Leadership from TRIBES

Insights on Leadership from Seth Godin's book TRIBES:

“In other words, if everyone could do it [be a leader], they would, and it wouldn’t be worth much.

It’s uncomfortable to stand up in front of strangers.
It’s uncomfortable to propose an idea that might fail.
It’s uncomfortable to challenge the status quo.
It’s uncomfortable to resist the urge to settle.

If you’re not uncomfortable in your work as a leader, it’s almost certain you’re not reaching your potential as a leader.

Leadership is a choice. It’s the choice to not do nothing."

Finding the lost city

Does the Amazon jungle conceal a vanished empire?

By David Grann | February 22, 2009

In 1925, the legendary British explorer Percy Harrison Fawcett ventured into the Amazon, vowing to make one of the most important archeological discoveries in history. He was searching for an ancient civilization, which he had named, simply, the City of Z.

Ever since the Spanish conquistadores descended the Amazon River, in 1542, perhaps no region on the planet had so ignited the imagination - or lured so many men to their death. For centuries, the conquistadores had searched the jungle for the glittering kingdom of El Dorado. The kingdom, which the conquistadores had heard about from Indians, was said to be so plentiful in gold that its inhabitants ground the metal into powder and blew it through "hollow canes upon their naked bodies." (El Dorado literally means the Gilded Man.) Thousands had died looking for this golden realm.

Yet after a toll of suffering and death worthy of Joseph Conrad, most archeologists had concluded that El Dorado was no more than an illusion. Many modern scientists have assumed that no complex civilization could have emerged in so hostile an environment, where the soil is agriculturally poor, mosquitoes transport lethal diseases, and predators lurk amid the forest canopy. The Amazon's brutal conditions have fueled one of the most enduring theories of human development: environmental determinism. According to this theory, even if some early humans eked out an existence in the harshest conditions on the planet, they rarely advanced beyond a few primitive tribes. Society, in other words, is a captive of geography.

Fawcett, however, was convinced that the Amazon wilderness - an area virtually the size of the continental United States - concealed the remnants of at least one, and

probably more, highly advanced civilizations. He was the last of a breed of explorers to venture into blank spots on the map with little more than a machete, a compass, and an almost divine sense of purpose, and he spent nearly two decades gathering evidence to prove his case and pinpointing a location. With his 21-year-old son, Jack, and Jack's best friend, Raleigh Rimell, Fawcett finally set off into the Brazilian jungle to find the City of Z. Then he and his party vanished, giving rise to what has been described as "the greatest exploration mystery of the 20th century."

Fawcett had warned that no one should follow in his wake due to the danger, but scores of scientists, explorers, and adventurers plunged into the wilderness, determined to recover the Fawcett party, alive or dead, and to return with proof of Z. In February 1955, the New York Times claimed that Fawcett's disappearance had set off more searches "than those launched through the centuries to find the fabulous El Dorado." Some were wiped out by starvation and disease, or retreated in despair; others were murdered by tribesmen firing arrows dipped in poison. Then there were those adventurers who had gone to find Fawcett and, like him, simply disappeared in the forests that travelers had long ago christened the "green hell."

History has been as unsparing of Fawcett as was the jungle. Although his legend helped inspire Arthur Conan Doyle's novel "The Lost World" and once spawned radio plays, poems, documentaries, movies, stamps, children's stories, comic books, ballads, stage plays, and graphic novels, Fawcett has increasingly been forgotten. Most scholars have dismissed him as a crank who sacrificed his life, and that of his son, in pursuit of a mad fantasy.

Yet in recent years archeologists have begun to find evidence of what Fawcett had always claimed: ancient ruins buried deep in the Amazon, in places ranging from the Bolivian flood plains to the Brazilian forests. These ruins include enormous man-made earth mounds, plazas, geometrically aligned causeways, bridges, elaborately engineered canal systems, and even an apparent astronomical observatory tower made of huge granite rocks that has been dubbed "the Stonehenge of the Amazon."

The discoveries are not only transforming our understanding of one of the most daring and eccentric explorers ever to set foot in the New World. They are challenging long-held assumptions about the Amazon as a Hobbesian place where only small primitive tribes could ever have existed, and about the limits the environment placed on the rise of early civilizations. And these revelations are exploding our perceptions of what the Americas really looked liked before the arrival of Christopher Columbus.

The idea did not strike Fawcett like a bolt of lightning. Rather, the theory of Z developed over time, with one clue leading to the next. Fawcett, who was born during the Victorian age of exploration, had trained as a surveyor at the Royal Geographical Society in London, the same place that had helped launch such explorers as Richard Burton and David Livingstone. In 1906, after serving as a British secret agent in Africa, Fawcett had been recruited by Bolivia, Brazil, and Peru to map the interior of the Amazon. The region was still so unexplored that these countries could not even agree on their borders: They were simply speculative lines sketched through forests and mountains.

It was during these epic journeys - journeys in which many of his men perished from disease and starvation - that Fawcett began to gather evidence of Z. Over a span of nearly two decades, he made contact with various unknown tribes, documenting how they had brilliantly adapted to the conditions in the jungle. They often used the Amazonian flood plains, which were more fertile than terra firma, to grow crops, and relied on elaborate ways of hunting and fishing. As a result, they were able to generate enough food to sustain larger populations - a precursor to any sort of complex society with divisions of labor and political hierarchies such as chiefdoms and kingdoms. "Food problems never bothered them," Fawcett said.

Fawcett also studied the 16th- and 17th-century chronicles of the El Dorado hunters. Even though the conquistadores had not found a golden kingdom, they had reported seeing "cities that glistened in white," with temples, public squares, palisade walls, causeways, and exquisite artifacts. Because later explorers never came across similar settlements - or indeed any large populations - it was assumed these descriptions, like El Dorado itself, were simply products of the conquistadores' fervid imaginations.

But once while Fawcett was climbing a desolate mound of earth above the flood plains of the Bolivian Amazon, he noticed something sticking out of the ground. He scooped it into his hand: it was a shard of pottery. He started to scour the soil. Virtually everywhere he scratched, he later wrote, he turned up bits of ancient, brittle pottery. He thought the craftsmanship was as refined as anything from ancient Greece or Rome or China. "Wherever there are 'alturas,' that is high ground above the plains" in the Amazon basin, Fawcett said, "there are artifacts." And that wasn't all: extending between these alturas, there appeared to be some sort of geometrically aligned paths. They looked, he could swear, like "roads" and "causeways."

Still, Fawcett struggled to make sense of his own findings. The notion of a complex civilization in the Amazon contradicted the two ethnological paradigms that had prevailed since the first encounter between Europeans and Native Americans, more than 400 years earlier. Though some of the first conquistadores were in awe of the civilizations that Native Americans had developed, many theologians debated whether these dark-skinned, scantily clad peoples were, in fact, human; for how could the descendants of Adam and Eve have wandered so far, and how could the biblical prophets have been ignorant of them? In the mid-16th century, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, one of the Holy Roman Emperor's chaplains, argued that the Indians were "half men" who should be treated as natural slaves.

At the time, the most forceful critic of this genocidal paradigm was Bartolomé de Las Casas, a Dominican friar who had traveled throughout the Americas. In a famous debate with Sepúlveda and in a series of treatises, Las Casas tried to prove, once and for all, that Indians were equal humans ("Are these not men? Do they not have rational souls?"), and to condemn those "pretending to be Christians" who "wiped them from the face of the earth." In the process, however, he contributed to a conception of the Indians that became an equal staple of European ethnology: the "noble" savage. According to Las Casas, the Indians were "the simplest people in the world," "without malice or guile," who are "totally uninterested in worldly power."

Although in Fawcett's era both conceptions remained popular in scholarly and popular literature, they were now filtered through a radical new scientific theory on the origins of humankind: evolution. Victorians now attempted to make sense of human diversity not in theological terms but in biological ones. A popular anthropology manual, which Fawcett studied, included chapters on "Anatomy and Physiology," "Hair," "Colour," Odour," "Physical Powers," "Senses," and "Heredity." The Victorians wanted to know, in effect, why some apes had evolved into English gentlemen and why some hadn't.

Fawcett was deeply influenced by such racist ideas; his writings are rife with images of Indians as "jolly children" and "ape-like" savages. And he constantly struggled to reconcile what he saw with everything he had been taught. The only thing he was certain of was that the Amazon and its people were not what everyone assumed them to be. Too much evidence indicated that the jungle had once been the center of a great civilization.

After Fawcett disappeared, many scientists no longer doubted his theory on biological grounds. The Aztecs in Mexico and the Incas in Peru had obviously produced extraordinary cities, disproving any notion that Native Americans were somehow "half men" physically incapable of such feats. Instead, many scholars assumed that the Amazon jungle was simply too inhospitable to sustain a sophisticated society. Biological determinism had increasingly given way to environmental determinism. And the Amazon - the great "counterfeit paradise," as the archeologist Betty Meggers famously coined it - was the most vivid proof of the Malthusian limits that the environment placed on civilizations.

And then slowly it began to happen. After many archeologists had ignored the Amazon, assuming nothing of import would be found, a small group of revisionist scholars started to visit the region. Unlike their predecessors, they were often aided by an array of sophisticated tools, including ground-penetrating radar, satellite imagery to map sites, and remote sensors that can pinpoint buried artifacts. And what they found, in the words of one archeologist, was "earth shattering."

In the last few years, a team of researchers led by the archeologist Michael Heckenberger uncovered 20 pre-Columbian settlements in the Xingu region of the southern basin of the Amazon - the very region where Fawcett believed he would find the City of Z and where he disappeared. These settlements, which were occupied roughly between 800 and 1600 AD, included houses and moats and palisade walls. There were causeways and roads, which connected the settlements together. There were plazas laid out along cardinal points, from east to west, and roads positioned at the same geometric angles. (Fawcett had reported that Indians told him legends that described "many streets set at right angles to one another." ) According to the scientists, each cluster of settlements contained anywhere from 2,000 to 5,000 people, which means that the larger communities were the size of many medieval European cities.

"These people had a cultural aesthetic of monumentality," Heckenberger said. "They liked to have beautiful roads and plazas and bridges."

Other scientists are fueling this revolution in archeology, which is upending the view of the Amazon as a place that could never sustain what Fawcett had envisioned: a prosperous, glorious civilization. Anna Roosevelt, a great-granddaughter of Theodore Roosevelt, who is an archeologist at the University of Illinois, has uncovered in a cave near Santarém, in the Brazilian Amazon, the remains of a settlement at least 10,000 years old - about twice as old as scientists had estimated the human presence in the Amazon.

The settlement is so ancient that it undercuts the long-held theory that the Americas were first populated by the Clovis people, who crossed the Bering Strait from Asia at the end of the Ice Age, settled in North America around 11,000 years ago, and then gradually migrated down to Central and South America.

In the cave and at a nearby riverbank settlement, Roosevelt made another astonishing discovery: pottery that dates to 7,500 years ago, predating by more than 2,000 years the earliest pottery found in the Andes or Mesoamerica. This means that the Amazon may have been the earliest ceramic-producing region in all the Americas, and that, as Fawcett radically argued, the region was possibly even a wellspring of South American civilization - that an advanced culture had spread outward, rather than vice versa.

Using aerial photography and satellite imaging, scientists have also begun to find enormous man-made earth mounds and causeways across the Amazon - in particular in the Bolivian flood plains where Fawcett first found his shards of pottery. Clark Erickson, an anthropologist from the University of Pennsylvania who has studied these earthworks in Bolivia, says that the mounds allowed the Indians to continue farming during seasonal floods. To create them, he said, required extraordinary labor and engineering: tons of soil had to be transported, the course of rivers altered, canals excavated, and interconnecting roadways and settlements built. In many ways, he said, the mounds "rival the Egyptian pyramids."

Some scientists now believe the rain forest may have sustained millions of people. And for the first time scholars are reevaluating the El Dorado chronicles that Fawcett used to piece together his theory of Z. Though no one has found evidence of the fantastical gold that the conquistadores had dreamed of, the anthropologist Neil Whitehead said, "With some caveats, El Dorado really did exist."

These scholars say they are just beginning the process of understanding this ancient world - and, like the theory of who first populated the Americas, all the traditional paradigms must be reevaluated. "Anthropologists," Heckenberger said, "made the mistake of coming into the Amazon in the 20th century and seeing only small tribes and saying, 'Well, that's all there is.' The problem is that, by then, many Indian populations had already been wiped out by what was essentially a holocaust from European contact. That's why the first Europeans in the Amazon described such massive settlements that, later, no one could ever find."

Fawcett often complained about his many detractors, about the "men of science" who had "in their day pooh-poohed the existence of the Americas - and, later, the idea of Herculaneum, Pompeii, and Troy." He spoke of his vision of a majestic culture rising in the Amazon and radiating outward, before being finally overwhelmed and swallowed by the lianas and creepers and palms. And in his final letter, which was carried out of the jungle by an Indian runner before he vanished, Fawcett assured his wife: "You need have no fear of any failure."

Obama will drive now

Excellent!

Imagination. Originallity, freshness

Cultural dimensions in Management Theory

According to Geert Hofstede, there is no such thing as a universal management method or management theory across the globe. Even the word 'management' has different origins and meanings in countries throughout the world. Management is not a phenomenon that can be isolated from other processes taking place in society. It interacts with what happens in the family, at school, in politics, and government. It is obviously also related to religion and to beliefs about science.




The cultural dimensions model of Geert Hofstede is a framework that describes five sorts (dimensions) of differences / value perspectives between national cultures:

• power distance (the degree of inequality among people which the population of a country considers as normal)

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• individualism versus collectivism (the extent to which people feel they are supposed to take care for or to be cared for by themselves, their families or organizations they belong to)

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• masculinity versus femininity (the extent to which a culture is conducive to dominance, assertiveness and acquisition of things versus a culture which is more conducive to people, feelings and the quality of life)

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• uncertainty avoidance (the degree to which people in a country prefer structured over unstructured situations)

*

• long-term versus short-term orientation (long-term: values oriented towards the future, like saving and persistence - short-term: values oriented towards the past and present, like respect for tradition and fulfilling social obligations)

To understand management in a country, one should have both knowledge and empathy with the entire local scene. However, the scores of the unique statistical survey that Hofstede carried out should make everybody aware that people in other countries may think, feel, and act very differently from yourself, even when confronted with basic problems of society. Any person dealing with Value Based Management or Corporate Strategy is well advised to bear the lessons from Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions Theory constantly in mind (human beings have a tendency to think and feel and act from their own experiences), especially when working internationally.

The origin of the @

The origin and use of the @ sign


In Germany, they call it Klammeraffe, the spider monkey. In Hebrew, it's called strudel, as in the rolled pastry. Its Italian nickname is chiocciola, for snail; in Russian, it's called sobaka, for little dog; and in Greece they call it the papaki, which means duckling. In the English-speaking world, however, we know this symbol, @, as the at sign.






Strictly speaking, by current Unicode standards, the official name for the @ symbol is the commercial at. Most folks didn't encounter the @ until they became regular e-mail users, which has led to a common misconception that the @ symbol was created for, if not e-mail, then at least computer software in general. Not so.





The @ symbol was included in the original ASCII character set in 1963, and ASCII was created largely for the benefit of teletype, not computer systems. (Although early computer developers found ASCII very handy.) Moreover, the original ASCII codifiers didn't generate the @ symbol from whole cloth, as this odd little be-swirled letter has appeared on typewriter keyboards since at least 1902. So where, exactly, did the @ symbol come from, and what did it mean before it found a use in e-mail addresses?





That explains where the @ symbol came from before e-mail, but surely both @ and e-mail have been synonymous since the latter was created. Again, not so. E-mail existed in various forms before it was ever associated with @ sign, and it took one particular techie to decide that the @ operator would be perfect for this then-new communications medium.


The developer in question is Ray Tomlinson, who worked on both ARPAnet, the precursor to the modern Internet, and TENEX, an early mainframe operating system. Tomlinson is often cited as the outright inventor of e-mail, a claim that is inaccurate and one that Tomlinson himself denies. The accolade which is due Tomlinson is that he sent the first Internet e-mail, and he was the first to use the @ sign as an address operator.




The first e-mail, by most accounts, was sent in 1965 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology between users of the Compatible Timesharing System (CTSS) mainframe. CTSS users could post messages to each other, so that whenever the receiving user logged onto the mainframe, the message was waiting. (Actually, the new message was simply appended to a running message file, and each user got one, long, constantly updated message logfile.)



In 1971, Tomlinson was working on a similar message system for the TENEX operating system, called SNDMSG, as part of the ARPAnet team. He hit upon the idea of extending the functionality of SNDMSG to e-mail messages not to just users of the same mainframe, but to users of any mainframe connected to ARPAnet. In this case, he’d need an addressing system that indicated both the username and the host computer name. To combine these two data spaces, he chose the @ symbol because, in his words, “It made sense. At signs didn’t appear in names so there would be no ambiguity about where the separation between login name and host name occurred.”



Tomlinson sent the first Internet e-mail message in 1971 — he doesn’t recall exactly when, though it was most likely late summer or early fall. The e-mail traveled between two DEC mainframes sitting side by side, but which were connected exclusively through ARPAnet. Tomlinson tested the technology with a standard qwertyuiop-style nonsense message, but what Tomlinson describes as the first substantive message simply alerted all the local users to the availability of the new @ operator-enhanced ARPAnet e-mail — which is to say, it was a message from IT that e-mail was working. My, how little has changed in 37 years.

14 things to do if you are laid off from a tech job

A post from Rafe Needleman, CNet

I saw a great piece of advice in a recent story on U.S. News & World Report called 10 things to do on the day after you're laid off: "Write a thank-you note to your former boss." I like that. It can't hurt, and if your boss hears of openings elsewhere, you're now that much more likely to get the referral.



Geeks and other tech employees are a little different from the vanilla workforce, though, so I wanted to put together a list of specific things that people in our part of the economy might want to consider if they're let go. Here's the rundown.




1. Get involved in an open-source project
It's where the most interesting and influential products are being developed, and more importantly, many open-source projects are filled with people who are also connected to companies that pay their engineers. Plus, obviously, working on a development project will keep you sharp and expand your skill set.


2. Go to start-up fairs
Wherever people are pitching new businesses, be there. They're all hiring. If not now, then soon. I am partial to the Under the Radar series (I helped start them and moderate at many of them), and there are several a year. Update: I just talked with the organizers of the next UTR event, which focuses on mobility startups, and they've created a special pink slip discount: $200 off admission, includes entry to the opening night reception for even more networking. There are 20 tickets at this rate.


3. Get project work
You may not have a daily gig, but you still have your skills, and there are people who need them. Head over to a project marketplace like oDesk or eLance and pick up some work.


4. Update your profiles
Go to your pages on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter etc., and let people know you are available for new projects. While you're at it, proactively send out notes to your trusted associates that you are looking for work. As we say here at CNET: "duh."


5. Learn some new skills
No, I don't mean to learn Rails if you're a Java guy. That's obvious. I mean cooking, rock climbing, riding a motorcycle--something that you didn't have the time to do while you were an FTE.


6. Answer some questions
Scan Friendfeed and Twitter Search for people asking questions in your areas of expertise, hang out in message boards on things you know stuff about. You'll see what's going on in the industry, you might be able to help people out (always worthwhile), and you might also land a tip for a gig.


7. Get a girlfriend or boyfriend
Don't let the fact that you have no job, per se, slow you down. You can still earn some dough. You will have more control over your schedule. And you can spend some of your newfound time with your new friend, assuming this friend doesn't have his or her own 18-hour-a-day engineering job.


8. Campaign in a swing state
Hurry up, though.


9. Take some time off
"Invest a little and travel to a seaside town in Mexico, even if it's just a few days. Mexico is easy to get to, it might be cheaper to live there, and lying on a beach is certainly not a bad way to contemplate what you want to do with the rest of your career. At the very least, you'll see people who get by on a lot less than we make."


10. Move out of the Bay Area
Just a thought: This is a very expensive place to live, and the economy is heavily tilted to tech. If you have other skills, you might find a better market for them elsewhere, and it will be less expensive to maintain your lifestyle. Plus, you can continue to do project work.


11. Buy a new rig
Yes, you're going to have to do the obvious and odious task of taking a financial inventory and cutting back on your expenses, but you will also need current tools to pick up projects. You'll be more positive about working on those projects if you're doing it on a shiny new system configured just the way you like.


12. Take pictures
Put your $1,500 dSLR to use by selling stock-art pictures of household objects to Fotolia, ShutterStock, iStockphoto, StockXpert, etc. "It's cheap for people to buy images compared to the traditional stock (photo) market, but it can be lucrative over time because images sell over and over. I've made money without trying too hard. But quality standards are going up, so you can't just upload any old crap. Brush up on your model releases."


13. Volunteer
"It can build new skills (like leadership), a new portfolio. Someone capable of making their kid's Boy Scout troop turn a profit suddenly looks a lot more proactive than the shlub who catches up on reruns while waiting for Craigslist to pay off."


14. Start your own company
If you have some savings and can afford to work for peanuts (or less), it's a great time to start a company. Without the annoying distraction of a booming economy, you can focus on building a product to solve a problem you know people will have again when the economy loosens up. There is still funding, even, for early-stage companies. What should you build? We leave that as an exercise for the reader.

China’s Rise Goes Beyond Gold Medals

August 21, 2008

Op-Ed Columnist

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

BEIJING

China has displaced the United States as the winner of the most Olympic gold medals this year. Get used to it.

Today, it’s the athletic surge that dazzles us, but China will leave a similar outsize footprint in the arts, in business, in science, in education.

The world we are familiar with, dominated by America and Europe, is a historical anomaly. Until the 1400s, the largest economies in the world were China and India, and forecasters then might have assumed that they would be the ones to colonize the Americas — meaning that by all rights this newspaper should be printed in Chinese or perhaps Hindi.

But then China and India both began to fall apart at just the time that Europe began to rise. China’s per-capita income was actually lower, adjusted for inflation, in the 1950s than it had been at the end of the Song Dynasty in the 1270s.

Now the world is reverting to its normal state — a powerful Asia — and we will have to adjust. Just as many Americans know their red wines and easily distinguish a Manet from a Monet, our children will become connoisseurs of pu-er tea and will know the difference between guanxi and Guangxi, the Qin and the Qing. When angry, they may even insult each other as “turtle’s eggs.”

During the rise of the West, Chinese culture constantly had to adapt. When the first Westerners arrived and brought their faith in the Virgin Mary, China didn’t have an equivalent female figure to work miracles — so Guan Yin, the God of Mercy, underwent a sex change and became the Goddess of Mercy.

Now it will be our turn to scramble to compete with a rising Asia.

This transition to Chinese dominance will be a difficult process for the entire international community, made more so by China’s prickly nationalism. China still sees the world through the prism of guochi, or national humiliation, and among some young Chinese success sometimes seems to have produced not so much national self-confidence as cockiness.

China’s intelligence agencies are becoming more aggressive in targeting America, including corporate secrets, and the Chinese military is busily funding new efforts to poke holes in American military pre-eminence. These include space weapons, cyberwarfare and technologies to threaten American aircraft carrier groups.

President Bush was roundly criticized for attending the Beijing Olympics, but, in retrospect, I think he was right to attend. The most important bilateral relationship in the world in the coming years will be the one between China and the United States, and Mr. Bush won enormous good will from the Chinese people by showing up.

Having won that political capital, though, Mr. Bush didn’t spend it. Mr. Bush should have spoken out more forcefully on behalf of human rights, including urging Beijing to stop shipping the weapons used for genocide in Darfur.

It’s a difficult balance to get right, but China’s determination to top the gold medal charts — and its overwhelming efforts to find and train the best athletes — bespeaks a larger desire for international respect and legitimacy. We can use that desire also to shame and coax better behavior out of China’s leaders.

When the Chinese government sentences two frail women in their late 70s to labor camp because they applied to hold a legal protest during the Olympics, as it just has, then that is an outrage to be addressed not by “silent diplomacy” but by pointing it out.

We also must recognize that informal pressures are becoming increasingly important. The most important figure in China-U.S. relations today isn’t the ambassador for either country; it is Yao Ming, the basketball player — and David Stern, the commissioner of the N.B.A., is second. The biggest force for democratization isn’t the Group of 7 governments, but is the millions of Chinese who study in the West and return — sometimes with green cards or blue passports, but always with greater expectations of freedom. China’s rise is sustained in part by the way the Communist Party has grudgingly, sometimes incompetently, adapted to these pressures for change.

On this visit, I dropped by the home of Bao Tong, a former senior Communist Party official who spent seven years in prison for challenging the hard-liners during the Tiananmen democracy movement. The guards who monitor him 24/7 let me through when I showed my Olympic press credentials.

Mr. Bao noted that Communist leaders used to actually believe in Communism; now they simply believe in Communist Party rule. He recalled that hard-liners used to fret about the danger of “peaceful evolution,” meaning a gradual shift to a Western-style political and economic system. “Now, in fact, what we have is peaceful evolution,” he noted.

That flexibility is one of China’s great strengths, and it’s one reason that the most important thing going on in the world today is the rise of China — in the Olympics and in almost every other facet of life.

Don't ask (in BEIJING)

Preparing for the influx of Olympic visitors, authorities in Beijing published posters on bulletin boards around the forbidden city counseling locals against a wide range of potentially awkward conversation topics with foreigners.

The authorities (actually, the Propaganda (!) department) issued a list of "eight don't asks":

• Don't ask about income or expenses,
• don't ask about age,
• don't ask about love life or marriage,
• don't ask about health, don't ask about someone's home or address,
• don't ask about personal experience,
• don't ask about religious beliefs or political views,
• don't ask what someone does

I wonder what's left to ask...The weather perhaps. And then there are probably so many "don't tells"

The ideal husband

This is from an editorial by MAUREEN DOWD, in New York Times:

Father Pat Connor, a 79-year-old Catholic priest born in Australia and based in Bordentown, N.J., has spent his celibate life — including nine years as a missionary in India — mulling connubial bliss. His decades of marriage counseling led him to distill some “mostly common sense” advice about how to dodge mates who would maul your happiness.

“Hollywood says you can be deeply in love with someone and then your marriage will work,” the twinkly eyed, white-haired priest says. “But you can be deeply in love with someone to whom you cannot be successfully married.”

For 40 years, he has been giving a lecture — “Whom Not to Marry” — to high school seniors, mostly girls because they’re more interested.

“It’s important to do it before they fall seriously in love, because then it will be too late,” he explains. “Infatuation trumps judgment.”

I asked him to summarize his talk:

“Never marry a man who has no friends,” he starts. “This usually means that he will be incapable of the intimacy that marriage demands. I am always amazed at the number of men I have counseled who have no friends. Since, as the Hebrew Scriptures say, ‘Iron shapes iron and friend shapes friend,’ what are his friends like? What do your friends and family members think of him? Sometimes, your friends can’t render an impartial judgment because they are envious that you are beating them in the race to the altar. Envy beclouds judgment.

“Does he use money responsibly? Is he stingy? Most marriages that founder do so because of money — she’s thrifty, he’s on his 10th credit card.

“Steer clear of someone whose life you can run, who never makes demands counter to yours. It’s good to have a doormat in the home, but not if it’s your husband.

“Is he overly attached to his mother and her mythical apron strings? When he wants to make a decision, say, about where you should go on your honeymoon, he doesn’t consult you, he consults his mother. (I’ve known cases where the mother accompanies the couple on their honeymoon!)

“Does he have a sense of humor? That covers a multitude of sins. My mother was once asked how she managed to live harmoniously with three men — my father, brother and me. Her answer, delivered with awesome arrogance, was: ‘You simply operate on the assumption that no man matures after the age of 11.’ My father fell about laughing.

“A therapist friend insists that ‘more marriages are killed by silence than by violence.’ The strong, silent type can be charming but ultimately destructive. That world-class misogynist, Paul of Tarsus, got it right when he said, ‘In all your dealings with one another, speak the truth to one another in love that you may grow up.’

“Don’t marry a problem character thinking you will change him. He’s a heavy drinker, or some other kind of addict, but if he marries a good woman, he’ll settle down. People are the same after marriage as before, only more so.

“Take a good, unsentimental look at his family — you’ll learn a lot about him and his attitude towards women. Kay made a monstrous mistake marrying Michael Corleone! Is there a history of divorce in the family? An atmosphere of racism, sexism or prejudice in his home? Are his goals and deepest beliefs worthy and similar to yours? I remember counseling a pious Catholic woman that it might not be prudent to marry a pious Muslim, whose attitude about women was very different. Love trumped prudence; the annulment process was instigated by her six months later.

“Imagine a religious fundamentalist married to an agnostic. One would have to pray that the fundamentalist doesn’t open the Bible and hit the page in which Abraham is willing to obey God and slit his son’s throat.

“Finally: Does he possess those character traits that add up to a good human being — the willingness to forgive, praise, be courteous? Or is he inclined to be a fibber, to fits of rage, to be a control freak, to be envious of you, to be secretive?

“After I regale a group with this talk, the despairing cry goes up: ‘But you’ve eliminated everyone!’ Life is unfair.”