World Autism Awareness Day 2012

I have no idea if anyone is still using the above logo/icon/whatever, but I like it, so I am. I'd like to think there's a certain appropriateness to that.

Minions has visited this day from time to time, apparently last in 2009, the commemoration's first anniversary. I haven't chosen to post on April 2 in 3 years. I'm fairly sure that this has not made any of you less aware of autism. It certainly hasn't done so to me. There's some twinge of guilt here, some internal nag that I should've been marking this day each and every year. And there's a recognition of reality, too. Because you're not any less aware of autism, or how it affects me and my family.

The usual suspects will spout the usual idiocy on this day. There'll be a lot of feces-throwing, and a lot of earnest labelling, and a lot of self-pity. Shit, I do all that every day, I don't need a special day for it, and neither does Bam-Bam, who is, as you probably remember, Minions' local person with autism.

There are some truths about autism that are pretty absolute. It isn't a condition or a disease as much as a spectrum of observed--and, it is hypothesized, related--behaviors that can vary wildly from one person to another. It is not caused by vaccines. It is not caused by toxins. It is not related to diet, though some children have comorbid conditions related to diet, or may display some autism-like behaviors as a result of gastrointestinal issues. It is most likely genetic in origin. These are all things that have pretty solid scientific backing. The truth is that there's a little of the spectrum in many of us, and probably some way that each of us can find to connect to that.

It's probably best to let people who are passionate about autism believe as they choose. Parents should select the treatments they think appropriate for their children (within certain limitations--for instance, chelating children to remove heavy metals is a treatment that probably amounts to child abuse). You're not going to talk an antivaccination lunatic out of their position using calm reason or science or anything else. You can't talk to Jenny McCarthy, period. What can be done is to insist that research money not be thrown down black holes of wackaloon alternative research or into self-serving charities that believe that there is a one-size-fits-all "cure." Many high-functioning persons on the autism spectrum detest the notion of a "cure" in the first place. Others, like my friend Swami and her son Max (see here)...not so much.

And then there's Bam-Bam, my stepson, who lights up my life in a way no other person can. That doesn't mean I love my wife, or Bam-Bam's brother Databoy, or anyone else, any less. But Bam-Bam and I connect. I wrote this once, about a month before the first WAAD. Here's the money quote:

I accept Bam-Bam for himself. He is a happy kid who lights up when he sees me, who wants me to play with him and hug him and wrestle with him and bathe him and put him to bed and give him pizza or chips or cheeseburger and wake him up in the morning (when he doesn't do that on his own at 4 AM) and put him on the bus. This kid loves me and I love him. He is a sweet and stunningly smart kid who happens to be different, and who happens to have some trouble communicating. And by different, I don't mean "sick" or "disordered" or "damaged." I mean different. Bam-Bam views things through his own lens, and who the hell doesn't? His lens just isn't shaped the same way as mine.

Nothing there has changed in the four years since I wrote it. Bam-Bam is now 11, and in middle school. The school program is a little more focused on occupational skills--counting and sorting and packaging and the like--and on interacting in the community; his class goes on community outings three times a week, rather than just once. The high school program is even more focused on life and occupational skills, and we're fortunate that we live in a jurisdiction that will, essentially, allow him to extend high school by 3 years without prejudice. That's 9 more years of school for him. Who the fuck knows how he'll be able to grow?

I don't know what the future holds for Bam-Bam, and like any parent, I'm scared shitless about it. I'm so scared I can't begin to process it. So, like him, I just keep on, doing the things that can be done. Unlike him, I press a little harder--usually not enough to piss him off, because that doesn't do anybody any good. But he presses too, and he'll usually answer a challenge when its posed.

So please give a thought to Bam-Bam, and to my friend Swami and her Max, and to my friend Kimmah and her Sam, and to millions of other parents and kids I don't know and can't name, every one doing the things they have to do, day by day, often one minute or hour at a time. Just today, or today and every day, or whatever thought you can spare, when you can spare it. Speaking for me and Ilse, there are parents of ASD children who are in far more stressful straits than we are; there are people whose uncertain and scary future is next week, not next year or next decade. Of course I'm scared for me and mine, but I think of them too, especially those whose childrens' behavior is less comprehensible, more threatening, more self-endangering than Bam-Bam's.

And to Bam-Bam, my little buddy...well, words don't cover it, can't and won't. But I'll be there when you wake up. Sleep well, my son.

Bad Newsies

Autism is splashed all over the news today, as a press conference by Hannah Poling's parents accomplished what opportunist David Kirby couldn't accomplish last week: a newsgasm over the government's concession of their vaccine compensation case. The Poling case was one of three test cases in what are referred to as the Omnibus Autism Proceedings in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. Two other cases remain contested and serve as representative of about 5,000 other cases that are on hold as the Omnibus Proceedings continue.

Here's what didn't happen: the government didn't concede that there is a link between vaccines and autism. The government didn't concede that Hannah Poling is autistic, despite what an awful lot of sloppy newsies would have you believe. The very solid science underlying the very solid theory that there is no causal connection between vaccines and autism did not change. And no one refuted the fundamental concepts of autism epidemiology.

Here's what did happen: the government conceded that vaccines aggravated Hannah Poling's underlying (and exceedingly rare) mitochondrial disorder, causing autism-like symptoms. That's a long, long way from significant in the context of autism science, and it's also not at all significant in the context of the Omnibus proceedings. If it were, the government would have conceded more than just the Poling case.

CNN, in the person of Larry King, is going to be frottaging this issue tonight, welcoming Dr. and Mrs. Poling as his guests. I can't bear to watch, although I must give Jon Poling due credit; he has been very, very careful in his public statements about this case. He has not stated that there is a causal connection, he has not mischaracterized the government's concession or his daughter's symptoms, and he has very explicitly stated that he is very much in favor of vaccines. He questions the safety of vaccines now extant in a generic sort of way, but that's fair game. The Polings are also to be wildly applauded for lifting the haze of secrecy that surrounded the government's concession; until they spoke out, there was a lot of mystery about this because the government could not violate the Polings' privacy by releasing confidential information about the case and the settlement.

More interesting will be CNN's planned autismgasm on April 2 to mark Autism Awareness Month, or some such thing. I don't know yet whether I think that's good or bad. It's possible that someone at CNN will get a clue and read up on actual science. While it would be irresponsible for me to speculate if anyone were reading this, they're not, and I speculate that it seems likely that CNN will follow its own lead, and the lead of much of the media, in playing the so-called vaccines/autism controversy straight down the middle. Unfortunately, giving the autism conspiracy theorists the undue concession of middle ground is precisely the same thing as treating intelligent design like real science. There's no there there.

Bad Science

I've rearranged the furniture some, adding some links under a heading I've chosen to label "Science." The truth is that the links are to blogs that post, at least sometimes, about autism. You can find a bunch of other links over at my friend Kimmah's place, if you don't like my links.

Most of those who read this blog know that my wife Ilse's son Bam-Bam is autistic. I've done some reading about autism, but not much, and I haven't troubled myself with any intimate familiarity with controversies related to autism, although I've been aware of them.

Here's my view: I accept Bam-Bam for himself. He is a happy kid who lights up when he sees me, who wants me to play with him and hug him and wrestle with him and bathe him and put him to bed and give him pizza or chips or cheeseburger and wake him up in the morning (when he doesn't do that on his own at 4 AM) and put him on the bus. This kid loves me and I love him. He is a sweet and stunningly smart kid who happens to be different, and who happens to have some trouble communicating. And by different, I don't mean "sick" or "disordered" or "damaged." I mean different. Bam-Bam views things through his own lens, and who the hell doesn't? His lens just isn't shaped the same way as mine.

Whose is?

There are people like us. There are people whose children are far more severely challenged than Bam-Bam. Some of them are like us; they accept that their children are what they are. They help as best they can, as we do. Some of them are horribly burdened by their childrens' needs. We're lucky; Bam-Bam needs a little help in the shower and in the bathroom, and we and the kid need to work a little when he's trying to communicate with us. He needs to be watched or gated in, but he respects baby gates and stays where he's supposed to; in fact, sometimes he thinks he's gating us out, and that's the way he sometimes likes it.

There isn't a cure for Bam-Bam. We can treat symptoms and change behaviors. That's what we do. That's what science--and experience (we'll come back to this)--tell us to do. We can work with him to help him develop independent skills. We can work with him to find his place in this wrong society that is not well-suited to allowing him a place. That's what responsibility and decency tell us to do. He is what he is, and some of that can change as he grows and ages, and some of it can't. What we can give him is a context and some tools to adapt as well as he can. We don't mope about this. It is what it is.

There are other people. Some of them have children who are less severely challenged than Bam-Bam, or far, far more so. These people cannot accept. They believe their children are damaged, disordered, sick. They believe there is an identifiable cause. They believe there is a cure, a magic bullet that will suddenly erase their children's symptoms and undesirable behaviors and leave them with theoretically normal children. Most of them believe that there is an identifiable cause, and namely their childrens' childhood immunizations. They advocate not immunizing children. They believe that there is a giant conspiracy between Big Pharma and the government to cover up a causal connection. They seek compensation from pharmaceutical companies and the government. They chelate (chemically cleanse) their children to remove mercury, the agent that they believe responsible for their childrens' conditions. Unfortunately, a common side effect of chelation is fatality. I am neither joking nor exaggerating.

Of course, it's very difficult to prove a negative, but all efforts--numerous efforts--to scientifically link autism-spectrum diagnoses to childhood immunization have failed. Utterly. There is no demonstrable connection between vaccines and autism. None. The links under the "Science" heading can lead you to a host of technical data on this, if you're interested, but the bottom line is this: there is precisely as much evidence that stuffed animals cause autism as there is that vaccines cause autism. The theory that there is a causal connection between vaccines and autism is as valid as the theory that copulating with a virgin cures syphilis. I am neither joking nor exaggerating.

Such organizations as Autism Speaks and Cure Autism Now, along with a host of others, to whom I will never link, are proponents of this vaccine nonsense. Beware of them. Please, please, please do not give them your money.

The short of the furniture rearrangement is this: I tripped over some anti-vaccine propaganda on, of all places, the Huffington Post, and did some more reading, and discovered that HuffPo is a notorious hotbed for these insane persons, apparently because Ariana Huffington is pals with Bill Maher, who is an anti-vaccination nutbar. I'm done with HuffPo (I was done with Maher a long time ago). That got me reading. That got me linking.

Sorry to inflict a completely humorless post upon you, my gentle and loyal and loving readers, but I had a little story to tell here. End of story.

The Tipping Point

We all experience the accumulation of idiocy in various forms, affecting various aspects of our lives, many of them trivial, some of them less so. I decided a while back that the genus of idiocy relating to politics and worldviews was one I no longer wanted to significantly engage in this blog. The thoroughgoing blindness and pervasive dishonesty of the other side just saps my soul. Should somebody engage them? Sure, somebody should, but I'm mostly not going to, and in so deciding, I forgo the right to an opinion on who should.

Yesterday's little dustup in Boston, though, is not possible for me to ignore; it is the tipping point of my rage on this issue. The "war" on terrorism is unadulterated bullshit. If you are not a law enforcement or intelligence official and you go around worrying about terrorism, you are either a complete fucking idiot, you are seeking an excuse to impose your brand of fascism on our country, or you are psychologically disturbed and should seek some help. Multiple choice is plausible.

Let me be abundantly clear about this: if you see a small electronic sign, one with blinking lights in a pattern that appears to be flipping you off, and your first thought is that you are looking at an explosive device? You need competent medical help. Seriously. It is not possible for a sane and rational person to look at this:

and think, "I am looking at a terrorist bomb." It's just not possible.

It would be easy to write this off to the stick up Boston's ass. We are talking about the descendants of the folks who brought you the Salem Witch Trials. Today's news bears this out; the two poor bastards hired by Turner Broadcasting to carry out its nefarious plot of using art installations as advertising are facing arraignment in Boston-area courts this morning, and city officials are acting like the company--and its temporary starving-artist hires--are actual agents of Al Qaida.

Let's set the terrorism thing straight: you, personally, are not going to die of terrorism. It ain't gonna happen. Let's take a look at the things that will kill you.

The World Health Organization estimates (and by the way, I worked on the book pictured on the linked page, there) that, in 2002 (the most recent year for which WHO has published data), there were about 291 million people in the United States (please forgive my national chauvinism if you're one of Minions' 0.135 non-U.S. readers). A little over 24 million of them died. That's about .08 percent of Americans. Eight tenths of one percent, eight out of every one thousand Americans, died that year (the actual figure is 831.7 deaths per hundred thousand population--I'm even willing to put the worst possible face on it and call it a whole nine out of a thousand).

That's a slim chance of dying to begin with, on the low side of the middle of the spectrum, around 80th in the world (191 countries are listed), a death rate most similar to that of, oddly enough, France. Our national death rate in 2002 was not very far from the global death rate of 918.5 deaths per hundred thousand population.

Various countries in Africa approach or exceed a death rate that triples ours. Stop. Think. Triples. Around 2.7 percent of the denizens of Sierra Leone (not a particularly safe country for humans, I grant) died in 2002.

So, when it comes to dying (at all--we haven't even gotten to terrorism yet), you have a middling advantage in that you are an American. You would do a bit better in any of a number of countries--including, interestingly enough, Israel and Syria--and significantly better in a handful of countries, all of them (with the exception of Brunei) oil-rich countries that border Saudi Arabia.

Why did people die in 2002? WHO classifies deaths by cause. Globally, about 26 percent of deaths in 2002 owed to infectious diseases of various sorts, 12 percent to cancers, a whopping 29 percent to cardiovascular diseases, and smatterings of 4 and 5 percent attributable to various other causes; 58 percent of deaths owed to causes classified as noncommunicable diseases, which subsumes everything not infectious or injurious.

Only 9 percent of deaths in 2002 owed to injuries, and of those, two-thirds were accidental in nature--traffic accidents, falls, drownings, and the like. Another 17 percent of injury-caused deaths were from self-inflicted injuries, meaning suicide. Only 1 percent of deaths (and it's almost exactly 1 percent) resulted from violence or war.

As a citizen of the world, you had less than a 1-percent chance of dying in 2002. If you died, there was only a 1-percent chance that you died from any violent cause--including terrorism.

As an American, your advantage here really kicks in, unless you're me. 87.5 percent of U.S. deaths in 2002 were caused by noncommunicable diseases--23 percent by cancers, 38 percent by cardiovascular diseases, with smatterings attributable to other disease-based causes. In the U.S., only 6.3 percent of deaths were attributable to injury, and of those, around 70 percent were accidental.

Roughly 157,000 Americans died of violence-related causes in 2002, less than six-tenths of one percent of all deaths. In 2002, you were seven times more likely to die from an accidental cause--itself not all that likely--than from any violent cause, including terrorism. Even if we take a liberty with the numbers and add in 5,000 terrorism-related deaths from 2001 into the totals, the incidences don't change significantly.

Now let's talk about preventable deaths. Well over half of cancer and cardiovascular deaths can be prevented. Compare the amount spent on preventing deaths from noncommunicable diseases to the amount spent on the so-called war on terror. No rational person can look at these proportions and think them appropriate.

Like I said, if you're scared of terrorism, you're either stupid, lying, or deeply troubled. If you're deeply troubled, I truly hope you can get some help for that--it's not surprising that, given the government's propaganda campaign of the last five years, people's heads are twisted by this issue. But if you're stupid or lying--and if you have a fear of terrorism for any reason other than some psychological disorder, you're one or both--just shut the fucking fuck up and consider a fact or two.

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.

All The Whining In The World

I promised some blogging on China, and I am a man of my word. When it suits me. And I feel like it. And my allergies aren't too bad. And I don't have something better to do. And I don't feel like doing something I'm supposed to be doing. You know, all that. So here we are.

Quick review: Trip to China. Large international conference attended by people from all over the world--seriously, something like 85 countries were represented. I was there as the finance officer, handing out money to people from poor countries--this made me fairly popular. I was also doing some evaluation work on the conference itself, trying to answer questions like, "Why am I here?" and "Couldn't I have figured out a better way to do this?" and "Whose idea was this, anyway?"

I spent months wriggling to avoid the Beijing trip. It's a long, long trip, and I knew that sightseeing opportunities would be limited and the work grueling. It just wasn't worth the tradeoff. I had a fair degree of success at avoidance; I adopted the "I'd be happy to go but you don't need me" strategy, which worked brilliantly; at only two points did the chance that I would have to make the trip escalate alarmingly, and it quickly subsided both times. The second of those points was about a week before I found out I'd have to go, and I made the problem go away by finding someone else to pass out money.

Then, nine days before the conference was to begin, disaster struck; my sacrificial disbursing victim had to back out of the trip. I woke up to a good life, one where I'd soon face a week of an absolute dearth of supervision; at eleven, she and I were sharing a taxi and she was giving me the mournful news; by noon, I was figuring out the visa process and planning my workload, and by four, I had a nonrefundable e-ticket on Air Canada. It was stunning how quickly a day could go all the way south.

My main work task in the next few work days was ensuring that I'd have enough money to pass out in China. The client sponsoring my trip purchased $54,000 in travellers' cheques so that I'd be able to make payments with those. This totalled 630 cheques, each of which I had to sit there in the bank and sign. And record the serial numbers.

We were worried about how to get all this money into a commie country with strict border controls. Nobody wanted to see me in a Chinese prison (not even the inmates--I'm just not that pretty). After I had a little discussion with a mysterious official at the Chinese Embassy in Washington, we decided to try shipping the travellers' cheques in by DHL. Everything was open and aboveboard.

So we shipped in about 25 boxes of conference materials--folders, exhibits, displays, office supplies, conference supples, conference tchotchkes, pamphlets, all kinds of crap with no export value and no possibility of being resold or illegally distributed in China. It got detained in Customs and we had to pay a bribe duty of about $500 to get it out. Once I got there, of course.

My $54K? Two envelopes, clearly marked as to contents, breezed through, waiting for me at the hotel desk when I arrived, no theft, no duties, no bribery, no nothing.

China is not an easy country to enter. A Chinese visa is fairly expensive, as these things go, and there's an interesting price structure. It's something like $35 for citizens of every country in the world, save one. U.S. citizens pay more like $50. Of course, if you need the thing quickly, start handing over additional fees. We were, of course, in a great bloody hurry, so I made a number of trips to the consular section of the Chinese Embassy, doing the application process and getting the whole thing sorted. The day came for me to pick up the visa, and it's a lovely and officious-looking little sticker in one's passport. Very shiny.

However, they fucked up my passport number on the visa. More visions of Chinese prison danced in my head as they reconfiscated my passport and redid the visa. They were kind enough to do so while I waited. I still shudder, thinking about what would've happened at Chinese Frontier Security had I not accidentally discovered their error.

Just so you know, so you have a little index of where you are in life: we're still a few thousand words from me actually discussing China as a country or as an experience, per se. I'm still busy telling you about me. Pretend to like it.

I was flying out of National, DC's close-in airport. We have three, each with its own set of peculiarities and disadvantages. At National, parking is inconvenient, expensive, and not particularly safe. It also suffers from the phenonmenon of idiots who don't live here (and some who do) calling it "Reagan." This unspeakable appellation was forced onto Washington National Airport by a crazed fascist-controlled Congress during the Clinton administration, as a way of reminding the President who was boss. I will never call National Airport by any other name, not even after the self-same fascist twits start calling BWI "Marshall," its recently acquired nom de guerre, after my very own uncle Thurgood.

BWI is a great airport, with one serious and near-fatal flaw; it's in Baltimore. No, not in Baltimore, actually, but it's as close to Baltimore as National is to Washington, time-wise. For denizens of the Peoples' Republic of Montgomery County, Maryland--or, just as important in my case, for denizens of the Independent Cult of Fairfax, Virginia--Baltimore is about 12 hours away, 16 hours during rush hour. Okay, I exaggerate, but it's way the hell out there, well over an hour from the Cardboard Box Fortress of Landrutude, nearly two hours from the Domain of Ilse over in Fairfax (no, we're still not living together). Cheap parking, and it's a Southwest hub, but absolutely abysmal location.

Dulles--which we really call Dulles, making the local airport naming scheme a clear victory for Cold War-style imperialist oppression--has a similar problem, compounded by its location just outside of the ICF. Unless one is travelling from Dulles to West Virginia, there is no way to avoid entering Fairfax en route to one's final destination. Which, seriously, ought to be somewhere other than Fairfax. This problem is further compounded by a simple fact: flights only leave or arrive at Dulles during rush hour. I don't think I've ever flown to or from Dulles, or picked someone up or dropped them off at Dulles, at a time of day that didn't involve 237,000 cars per second traversing the Beltway at the Dulles Airport Road exit.

Dulles is also hampered by its physical layout, which requires one to take a bus from the gate to the terminal. These snorting, lumbering monuments to diesel pollution were all the technorage when the airport first opened. In 1962. They tell us that the airport subway at Dulles, linking the main terminal to the concourses, will be done about fifteen minutes after I die of Dulles-induced apoplexy in 2012.

Let's not even discuss public transit to My Local Airports. There is no public transit to Dulles; BWI is theoretically within spitting distance of a train line, but don't try taking it if you have a flight to catch; and while National is, in theory, convenient to Washington's subway system, I can assure you that this is only for a given value of "convenient," that value meaning "a lot of walking while you're carrying luggage."

Parking being what it is at National, and knowing that I was to return to a different airport entirely, I got my brother, 32-Ounce, to drive me and my copious baggage to a hotel near the airport the night before my 6 AM flight. It was a Wednesday night, there was a new South Park scheduled, and Ilse was to drop by the hotel for one last roll before my long trip off to incarceration in a Chinese prison. I had only to watch a little TV, do the wife, roll over and sleep, and get up at 4 AM to clean up and catch an airport shuttle.

The hotel didn't have Comedy Central on its cable, and the airport shuttle didn't leave until 20 minutes before my flight, so I had to call a cab, which didn't arrive for 35 minutes.

The wife worked out fine, though.

This is getting long. I think we'll get to China in the next post.

Capitalism

My friend Sasha is interested in the history of capitalism in America.

I got your history right here, Sasha: give me your freakin' money. Then go find more money and give that to me.

Wait, maybe that's the history of something else. Never mind.

One problem with capitalism--materialism, really, I guess--is that when it works, it's darned attractive, and when it doesn't, it leaves painful infected teeth marks in your pretty ass. At the moment, I am an ointment junkie.

You may know that I am essentially (and legally) self-employed. After having every reason to believe that I had gotten my business house in order, I came to find yesterday that, after mid-December, I will have very, very little business unless I go find more, on a pretty immediate basis. This is an uncomfortable prospect--for three years now, I've had a plentiful supply, and until yesterday, I had every reason to believe that that supply would continue for at least two more years. At the moment, it appears that as of December 14, I will be markedly underemployed.

Like any good capitalist, I carefully planned this year's annual assault on the piggybank, taking into account high-and-mighty economic principles like supply and demand. I forgot one key thing--my key customer is the government, which is dedicated to levelling off the effects of that key driver of all things.

It should have been simple: I am the supply, and my customer demands me. It has good reasons for doing so; I clean up well, I'm smarter than I look (even after I clean up), and--I think this bit will surprise you--I have something of a knack for getting people to do things I want them to do. I set a market-based rate (and really, it wasn't an extravagant rate) for the supply of me.

Sadly, an entrenchified government person did not like that market-based rate, and preferred to compare my value to that of, say, sand or zucchini or those guys from the jail who pick up litter on your local highways. Said person dug in, and as the sound of progressively larger dicks being slapped on tables grew really quite deafening, I remained confident that the biggest dick slapped down on the table would be slapping in my favor.

I appear...to...have...miscalculated.

As I write this, the biggest johnson on my side is over at the headquarters building I like to call The Big House, playing a little game of Dueling Johnsons with The Big Cheese (who, it must be admitted, is actually playing Dueling Johnsons using her vagina). It'll be the final game of Dueling Johnsons in this little saga. The meal ticket of poor Ilse and her poor urchins, DataBoy and Bam-Bam, rides in the balance. Such is the tragedy of capitalism. On the other hand, capitalism been berry, berry good to me. More later.

In A Developing Country

I've told you a little bit about my day job, which involves caring about global public health, and by extension about the lives and health of those in developing countries (you may know them better as "The Third World", although their designation in both international and U.S. officialese is "LMCs", for "low- and middle-income countries", and others of you may just know them as "places where wogs live"). I take a fair amount of abuse at my day job, because I do not, in fact, except at a purely conceptual level, give a flying fuck about developing countries. I do not visit them and move amongst the people feeling their pain and their need for economic development and improved health care and a decent pinot, although of course I recognize that these folk have this pain and these needs and I am perfectly supportive of throwing money at poor foreigners and their problems, as long as it's other people doing the airdrop and refuelling in Mumbai for a 22-hour flight home.

If it is your personal opinion that this makes me a bad person, I can live with this, and I will suffer your disdain and your wrath and go pour myself another glass of red, and I may even toast your right to hold the personal opinion that I am a bad person. I may even be clinking glasses with you.

Now, the level at which my job involves caring about global public health is at the giving-money-to-other-people-to-do-actual-work level. I don't do any actual work. The things I do, like agreeing to give people money, and keeping careful track of who I agreed to give money to, and calling them names when they don't do the actual work we paid them to do, and keeping track of the actual work that is done, and maybe even, when they say pretty please and offer me sexual favors, shaking the government's money-disbursing tree so that it will just maybe consider actually paying them the money that it, in the guise of me, promised to pay them for doing actual work, are not, in fact, actual work, in the global public health sense.

So the people who do actual global public health work think I'm sort of an odd duck. Sometimes, when the actual work they want to do is borderline stupid, I'll make them dance a little for their other peoples' money; sometimes I'll even make them drink a bunch of Jell-O shooters and dance nekkid, if I'm feeling particularly snarky. I do this in a way that impresses them, at least superficially, because while I am not a global public health person and I do not, in some academic or technical sense, know shit about global public health, I have learned a great deal through the osmosis of boredom (and through the osmosis of having a retired public health official for one parent and the She-Nurse of the SS for another parent). I can manage to ask probing and articulate and cogent questions about the actual work for which these people would like to be paid from the pool of charitably-funded slush that I administer.

They get confused, then, these people. They grok my cogent question and ask when I was last in Brazzaville or Manaus or Chennai, and they get more confused when I answer, "perhaps in my previous life as an officer in Gordon's cavalry," or "well, it was just part of Pangaea back then." Their little highly educated brows furrow and they think, hard, and ask where I've been. And I tell them about Augusta or the other Augusta or perhaps even the north side of Columbus, or if I'm feeling really naughty, I'll tell them that I've been on 125th Street and I was pretty darned sure that was a low-income country, at least it was back then, before Bill Clinton starting hanging out there and blowing his horn or checking out splashtacious booty or feeling peoples' pain or their ta-tas or whatever the hell it is he does in Harlem.

I have charmed these people, so they manage to limit their outrage, because outrage just isn't polite and anyway I could cost their employers thousands of dollars just by farting out a few well-chosen gems of bureaucratic negation if I really were as vindictive as we all like to pretend I am. But they're really, really bothered by the notion that I don't go to Chad for fun. Or for any other reason.

I am so opposed to this notion of other continents that I am wiggling like a thousand rabid earthworms to keep from having to go on a mission to Asia next year, for the grand opening of our newest superstore--the jewel event in our crown of eventitude. Why? Because it's a really, really long flight, the government of the host country is really interested in the mission and I'd have to make a serious effort to behave myself for the entire time I was there, and I don't want to eat what foreign people put in front of me at banquets or risk hurting their little feelings if I don't happen to share their no-doubt hard-earned opinions on what one calls food. Would I see some really, really cool stuff, I mean mind-bogglingly cool stuff that has been on this Earth for thousands of years, in a culture that has outlived ours by that very magnitude, and that anyone in their right mind would dream of seeing? You bet. But I'm not eating jellied octopus pancreas.

If it is your personal opinion that this makes me a bad person, I can live with this, and I will suffer your disdain and your wrath and go pour myself another glass of red, and I may even toast your right to hold the personal opinion that I am a bad person. I may even be clinking glasses with you.

But I can no longer suffer the wrath of my colleagues in the global public health industry, so I am finally breaking down and travelling out to the developing world tomorrow. I have chosen, to be sure, a country that shares our linguistic values, so as to minimize my feeling of alienation from the culture. It is an old country, with a culture that predates ours (which is not hard, since we're still in the pretty darned young range, as far as cultures and governments go). They have some odd culinary habits, to be sure, but I think I can manage to stomach what this proud nation has to offer in the way of gustatory delights. It is a country that has, for more than a few years, depended on U.S. foreign aid of various sorts to make ends meet, and to preserve its most peculiar form of democracy. But it is not to be scorned for that, for is that not America's righteous place in the community of nations? Its citizens are plagued with health problems, most especially bad teeth and a propensity for mob violence. But I will go minister to these unfortunates, and bring to them a bit of the charm and graciousness that marks our fine culture, as I sample and come to appreciate theirs in the spirit of world oneness.

And don't worry, my hotel is right down the street from the British Museum, and there's a Starbucks around the corner. I'll still be able to post.

Now I'm Just Whining

So I'm off to visit the world for a few days, as part of my incarnation as a busy software company executive wannabe. What? You didn't know about that? Yeah. I lead a number of professional and semi-professional lives, two of them related to boardgaming (see the Diplomacy thing).

By day, on days when I can't avoid it, anyway, I'm the project manager for a global public health program that's housed at a U.S. government agency (it's not a government program, but the funder gave the money to the government). By night, I'm a teenage tiger and a goo-goo muck. Wait, that's not right. By night, I'm a busy software company executive wannabe. Okay, not so busy, because we have no product, and no revenue, and no customers. Yet. But let me tell you, that endless railing at my two partners, who are the busy programmers producing our wannabe product, that gets exhausting and stuff. In fact, I think I need a lozenge.

In between all that, by which I mean when I'm pretending to work on my other jobs, I'm the Director of Competition, or some such twaddle, for a big Diplomacy hobby organization. We're hosting the World Diplomacy Championships this summer in DC. I'm the one delegating everything to my horrible teammates and cleaning up their messes and all that. And I still have to be pretty when Mr. Trump shows up. It's so unfair.

So where I'm off to this weekend is Columbus, for some big show of geekery, where we may debut a demo of our actual product. That is, if my partner Mr. Bigglesworth can take the game code that was just cleared from testing yesterday and wrap the communications code around it without hosing everything up entirely. Since Mr. Bigglesworth didn't find my email from yesterday until this morning, I'm feeling a tad pessimistic about the possibilities here. But I'll get to sit next to him on the airplane and nag him while he writes the code.

So what am I trying to say here? Well, the real message here is that I'm meeting Gothmog this weekend. This raises all kinds of fears. I've met (in person) probably a dozen and a half people that I originally met on the Internet. What if Gothmog is, like, the one of those who sucks? What if he has a hot wife and she likes me? What if the voices in my head tell me not to maintain my usual policy on not farting on the first date? What if travelling to Ohio makes me a Republican? What if not having a lighter on an airplane makes me try to set my shoes on fire with matches?

Life's just too fucking complicated.