

I'm too busy right now to do anything but parrot the party line. So here it is:

• Shut up, you corrupt trough-shitting pigs. Tristero, writing at Hullaballoo, elaborates. (ThinkProgress and Digby)
• Shove a loofah up your lying, hypocritical ass, O'Reilly. (Media Matters)
• Quack. It's a duck. Or maybe it's just a drake that made a mistake. (Patriotboy, with links you must follow)
• Malkin fisks a fraud. ONE fraud. Wow, that, like, completely invalidates the entire anti-war movement. Thanks for showing me the error of my ways, Mrs. Malkin, you ping-pong-ball-queefing, self-loathing, racist, theocratic, Goebbels-worshipping cesspool of slime and corruption. Also in Malkin: A Democrat took bribes! So, that, like, totally tilts the scoreboard, right? Right?
• Open up your heart and let the Rude shine in.
• Ruh-roh. We suck. Can terrorists be far behind? (blackDogred, to whom I owe a considerable bit of IT work that I will try to do very soon)

Personal notes, mostly for blackDogred, who has resorted to studding his blog with deeply personal inside jokes to make sure I haven't slumped over:

• Job suckage, but it's mostly a volume thing not indicative of deeper issues.
• I need sleep, but if I were smarter, I'd go to bed at 9 PM instead of playing Madden 2006 or old PC war games that echo whatever historical nonfiction or semi-fiction I've been reading of late.
• The Grand Parakeet, my snortingly irresponsible SUV, was in the shop yesterday and I had to rent a car. They gave me a PT Cruiser. The Parakeet is back, and the Cruiser-induced urge to slurp johnsons has safely passed.
• We did sign a lease on a gigantimongous house in a fine neighborhood that may well be outside of nuclear IED range of the Malkins. Sorta depends on the competence of the bombmaker. Landru to move in early July, Ilse and progeny to move in early August. This will complete the unification of the House of Landru and set in motion a range of events leading to the complete annihilation of the polar icecaps. Or it'll cause ManBearPig. Or Paris Hilton.
• Off to BlueSky for the holiday weekend; fortunately, BlueSky resident Mom, aka the SheNurse of the SS, will be on the way up to housesit (note: well within nuclear IED range of the Malkins) for 32-Ounce, Sil, and the Crown Princes, so I'll pass her at a Cracker Barrel somewhere on I-95. Small mercies.

The Weekend Roundup

• Malkin still insane. Reverend Mykeru and Tbogg do better than I did. Of course, they're, y'know...civil. I, of course, labor under no such delusion.
• The New York Times is soooooo liberal. I mean, what could be more liberal than a puff piece on America's favorite glamour couple, Bill and Hil? A puff piece that delves into exactly how much time they spend together and notes that their aides declined to provide the Times with the Clintons' personal schedules? A piece that notes, reluctantly, that the tension over Bill ejaculating onto a power-crazed trollop dissipated at some unknown point, according to some "close" to the couple. Tell me, is there a waiting list for sucking the Republican Party's cock after the administration threatens to jail reporters it doesn't like, or is that still an easy reservation to get?
• Heather Havrilesky got married over the weekend. I'd be a lot more upset about this, but that would get me into way too much trouble with Ilse.

Our Lady of the Concentration Camps Cracks Up

Wonkette is suffering mightily now that it's no longer getting any Cox, but it still has the power to enthrall. And the power to bring smug, stupid and/or intellectually dishonest, self-loathing, racist propagandists to their knees.

Our Lady of the Concentration Camps and some of her rabble have formed this thing called Hot Air (you'll find it if you look), dedicated to ranting and spewing disinformation about whatever right-wing cause they find notional. On it, each day, She produces, presumably with the help of her other skin-worshippers, a short video. The other day, her video du jour was apparently a faux commencement address. Excuse, please--I sincerely hope it was faux, because despite having gone to a college loaded with reasonably bright people and done some time in grad school, or hung around her self-loathing husband who did, she's either pretty fucking stupid or pretty fucking criminal, and any institution that would hire her to give a commencement address should be unaccredited pretty damn fast.

I've watched some of this video, by way of keeping up with trends in propaganda. It's smug, it's shrill, it lies. A lot. The logic is specious, the reporting selective. Her video presence is wooden, Her style a perfect demonstration of why She works mostly in print and uses Her few appearances on racist claptrap like Hannity, O'Reilly, and other safely untruthful outlets mainly to give the other side opportunities to vidcap Her looking hostile and angry--a thing at which She excels.

Wonkette, apparently, hadn't. Watched some of this video, I mean.

wonkette: OMG I AM WATCHING MICHELLE MALKIN’S INTERNET VIDEOS FOR THE FIRST TIME
operative: she has internet videos?
operative: does she do the thing with the ping-pong balls?

More from the same post:

wonkette: GET A REAL JOB
wonkette: SHE SAID “GET A REAL JOB”
operative: AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!
operative: BECAUSE PEOPLE SHOULD GET REAL JOBS!
operative: ON THE INTERNET!!!!!!!!
wonkette: SHE IS A PROFESSIONAL INTERNET PUNDIT AND NOW SHE’S TELLING WHO EXACTLY TO GET A REAL JOB?
operative: I think she’s referring to the Unabomber
wonkette: i think i envy the unabomber for probably not knowing who michelle malkin is.
operative: plus, he’s got a great haircut
wonkette: also: less scary

Our Lady is unamused. "Pat yourselves on the back, you tolerant liberal bastards," she writes.

Uhm? Mrs. Malkin? Fuck you, you lying, skeeving sack of shit. You have absolutely no right to act wounded here. Every day, you spew vile and venom and hatred and call names based on race (and then some, "then some" mostly being "failure to agree with you").

If you can't take it, don't dish it out. If you're the Christian you chest-thumpingly claim to be, then turn the other cheek. If you're not, then just implode from the force of your own lies. Either way, do me a favor and leave my fucking neighborhood, because now that you've provoked the outing of your home address, the chance that you'll bring down acts of terrorism on our little suburb is growing pretty unacceptable. In fact, y'know what? Never mind. I'll just pack up my wife and kids and head to the next burb.

Also? It's really great, Mrs. Malkin, that you knew to include the word "queefing" in one of your links to people making the ping-pong-ball joke. Thanks.

Update: The Wonkette correspondent is a racist, according to Mrs. Malkin and about two and a half dozen of her rabid friends. For its part, Wonkette recognizes that its post wasn't funny, and is vewwy, vewwy sorry. And Mrs. Malkin is taking great pains to make sure that we understand that every sentence she spews isn't racist. More later, because Auguste has been silent for a few days, necessitating considerable ventage on my part.

Blogging and Stress

There's a buttload of noise in the 'sphere about chickenhawks (and others) whinging about the stress of the grind of blogging to Keep America Free (of brown people and liberals). Some are mocking them, and they should be mocked--who the fuck are they to whine about their fucking blogging problems, given the problems of the troops fighting a war that the same wingers so fervidly support? Not to mention the poor, the tired, the hungry, the disenfranchised, and the families of those same troops.

On the other hand, some of it's overboard. They're not packing it in and going away. They're just whinging children. Ignore them, they'll feel better tomorrow.

I am put in mind of a cat that once owned me, the greatest cat in the history of the entire fucking universe, actually, and I'll still throw it down and kick your ass into the next millennium if you want to make something of that. I hope Kitty Heaven is all it's cracked up to be, Callie.

Hmm. Sorry, brief humanizing distraction there. My bad. I am put in mind of this cat, Callie, because she was just flat vicious, when it occurred to her that viciousness might be entertaining. She would pretend to mope, then start purring at your very presence, then--wait for it--gaze at you adoringly with her big beautiful greenish-yellow eyes, luring you in, luring you in, pet me, pet me, I'm just a little kitty, a little 14-pound, 22-year-old kitten, really, aren't I totally fucking adorable?, comfort me, I'm depressed and you are my human, just a little closer, oh yes, look, my underbelly, hear my purring when you rub my tummy? WHAM!!!

Matching scratch lines, perfectly parallel down your forearm. Or your face, if you were really imprudent. The kicker was the way she'd lick her lips and purr louder after drawing your blood.

Damn, I loved--still love, in fact--that cat.

I do not, however, love stressed-out wingnut bloggers, and this blogging PTSD horseshit? It's just another version of Callie--a far less socially useful or redeeming version--laying there, waiting for the opportunity to draw your blood. Don't fucking pet them.

Scream It From the Rooftops

Digby, who I never remember to read (I'll fix that), notes that Crooks and Liars busted WorldNet Daily (to which I will not link) commenting that immigration just isn't a hard problem to solve; you just Holocaust them:

"Not only will it work, but one can easily estimate how long it would take. If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn't possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don't speak English and are not integrated into American society."

Riiiiight. Link psychofascists to this behavior every chance you get. And when one of them chastises you for labelling them as Nazis? Laugh in his face.

Making Shit Up

Americans are really, really fond of making shit up. It's a time-honored tradition; ask Samuel Clemens, although the thing of course predates him, rooting more probably as an Anglo-American tradition in the swishy Alexander Pope and the unconscionably dangerous Jonathan Swift. Please note that this very likely exhausts my recall of things to which I paid attention in English class.

Be that as it may, I know a trend when I see one. Heck, I'm no stranger to making shit up my ownself.

See that? That was a really cool ploy, there. I made up an excuse to get you to click on the links for old, useless posts. Damn, I'm cute. Damn, I love making shit up.

It's a right that we hold pretty inalienable, is making shit up. Pry it from our cold dead fingers and all that. This sort of thinking, of course, tends to lead pretty directly to cold dead fingers, but then again, what doesn't, in the fullness of time?

Media Matters, now carried in the Sausage Roll to the right, is devoted to exposing twits who expect to be taken seriously, yet who are Making Shit Up. Let's be clear, here. No one is paying attention to me, and that's as should be; I'm a dim bulb who enjoys vomiting on things that piss me off. I'm nobody. I'm a net exporter to the intellectual sewage system that is the Internet. The eight of you who have rediscovered that I am occasionally posting are the only ones who see this nonsense, and you have enough sense to understand irony, even not-particularly-good irony.

There are those who have wider exposure, however, and they should be held to a certain standard of honesty and truthfulness. You know who I'm talking about; don't make me name names or haul out my well-thumbed and suspiciously sticky copy of the Ad Hominem Thesaurus.

Let's digress a moment. It's perfectly acceptable, under some circumstances, to indulge ad hominem attacks. I'd like to point out to a certain segment of the population that ad hominem does not mean "unfair" or "unreasonable." It simply means that a thing (usually an attack) is directed at a person, rather than at the person's ideas.

Well, poppycock. The two are often intimately connected, and if a person is fucking stupid enough to believe or generally agree with the O'Reilly's and Malkinses and Assrockets of the world, then the person probably deserves an ad hominem attack, ne c'est pas?

Where was I? Oh yeah, Media Matters ripping O'Reilly and Malkin a new one. The site's been a little obsessed with Glenn Beck lately, and I suppose there's something to that, Glenn Beck being a high-volume provider of bullshit to call out. But today, the site exposes a bit from O'Reilly's show, wherein his guest is Our Lady of the Concentration Camps herself (aside: the still pic of Malkin from this makes her look exceedingly brown; how the hell can she stand herself?). They proceed to attack a California law requiring the addition to history curricula information about the positive historical contributions of gay persons.

O'Liar and Our Lady proceed, in the clip, to demolish truth, claiming that the law prevents all negative speech about gay persons, and to claim that the law was "a form a fascism."

Are their fingers cold and dead yet?

Dear Lefty Blogosphere

Of course Richard Cohen is a wanker, you fucking nimrods. Reasonable people can, indeed, differ on whether Stephen Colbert's WHCA speech was funny. People who don't think it was funny are wrong, but that doesn't mean we can't differ.

There are, however, several related topics where reasonable people cannot reasonably differ, and all of them are getting ass-plungered by people who are fast approaching Cohenesque wankitude. To wit:

1. It doesn't matter whether you think Colbert was funny. The core issue is whether his speech was appropriate. The underlying implication of everything written on the topic by right-wing and other fucktards is that it wasn't. That? Is a lie. A damned lie, even. Was it okay when Imus did it to Clinton 10 years ago? Of course it was. So shut the fuck up, you snivelling, lying asshole.

2. Civility doesn't matter. The Web has abandoned all pretense of civility. Do you think right-wing fucktards will listen to us if we're civil? They haven't so far, and they tend to respond to it with incivility of their own. To top all of this, Richard Cohen wants to lecture us on civility? Get a fucking grip, Richard, you goddam fascist warmongering (yes, despite your impassioned and completely untruthful denial, you a a fucking warmonger) twit. And further, deluded bloggers want to pretend they'll be listened to if they're civil? Ki-yi-yi. The gross disconnect of our culture from reality is truly staggering.

3. Y'know, I'm a proponent of just sitting around wanking until about 70 days before the mid-term elections, with the exception of some low-grade meme perpetuation. I think that anything else increases the chance that the Idiot Middle (which will elect the swing members of the next Congress) will grow tired of our message and our perceived incivility. But this topic has really exhausted the possibilities for entertaining wankitude.

So shut the fuck up. Colbert was funny and on-target; Cohen's a jackass; civility machts nichts. So stop. Just stop. All of you.

Eager to Please

Previously:

I whined about the trip, and about getting ready for it.

Now:

It's a daunting prospect to fly across an ocean, especially the bigger one. I had never done it before, and it's not something I'll put down for a monthly rotation. Flying in the front of the plane makes it darned near tolerable, though. It's a 14-hour flight from Toronto to Beijing, and stunningly, the Canadians are pretty not-wacky about smoking, so I got to load up on nicotine in a smoking lounge before boarding the aircraft.

Air Canada is pretty civilized, too, at least in business class (I've never flown in their livestock section). About an hour into the flight, they start loading you up with a gourmet meal--multiple courses, decent enough food, a little tablecloth over your lap tray, and all the red you can swill. It's a leisurely, 90-minute meal, and this aircraft had a beautiful little on-demand feature for videos. I watched a movie (the latest Harry Potter thingie, I think) and got real drowsy by the end of it. When I woke up, it was time for a mid-flight bowl of noodles (AirCan's nod to the destination, I think, in addition to a nod in the form of a really hot Asian stewardess named Vivian whose idea of passenger service for not-horribly-ugly-or-smelly male passengers includes just about everything short of a tug job*), and another movie (the very bad Zorro movie starring Antonio Banderas and, thank the gods, Catherine Zeta-Jones, who provided a lot of very entertaining, heavingly bosomy footage). That occasioned another nap (plagued by sweet heaving dreams). I spent only about 7 hours of the flight awake, and that? Is a lot less daunting.

When I landed in Beijing, it was about 1 PM local. I was pretty tired, but well within range of toughing things out and semi-normalizing my time orientation by staying awake until bedtime and getting a decent night's sleep. With my faithful travelling companion Andres (not his real name), I disembarked into the Commie's lair.

Andres is a real good guy. He's a fairly high-ranking servant of a major multilateral institution, and without his help, our project--i.e., the topic of this fabulous Beijing launch activity--would not have come to fruition. He personally ensured that his organization did about a million bucks of work on spec--which is to say, I was very, very slow to pay him (we still owe him about a quarter-million bucks)--and another half million just out of the goodness of his heart. He's appallingly handsome, debonair, well-dressed, classy, distinguished. I feel dirty standing next to the man, he's so fucking shiny. He's a really, really nice guy, too, and quite pragmatic about getting a job done. He had been in Toronto visiting his son for a day or two, and we ended up on the same flight. We weren't sitting together, which was likely a good idea, because Andres is far too nice to be able to put up with the likes of me for 14 hours, and because he didn't deserve to sit next to someone who snores as obnoxiously as I do.

But at the airport, I had hand, because the car was there for me. Somehow, our conference organizer had forgotten Andres' existence, and he was riding into town at my sufferance. I almost never get rock-star treatment at an airport, but this? Was my day.

After the fright with the money and the visa, Chinese Frontier Security was pretty laughable--remarkably cursory. I didn't have SARS and I wasn't a religious activist. They just didn't care. We got through the formalities quickly, and strode confidently out into the arrivals hall.

Which was mobbed. Oh my Sweet Jesus Titty-Fucking Christ, I have never seen such a sea of pulsating humanity. Thousands of 'em, crowded up to the perp walk you have to do coming out of Frontier Security, waving signs, shrieking, elbowing, weeping, and just generally...well, pulsating. The sign with my name was pretty obvious, and after a quick rendevous with an ATM that dispensed currency with pictures of Chairman Mao, we made for our car, escorted by our guide, who told us her name was Echo.

The car was handsome--like a small Town Car, but the Chinese apparently don't believe much in trunk space, because my giant duffel and garment bag and large laptop/briefcase/flight bag would not coexist peacefully with Andres' giant rolling monster and smaller flight bag (Andres is a much smarter traveller than I am, at least for longish trips). We ended up with my duffel and flight bag in between us in the back seat.

Echo introduced us to the driver, Mister Somebody, who looked and acted like a mobster. Fine with me, he's on my side. Echo told us proudly that this car model was the first Chinese-manufactured limousine, the Red Flag. It was pretty nice--leather seats, very comfortable, nice smooth ride. I felt like Dan Akroyd as a mohel.

Echo nattered constantly during the ride in. This suited Andres--he's a people person, and can sustain a conversation with just about anyone, even a surly sociopath like me. He kept Echo occupied while I surveyed my surroundings.

Which were bleak. Beijing sits on the edge of the desert, a fact I found quite surprising. I wondered, as we drove in, about the long, perfectly straight ranks of trees planted along the highways; I found out later that they had been planted, in a massive, hero-project effort, as erosion breaks, an attempt to cut down on pollution from sandstorms. Good idea, as it happens, because Beijing is polluted enough from other sources.

Peering between the perfectly spaced ranks of trees, I could see...a poor country. Bleak, sandy villages without motor vehicles, with wooden shacks or huts or hovels. Few bicycles. Dirt roads and tracks. Not much of an infrastructured look. This only 20 miles or so out from the center of the national capital. I began to wonder what the fuck I had gotten myself into--this place is supposed to be a dangerous, modernizing superpower, right?

I don't think I was supposed to be noticing this, because Echo started to try to draw me into the conversation, which was mostly about banal stuff like how progressive and forward-looking China is, and how the Chinese have many sayings, and how they are very excited about the upcoming Olympics in 2008, and how the Chinese have many sayings. By the end of the ride, Echo had related about 114 of them, of which maybe 3 made sense. Damned if I can remember them now.

After 15 or 17 miles, we were obviously in the urb. Traffic was thick--devastatingly so. The smog was choking--at least, I thought it was the smog. It turned out that about half of it was sand, blown in from a Gobi sandstorm. Damned Mongoreans.

Which gets us to the most difficult challenge I faced during my eight days in Beijing, which was not speaking out loud these words:

Why Mongoreans attack Shitty Wall?

Ilse had spent days prepping me for this, and not kindly. Every day for a week, she pranked me with phone calls delivered in a pidgin accent, trying hard to get me to stop laughing like the diseased imperialist racist piglet that I am. If I was going to a Chinese prison, it wasn't going to be for laughing at the letters R and L.

It's a filthy city, far dirtier than my favorite European and American cities. There are, as you'd expect, many banners and billboards and placards, all unintelligible to the likes of me, but there's something about an exhortation to Work Hard for the Glory and Well-Being of the People that manages to transcend alphabets and bore itself into your skull anyway. There are things about Beijing that you can find anywhere; traffic, noise, diesel fumes, mobs, uniformed persons of all stripes and types, wide avenues and choked alleys, grandiose buildings, a mix of the ancient and modern.

It's just that in Beijing, you don't really know what the uniforms mean (I found out a little bit later on), the smog and fumes are far, far worse, and it's a real stark line between the ancient and modern. Looking out from any vantage point in the central city, you can see a mix of ancient Asian rooftops and modern skyscrapers that you certainly won't find in London, obscured by an indeterminate haze that you won't find even in New York or LA.

You'll also see a forest of cranes (the construction sort, not the origami sort). Beijing is a rework in progress, owing to the upcoming 2008 Olympics. The Chinese are tearing down and rebuilding huge swaths of the city. The Olympics are important to the Chinese, to an extent that is hard to convey. They are stompdown fucking nuts about it. They understand the importance of presenting a good face to the world for this one, and they're damned if anything's going to stop them from doing just that. They're building a new international terminal at the Beijing airport that is bigger than the rest of the airport put together. They're building countless new hotels and shopping areas. They are going to have a functioning market economy in place in Beijing in time for the Olympics, if it kills them, and one wonders, seriously, if it will. The Chinese are not afraid of hard work, and they're at it. We should all be grateful that they're doing something constructive, because if these people decide to focus all that energy on cleaning out our skinny white asses? We're gonna be a in world of hurt.

The traffic in Beijing is insane, beyond the wildest imaginings of any Washingtron or San Franciscan or Bostonian, and the drivers unimaginably more primal and aggressive. I cannot recommend, by way of sport, jaywalking in Beijing. There is a zero-sympathy policy for anyone caught hanging around the midline of a city avenue waiting for oncoming traffic to clear. Just when you think the terror is about to end and you can make a dash for the far shore, more traffic materializes in a way that can only be described as deliberate and malign.

This problem is compounded by the street layout. There are no curbs in much of the city; the sidewalk and street are the same pavement, and there is only a nodding respect to the concept that some of this pavement does not belong to wheeled traffic. There are some undefined boundaries between the spaces intended for cars, bicycles, and pedestrians, and it's just not a good idea to be more than four feet from a building. On my eventual visit to Tienanamen Square (on my penultimate day in the city), I survived only because my friend Beth is really, really fast and twice bodily yanked me out of the way of onrushing vehicles--police vehicles.

I staggered in to the Beijing Hotel, and arranged to meet Andres in two hours or so for a walk down to Tienanamen Square, which was only a 5-minute walk away. My room was perfectly continental in every respect--the place is apparently a 5-star hotel. While there was an annoying acetate smell in the hallways--we never did find out why--it was all pretty serviceable. Not wanting to fuck up my internal clock any worse, I settled in to test my Internet connection and see what the Chinese government would let me transmit over the Web. Various guidebooks had warned me about the degree of electronic monitoring there, so I was real cautious, and I didn't experience any problems.

At the appointed hour, I strolled down to the elevator bank, where I discovered a disturbing fact; I was on the same floor as the staff office for the conference. Uh-oh. What was worse, I was spotted. What was even worse, the spotter knew that I had flown business class, and expressed the expectation that I should pop off of a 14-hour flight in business class refreshed and ready to actually work.

"Are you out of your fucking no-account mind?" I asked politely. "I'll work tomorrow. Leave me the fuck alone."

No dice. Energy Girl, who shall be known here as Ptraci, for obscure reasons that about two of you will understand, stood her ground. I was drafted. I slunk off to notify Andres of my plight, and slunk back up to the tenth floor to settle in to meet my fate.

I will try not to bore you too terribly much with the details of my fate. After all, you want to hear about the China bits, and in truth, many of the details of my fate could have happened in any dirt-poor country with a crappy banking system, a half-assed market economy, and a fluffy and ephemeral currency.

But here, my fate involved actual Chinese persons, of whom you will care to hear. We had a two-hour meeting to go over every detail of the conference, which was to begin two days hence. This meeting was attended by our on-site staff, a combination of employees and consultants of my sponsor (me, Ptraci, my buddy Slim, and our media grrrl, Foxy), local subcontractor employees, and the conference coordinator, Blanche, an imperious frosted-blonde sack of seething American contempt for all living things, most especially wogs or people who ought, in her view, to be wogs.

Which we had in abundance, because we hired a pretty good subcontractor to handle all the destination stuff, including the airport pickups and bodydumps, and logistical/administrative support, and translations, and registration/hospitality, which is not code for anything no matter how much Dweezil and Goth want it to be. They had four people there, and these four people are central to our story.

Tourism is important in China, an important source of entertainment, for those locals that can afford it, and an important source of hard-currency income from international tourism. I mentioned last time that it's not easy to enter China, and that's a little hard to understand, until you come to realize that it's a pretty officious culture and they mean nothing by it, and the not-easy part is mostly show, dedicated to keeping out those the government would consider political undesirables.

Once you're in country, though, it all changes, and everyone--I mean everyone--is eager to please, or at least tries to put on a convincing show of being eager to please. It is a nominally customer-service culture, at least for foreigners, and at least within the bounds of the usual Asian face-saving values.

To this end, the tourism industry is pretty huge. Colleges offer degrees in tourism, and the four lovely, young, cute, cuddly, eager-to-please little thangs in this meeting were all graduates of tourism school. Ordinarily, they conduct tours. One of them told me about spending two years in Tibet as a tour guide. I asked if it was difficult to get into Tibet; there is a special visa required, and they certainly aren't about inviting Richard Gere in for a book tour. She told me that it wasn't particularly difficult, there were lots of flights into the region. Realizing my error, I recalibrated the question, asking about the special visa.

"Oh," she said. "That's political. Is because the Dalai Lama betrayed the government."

Welcome to history. More about it later.

Tourism school includes classes in English. All of our lovely, young, cute, cuddly, eager-to-please little thangs had been given American names in their English classes, because it is thought to be courteous to not make our thick, moonshine-swollen tongues try to wrap themselves around Mandarin syllables. Hence, I set about a week's collaboration (still not code) with Holly, Susan, Joan, and Nancy. It is disconcerting to try to conduct a pidgin conversation, dropping all indefinite articles by force of habit after only a day or two in country (even in conversations with native English speakers), with a smiling, eager-to-please, fresh young Chinese girl wearing a giant name tag that says "NANCY." It just doesn't fly.

It turned out that Holly, Susan, Joan, and Nancy were among the most pleasant aspects of my time in Beijing. They were enduringly helpful, sweet, curious, and interested in comparative cultural analysis (Attention; ATTENZIONE: There is no code in this post. Thank you.) Hanging with them, working with them, talking to them, these were the high points of the work-related experience.

Except it took a few days for them to warm to me. We met, you see, less than four hours after I disembarked from the plane. I was pretty fucking hostile at this impromptu, let's-go-over-every-fucking-detail-for-the-forty-second-time meeting. Hostile, grumpy, hungry for viscera. This meeting was not the best getting-to-know-you sorta scenario.

But I am a perfectly responsible and artful person, and it didn't take us long to get to eager to please.

More later.

*I'm exaggerating, honey.

Tip of the horns to Dweezil for making possible the title of this post.

Broken Vow

Okay, I promised to stop venting my spleen over Our Lady of the Concentration Camps. But I have to admit that I go to her site to see what she's capable of. What she was capable of yesterday (remember my motto: Yesterday's News Tomorrow, Or Maybe Next Month) is a rant about the Texas Rangers sporting, on Friday night, special Cinco de Mayo jerseys emblazoned with "Los Rangers."

It's pretty harmless stuff, Cinco de Mayo jerseys, right? I mean, c'mon, in this country Cinco is an excuse to get stupid on Coronas and Modelos, right? It's not like anyone here imbues it with any big political significance. Anyone other than the Ubercunt, that is:

"I understand the Rangers wanted to do something innocuous to recognize a holiday celebrating historical and cultural pride. But the politically correct selectivity here is telling. While it's considered a celebration of "diversity" to acknowledge the military sacrifices of another nation's heroes, it's considered racist to acknowledge the military sacrifices of one's own.

Case in point: Can you imagine if someone proposed changing the Rangers' jerseys to "Confederate Rangers" to celebrate Confederate Heroes' Day*?

Oh, and I'm sure I'll be labeled a racist for pointing out the double standard.

Like that's anything new..."

Uhm...no. I'll label you a racist, Mrs. Malkin, because...well, because you are one, as you demonstrate conclusively about 65 percent (or more) of the time you open your mouth or put pen to paper or electrons to screen. I'll also label you a racist for finding it necessary to link to a Googlesearch of "Confederate Heroes' Day" in the midst of this passage, just in case your readers need help getting in touch with their own racism.

What I'll label you as for "pointing out the double standard" is really, really, insufferably stupid. Stupid beyond measure. There is no double standard here, because there's no fucking comparison. Who the fuck celebrates Confederate Heroes' Day? You're pretty much my neighbor, and I see almost infinitely more restaurants trying to increase drunk driving by advertising Cinco de Mayo than I do restaurants even mentioning the Confederacy. And when the fuck did the Confederacy become a legitimate nation? Is it possibly that your tiny brain can wrap itself around the notion that the Confederacy was an illegal separatist movement? I mean it was, because they lost, and did so as a result of actions by...why, American military heroes! How about that?

In another sense, the Confederacy was a pack of terrorists! Terrorists, Michelle! You fucking Jihadist! Why do you hate the American troops who won the Civil War?

And no, it's not new that you're being labelled a racist. Or that you're being labelled as too dumb to suck air. And neither is surprising, because you are, in fact a racist, and you are, in fact, too fucking dumb to suck air. Jaysus.

It's A Beautiful Day In Mister Right-Wing Fucktard's Neighborhood

Mister Right-Wing Fucktard: I'm so happy! Another drunken Communist Kennedy crashed his car! And he was on drugs!!! Now we can rape him like you unhinged moonbats raped Rush Limbaugh, who wasn't arrested and didn't commit a crime!

Me: Gods, you're pathetic.

Mister Right-Wing Fucktard: No, don't you get it? Kennedy! Drunk! Car! Drug addict! Resign! Leftist Liberal Reconquista Lesbian Queer Terror-Lover! Chappaquiddick!

Me: Okay, here are some facts...

Mister Right-Wing Fucktard: No! Kennedy! Drunk! Car! Drugs! Chappaquiddick! Favoritism!

Me: You do understand that we're talking about the Capitol Hill Police, and that Patrick Kennedy is about the 346th consecutive Congresscritter that the Capitol Hill Police have caught driving drunk at 3 in the morning and released back into the gene pool? And that the very existence of the Capitol Hill Police is predicated on favoritism and the need to get drunk Congresscritters safely and quietly off of the street before they kill someone? And that Representative Kennedy's "I'm on my way to a vote" line is what every single Congresscritter ever arrested for anything has said immediately upon his or her arrest, ever? And that if Rush Limbaugh were black or Hispanic he'd be doing life in prison? And that between Laura Bush and Ted Kennedy, the first one to kill someone in a car crash was, oddly enough, Laura Bush? Do you get any of this? Or are you too busy mopping up torrents of your own spooge* to actually focus on anything that resembles a fact, or even an objective relativity?

Mister Right-Wing Fucktard: Kennedy! Drunk! Car! Drugs! Favoritism! Chappaquiddick! You! Mean to Rush! Hilary's a dyke! You love terrorists! Wetbacks! Millions of 'em! You hate troops! Moussaoui! Kennedy! Drunk! Chappaquiddick!

Me: Sigh. Lookie there, it's Porter Goss and his string of poontang in the unemployment line. And on a Friday afternoon, no less. Will you just shut the fuck up now, you fascist asshole?

Mister Right-Wing Fucktard: Hey! You said a bad word!

*Thanks for the inspiration, Rude.

Also: gratitude to Tom Tomorrow for giving me something to pretty much rip off, albeit in my own idiom.