The ongoing efforts to ensure (or pretend) that Beijing's air is clean enough for world-class athletes to breath...

It's time this meme was killed for good.

Ever been in Beijing over the Spring Festival national holiday? No? I didn't think so. Beijing's air is just awful for the rest of Spring, and yet it's clean and fresh over Spring Festival.

And so anyone who has been in Beijing over that week and a half knows _exactly_ what the Chinese government will do to ensure clean air during the weeks of the Olympics. It's exactly what they do every Spring Festival:

They turn off nearly all the factories in the country. Construction stops. Migrant workers go home. Streets are (relatively) free of cars.

All those things are planned for the Olympic weeks.

You can experience a mini version of this effect almost every Sunday in Beijing, as no matter how gray and desperate Friday was, by Sunday the only pollution to be seen is usually the smog known to all large cities -- the really poisonous black-snot nose-bleed stuff is simply not there, as the factories that produce it are off.

No-one, least of all me, would claim that "all is well" with China's environment, or Beijing's air.

But it will be fresh and clean for the Olympic weeks. I'd lay money on it.

Like Glenn, I prefer a different explanation from "slip of the tongue".

I think McCain is trying to say two things at once. To the 30-percenters (or whatever minority now remains in the Bush camp) he is saying what he is saying -- repeatedly -- Iran is arming Al Qaeda.

But to the MSM -- and by extension the rest of the country -- he is saying the opposite, which is actually the source of the "serious foreign policy expert" tag. Apparently the bar for "expert on the region" is set as ankle-endangeringly low as simply knowing the names of the two major Islamic "factions".

So, either he's got serious (possibly age-related) memory issues -- which disqualify him, surely, from the highest office in the land -- or he's following a moderately Machiavellian and utterly dishonest "strategy" which is working extremely well so far -- and which disqualifies him, surely, from the highest office in the land.

Lose-lose for McCain.

Unlike the supermen heroes penned by some of his contemporaries (Heinlein, Asimov, etc.) Clarke almost always gave us human beings -- flawed, jealous, believable -- interacting in his future landscapes.

Which I think was actually much more important than his "predictive" technologist powers.

I really hope that the "Rendezvous With Rama" film -- due in 2009 -- is a fitting tribute to this titan of science popularization and science fiction.

Clarke was often quoted as saying that one of the things that made him proudest was the number of astronauts and scientists who attributed to him powerful motivation for their lifelong love of science.

Goodbye, Sir Arthur.

>>>>then you're looking at President John McCain for the next four years -- with all of the disasters that brings with it.

>>If that happens, then we deserve it.

Was it de Tocqueville who said that in a democracy the people get the government they deserve?

I'd love to get an authoritative source for that oft-quoted aphorism.

(Of course, even among urban dwellers, people with enough money and connections are able to get away with having more than one child.)

Of course, you are merely spouting what you've been told so often it must be true, without checking it first.

What could you possibly mean by "get away with"? Unless you secretly bore the child at home, and planned on it never getting a passport, driver's license, bus pass, or attending school, no-one could possibly "get away with" it.

To save you actually being a journalist and doing research, here's what happens if you have a second child in China, as an "urban dweller" (ie. someone with a big-city residence permit or "hukou"):

You'll be fined. And it will be difficult and expensive to get a residence permit for the second child. That's it. No-one goes to jail. Excess children are not separated from parents. No "2nd child detector vans" roam city streets.

The residence permit is what prevents (to take a positive slant on it) enormous Indian-style or African-style or South-American-style slums at the edges of China's large cities. That's because the residence permit is what allows you to attend government schools/hospitals etc.

That's not the same as people being prevented from "freedom of movement". It just that their access to government services outside their "home" area is limited. Not denial, but discouragement. Young 20-30 somethings with university degrees work anywhere they can, and eschew the limited protection of access to public insurance, and buy private cover, or have none.

Now, anyone can have their own opinion on residence permits (the Chinese government realizes the current system doesn't work well and is scrambling for a replacement) and anyone can have their own opinion on reproductive "rights".

But please, if you're writing articles about these issues as they apply to China, a little more rigorous fact-checking could be in order.