It'll be New Year's Eve here in China, at least the New Year's Eve on the Julian calendar, half a day before it is in the West.

I've never made New Year's resolutions. I make resolutions day by day, that's the only way I can keep them. But this year, I have New Year's requests.

I ask of the new year that it be truly new. I ask that it be a people's new year in that people petition, pressure, coerce and otherwise influence their leaders to consider the repercussions of their actions. I ask that it be a year of reconcilement and reassessment, that 2004, the year of the monkey, my year, be a year of reason. I ask that it be a year of compassion, a year of integrity and a year of a clean American presidential election. I ask that dignity and credibility be restored, at the will of its citizens, to the greatest nation on Earth, by the sense of decency and accountabilty by which it rose to greatness.

A friend of mine from California emailed me that she feels embarrassed to be American these days. Try being an American in China and answering to your students when they question American integrity. First, you hope to have the detachment not to take it personally, because it's never meant personally. And you stand there and vulnerably express, with the caveat that all countries have their disaffections, that you do not personally feel at all comfortable with some of your government's actions. I'm still passionate about American ideals. So I ask that the most authentic American empowerment be exercised anew. Maybe I had to get this far away to know how deeply it truly exists, so deeply it can never get truly lost for very long.

I ask that the new year bring regime change in the United States of America. I ask this humbly, celebrating the privilege to so say that it is my birthright. I ask that regime change represent a change of will, a change of process and a change of consequence. I ask that the sense of purpose in national decisions reflect the issues and values of human kindness, respect and the willingness to learn about and accept cultural differences with which, in this age of globalization, we must, with all dispatch, learn to co-exist.

Let this new year resound with novelty, enthusiasm and freshness. Let this be the year that greatness is rediscovered and shared, that bitterness give way to understanding, that arrogance give way to humility and hegenomy give way to cooperation and a rededication to justice. For all. For all time.

Each day dawns anew. Each day each of us can begin again. After a bad day, we say, "tomorrow's another day." But tomorrow, these days, where communication is instantaneous, carries the heavy shadow of yesterdays. Nothing is simple any more. In the face of that, I ask a simple thing. Let this new year be new.

"He was found to have used most of his money to try to bribe investigators into dropping an investigation..." qualifying him for a Crackpot dishonorable discharge award.

China is doling out the death penalty for corruption, smuggling and other crimes against its credibility and fiscal stability these days. This article is from China Daily, the English edition of which is freely distributed to the foreign teachers at the China Foreign Affairs University, where my husband and I are teaching this year. The sincerity of how China is emerging as a 21st century power is outdone only by the speed at which this is being accomplished, something we witness daily. This crackpot hit the jackpot--the ultimate sentence.

China Daily 12/30/2003 (page1)

Official gets death penalty
GUO NEI, China Daily staff

The Intermediate People's Court in Jinan, capital city of East China's Shandong Province, yesterday sentenced a former provincial vice-governor to death for accepting bribes and holding large amounts of assets he could not account for.

Wang Huaizhong, a former vice-governor of East China's Anhui Province, is the latest in a string of officials convicted in China as part of an intensified campaign against corruption.

"In the face of irrefutable evidence, he indulged in sophistry in every possible way and refused to admit guilt," Xinhua News Agency quoted the court as saying. "His attitude was disgusting and he was severely punished in accordance with the law."

The court convicted Wang of accepting bribes totalling 5.17 million yuan (US$623,000) between September 1994 and March 2001. Wang was unable to account for another 4.8 million yuan (US$578,000) in assets seized by the authorities. He was found to have used most of his money to try to bribe investigators into dropping an investigation. Wang, who was taken into custody in April 2001 and expelled from the Communist Party in September this year, has 10 days to appeal.

...snip...

Lu was expelled from the Party and his case transferred to a judicial department for further investigation, the provincial disciplinary committee said.

...snip...

"These measures show the determination of the new generation leadership to fight corruption and change the bureaucratic styles," Xinhua quoted an official with the central disciplinary authority as saying. Experts said authorities have been increasing the transparency of the anti-graft campaign by publicizing details of the cases to the media.

Read this and also read what The LongBow Papers says about what corrupt American financeers might take notice of.

Tis the Season to be nekkid, wot?

Nude Man Pulled From Chimney on Christmas
Fri Dec 26,10:09 AM ET - AP

MINNEAPOLIS - A naked man got stuck in the chimney of a bookstore early Christmas morning. Don't worry, it wasn't Santa Claus.

The 34-year-old man was treated Thursday for bruises and abrasions at Hennepin County Medical Center after being found naked and lodged in the furnace flue at Uncle Hugo's Bookstore. He was expected to be charged with attempted burglary on Friday.

"He was lucky," said police Lt. Mike Sauro. "He was only stuck in that chimney for a few hours. It's kind of a happy ending, because if he had been in there until that store opened Friday morning, it's my judgment he would have died.

"He doesn't appear to be a hard-core criminal, just stupid."

Police suspect that the man was drunk when he climbed atop the one-story building and removed all his clothes to help squeeze into the chimney. He then started to slide down the 12-by-12-inch chimney shaft, Sauro said.

"He's not Santa Claus," Sauro said. "He's a really skinny guy. And he's lucky he didn't get cooked."

The man told police that he entered the chimney about 1 a.m. Thursday to retrieve keys he accidentally dropped down the shaft.

A passer-by called police around 9 a.m. Thursday, after hearing screams for help coming from inside the store. Firefighters broke into the chimney with sledgehammers and freed the man.

"The store is pretty well torn up," said owner Don Blyly, who came in Thursday to hang up signs for a sale to begin Friday. "This is not what I came in here for today, but that's what I have to deal with."

But Chinese women are usually so docile and modest....

I didn't read this in the Beijing edition of China Daily, but I guess Hong Kong, being closer to Guangdong, had more interest in this item.

Woman ran down street naked to punish husband

Story filed: 10:19 Wednesday 24th December 2003

A Chinese woman got her own back on her husband after a row by running down the street stark naked.

Ai, 40, from Guangzhou, staged her nude run at 1pm, reports the Hong Kong edition of China Daily, quoting the Southern Metropolis News.

Her husband ran behind, apologising to passers-by and begging his wife to come home.

Ai, who sells fruits at a local bazaar, reportedly caused a heavy traffic jam and refused to put her clothes back on until police arrived.

The Moscow Times

If you're reading this in the U.S. or Europe, I'd be willing to bet that you never really think about reading newspapers from developing countries. I am living in China right now, a developing country itself, and watching it grapple, for the most part successfully, with domestic priorities vs. international trade priorities to safeguard its own rapid economic development in a globalizing market. Only now am I beginning to understand why developed nations are actually going to have to adjust their expectations rather than enforce assumptions of economic primacy because no economy, having saturated it's own potential, is going to prosper without productive interaction with developing markets. Sometimes the irony is just too much.

An article titled Piracy for Progress, arguing that it is unrealistic to expect strict enforcement of intellectual property rights of developing nations offers the model of developing industries. The American movie biz, recalls the author, an assistant professor of history and global studies and a research associate of the Institute for Globalization Studies in Moscow, moved to southern California, not for the weather, but to distance itself from the East Coast so that patents on film technology owned by east coast corporations couldn't be enforced. But it's his penultimate reference that struck me, one I regret to confess that I havn't heard before and one that has multiple applications at this moment in time:

As the late Israeli scholar and statesman Abba Eban once reflected, "Nations typically do the right thing, but only after exhausting all other options."

And this next classic I submit as a cautionary brickbat as Americans face another presidential election next year:

Following the State Duma elections this month, the opposition conceded that election fraud had been no worse than usual.

An article on the Kyoto Protocol and why Russia can't afford it right now ends with:

Cleaning up the air is an important task, but surely the Kyoto Protocol is not the way to go if it means handcuffing Russia's economic growth. After all, what good is clean air if people have nothing to eat?

I'm having a brain cramp: What was the excuse for the U.S. declining to sign the Kyoto Protocol again?

Check out some foreign newspapers some day when you're tired of the same old same old of your local rag. Good for a chuckle or a wince or a challenge to your mindset. You can get to a lot of them through my favorite mega-reference page, Refdesk.

Buzzflash says it better than I can:Our Dead GOP Hypocrite of the Week, in a link to the Washington Post's story on "reformed" arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond's love child by a black woman.

It's next to useless to blog a story from a major national newspaper, as they get archived in a week and are unavailable without a paid subscription, so I offer the salient graf:

Tuesday, December 16, 2003

After decades of denials, the family of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) acknowledged yesterday a claim made by a 78-year-old Los Angeles schoolteacher that she is the senator's mixed-race daughter, a charge that had dogged her throughout her otherwise quiet life and shadowed Thurmond during his public career as a leading voice of racial segregation.
...snip...
Thurmond, whose political life spanned 75 years, died in June at 100.

I am an American expat living in Beijing, China, where I am teaching and, of course, learning. One of the first things you learn about China is that it is a web of ultimately amusing contradictions. Traditional and modern, dependable for its quirkiness, festive and serious, China is a mystery that took milennia to accumulate and takes more than one lifetime to comprehend, if you are not Chinese. Life here is a mixture of frustration and awe, humility and astonishment every single day. All that said, this one takes the dan gao.

Story filed: 12:06 Wednesday 10th December 2003

A thief in China sent his victim eleven red roses after stealing her bag.

The young woman, named only as Ma, was targeted by a man on a motorbike in the southern city of Guanzhou.

Realising her phone was still in her bag, she sent it a message asking the thief to return her identity card and boyfriend's photo.

The Southern Metropolis magazine, quoting a report in the Hong Kong edition of the China Daily, says the criminal obliged.

And he added a gift of eleven red roses which, he later telephoned the victim to say, had cost him the equivalent of $8.36 (£4.80).

A Bob Dylan line goes "to live outside the law you must be honest..." I guess there's honor among thieves, or at least this Chinese bag nabbing crackpot.

"The miracle today is communication. So let's use it."
---John Lennon '69

It was many years ago today, Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play. And John Lennon, one of the fine minds and great voices of the later 20th Century was shot down like a dog by a deranged young man in New York in 1980. I got the news while I was listening to his just-released new album, "Double Fantasy." Unimaginable.

I met John Lennon. I interviewed him during the bed-in world peace caper in Canada, and took the picture of him and Yoko on this page at a Peace Concert in 1969.

On the night he was killed, it seemed like the turning points in my consciousness were an intermittent string of assasinations that hurled deep wounds into our culture to let us know just how precious and unexpectedly fragile it was. I don't know John Lennon's birthday. But I will never forget the brutal shock of hearing that John Lennon was dead that December 9th and the week that followed as the awful loss set in. And I feel it today. Remembering John Lennon.

Think your job is bullshit? There's a website where you can vent by circulating all the stupid memos, announcements, email and other absurdities you shake your head over. Someone with a bullshit job and time on his hands has created your virtual Dilbertville. Check it out at http://www.bullshitjob.com