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This Bill Moyers Journal interview with Andrew Bacevich is one of the most gripping interviews I have seen in a long time. I strongly urge you to view the two-part video (part 1; part 2) if you can, as Bacevich speaking is compelling. There's also a transcript provided.

The first part of Bacevich's book, "The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism," is also available at the Moyers site.

That Bacevich, a self-professed Christian conservative, hails Carter's 1977 "Crisis of Confidence" speech as the last honest appraisal of America's energy demand is very sad. Bacevich also cites US Gen. Eric Shinseki as one of the only recent military generals who has spoken the truth to the government or the US people.

There are so many compelling quotes from this interview- please just watch it or read it.

The Nouriel Roubini profile (Wikipedia; Roubini's blog; blog RSS) in the Sunday NY Times was fascinating.

Roubini, a respected but formerly obscure academic, has become a major figure in the public debate about the economy: the seer who saw it coming. He has been summoned to speak before Congress, the Council on Foreign Relations and the World Economic Forum at Davos. He is now a sought-after adviser, spending much of his time shuttling between meetings with central bank governors and finance ministers in Europe and Asia. Though he continues to issue colorful doomsday prophecies of a decidedly nonmainstream sort — especially on his popular and polemical blog, where he offers visions of “equity market slaughter” and the “Coming Systemic Bust of the U.S. Banking System” — the mainstream economic establishment appears to be moving closer, however fitfully, to his way of seeing things. “I have in the last few months become more pessimistic than the consensus,” the former Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers told me earlier this year. “Certainly, Nouriel’s writings have been a contributor to that.”

At the end of the article Roubini muses that, “This might be the beginning of the end of the American empire.”

Is that a bad thing? If it is, then we had the wrong guy at the helm for the last 8 years.

There's been a lot of coverage of the controversy surrounding the Spanish Olympic Basketball team's racist mocking of Asians in an advertisement run in a Spanish paper.

José Calderón, (who normally plays guard for the Toronto Raptors), made the situation worse by blogging an apology that wasn't sincere (claiming that the US and UK has racism as well) and that called Asia the "Orient" (a phrase that has long since been deprecated.)

"During a photo session where the Spanish national team was unveiled, one of our sponsors asked us to pose with a 'wink' to our participation in Beijing and we made an oriental expression with our eyes," [Calderon] wrote on his Internet site.

"It seemed to us to be something appropriate and that it would always be interpreted as an affectionate gesture," [Calderon] added.

"I want to express that we have great respect for the Orient and its people, some of my best friends in Toronto are of Chinese origin."

The "some of my best friends are" line never works in this situation. Who cares who your friends are or how multi-cultural Spain is- that's irrelevant here. If your actions or words are racist, they are racist.

Now there's news that the Spanish Olympic Tennis team was caught doing the same thing. Spanish Tennis Team Also Strikes "Chinky-Eyed Chinaman" Pose!

The Telegraph UK reports that:

The photo is still visible on the official website of the Spanish Tennis Federation, where it was spotted. The original is captioned “Estamos preparados para China”, which translates as “We are prepared for China”.

With this second image, it's clear to me that in Spain (as it is elsewhere), this "slant-eye" gesture is a culturally-recognized way to image Asians, albeit a racist one.

Even a journal article looking at the Chinese in Spain recognizes that,

"Even though the Chinese community has a long history of settlement in Spain, the Spanish population still considers the Chinese as a closed and somewhat mysterious community. References to exaggerated stereotypes and prejudices regarding their activities and social organization can often be overheard in daily conversations."

Finally, Spanish writer, Pablo Bustelo, Senior Analyst, Asia-Pacific, Elcano Royal Institute and professor of Applied Economics at Madrid’s Complutense University, writes in The Economic Rise of China and India and its Implications for Spain:

The Spanish economy cannot allow itself the luxury of failing to adapt to the rise of China and India –a world economic trend that will profoundly alter the international scenario in the coming decades–.

One of my favorite reporters, James Fallows, schools NYT columnist David Brooks: David Brooks from Chengdu: my lord. Brooks knows not a thing about 'Asia' or China or whatever he wrote about in that op-ed. Makes Brooks look the fool and neophyte in China.

(I'm testing ScribeFire.)

NPR on Gedde Watanabe and Sixteen Candles. I am definitely among those who always winced at Watanabe's role in Sixteen Candles. It's amazing to think that the actor, a) does not speak Japanese, and b) had no idea how his role would have had such an impact on pop-culture and Asian-American stereotypes. I guess he was too young to realize.

It's good to see the Giant Robot guys still doing well. I met them when they were still struggling in the late 90s when I was working for Toyota in LA.

In 1984, when Sixteen Candles came out, some Asian-American groups decried Long Duk Dong as stereotypical, racist and part of a long history of Hollywood's offensive depictions of Asian men.

"It took me a while to understand that," Watanabe says. "In fact, I was working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and I was accosted a couple of times by a couple of women who were just really irate and angry. They asked, 'How could you do a role like that?' But it's funny, too, because at the same time I laugh at the character. It's an odd animal."
...
The situation for Asian-American men in Hollywood has improved a bit since 1984. There are more Asian Americans behind the camera, and more substantial roles, especially on TV. As far as film actors go, many people mention John Cho. He is best known for playing Harold in the comedy Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle and in an upcoming sequel.

But Asian-American actors are still trying to overcome several big issues. They want more roles that are simply American, not ethnic.

And, says Watanabe: "We really need an Asian-American star, and it hasn't happened." Hollywood may be importing leading men from Asia, one oft-heard argument says, but it has a ways to go with Asian Americans.

Wretch.cc now #1 site (by traffic) in Taiwan. If the reported purchase price is true, it was a very good purchase.

Wretch.cc was ranked the top Web site in Taiwan in a top-100 list tabulated by Business Next, a local magazine, and Taiwan's Access Rating Online (ARO). ... But despite Yahoo's best attempts to keep up with new features such as blogs, Wretch.cc continued to grow and gain popularity. It proved such a difficult battle that Yahoo Taiwan finally used cash to end the battle, buying Wretch.cc for an undisclosed sum. Local newspaper reports valued the deal at NT$700 million (US$22.7 million).

Yahoo Taiwan came in second in the ranking overall, but it remained number one against other Internet portals.

Rounding out the top five overall Web sites in Taiwan, PChome Online came in third, Yam.com ranked fourth, and Gamer.com took fifth place in the Business Next/ARO list.

The U.S. version of Google ranked first among search engines, and 14th overall, while Google Taiwan came in second, China's Baidu ranked third and video search engine Flurl came in fourth.

Yahoo Dethroned in Taiwan

Now there is no reason not to have read Larry Lessig's The Future of Ideas. Lessig has arranged for the book to be free with a Creative Commons license.

Ken Auletta reports in The New Yorker on Google's increasing lobbying operations in Washington DC: The Search Party. The last quote by Eric Schmidt was fascinating.

“When you have a technology that is as engrossing as the Internet, you’re going to have winners and losers. I’m not trying to sound arrogant. I’m trying to sound rational about it. The Internet allows people to consume media in a different way.” He believes that because Google is “run by three computer scientists we’re going to make all the mistakes computer scientists running a company would make. But one of the mistakes we’re not going to make is the mistake that non-scientists make. We’re going to make mistakes based on facts and data and analysis.” He paused. Then he said, “What kills a company is not competition but arrogance. We control our fate.”

Comments on my blog are still broken.

This is more than a week old but highly readable.

All-in-all, Android seems to be the only non-proprietary operating system with a strong chance of wider commercial adoption. Motorola is losing interest in LiMo (it committed to Qtopia APIs, whereas LiMo supports rival GTK). The LiPS forum doesn’t really have a route to market, apart from Chinese ODMs, and is a partial OS. All other mobile Linux operating systems are either in alpha stage (Celunite, ALP, A la Mobile), not shrink-wrapped (Greensuite), or not backed by a big services firm (Purple Labs). Symbian is dominated by Nokia and DoCoMo; outside Japan, the overwhelming majority (volume-wise and model-wise) of Symbian handsets are Nokia, whereas in Japan the vast majority of 30 million Symbian-based shipments are DoCoMo (60 out of 66 models). And Windows Mobile is for enterprise segments only (at least up to version 6). Plus Android ticks several boxes of OEM checklists including control, time-to-market and cost.

VisionMobile Forum :: The significance of Google’s Android

Sad but not surprising.

In any case, the decision to bar me is a grim reflection on China's concept of security. I have consistently argued that China has a right to develop and that the West has a duty to help it find a sustainable path in a global environment already seriously hurt by Western development. To construe this as enmity, or to believe that a better relationship could be achieved by bribery and bullying, is not only absurd but also deeply worrying.

Most disturbing is that this primitive "friend or foe" logic is still applied not just to foreigners, but to Chinese people. Recent months have seen heightened surveillance of local NGOs and the forced closure of some, such as a "rural reconstruction" initiative led by the eminent People's University professor, Wen Tiejun. This is the government's way of "killing the chicken to scare the monkey," as the Chinese proverb goes. It's a signal to others to watch their step.

Opinion: Why China cracked down on my nonprofit

Via Danwei