Just got back from a drama competition. I was supposed to judge but managed to weasel out of that. Instead, I had to sit in the second row. I'm tired of being introduced at every formal event that I happen to be in the audience for. This happened at the debate contest that I saw this week as well, even though I wasn't judging, the debate was in Chinese, and I wasn't even explicitly invited. And what makes it more annoying is that introductions tend to go: "Professor Zhou Ming ... Teacher Li Dan Ming, and, Joel." If you've got a microphone in your hand, then tt's "Mister Joel Aufrecht" or "Teacher Joel Aufrecht" to you, bub.

Anyway, I read my New York Review and mostly ignored the drama and tried to be inconspicuous. The unventilated hall that was horribly stuffy a month ago is now comfortably warm, as the outside temperature has dropped to about 45 and none of the buildings or vehicles are heated (and leaky concrete shells turn out to be poor insulators).

After six performances of varying qualities - call me biased, but I think the English department was best, although none of the performances were even at the level of a good US high school show - and I'm not referring to language ability here, but to staging, timing, and acting. One group chose to simply re-enact various scenes from Tarzan. Tarzan, of course, refers to the Disney movie, and I was afraid to ask if anyone was familiar with any antecedents to that particular version.

Whatever. I'm grumpy and ready to go home and recharge my cultural batteries. Or it's the cold weather.

Today for no special reason I happened to browse about ten different huge articles, and also got the 4 Oct New York Review of Books in the mail, as well as the Amazon books I ordered (a 700 page history of China and a book on how to teach). It's Thursday, and I have the usual stack of homework to grade by Monday/Tuesday, which are the last days of class for my college course (though not, sadly, for my middle school kids) - I don't need much lecture, but I do want to prepare some handouts, and also Zhang Ming and I will give a bilingual lecture next week on "Open Source, Copyright, and the End of Scarcity." (I want to put Intellectual Property in the title but I'm afraid that that would just scare away the audience because they would think it was just a lecture on 'you shouldn't keep buying and renting pirated movies and music' and, by the way, it's almost impossible to buy non-pirated DVDs, CDs, and VCDs even if you try; they're simply not for sale.)

I still have a few thousand words queued up to mail and post, but they're intermingled with notes that have yet to be inflated into prose, not least of which including the whole of my Autumn Festival vacation and the Beijing wedding, and in the mean time life keeps happening and I keep taking more notes. Meanwhile Julie has scads of digital pictures on her Mac PowerSeat that I'd like to put on my site and she's leaving in a week, so I gotta grab those ASAP.

So, the rest of this email is just quotes from stuff I'm reading.

Bruce Sterling's Speech at "Global Challenges, Trends and Best Practices in Cryptography," Washington, DC November 20, 2001

http://www.viridiandesign.org/notes/251-300/00283_geeks_and_spooks.html

The truer and sadder story of crypto was that the spooks and the geeks both beat the hell out of our democratic process, rendering lawyers, consumers, the Congress, the industry, and the Administration totally irrelevant, and leaving crypto as a blasted technical wasteland, in a kind of Afghan-style feud, where every single party was necessarily a crook, or a scofflaw, or a deceiver, or weirdly suspect, and there was no legitimacy, and no common ground, and still, today, no good method to assemble any.

http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/policy/senate.htm

Mr. Chairman, Senator Hatch and members of the Committee. My name is Scott L. Silliman and I am the Executive Director of the Center on Law, Ethics and National Security at the Duke University School of Law. ... Prior to joining the law faculty at Duke University in 1993, I spent 25 years as a uniformed attorney in the United States Air Force Judge Advocate General's Department. ... I will discuss what I consider to be a weakness in the Administration's argument regarding the President's legal predicate for authorizing the use of military commissions with respect to the terrorist attacks on September 11th, a weakness which I believe needs to be remedied by the Congress through legislation. I will then discuss my policy concerns as to the overall breadth of the current order and how I believe it could adversely impact our international credibility as a nation under the rule of law.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1284,606765,00.html

Mullah Faizal promised to deliver up the Taliban's International Brigade. In return he was assured a safe passage back to Kandahar. The foreign volunteers duly travelled for five hours across the desert, pitching up on the outskirts of Mazar-i-Sharif in the dark early hours of Saturday.

They woke up to find themselves confronted by an opposition army crammed into pick-up trucks and tanks. Sources suggest the foreigners had been tricked into going to Mazar on the understanding they would attack it. When opposition troops disarmed them they were initially nonplussed. And then they were angry.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,2001540008-2001551563,00.html

'Michael asked one Taleban why he had come to Afghanistan. He said: 'We are here to kill you' and jumped at Michael, who shot him and three others before being wrestled to the ground'

WHETHER it was incompetence, overconfidence or duty that prompted two CIA operatives to interrogate dozens of Taleban on their own will perhaps remain a mystery.

Dinnage, Rosemary. The Crackup. New York Review of Books. 4 Oct 2001. p 16. (A review of several books on depression)

There is no shortage of answers, then, to the authors' question, "Why?" Probably most cases involve several, the facile idea the depression is either endogenous ... or exogenous ... having faded. And behind all the causes, the symptoms, the patterns of depression, there is a basic fear that is so taboo that it has no single name: horror vacui, the fear of nothingness. People, I think, fall into two categories, either recognizing what this means or being genuinely baffled by it.

http://www.latimes.com/templates/misc/printstory.jsp?slug=la%2D000094697nov28

... But, while the Bush administration was busy tearing apart Afghanistan to find Bin Laden, it failed to notice that the Russians were taking over half the country.

The Russians achieved this victory through their proxy--the Northern Alliance. ... To the fury of Washington and Islamabad, in a coup de main the Russians rushed the Northern Alliance into Kabul, in direct contravention of Bush's dictates.

The alliance is now Afghanistan's dominant force and, heedless of multi-party political talks in Germany going on this week, styles itself as the new "lawful" government, a claim fully backed by Moscow.

... The U.S. ouster of the Taliban regime also means Pakistan has lost its former influence over Afghanistan and is now cut off from Central Asia's resources. So long as the alliance holds power, the U.S. is equally denied access to the much-coveted Caspian Basin. Russia has regained control of the best potential pipeline routes. The new Silk Road is destined to become a Russian energy superhighway.

By charging like an enraged bull into the South Asian china shop, the U.S. handed a stunning geopolitical victory to the Russians and severely damaged its own great power ambitions. Moscow is now free to continue plans to dominate South and Central Asia in concert with its strategic allies, India and Iran.