Chinese Democracy

Black and White Cat is a blog that writes about China from an insider's perspective. (btw, found this via Forbes ===>Reporting From The '1984' Beijing Olympics by Paul Maidment)

Charles McGrath wrote a story for the New York Times that the Beijing Evening News translated. Um, ruthlessly edited. *cough* censored *cough*. B&W cat translated it back to english, so we can examine how the chinese news service eliminated anything even slightly negative and edited all the nuances out. It reads like propaganda now, IMHO.



===>Full text at Black and White Cat

The Chinese aren't alone in this. Everyone does it, I know, Last Friday I was editing an article while a reporter was present (not her article) and I could see her wincing wile I wrote over things, deleted others, switched paragraph order. Ya know, edited. This was an agency text so I couldn't call the reported and ask him/her to clarify something. What were you trying to say when you wrote unexpectedly modestly plummet?

Aaand it's a translation. Another area I dabble in, and wracking my brains out for the exact turn of phrase that sounds more professional without losing the essence, thinking, am I pouring my opinions into this? Am I interpreting too much?

Even so, it's just a reminder that freedom of the press is not a fact in China. And in many places too.

Did you know, the Singapore government claims that it does too respect freedom of the press. But it has a hand, and it discourages community participation. It wants a press that supports capitalism and free trade, but not citizen involvement or participation.

A lot of censorship is self censorship. We cover flashy items, we eschew analysis in favor of a catchy headline, and ignore community issues.

But back to the point, Madiment pointed out that editing like this explains a bit why the Chinese, according to a Pew survey in June, believe that the world thinks better of them than the rest of the world really does. (see ==>A Spectacular Misunderstanding, also by Maidment)

And when they're confronted with that reality, that your country isn't beloved byt he world and not everyone thinks you're A OK, that's when shock and ugliness ensues. Accusations that the rest of the world willfully misunderstands them, characterizes them in black and white.

Well, I'm Mexican, I'm used the the U.S. press and their broad strokes. Yes, I've crossed them off as xenophobic, ignorant, out for a quick headline, etc. Yet they do tell the truth sometimes. And truth stings.

Ok, so he's the annointed one now. We are on track, set to go. Don't choke. Please, U.S., don't fuck this up.

I keep thinking, shiiit, they're gonna get all resentful that he's like the prom king and too cold and pragmatic and they're gonna shun him! They need to keep in mind that of the options they have, he's the best man for the job. They need a pragmatist, not a beer buddy!

Although that kind of reaction is more likely to happen in Mexico, not in the US where the American dream is alive and well and that's why people don't pick on and resent the rich or the elite so much, since they live in hope that they too, will be one of them, some day.

Still, I'm not totally sure it can't happen. Anything can happen. Karl Rove got George W. Bush elected. Twice.

The so called American people had an earnest, dorky pol in Al Gore, and they chose Goober. Never mind Florida, 'cause the margin had to be really slim in the first place for that to have happened. So now they have this smart guy from a very different background, and people are in love with him. And I'm hoping the love affair will last.

He's not really a prom king ya know, not with a middle name like Hussein and a free spirited mother that sometimes went on food stamps. Don't be fooled, he may be charming but he didn't lead a charmed life. Sure, things are "easier" for Obama than for other politicos, but he still had to fight to get there.

Does this sound like incoherent ranting? I'm sorry, I just need my morning coffee, and I'm using this poor blog to vent, since most of the subjects du jour can't be published right now. They are embargoed, so to speak. But I'll find a way around it.

When the important things get buried under urgent stuff

==>US set to adopt IFRS rules

This is a small item, no big headlines. It's a bit of legislation about accounting practices, quite boring. But the repercussions, I believe, are important.

US companies are set to switch to international accounting rules in a move that will, for the first time, see all the world's most important listed groups reporting according to the same set of standards.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission yesterday proposed a "roadmap" to manage the migration of US companies from its rules to the international ones. The plans are open to comment for 60 days.

More than 100 countries use, or are adopting, International Financial Reporting Standards, including all 27 European Union members as well as China, Japan, Canada and India. US GAAP, the accounting lingua franca until the sudden rise of IFRS, is the last significant standard to be switched.

Under the SEC's plans, US groups are likely to adopt IFRS in 2014 providing certain conditions are met, a decision that will be taken in 2011. Some companies may be allowed to adopt IFRS sooner.

What does this mean? Financial statements are a labyrinth where accountants, tax attorneys and the like can hide their bosses' pecadilloes and misdemeanors. The situation is even worse when you're comparing companies accross countries, since everyone has their own accounting standards.

Case in point: the WSJ recently called out Cemex for it's debt management. According to the Journal, Cemex might be in trouble not because of the Venezuelan expropriation, but because they are heavily leveraged and demand is declining.

==>Cemex's Cement Shoes

But investors should be more worried by the Mexican company's large, complex and, some fear, overly engineered debt. This exposes shareholders to risks associated with things like movements in the Japanese yen and changes in Cemex's own share price.

The article also points out that the company's 17.6 billion dollar debt- mostly acquired when they purchased Rinker- doesn't include about 4 billion that are considered capital assets in México, but instead are liabilities under US GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles).

This is all very boring to most of you, I know. Only very geeky people get excited about accounting rules. The bottom line is, having everyone (or more companies at least) follow the same rules when counting their chickens means less room for interpretation and subterfuge. Less room for bubbles and meltdowns, less Enrons. And while this may not be stop all presses kind of item, in the long run, I think it's an important move in the right direction.

What's going to happen when Obama wins the election? Ok, ok, if he wins the election.

This isn't about his capacity to govern etc, I'm just wondering about the media aspect of it all. I mean, will they phase out his Twitter updates? The presidency is not a West Wing episode. It's not all glamour, and some national security issues can't really be discussed over Web 2.0, can they?

Maybe his fans know that, and I'm subestimating them. Although they shouldn't be called fans in that case. And therein lies a problem.

First of all, there's the candidate / elected official transition. Vicente Fox was a good candidate but not such a good president. And people expected miracles and didn't lift a finger, etc... But now this is a very mediatic (is that a word?) candidate, one who's in touch, so to speak, with his constituents or whatever, through the web. And I'm wondering if all this closeness will continue once in office.

So yeah, um, we removed the dirty pic. It wasn't pervy or anything, but apparently anyone and everyone who googled chingada, chingar, chingan and other derivatives of the word, arrived here. And I didn't even tag it, so what the hell? But, as R. just pointed out, removing the pic might not deter those would be searchers since I am still including the word in this post. We'll see.

So, on a totally unrelated topic, I'm an MBA now. Here's to late nights, to finding out I am a good student only if I like the subject, and to finding out that even if I don't like the subject I can still scrape by (albeit not as happily). Here's to my parents, and my teachers, and my advisor. To saying goodbye to Excel spreadsheets. And adios, McKinsey case studies! Good riddance.

Here's to beer, and singing the Pet Shop Boys really loud on a Tuesday night. Here's to my teammate Wendy who's in friggin' China and still manages to be saner and more on the ball and more communicative than other teamsters residing in good ol' Monterrey. I promise I'll visit you one of these days!

So, I'm not switching jobs. I like my current one just fine, thank you very much. I like to write. I'm not very keen on working for investment bankers. Or being one, for that matter.

I also like the fact that I am getting an inmense amount of time back. What will I do with it? I dunno, sleep maybe? Gardening, running, biking, drinking, cooking, reading, watching movies, writing (or attempt to) screenplays, the list is endless. Some things I never stopped doing, but they were scaled down some. Sleeping, for example.

Anyhooo, I am just glad to be done with the whole thing. Even at work, I'm no longer writing about venture capital funds, and we're back to agribusiness. Slaughterhouses. Yeah, so. I actually like the subject, although I predict I won't be eating beef the next couple weeks. Or months.

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

- Douglas Adams

Well, I don't. It seems my procrastinating ways have caught up with me, or I'm simply overextended. I have dreamed that Imelda Lopez called saying I couldn't graduate 'cause I missed a test. A test I had never known about. As I finish up the infernal projects due on each subject I can feel my back unkinking a bit, but then it kinks right back up when I see all that is still due on something else. A translation that is pending, some paper I have to notarize, (notaries aren't the same thing in the U.S. and Mexico. A Mexican notario can marry people and whatnot, and they have the strictest schedule of any bureaucrat.)....

Sorry to complain so much, I'm really not a deadbeat. I'm not!

I have to get back to work now, 'cause aside from all this I also happen to have a job, the one where they actually pay me instead of the other way around, trolling for news which is scarce right now since everyone has olympic fever and they can't be bothered to care except for the same tired old rumors on chrysler and fannie & freddie.

There is minimal trading on the nymex, you can tell they're not paying much attention when the biggest news hardly causes a ripple and then everyone goes berserk right before closing time. It goes up, down, sideways with barely three transactions, since there aren't any clear trends.

This is when you see that the traders are really just a bunch of little boys, sheep really, trying to see who has the biggest stick, (or prove who has the biggest cojones if you want to be all freudian), and if one gets excited then they all do and they start jumping up and down...

I mean, whenever we say, oil went up today because of this and this, or the NY Stock market lost ground today because of blah blah... we don't really know that. Besides, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is really not a good barometer, it can only gauge manufacturing industries really, and it's price weighed instead of market cap weighed, so smaller companies influence it more than firms like GE which is a behemoth and it only has 30 stocks.....

Well, I have some translations due also, so I can work on that and stop moaning.

Quote(s) of the Day:

When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer.

-Isaac Bashevis Singer

I don't care how eloquent your phrasing. Unless you're a storyteller, you're not a writer.

-also by IBS, although I've only found this on Orangette's blog

Anybody have the inside scoop on why the Confederación Nacional Agropecuaria (CNA) hasn't sworn in its new president?

Jaime Yesaki has been there for four years now, and they had some odd little election almost a month and a half ago. Juan Carlos Cortés won, but he hasn't made any waves at all so far.

Yesaki is still going strong, today he accused the U.S. goverment of unfairly protecting its farmers by blocking mexican imports using the salmonela incidents as an excuse.

Since they cleared the tomatoes, and the jalapeño wasn't infected by salmonella in Mexico, they might be going after onions and avocados now. It's a little bit of both, I guess, and it makes for interesting news on a Monday morning.

But to get back to my original question, why is Yesaki still there?

Le scaphandre et le papillon

Jean-Dominique Bauby era el editor de la Elle francesa caundo le dio un infarto cerebral masivo que lo dejó totalmente paralizado excepto por su ojo y párpado izquierdo. 'Locked in Syndrome', le dicen, porque sus facultades mentales siguen intactas.

Bauby iría a escribir un libro llamado La escafandra y la mariposa, escribiendo y editando en su mente, y dictando a través de su ojo. Su asistente recitaba el alfabeto (las letras en orden de más uso en francés) y el parpadeaba cuando llegaba a la letra que él buscaba. Y así formaba palabras, y oraciones, y párrafos, y capítulos....

Algunas notas acerca de la película...

Julian Schnabel, un pintor muy interesante y un cineasta aún más, filmó el biopic el año pasado. Aquí lo interesante es el camino, más que el destino. Sabemos que el hombre no se va a curar. Aunque eso no le quita el suspenso ni le resta drama a la conclusión.

Me gustó mucho el personaje de Bauby, me pareció en ciertos aspectos l'essence même de l'homme français, o lo que es lo mismo the quintessential frenchman. Salvajemente mujeriego pero a ratos muy tierno, no es un santo pues, aunque sea un inválido. Esa palabra no es políticamente correcta pero me vale madre como ya sabemos.



Pero bueno, el chiste no era juzgar si captó a los franceses o no, que de paso admito que no se nada del alma francesa. Al iniciar la película, que la cámara/ojo comienza a parpadear, pensé, no puedo ver esto no voy a aguantar dos horas atrapada. Inemdiatamente me identifica con Bauby la cámara. No dura toda la movie esa cámara personal, que fue algo muy bien hecho tanto técnicamente como dramáticamente.

Me gustó mucho la escena donde rasura a su padre, me dieron ganas de llorar.

Mathieu Almaric, que salía como el hijo en Munich, se mantiene tan tieso que me impacta. Es mucho trabajo estar totalmente inmovil cuando uno no lo es.

Volviendo a que Bauby es un hombre y no un santo, se va de 'dirty weekend' a Lourdes pero la novia le sale sorprendemente devota, y me acordé de todos esos momentos donde las mujeres nos portamos como unas locas y los hombres en nuestras vidas ponen jeta pero la neta no entienden porqué estamos haciendo eso, y no saben reaccionar.

El hecho de que Bauby siga queriendo ver a su amante, a pesar de que ella no va, y su esposa SI está ahí, se me hizo un detalle super honesto, salvaje en su franqueza. Como diciendo, esto es lo que hay.

La edición tuvo que ser una chinga, aparte de la fotografía y la actuación, editar todo de manera que concuerden los parpadeos con las reacciones y el sonido, neta se llevan las palmas. La música es muy buena por cierto.

Los elementos fantasiosos, la esposa de Napoleón, el bailarínde ballet. Schnabel tiene algo que decir, por eso a veces pienso que el que quiere hacer cine no debería estudiar cine sino vivir en el mundo y adquirir experiencias. Acumular una paleta en vez de memorizar todas las movies de Brian de Palma y Martin Scorsese, y regurgitarlo como niños obedientes.

What is your style statement?

I just started reading something than Ben brought back from Minnesota. It's called Style Statement, Live by Your Own Design, by Carrie McCarthy & Danielle LaPorte. These two chicks in Canada who write very good copy about being authentic and finding your style statment and everything means something, purposeful life, that kind of thing. TOtally not cheesy or creepy and Not Oprah.

I know this sounds silly, but I am totally itching to find out what my style statement is. Sacred dramatic? Refined treasure?

It's cloudy and overcast today, the view from the skilight was totally gray this morning. It's brighter now, but the sky is still pale. It's a bit smoggy, too. The perils and pitfalls of working downtown!

I wanted to write about what I had cooked last night, except I ended not cooking at all.

Yesterday, Ben and I were talking about food writing. Non fiction has gotten cooler in the last few years apparently, and food writing is part of it. I was saying that I liked the genre because it's evocative and descriptive and how a people's atitude towards food and their methods of preparation gives us insights to a country's culture abd history, etc... And Ben remarked how that sounded exciting and made you wonder how could anyboday not want to write about food, like how could anybody write about anything else at all.

The thing is, I guess that's how I pretty much how I feel writing in general, but food writing especially, at least for now. I do like business, and maybe I only have a case of the editing blues. But I just want to take a topic and write. Research the hell out of it, think of clever turns of phrase and then delete them because they're too fussy or precious. Just plain, sharp, fabulous writing. Fab because it knows it's good, and it doesn't try too hard. Anyway. I just might try my hand at a food article. See what happens.

Mes parents son partis de vacances... Es correcto? ya no me acuerdo.
hoy habrá texas en mi casa, cortesía de kux & friends---

Aunque en realidad debería estar haciendo el trabajo de Internet Marketing.....
Y lo que en realidad quisiera hacer es cocinar un pastel de chocolate, al estilo natalia la fourcade.

Quiero adquirir la costumbre de cargar con mi cámara. No que yo tenga mucha aptitud para tomar fotos, pero si no practico pues menos. Me acuerdo cuando voy en el carro, casi siempre a la altura de Enrique c. livas. Hoy le tomaré una foto a los jugadores de texas. Y si cocino algo estéticamente agradable, también le tomaré pics.

Estoy escuchando a jorge drexler, que raro, Hace un momento subía notas de mercados y veía el cielo por el tragaluz.

Me gusta mucho ese tragaluz, aunque a veces me encandila. Pero me encanta girar el cuello ligeramente a la derecha, levantar la vista, y ver el cielo brillante y azul. Incluso cuando está nublado. Casi siento el aire. Sonrío sin mostrar los dientes. Porque es un pequeño placer de esos que dice E., que hacen aflorar una sonrisa que navega con bandera de sangrona pero en realidad es un poco timida. Fue hace mucho y como siempre involucró grandes cantidades de vino tinto entonces dejémoslo así.

Voy a buscar mis guiones oldies. Aquellos por los cuales me jalaba el cabello. ¿Porqué lo dejé? Las razones para dejar de ser AP siempre estuvieron muy claras en mi mente, pero no tanto dejar los guiones. De hecho eso fui dejándolo casi sin darme cuenta. Como cuando sueltas la mano de alguien. Hasta que un día, bah. Llevo meses sin abrir un archivo o sin tomar un lapiz rojo. O lo dejé de lado para terminar una cosa y se atravesó otra y luego me percaté que esto otro.... en fin.

Escribir comedia nunca me fue fácil. Supongo que a nadie. Espero que con este tiempo que ha pasado, donde he aprendido a no tomarme tan en serio, mis habilidades, si no han mejorado, mínimo no hayan empeorado.

Regreso a mis obligaciones editoriales, antes que se me haga más tarde. A ver si hoy salgo a una hora decente (todo depende de mi) y posiblemente robe una recette d'orangette . Me rehuso a servir nachos para jugar poker. Ya es mucho cliché.

I am a dilettante

No more excuses today, I'm just gonna hammer out a post and hope it somehow cleanses my soul. Cross that, it's not like I feel like a sinner or anything. More like metaphysical congestion. Like writer's block. There. I. Said. It.

There are a million things swimming in there but I'm just too, too tired these days, despite the fact that I'm sleeping like nine hours at night. I feel like a narcoleptic. My sinuses are constantly throbbing. Coursework piles up everyday. I haven't seen a movie in weeks.

I'm taking the last two subjects I'll ever take. Well, not true. The last subjects in a long time. Come December, I'll wear the silly mortarboard and the toga and stand in line and I'll have an MBA from the quite Republican university, aka red state university, aka Texas A & M. Thank you, R, for saying all that last night. We live in hope.

I have several half drafted posts saved, about 'serious' issues like corporate social responsibility from something I read in Portfolio, and sustainability and Barbara Kingsolver-dom and the rest of that shit and how it does too matter, jajaja...hipsteur much?

'Cause it turns out I can only dabble. I don't know anything about the environment, not really. I can't grasp anything that's not expressed in dollars and cents. I can't know poetry, I can only know about the Dow Jones. Whatever.

Sorry to vent like a self centered seventh grader.

Well, let's try this. Beatles therapy usually does the trick, but I feel like a little Jorge Drexler today.



Fusión /Jorge Drexler
¿Dónde termina tu cuerpo y empieza el mío?
A veces me cuesta decir.
Siento tu calor, siento tu frío,
me siento vacío si no estoy dentro de tí.

¿Cuánto de esto es amor? ¿Cuánto es deseo?
¿Se pueden, o no, separar?
Si desde el corazón a los dedos
no hay nada en mi cuerpo que no hagas vibrar.

¿Qué tendrá de real
esta locura?
¿Quien nos asegura
que esto es normal?
Y no me importa contarte
que ya perdí la mesura
que ya colgué mi armadura en tu portal.

Donde termina tu cuerpo y empieza el cielo
no cabe ni un rayo de luz.
¿Que fue que nos unió en un mismo vuelo?
¿Los mismos anhelos?
¿Tal vez la misma cruz?

¿Quien tiene razón?
¿quien está errado?
¿Quien no habrá dudado
de su corazón?
Yo sólo quiero que sepas:
no estoy aquí de visita,
y es para ti que está escrita esta canción

so beautiful. His songs always make me want to feel loved. Don't get me wrong, I am not unloved. But his songs are romantic. And metaphysical. You know what I mean, no? god, this sounds so pathetic.

A couple of days ago, I stumbled accross an old notebook, and a James Wright poem. The last lines were so moving back then, and still are now. I just want to get back to that point where this could describe my state of mind:

Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

friedmanesque

I read an interesting editorial in Portfolio yest.
Yeah, I buy Conde Nast. So sue me.

Anyway, the Viewpoint /brief written by tunku varadarajan deals with corporate social responsibility, specifically the Beijing Olympic's corporate sponsors'. Should they question China's human rights record?

TV writes that for Milton Friedman, the sole social responsibility of a business is to increase its profit. Execs are responsible to stockholders alone. Doing anything that would result in a decrease in profits, like say provoking the chinese into cancelling a contract by protesting, is irresponsible.

However, in our evolved new century, the concept of stakeholders has widened. Varadarajan provides some keen insights on this. Fr example

Iconoclast

George Carlin, anti-establishment comedian and one of my personal heroes, is dead at 71.

http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSN2339172520080623

Home Birth

Docs to Women: Pay no attention to Ricki Lake's Home Birth

How come we hardly see info about this? There are no consipiracy theories, but somehow info like this slips through the cracks and unless you're really looking for it, it's easy to get carried away in the msm mentality (coming up after the break, what you don't know may kill you) that is really a corporate/ commercial mentality, sell sell sell.

Chic y bonito

"Obama es un buen tipo, chic y bonito".
- Caetano Veloso

I'm conducting an informal survey, and I need my three dear readers' help. Do you prefer posts in english, in spanish, or is it the same to you?

A world opened up by communications cannot remain closed up in a feudal vision of property

No country, not the US, not Europe, can stand in the way of it. It's a global trend. It's part of the very process of civilization. It's the semantic abundance of the modern world, of the postmodern world - and there's no use resisting it.
-Gilberto Gil

Librocara, and they don't make them like they used to

I couldn't help imagining a charming romcom situation for this ad. Although reality might turn out to be as charming as a Cameron Diaz & Ashton Kutcher movie, I wish Charlie Tibshirani a happy ending. A real one, not the ones in those soul deadening chick flicks of late.

Whatever happened to Billy Wilder, Howard Hawks, George Cukor? You know, His Girl Friday, Bringing Up Baby, Some Like it Hot, The Philadelphia Story, Woman of the Year? Yeah, that was a George Stevens picture, but you get the idea. Competent directors with range. Blake Edwards directed Breakfast at Tiffany's and Days of Wine and Roses.

These movies used to potray love as a grand enterprise, a risk worth taking. It sounds counterintuitive, but sometimes I think the female characters in movies like Adam's Rib were more emancipated than those insipid Cosmo girls in modern romcoms. They certainly weren't afraid to be mean at times.

27 Dresses, btw, sucks. Avoid it, unless you can watch it on pay per view for free, like we did, and even then consider that you can't get those two hours back. Katherine Hiegl's character is pathological, Ed Burns is bland (isn't he always, though?), Heigl's sister is a monster, but please, in what universe will Izzie be the "plain" sister? James Marsden was funny in Enchanted, and here he gets to quip "Love is patient, love is kind, love is slowly going out of your mind." Ehhh. His backstory is boring though.

And although I like B-b-b-b-benny and the Jets, that whole scene was, hmmm, trite. I did like it when he said, " I cried like a baby at the Keller wedding". Heigl has some good deadpan, see "hot hate sex", "real good caulker", and "I'm Jesus". But the story, the story!! Silly premise, no growth, one dimensional characters, no tension, completely stupid ending.

I remain a sucker for happy endings (not this one, though). Despite the fact that I believe monogamy is a social/cultural construction and happiness is mostly an illusion (not one of my better days, I see). Does this prove that I can hold two contrasting, conflicting ideas in my mind at the same time without going nuts? Or does this just prove I'm nuts?

Btw, I'm listening to Portishead's new album right now, so maybe I'm just incredibly malleable and excellent creepy music can creep me out and just put me in this frame of mind. Or not.

Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead!...sorry!

Obama is in! No time to post about that right now, sorry, much work to be done.