or Powell's or me• • •
"Mike and Jon, Jon and Mike—I've known them both for years, and, clearly, one of them is very funny. As for the other: truly one of the great hangers-on of our time."—Steve Bodow, head writer, The Daily Show
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"Who can really judge what's funny? If humor is a subjective medium, then can there be something that is really and truly hilarious? Me. This book."—Daniel Handler, author, Adverbs, and personal representative of Lemony Snicket
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"The good news: I thought Our Kampf was consistently hilarious. The bad news: I’m the guy who wrote Monkeybone."—Sam Hamm, screenwriter, Batman, Batman Returns, and Homecoming
May 12, 2008
Grief in Asia
By: Bernard Chazelle
It's been a rough ride for Myanmar and China.
What have the poor Burmese people done to deserve both a horrific cyclone and one of the vilest dictators on this side of the Milky Way? At least, General Than Shwe is showing a Churchillian capacity to stand tall in the face of adversity. "Cyclone, what cyclone?" No, what's got him all agitated right now is this May 10 referendum that had to be postponed in parts of the country. You see, dictators are more sensitive than the rest of us. While I'd be quite happy to be elected with 99.99998% of the votes, a true dictator will not rest until enough heads roll to bring the percentage to 99.999999.
The China earthquake has a personal angle for me. I was in that part of China 2 weeks ago. I've tried to contact my friends there all day, but so far no luck. As a little boy, after seeing a stupid movie I began to have a recurring nightmare that I was stuck in the rubble of an earthquake. It's still hard for me to imagine anything worse. The Chinese are amazingly good at quick, large-scale projects and I hope they'll use their organizational talents to rescue as many people as quickly as possible. My heart goes out to them and to their Burmese neighbors.
— Bernard Chazelle
Indeed, the Chinese leaders are definitely not the Burmese leaders. While there is the inevitable corruption of a 3rd world nation industrializing and becoming a 1st world nation (just ask President U.S. Grant about that), they Get Things Done. My guys are in the Shanghai area and other than getting sick to their stomach as their building shook beneath them, they're fine and back to work. But the very building that my guys are working in is proof of how quickly the Chinese can move. If, ten years ago, you had said "China will become a power in the software engineering field", people would have died laughing. But the Chinese government built that building (and leases it to us for $0 provided we employ and train the software engineers), provided us with high speed Internet infrastructure so we could communicate with each other, they stocked their universities with excellent scholars to teach the engineers the theory before they got to us (and their guys are *smart*, they don't have experience but they can get sh*t done)... and they did all this in less than ten years. If you'd asked me ten years ago whether folks who were barely out of 3rd world status could do something like that, I would have stared at you as if you were nuts. But the pragmatists got in charge in China, and they are... pragmatic. And surprisingly effective.
So despite everything, I feel a lot better about the situation in China than about the situation in Burma. The Chinese leaders have shown themselves to be pragmatic and effective and I'm sure that all necessary resources are on the way to the disaster area. The Burmese leaders... not so much.
-- Badtux the Software Geek Penguin
If you look at the China efforts, you'd quickly realize what a sham the Katrina efforts were in comparison. China has four times the population of the USA, it is a twentieth as rich in terms of GDP per capita, and even it can mobilize aid at the central administrative level within one day of disaster, with the country's paramount leader coordinating the efforts himself. Makes you think, don't it?
Posted by: En Ming Hee at May 14, 2008 01:09 PM
