On The Turning Away

If you knew this word, you’d win the Scripps National Spelling Bee today. Otherwise, you’d be forgiven to feel a bit weltschmerz, which, incidentally, is the runner-up word.

Schoeni Art Gallery

If The Economist’s report is any indication, China’s art market is booming. The social upheavals brought by the economic transformation and the easing of censorship since the early 1980s led to a burst of creativity. In stark contrast to the delicately inked scrolls and flowery watercolours that are familiar to the foreign public, the contemporary materials are often brutal and disturbing, political and cynical.

The artist of “Great Wall”, below, is Zhang Linhai. Zhang said in an interview with That’s Beijing, “I prefer you understand me through my paintings.” The 41-year-old Shanghai-born painter has been expressing himself on paper since the first grade, when he drew his first portrait of Mao Zedong. Zhang’s paintings are characterized by scores of bald children in pastoral countryside marked by traditional stone houses and walls, fields of sorghum and seas of red flags.

Schoeni Art Gallery

Living life vicariously will be easier - with the help of a R.A.D., or Reality Acquisition Device, extolled by a tech evangelical none-other-than Bill Gates at the D: Conference.

“Reality acquisition devices” are, according to Gates, what the mobile phones and PDAs of the future becoming. In fact, they’ll become part of you, virtually and otherwise, by providing you with all kinds of information about wherever you happen to be, ranging from the history of the location to entertainment venues nearby to dining and shopping suggestions (based on your individual preferences). Even trivia such as which of your friends have been there - “wish you were here“, and statitics like property values. In a nutshell, in the future, your R.A.D will not only be the guiding light of your life, that is, if you’re not paralyzed by the choices, but also let you indulge in the what-ifs, or as Pink Floyd would call it, “your possible pasts.”

Naturally, we’d like to pose the question to Bill “RAD” Gates - will our R.A.D. tell us how we’re feeling at this moment? Euphoric, is the likely answer and one that we expect.

While May is all about emerging markets meltdown, the start of June is abuzz with, what else: The Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital conference.

It’s the 4th edition of the top annual gathering of the digital world, touted as something that “has brought to life the energy and excitement of the digital revolution in an unscripted, upfront and unparalleled way.”

The Guardian reported last August that Haditha is “a farming town of 90,000 people by the Euphrates river, is an insurgent citadel.” A mere 140 miles north-west of Baghdad, “insurgents decide who lives and dies, which salaries get paid, what people wear, what they watch and listen to.”

With the facts trickling out, the Haditha case seems involving both the alleged killing of civilians and a purported cover-up of the events that unfolded Nov. 19, 2005. “This is a war in which the distinction between killing the enemy and massacring civilians is not always completely obvious,” said John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org. “Counterinsurgency operations are particularly prone to the killing of people who, in retrospect, are judged to have been innocent civilians, but who in the heat of battle seemed to be the enemy.”

According to the AP, Sunni political leaders will find it difficult to defend U.S. actions, even those aimed at establishing the truth, if they want to maintain their position as leaders of the Iraqi minority that provides most of the insurgents. Even if criminal charges are brought in the Haditha incident, Sunni insurgents are likely to claim the case is simply a charade and argue that the Marines will escape serious punishment.

Michael Smerconish argues an “alternative”, albeit with a whiff of self-justification, explanation: the cover-up is not “consciousness of guilt”, rather of “reality”.