politburo diktat 2.0

As my regular readers know, I periodically blog ordinary, high-profile news, or then go off on obsessive tears on obscure subjects of little interest, and then have not much to say about anything for a while. That’s where I am now.

So in lieu of reading two dozen inconsequential blog posts of mine for the past week, read these two longer, more worthwhile articles: one by James Fallows on the Great Firewall of China, and the other by John Burns of the NYTimes, reflecting on five years of war in Iraq.

“The Connection Has Been Reset”

Disappointingly, “Great Firewall” is not really the right term for the Chinese government’s overall control strategy. China has indeed erected a firewall—a barrier to keep its Internet users from dealing easily with the outside world—but that is only one part of a larger, complex structure of monitoring and censorship. The official name for the entire approach, which is ostensibly a way to keep hackers and other rogue elements from harming Chinese Internet users, is the “Golden Shield Project.” Since that term is too creepy to bear repeating, I’ll use “the control system” for the overall strategy, which includes the “Great Firewall of China,” or GFW, as the means of screening contact with other countries.

Looking Back at Five Years in Iraq - New York Times

FIVE years on, it seems positively surreal.

On the evening of March 19, 2003, a small group of Western journalists had grandstand seats for the big event in Baghdad, the start of the full-scale American bombing of strategic targets in the Iraqi capital. We had forced a way through a bolted door at the top of an emergency staircase leading to the 21st-story roof of the Palestine Hotel, with a panoramic view of Saddam Hussein’s command complex across the Tigris River.