"Reagan proved that deficits don't matter."

"What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them."

"I know that there are some who say, ‘Let’s just get more money from the higher-income people, let’s just tax them some more', and I understand that’s popular in a lot of people’s minds. But just don’t forget that old Margaret Thatcher line, ‘Sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.’ ”

Um, who is running out of money?

Mitt Romney is worth an estimated $190 - $250 million, and of this, $100 million went as a gift to his children and due to some absurd tax law he paid NO gift taxes on this amount. He estimates he’ll pay $3.23 million in federal taxes for 2011, on income of $20.9 million. Romney will have $5.7 million in itemized deductions, including $4 million donated to charity. The bulk of those charitable donations -$2.6 million - went to the Mormon Church.

Outside of the charitable donations $1.7 million was for other itemized deductions meaning property taxes, mortgage interest (if any), all manner of medical expenses and any state or local taxes that would be deducted from income.

Imagine spending almost 2 million on any of these things.

He DID make income, but no doubt that was wiped away by the HUGE amount of itemized deductions and you may call him charitable, but cynic that I am, I’m willing to bet his itemized deductions match what is allowable for his income. In other words, rather than pay a higher tax rate on income he can give the money to charitable groups he supports ie; the church and deduct it instead of paying the government in taxes.

You can estimate 2010 income here:

Romney's 2010 Income

Of course this is 2010, but it looks to me like you can get pretty close to $4 million if one looks at the income categories, speaker’s fees and imagines the amount of interest income (not disclosed) and I'm guessing here, but I imagine his yearly income doesn't fluctuate wildly.

Republicans argue that during earlier years as Romney earned his money he paid taxes at the regular rate, so it is now fair that he should pay less on the money he now earns off that money in the form of capital gains. Kinda like saying "Congratulations! You are now tremendously wealthy. You no longer need to give to your country."

Let’s look at how trickle down theory is working in this case. The Mormon church did well, but will they use the money to help people or to build another church? Or put it toward genealogy research so that they have a database of all our dead relatives and these families can finally be saved?

It is going to take some dough to get all the way back to Adam. Yes, that is their goal.

Romney’s kids did fantastic, but will they use their money to build factories and companies and put people to work? And how many people does Mitt currently employ?

Good accountants for sure!

No doubt lawyers…

And no doubt low-income positions abound in his household – maids, chefs, drivers, greensmen, pool boys, maybe a pilot or two, assistants and what not.

Not much tricklin’ going on here is there?

Meanwhile, the IRS is coming after Ms. 91, who makes .001% of what Mitt Romney does, for back taxes which she probably didn’t file because she has dementia and gets confused. Sure she owes them, but it’s a hardship for her to have to pay the pittance they are after.

And on another note...

Romney’s family traces back to the Pratt family in colonial times. His great grandfather Pratt had three wives and his great, great grandfather had four. This is one of the reasons for the Mexican heritage that Mitt so proudly claims. Both Pratt and Romney families fled, along with other Mormons, to Mexico because the good ole U S of A frowned on polygamy. His great, great grandfather on the Romney side also had two wives.

“…the kingdom of God cannot rise independent of Gentile nations until we produce, manufacture, and make every article of use, convenience or necessity among our people."

These two families are powerful white Mormon families, in both the church and in politics, which both trace back to colonial times and though some of them were born in Mexico it was not necessarily because they dug the place. They operated a Mexican Mission in Chihuahua in order to convert the Mexicans there. In other words, they were there to CHANGE the culture… not embrace it.

In a 1997 article in Time magazine it was estimated that the Mormon Church’s assets were worth 11 billion dollars. "The church owns many for-profit assets including agribusiness, media, insurance, travel and real estate. Deseret Management Corp., the company through which the church holds almost all its commercial assets, is one of the largest owners of farm and ranchland in the country, including 49 for-profit parcels in addition to the Deseret Ranch. Besides the Bonneville International chain and Beneficial Life, the church owns a 52% holding in ZCMI, Utah's largest department-store chain." These provide over $600 million in income, in addition to this, in 1996 the church brought in $5.2 billion in tithes.

Mitt's mamma used to sing American anthems and according to Mitt he LOVES this country, perhaps that is because his family and the church want to own it one day.

If I had $17 million after taxes and $100 million in the bank? My mind reels with the thoughts... I could build schools, I could give people housing, I could adopt children, I could, I could, I could... why don't they?

Reagan, Bush, the Tea Party have run this nation into the ground. What's it going to be like here when the oil runs dry, the population has no chance at an education, their homes are rotting, but there is not enough affordable housing, millions take to the streets, and die ("Yay! Serves ya right for not buying health insurance." they cry), and China is now providing the World with all the smart technology it needs.

Lady Liberty still stands there welcoming the poor, but they don't want to come here any more.

The leftist Occupodos have finally woken up, but they are angry with the left, which is where our reversal of fortunes lie, but in a reasoned way.

The right has left us with some pretty fucked up shit to clean up.

Here is something:

Constitution Free Zone

The article above, if you chose to skip it, describes a 100 mile swath around the entire country where the Homeland Security Department felt they needed to have the right to be able to search and detain ANYONE without a warrant. Perhaps this might be one reason the immigrants are absent… Or could the reason for these 100 mile zones be political.

Let your eyes rove around those zones. Seems to me they swallow up over half the purple and blue districts… Hmmm… how strange…

But phew! I’m glad I’m protected from those pesky criminals and immigrants flowing in from Lake Michigan or the ones crossing the Detroit River! Damn Canadians! They’ll try anything to smuggle their cheap goods into OUR country.

And those damn Brits sailing the Atlantic in order to sneak into the Hamptons to rob and pillage making up for years and YEARS of taxes on tea… Or, or the Japanese invading the West Coast in droves, floating in on old tires across the Pacific, I know, I know they used planes once, but times have changed.

It’s just… just such a frustrating problem!

But now comes Grover Norquist saying, “We need to cut taxes! People know how to spend their money more wisely than the government.”

I’m so excited!

Now, that our borders are safe, suddenly, all those old Enron CEOs will see the light, help collect the garbage, police our cities, educate our children, INSTEAD of buying gold shower curtains and stashing their cash in offshore accounts and FINALLY now will, with glee, invest their money in the sagging American economy. Yay!

They will take in new employees, give them healthcare, educate them, give them a place to live…

I’m sure they will follow the example of the saintly Samuel Slater (google the great man), who in 1793 came up with the kindly idea to offer his workers, housing, a company store and education. Hey, it came out of their paycheck and they had no other options in life, but they were fed right?

Wow! Utopia!

Maybe the wealthier of us could just let the poor work for free in exchange for room and board if they commit to a lifetime of service. Oh, we tried that it was called slavery, right?.

Is that illegal now?

And you’d think with all this opportunity the poor, the huddled masses yearning to be free would be flooding in…

Foreign Workers Leaving US

Maybe Lady Liberty’s torch should be replaced with a wave bye-bye.

Christina Fernandez Kirchner won 37% more votes than her opponent in Argentina’s presidential race. Their GDP is up 9% and there has been a 30% rise in salaries. This is largely due to huge investments from China and partly Brazil, which took Argentina out of a 2009 recession.

Clearly Detroit’s borders are safe, but I don’t like the idea of being felt up by the FBI whenever they wish.

Buenos Aires aquí vengo!

I’ll turn the lights out before I go.

Reading: Jeffrey Sachs – Columbia University "The Price of Civilization"

The Chinese system of government has three main branches: the Communist Party of China (CPC), the State Council (also known as the “Central People’s Government”), and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The Constitution of the People’s Republic of China guarantees the legal power of the CPC, which exercises control over the state, military and media. Functionally, the government has three arms which carry out CPC-led policy: the National People’s Congress (NPC), the State Council, and the President.

The NPC meets once a year, usually in March, and, the most recent NPC elections of members (called “deputies”) took place in March 2008, at its first meeting of the new session, officially titled the “1st Plenum of the 11th National People’s Conference”. Terms of office for each delegate are 5 years, with the next likely change of office coming in March 2013. Deputies are elected to the National Congress by each of the 23 provinces, 5 autonomous regions, 4 municipalities, 2 SARs (“Special Administrative Regions” - Hong Kong and Macau), and even the armed forces, over a three month period. The amount of delegates sent by each is related to the number of electors in each delegate’s constituency.

When the National Congress is not in session, legislative work is carried out by the National People’s Congress Standing Committee (NPCSC), which meets every couple of months. The NPCSC is made up of 150 members, elected by the NPC. The NPCSC decides how many NPC deputies are allotted to the NPC from each of the 35 electoral bodies just below the NPC (provinces, regions, etc.), but in any case, the total number of deputies does not exceed 3,000. Furthermore, a minimum of 15 deputies come from provinces and autonomous regions with small populations and ethnic minorities have at least one deputy of their own in the NPC. The Chairman of the NPC is elected by the NPCSC.

The State Council is the chief administrator of the People’s Republic of China. It is chaired by the Premier, and contains the heads of each governmental department and agency, falling under a few different categories - Ministries, Commissions, Organizations, Offices, and Institutions. A comprehensive list of all governmental bodies under the supervision of the State Council can be found here. The State Council also oversees the provincial governments, and maintains a relationship with top Communist Party leadership, as most State Council members are high-ranking Communist Party officials.

The State Council also has a Standing Committee, made up of the premier, four vice-premiers, five state councilors, and the secretary-general (not the same as the General Secretary of the Communist Party). The State Council meets once a month and its standing committee meets twice a week. The vice-premiers and state councilors are nominated by the premier, and appointed by the president with National People's Congress' (NPC) approval. The premier is nominated and appointed by the president with NPC approval. Incumbents may serve two successive five-year terms.

Most, but not all, positions of power within all branches of the Chinese government belong to members of the CPC. The CPC was founded in Shanghai in 1921, and, after fending off the invading Japanese and then defeating the Kuomintang (KMT) in a civil war, took power in 1949. In late September, 1949, the CPC along with a few other groups, held what was effectively, their first Constitutional Convention. On October 1, 1949, they proclaimed China a republic, and in 1954, had instituted the initial version of the “Constitution of the People’s Republic of China”, which guaranteed the legal power of the CPC.

The CPC is the largest political party in the world, with around 80 million members. The most powerful body within the CPC is the National Congress of the Communist Party of China, which meets at least once every five years (a different body from the National People’s Congress). The next meeting should take place in late 2012 (as the last was October 19, 2007). The congress approves changes to the constitution, and elects (only a formality as positions are determined beforehand) both the Central Committee and the Politburo (officially called the “Central Politburo of the Communist Party of China” or “The Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee”); subsequently the Politburo Standing Committee is elected. Currently, the Politburo Standing Committee has 9 members.

The Politburo meets once a month, and consists of just over 20 members. It wields a lot of power because many of its members hold power within the State Committee, and others are high ranking provincial officials. The Politburo Standing Committee meets once a week. This committee, the most powerful, most concentrated body of power in the CPC, has generally consisted of between 5 and 9 members, and its power has varied throughout the history of the republic; it was relatively weakened during the Cultural Revolution; later, many members were ousted by Deng Xiaopeng after their protests to the government’s response to the Tiananmen Square riots in 1989.

The PLA is the third branch of the Chinese government. It unifies all air, land, and sea military operations as well as a strategic missile program. It was established on August 1, 1927 (now called “PLA day”). The PLA has 3 million members, and the army has just over 2 million itself, making it the largest standing army in the world. Technically, the PLA falls under the CPC’s Central Military Commission, although it reports to two Central Military Commissions - one run by the state and another run by the CPC, with both usually having common leadership.

The Chinese electoral system holds both direct and indirect elections - at the village level, citizens vote directly for their representatives (to participate in “village councils”), and then, each successive level of elected official elects the next highest level. Therefore, most outcomes are predetermined, making such indirect elections a formality. At each level, and most especially at the provincial and national level, the CPC exercises a great deal of control over the outcome, allowing only party members, members of smaller parties, or non-party sympathizers to hold power. The divisions of power at the lower levels are complicated, and are typically based on how each area is divided - for example, if an urban area is divided into districts, then the officials who lead each district vote for the city’s mayor. If there is no such division, then it could be a direct election.

When I started researching this piece (mostly via wikipedia, the most accessible source of data on the internet, albeit confusing at times), I knew very little about the fundamental makeup of the Chinese government. I hope that, after reading this, you have learned as much as I have. As always, I am open to any corrections or modifications which can be justified and are brought to my attention.

By Mary Hannington

What? So much crap flies at me every day I need a crap racket, dodger or some sort of athletic equipment!

Ms. 91 doesn’t get the fact that even though there is a Slouchy, I’m still single. Eh, so be it.

Some picture Ms. 91!

She is a Democrat now and maybe she always was. She hangs out with black men and women, has gay friends, wears a low cut swimsuit in the YMCA pool that would make her husband, who would avert eyes to my teeny bikinis, blush (RIP). He was a quartermaster that was on one of the boats that took Okinawa and then became an engineer and a comptroller for a southern automotive plant.

I grew up in a household controlled by this conservative Scottish father whose own father ruled him with a strap. He was embarrassed by his daughter’s sexuality, couldn’t hide his shock when he opened the door once and found my date to be a black man and openly griped when I chose to live with a man unwed. He didn’t do a lot of parenting, not until much, much later in my life when we came to a meeting of the minds and we could talk about adult things like business and even sex.

A football rivalry was the real kicker. A way to take our aggressions out in a healthy manner.

He was a child of the 50’s - the world of the American Dream. Maybe he’d be dismayed with the state of the country today and the state of the GOP, but it is more likely that he’d still support that American Dream and those ideas and want it for his daughter, who sees that it is gone.

Ms. 91 on the other hand not only lived the American Dream, but she lived in the 60’s and in the moment (still does). She wore Muumuus and Earth shoes. She had an organic garden, a Zen garden and we both did our Yoga every day.

In the 70’s we shopped for me together and searched for the little known new designers and swore off Halston and Yves St. Laurent or Pierre Cardin that other girls might covet. I wore African style dresses in colorful cloth by Kenzo before he was KENZO and had an odd tattered looking tie-die number by some Danish designer whose name escapes, purple bikini jeans or green velvet, or the crushed purple velvet pants with the HUGE Famolare clogs.

And those bikini jeans weren’t worn with a thong peeking out. They exposed butt cracks that tiny panties couldn’t cover whenever a girl sat down.

It was wild and it was fun while it lasted.

Guru aches for it, I remember it fondly like one should and celebrate it every day in my mind’s eye. Things change and you can’t control the world, but I understand the obsession to try.

My parents made their nest egg and they left for the south again and I set off to make mine.

In the 80’s I was already a punk, having picked it up in a stint in London paid for with student loans and hanging out in the Detroit’s dive bars carousing with freaks my dad would have keeled over at had he opened the door to any of them. I studied Marxism and communist China, read the Guardian and sang songs about Anarchy. Then I got into American politics, which is still slapping me in the face.

I was a delegate for Kennedy – how’d that work out?

I had a chance to go to Parson’s for my Masters of Art with a man I deeply loved - Reagan conservatism and family values ramrodded that whole deal.

For a while it was good. I bought a big house filled it with stuff and along came Dubya and now the house and the stuff are all I have.

When I was fourteen I designed a house on a cliff overlooking the sea, no specific place, but within a train ride from New York City.

I always thought I’d get to that house some day.

I threw the blueprints away five years ago.

It will take an army to do what I need to do to get there. I’m it.

I get half a foot of mail a day, I’m suddenly the mother of 4 kittens and two cats, Ms. 91 goes to the Y three times a week and the only time I get a workout is in the locker room, I have a trademark filing deadline, a Groupon expiring, a class to be completed, bills to pay on time, no money in the bank and the stock market is plummeting, a dental consult, a blood lab and doctor’s appointment, a dinner out for Ms. 91 and my cousin Tom to plan, oh and my medical insurance expires in October, pictures to send to Ms. 91’s sis, plaster work that can’t be finished because the roof that I have had sealed TWICE still occasionally leaks which is why I can’t let the Groupon expire, I had to hire some help, which I can’t really afford, but I don’t have time to deal with it all and at least it is discounted, my garden is now full of weeds again and at least that is a Zen thing for me., the house needs painting and that means me on a cherry picker (maybe in the fall), I have pebble dashing (Just google it!) work to do on three sides of the house, my entire 2 ½ car garage is filled with props and the remains of a 6500 square foot studio and it seems I am now the proud owner of a giant cast iron fireplace that thank Buddha is on a furniture dolly because the damn thing weighs a ton!, the room I’m trying to restore upstairs is filled with props from the last three films and the steamer trunks I lent to the latest and the room I put everything I want to sell on Ebay and organized on shelves is quickly getting disorganized and the guys that helped me do this rewired a ceiling lamp that was in the way of a shelf, but could have easily been raised without rewiring, but in doing so knocked out most ALL of the ceiling lights in the upstairs bedrooms, which I was hoping to eventually rent out, the kittens are in a room that still has a computer desk that I no longer need or use and should sell, but see above, I long ago paid for a series of spa appointments that help me feel better about myself, but I don’t have time to go, I have Ms. 91’s china and crystal service for twelve, but since she LIVES in my dinning room it’s not likely I’m going to serve dinner to twelve people anytime soon, not to mention I have enough china and glassware for a boffo soirée anyways and I don’t need any of it and I just got an ambulance bill from the city for a trip Ms. 91 took 5 months ago!

She woke up one day and couldn’t move. Turned out she was fine.

There are two men that I dearly love in New York and one other that has apparently flown the coop that need me, but there is not much of ME left.

And truth be told I read the news, surveil what’s around me and that house on a cliff has become a jump off a cliff. I’m so scared about what our future looks like that I want my body to hit the rocks rather than see it.

My life is in the hands of Ms. 91 and a bunch of jokers in the White House and a governor, who looked a bunch of folks in the face and lied.

And I love you Speedy, but it is not MY regression. It’s this country’s. And it’s giving me some cement shoes to take me down with it. I be swimming with the fishes if the nonsense don’t stop. You were just a baby when Reagan was kicking my ass.

That was nothing compared to the current onslaught.

American Dream pshaw!

You two, my VG partners, want to change the world? I’m doing it. One kitten at a time. One Ms. 91 at a time. One more chunk of change to the IRS. One more walk to the store and less gas spent.

One more lettuce rind thrown into the composter.

Can I get a Serenity Prayer?

I laugh every time the union sends me a note. “Dear brother and sisters….” “Fraternally yours…” It’s a small world that doesn’t exist outside of those hallowed halls. And inside those halls are egos bigger than the affection for any brother or sister can bring down, but a love of self that, for whatever reason, means more than anything.

I’m just one small woman in a troubled city doing the best I can.

And I’m fucking tired.

Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise.

The reason is clear: We have an economy that increasingly rewards education and skills because of that education.

Come on people now! Smile on your brother. Everybody get together. Try to love one another right now.

When Rick Snyder (R) took office in Michigan he immediately cut spending on education and the film industry (we are unique, a union business that trains their own) and offered HUGE incentives to big business. So apparently “Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses…” no longer applies in this country. The film industry here, once a white boys club, increasingly embraced minorities and trained them. With a lack of support for the education of the inner city poor where can they possibly go but to lower income jobs?

A recently published 2009 study by Pew Research showed the drop in household wealth for Hispanics was a whopping 66%, while Blacks faired little better losing 53% of wealth over four years (2005-2009).

Click chart to enlarge

The percent of our revenue from business income is one of the lowest of any European and Asian society, those countries make closer to double the percent of GDP vs. the U.S.

Social Security = $865 Billion
Individual Income = $899 Billion
Corporate Income = $191 Billion

All of us came here from somewhere, the exception being native Indians, and benefitted from the ideas in Emma Lazurus' (born of Portuguese Jews) poem. And some very smart wealthy men (including the President) have said they would gladly pay higher taxes to keep her ideas, inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, alive.

Click chart to enlarge

A Pew Center and CBO study named these as the main reason for a decline in U.S. financial standing:

▪ Revenue declines due to two recessions, separate from the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003: 28%
▪ Defense spending increases: 15%
▪ Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003: 13%
▪ Increases in net interest: 11%
▪ Other non-defense spending: 10%
▪ Other tax cuts: 8%
▪ Obama Stimulus: 6%
▪ Medicare Part D: 2%
• Other reasons: 7%

I opened my film business in 1991 in Detroit, hiring crews of up to 30, employing four, plus reps in the Midwest and New York and summer interns, greatly improved a 6500 square foot studio, provided food for neighborhood down and outs and was bringing in business from all over the country. By 2005 most of the assets had been sold and what was once a high tech studio remained shuttered for over five years and the neighborhood declined.

This period represented a switch from a Democrat in the Governor’s office to a Republican one, but was mostly under a Clinton presidency. Under Grandholm (D) 2003-2011 the studio became a nursing school and the neighborhood thrived again. Young creatives moved to Detroit started high tech businesses like mine and I had more offers to work feature films than I could handle.

I rode out the first recession, but saw the second one coming as the automotives continued to spend, not on the future, but on the cash cow, the SUV. I shut it all down helping no one. Many of them now support the film industry and Detroit Mayor Dave Bing is working to keep the city growing with a new incentive for employees to move downtown called “Live Detroit”.

A switch to smarter thinking about keeping cities vital and taking care of those in your own backyard.

From Crain’s Detroit Business:

“Here's how the incentives work: New homeowners can receive a $20,000 forgivable loan; new renters a $2,500 rental allowance (and $1,000 for the second year). In addition, existing renters will receive $1,000 for renewing a lease, and existing homeowners can receive matching funds of up to $5,000 for exterior improvements on projects of $10,000 or more.”

For me it’ll be back to high tech with the hope that the Republicans, who seem to always make a creative girl's life miserable, will realize after the terrible news from Norway that some of the Tea Party types they have aligned with will ruin this economy and send its poor and its huddled masses packing.

These are the member countries of the Convention on the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development on the chart above.

Click here

Three Gorges Dam

Spending three days heading down the Yangtze River was serene and surreal: first, the Yangtze is the world's third longest river and connects inland cities like Chongqing and Wuhan to Shanghai by water; second, the wonder of the Three Gorges - some of Mother Nature's most remarkable work has created massive and deep openings in the terrain, and a powerful turquoise waterway abuts steep, tall rock faces and mountains that seem to go as high as the sky; and, last but not least, our destination was one of China's most significant achievements to date - the Three Gorges Dam.

We disembarked from the cruise at Yichang (population 4m), and boarded busses for the short trip to the dam. Approaching the dam was like approaching an amusement park. There was a large pavilion we all had to enter where we snaked around the guideropes, making our way from the ticket window through security and onto other busses that would take us around this massive complex. Security was tight, and visitors were only allowed off the bus in certain areas.

As the bus started away towards our first destination, what I saw through the window was in sharp contrast to the natural beauty that surrounded me for the previous half week. Gray, almost dingy looking structures were in my proximity, while massive powerlines headed off into the distance. The project is an example of function over form, and NOT the other way around. The first part of the complex we passed was the series of locks which handle all the water traffic.

The locks are a series of four discrete chambers which are drained and flooded to either lower or raise a ship as it passes through the dam. Passing through each lock takes around an hour, and engineers are now in the process of constructing a ship elevator. This structure, which is much more complex, is a single chamber which is filled with water, then raised and lowered. As you could probably guess, the chamber is extremely heavy, but will also allow ships to pass through the dam more quickly - 30-40 minutes, as opposed to nearly 4 hours.

We passed the locks and headed for the best place to view the entire site, Tanzi Ridge. Tanzi Ridge is about 800 feet above sealevel, located on the strip of land between the dam and the locks, and from here you can see off in every direction. There are various artifacts and monuments here related to the dam's history, and a small building called "Three Gorges Project Model Room" that houses a model of the dam.

We spent an hour here before heading down to another viewing area, where we could see the huge dam. Above the waterline, a massive concrete wall has created a reservoir upriver. Thousands of square kilometers of land have been flooded - in some areas the water level has risen 20 feet - creating what some refer to as a lake, between Yichang and Chongqing. Flooding the river between Yichang and Chongqing allows larger ships to travel all the way to Chongqing, through the deeper water. This will increase upriver waterborne traffic and transform the significance of Chongqing as a shipping hub. The other function this part of the dam serves is to control the flow of water and silt downriver, all the way to Shanghai. Silt buildup is a byproduct of halting the flow of such a massive body of water - it changes the ecological makeup of the river and can even cause ships to unwittingly run aground. Dam operators open the dam very carefully from time to time, to allow water and silt to flow downriver.

Energy generation takes place below the waterline, according to one law: gravity. Each of the 26 turbines (also called generators) sit at the end of long descending tunnels. Water flows down each tunnel, spins the turbines, and electricity is created. The turbines weren't cheap: the Chinese paid $150 million for each one. The science behind hydroelectric power generation is relatively uncomplicated - falling water increases its pressure, turning the generator's rotor very quickly; electromagnets are attached to the rotor, housed in coils of copper wire, called "stators". Electrons flow from the stator coils as the rotor spins the magnets. This electricity can then be stepped up in voltage and sent over transmission lines.

Throughout the 20th century, various Chinese leaders dating back to Sun Yat-sen proposed the idea of a dam on the Yangtze. Because of political and social instability, and economic crises, plans couldn't be married to action until the late 1980s. During a 1992 meeting of the National People's Congress, overwhelming approval was given for construction, and before the end of 1994 construction on the dam had started.

This project has been a massive, risky, dangerous and long undertaking - over 1 million upriver residents had to be relocated due to rising water levels. In some cases, families who had lived along the shores of the Yangtze for centuries were uprooted for the first time. In other instances, new cities were constructed either at a higher elevation or directly across the river. In at least one case, a high wall was constructed to protect a city from rising floodwaters.

Various sources estimate the number of workers involved in construction to be anywhere from 20,000 to 250,000, and it has taken them about 15 years to complete the dam (it is fully functional, but the Chinese have yet to complete the ship elevator). The total cost of the project is somewhere around $25 billion - hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of cement were used, hundreds of thousands of tons of steel as well, and the cubic yards of earth that had to be moved was in the hundreds of millions. The cranes used on the project were the tallest in the world, the number of turbines at the dam is the largest of any dam in the world, and the megawatts of electricity generated is the largest as well. And yes, the Three Gorges Dam can be seen from outerspace.

The tour was very comprehensive - it started on one bank of the river, by the locks, and ended on the other side, where we saw a museum and some of the construction equipment used during the project. Looking ahead, the Chinese have to continuously manage the river's ecology and traffic; in addition, because a large reservoir has been created, there is an increased risk of seismic activity in the area. The resettlement wasn't without its difficulties; people's lives were disrupted, and settlements that existed for centuries, in addition to innumerable ancient artifacts, have been lost forever in the flooding. On the other hand, this is the largest "green" project in the world - simply by harnessing the power of one of the world's longest rivers, the Chinese are able to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels to create energy.

Yantze River

I booked my river cruise about a week prior to its departure to ensure I would get my desired accommodation and schedule. We left Chongqing from a port on the Jialing River in Yuzhong, Chongqing’s central business district.

Although the travel agent, the accompanying brochure, and even the Lonely Planet called it a river “cruise”, the accommodations and hospitality were spartan. Even Kathie Lee's old jingle couldn't sell this trip! Nevertheless, I had a nice roommate and settled in comfortably prior to departure. Judging by the other cruise ships at the dock that evening, this excursion was a popular one - through the Three Gorges, and ending at their eponymous dam, with a handful of sightseeing stops in between.

The ship pulled away from the dock after sundown, and we headed east, downriver. I slept soundly until the middle of the night, when a loud boom and accompanying crunching sound woke me up - I thought it was no big deal, but when I woke up in the morning, I got the alarming news: another boat attempted a turn and crashed into us. Not exactly what I wanted to hear. The damage our ship sustained wasn’t enough to sink our boat, but it did force us to remain in port - 12 hours of travel time was instead spent fixing a needless accident. This was no pleasure cruise, for sure.

Eventually, everyone moved onto a new ship and we were on our way. I spent as much time as I could taking in the view from the top deck as we went downriver. For miles we saw various sized riverine settlements, nestled into a rolling, mountainous landscape. Some had just a few small houses and buildings, and others were larger cities with ports, able to handle different volumes of river traffic. From either side of the ship, I could see high hills and small mountains - for millions of years, the Yangtze, the world’s third longest river (the Nile and the Amazon are 1 and 2, respectively) had carved this wending route from the Himalayas out to the Pacific through some of the most remote parts of China.

I was one of the few westerners on the boat. It took getting to know Sam and Ollie, two Brits travelling together, and Virginia, a retired schoolteacher from Brooklyn, to figure out when mealtime was, and what other activities were available to us onboard. I used my best Chinese to get to know about a dozen fellow tourists - off-duty policemen, families on vacation, and even a university professor. Like me, they were here to relax and take in the sites. I spoke to a number of the tour guides onboard - the trip was part of a well-trodden path for them; what I thought would be a discussion about years spent traveling the river (interesting to me, monotony for them) turned into Chinese and English lessons, ensuring mutual amusement.

There were a limited number of things to do onboard - I spent most of my time on the top deck, watching the landscape scroll like a movie reel playing out from side to side. Many of the Chinese played mahjong, a popular gambling game, others smoked (too much, I thought, when I had to breathe it in), while others just sat on the top deck, drinking Tsingtao beer and munching on pumpkin seeds ("gua zi"), carefully breaking the shell away - a tedious undertaking which helped pass the time.

When we passed through the first gorge (Qutang Gorge), before reaching the Daning River (check out this link for an easy-to-read map), it was as if we could reach out and touch this massive rock wall, tens of stories high. As I looked downriver, two mountains seemed to converge with the bending Yangtze disappearing into the distance. The highest peaks extended far into the sky, and were either bare rock faces or green mountain sides. The pristine turquoise river butting up against a muddy brown rock face formed a stark natural color contrast.

We had a few scheduled stops, which, like cruises I've been on back in the US, were geared towards tourism, and set up mostly to separate visitors from their renminbi. Things on the boat weren't so interesting, so disembarking even temporarily was a welcome change. The most notable stop we made was to see the "Mini" Three Gorges, also known as the "Lesser" Three Gorges.

We hopped onto a different boat when we reached the juncture where the Yangtze and Daning met, and took a three hour excursion up a smaller river, passing through gorges known as "Dragon Gate", "Misty", and "Emerald". The Daning was a bit narrower, so at times it seemed that the very tall rock faces blocked out most of the sky. It was amazing to see the work mother nature had put in at the end of the last Ice Age. Nearly flat, perpendicular slabs of rock stood like towering sentries over a pristine yet powerful body of water. And to think, we still had two larger gorges on the Yangtze to pass, the Wu and Xiling, which extended even farther along the riverbanks than Qutang Gorge.

When we passed through the Wu and Xiling Gorges farther down river, the experience was similar - massive mountainsides and cliffs carved out by the river. That we would pass through the gorges was no surprise; seeing their height from close up was unforgettable. Our ship was easily dwarfed by the land masses on either side. Mother Nature had done some of her most outstanding work forcing this river through the terrain, from the highest peaks of the Himalayas thousands of miles east to the Pacific, making its way past what are now some of China's most populated cities.

Up until I boarded the ship back in Chongqing, I had spent my time either in heavily populated urban areas or on crowded high-speed trains. The boat trip, while a little perilous, got me close to some remote parts of inland China. Just days ago, I had only heard about the Yangtze and the Three Gorges. By the time we disembarked in Yichang, I was grateful to have taken in a good portion of China's natural beauty, before heading to one of mankind's most significant construction projects to date: the Three Gorges Dam.

(to be continued...)

Guangzhou

The ancient history of people now referred to as the Cantonese is part of the histories of Guangdong and Guangxi provinces and northern Vietnam. All three areas were unified under the Qin dynasty (221 - 206 BCE) and considered part of the Nanyue kingdom. The kingdom was passed to the Han dynasty (206 BCE - 220 CE), but only after the Han dynasty collapsed did large numbers of Han Chinese migrate to southern China.

In subsequent centuries, political turmoil in the north and Mongol invasion pushed more and more Han Chinese into Guangdong. In addition, Guangdong had established relationships with merchants and traders from as far away as Rome and the Middle East. In the early 1500s, the Portuguese landed in what is now known as Macau, and by the 1800s, the British established themselves in Hong Kong. From the middle of the 18th century until the middle of the 19th century, Guangzhou was the only mainland Chinese port through which the Chinese government allowed foreign trade (mostly in silks and spices), attracting the Dutch and French in addition to the British and the Portuguese. Because the Portuguese were the first foreigners to arrive via the port of Guangzhou, historians think that they are responsible for giving Guangzhou its "romanized" name, Canton, and referring to its population as Cantonese.

By the late 1830s, the British had been so effective at smuggling opium into China via Guangzhou, to balance out the silk and spice trade, that major currency outflows disturbed the local economy. The Chinese began to crack down much harder on opium smuggling, and two conflicts took place over the next few decades known as the First and Second Opium Wars.

As a result of both conflicts, the Chinese were forced to sign treaties opening up more ports to foreign trading and ceding territory and land rights to foreign powers. The First Opium War ended in 1842 with the Treaty of Nanjing, opening four ports and giving Hong Kong to the British. In 1844, the Chinese signed the Treaty of Wanghia (named after a village in Macau) with the United States, giving the US similar access and power in China as the British. The Second Opium War was ended in 1860 with the signing of numerous agreements which came to be known as the Treaty of Tientsin, that involved China agreeing to terms with France, Russia, Britain and the United States. The Treaty of Tientsin opened yet additional Chinese ports to these parties, ceded more territory to Britain (Kowloon Peninsula) and Russia (north of the Amur River and east of the Ussuri River, which still border the nations today), and gave them all the ability to station their representatives in Beijing, a city previously closed to foreigners. The Chinese could not avoid the far-reaching influence of foreign powers.

Starting around the middle of the 19th century, massive waves of immigrants from Guangdong began to arrive in places like Canada and the United States. They established "Chinatowns" in port cities that dotted the eastern and western coasts of North America, in addition to other major cities. Many of these Chinatowns, including the one found in Manhattan, were distinctly Cantonese.

For almost half a millennia, seafaring western powers who sought to tether the Far East to their imperial desires made their earliest connections to China via Guangzhou. In addition, many of the Chinese who have immigrated to nations like the US, Canada, and the UK can be considered to have Cantonese ancestry.

Guangzhou was the final mainland city on my trip. I arrived there via overnight train from Shanghai, and (by now, I had a pretty good idea of what to expect in terms of crowds and transportation) made my way through the hordes who had come for the Asian Games, and onto the subway. Ultra-clean, ultra-modern, covering the city like a net... if you've read my other articles, the high-quality of public transportation is nothing that will surprise you. I made my way to my hotel, finding the tropical heat calmed me down as I walked. I only planned on spending 48 hours here before heading to Macau, and wanted to keep moving, but I needed to settle in first. Unfortunately, my fatigue and hunger led me to do something I had done my best to resist on this trip - In Chinese, I could say, "wo qu le mai-dan-le"... In English that means "I went to McDonald's!"

Soon after I got cleaned up, I headed out. I boarded the subway and headed towards the center of the city. My first stop was the Museum of the Mausoleum of the Nanyue King. In a story very similar to that of the Terracotta Warriors, about 30 years ago, workers had started a construction project, digging up an ancient tomb in the process. Archaeologists studied the findings and realized that the tomb belonged to the Nanyue king Zhao Mo, who died over 2,000 years ago. Ancient relics, along with numerous courtiers of the king (thought to be human sacrifices) were also discovered. The museum was full of Han Dynasty artifacts, like weapons, clothing, cookware and artistic drawings and carvings. Maps depicting the ancient trading routes (by land and sea) that I discussed above covered the walls. The decaying artifacts hidden behind secure glass and maps with ancient city names continued to drive home an overarching theme: Chinese civilization is thousands of years old and very complex; even in ancient times its people and its cities were connected to far off lands.

I could feel fatigue setting in, and I knew I would have a pretty busy day the next day. I hopped on the subway, and headed back to my hotel. After a meal it was easy to fall asleep, even though I was thinking of the rest of my time in Guangzhou.

I wanted to make sure I ventured beyond the well-developed urban environment and took in sites on the outskirts of the city. The Whampoa Military Academy, with a museum open to tourists, was the ideal destination on the far eastern outskirts of the city, down one of China's major waterways, the Pearl River.

In 1924, after requests for support were spurned by various foreign powers, Sun Yat-sen, a major 20th century Chinese figure, gained Soviet assistance for the development of a military base in his native Guangdong Province. Up to that time, China was a fragmented nation ruled by warlords; the warlords had stronger fighting forces than the government, necessitating some action by Sun's ruling party, the Kuomintang.

The history of the institution itself is short-lived, having closed only 2 years after it opened. However, it provides a window into early 20th century Chinese history, and took outside the city. The journey (with excellent guidance from my Lonely Planet) had me take a subway to a bus to a ferry, bringing me far from the city center. Just like most of the other urban areas I'd visited, once I got beyond the huge buildings and traffic, it was either industrial areas or farmland for miles around. The academy and its accompanying museum illustrated the major figures in modern Chinese military history, and conflicts the Chinese were involved in. At this point, I was eager to return to the city, spend the rest of the afternoon wandering around and thinking of Guangzhou's role in the next century as opposed to the previous one.

I had the afternoon free, and nothing in the Lonely Planet had jumped out at me. So, I hoofed it - I walked along the promenade that runs along both sides of the Pearl River. Like so many other cities in China, everything around was new, clean and modern. I thought deeply about my trip, and about this city. Seeing sites recommended by the Lonely Planet was a useful guide, but I wanted a big picture view of Guangzhou. The cityscape here was similar to Shanghai, the major port city in the region starting centuries ago had blossomed into one of the most modern cities in the world, harnessing China's most productive province to the global economy.

My last destination as I coordinated my departure from the mainland (to Macau) was the Peasant Movement Institute. The movement was a coordination between the Kuomintang and the Communists during the 1920s. The institute was led by Sun Yat-sen and later Mao Zedong, educating students in methods that would undermine feudalist and imperialist forces, leading the way to the Chinese Revolution. The Peasant Movement Institute, along with the Whampoa Military Academy, illustrate that Guangzhou's role in 20th century Chinese history predates the internal conflict between the Kuomintang and the Communists.

Guangzhou has a tropical climate most of the year, and when I arrived around mid-November, the backdrop almost everywhere I went was the presence of the Asian Games, a mini-Olympics which drew in tourists and athletes from around the region - nations such as Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, India, Nepal, Japan, Korea and many others swarmed to the city to participate in events like rowing, judo, archery, cricket and dancing. The city was teeming with activity, but, just like Beijing 2 years prior, Guangzhou was made impeccably organized, safe and clean.

The fact that Guangzhou would be the last mainland city on my trip meant I could make informed comparisons about it in relation to each of the regions and cities I'd visited. I was impressed. I was impressed because I could see that Guangzhou fits in well with my conception of modern China. It is a large coastal city with a history that weaves its way from ancient times to modern ones. The massive buildings and impressive infrastructure, as well as the presence of the Asian games, mean that the central government wants Guangzhou to retain its position as one of the nation's most important commercial and cultural centers. I was also impressed to learn that Guangdong Province is China's wealthiest and most populous, exporting through Guangzhou, one of two major port cities in the province (the other is Shenzhen). Because I set out to learn about the culture and economy of the mainland, Guangzhou was an ideal bookend for this part of my trip.

Sources:

1) Shi, Mingzheng. "Guangzhou." World Book Online Reference Center. World Book, 2011. Web. 29 Mar. 2011
2) Edmonds, Richard Louis, and Richard J. Smith. "China." World Book Online Reference Center. World Book, 2011. Web. 29 Mar. 2011
3) Wikipedia

Because religious groups see abortions as murder they see ANYTHING that has to do with abortion as not being for the public good and therefore not qualified for federal funding, tax credits or subsidies DESPITE the fact that their churches DO receive federal funding, tax credits and subsidies, but I'm not here to argue separation of church and state. Just pointin' it out. With HR3 they seek to block women from buying insurance that covers these procedures EVEN if it save lives.

As a secular person I could argue that these churches do no public good as well. Catholic priests molest and abuse boys, televangelist’s enrich themselves and fool the public with fake healings, Muslim women are made to adhere to strict laws, Hindu widows, in a practice known as sutee, are burned alive on their husband’s funeral pyres and despite being outlawed outright in 1987 the practice continues today, a Catholic hospital in Arizona recently lost its affiliation with the church and a nun that worked there was excommunicated because they aborted a baby to save the mother’s life… I’m not making this shit up!

The Catholic Bishop there called it scandalous.

Then there are the little things Christians did like burning women at the stake as witches and the CRUSADES!

23 states in this country sell “Choose Life” license plates and donate the money to pro-life groups. Can you imagine the ruckus if this were reversed?

Abortions were merely a misdemeanor in this country (following English law) unless performed after the mother could feel the child (the quickening) when they were considered a felony. As methods of detecting early pregnancy improved the felony charges were later moved to earlier pregnancies. Those performing abortions were charged and not the women, but it was a difficult case to prove (the pregnancy having been terminated) and it was rarely prosecuted.

According to author Leslie Reagan, "When Abortion Was A Crime", in the early 1900’s as many as 1.2 million illegal abortions a year were being performed (including self-induced). Prior to Roe v. Wade poor women without access to expensive and safe abortion doctors often died at the hands of quacks and many more by using coat hangers or other dangerous methods on themselves in order to terminate pregnancies.

The original opponents of abortion were nativists concerned over the rise in the Catholic birth rate, anti-feminists, who also denied the rights of wives in the bedroom and doctors. Yes, doctors, who were seeking to drive the midwives and homeopaths out of business, yet whom continued to perform the procedures themselves. What they set in motion, however, cost them. Laws were formed that required they not treat a woman for abortion related trauma unless she confess, and in the case of non-married women, not only did she have to cough up the name of the doctor, who performed the procedure, but the father as well. By the 1920’s 15,000 women were dying from botched abortions every year.

Do no public good?

The nativists would be pleased to note that 28% of women receiving abortions today are Catholic and 37% Protestants and more recent estimates have them now running neck and neck.

I live in the 13th District, which encompasses downtown Detroit, Wyandotte, Lincoln Park, Harper Woods and Grosse Pointe Woods. It is presided over by Kwyame’s mommy Caroline Cheeks Kilpatrick (a real nutter), but it is John Conyers, who represents Northwest Detroit, Dearborn and the southwestern suburbs, who stood for me as a member of the House Judiciary, Subcommittee on Constitution along with Jerold Nadler, who was at Stuyvesant at the same time Guru was and represents the Upper West side (where I stay when in NYC), down to Battery Park and parts of Brooklyn, where he grew up.

They both made some very cogent points, amongst the arguments by conservatives for HR3, which calls into question primarily federal funding of Planned Parenthood, and who frequently brought up descriptions of OUT OF DATE and no longer used methods of partial birth abortions in an effort to horrify the public. BUT according to the CDC’s 2006 data, the percentage of abortions that would consist of partial birth abortion are small, only 3.7% are performed after 16-20 weeks and only 1.3% are performed after 20 weeks and these are LIFE SAVING procedures. Abortion rates are down to 1.21 million, the same as they were in 1900, from almost 1.6 million in 1988.

According to a 2010 report from the Guttmacher Institute, from 1986 until 1991 teen pregnancies were on the rise, but after this time they steadily declined until 2005. In 2005, for the first time in fourteen years rates began to rise again. Surely this is due to an ever-increasing belief in abstinence education by schools (brought on by the Bush administration) and perhaps parents as well, who in large numbers leave sex education up to the educators.

I read recently that one high school in Memphis, Tennessee has eighty-six pregnant teens attending classes. Eighty-six? It turns out that more than a quarter of the school’s population of girls is pregnant.

So what do school officials do? They hire Girls, Inc., a group that promotes abstinence. Although to be fair the group does mention condoms, their main message is that girls need to learn how to say no. They claim that older male classmates prey on these girls, which in essence takes away the responsibility from these young women and forces it onto the men, when it should be BOTH.

No one “preyed” on me, it was MY decision to have sex, but no one was preaching abstinence either, they weren’t preaching anything, they were ignoring it.

My parents were children of the 40’s and 50’s and were old enough to be my grandparents. Ms. 91 nervously tried to have the “sex talk” with me and had bought me a book on sexuality. Relief spread across her face when I revealed that my best friend’s mother, a social worker, had explained this already.

My sex education at school consisted of a Disney movie in grade school and I distinctly remember Jiminy Cricket and dancing sperm, but can no longer find any reference to this film. Following the sex education movie, Nurse Ball (I swear that was her name) demonstrated the use of the sanitary pad and us girls each were provided with a belt and our very own pad.

When it came time, I was just turning twelve, I dutifully wore the thing for a day before saying, “Fuck this, get me a tampon!” I suppose in the back of my mind I knew that having a period also meant I could get pregnant, there was the book from mom after all, but not ONCE did anyone bring up birth control. I was sexually active early, to the embarrassment of my friends, and was condemned for going too far too fast, but praised for landing a hot guy as a boyfriend and screwing him.

No one suggested I protect myself and apparently the boys were as unaware as I was. When I told my college roommate I was pregnant she was shocked to find that I wasn’t using ANY form of birth control. Like so many teenagers I felt unbreakable – full of curiosity and joie de vivre.

My roommate’s mother was sixteen when she gave birth to her daughter and was a feminist, who worked at Planned Parenthood the group that the passage of HR3 would destroy, she certainly had made sure her daughter was well educated on the topic of sex.

I had read the Hite Report, knew my body and enjoyed the sexual freedom of the times. It never occurred to me, or certainly my parents (they just assumed I wasn’t doing it) that I could become pregnant. I was the product of a white suburban conservative environment and my girlfriends, while they gossiped, rarely discussed their own sexuality. I was rebelling against all of it, but I had no "sisters" to guide me.

It’s horrifying to think of it now!

That first meeting with a Planned Parenthood counselor was incredibly empowering… all the choices I never really knew or thought about, but I entered the meeting already knowing that my decision would be to end the pregnancy.

It wasn’t done cavalierly; I had some VERY good reasons.

And I have since seen what pregnancy can do to a woman.

I have read of a Catholic woman who had 27 children; she was committed to a mental institution.

A friend had three children in rapid succession and fled into homelessness and insanity.

Another has an immune disease and can no longer take part in activities that she once loved without risking death.

According to Catholic doctrine even baby's with Anencephaly (missing parts of the brain, blind, deaf, unconscious and unable to survive outside the womb) should be carried full term, forcing mothers to face the risks of carrying a child only to watch them die.

This not only seems cruel... it's MEDIEVAL!

I had long ago decided to keep my last name even if I married and after delving into genealogy for some years I discovered my brother and I were the last of 7 generations of Scottish Hanningtons that I eventually traced back to Elizabethan England and the name itself goes back to Norman times.

I found a cousin in California, who hails from my Great, Great, Great Aunt Anne, who was a Hannington-Menzies. To my delight that cousin was also the last of that line, who continued to use the hyphenated name and she kept it upon marriage.

It is silly to worry about carrying on a name, I know, but I often wonder if the baby was a boy or a girl… what my life would have been like had I been a mother and there is still a wince, a pang and an empty feeling.

No man can possibly understand this.

And yet the same white men that I saw in that committee meeting are the same white men that spent decades shaming desperate women, who for whatever reason chose to have an abortion. Thousands upon thousands of us lost our lives because of it.

The year after New York legalized abortion the maternal mortality rate dropped by 45% and in the end it was the doctors that led the cry for change. They had seen enough carnage - 5,000 women (poor and mostly black and Hispanic) were dying every year because legal abortions weren't available in their state.

Do we really want to go back to THAT?

Note: Leslie J. Reagan's "When Abortion Was A Crime" won a President's Book Award from the Social Science History Association and is a work of serious scholarship. The remainder of the statistics came from the CDC's studies and those of the Guttmacher Institute, whose reports are cited by both Democrats and Republicans.

For more on federal funding of stem cell research.

Chongqing

After a day and a half, I had seen quite a few of the sites in Chongqing, which were all in Yuzhong. As I stared at a city map, though, I knew I had only seen a small part of this massive metropolis. With an eye toward my trip to the dam, I knew I didn't have to leave Yuzhong to catch the boat. I wanted to see as much of this area as possible, so I hopped in a cable car that took me over the Yangtze River.

As the car started away, I had to do a double take. On both sides of the river, running up and down its shores, I saw a city more massive than I could have conceived (of course, I hadn't yet visited Shanghai...). Before I boarded, I thought I understood the scale and makeup of Chongqing - I compared Yuzhong to Manhattan; both have rivers running along either side which eventually converge. Taking my logic a step further, the outlying areas would be reminiscent of Jersey City, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, flatter with more space, fading away in the distance. I was dead wrong. Instead, I saw massive buildings rising up in all directions, a handful of bridges stretching from bank to bank of the bending rivers, and water-borne traffic off into the horizon. Highways ran in every direction through available gaps in skyscraper construction and a network of tunnels weaved through the mountainous urban terrain.

Chongqing is a frenetically busy place and, like many of the other cities I had visited, there were plans for expansion - Chongqing already has two train stations, but now there were plans to extend the subway and build additional universities and technical centers. Sometimes, when visiting a large city in the western world, one can compare the population to a small country. In this case, the massive municipality of Chongqing, with over 30 million people, is more like a medium-sized one.

Before leaving the city, there was one last thing I had to do. Up to this point, I had eaten excellent Chinese food in city after city. I learned what Chinese breakfast was all about in Changchun, regrettably missed the Peking Duck in Beijing (rookie mistake!), but I sampled some great food in Xi'an and Haerbin as well. The Lonely Planet couldn't stress this one dish enough - a fiery blend of meats and vegetables with a side of rice in case things get out of control. In Chinese it's written: 火鍋, which is pronounced ("huǒ guō"). The literal translation is "fire pot".

I'll never forget the first time I went into a hotpot restaurant - I was starving and wanted to give it a chance. I couldn't read any chinese, and I at least thought I knew how to pronounce a few simple words like chicken, beef, pork, vegetables and beer. The waitress handed me the menu, comprised entirely of Chinese characters; I couldn't read it, so I did my best to build an order on the few words I knew.

Weeks before, my teacher Ren, and her cousins from Changchun, taught me how to ask for spice. "la" is the word for spice. If you want something very spicy, you could simply say, "hen la"; a little spicy, "yi dian die la"; without spice, "bu la"; spice on the side in a small bowl, "yi dian die wan la". I wanted the oil filled wok to have a little fire to it and add spice as I wished, so I asked for "yi dian die la" and "yi dian die wan la". I tried to tell the waitress (pretty sure I was flubbing it) that no matter what she put in front of me, I would eat it. The next thing I knew, I had a 40 oz. bottle of Tsingtao an arm's length away, and a wok full of spicy red oil with mysterious contents was placed on the cooking range in the center of my table.

Then, she brought over plates of raw meat and raw vegetables, and I carefully dropped them in the hot oil. The meat was thinly sliced and the vegetables were chopped, so I knew they would cook quickly. I watched excitedly as the entire pot bubbled and the food soaked up the oil and spices. I dipped my chopsticks into the oil, and pulled up an oily, hot, reddened mass of meat and vegetables. I could smell the spices and saw some peppercorns stuck to my food, so I ate slowly, keeping one hand by my beer.

I started to get the hang of it, and my eating became more bold. The portions I grabbed became bigger, and with the increased intake of spice, I took more gulps of beer. I knew the combination wasn't the healthiest, mostly because I was coughing and I could feel my face turning red. The taste was excellent, but the after-effects were tough on my stomach. I couldn't get enough though - the fiery spice, the Chinese beer, and the exotic sensation of eating a regional dish over 1,000 years old, made this an experience I would want to have again and again.

Fortunately, the only climactic event was that I enjoyed everything I ate. From here, though, the best thing to do was hop on the subway and head back to my hostel. Sleeping off a meal like this close to a bathroom was the most advisable idea. Over the next 4 days, I would eat hotpot twice more - good for the taste buds, but rough on pretty much everything else.

One more thing I want to tell you about took place before I left.

I made my way to another hotpot restaurant (they are everywhere), but this time I had help ordering. The restaurant was less than half full, and, because westerners are so rare in Chongqing, I could feel the curious stares on me as I entered. I was in the middle of ordering (again, not having much luck), when - lo and behold! - another foreigner came over to my table and asked me if he could help translate my order to the waitress. I was grateful to have someone who could do a better job of ordering than I could, and invited Sebastien (a German) and his Chinese girlfriend, Sally, to sit down with me.

I appreciated the company, and Sebastien's helpful gesture, and from there we took the conversation straight to a global level. They both live and work in Chongqing. Sebastien works at one of the many Marriott Hotels dotted around the country, and has been here for a few years now. Sally, who speaks perfect english with a Chinese accent, works for Proctor and Gamble. Sebastien works in a "front of the house" capacity, dealing directly with incoming guests. By this time, I had seen the massive globally branded hotels (many, if not all, are somewhere in Manhattan), and had been around the hustle and bustle of the city enough to ask him a single question: "where do most of the guests come from?" His answer: China, Europe, India, South America, North America, Japan, Singapore, London, New York, Buenos Aires, Russia, and the Middle East. Basically, everywhere! He also told me that although Marriott has about 60 hotels dotted around China, there are plans to build about 60 more.

The conversation went on - I laughed when he told me his American boss informed him he had to brush up on his English if he wanted a promotion; as if his native German, good English and fairly good Chinese weren't enough already. Now, looking back, maybe they weren't.

I turned to Sally, who, although she was about 25, was aware of the "financial crisis in America", as she called it. Comparing that to what westerners call it ("the global financial crisis") tells you all you need to know about the economy in China. Sally, along with every student in China, has taken mandatory English classes in school. A small portion of the more than 100 million students in China have even taken extra English classes through private companies. Why? When she told me, the answer couldn't have been more simple: "you can get a better job if you speak English and Chinese."

She came off as articulate, confident, and aggressive and it surprised me how much she knew about America. She discussed the US Presidential Campaign of 2008, and we talked about the financial crisis and its impact on the United States and China. She told me a little about her job - part of her duties are to communicate with P&G headquarters back in Cincinnati about once a month because she oversees the distribution of P&G goods to local convenience store chains. The P&G business model is a metaphor for the economic relationship between America and China: P&G in America finances Chinese manufacturing of P&G goods for distribution to the growing Chinese consumer market, as well as to America; you can come to your own conclusion about the relative number of jobs created in Chongqing vs. Cincinnati.

I got lucky - not only was I able to have tasty hotpot again, I got to speak to a pair of people who, in a small way, represent the shifting sands of the global economy. Sebastien, a young foreigner, has begun his career in China, having almost no work experience in his home country. The company he works for has plans for massive expansion in the local market, and no shortage of opportunity for him in particular. He can't find this in Europe. Sally represents the most modern generation China has ever produced - an unmarried bi-lingual, college-educated woman who works for a major multi-national corporation in one of China's largest cities. When you hear folks talking about the "global competition for talent", Sebastian and Sally are some of the participants in the game.

I don't travel to the other side of the earth to see the proverbial "largest ball of twine." I don't spend twelve hours in an airplane seat or 36 hours sharing a train compartment with 5 other people to be able to say tell my friends I was in this place or that one, and I don't need to go to every country around the globe. I went to China to learn as much as possible about what's going on there, and how China and the Chinese people fit into the global landscape.

It's clear that China will soon overtake the United States as the world's largest economy, challenging every economic assumption we have ever made in the west, and overturning those that are wrong. The Chinese are deliberate and focused on building a better life for all who live within their borders, and, like every other young, powerful nation that has ever existed, they are committed to doing it their own way. Looking back, sitting in my living room here in New York, I couldn't believe the "success" of my trip to Chongqing, mainly because I learned so much.

Chongqing

China (a/k/a the "People's Republic of China" or "PRC") controls 22 provinces. Each province has a capital, and the 22 provinces together don't make up the entire country - included in the PRC are separate entities called "autonomous regions", "special administrative regions", and "municipalities". There are 5 autonomous regions (Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Tibet, Ningxia, and Guangxi), 2 special administrative regions (Hong Kong and Macau), and 4 municipalities (Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and Chongqing). To add further fuel to the bureaucratic fire, in 2005, the government via the "Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development of the People's Republic of China" initiated urban reforms, one of which was to promote the concept of five "National Central Cities": Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Guangzhou and Chongqing.

I knew before I left America that I would go to Beijing and Shanghai, I thought it likely that I would go to Guangzhou, and unlikely that I would go to Tianjin. I didn't find Chongqing as interesting, but knew I could get on a Yangtze River cruise from there, and - for some reason - the Lonely Planet talked up this strange dish called "hotpot", so I figured it was worth spending a couple of days there.

I reached Chongqing by overnight train from Xi'an on a damp and overcast morning. I did my best to decipher the Lonely Planet map, but foolishly did not stay at a hostel recommended in its pages. I boarded a public bus from the train station to get to the hostel, but because of the city's layout and misty darkness, I had no idea where I was going. I thought it wise to get off the bus and resorted to an old trick I used a bunch of times already - after I got in a taxi, I called the hostel and asked them to speak directly to the cab driver. Chinese-Chinese discussion would solve the problem more quickly than me serving as a translator. The taxi driver seemed to understand the directions, and as we started down the massive, windy highway, it quickly became apparent that I had lost all sense of orientation; this was the first city I'd visited that wasn't flat!

After I got settled in to my hotel, which was in the central district of Yuzhong and overlooked the Yangtze River, I immediately headed to the nearest bus stop - I wanted to get to the Three Gorges Dam museum. I made a short climb up a long hill, and did my best to decipher the signage at the bus stop - numerous busses stop there, with arabic numerals clearly indicating the bus route above the windshield. I wanted to see how many stops I needed to pass before I got close to the museum, but my bus arrived too quickly, so I just hopped aboard. Of course, though, I couldn't tell when my stop was coming up. I looked in my Lonely Planet, and found the pinyin pronunciation for the museum ("sanxia bowuguan") and asked a woman sitting next to me. When my stop came up, this very kind woman grabbed me by the arm and led me up a long curved hill toward the impressively designed museum's facade. I would experience hospitality and the kindness of strangers again and again.

I spent some time exploring the museum, eagerly anticipating my upcoming trip to the Three Gorges Dam. I spent the rest of that day searching for good restaurants, wandering around the city, and exploring the main shopping area, near what is known as the Liberation Monument. The area surrounding the monument is one of the main tourist centers in Chongqing - there are huge hotels like the Marriott and the Intercontinental within walking distance, the subway/tram system stops here, and massive construction projects are going on nearby. This is the part of Chongqing that says to foreigners: "open for business."

The next morning, I got on the subway right by my hotel - I was headed to the other side of the downtown area, and this was the easiest way to get around; I could avoid the windy roads and hills that were so confusing the day before. I was headed to the Stilwell Museum. General Joseph Stilwell, the museum's namesake, was the commander of US forces in the China-Burma-India theater and Chang Kaishek's chief of staff in 1942. The museum is his former home and guest house for VIPs of the Kuomintang.

The Stilwell Museum was tough to find (again, winding hilly streets and passageways made the journey from the subway confusing), but it was a hidden gem. Photos and storyboards inside trace over the history from 1940s China to the present, and US involvement in the area during that time. There are also photos that tell the story of commercial transactions that have taken place in China since then - companies like Coca-Cola signed major deals in Chongqing decades after the end of WWII. Stilwell's family lived there with him for a time, and in many photos, Stilwell is the only westerner posing with local Chinese. He studied Chinese, and immersed himself in Chinese culture as best he could while commanding a US fighting force with influence all the way to Delhi. The place had special meaning for me because my paternal grandfather fought with the US Army in Burma during WWII; he certainly would have recognized Stilwell's name, if he didn't serve under him directly. Stilwell's presence there and his desire to learn Chinese was memorialized after his death - five decades after Stilwell departed Chongqing, the Chongqing Stilwell Foreign Language School was founded in the city.

(to be continued...)

Changchun

According to my research, there are at least 50 cities in China that have a population of over 1,000,000. I visited 13 cities on my trip (including Macau and Hong Kong, which are not considered part of mainland China), and each one except Macau is home to over 1,000,000.

Beijing, because it is the national capital and was the site of the 2008 Olympics, is one of the two most popular (and populous) cities in China familiar to westerners. Shanghai, China's financial capital, and the site of the 2010 World Expo, is the other. But, just as their American counterparts Washington D.C. and New York are dissimilar to much of America, Beijing and Shanghai have a similar relationship with China. All four are the most international cities in their respective countries, and serve a variety of functions as municipalities the size of small nations.

Which cities, then, are more representative of urban life in mainland China? Beyond the impressive facade a foreigner sees on a quick business trip to Shanghai, or a diplomatic visit to Beijing, what goes on in the dozens of other cities which will help push the Middle Kingdom forward into the future?

I want to look at three cities I didn't know much about, if anything, before my trip. What I saw and experienced in each of them left an indelible impression on me. There are probably at least a half dozen others that could be on this list, but even months after I returned, there are three cities I can't get off my mind. Here is the first one:

1) Changchun, capital of Jilin Province with a population of just over 3 million.

Jilin Province borders North Korea, and in the 1930s partly made up the Manchu State in the Manchurian Region. Before the establishment of the Manchu State, the Manchu people had been responsible for the formation of the Qing Dynasty, the final monarchical dynasty in China, overthrown in 1911. When the Japanese invaded Manchuria in the early 1930s, they installed the last emperor of the Qing Dynasty, named Pu Yi, as the nominal leader of Manchukuo. He had been dethroned decades earlier, so the Japanese promise that he would eventually be able to rule China from Changchun enticed him to rule at their behest. In the intermittent decades between Pu Yi's overthrow and his return to power, the Russians pushed their influence in the region, asserting control over part of Manchuria they had sought since the late 19th century.

In 1945, the Japanese war machine was stopped in its tracks, and by 1949, the People's Republic of China (PRC) was founded. Soon after the formation of the PRC, Pu Yi was placed in prison, Changchun remained the provincial capital, and throughout Manchuria, one can still find evidence of former Russian and Japanese presence.

Changchun was the second city I visited during my trip to China in October 2010. Because my tutor Ren's family is from there, I became attuned to the local culture as soon as her cousins James and Monica (Zhang Jian and Yang Li, in pinyin) picked me up at the train station. They couldn't be any nicer as we went straight to my hotel to check in, then to a fantastic dinner. It was a damp and chilly evening when I arrived, but I was in great spirits, grateful for companionship, hospitality, and excellent food. Right away, I was plugged in to the local culture, grateful because I knew I would benefit from the experience.

Right from the inception of the PRC (People's Republic of China) in 1949, Changchun became China's motor city. To put it in other terms, Detroit has Ford and GM, Changchun has FAW ("First Auto Works"). Around the 1950s, FAW had an electrical engineer working for them with experience in Russia's automotive industry - his name was Jiang Zemin, and he would eventually become PRC President, part of what is known as China's "Third Generation" of leadership. Today, Changchun remains China's leading automotive production and R&D center, and is known throughout the country as a steel-based industrial hub. Changchun also has ties to foreign auto makers such as Audi and Volkswagen. Over the last few decades, the city's economy has diversified, but heavy industry is still a large part of the city's economy.

As James drove me around the city, we talked about his family's past, the life he and Monica share, and about the day to day experience of growing up and living in Changchun. I'll never forget how he introduced me to Chinese breakfast food (in Beijing, I had only visited either KFC or a place aptly called "American Steak and Eggs"). He showed me where he attended university - he studied business management, and now works as a salesman for a steel company in Changchun. He took me to the outskirts of the city to see Jilin University, the university with the largest student population of any in China. We drove their Suzuki down long, wide avenues and encountered moderate traffic. I'll never forget seeing the light-rail system cross our path (looked like something you might see on Back To the Future, Part II or Star Trek), or the massive highways; both with plans for further expansion.

Much of the city was modern - the buildings were shiny and new, and the roads were clean. Because the temperatures were below freezing (in mid-October), we stopped at Wal-Mart so I could buy longjohns. It looks similar to the Wal-Marts I've seen in America, except that everything is in Chinese. They didn't accept my credit card, so I had to pay in cash.

It was a Saturday, so Monica was off teaching English to university students. Their first trip outside the country was within the last couple of years, and they went to Thailand. In spite of having little exposure to the English speaking world, we were all able to converse in English pretty easily. I visited their apartment, a spacious apartment about 5 stories up in a complex right by my hotel. It was modern in every way, and, in terms of its amenities and style, would fit in any major western city.

We visited Jilin University's medical school, where James' aunt is a biomedical researcher conducting genetic research, and passed a park, constructed by the Japanese during their occupation, exclusively for the Japanese. I can't begin to describe the excellent food we had. Hot, spicy soups to counteract the frigid weather, spicy beef and seafood, steamed bread and seasoned vegetables - we washed it all down with "pi jiu" (beer) and the very dangerous rice wine. This was all in one excellent 24 hour period.

The next day, I got lucky again: Ren's dad was in Changchun when I was visiting - he's an art teacher at a university there, and returns to the US when school is not in session. He was showing some friends around the city, and I was invited to tag along. I couldn't help it when I first met him, I had to tell him how talented his daughter is - she's been teaching me Chinese for five months, and she speaks Italian as well as English. The world needs more people like her, and I made sure he knew that.

In the morning, the group went to Pu Yi's Palace - this was where the man made famous to Westerners in the 1980s film "The Last Emperor", lived and worked under Japanese occupation. We made our way around the grounds for a few hours before being whisked away to an amazing lunch - authentic Vietnamese food; of course, in the Far East, there is no other kind.

During the afternoon, we went to a park, and saw a sculpture exhibition. Changchun is up north, and it gets chilly there; as the sun started to set on the horizon, the group headed off for a final, fabulous dinner. We went to a restaurant just off the highway - this place was essentially a massive indoor park, ideal for weddings and banquets; our group had a private lounge with a massive circular dinner table. I had gotten to know the group as best I could - a few of them spoke English and I was doing my best to speak in Chinese, but it wasn't that easy. James and Monica rejoined the group and we had another excellent meal. We each got the chance to thank Ren's dad - while eating yet another excellent meal - for his hospitality.

The next day was a Monday - James and Monica headed back to work after a busy weekend, and I tried to take care of some personal business in Changchun. I needed to get a cell phone, and make arrangements to go to Harbin by train the next day. James invited me to his office during the afternoon, and he and his wife invited me to their place for dinner that evening. I will be forever grateful for their hospitality, and told them a few things:

1) Their nation is going to special places, and it is clear that so are they.
2) I hope someday they come to New York so I can repay their hospitality.
3) I thought that when I decided to spend 6 weeks in China, I would be by myself most of the time. So far, nothing has been further from the truth. They were very engaging and helpful, and I was grateful I met them early on in my journey.

The following day, I boarded the high speed train to Harbin. It is about 150 miles from Changchun, and the trip would take me less than 2 hours.

Methinks thou doth protest too much!

Shakespeare - Hamlet

Three days ago Michelle Malkin published “The progressive “climate of hate” an illustrated primer 2000-2010” consisting of photos, lists of incidents and videos of supposed leftist hate. Over a ten year period she doesn’t have much to show. People threw cream pies at Anne Coulter. Montel Williams told Michelle Bachmann “…to go ahead slit her wrists.”

What she doesn’t mention is what Bachmann, at an anti-Health Care Reform rally, said, “What we have to do today is make a covenant, to slit our wrists, be blood brothers on this thing. This will not pass. We will do whatever it takes to make sure this doesn’t pass.” Nor does she mention that ten tea partiers at this event were arrested for storming one of Nancy Pelosi’s offices and refusing to leave.

"Sandra Bernhard bashing Sarah Palin and cursing her head off with hate warping her crazed face:"

- Michelle Malkin's description of Bernhard telling a Palin joke.

And Coulter? She’s the biggest spewer of hatred around! She calls Senators fags and talks about using a baseball bat on liberals.

Maybe she deserves a few pies in the face.

There is a video of crowds of people in the SF neighborhood called the Castro escorting a group of Christian fundamentalists (I doubt the fundamentalist were there on friendly business) out of the area, a dozen or so works of artists that poked fun at Bush, Palin and McCain (a few with bloody imagery), five Kerry supporters that slashed tires, a slew of folks that stole or defaced Bush/Cheney signs, a fight between two men and a small crowd of tea partiers in which the tea partiers look to be getting in more punches, a woman who pushes a cameraman’s camera away at an immigration law protest, a few celebrity rants, a man that threw tomatoes at Palin, a Black Panther video, filmmaker Michael Enright, who after being embedded with troops in Afghanistan came home and assaulted a NYC Muslim cabbie, and a smattering of vandals and disorderly conduct arrests.

Four days ago Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips sent out an email to say, "The left is coming and will hit us hard on this [the Arizona shooting]. We need to push back harder with the simple truth. The shooter was a liberal lunatic. Emphasis on both words," he wrote and was quoted in the. Atlantic. They appear to have listened. Conservatives like Malkin are out in force trying to convince folks that it is the hate speech from the left that spurred on Loughner.

I went looking for leftist hate speech for my article:

Googling GOP

Despite their efforts what I mostly found was pretty mild stuff and some very angry right-wingers, who in spite of my civility (I was doing research not GOP bashing), called me a "piece of shit liberal". One claimed that I was familiar with murder and hate, that it was a part of my ideology. The reasoning here was that Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao and others were leftist and they committed murder so that makes me a murderous hater too.

They state that Loughner owned a copy of the Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf (leftist books they claim), listened to rock ‘n roll and posted a video of a burning flag so he is clearly a pot smoking liberal. His friends said he was in the past. Right?

Yes in 2007 when he was 17 years old and still had friends.

And sorry, no one is going to convince me that Hitler and “Mein Kampf” are somehow liberal!

The flag burning is not so cut and dry either. In the video Loughner is wearing black plastic around his legs, a brown hoodie and a mask. Mark Potak of Southern Poverty Law Center suggests he may be portraying an immigrant burning the flag.

Loughner also shaved his head and seemingly followed the theories of the Sovereign Citizens Movement (see video). This group is an anti-Hispanic and anti-Semitic, Christian right-wing confederacy that believes the federal government has no power over them. They produced Terry Nichols and father and son, Jake and Joseph Kane, who gunned down two officers during a routine traffic stop in May of 2010.

This crime was caught on tape below and far surpasses any violence Malkin could find over a ten year period from the liberal left.

BTW here is the full list of books:

Animal Farm, Brave New World, The Wizard Of OZ, Aesop Fables, The Odyssey, Alice Adventures Into Wonderland, Fahrenheit 451, Peter Pan, To Kill A Mockingbird, We The Living, Phantom Toll Booth, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Pulp,Through The Looking Glass, The Communist Manifesto, Siddhartha, The Old Man And The Sea, Gulliver’s Travels, Mein Kampf, The Republic, and Meno.

They ALL have themes that concur with beliefs of Sovereign Citizens Movement. Huxley's "Brave New World"? Sleep learning to help create changes in society. Loughner believed and the SCM teach that the government stops your dreams. The Old Man and the Sea, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Farenheit 451, Animal Farm all struggles against power.

“We the Living”?

Nothing says tea party better than Ayn Rand.

Alice and Wonderland and The Phantom Toll booth are both books with word games and jibe with beliefs of government control of grammar.

As far as Malkin goes? I could easily produce a primer for the Right from just 2010, equal in length or longer, that contains far more heinous crimes than pie-throwing and far more disturbing statements than those of Mr. Williams.

Conservatives are complaining that the liberals are using the events in Arizona to fund raise, citing Senator Bernie Sanders’ fundraising newsletter. In a paragraph contained in a four-page letter, he mentions several instances of threatening behavior in Arizona. A bullet through Rep. Raul Grijalva’s office window, Rep. Harry Mitchell has received death threats, Sen. Gabby Giffords' office door was smashed in and then we have a shooting.

Giffords by the way is Jewish.

I have to ask.

Who put the bullet through Grijalva window? Who smashed in Giffords' office door? Who is making death threats to Mitchell? Who is spitting on Barney Frank? And calling Congressmen niggers?

Who said, “I’ll tell you who should be tortured and killed at Guantanamo: every filthy Democrat in the U.S. Congress. “?

Conservative hero, Sean Hannity on the Hannity and Colmes Show on June 15, 2005.

Our President at the memorial and Democrats are all saying can we please get along?

Conservatives and the Tea Party all seem to be saying….

NO!

“Dying for your country is not really the question. Are you willing to kill for liberty?”

- Michael Badnarick, Libertarian Presidential Candidate

“My dear friends, I pray for the day that the first sheriff in this country [is] the one to fire the shot heard ’round the world and take out some IRS agents!”

- Arizona Sheriff, Richard Mack

"[Gay rights activists] pressure these students to declare a disordered sexual preference when they’re too young to know better, [so] they share some culpability.”

- Bryan Fischer, American Family Association on the uptick in gay suicides.

"It's a surveyor's symbol!"

- Tammy Bruce, Conservative talk radio host on the Palin map.