Zhu Rongji scolds the Taiwanese electorate
on March 15, 2000.

They never learn, do they? (sigh)

In a Reuters article posted up on the ABC News site we learn this:

A Chinese major general-turned-vice minister, speaking days before Taiwan's parliamentary elections, warned the island against miscalculating Beijing's determination to crush its separatist dreams.

"There can be no peace (if) Taiwan (becomes) independent, there can be no stability (if) Taiwan splits," the official People's Daily on Thursday quoted Wang Zaixi, a vice minister of the policymaking Taiwan Affairs Office, as saying.

"It would be a serious, dangerous miscalculation if the Chen Shui-bian authorities…think the Chinese people will tolerate 'Taiwan independence' splittist activities for the sake of seeking a peaceful environment to develop," Wang told a seminar in Macau on Wednesday.

China has tried the admonishment strategy a number of times and each time it has failed miserably. In 1996, China fired missiles into the Strait to try and intimidate the Taiwanese electorate into voting for Ling Yang-kang of the New Party, rather than the KMT's Lee Teng-hui or the DPP's Peng Ming-min. To anyone in Taiwan this show of force hailed from the theater of the absurd. The New Party, which advocates unification with China, received 14.9 percent of the vote at the time.

Then in 2000, Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji wagged his finger at the Taiwanese electorate, this time around implying that the KMT were to be voted in rather than the DPP candidate Chen Shui-bian. Again it didn't work.

One would have thought the suits in Beijing would have changed their tactics, and indeed in this year's presidential election, perhaps because the communists were convinced that the KMT would win, there were no public dressing down of the Taiwanese electorate. Here we are on the cusp of this year's legislative election (the Taiwanese go to the polls on Dec. 11) and its the same song and dance all over again. Considering their record, do they still think they can affect the outcome of an election in Taiwan?

What are they thinking?

You may have noticed both on Google News yesterday, or on the front page of the Taipei Times today, that the US State Department has warned Taiwan's President Chen Shui-bian that he must stick to the "Four Noes" platform that he laid out upon his first inauguration. That means Chen will not declare independence, not change the official name of Taiwan from the Republic of China, not add the state-to state model of cross-strait relations to the constitution, not hold a referendum on the status of independence or unification and not abolish the National Unification Guidelines.

Last week KMT Chairman Lien Chan dared Chen to hold a referendum, and Chen, while not stating that he would do so, bandied the idea about to call Lien's bluff and show the voting public what an asinine idea Lien had come up with in the first place. All politics as usual for the upcoming legislative elections.

But this idea that the US seems to have that Chen is going to pull a fast one and submit a constitution that has a gazillion amendments that scream "Taiwan is independent, yeaaaarrrrggghhh" is ludicrous. Chen has repeated ad nauseum that constitutional reform is needed so the constitution will reflect the realities on the ground rather than the fiction upheld in an anachronistic document that suggests the government of the ROC runs all of China and Mongolia as well.

What compels the US State Department to make such a public announcement? Are there not people in its ranks that have a background on Taiwan, and in particular, Chen's history as a politician? Perhaps they are buying China's alarmist rhetoric. Or maybe the announcement has less to do with Chen and more to do with throwing China a bone.

Lies are the mortar that bind the savage individual man into the social masonry. -H.G. Wells

The guys over at Something Awful have had this flash gem up for awhile. Don't watch this at work unless your colleagues already think you are a complete kook. (Oh yeah, click the poorly drawn arrow on the flash to get it moving.)

Working for the government ...

As many of you know, my full-time job is with the ROC government. The building I work in is very close to the Executive Yuan and the national police building. And it's only a few blocks away from the Legislative Yuan. This means that roughly once a month, some nutjob feels that the government needs to redress a grievance. This is frequently done either with a megaphone or a little bravado brought on by the bottle.

Taiwan is proud of its democratic traditions. The man hollering outside of my office, making it difficult for us to concentrate on our work, has been out there for nearly three quarters of an hour. No one has asked him to go away.

I am a monster after ...

One blini disaster. (tip: do not kill the yeast!) And to top it off my cat peed on my curtains. I'm cranky and I'm gonna get a cup of coffee.

Franz Kafka (and his handsome dog).

Something on the man.

To the barricades.

Timothy Garton Ash weighs in on the struggle in the Ukraine here.

For the citizens of the Ukraine ...

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. --Vaclav Havel

Let's hope that Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych accedes to the recount demands and that Vladimir Putin is able to rein in his anti-democratic longings. Above all, let this be settled peacefully. Lech Walesa is on the way to mediate. Canada, the EU, the US, Germany and NATO have all expressed reservations about the legitamacy of the elections.

Lien Chan makes me laugh ...

The party chairman of the KMT, a man who has led his party into three consecutive losses (and it looks like it may be four soon), including two presidential defeats and a loss of seats in the last legislative election, says he is willing to make peace with President Chen Shui-bian, if of course the president will compromise on a couple of issues.

Lien says the KMT will pass Chen's defense budget which Chen has been trying to push through for well over four years now if Chen will be a gentleman and cut it in half. As I pointed out in my very first post here, Taiwan, if the initial budget is passed, will still be paying only 2.8 of its annual GDP on defense, less than Singapore, less than South Korea, less than the US.

Here on the eve of the legislative elections, it looks like Chairman Lien is getting the heebie geebies. He has sniffed defeat one time too many and if he goes down this time, it's off to the abattoir.

His other offer? That if the Chen administration will not interfere with the 319 Special Truth Investigation committee, the KMT will accept its findings. My what a generous man you are Mr. Lien!

For those who have no idea what the hell I'm talking about, this committee was formed to investigate the shooting of the president on the eve of the presidential election. Formed under the auspices of a pan-blue vote (the opposition to the president, many of whom still believe that the president had someone shoot him in order to gain a sympathy vote to win the election), the committee is clearly unconstitutional and has extralegal powers, powers the judiciary and police might envy.

Lien, when he speaks of interference, is referring to the ruling party's legal challenges to the constitutionality of the committee. So if the ruling party will let this farce of a committee distort the constitution and the judicial process, he will accept the results.

This from a man who has already implied that any result that goes against his wishes (notice the sense of entitlement here) must be a result of illegal, political interference. Lien threw such a temper tantrum a couple of weeks ago when the court threw out his party's case to annul the election that, in a moment of calculation surprising for such a dullard, he used a classical Chinese idiom that could be interpreted as a call for violence in a speech he gave after the court's ruling. In everyday Chinese, what Lien said could be taken to mean that since the president had stacked the courts (a ridiculous allegation by the way) and had won his election through fraud, anyone was entitled to kill the president. Of course, the nuance, the spirit in which the idiom was intended in its original form meant that anyone could admonish or punish the president for such behavior.

Lien has not accepted a single result that has run counter to his belief that he and only he deserves to be in power since he lost the presidential election. Why on earth would he start now?

Well hell ...

A Hmong hunter went on a killing spree in Wisconsin. Some scientists say that chocolate may be good for a cough (That's good news!) And all I can think about right now is how to make Blini. Anyone have a good recipie?

Vaclav Havel is here ...

The former Czech president, political dissident and playwright is here in Taiwan. Yesterday, President Chen Shui-bian awarded him the Order of the Brilliant Star for his continuing support of Taiwan and Taiwan's democracy. Havel, when president of the Czech Republic, refused to make state visits to China and also barred dictators from Belarus and The Ukraine from entering his country on the grounds that they abused human rights and were therefore not welcome.

Of course, he is known as one of the key authors of the Velvet Revolution and his book Open Letters has one of his most powerful essays,"The Power of the Powerless." Here are some excerpts.

A mish-mash.

Taiwan's shares fell on weak tech stocks. President Chen Shui-bian, out campaigning for the legislative elections, is talking about a new constitution and perhaps a referendum "if China pushes too hard." One wonders if this has anything to do with the recent braggadocio summoned up by Chen's rival, the KMT's Lien Chan, who challenged the president to have a referendum on independence. Chen had already sworn to reform the constitution when he was running for his second term. This referendum talk, though, is nothing more than political posturing. Chen and the DPP know full well that China has explicitly said that it will not stand for a referendum on Taiwan's independence.

In other news? Timothy Garton Ash says the US and Europe need to get along. The story about the Chinese nuclear sub in Japanese waters is well over a week old now but making Japan nervous will play out in other ways, such as Japan seeking to solidify its relationship with Taiwan and possibly the US. More here.

And this is the banality of the day, perhaps a good study if you are a poor twenty something living in New York and wanting to throw parties.

Music as an education.

David Eggers has an amusing column up in The Guardian about how pompous references in pop songs get us to scramble to the library or dictionary. He claims the British drop literary references more often than American artists do, but I'm not sure that's the case. I just think overall the Americans are a bit subtler.

In Ballad of a Thin Man, Dylan sings :

With great lawyers you have
Discussed lepers and crooks
You've been through all of
F. Scott Fitzgerald's books
You're very well read
It's well known
Because something is happening here
But you don't know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

And anyone who has been following the surge of "research" into Dylan's lyrics should know by now that most of his songs are chock full of literary references, prompting one critic to call him a "magpie poet." Dylan's album Time Out of Mind has a great song called I'm Sick of Love. That title was taken straight from the Songs of Solomon in the Bible. And earlier this year there was a kerfuffle over Dylan's having snatched a few lines from an obscure Japanese writer Junichi Saga for the song Floater on his 2001 album Love and Theft.

And what about Lou Reed? I mean a song called The Sword of Damocles?

While Randy Newman may not drop names from the stacks, he has opened up listeners eyes to historic figures and events across the American landscape. There's an Austin, Texas band that named itself after a William Faulkner novel. There's more, but this is too long already.

The essay.

I've always been an avid reader of essays, and I think my fondness for them is what helped me make the leap from the lake of fiction to the sturdier realm of travelogues, reportage and history. Yet coming from fiction first has its advantages. One can spot the yarn buried within, the fable brandished as fact. Once fiction makes a cameo in an informative piece, it is up to us, the readers, to judge what master it serves.

Here's a good book review on a compliation of essays.

Why don't we do it in the road?

Here's why. Because it's immoral, in fact simply alluding to it is clearly a bad idea. At least that's what the congressman from Indiana thinks. Don't laugh at this. Stop it. Am I going to have to make you go out and strip a limb off the Birch tree?

From Ohio, with love.

A friend who lives here in Taiwan sent me a picture of his absentee ballot, which he received today, some two weeks after the election. Click on the image to enlarge. There you can make out that the Ross County Board of Elections in Chillicothe, Ohio sent his ballot to sunny Jamaica instead of Taipei. Better luck next time, huh?

Who will rid me of this meddling priest?

President Chen accuses rivals Lien Chan and James Soong of attempting to overthrow the government. Read on.

Don Knotts as Dubya.

Enjoy.

DPP supporter holds a rose.

Feeling glum or glib?

"I know what you're thinking about," said Tweedledee, "but it isn't so, nohow. " "Contrariwise," continued Tweedledee, "if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic." -Lewis Carroll,Through the Looking Glass.

Tired of losing arguments with your mates and family? Maybe Stephen's Guide to the Logical Fallacies makes for good Sunday reading.