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Parliament prorogued

2008-12-05T00:05:00.000Z

Yes, yes, yes, it's terrible to set a precedent that you can suspend Parliament just to avoid a confidence vote. But to be fair to the Governor-General, it's not an easy position she was put into and this was the least interventionist, most (I hesitate to use this word in this context, because it implies a bias I very much doubt exists) conservative thing to do.

But what happened happened. Now the coalition should play with the cards it's got. Use this time to flesh out how they would govern, what policies they would enact. It would be great if they announced a cabinet and put together a concrete budget proposal. Whatever is done will be criticised by the other side, of course, that is the nature of politics. But it would seize the initiative, put the Conservatives on the defensive, and go a long way to convince more people that this is something that can work.

The majority didn't want Harper to be Prime Minister. Now let's make it happen.

Holy phoque!

2008-12-04T13:38:00.002Z

First of all, all this is clearly and indisputably the fault of the Conservatives, if not Harper personally. Yes, of course it was the ending of the $1.95 per vote subsidy that galvanised the opposition, and that is why they triggered all this. Anyone with a brain can see that. However, that move itself is tremendously partisan and epitomises the attitude Harper has towards governing and politics. It was a deliberate attempt to choke the opposition parties and while they would certainly have survived in the long term, in the immediate future it practically promised to turn Canada into a one-party state.

But that wasn't the only thing; it was simply the straw that broke the camel's back. This has been building up ever since Harper took office and displayed his bullying, arrogant style of governing. The Liberals, the NDP, and the Bloc simply got sick of this constant assault: defining everything a confidence motion to humiliate the Liberals, for instance, saying they liked the Taliban more than the soldiers, accusing one of their MPs for being against anti-terror legislation because he was related to someone related to the Air India bombing. I could go on.

The parliamentary system aside, it cannot be disputed that the entire point of calling anything a democracy is that it should represent the popular will. If you have a clear majority of the seats, and more to the point, 62% of the popular vote, that seems to be popular will right there. And specifically with regard to the parliamentary system, an indisputable rule is that you only get to form the government while you have the confidence of the House of Commons. When you lose it, when a majority are against you, you lose that right. By either standard, Harper cannot legitimately remain Prime Minister.

What can the Governor-General do? With the precedent of the King-Byng affair, Harper's asking to prorogate in order to avoid a confidence vote should lead to her turning to Stéphane Dion to form the government, especially when there's a formally signed deal in place with a promise of stability for at least 18 months. It still remains to be seen if it will work, but it's reasonable to assume that it can hold up. The Liberals and the NDP are broadly similar, after all. What is clear from the polls that have been made is that public opinion is evenly divided and inconclusive, and therefore, the consideration of constitutional law, as well as the precedent her actions would set, should be the sole guide in this situation. There is no overwhelming popular push either way.

Of course, it can be argued that people voting NDP and Bloc did not vote for Stéphane Dion to be Prime Minister, and did not vote for a Liberal government. They also did not consciously vote with a Liberal-NDP coalition in mind. But they did vote for their respective parties, which gives those parties a mandate by which they can legitimately seek power. You can argue that people don't actually vote for parties but for MPs, but just try telling that to the Liberal no-longer-MPs for whom Stéphane Dion being leader was a major problem in the last election. The Bloc in general is also centre-left and by some measures even to the left of the Liberals, although of course this isn't specific to their party and more a representation of the political inclinations of Québec. All in all, though, while it is valid to say there's no mandate for the Liberal-NDP coalition, there is a clear mandate against Harper. If 62% of the voters vote against you as the incumbent Prime Minister, I don't know what else you can call that. The legitimacy is suspect on both sides, but the democratic mandate is with the Liberals/NDP.

People voting for the Liberals would definitely expect that their vote was for a Liberal government. People voting for the NDP probably don't have that same expectation but are hoping that their party can wield some power nevertheless. I doubt there are a whole lot of Dippers who object to the coalition; I personally wish they'd thought of this two years ago. While it isn't provably false that NDP voters didn't vote for a coalition, it certainly isn't true either. The same could probably be said of many Bloc Québécois voters.

To round off, just a few points about this whole anti-Bloc Québécois line of attack:

- It is rather hypocritical when we know Harper was willing to enter a similar kind of deal with the Bloc against a Liberal minority. It's even worse when we learn Stockwell Day was willing to go a step further and actually include them in a coalition.

- "Québec doesn't matter"; "the Bloc doesn't matter", or worse, "the Bloc are evil seperatists and hate Canada" is a dangerous game to play when you're trying to champion national unity. If anything, this demonisation of the only fans the seperatist flames which had died down to embers over the last few years.

- Further to the previous point, in the last few elections the Bloc and even the Parti Québécois have toned down sovereignty and seperatism in favour of nationalism, and many voters voted for them on that basis; that sovereignty for Québec was something put aside and it was now primarily advancing the interests of Québec in the federation. It's not very smart to keep reminding them to be seperatist, because they just might take up that suggestion again. As far as national unity goes, the Conservative tactics of demonisation and marginalisation are counter-productive.

Remember, remember, the fifth of November

2008-11-05T11:05:00.004Z

...the day we woke up from the nightmare.

Even as Obama explicitly attacked cynicism, I want to be cynical about a guy who voted for wiretapping, who will not bring universal healthcare to the country in which it is most glaringly absent, who hasn't shown any inclination to fight the corporate power which grips the United States and the corporatocracy, the extension of that corporate power, which grips, exploits and destroys so much of the world.

He ran on "change", but I wonder how much he really can change, and how much he really is willing to change.

But when they finally projected the victory, and when CNN showed the crowd cheering in Grant Park, I simply could not stop myself from smiling.

"President Obama" has a good sound to it, and I fervently hope it will be a presidency which fulfils the hope and, more importantly, is not ended prematurely by a gun-fondling madman.

So I went to JBJ's funeral...

2008-10-04T09:26:00.002Z

Just for the record, since I highly doubt it'll be covered very accurately by the Singapore media:

There was a good-sized crowd on hand to witness the funeral, a small crowd but big enough to overflow the cathedral's capacity. Like about maybe three hundred others I ended up under a temporary shelter outside, straining to view the proceedings on a television screen.

It was not anything extraordinary, but then, what exactly were we expecting? It was a dignified and touching funeral. His sons spoke at length, hymns were sung and condolences were read. The crowd followed behind his coffin to the gates of the cathedral, some got on buses to head to the crematorium while others went on their way.

A massive outpouring of grief this was not. JBJ was an old man and his death can hardly be counted as a shock. The people were not there to wail and moan over the passing of a great man, they seemed more intent on witnessing the event and in their attendance, paying tribute to him.

The reason he was such an important and iconic figure was what he represented. Not just opposition to an overwhelming, arrogant and authoritarian government, but he represented conscience, heart, courage, soul, and humanity. He dreamed of a better society, a better country, and a better world, and while by the end of his life he must have known that his fight was futile, he fought on anyway.

He stood up for the ones who Singapore society seems so intent on ignoring in the pursuit of materialism and world rankings, the "exiles among them", the underclass whose existence doesn't seem to intrude onto the consciousness of most people here. He stood up for decency and compassion to a hard-nosed, heavy-handed regime which saw no need for it.

He was a good man fighting for a good cause. May he rest in peace.

Get a bucket and start bailing!

2008-10-01T07:59:00.002Z

Any expenditure looks small next to that $700 billion. You could have seventy Large Hadron Colliders, for instance, that's seventy of the biggest and most expensive scientific experiment ever conducted. And no doubt everyone's already going crazy calculating how much of stuff you could have and what else you could do with US$700 billion.

Should the bailout go ahead? Like (apparently) most people my gut instinct is not to like it. Shifting the burden of the wild excesses of free-market capitalism and financial industry players run amok onto working taxpayers just isn't right, and remember, this isn't really nationalisation and no one is even talking about maybe creating some kind of public bank(s) or insurance firms. If it actually were the kind of accomplishing-social-goals nationalisation of failing private enterprises that some of the Republican legislators seem to think it is, then I might be inclined to like the idea. But it isn't, it's basically just tossing a shitload of money into a hole, to save capitalism from itself.

And that's the reality; if you don't bail out Wall Street, then the financial system could well collapse and then we'd really start to see the real effects echo throughout the more corporeal bits of the economy - foreclosures will have been just the beginning - and the world might head into a depression for real. And as much as the left wingers sigh and try to restrain themselves from jumping on tables and yelling "We told you so!", that would be terrible and no one really wants that to happen.

To summarise: rock, hard place.

Sounds of the Yamanote Line

2008-09-24T11:46:00.004Z

Newly added to the "OMG I can't believe there's a website for this but I'm so happy there is" file, is this website with recordings of the music played as trains stop along Tokyo's Yamanote Line.

Update: And this one is even better.

How To Drain Lake Michigan

2008-09-18T13:05:00.005Z

The first bit of a long short story I wrote over the first half of 2005.

---

It is both contextually and logically obvious that Douglas Adams had Heathrow in mind when he wrote that airports are ugly, some are very ugly, and some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort.

Both customer and security demands have necessitated the matching up of baggage with passengers and their itinerary, making lost luggage a relatively rare occurence, even with the increase in hubbing as the great majority of passengers passing through major commercial aviation hubs like Heathrow or O'Hare are in fact on their way to somewhere else. Barcodes, multiple checks and the like have all made lost lugguage offices a lot less busy than they used to be. But all these advances, checks and techniques serve to make it all the more fustrating when it does happen to you.

For Kelly, something as fustratingly dumb as a typo somewhere down the line and the visual similarity of the letters "P" and "O" to busy baggage handlers and the mindless computer system had caused her luggage to be in the process of making its way to a small town in Western Australia near Port Headland by the name of Pardoo (PRD) instead of being offloaded at Chicago O'Hare Airport (ORD) like it was supposed to be.

At the moment she was staring, alone and in despair, at the baggage claim belt, her bag was being sent round in circles within the O'Hare luggage conveyor belt system as the computers tried in vain to find flight UA1104 to Pardoo, then eventually gave up and sent it onto the most distant destination convenient at the time, which was UA881 to Tokyo, in a fit of electronic malevolence.

Three days in Chicago, or in any city you are a tourist in for that matter, with only one change of underwear, is a frightful prospect to almost anyone who was raised and trained in the hygenic standards the majority of the developed world is used to. She filled out the form and the woman at the left luggage office said she'd do her best. Then, at length, for the United terminal at O'Hare is quite a long walk to the street, Kelly made her way into Chicago.

The rainbow-coloured neon lights in the underpass between the United terminal and the rest of O'Hare Airport are fascinating, but generally people who traverse that passageway are not in a mood to be fascinated. Airports, even when a concerted effort has been put into their not being ugly, seem to dampen the spirits of many people, especially jaded travellers or those going places for business. It's not quite Dante's Inferno, "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here", but it still, it is pretty close. And this goes for all airports. Even in Singapore Changi Airport, which is consistently named the best in the world and is also consistently mispronounced, you are bound to find at least some travellers in a state of despair for various reasons, whether they have missed their connection, are lost and cannot understand any of the signs, are simply emotionally numbing themselves for the long flight ahead, or have been caught by Customs with two kilos of cocaine in their asscrack.

People invariably complain about air travel. There is no known reason for it, but almost everyone has their own story of aviation horror. Why people complain particularly about airplanes and airports when annoyances similar to those encountered in the process of travelling at four-fifths the speed of sound in a pressurised metal tube 9 kilometers above sea level can be encountered elsewhere in greater abundance is not known either, and no scientific study has ever been conducted on it because no scientist is that stupid. Everyone agrees that air travel sucks, but even though clearly the growth of commerical aviation has much, much more good than bad, no one seems to be interested in finding out why everyone thinks like that.

So we find Kelly with her toiletries, one change of clothes, one change of underwear, and a wallet, in a taxi making its way by the Kennedy Expressway to downtown Chicago. I would like to just skip ahead as if this journey only took a couple of minutes, but the reality is that the traffic was, in the words of Simon Cowell, absolutely awful. It took about an hour, and from the way the cab driver abruptly began swearing, it was clear that they'd missed the intended exit.

Kelly, sensing an opportunity to squeeze in some sight-seeing, asked the cab driver, "Is it going to be way off if you go up Michigan Avenue?"

"Well actually yeah, m'am. Your hotel's on Michigan Avenue anyway."

"I just wanted to see the, you know, Magnificent Mile and all," said Kelly.

The taxi driver gave a little snort, as if to say that it was overrated and better seen on foot, but oh well it's your money, which is what he was, in fact, trying to communicate, and complied anyway.

Michigan Avenue from a car is overrated, as a matter of fact. The best way to see a road, if you wanted to see it, is to walk along it. You'll better appreciate the nice bit near Buckingham Fountain and the Art Institute, and there's nice bas relief carvings on the Michigan Avenue Bridge which you can't inspect closely from a taxi. Also, a Chinese joint near the bridge which serves Chinese food like you'll find everywhere in the Western world, which is basically everything covered in sweet and sour sauce. It's weirder considering that the people who run these joints are, in fact, Chinese immigrants and should know how Chinese food is supposed to be, but apart from the expensive places and one place in Merritt, British Columbia, which does a great Sichuan Sauce Beef, they all serve basically the same sweet and sour shit.

Another observation Kelly made as the cab made its way past Michigan Avenue's junctions with Superior, Huron, Erie and Ontario streets was that one section of the downtown had its streets named after the Great Lakes. She momentarily wondered why Lake Michigan was the only lake which didn't have one named after it before realising how stupid she was being.

It was a good thing Illinois was a relatively liberal state and voted Kerry in 2004, or the Le Meridien might have been burnt to the ground by an angry anti-French mob, causing her reservation to be lost. Illinois is also the state which elected Barack Obama, who, after becoming the fifth black Senator in history and the only black Senator at present, immediately was trumpeted by the media as the future of the Democratic Party and then quickly forgotten by the exact same media. But it all worked out and Kelly dropped her pitifully small carry-on bag in the room and went out into Chicago's late afternoon.

Kelly decided to confine herself to the downtown loop. A Turkish man sold her a hotdog outside Water Tower Place and she stood around eating it for a while. It was early for dinner, but also late for sightseeing since at this time in the day everything touristy was closing or was about to. She found a place called Flat Sammies and had a flat sammie - apparently, the Chicago word for a big-ass sandwich. So that was dinner, and it was still only seven. She had no idea where to go for some Chicago nightlife, and didn't feel like spending a few hours drinking too much and being squashed on all sides by sweaty strangers while having her eardrums attacked by thumping bass speakers, so she decided to get drunk in the hotel bar, thus minimising the distance for which she would be staggering around as an open invitation for a mugging.

The hotel lobby was full of people. Given the fact that a lot of them were dressed in exactly the same ridiculous way, it was probably one of those conventions where fans of Star Trek or anime or something got together just so they could feel like they weren't totally alone in being much too obsessed with their object of fandom. She took her seat at the bar, ordered a scotch rocks, and could hear a group of the attendees hotly debating the relative merits of Rasengan and Chidori.

Japanese food. She would have Japanese food for dinner tomorrow.

Her neighbour was a young man, about her own age, in a business suit. He had unbuttoned his jacket and was fiddling with a tape recorder. He hadn't noticed Kelly because he was pointing the recorder at the group. This went on for about five minutes, with Kelly getting less and less sure about her inital assumption that Rasengan was some kind of Japanese beef dish all the while, because from the conversation it apparently was able to break swords or something. Eventually the man sighed and packed away the tape recorder, turning his attention to his drink. He smiled at Kelly.

"Hi there," her neighbour said, "I'm Russell."

"Kelly," Kelly said. They shook hands.

"Are you with..." he said, motioning at the convention outside.

"No. I'm just staying here. I'm from St. Louis."

"Well, I'm a convention refugee." he said.

It was a bad joke, but Kelly laughed along anyway. He was nice, kind of cute, and the scotch was asserting itself.

"Actually, I'm a writer for the Chicago Sun-Times and I'm covering these guys as part of the culture section... We're doing a piece on subcultures and I got the Anime beat," said Russell. "It's actually quite a good assignment. It's cool, quirky, and very, very weird, sometimes all at the same time."

Kelly nodded.

"I feel sorry for my colleague Leslie," continued Russell, "she got the Wiccans and people who think they're vampires." He handed her his business card. Kelly pocketed it.

"So I take it you're here to see Chicago?"

"Oh yeah, just looking around." said Kelly.

* * *

The lengths to which salmon go to in order to fuck are ridiculous, and also incredibly stupid. An entire species which lives practically its entire life in the ocean, yet needs to swim up rivers thousands of kilometers from its habitual home just to spawn is clearly a tad insane. Humans intent on reproduction don't have it off in maternity wards. The stupidity thing for salmon comes in because the rivers in which they fuck have an amazing tendency to be fucked up by humans, who happily dump toxic chemicals, sewage, and industrial waste into the water. So the survival of the species doesn't just depend on where they live, it also depends on areas which are really prone to destruction.

Kelly did not think of this as the chef shouted something in Japanese and placed a platter of sashimi before her and Russell. It turned out that he was also the regular food columnist and was paid to get free meals at pricey restaurants.

With a crack she broke the fused-together chopsticks in half and popped a piece of salmon, garnished with some vinegar-related substance, into her mouth. The chef beamed at her as she chewed it and nodded in an ingratiating fashion to convey that it was very, very good, it was like an orgy in her mouth, oh my God you are a fantastic chef and should be given a Nobel Prize or something. It is not possible to do otherwise when sitting at the sushi bar, because the chef has a very sharp knife.

Dinner proceeded in a reasonably enjoyable fashion. They talked, they shared stories, they experienced sudden bouts of apprehension before broaching a new topic or revealing an opinion on one of the many debatable topics which exist for a bunch of egomaniacs to earn money screaming on American talk radio stations about. In three words, they shared conversation.

Things were now winding down and it was at the point that Kelly was considering if she would like to engage in the same kind of behaviour the salmon she had eaten jump waterfalls and swim thousands of miles for. At least the human prelude to sex is a lot less arduous. Russell called for the bill, presented his credit card, or more accurately, his newspaper's credit card, though as long as he kept the column coming the editor overlooked the somewhat extravagant dining charges, and then scrawled his signature on the bill.

There is a certain, unspoken cue at this point in a restaurant meal where everyone stands up and leaves the table simultaenously. It happened.

"I'll drive you back to your hotel?" Russell offered.

"Sure." said Kelly.

"Hold on, I need to use the bathroom first." said Russell. Kelly had a sudden flash of fear that this was some kind of ruse by which Russell was going to extricate himself from their newly-formed relationship by climbing out a window and jumping into Lake Michigan, but her rational mind kicked in and told her to stop being so silly.

Urinals truly are amazing things and it is therefore sad that approximately half the population of the world will have no opportunity to truly appreciate them. They don't take up as much space as cubicles, are more convenient, largely eliminate the aiming problem, and if you place urinal cakes in them - true marvels of technology which, counter-intuitively, release nice smells when they are peed on - they make the whole toilet smell lovely. Urinals promote convenience, hygiene, and in tandem with urinal cakes, a pleasant environment. They greatly improve things in general. With all this considered, it is thus ironic that it is therefore impossible for the urinal to have been invented by anyone other than a woman.

Russell, in his state of excitement that he might be within a few minutes of a night of wild sex, stood in front of a urinal willing his bladder to hurry the fuck up. He was paranoid that someone was right now talking up Kelly and that he would emerge from the bathroom to find Kelly leaving with Brad Pitt or something.

Their mutual paranoia was sated as Russell emerged from the bathroom and they walked out onto the streetlamp-illuminated pavement together. Russell opened the car door for Kelly and got in himself.

It was a short drive to the hotel, the lobby of which was filled with the dispersing costumed crowd attending the second day of the convention. They dodged past a Death God, a fat guy eating potato chips, a dominatrix, the Fourth Hokage, and nearly smashed into Gundam Deathscythe as they pushed ahead through the crowd, angling for the lift lobby. Russell reminded himself not to look. There is stuff going on at an Anime convention that will kill a boner instantly.

The lift door closed and an uncomfortable silence, the type which hangs when two people who both want to have sex with each other but don't want the other to know are alone together in an enclosed space. Almost mechanically, they walked together to room 406. Kelly fumbled for the key.

Kelly was tingling with excitement, but she told herself, she had to play it cool. Make herself a bit of a challenge for Russell to overcome. Besides, she didn't have any change of underwear. She opened the door, and stepped into the room. Russell's heart thumped through his chest, hoping she would invite him to cross the magic forcefield indicated by the division in the pattern of the carpeting. Struggling to keep her voice confident and alluring at the same time, Kelly said, "That was fantastic. Call me tomorrow if you're free."

"Aww." said Russell, grinning so she would think his disappointed groan was for the purpose of humour, even though it was not.

She smiled and pecked him on the lips. "See you tomorrow, Russ."

Hopefully her luggage, and her clothes, would have been found by then.

* * *

He looked at his ill-gotten loot. Someone had obviously fucked up back in Chicago, but that was none of his concern. Kurosaki Hidetoshi would take it home and hope there was something nice and expensive in it. Usually these were in the form of Japanese products made by Japanese companies which now were in Japan for the first time in their existence. Hidetoshi quickly stashed the bag in his locker and clocked out for lunch.

"KELLY PETERSON" said the luggage tag.

* * *

"There's actually very little that's really original anymore," said Russell, "especially in journalism, where you have to adhere to certain style rules, with the result that every report reads like everyone else's. When you're writing a news item, it's nothing more than the presentation of facts... even when I do, like, restaurant reviews, how many adjectives are there for something which tastes really good?"

Kelly, he was amazed to realise, was only slightly bored with what he was saying as opposed to monumentally bored. This was a promising sign. He was also surprised that she was wearing the same T-shirt and jeans she'd been wearing since they'd first met. Women didn't usually do that - he'd travelled with his sister once and her luggage had outweighed his by a factor of three.

"Sometimes, I long to go to a really shit restaurant just so I can use a different set of adjectives. I guess most bad reviews are kinda founded in that really."

"Except when the music column says U2 is shit," said Kelly, "because that's what they are."

"Oh, yeah," nodded Russell. He made a mental note to go through his CD rack before inviting her over, something he was, at this point, determined to do.

"So did you get the stuff you needed from the convention?" Kelly asked.

"Well, not really. Everyone just treated me like an intruder. I asked all kinds of questions, you know, what does that mean, why does the boy have a robot growing out of his head, how come this guy has orange hair when everyone in his family has brown hair... but nothing. I guess I'm just not supposed to know."

Kelly laughed. "Well, Japan's really weird, so I guess that should explain it all."

Weirdness is, of course, relative. A while ago astronomers discovered a planet, for instance, which is so close to its sun and has an intense greenhouse effect that it routinely rains iron. Even on the planet Earth, things much weirder for commentary than cultural differences between America and Japan are readily available, such as the duck-billed platypus or Celine Dion. Once again, of course, this is also relatively speaking, and neither would be as strange as the planet where it rains iron, though many people do at times wish that Celine Dion would be transported there.

At the time of making that potentially insulting comment, Kelly did not realise that fully one third of all the clothes she owned, as well as a pair of nail clippers which could not be brought on board the airplane because a terrorist might hijack the plane by using them to distract the pilots by offering them manicures, were at the mercy of a crooked Japanese baggage handler. It was just as well that the comment it would have no bearing on her luggage crisis situation whatsoever.

The time difference meant that Hidetoshi was asleep while Kelly was remarking about how weird Japan was compared to what she was used to, but before calling it a night he had thoroughly searched the bag to find nothing worth keeping. Sony, Canon, Nikon, Toshiba, Panasonic, nothing. Not even something done by Finns or Germans. There was absolutely nothing electronic, nothing that remotely resembled treasure, except in the literary sense, but Hidetoshi couldn't read English, much less Kazuo Ishiguro, and despite what many who first hear his name think, his books are translated into Japanese rather than from it.

In the time it took for you to read the last three paragraphs, Russell had invited Kelly into his home.

"Sure." said Kelly.

There is a lot of sex in the media nowadays, and this can partially be attributed to the weakening attention span of the average American, for whom almost every movie and TV show is aimed at. Thus, relationships, in order to be successful, must quickly lead to sex. It is not possible to engage the reader with a slow build-up in a relationship through several months, years even, of friendship and love. Therefore, I do not mean to suggest that Kelly and Russell are complete hedonists, though to keep things believeable, you can attribute the quick progression to Kelly's limited time in Chicago. But suffice to say, that night, after a romantic prelude and some frantic fumbling with a condom, Kelly and Russell failed to save themselves for marriage.

* * *

The water swirled, gushing forth in a raging torrent as it entered the toilet bowl and raced its malodorous cargo into the sewage system of Tokyo.

He watched it, fascinated. He always found toilet flushes fascinating. There were different kinds to see and experience, as well. Hotels had some great variety, some using the kind where the water emptied into this valve at the bottom which sucked up the contents of the bowl while water from the cistern refilled the bowl quietly, without the splashing noise most toilets had. Others had what he had come to decide was "regular" and the most common, and the one he had at home - a gush of water which obscured the contents of the bowl while it pushed it into the sewers.

Kurosaki Hidetoshi also liked airplane toilets. The power and noise of the suction was almost intimidating, yet somehow satisfying. It had a feeling of finality to it, like the inescapable gravity of a black hole, pulling whatever you'd deposited into a singularity or perhaps a parallel universe. In this case, of course, it simply went into a septic tank. But black holes and parallel universes are a lot more exciting to think about than septic tanks.

A tattered blanket of greyish cloud had enveloped Chicago overnight and perceptibly dimmed the brightness of the summer morning, promising some dribbles of rain and a slight respite from the airless, dry heat which the city had been baking under for the past week. The winds for which Chicago was nicknamed had returned that night as well, and it seemed all was back to normal meteorologically.

Upon returning to her hotel, Kelly had been rudely jerked back into reality by the news that a message was waiting for her. It couldn't have been from Russell, since they'd had both social and sexual intercourse just the night before and if he'd had anything he needed to tell her he'd certainly done it over breakfast. Besides, he definitely hadn't come up with an idea for something to do in the 23 minutes it'd taken Kelly to get back to her hotel, since he'd gone to work. There was only one other likely source of the message.

Yes, United Airlines, or more accurately one of its employees, had left a message that they'd traced her lost luggage and would she call their customer service hotline at her convenience. So she called them and got put on hold.

The music made it seem a lot longer than the brief 30 seconds she was actually on hold, though she did derive some satisfaction when the operator's "Hello, United Airlines Customer Service, how can I help you?" cut off the annoying prerecorded spiel that they highly valued your business but were making you wait for another interminable period.

"My name is Kelly Peterson, I'm calling about my lost luggage." she informed the disembodied voice.

"Hold on please..." the underpaid Indian labour said while he frantically waved for the supervisor.

Thankfully, the music did not come on.

Back in Mumbai, the operator and the supervisor were trying to send her call back to the office in Chicago, which was walking distance from where Kelly was calling from. This is the logic of outsourcing and globalisation.

"I'm Kelly Peterson, I'm calling about my lost luggage." she persevered.

Quickly, the customer serivce phone monkey established that the reason the airline had not simply delivered the luggage to Kelly's hotel like they usually did when people lost their luggage was because it had disappeared utterly and completely. Its barcode had been scanned on its way into the wrong airplane and they knew it'd been sent to New Tokyo International Airport, or Narita as everyone insists on calling it, IATA code NRT, ICAO code RJAA - just a spot of aviation pedantry I promise I will not engage in again - and from there it had vanished.

They did not know, of course, about Kurosaki Hidetoshi, or his love for ill-gotten gains. Neither did anyone besides Hidetoshi himself know that Kelly Peterson's luggage, devoid of anything he could've sold clandestinely for a decent amount, was languishing in a corner of his tiny apartment, saved only because his work shifts had not allowed him time to surreptiously dispose of it.

"So what are you telling me?" came Kelly's somewhat distressed voice.

"We'll do our best, ma'am, but I can't make any guarentees. You'll have to sit and wait."

In search of the perfect Madmobile

2008-07-02T11:58:00.007Z

It was a very fruitful day as the search for the ultimate Madmobile continued. Unusually fruitful, in fact. Either people's standards of taste are deteriorating rapidly or we just got lucky. I'm not too confident in the latter explanation.

What is a Madmobile? That's a question many ask when they first hear of our noble quest. The answer is a more difficult one than it might first appear. Quite simply, it's a normal car plagued with aftermarket modification gone mad, in a manner which leads you to believe that the owner must him or herself be mad to have taken the effort to be seen in public driving it.

I'm sure you've seen them. Plastered with stickers and with wholly unnecessary bits attached, they think they look astoundingly cool. They cruise behind tinted windows (and not because they're so ashamed of it they want to hide) and on glowing neon, exhaust puttering out of a pipe big enough for an adult cat to sleep in. But more, much more than it. There must be evidence of good taste thrown to the wind, or even better, hiding in a corner and crying - which not coincidentally is the response of some children who sight them.

"How about this?"

Oh no. There's evidence of restraint... taste... a conscious effort not to appear like a crazed moron. It's a little mad. But that's not even close to what I'm talking about. There's evidence of a slightly warped sense of what looks cool, but not outright insanity.

The question's been asked: would the Batmobile itself qualify as a Madmobile? Well, no. Despite the fact that there's clearly extensive modification, it simply is too cool. Also, and this is crucial, it's one single colour.

"This one?"

We're getting there, kiddo. Incipient psychosis is in evidence. That bonnet alone makes it a strong candidate. And I'm sure we'd see some awful spoiler and perhaps an exhaust pipe suitable for hiding narcotics in if we looked at the back. But there's still something missing, that sense of outright insanity... No, what I'm looking for is this:

But we aren't even there yet. We've got a long way to go. The quest for the ultimate Madmobile can never be over...

Two (nearly) awesome aircraft registrations

2008-06-13T10:00:00.002Z

Both courtesy of Air Canada...

Multiculturalism

2008-06-05T03:51:00.002Z

Canadian multiculturalism was encapsulated for me in Montréal not far from the Guy-Concordia metro station: Chinese people eating crepes for breakfast in a Hawaii-themed cafe run by Arabs.

A new definition...

2008-05-15T14:23:00.001Z

Colgate - a political scandal involving the misappropriation of toothpaste.

More Straits Times Forum idiocy

2008-04-11T00:50:00.004Z

Who is writing all these stupid Straits Times letters? I certainly hope they aren't the medical kind of doctors.

Tibet's current violence smells of a Western agenda
THE violent riots in Tibet that occurred after more than 40 years of quiescence curiously coincides with the approach of the Beijing Olympics. It is difficult to believe that they were spontaneous and had no backing.

The Western media has been very effective in mobilising world opinion to condemn China. Even the restrained control by the Chinese authorities of the rioters who committed burning and killing was made to appear unjustified.

...

Westerners seem to think that the traditional 'charming' social system of Tibet should continue undisturbed even though any respectable Western nation would be horrified to have such a system installed in its country. The Western media are obviously unable to appreciate the misery of living an impoverished life in a backward land.

Dr Ong Siew Chey

I see! It makes perfect sense now. Reporters for the Western media have had nothing better to do these last forty years but to carefully breed resentment in the Tibetan population, and they also rigged the IOC vote to award the Olympics to Beijing in order for all this to take place and lead to China looking bad! With perfectly formed conspiracy theories like this, who needs facts?

There's a reason Tibetans targeted Han Chinese people and property with their anger. They don't want to be occupied by China; they don't want China's bloody railway, immigrants, or culture. They want their own. If they were so happy with the development and with being occupied by China, all this would not have happened.

I personally don't really get how people with histories of being colonised don't recognise why the people who live under modern-day imperialism might not be so enthused just because the regime develops their places for their own ends.

Seen on teh internets

2008-04-10T09:13:00.000Z

lol

The Tainted Torch

2008-04-07T13:36:00.010Z

China has turned the Olympic torch from a symbol of the best of mankind into a symbol of nationalist egoism.

When they complain others are "sabotaging" or "politicising" the Olympics, they should look in the mirror to find the real culprits. Sending the torch through Tibet and Taiwan is just pure provocation. And when you ask for trouble, you shouldn't be surprised or act outraged when you get just that. China was the first to politicise the Olympics by turning it into what the news media refer to as their "coming-out party" and a touchstone of national pride. Let the blame fall on the right shoulders.

I'm happy to see anger and protest follow the Olympic torch around, and I'm happy that it got snuffed out a few times. I'm glad to see it because the Olympic torch, at least this time round, isn't a symbol of what the Olympics should symbolise any more.

It's a symbol of ugly Chinese nationalism. And it's nothing anyone can be proud of now. China has ruined the Olympics before they have even begun.

A few thoughts on sport and politics

2008-03-21T02:46:00.006Z

"It was a futile gesture. I'm not particularly proud of it."

"You threw it in the Mersey, didn't you?"

"Yes. It wasn't heavy enough to sink, so it just" - a glint of amusement - "bobbed around. There was a ship sailing past, quite a long way out, in the estuary, and I looked at this little scrap of ribbon floating and I looked at the ship, and I thought that me trying to stop this war was a bit like trying to stop the ship would have been. You know, all they'd have seen from the deck was this little figure jumping up and down, waving its arms, and they wouldn't've known what on earth it was getting so excited about."

"So you realised then that it was futile?"

Sassoon lifted his head. "It still had to be done. You can't just acquiesce."

- Pat Barker, "Regeneration"

So very often, people go on about how sports and politics should be seperate, and that they don't and shouldn't mix.

It's a fair assertion. We don't want wars to start over a bad offside call. We all know the tragic consequences when they have mixed - the deaths of Israeli athletes in Munich, or the war that actually did break out between El Salvador and Honduras triggered by a riot at an international football game.

But the truth is that sport and politics are conjoined twins. As much as you might want to seperate them, it's tricky and very difficult (and that's kind of the limit to this clumsy metaphor of mine). When something evokes so much passion and is tied in so much with identities, how could it possibly remain apolitical? As long as teams are representing places, cities, regions, and nations, like it or not, it can never be too far away from politics.

This topic comes up now in the wake of renewed calls for an Olympic boycott after China's government helpfully reinforced the perception of it as brutal, opaque and heavyhanded with a crackdown in Tibet. The idea has been dismissed again and again, and I'm not saying I'm in favour of it, but it does have some merit.

The Olympics is probably already the most politicised sporting event of all, for the simple reason that it covers a wide scope of sports and features competitors representing countries. It is inevitable that politics should creep into such an event. The national prestige in winning at the Olympics is undeniable. And the prestige from hosting them is even greater.

The 2008 Olympics have been repeatedly portrayed as China's coming-out party, its opportunity to make its mark as a global power. From the tremendous effort its governments at multiple levels have put in, as well as efforts to deal with its image problem, it's clear that China sees it this way too. China does not want to show off a repressive, backward nation choking in pollution this August, even though that's what it might be. Thus, the success of Beijing 2008 is a very important thing to China, and, more to the point, it's already been very politicised by China.

Boycotting the Olympics would be one way to hit back, to say "we can't in good conscience be part of this." To be sure, China isn't as bad as Myannmar or Sudan, but it does help prop up those regimes, and in any case, that's not really point. China's record sucks, full stop.

There's only one precedent for an Olympic boycott, and that was when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan - the other boycott was in retaliation for that boycott. It didn't accomplish much, and it became just an anomaly in the record book and a minor footnote in the wider context of the Cold War. And if a boycott of Beijing 2008 took place it'd likely have about the same impact.

Furthermore, and I find this argument most convincing, it wouldn't be fair to the athletes at all. Some would be denied the experience of a lifetime, and their participation, or lack thereof, isn't going to change China. It isn't going to stop them funding genocide in Darfur or end the occupation of Tibet. The threat of turning China's Olympics into a farce is far more effective than actually doing it would be.

The best that can be done is not to boycott, but to make a lot of noise while there. It's not the grand stamp of disapproval some might want to see, but it's the best that can be made of this situation.

Frequently Asked Questions No One Asked - Musical Extravaganza

2008-01-28T11:02:00.000Z

Q: If I just stay here, if I just lay here, would you lie next to me and just forget the world?
A: No.

Q: If we wrote a song about someone wanting a love song written for them, wouldn't that be totally ironic and cool?
A: Only if you have a terrible sense of what is cool and don't know what irony is. Although that doesn't preclude the song being popular because most people are musical dickheads.

Q: What if we spliced some old songs and new songs together, like say, Stand By Me with Shaun Kingston, and that "I'll be watching you" song with one done by a popular current musical freakshow? Wouldn't that be awesome?
A: AAUUUGH MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP HELP.

Q: What is "it" and why won't it ever work?
A: Shaun Kingston is referring to an erectile dysfunction problem due to the pressure of having a girlfriend who is way too beautiful.

Q: What is "ridin' dirty"?
A: Ridin' dirty is a slang term to describe operating a motorcycle while not having showered in several days.

Q: First you say you won't and then you say you will, you keep me hanging on... which is it?
A: What the Click Five don't know is that Jenny has dumped them all out of sheer embarrasment at being associated with one of the greatest seminal failures of a musical group. Anything positive that she ever said was only out of politeness.

Q: Oh and what about Maroon 5 they're such posers eh?
A: I'm not sure what exactly they're posing as, except whiny idiotic dickheads pretending to be all sensitive and shit, which I don't think is an act.

Q: What is so hot and why do you have to drop it?
A: The only redeeming factor in that track is that it allowed for the creation of this.

The full glory that he deserves

2008-01-14T12:35:00.000Z

Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew on Sunday paid a tribute to his old friend, Indonesia's ex-president Suharto after a whistle-stop trip to Jakarta to visit the critically-ill former leader.

Speaking to Singapore reporters just before his flight home in the afternoon, Mr Lee said: 'I am very sad to see his life coming to an end without the full glory that he deserves.' - The Straits Times, January 13, 2008.

Just like Suharto, Lee Kwan Yew clearly would like to selective amnesia to work to his benefit, although he admittedly has much less severe things that he hopes other people forget. Singapore should just feel happy that their Dear Leader never "needed" to do anything like what Suharto did.

A conservatively estimated half a million sympathisers were killed in the failed revolt, while bloodshed occurred in annexed East Timor as well as restive Aceh and Papua. - Agence France Presse

In September, the United Nations and the World Bank put Mr. Suharto at the top of a new list of world leaders who had embezzled the most from state coffers. They quoted an estimate by Transparency International, a private anticorruption organization, that he stole $15 billion to $35 billion in state assets while in power.

In December, the National Human Rights Commission said it was examining for prosecution six major cases of human rights abuses, including the killings of more than half a million people in an upheaval when Mr. Suharto took office in the late 1960s. - New York Times, January 8, 2008.

It's frankly astounding that Lee Kwan Yew would feel so comfortable expressing publicly that he feels Suharto deserves "glory". While you can't expect him to give a shit that some people experienced life termination at Suharto's hands, surely the rampant corruption that occurred under Suharto goes right against what he says he and the system he built in Singapore is all about?

Indonesia's current President did visit too, and did express similar sentiments. Indeed, no international incident is likely to emerge - except perhaps with East Timor. Who cares, of course.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Cabinet ministers and ruling party leaders have gone to Pertamina Hospital in recent days to see Suharto, a sign of his continuing influence over the ruling elite. - Associated Press.

Aha. So we don't actually know how the average Indonesian, with all the shit they've been through, feels about him. But we do know that ruling elites liked him. Well, it isn't hard to see why. Suharto's reign enriched not Indonesia, but the Indonesian elites. It's easy to say "he built roads, he built hospitals, he built schools, oh good." But what matters is who all of that benefits.

I thought it was also worth mentioning that Lee Kwan Yew compared Suharto's foreign policy favourably with Sukarno's mainly because of the Confrontation. Sukarno, you see, had these ideas of Third World unity and was opposed to Malaysian federation - which included Singapore at the time - because he saw it for what it was. It was a ploy through which Western powers installed governments which were anti-Communist and could be "trusted", and to hell with what the inhabitants actually wanted. Naomi Klien, in The Shock Doctrine, calls Sukarno the "Hugo Chavez of his day" and in that comparison you could envision how Chavez would react if the United States installed a puppet right-wing government in, say, Colombia or Brazil.

I think I can see why Lee Kwan Yew liked Suharto. Suharto was good for him and he doesn't care about who died or was persecuted as a result. He doesn't really care how Indonesia turned out under Suharto's rule. Suharto's deathbed is basically a ruling class love-in. But it's not the ruling class who get to judge him. It's his victims who get to decide if they can forgive him, and ordinary Indonesians to decide if in the final summation he deserves any glory at all.

Notes from underground Tokyo

2007-12-18T11:52:00.000Z

"This is the Yamanote line train bound for Shibuya and Shinjuku. The next station is Osaki. The doors on the right side will open..."

The Yamanote line, encircling Tokyo in a reassuring hug of a checkered line, white and black and white and black again. One could get lost here and ride it loop after loop, the train's destination always changing to a more distant station. It would be bound for Shinagawa, and when Shinagawa was reached, Shibuya, then it would shift to Shinjuku, Ikebukuro... and so on ad nauseum forever. The enthusisatic disembodied voices will emanate from speakers, calling off the names of stations, strange jangly synthesised music will play, chimes will sound, the doors will close, and the train sets off again in hypnotic, yet exciting repetition. Tokyo Station and Shinjuku Station, busiest by number of trains and number of passengers respectively, on opposite sides of the Yamanote, artificial antipodes, locked in a primal battle for supremacy. 31 minutes from Tokyo to Shinjuku and 31 minutes back again. Commuters streaming out of Shibuya to the welcoming bronze silence of Hachiko. The doors on the right side will open, then the doors on the left side, then the doors on the right side, "Harajukuuuuu.... Harajuku-deska", announcements in Japanese, then sometimes in English, and at every station a male voice saying "Ichiban-sen..." followed by words you don't understand.

---

"Don't toss around words like "Aoyama-itchome" or "Ueno-okachimachi" like you know what they mean. And how the fuck do you pronounce that?"

"Kokuritsu-kyogijo?"

"Gah."

"Also, the "i" in "Akabanebashi" is silent, got that? And don't confuse it with Akebonobashi."

"Help."

---

The passages of Shinjuku are downright labyrinthine. I swear they move around and change at whim like those staircases in Hogwarts from Harry Potter. You might want Shinjuku station on the Oedo line, but you'll end up at Shinjuku-nishiguchi because all the signs will lead you there and force you to waste time and potentially get on the wrong train at Tochomae. But with nearly the entire population of Singapore passing through that station every day I suppose there's some justification in this. The over-three-million commuters have to fit in somewhere, and how will they obtain their copies of dirty books with titles like "Lemon Incest" if there are no shops?

---

"Furi wa... Uchisaiwaicho... Uchisaiwaicho..."

"That sounds like something from an anime I saw once."

---

Perish, you fools who fail to grasp the difference between JR lines, Toei Subway and Tokyo Metro.

---

(translated)

Takeguchi-san,

For your good idea, thank you very much. I will incorporate it into the presentation. I am now sending you the files as there is a strange foreign person looking at my laptop as I type this. I don't think he can read Japanese but do be careful about the information. If he murders me please tell my wife I love her and that the life insurance will cover our child's university expenses.

Sincerely,
Yanomaru.

---

The passageway to the Marunochi line at Ginza station is cunningly hidden from passengers getting off the Hibiya line train. This is to force an extra 130 yen out of you and is due purely to malice.

---

The thing I really love about Tokyo is how the city literally is like a living organism. Even though the Japanese might culturally tend to be a reticent bunch, even if just 1% rebel, in a city of 35 million that's 350,000 people willing to dress entirely in pink, play heavy metal in Yoyogi Park, and breathe a throbbing pulse of life into the city. And I can guarentee that much more than 1% of Tokyo don't fit that stereotypical sarariman template. The roads, buildings, parks and everything exude an energy that is uniquely Tokyo, and every part of it - Harajuku, Akihabara, Roppongi, etc. is unique in itself but joins to create a wonderful whole. And the train lines are the arteries of this living organism that is one of the world's true great cities.

I didn't mean it, honest.

2007-11-26T11:34:00.000Z

I was going to use this for my writing.

That didn't mean a stream of angry political diatribes with gradually peter out as I realise, during this whole Taser thing, that there are many people far better than it than I. But it's just been that kind of year for me.

Creative output just isn't there right now. Thus the deadness of this.

But I'm going to Tokyo in two weeks. That'll get the juices flowing, I hope.

So with the current corspe-like nature of this blog explained, ta for a while more.

Why Dion should bring down the Tories

2007-10-20T01:05:00.001Z

Even though the common perception is that the Liberal Party is facing electoral disaster if one were to occur, I think there is a very good reason for the Liberals to bring down the government now.

First there's the constant bullshit that "Canadians don't want an election" which every party leader seems to be parroting in an off-putting, cross-your-fingers manner even as they actively steer towards the precipice of one. It's a slightly dishonest thing to say because I'm not aware of any recent poll that asked if Canadians wanted an election or not. Of the five parties conceivably capable of winning seats in Parliament, only one leader, Elizabeth May, is upfront about it and echoes my own sentiments - I want an election now, and I want it to dump Harper, and I'm sure many, many people feel the same.

It's also worth noting that the "Canadians don't want an election" line might be somewhat truthful when it has indeed been too soon since the last election, but now that this minority government has lasted longer than the average 16 months, it's not really too soon, in that context.

The Liberals do indeed fear electoral embarrasment and I'll admit the prospect of Liberal voters deserting en masse for the NDP and the Green Party is something that appeals to me. And now is indeed quite a bad time for the Liberal Party. But they will only stand to lose if they let the Throne Speech pass, because of the minefield Harper has laid out declaring practically every government bill a confidence motion.

The first of those is an odious crime bill which is being used to force through a disgusting American-style three-strikes provision, and to stoke up unwarranted crime paranoia at a time when crime is as low as it has ever been in the last quarter of a century. Add to that, it's delaying and holding up the other bills which got packaged in just so Harper can have a political prop. It's another of Harper's bastardly stunts, it shows once again for anyone who cares to see that he's more interested in power than in governing responsibly, but it's also going to force a disagreeable law through.

More importantly, the Liberals, if they are going to keep avoiding an election, will have to vote in favor of that bill and, no doubt, lots more disgusting legislation that Harper will undoubtedly test them with. And that would be an even bigger disaster for the party. Its troubles now are simply internal, but they would lose all credibility if they continue to prop up Harper and his campaign to turn Canada into the 51st state. As Harper is no doubt aware, they would find themselves voting for and passing piece after piece of reprehensible shit which would alienate their voters. They have credibility but when that inevitable election does come, they will have lost it.

Furthermore, it isn't actually as bad for the Liberals as it seems, because even after the fallout of Outremont, polls still show them within a few points of the Conservatives, who are unlikely to gain a majority. In spite of, and perhaps because of, all of Harper's efforts, schemes and tactics, and even with the party's Outremont-inspired spell of self-loathing, the Conservatives have gained practically nothing on the Liberals. This is a sign for Dion and the Liberals to step up and throw themselves on the will of the electorate, and it shows that most Canadians don't want Harper or his agenda and will vote for anyone credible who can replace him. The Liberals are wrong to fear an election and they're wrong to force Canada to endure more of Stephen Harper. It's simply unfortunate that their balls have shrunk - unfortunate for them and for Canada.

A little addition to this post: having read the latest political poll, I need to revise some of my conclusions. The poll's results can be seen here. While of those who responded more said they don't want an election, an even bigger number, 45%, were undecided. I think my belief that the "Canadians don't want an election" line is bullshit stands since almost half apparently don't know what they want yet. Stephane Dion has absolutely horrible numbers but the Liberals are still within 5 percentage points of the Conservatives. That says a lot. I'm forced to conclude, based on the numbers, that Harper would probably remain PM of a minority government if an election happened now, but I think it would also give the NDP a boost and as an NDP supporter I like that idea.

Conspiracy!

2007-10-11T13:12:00.000Z

This is probably the finest piece of inadvertent comedy that The Straits Times has printed in quite a while. I wonder what kind of doctor this guy is; I certainly hope he's not a medical professional because he seems to be batshit loony and we all know how that combination tends to work out...

Okay, well, I suppose we should come clean now and say yes, there is a global conspiracy against Singapore. We've been having the Indonesians burn the trees on purpose and right now, coalition forces composed of Dow Jones, The Financial Times, and a special UN force are planning to invade and make all your women maids. There is no escape.

(The online discussion, incidentally, is a train wreck of nationalistic idiocy which is the bad kind of awesome.)

Why is Singapore suddenly under siege?
Suddenly, Singapore seems to be under attack from many fronts - Indonesia will pile on the pressure on us after the abortive defence cooperation and extradition treaties turned acrimonious despite the diplomatic language used.

The smog will start to go up the PSI scale as Indonesia wants money for not burning down its forests. It refuses to ratify any bilateral framework to fight hot spots in Sumatra.

Commercial investments take on political overtones as our large amounts of money sunk in are held hostage, e.g., the charges of Temasek fixing telco prices in Indonesia.

Expect more harassment on granite and other bilateral matters.

Human-rights groups in Europe have started their campaign to smear Singapore's reputation as a financial hub by accusing it of money-laundering Myanmar junta generals' millions here. The Financial Times joined in the kill with similar misleading reports. Even Myanmar leaders seeking medical treatment here is criticised.

The Dow Jones is having a field day with ammunition on the above topic and fuelling anti-Singapore sentiments in the United Nations.

US investment banks are putting out suggestions that our economy is overheating and predicting less-rosy scenarios for Singapore.

I wonder why there is a sudden coalition of anti-Singapore forces.

- Dr Lim Boon Hee

Thailand 1, England 0.

2007-10-04T13:04:00.000Z

Thai chilli dish sparks terror alert (BBC)

A news roundup

2007-09-20T14:18:00.000Z

the new Code recommends similarly tougher penalties for those guilty of racially or religiously aggravated offences.

This will work in conjunction with another amended law that will make it an offence to utter words - including postings on the Internet - aimed at insulting an individual's race or religion.

There is also a new provision that will hit anyone who stirs enmity between different racial or religious groups.

- The Straits Times 'Major changes to Penal Code to reflect changing times', September 17, 2007.

This being the Internet it's not surprising most people are celebrating the fact that it's now legal to have oral or anal sex as long as you aren't gay, in which case it's a grossly indecent act totally against the conservative core and deserves jail.

But I'm worried about this now. Does this law now make atheism, which basically holds that all religions are bullshit, illegal? Does the right to believe in religion also cover the right to disbelieve?

While I continue to live in Singapore I would technically be banned from expressing my own beliefs because asserting that there is no god and that religions are merely very widely-believed superstitions could get me in trouble if that's considered "insulting" to the very religious, a group of people not particularly known for rationality or restraint.

I honestly don't know, but if there's freedom of religion, is there also a freedom to reject it?

Now, how about this shit?

Iranian president banned from laying wreath at Ground Zero

The request to enter the fenced-in site was rejected because of the construction going on there, and because of security concerns, New York police spokesman Paul Browne said Wednesday.

"Security concerns"? What, do they really think the President of Iran will make a state visit in order to suicide-bomb a construction site with the nuclear bomb he must have strapped to his body? Why doesn't he, a foreign leader of a country which had no involvement in the terrorist attacks, get a chance to show that he feels sad about the whole planes crashing into buildings thing?

The prejudice is astounding. Is it perhaps because the Americans have already reached their own judgement of Ahemdinajad, their own judgement on Iran, and do not want to be forced to reconsider it by anything, even facts?

The fact is that Iran as a nation might just want to show some sympathy towards the United States. It's too bad the entities in question are too bigoted to see it.

Step up, NDP

2007-09-18T11:27:00.000Z

The NDP have won a big victory in Outremont, and a body blow has been dealt to the Liberal Party.

Now, the Conservative strategy, as the media have seen it, is to replace the Liberals as the federalist option in Quebec. However, that has one obstacle: generally speaking, on the whole, Quebecers are more in tune with the left than the right. That's not true of all places and all regions, of course. But that's most likely why the Liberals are the federalist option in the first place.

But now with the Liberals reeling, that's the opening the NDP (or, since we're talking Quebec here, NPD) must take. The NDP's strength is that it is a party of the left which doesn't carry the kind of baggage the Liberals have and even though it isn't a true socialist party, nonetheless it's a decent left-wing choice which is both strong in the West and appeals to voters in downtown Toronto.

This is the time for the NDP to make the breakthrough. To do that, and nationwide as well, there are some things that have to happen.

First, there's a perception that the NDP's solution to everything is spend, spend, spend. Furthermore, they're often accused of not thinking about how financially feasible some of their proposals are. The perception must be fought and the party must also think twice before making extravagant promises.

Second, they have to show that they're the real opposition. The Conservatives and Liberals are not really two different choices; just as with the Republicans and Democrats south of the 49th, they are two sides of the same coin and have more agreements than differences. Neither the Liberals nor the Conservatives have the answers for poverty and income inequality, or the serious environmental issues that have to be dealt with - and they mean much more than just meaningless bills demanding the government meet the Kyoto obligations within a ridiculous timeframe.

Jack Layton has to be seen as a viable Prime Minister. Someone people can see leading the nation. As much of it is in the marketing as it is in actual substance, but nevertheless, it needs to be done, and without reaching over and becoming like Tony Blair's New Labour.

I've said before that I think most people are anti-capitalists but don't realise it. I also think many people are NDP supporters but don't realise it either. It's Jack Layton's task to help people to that realisation, and to do that, he first needs to show that his party are a viable, real choice.

There's plenty of opportunity to seize. The NDP has to seize it now.

Goat sacrifice: an integral part of flight safety

2007-09-05T12:04:00.000Z

Nepal airline sacrifices goats to appease sky god

KATHMANDU (Reuters) - Officials at Nepal's state-run airline have sacrificed two goats to appease Akash Bhairab, the Hindu sky god, following technical problems with one of its Boeing 757 aircraft, the carrier said on Tuesday.

"In the unlikely event of a water landing, please remove the sacrificial goat from under the seat in front of you. Follow the crew's instructions and remain calm while performing the ritual sacrifice to Akash Bhairab..."

Mother nature will eat your face

2007-09-02T13:15:00.001Z

Wandering polar bear heads south again

Did we really think polar bears would so gracefully go extinct when all the ice melts? Oh no. Mother nature don't like extinct. She will send them south and we all know what that means. I think the message is pretty simple... we gotta stop global warming or polar bears will EAT YOUR FUCKING FACE.

Must... crush... capitalism!

2007-08-30T13:04:00.000Z

From POGGE, a wonderfully written piece summing up why capitalism really, really blows.

I'm convinced that many people, especially those who count themselves among the middle class, are anti-capitalists without knowing it. They, perhaps, think that capitalism is a system that has served them reasonably well and that the only alternative perished in 1991. Present-day socialism, meanwhile, spouts the old rhetoric of class war and squander any sympathy it might get from the middles with it because some don't seem to recognise that the middle and professional classes are merely the more fortunate part of the working class. The "bourgeiosie" today make up the very tiny fraction of people who control and own the capital.

Many of the middle class have been able to buy in to capitalism, such as through the stock market, investment funds, or real estate. But the fact is that they are still at the mercy of the extremely rich, the kind who snap up ten condo apartments in a single day. Their small stock holdings are small fry compared to people who can afford to purchase majority shareholdings and the small fry are the hapless victims when an economic shock sends the prices plummeting. Capitalism doesn't serve the middle class or even the upper middle class who might think they're getting a good deal from it. It serves the powerful and the extremely wealthy, the very top 0.001%, and even your lawyer on a six-figure salary driving a Mercedes around is not one of them and never will be.

There has to be a 21st-century socialism that isn't caught up in blind ideology or hectors its citizens for several hours every Sunday. A socialism emphasising the collective power that is the essence of democracy and promising more than the ideological but impractical. And it's something that will probably get more support than most realise.

Tipping point?

2007-08-18T09:10:00.000Z

Arctic sea ice shrinks to lowest area on record (Canadian Press via CBC.ca)

There was less sea ice in the Arctic on Friday than ever before on record, and the melting is continuing, the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center reported.

"Today is a historic day," said Mark Serreze, a senior research scientist at the centre. "This is the least sea ice we've ever seen in the satellite record and we have another month left to go in the melt season this year."

Less sea ice means less heat is reflected, meaning that more heat will be absorbed by the land and water. That in turn means a warmer environment, which could mean more ice if the increase is low enough, but since that evidently isn't happening, we've most definitely gone past that, meaning that more heat is going to mean less sea ice. That in turn means even less heat will be reflected, even more will be absorbed...

Are we coming to the point where that chain reaction starts? Have we already gone past a point of no return?

Not all prices are paid in money.

Have it your way...

2007-08-11T03:24:00.000Z

It's incriminating. It's damning.

It's also already happened. Maher Arar has already been renditioned, tortured and imprisoned and all the resignations and inquiries and apologies can't fix that. And it could happen to anyone.

Are we sure we want to give governments more powers and less oversight in the name of "anti-terror measures"? Do we want or need no-fly lists and all the other intrusive nonsense they say they need? Do we want to live in fear of our governments?

(In fact, this whole case harms anti-terrorism efforts. Governments sharing their information can potentially be very useful and important, but knowing this is the result of it, I'm not likely to support it and neither will most other people. Well done, you morons.)

On a lighter note, Ontario's plan to give eco-friendly cars green licence plates has run into a somewhat problematic snag... of course the Americans shouldn't be doing that; it harkens back to the Middle Ages with thieves having hands chopped off and branded on their foreheads to identify them as criminals, but it's pretty funny all the same.

I still call... where home?

2007-08-09T12:47:00.000Z

You may accuse me of taking any opportunity to take a giant crap on Singapore, and frankly you would be quite near the truth, although the fact is that it isn't really Singapore I'm crapping on most of the time; it's just that it tends to be a composite of many things I can't stand. Artificiality, blandness, superficiality, mindlessness... the list goes on.

Anyway, upon seeing Kit Chan's performance of this year's National Day theme song I was struck by an incredible similarity to a certain other patriotic song... one that is much more well-known, due to its global use on advertising for Qantas. It's an ad that I most definitely have seen in Singapore, so ignorance isn't an excuse for the fact that There's No Place I'd Rather Be is a stunningly blatant rip-off of the theme and idea of I Still Call Australia Home.

I've been to cities that never close down
From New York to Rio and old London town
But no matter how far or how wide I roam
I still call Australia home

I've walked the streets of Cairo and Bombay
I've seen the neon signs on ole Broadway
I've climbed the Eiffel Tower
The Great Wall in one hour
Experienced sweet and sour but that's okay

I'm always travelling, I love being free
And so I keep leaving the sun and the sea
But my heart lies waiting over the foam
I still call Australia home

Seen Hollywood, the sunsets in LA
The London Bridge, Big Ben, the Thames, UK
I've crossed the River Kwai
Yet I still don't know why
I think of you each night and every day

All the sons and daughters spinning 'round the world,
Away from their family and friends,
But as the world gets older and colder,
It's good to know where your journey ends.

There's no place I'd rather be
You'll always be a part of me
And even though I've roamed the world
It's still my home I long to see

Someday we'll all be together once more,
When all of the ships come back to the shore,
I'll realise something I've always known,
I still call Australia home.

This is where my family
And my friends grew up with me
So I'll cross the skies and sail the seas
To be where I wanna be
Cos there's no place I'd rather be

But no matter how far or how wide I roam,
I still call Australia,
I still call Australia,
I still call Australia home.

...in case you missed it, I spliced the lyrics of the two songs together. But really, if only ignorance were a believable excuse, because the fact that Australia is probably the biggest emigration destination for Singaporeans makes this doubly pathetic.

Comparison also yields another interesting observation that may or may not be significant, but since I'm already being a curmudgeony asshole, I'll go for it anyway. I Still Call Australia Home dispenses with the "I've seen these places" part in one stanza and goes on to some mildly poetic lines about Australia and a bond between Aussie compatriots. The point's been made: I've been places, so it's not like I'm some provincial frog-in-the-well moron who loves Australia because it's the only country I've been in. There's No Place I'd Rather Be, unfortunately, doesn't let it rest and ticks off various other places for another stanza. As a result, you spend almost two stanzas and half the song comparing Singapore to nine other places, instead of a single verse and three cities. It's probably the first time a nationalistic song has actually spent so much time focusing on places other than the one it's supposed to make you nationalistic about. And let's be honest, Singapore doesn't really come off well in the comparisons, whereas by this time, the Qantas choir is already busy with "my heart lies waiting over the foam/I still call Australia home".

The problem is that there's no real poetry in the Singapore rip-off. Peter Allen gets away with cheap nationalism because he cushions the blow with some metaphor and appropriate rhyming, like "someday we'll all be together once more/when all of the ships come back to the shore". Jimmy Ye, however, smacks you in the face with it. There isn't much subtlety in this. And, oh God, the horror of the line "Experienced sweet and sour but that's okay", which implies that you will experience "sour" experiences if you go beyond the 600+ square kilometers that make up Malaysia's booger. What a way to inspire the infuriating jingoism that infects so many Singaporeans with their complaints about what they will tell their children after encountering a gay rights protest in Trafalgar Square, how confusing the New York Subway is with its "local" and "express" and "so many colours and you can't tell where the lines go, so disorganised", and of course, their constant paranoia of being carjacked and beaten to death by the armed gangs which rule Malaysia.

When you invite comparisons, whether it's with other places or with a song whose theme you blatantly plagarise, you'd better be sure you're at least up to the mark. Singapore, and There's No Place I'd Rather Be are manifestly not up to the mark. Thank you for playing, please try again.

I have the day off and have too little to do blogging

2007-08-09T10:12:00.000Z

Ever notice that the stars in the Singapore flag form a pentagon? And what does the pentagon represent? Yes that's right, the Pentagon, the headquarters of the American military! Surely this sly, sneaky wink of the eye is compelling evidence that SINGAPORE IS ACTUALLY A HOLOGRAM CREATED BY THE CIA AND THE US ARMY TO SECRETLY BE USED AS A DEATH RAY TO CONTROL THE ASIAN CONTINENT!!!!

Terrorist goes free!

2007-07-29T03:03:00.000Z

Australia drops terrorism charges against doctor - International Herald Tribune

Among the "mistakes," Bugg said, was that the SIM card had not been found in the jeep that burst into flames at the Glasgow airport, as the prosecution had said, but was in the possession of Sabeel Ahmed, who was several hundred miles away.

Also contrary to earlier police and prosecution statements, Haneef had not lived with the Ahmed brothers, Bugg said Friday.

It was in large measure because of that now erroneous assertion of association that the immigration department had revoked Haneef's visa. On Friday, Andrews said he would now review that decision and that until the review was complete Haneef was free to live where he wished, but had to call the Immigration Department daily.

Okay, so law enforcement reacts swiftly to apprehend the Al-Qaeda operatives masterminding trucks being driven into airports, only it turns out this guy is actually completely innocent, the police fucked up and the prosecution can't prove anything in court. Also his life is ruined and he might end up getting deported. But you just know that the media, especially the right-wing media, will presume guilt and this case will become some kind of bizarre argument for laxer legal standards and more trampling on rights as far as "terrorism" is concerned.

If I sound over-cynical, well, I think I've got plenty of reason to be. The "war on terror" is just getting even more farcical.

Eaten by Singapore

2007-07-22T05:34:00.000Z

From The Age:

WHEN shareholders in Perth-based energy utility Alinta Ltd gather to vote on the $15 billion carve-up of the company on August 13, few of them will realise the remarkable historical event they will trigger.

In accepting $4.5 billion of cash from Singapore Power for a suite of Australian electricity and gas distribution assets, Alinta shareholders will lift the total value of Australian business assets controlled by the Singapore Government to almost $30 billion.

This will exceed the value of commercial assets owned by our own Federal Government, which is surely an unprecedented situation for any First World country. How can a foreign power own more of Australia than our own government?

And no, I don't think he's being xenophobic. Why should people thousands of kilometers away profit from and control crucial parts of your economy and infrastructure? Not that anything nefarious is taking place, but simply, Australia's assets should belong to Australia, or at least an Australian, just as Alcan should belong to Canada and SingTel should belong to Singapore. Foreign investment isn't necessarily a bad thing. But there are many remarkable similarities between Australia and Canada and both have to be careful about hollowing themselves out.

In the end, though, it'd be great if democratic ownership could prevail. In truth, there isn't any rational basis to think Australian capital owners will care more about the interests of Australian consumers than Singaporean capital owners, because for better or worse they driven by money and not the ephemeral emotional ties to nations. And this doesn't mean just government ownership, though it can mean that if it's a democratic, transparent and accountable government. What it does demand is that the company is accountable to its customers and its employees - not the elite cabal of large shareholders - and public or private makes little difference if this kind of democratic structure exists.

"You think this your father's army arh?"

2007-07-14T09:59:00.000Z

Singaporeans can rest easy knowing that their royal family's tattletale prats will always be valiant watchdogs for misdeeds in the civil service...

I suppose I'm not really all that qualified to comment and besides, there's nothing insightful or original I can really say about this. Having read the e-mail, though, I think he's a naive, condescending, self-righteous twat, and I see shades of "get out of my elitist uncaring face".

Still, I suppose it's always going to be problematic when bitching to your dad about your nasty sergeant can be considered bypassing the chain of command, and you have to be very careful about your answer to the eternally-posed question, "you tink this is your farder's army is it?"

The value of music

2007-07-14T00:31:00.000Z

Prince sparks U.K. uproar with weekend CD giveaway

Yes, he does look really creepy in that photo. But give someone credit for putting up a fight. And there was one quote in that article I wanted to pick out:

Others have said that the giveaway practice diminishes the value of the music.

Which I completely agree with. In this modern world, "value" should be determined entirely by how much money you can make out of something and music is a commercial commodity now. I've always felt that buskers and street performers should be rounded up and shot for diminishing the value of music by allowing people to hear it for free. To do otherwise is economically inefficient and will only lead to communism.

Hollow it out...

2007-07-13T12:46:00.000Z

I was going to write an angry diatribe about the Alcan takeover and Canada's economy being sold off to foreign lands, but it seems the Toronto Star saved me the trouble.

Foreign buy of Alcan no 'win' for Canada.

Spare the rod...

2007-07-08T01:20:00.000Z

I know I'm a little late on this story but anyway, here goes.

Last week, it emerged that a 20-year old convicted of vandalism in Singapore was caned three times more than he was supposed to be due to a clerical error. His family then asked for $3 million in compensation. Quite predictably, the government rejected this kind request and decided (i.e., dictated) that an apology would suffice.

SINGAPORE: The government regrets an error which led to a 20-year-old vandal being caned three strokes more than ordered in his sentence, but has rejected his family’s request for S$3mn ($1.94mn) in compensation, a statement said yesterday.

Steps have been taken to ensure “that the mistake will not happen again”, said the Ministry of Law and the Ministry of Home Affairs.

Dickson Tan Yong Wen, 20, was sentenced to nine months in jail and five strokes of a rattan cane on February 28 for two offences involving abetting an illegal moneylender to harass a debtor.

A court clerk identified as Kelvin Kwek added three more strokes to the punishment when he was preparing the paperwork.

The caning was carried out on March 29.

Tan is still suffering from the trauma and has become quiet and withdrawn compared to his previous talkative and active state, said Ho Gee Lin, his mother.

The statement from the two ministries said Tan did not object to the number of strokes he would be receiving on three separate occasions.

The 52-year-old Ho however said her son had alerted two prison officials to the error prior to the caning.

“My son is prepared to go for a lie detector test,” The Sunday Times quoted her as saying.

The housewife said the officials dismissed her son’s protests and he decided to stop pointing out the mistake out of fear of being further punished for insubordination.
Lawyer Joseph Chen, acting for the family, advised her to seek the S$3mn in compensation based on legal principles in the United States and Britain.

Tan is currently on home detention and due to complete his sentence in August.
Eight strokes meant he was caned by two prison staff, each delivering four strokes, to ensure the last was as forceful as the first.

Kwek has since resigned from the subordinate courts.

Ho said she was asked to accompany her son when he reported to a home-detention-scheme reporting centre earlier this month. A legal officer apologised then.

I should explain, of course, that in Singapore and several of its neighbouring countries, caning is a common judicial punishment applied for a very large number of crimes, including robbery, rioting, "sodomy or gross indecency between males", and the British are to thank for bringing with them this wonderful bit of civilisation when they colonised Southeast Asia in the 19th century. Still, of course, you can hardly blame the British for the fact that it continues to this day.

What this caning actually involves is prisoners being thrashed with a big piece of rattan, 1.2 metres long and up to 1.27 cm in diameter, several times. Each stroke must break the skin or it does not count, if you black out they will stop and wake you up, and the cane is usually soaked in antiseptic beforehand, so it's not so bad. I mean, they really do care about the welfare of criminal scum and actually try to avoid them getting infected wounds on their buttocks! They even will protect your kidneys so you won't accidentally die from a misplaced stroke! What a civilised society this is! They'll even exempt you from caning if you've been sentenced to death! Wait, wait, no, I'm being sarcastic and unfair. Here I am judging non-Western people by Western standards. I really should be more tolerant of state-sanctioned brutality; after all, it's well known that corporal punishment has a powerful deterrent effect and those countries which don't practice it are crime-ridden hellholes where no one dares to walk the streets even in broad daylight, and Saudi Arabia is of course a much better and safer place to live in than, say, Australia.

Anyway, this isn't the first time it has happened in Singapore. In fact, in 1991 a man was caned 48 times, twice the legal limit of 24. If you'd care for a more vivid description of what that would be like, you might care to have a look at this website.

But what's the most astounding thing? That no one gives a shit. Oh, of course, there was some outcry but this had mainly to do with how the error failed to be caught, rather than with the fact that unquestionably cruel and brutal punishments are routine in the country. Singaporeans actually seem to really believe that if they got rid of caning (and the death penalty, while we're at it), crime would dramatically increase overnight. These are non-issues. Last year, in the wake of the case of the Vietnamese-Australian drug smuggler, the Sunday edition of The Straits Times reported that support for the death penalty in Singapore was 96%. This isn't even being talked about. One is forced to conclude that this is a sign that no one cares.

Has this place really gone "from Third World to First"? No. It's gone from poor to rich, and that is all.

The big 140.

2007-07-01T08:36:00.000Z

Yar.

Poll time!

2007-06-23T03:44:00.000Z

The Globe and Mail poll question formulating people are either extremely clever or extremely lazy with this latest one:

Well, I'm kinda happy, but at the same time I am quite pissed off about... er... so I'm mostly happy but it's not like I can't say I'm not unhappy, but then that means I'm not really 100% happy, am I? So I'm not actually happy, but - AAAUGH!

I support the troops more than you!

2007-06-21T11:00:00.000Z

"I think it's important that Toronto demonstrate its support for the troops given the perception that some how the city wasn't supportive, which was never true."

-David Miller, Mayor of Toronto, quoted by the CBC

You hear that, Halifax, Vancouver, Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Quebec City, all you cities with no yellow ribbon decals on your firetrucks, ambulances and police cars? You are unsupportive of the troops! Don't you realise we cannot have any meaningful discussions without making it clear that we all support the troops? It is because of your failure to support the troops that they are dying so much! Yes, you heard me, you evil troop-killers! Toronto is supporting the troops, but all you residents of non-troop-supporting cities with your non-troop-supporting fire engines are just as responsible for the most recent tragedy as if you personally rigged up that IED that brought the death toll to 60! It cannot possibly be a political statement because how can supporting the war in Afghanistan, I mean, the troops, possibly be a political issue? How dare you politicise the troops by using them like props for your political gain!

However, this is only a small step. I implore Toronto, which has demonstrated foresight and leadership in troop support, to support the following causes by affixing suitable decals to its city vehicles. Any less would be unworthy of Canada's leading city.

I call upon Toronto and all cities to support:

curing cancer

global cooling

ending child poverty

the war on AIDS

Amnesty International (and the hell with the Catholics!)

the war on drugs

marijuana legalisation

organ donation

polar bears

stingrays

The Slow Food movement

independent recording artists

kittens

puppies

kitten-puppy hybrids

fetuses

local business

hardworking farmers who are the backbone of this country

whipped cream

feeding the world

jellyfish

free love

legalised prostitution

stem-cell research

hardworking Canadians

hardworking Lithuanians

the softwood lumber industry

the fight against deep integration

Maher Arar

education

children who are the future

children who are not the future

babies

people not dying

human rights and shit

Only when all public vehicles are plastered with decals showing support for everything will Canada's cities finally be able to hold their heads high. And support the troops, of course.

But... Kyoto is a socialist scheme!

2007-06-14T23:48:00.000Z

Global warming good for Canada, Yale study shows

But the problem isn't just that the temperatures are rising. It's the change itself that is the problem. It's happening too fast for us to deal with. Even the more extreme weather and the flooding of Bangladesh aside, our settlement patterns and economic activities are all based on climate patterns that have existed for hundreds of years, and now that they're suddenly changing, we're in the shit because we probably won't be able to adapt fast enough. Economies, countries and cities don't just radically alter themselves overnight.

Think of the ski resort employees across the European Alps who are going to have to find new employment and what's going to happen to the towns built on that industry. London was fortunate to have built the Thames Barrier a while ago - but they're already talking of extending it. Venice, or at least its first floors, could disappear entirely. Australia is experiencing the worst drought in history with no end in sight.

Even if it really does turn out good for Canada, if you can call a Canada without polar bears "turning out good", it would show a horrendous and callous lack of global awareness to think global warming should go on just so we can grow a few more bushels of wheat; and a few more really is what you'd get since the soils up north aren't actually so fantastic they'd yield a lot. And I strongly doubt that the benefits and costs will even out - after all, as the article points out, savings you get from heating in the warmer winter will evaporate when you need more cooling in the hotter summer.

...and there goes the Atlantic

2007-06-13T14:02:00.000Z

(See, it's all about momentum...)

With all that's gone on in the political scene it's actually pretty hard to believe that the last election was January 23, 2006. Less than 17 months ago. Now that the budget has passed the House of Commons the immediate trigger for the fall of the Harper minority is past, but the Conservatives have never looked weaker.

And while the attention is now focused on the latest acrimony with the Atlantic provinces, in reality, Harper can afford to piss off Atlantic Canada because he doesn't actually have that much to lose there besides his Minister of Foreign Affairs - yet, I have the feeling he'd be dispensible in Harper's majority-winning schemes. Not that it's anything more than a fantasy at this point, though.

However, there are only eight seats Harper can lose in the Atlantic provinces, five of them in the two angry provinces. If he's focused on pleasing Ontario and Quebec, he's probably hoping the gains there will offset the losses*. Even if Harper lost all his Atlantic seats, and that isn't likely, he'd still be ahead of the Liberals.

So the province to watch for the political impact of this latest federal/provincial flare-up, though, isn't Nova Scotia or Newfoundland, but Saskatchewan, where there are similar, if less outspoken rumblings^, but where Harper stands to lose twelve seats. Again, it would be pretty unrealistic to expect Sasketchewan to switch from blue to red just over dealings with the federal government, but damage to Harper's credibility there could be a lot more harmful than damage in Atlantic Canada, where there's a lot of red and orange.

* Of course, this also assumes that Ontario and Quebec voters won't sympathise with Nova Scotians or that they won't also see it as a sign that Harper will screw with their provinces as well. Of course, the latter also applies to all of Canada but this alone wouldn't cost him seats elsewhere.

^ Oops. Spoke too soon.

"But I got four As!"

2007-06-13T01:39:00.000Z

A lot of very disappointed distinction-toting A-level students are sore right now over not getting into the course they wanted at the National University of Singapore (NUS). We're talking people with four As. No, not four A-level passes, but four A grades in four A-level subjects. And how else to express this than - you guessed it - angry forum letters to The Straits Times about foreign student quotas and how unfair the Project Work component is.

But really, what it just shows is that quite simply, the competition in Singapore's education system is so intense it is ridiculous. Then again, what do I know? I've never had that kind of attachment to academic achievements. I've never cared that much and I wasn't raised in the kind of Asian background that values it so all-consumingly highly. I'm happy with being who I am - but to some teachers it's a character flaw.

This is transcendently silly, but what else do you expect in a system and society which wants everything to be explicitly quantified?

2007-05-24T08:11:00.000Z

Okay. Much more than a month. Sorry. I blame society.

Hiatus

2007-04-08T12:05:00.000Z

We're forced to bed, but we're free to dream
All us human extras, all us herded beings
And after a glimpse over the top
The rest of the world becomes a gift shop

I'll be back in a month or so.

More Harper shit.

2007-04-05T14:47:00.000Z

I thought this was a great column.

It does get me thinking, maybe Harper was an ideologue before, and that's given way to just a desire for power. It would explain why he's willing to do and say pretty much anything that will get votes and why his government doesn't seem to do anything without a political, vote-winning (or vote-buying, if you prefer) motive behind it.

But just below the surface lies the Harper of old, and there you can see the Harper of now trying to undermine judicial independence and fill the courts with judges he likes, saying the Liberals are Taliban-likers, and adopting Bush-style hide-the-military-coffins-and-don't-lower-the-flag tactics.

In the end, I think it's simply power he wants, and that seems like all that matters to him. If he can sneak in some of his hard-right ideology, he'll do it, but he'll break promises and flip-flop all over the place to win the votes.

Ministerial pay in the spin cycle

2007-04-05T01:20:00.000Z

The government-controlled media of Singapore is in full spin mode on ministerial pay, as today's Straits Times front page evinces (or see page 28, where the middle graphic carefully explains to readers why they are stupid for not fully supporting ministers getting paid more). Lee Kwan Yew takes up all except one column of the prime front-page-above-the-fold space, bumping the much bigger news that Iran is releasing the British sailors to the bottom, next to a WOW GOOD NEWS! GAHMEN IS AWESOME! story that the stock market is at an all-time high.

"The cure to all this talk is really a good dose of incompetent government, he said in his first comments on impending salary increases... Singaporeans' asset values would also disappear, he warned, adding that "your apartment will be worth a fraction of what it is, your jobs will be in peril, your security will be at risk and our women will become maids in other people's countries."

...at which point, I burst out laughing. Maybe he really is going senile.

But seriously now, I hate that bastard so much. As Lee Kwan Yew feels death's clammy grip tightening his egomaniac impulses kick in. Already he's tried and mostly succeeded at making the contributions of people like Goh Keng Swee his own contributions. His blustering about how opposition parties will be incompetent at governing is nothing new, but in fact it's not just people who oppose him, but anyone else.

Is $1.2 million versus $2.2 million really such a big deal that anyone with that choice will go for the million extra, leaving incompetent people to take the $1.2-million-a-year job which is three times the pay of the President of the United States (okay, yes, he is incompetent, but predecessors were paid less and not all of them were complete loons)? Well, in Singapore it is. And that's no one's fault but Lee Kwan Yew's. The premise of his argument is actually correct. But that's only because of his failings. He has created a society where money and material possessions is all people care about. $1.2 million a year isn't enough when you can make $2.2 million (never mind that the great majority could never dream of ever making that much over their entire working lives). He stamped out idealism for pragmatism and this is the ugly result. Thanks so much for your insights, oh great Emperor Minister Mentor Lee. How could life possibly continue to exist on Earth without you?

News roundup

2007-04-05T00:36:00.000Z

Am I a bad person for finding these news stories hilarious?

Gunmen abduct 22 Shiite shepherds, thousands of sheep (Houston Chronicle/Associated Press)

BAGHDAD — Heavily armed gunmen today abducted 22 Shiite shepherds who were tending thousands of sheep and had wandered into a dangerous Sunni area west of Baghdad, while six power plant workers were gunned down in northern Iraq.

Woman Dies in Shooting at CNN Building (The Guardian)

Soon after the shooting, CNN's own coverage of the shooting was being shown on large-screen televisions inside the atrium, near the escalator where the shooting had just taken place.

Is it still a "socialist scheme"?

2007-03-30T01:55:00.000Z

Clean air act panel takes on hotly debated bill again (CBC)

Climate ignites election fever (Toronto Star)

It's put up or shut up time now for Stephen Harper.

I think I know why someone who called the Kyoto protocol a "socialist scheme" to wreck developed economies suddenly cares so much about the enivronment. I think it's fairly obvious that when the environment has rocketed to issue number one, when the last two winters have been the warmest and second-warmest ones ever recorded, when the signs of global warming are all over Canada's vast Arctic territory and the polar bears are now the ones who need the saving, you would have to be pretty stupid to continue to be in denial and expect people to vote for you.

In that sense it's not fair to point to Harper's, or the Conservatives' past record in this regard. They should get a chance to wake up from the spin supplied by the various Astroturf organisations (i.e., with fake grassroots) to the reality. Neither is blathering on and on about twelve years of "Liberal inaction" because the point really is, what are you doing now?

So, that said, I think I know why someone with a history of being a climate change skeptic, the leader of a party which hasn't given a shit about the environment for so long, is suddenly painting himself as a green crusader and even trying to say Al Gore approves (and Gore quickly clarified that he did not). It's because he would have to be a complete moron to ignore the number one issue, and because he wants his majority.

So I think he's insincere. I think he's insincere about all his moves to appear moderate and reach over to the middle, so much so that his policies don't look all to different from Liberal Party ones. It's because he wants people who usually vote Liberal to feel fine about voting for him. He's betting that if it comes down to leaders rather than what the leaders' policies, he will beat Stephane Dion. Hence his attacks on Dion's leadership abilities.

But all that's what I think. By seeing what he does with the newly revised Clean Air Act, we will know for sure. While I don't like international carbon-trading since it tends to be a convenient way to pay some money, do nothing, achieve nothing, and feel good about it, overall the changes give it the bite it needs.

At least one Tory MP slammed the revised clean air act as a multibillion-dollar tax on industry.

Has the facade crumbled? Will we finally see what Harper really cares about - his friends in big business, his backers in the oil sands? If he's really seen the light about the environment, I don't see how he can kill provisions that would actually do something and take some action against heavy polluters and make them internalise some of the external costs they've been generating. But if all he needs the environment for is to not appear as a revolting right-winger to the Ontario and Quebec voters, we will see him kill the Clean Air Act and make all kinds of ridiculous excuses for it in the vein that his backbenchers are doing now.

Harper said at the time: "We have a plan that is going to replace rhetoric with results, a plan that is going to move from short-term headlines to long-term progress, a plan that is going to get things done on the environment."

Put up or shut up time now, The Right Honourable Stephen Harper. This revised bill will do that while the toothless platitude you sent into the committee would not have. Are you for real, or are you just doing and saying anything you think will get you a majority? Can you be trusted with the environment or not? Can you be trusted at all? It's quite obvious I don't like you and I am biased against you. But this is your chance to prove me wrong.

Some Quebec election analysis

2007-03-28T11:04:00.000Z

Hmmm.

There's lots of implications for federal politics which could take a while to sort out. It all hinges really on who voted ADQ and why. There are three main categories, I think.

- Federalists who were fed up with the Quebec Liberals.
- Sovereigntists who were fed up with the PQ, or Boisclair himself.
- Federalist conservatives who had always been voting for the Liberals to keep the PQ out of power, but now voted ADQ because it was viable.

How big that third bloc is will have the widest implications for Harper's desire to win a majority, and for Dion to prevent that. For a long time, federalist Quebecers had only the Liberals, both federally and provincially, as a viable party. How much of that was just perception, and how much of that was because most Quebecers really are Liberal Party supporters? Or put another way, does the ADQ's victory - because let's not pretend Charest is a winner in any sense other than he won the most seats - signify that Quebecers are conservatives and really are in agreement with Harper's Conservatives, or that they just found the Charest-or-Boisclair choice so revolting they revolted?

And more interesting, is this a defeat or a victory for Harper? He invested so much into Charest, wanting a federalist victory. Well, he did get a federalist victory. Somewhat. The ADQ might not want to secede from Canada, but they are "autonomist" and want to take more power from Ottawa. Charest himself wasn't popular but did he also get walloped because Quebecers didn't want to endorse Harper's political pandering? Was it a case of "we know you're just a disingenuous, power-hungry shit, Harper", expressed through the rejection of his pet, Charest?

It's enough to make your brain explode, but some pollsters are undoubtedly getting ready to accost some people in order to figure out what really happened. Still, what I'd really like to know is, if the issue of sovereignty/autonomy/federalism were put aside, who would Quebecers really vote for?

Very rough translation:
"I'm macho, I hate trade unions, I'm xenophobic and I detest B.S.!"
"...Do you have any faults?"

Happy Stockwell Day!

2007-03-24T09:33:00.000Z

Ex-MP doesn't deny documents at heart of Day nomination scandal

A former MP doesn't deny writing a handful of faxes in 2000 that allegedly prove he was paid to resign and let Stockwell Day run in his riding.

"The documents in question, written seven years ago, are what they are," Jim Hart wrote Friday in an e-mail to CBC News.

"[They] can be taken out of context or spun in any direction the conductor wishes."

Well, that kind of does the incriminating.

Whoa.

2007-03-22T11:24:00.000Z

Liberals furious at Harper's Taliban accusation

Harper's regime is looking queasily like Bush's in terms of political tactics. Thankfully, we've all learnt a valuable lesson about characterising any criticism of the government as being unpatriotic, supporting terrorists, non-support of the troops, etc. Well, what I really mean is "hopefully"...

---

I kinda agree with POGGE's take on it. Here's to Harper sinking his own ship with his own loose lips.

Also check out this lovely 22 Minutes skit.

Gus? Is that you?

2007-03-18T09:19:00.000Z

Yer Not The Ocean music video: environmental subtext much?

Gord's facial expressions are priceless. But where the hell are the rest of the band in the World Container videos? And why is Gord continually the subject of pursuit? Why why why? Oh, the questions! So many questions!

American Inquisition

2007-03-16T09:11:00.000Z

Alleged 9/11 mastermind confessed to Pearl execution: U.S.

...and much more, in fact. He also says, "I was responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z", and says he was the mastermind behind

The shoe bomb attempt

The Bali bombings

The 1993 World Trade Centre bombing

He also confesses to having planned bombings of Library Tower, the Sears Tower, the Empire State Building, American military vessels in Gibraltar, oil tankers in Singapore, the Panama Canal, bridges in New York, Heathrow, the New York Stock Exchange, Big Ben, and Canary Wharf, as well as attempting to assasinate Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Pope John Paul II (terrorists are not very patient people, apparently; if they wanted him to die they could've just waited).

Doesn't that just seem a little over-the-top? What it sounds like is he was tortured. You can imagine them demanding, "That's all? You think we're idiots? More waterboarding for you!" Of course, that's crazy. America is the beacon of liberty and human rights and would never torture anyone. Besides, it's illegal to torture people. Right?

"Is any statement that you made, was it because of this treatment?" the unnamed official asked Mohammed, according to the transcript. "To use your word, you claim torture. Do you make any statements because of that?"

Mohammed's answer is unclear in the transcript, as the military blacked out portions of his response. Later in the transcript, Mohammed is recorded as stating that he gave his confessions without pressure, threats or duress.

The military said it blacked out various sections of the transcript for security reasons.

Oh dear.

Den of thieves

2007-03-12T11:57:00.000Z

Let's get this one out of the way first, and it's not a joke. Halliburton is moving its corporate headquarters to Dubai.

---

Poor congregants of church cheer on obscenely rich pastor after newspaper expose.

It's stunning that this is their reaction to the revelation that their pastor was fleecing them in a most obscene way, demanding the mostly poor congregation tithe money, which he used for his own benefit instead of using it for charity, like you'd expect him to. And it kind of reveals what's so fustrating about the overly religious: their willful, defiant denial of reality. The realisation that the man they consider a man of God, their spiritual leader, has in fact been exploiting them in a horrific and disgusting way, would collapse their little bubbles. So the solution is to decide that the expose was the work of Satan and give even more money to the pastor.

Men like that are the true face of evil, even more so because they exploit the religious inclinations of people who don't know better and can't be expected to know better. And people like that aren't a rarity. There was also that documentary about Benny Hinn's life of luxury, and I'm willing to bet that many of those evangelical megachurches down in Jesusland have similar nastiness going on.

From an atheist perspective this is truly heinous. It's building lies upon lies and abusing people's emotions to take advantage of them. It's complete moral bankruptcy. It's a pity I don't believe in Hell, because it's something people like this pastor richly deserve. I think Jesus said something about camels and needles at some point.

Sports roundup

2007-03-10T17:24:00.000Z

Okay, I have just watched Italy vs. Wales in the Six Nations. The referee did a fucking amazing Mick McGeough*. You probably don't know what I'm talking about. Let me just give you as unbiased a version of events from someone supporting Wales and fuming mad.

It is the last minute of the game and in an toughly-fought, even contest, Italy is ahead by three points, 23-20, after scoring a huge try. If Wales score a try (worth 5 points, 7 if converted), they will win. If they score a drop goal or a penalty kick (worth 3 points), they will draw. Wales quickly and desperately hammer their way towards the try line and with seconds remaining, are awarded a penalty. James Hook picks up the ball and asks the referee if they have time to kick the ball into touch and go for five points - the other option is to kick a penalty for the draw, which would be more or less assured. But, the referee holds up 10 fingers and tells him he has 10 seconds. So he quickly puts the ball into touch at the corner.

Knowing the next stoppage will be the end of the game, the Welsh players run to form the line-out, determined to get the vital try and the win... except the referee, now being told through his radio that time is up, blows the final whistle, despite having told the Welsh players just seconds earlier they had time to kick into touch, and therefore screwing them out of what would have been almost certainly a draw since they would definitely have gone for the easy three points if the referee had said, "no".

What the FUCK.

*A "Mick McGeough" (mick muh-GOO), n., is a referee directly affecting the outcome of a game with a profoundly idiotic decision in the dying seconds. Such as this one.

Now, about the Chris Simon incident. I think it will explain a lot about the difficulty in following hockey from afar when I say that my first reaction was "What? Calgary traded him?"

This one is ugly, no doubt about it, and luckily there's no serious injury done. But it simply can't be compared to the Bertuzzi sucker punch. Simon himself had just been checked from behind into the boards and more than likely lashed out in the heat of the moment. This is not the kind of premeditated assault on behalf of a "wronged" teammate. This doesn't excuse the act, of course. But just as a murder charge is reduced if proven that it took place as a crime of passion, so Simon should get suspended for the month or so left of the season, maybe the playoffs, but no more. Too harsh a punishment will not be fair or just, and it will also show that there's a double standard in the NHL's disciplinary actions, where the stars get off lightly (and yes, I do think Bertuzzi got off lightly considering what he's doing now versus what Steve Moore is doing) and the other players are labelled "goons" and "thugs", and bear the brunt of harsh punitive action. After all, it could just as easily Holloway being suspended if Simon had been injured by his hit.

And something uglier took place in the Wales vs. Italy rugby match I just talked about, but which will likely take longer to crop up since the officials missed it, though it was plain as day on television - Bergamasco (I think it was Marco, can't remember which one) took a dirty and deliberate punch at a Welsh player for no apparent reason, splitting the area around his left eye open. But it's different in rugby. There's some truth in the cliche that hockey players don't respect another anymore - compare to rugby where there is less of this retaliative frontier justice going on.

Contact sports will always, inevitably have the machismo and the violence. It can't be helped. And hockey will always have more serious injuries because the speed amplifies the forces involved and sticks are dangerous things. But things have to change. In any discussion of who is the greatest player of all time, people always mutter that Wayne Gretzky had the benefit of tough guys like Mark Messier looking out for him. The fact the Gordie Howe fought his own battles and has better stats than Gretzky when you include his WHA play indeed to me places him as the number one. But the point is, the NHL needs to be an environment where players like Gretzky don't need someone for "protection". How many Ovechkins and Crosbys is the NHL missing because somewhere along the line a coach decided they weren't big enough? The "Code" needs to evolve, or die altogether because there's no point in a code no one is abiding by.

NHL gets new broadcast deal!

2007-03-09T04:05:00.000Z

NHL Signs Broadcast Deal With Food Network

NEW YORK—Flanked by Food Network president Brooke Johnson and cooking-show host Rachael Ray, Commissioner Gary Bettman announced yesterday that the NHL has opted out of its contract with the Versus cable channel (formerly the Outdoor Life Network) and has reached a long-term broadcasting deal with the Food Network starting in the 2007-08 season.

The Gilded Cage

2007-03-08T10:13:00.000Z

Singapore is a dictatorship, all right. Not in the sense that Burma is a dictatorship, or that North Korea is a dictatorship, but the same constriction of liberty is openly evident. The critical, and you could say the most insidious part of the system is that it is dictatorship by consent. There has never really been any real taint of fraud in the electoral system - the PAP does not need to do that. People willingly vote them into power.

The maintenance of the regime, therefore, is to ensure that people keep voting them into power. This demands good-looking statistics like high GDP growth rates and the touting of high placings in global rankings like "competitiveness" or "most open economies" (which is patently ridiculous since it assumes that those are necessarily good objectives for economic policy, but that's for another article). Statistics are meaningless, however, if people don't feel that life is good. So money is duly doled out towards this. Subsidised housing, subsidised medical care, Workfare: social spending, but not a cent more than strictly necessary, it should be said. It's like a wet dream of a capitalist; self-interest - staying in power - motivating actions for the good of everyone, as if by an invisible hand! Oh boy!

It also helps that Singapore is more developed than the surrounding countries. I believe this has to do with the ease of administering a tiny city-state with considerable development inherited from colonial rule versus a medium-sized country of 30 million, or an archipelago of over 17,000 islands with an extremely diverse and divided population in excess of 200 million, not any inherent superiority in quality of leadership or policies pursued. In my view governing Singapore versus governing Indonesia or Malaysia, and achieving what Singapore has achieved, is analogous to playing a computer game on "easy" versus "ultra-insane" difficulty. But enough of that, I'm straying from the point.

Before we go on let's talk about what would have to happen to make the PAP lose an election, assuming a decent opposition. It's all about the economy. Singaporeans are habituated to all the denials of rights and freedoms and simply don't care enough about social issues to vote out a government based on things like the casinos. For the PAP to be voted out, the economy would have to be in decline; unemployment going up fast, GDP shrinking, and more to the point, there would have to be a loss in confidence in the PAP's ability to make the economy do well again. As long as the confidence is there, the PAP is going to stay in power, and the confidence is there now.

At the same time, though, some freedom is necessary. In order to stay in power, appearances also need to be kept up. Foreign investors may be squeamish about a brutal dictatorship. Yes, capitalism propped up Pinochet, but that was thirty years ago and during the Cold War and the Red Scare. Conscience does sometimes pinch hard enough in these times. Foreign perception is also important so tourists aren't afraid to visit for fear of being messily castrated for being homosexual or publicly flogged for possession of chewing gum, and so people don't say when they get back, "How could you visit Singapore?! You're supporting an evil regime." As it really is, however, there's no reason to do so. The government's social engineering campaigns - Speak Good English, Be Courteous, Flush The Toilet, Make More Babies, etc. - are reported as eccentric oddities rather than extreme manifestations of eccentric despotism, such as North Korea's campaign of Let Us Cut Our Hair In Accordance With Socialist Lifestyle (Singapore did, incidentally, have a similar campaign in the 1960s where men with long hair were discriminated against, in a bid to keep out the influence of what was going on in the 1960s in the West, and I'm not joking about this).

And as much as people like Chee Soon Juan rant and rave, Singapore is still much freer than many other countries. I can write this without fear of being abducted by the secret police in the dead of night and there are no shootings of journalists on the streets or routine executions of political dissidents. However, just because the bars are well-camouflagued doesn't mean they aren't there. It's simply more sophisticated than the typical, brutal expectation of "dictatorship". You could say they have it down to a fine art. And, of course, this is also part of the strategy. With far more repressive regimes around, human rights groups devote their efforts towards Burma, China, Saudi Arabia, etc. Australia and the Philippines occasionally get upset when Singapore executes one of their citizens, and Paul Wolfowitz is compelled to say something about the farcical indoor protest areas during the IMF/World Bank meetings, but it's nothing like the firestorm of international disapproval over acquiring nuclear weapons or imprisoning Aung San Suu Kyi.

Knowing how to pick your battles is of crucial importance and the PAP generally knows which to fight. Indignant blogs read mainly by the few people actively seeking subversive and anti-government material aren't a danger to single-party power. It's when insidious comedians write columns in newspapers attacking the most important part of the PAP's election platform, their economic policy, which is the danger. To avoid making it too oppressive, there's only a limited amount of blatant censorship that can be done.

So it's no surprise what the precious political capital that they have is spent on. I'm sure they have shrewdly calculated the damage to their reputation if they engaged in Internet censorship like China does, plus the inherent difficulty, versus the what they would achieve, and made the eminently rational decision not to bother. Films and foreign television are easier, so they do bother. Ban satellite dishes, snip what they don't like, ban what they really don't like. Local media is incredibly easy to control and potentially the most dangerous to the regime if not controlled, so they really control it. Just ask Mr. Brown.

The result is a gilded cage, and oppression which exists just below the clean and happy surface. Most people don't truly see how little freedom they have because so few care about politics, and also because the victim-in-chief Chee Soon Juan has a reputation of being a nutcase (which, I'll allow, is also due to his portrayal by the state-controlled media monopoly). And the PAP keeps the people under their thumb by tut-tutting at the corruption in Indonesia and the lower development of Malaysia, and constantly assuring Singaporeans it could be worse. It is, in short, almost a perfect dictatorship because it doesn't feel like one.

Small Island, Small Minds

2007-03-05T13:56:00.000Z

(Generalisations are a necessity, and I apologise for them. I am fully aware that there are exceptions. But anyone with experience of Singapore should be able to identify what I'm getting at if they've been paying any attention at all.)

The size of Singapore has worked to its favour to a very great deal. Small means easy to administer, and makes government a lot easier. In this tiny city-state, there's no divide between the rural and the urban; everyone is an urban dweller. You can drive one end to the other, traffic permitting, within thirty minutes. A former Malaysian Prime Minister derisively remarked once that Singaporeans might be rich enough to buy sports cars, but there wasn't enough room in Singapore to get into fifth gear. He then invited such people to visit Malaysia for this purpose. A Taiwanese politician, responding to criticism by a Singapore cabinet minister of their moves towards declaring independence, questioned why Taiwan should care what a little booger of a country had to say (the literal translation was "nose shit").

Singapore is the 17th-smallest country in the world. Some countries are smaller, but not many of these are segregated from their neighbours to the extent that Singapore is. The smallest country is, of course, the Vatican. Some of these smaller countries are tiny European principalities whose main economic activity is being a tax haven or holding a Formula 1 grand prix, like Monaco, Andorra, Liechtenstien (which was accidentally invaded by Switzerland a few days ago), or San Marino. Others are islands surrounded by a great deal of water, like Saint Kitts and Nevis, the Seychelles, or Saint Lucia. Bahrain is smaller by about 27 square kilometers, but it's an Arab state which has one border - with another Arab state.

Small nations are usually surrounded by similar nations. In some cases they are tied to a larger nation in some way. Monaco's head of government is a French citizen and France is responsible for its defence. San Marino is surrounded by Italy and its language is Italian. Caribbean and Pacific islands are similar to each other, and generally have similar origins. Not so for Singapore. Historical events dating from the colonisation of Malaya by the British conspired to create an city on the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula with a population which was overwhelmingly Chinese, in an area where the Malays are the indigenous and the majority population. The 3.3 million Chinese in Singapore are surrounded by one hundred times as many Malays. Singapore is, to a very great extent, an anomaly. Neither here nor there, not fully in either the Western or Far Eastern realm, shorn of any real intrinsic connection to any other nation-state.

And so on this small isolated pocket, besieged seemingly by a great mass of people who are not like them, an island, an isolated island, in so many senses of the word, is it any wonder that Singaporeans don't seem to see past the end of the sea? The world ends on the beach of East Coast Park or Sentosa, on the edges of the seaport, halfway across the Causeway or the Second Link. Beyond, here be dragons. You can drive up to Malaysia for a visit, wary of the rampant anarchy and, for a sense of superiority and to cloak your insecurity, keep on the lookout for things you can compare to Singapore unfavourably once you get back. Or take a ferry to Batam or Bintan for golf - and shelve into the back of your mind the fact that these two islands are bigger than Singapore, yet are mere, unimportant outposts of the vast nation of Indonesia; which together with the Philippines comprise the mystical land where maids come from. You can fly to Thailand to raid the shopping malls of Siam Square. As you get further you hit the West, the white people with their new-age-colonialist ideas of liberal democracy and human rights, Western impositions which Singapore's Asian values can do very well without, thank you - the Americans with their hand-wringing over the brutal and vindictive corporal punishment of the rotan, the Australians who incomprehensibly tolerate people taking drugs and think a drug dealer shouldn't be executed - they are too weak to properly administer justice.

The task constantly falls to foreign leaders to put Singapore in its place. It's true Singapore is a developed country in a developing world. But it isn't jealousy that makes Indonesia cut off sand exports, or makes Thailand want to undo a deal done by a corrupt ex-leader, or riles up Malaysian leaders. It's because Singapore has deluded itself into thinking it's big and into thinking it has more power than it has. It's the frog in a well syndrome. Small minds which see their entire nation in 600 square kilometers, cocky about being richer (and hence more successful, they reason) than everyone around them, meaning they are right and everyone else, languishing in their Third-World hellholes, are wrong. Little wonder the neighbours feel the need now and then to yell, "Shut up you whiny little idiot! Who the hell do you think you are?"

Singapore is not a civilised society, and barbarity lurks just below the surface. For this, I would point to the criminal justice system as the strongest manifestation of this, since it is symptomatic of the attitudes in a society. And Singapore has a criminal justice system which is vindictive and punitive, and is egged on by a simple-minded society which sees jailing, caning and hanging as the ways to keep society orderly. David Marshall, however, the only non-PAP leader Singapore ever had, pointed out: if hanging murderers and drug traffickers deters murders and drug trafficking, how come the number of hangings just keeps going up and up? On a per capita basis Singapore is in exclusive company when it comes to executing people, in the top three with China and Saudi Arabia. This is not a civil society, it is a barbaric one. Singapore has precious little social progress to accompany the economic.

One of Singapore's elite uncaring faces (It was George Yeo, or Goh Chok Tong, I can't remember who exactly) once remarked that you can always spot a Singaporean abroad. That's not a high compliment at all. Unfortunately, it's often much too true; a great number of Singaporeans are immature, whiny, assholes, something most visible when they are surrounded by people who are not. Some of it is cultural and came along in the boats with the immigrants from China who make up the 75% today. And the rest of it has been exacerbated or created since then. I've personally witnessed incredible examples of this. In 2006 I was having blood taken for a medical. The guy who was doing it chatted about the World Cup, just to be friendly and probably to help people relax. Two guys who were behind me in the queue soon emerged and complained that the guy was "stupid" and trying to win "employee of the month or something". And then of course, you have the great tradition of idiotic newspaper letters, like this, which, I should stress, are commonplace since for some reason, any problem is seen as a personal affront and worthy of an incensed letter to The Straits Times. And of course one of Singapore's most popular "blogs" is a showcase of bimboism whose writer will doubtless be delighted to engage in civilised and intelligent discourse. I suppose a good chunk of the traffic is people who go there specifically to be offended and to feel better about themselves by not being her, but that can't drive the popularity. People actually have to care about and respect what you say, and Singaporeans care about and respect airheaded incoherence peppered with numerous disasters of the English language. It is, of course, unfair to judge an entire nation by what blogs its people read. Or is it? Would it be unfair to judge Americans (in general, not individually) based on the vapidity of their popular culture? Hits on a blog are essentially popular endorsement; doesn't that say something about the people who give that endorsement?

You can also see characteristic Singaporean behaviour in dealings abroad too. Just take the example of the Singapore Airlines wanting to fly between Sydney and Los Angeles. It's ridiculous to think that Singapore Airlines has some kind of right to fly it, or that Australia is going to allow it. Yet the corporate boffins apparently decided it would be a good idea to piss off Australia's government by demanding it as if it were theirs by right. It's an incomprehensible arrogance, unless you think of where they're coming from. And foreigners react predictably when confronted with this sort of attitude, which only spawns even more idiotic letters to the newspaper, like this.

Okay. So there's plenty of evidence to point to a general trend among Singaporeans towards immaturity and small-mindedness. In truth, Singapore has a first-world economy, but in pretty much every other sense, it is third-world. And part of it could be geopolitical isolation and the unique situation Singapore exists in. What else contributes?

One easy explanation is that economic progress outpaced social progress, and resulted in a society which only cares about the quantitative. One example is the education system and the offical stance of "meritocracy". Meritocracy requires a way to measure merit, and so in Singapore's education system, assessment is almost entirely quantitative. Even efforts to include extracurriculars, or "Co-Curricular Activities" in Singaporean Newspeak, are quantitative: one point for each year of 80% attendance, one point for representing the school in a competition, one point for holding leadership positions, etc. It's also Asian-style education, which means that the mad cramming, rote memorisation, and extra "tuition" (probably the most commonly and universally mispronounced word in Singapore) lessons seen in China, South Korea and Japan are here, though it must be said, it isn't as extreme. But it does, to a great degree, kill meaningful intellectual and social development and produce students good at taking exams and little else.

There's also the culture where your success in life is judged by your income, your car and your home. In the Singapore lexicon, the "Five Cs" represents a slightly satirical take on the "Singaporean Dream" - cash, a (nice) car, a condominium apartment, country club membership, and a credit card. None of the Western "inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world," or "equality and freedom, a sense of human dignity, and an opportunity to live a rich and meaningful life as a citizen of a free and peaceful world" bullshit. I'm sad to say that it is my belief that this stunningly materialistic, self-centre worldview is inherent in Chinese culture. At Chinese New Year, we greet each other by wishing abundance, wealth, and prosperity (as opposed to merriment during Christmas, for instance) and exchange oranges which are meant to symbolise gold. Outward appearance, or "face", is extremely important in East Asian (including Japanese and Korean) culture as well; status symbols like Mercedes cars and Rolex watches thus proliferate. I base this also on having read of very similar attitudes among the newly-rich of Shanghai who toss obscene amounts of money around and live opulently more to show off their status than because it gives them pleasure. At the same time, however, I think and hope that over time, it will give to a more sophisticated, restrained ethic as they realise there's more to life than showing off your wealth.

So the Chinese culture contributes greatly, and there hasn't been enough time for people to develop the social awareness or even the social civility commonplace and expected in the developed Western cultures built upon the foundations of the Renaissance and The Enlightenment. Why'd you think the government needs to threaten fines and punishment for spitting, not flushing, and littering? But I think above all it's the physical constriction and isolation. When everything outside your tiny nation is different and foreign, the temptation to not care about it and not to think bigger is great. When civic issues are national issues, your perspective becomes a wildly distorted one. And so you can't really blame Singaporeans for anything more heinous than being lazy and foolishly apathetic. That's a poor and sad excuse, but how on earth can the Singaporeans who are aware, progressive, and outward-looking ever hope to change that in an essentially backward society?

2007-03-03T16:37:00.000Z

The gross national product includes air pollution and advertising for cigarettes and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and jails for the people who break them. GNP includes the destruction of the redwoods and the death of Lake Superior. It grows with the production of napalm, and missiles and nuclear warheads... it does not allow for the health of our families, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It is indifferent to the decency of our factories and the safety of our streets alike. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, or the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. - Robert F. Kennedy

David Hicks

2007-03-02T04:39:00.000Z

I was going to tell you all about David Hicks and stuff going on in Australia at the time I was there, but since he's big international news now, I guess there's no need to. Hicks, basically, is an Australian citizen who has been a prisoner at Guantanamo for five years after allegedly being captured in Afghanistan fighting for the Taliban.

Australians, it seemed, were convinced that guilty or not of being a terrorist, he should be given a fair trial (or a "fair go"). Which he probably will not be getting, from the looks of things.

Anti-Terror provisions voted down

2007-02-28T01:50:00.000Z

A small victory for civil rights in Canada as Parliament votes against extending two provisions of the Anti-Terrorism Act.

The two provisions which will now expire allow the detention for up to 72 hours of anyone suspected of being about to commit a terrorist act. Admittedly it's not so terrible because of the definite time limit. The one which really had to go is requiring people to testify in secret or go to jail.

We might actually be able to rest easy with the Liberal Party under Stephane Dion if they continue to vote this way. This is good to see, of course, but the rest of the Anti-Terrorism Act is still on the books. At least it's a hopeful sign that this dangerous fear-driven legislation, written and fast-tracked in the immediate and paranoid aftermath of 9/11, may die out yet.

Nude painting turned to face wall

2007-02-28T01:29:00.000Z

A nude painting has been turned to face the wall at the building which houses the offices of Singapore's Ministry of Communications, Information and the Arts, because the law says that nude art apparently cannot be displayed in a way that the public "can have easy access to it." A guy from the gallery which is displaying the painting objects that it's "wholesome" and has no sexual connotations at all. Of course, the opposing view has to be aired...

But Mr. T.J. Lim, 60, a photographer who was passing by, said, "Older people may be uncomfortable with it as this is a woman without clothes. It might not be good for children passing by as it may affect their studies."

- "Nude art? Not in public area", The Straits Times, February 28, 2007.

I think only a smiley can properly express the WTF factor of this:

My File

2007-02-25T11:11:00.000Z

If the relevant intelligence agencies are collecting a dossier on me, this would undoubtedly be helpful.

Reading is the basics of all learning
I have subscriptions to Time (Asia edition) and National Geographic. I also frequent CBC.ca, and the Toronto Star websites for news, and I get the BBC World Service on radio as well.

I would unreservedly reccomend any book by the following people:

- Douglas Adams
- Ben Elton
- Joseph E. Stiglitz

...as well as the following books in no particular order:

Ronald Wright - A Short History of Progress
Noam Chomsky - Imperial Ambitions
Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner - Freakonomics
John Perkins - Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
Richard Dawkins - The Blind Watchmaker
Greg Palast - The Best Democracy Money Can Buy
Douglas Coupland - Souvenir of Canada
Tim O'Brien - The Things They Carried
John Le Carré - The Constant Gardener
Kazuo Ishiguro - Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro - The Remains of the Day
Bill Bryson - A Short History of Nearly Everything

These are my favorite chords, I hope you like them too

The blog's title may have clued you into the fact that I'm a major fan of The Tragically Hip.

Other bands which I particularly like include:

The Weakerthans
The New Pornographers
The Vines
The Joel Plaskett Emergency

Others which get frequent playtime:

Belle and Sebastian
Death Cab for Cutie
The Velvet Underground
Stripper's Union
Radiohead
The White Stripes
Ozma
Manic Street Preachers

The very first album I bought with my own money of my own free will was The Offspring's Americana. I think I was 11 at the time. Bands which were once favorites include The Vandals, The Ataris, Rage Against The Machine, NoFX, Flashlight Brown and Sevendust. One of my top sources for new music is CBC's Radio 3, otherwise it's mainly word-of-mouth.

Television set to free my mind, television set to drown 'em out

I feel sorry for future generations who will not grow up watching Friends.

The following shows are/were the ones I make/made a point of watching:

Grey's Anatomy
Heroes
The Practice
Whose Line Is It Anyway?
The Amazing Race
Futurama

2007-02-22T11:49:00.000Z

I just don't fit in this place
Their thoughts cast me out of here
Their home has run out of space
My mind's already out of here
Won't you come along, dear?
Won't you come along?

Words that are spoke alone
Phrases you will never hear
Empty rooms and a telephone
That I will never use, never fear
I am all alone, dear
I am all alone

- The White Stripes, "A Boy's Best Friend".

"Shame! Shame!"

2007-02-22T05:25:00.000Z

What in the hell was Stephen Harper thinking?

---
From the Hansard:

Hon. Stéphane Dion (Leader of the Opposition, Lib.):
Mr. Speaker, a democratic country is in trouble when judges warn that the government is putting their independence in peril.

It is sad to say that the Canadian Judicial Council, led by the Chief Justice of our Supreme Court, wrote that the government, “--puts in peril the concept of an independent body that advises the government on who is best qualified to be a judge”.

Will the Prime Minister agree to stop his unprecedented and unacceptable manipulation of our judicial system?

Right Hon. Stephen Harper (Prime Minister, CPC):
Mr. Speaker, as the hon. member knows, under our constitutional system the naming of judges is the responsibility of the elected executive arm of government.

The government has established an independent consultative process that includes, in fact, a broader representation of voices than ever before. We do not want the judicial appointments process to become a private club of judges and lawyers. That is why we included voices as diverse as victims and the police.

Hon. Stéphane Dion (Leader of the Opposition, Lib.):
Mr. Speaker, this is not a matter of police forces, which we all respect. This is a matter of judicial independence. Independence is not an individual right of judges.

The judicial council wrote: “Judicial independence is not the private right of judges but the foundation of judicial impartiality and a constitutional right of all Canadians”.

Why is the Prime Minister jeopardizing this constitutional right that belongs to all Canadians?

Right Hon. Stephen Harper (Prime Minister, CPC):
Mr. Speaker, as the leader of the Liberal Party knows, under our constitutional system, it is up to the elected government to appoint judges.

We take our responsibilities very seriously. Which is why we created advisory committees that include more diverse representation than ever before, including police and victim representatives. The appointment process is not reserved for a private club of judges and lawyers.

Hon. Stéphane Dion (Leader of the Opposition, Lib.):
Mr. Speaker, I explained the problem further to the Prime Minister. He need only read what the council wrote: “—there are seven members who are ... entitled to vote, with four chosen by the Minister of Justice. Because the majority of voting members are now appointed by the Minister, the advisory committees may neither be, nor seen to be, fully independent of the government. This puts in peril the concept of an independent body—”

Will the Prime Minister stop attacking the independence of Canadian judges?

Right Hon. Stephen Harper (Prime Minister, CPC):
Mr. Speaker, obviously the Liberal Party opposes the change we have made, which is to give the police a voice in this process.

I am not surprised, given what I am reading in The Vancouver Sun today, when I read this how the Liberal Party makes decisions: “The Vancouver Sun has learned that the father-in-law of the member of Parliament for Mississauga—Brampton South--”.

Some hon. members: Oh, oh!

---

Of course, it wasn't actually "Oh, oh!" that some hon. members was saying. As the CBC reports, the entire Liberal Party were thumping their desks and chanting "Shame! Shame!"

That was because Stephen Harper had just uttered something exceptionally stupid. It was stupid for three reasons. The first is that it was a blatant personal attack on the family of a Liberal member with little apparent basis for it. Navdeep Singh Bains, the member for Mississauga—Brampton South, is the son-in-law of a man who the RCMP questioned over the Air India bombing. One name among many in a wide-ranging inquiry, certainly nothing to suggest he has a real connection to the bombing. This ties in with the second reason, that Harper actually thinks the Liberal Party is against the changes to judicial appointments Anti-Terrorism Act because they want to protect the father-in-law of one of their members, who, Harper is implying, is a terrorist because the RCMP wanted to talk to him.

The reasoning behind this is so ridiculous it boggles the mind. If he's trying to make a political point he's got to be assuming that Canadian voters are so stupid they'll actually believe such a preposterous accusation, that the Liberal Party of Canada actually made a policy decision in the interests of protecting a terrorist related to their members. And of course you'd first have to accept the incredible assumption that being questioned in connection with something equates to guilt and complicity in that something.

The third reason is the least important, frankly: that such remarks are unbecoming of a national leader, demean the office of Prime Minister of Canada, etc. It was an incredibly weak argument for him to make and the damage is done more to Stephen Harper than to the office he occupies, hopefully not for much longer (to make my bias clear, I support the NDP). For a snarky, sniping, underhanded comment I would add that it was pointless for the Liberal caucus to appeal to Harper's sense of shame, because he evidently has none.

And if you're still with me, reader, it was also a political blunder. The Liberal Party was divided over the Anti-Terrorism Act, and Harper has now galvanised them. By bringing out such a partisan low blow with little apparent need to - I hope you've shared my WTF reaction at Harper switching from "we take our responsibilities very seriously, we created advisory committees" to "of course the Liberals are against us, because one of their MPs is the son-in-law of a terrorist" in about the time it took for Dion to ask a question - he has ensured that his opponents will be unified in anger for the ridiculous cheap shot.

And of course, it certainly doesn't help him to seem less repulsive to the average swing voter, which really is, I think, his main tactic with Stephane Dion not being as inspiring a potential PM as he needs to be.

Tasmania, Part 3

2007-02-21T23:49:00.000Z

Hobart has a lot of firsts and oldests, among them Australia's first pub. It's also never really grown too dense, so the tallest buildings are the Westpac and Hydro Tasmania buildings which are each about 14-odd floors high. It's not a big town so you can pretty much cover the downtown area in a day or two. And that's what I did.

Australian states usually have their own beer; Queensland has XXXX, literally Four-X Beer. On the Gold Coast there are neon signs everywhere with four red Xs on a yellow background, and the unknowing tourist is apt to remark on the great availibility of pornography. Victoria has, of course, Victoria Bitter. In Tasmania they have not one, but two beers, Cascade and James Boag. I very much enjoyed them both. The former is produced at Australia's oldest brewery and they also do a lot of very nice soft drinks.

I also saw a sign while walking about which said "Budgie Smugglers" and featured a budgie wearing that bandit ribbon thingy which is tied around a cartoon burglar's head with two holes of exactly the correct size for said burglar's eyes. At first I thought it was a clever name for a pet shop; it was only later when the subject came up with my Aussie friends, and I don't know what caused it to come up so allow your mind to run wild, that I learned that "budgie smugglers" is in fact an Aussie slang for very tight men's swimwear. Please work it out yourself, and I apologise if you never see small birds the same way again.

Salamanca Market on the weekend is also worth a look at. It's what you'd expect from a market. There is cool stuff there. I found postcards of old airline advertisements of the "The Kangaroo Route, now ONLY 12 STOPS on our luxurious Lockheed Constellation!" variety, snow cones, petitions for David Hicks (more on him later) to be released, and an anti-monarchist selling Eureka flags, which on further reflection I should have bought because they cost twice as much in Melbourne, so I didn't buy one there. Of course, the comparison-shopping was quite useless because I wasn't going back to Hobart, so the end result is that I didn't get one at all, which on further reflection saved even more money. Oh well, it's only reasonable that I'm useless at shopping.

Where there isn't a market on there are cafes and art galleries. There also seemed to be a party headquarters of the Australian Labour Party there. Oh, wait. It's Labor, no U. Australia does not display the pathological hatred of the letter U that Americans seem to have - and you wouldn't expect it from a place which has an English monarch on the money - but still, it was strange to see that.

And with that it was off to Melbourne, leaving the gloriously affordable and delicious seafood of Hobart behind. We did stop at an oyster farm on the way to the airport at a place called Barilla Bay. They have a great restaurant/food shop where oysters are obviously the main attraction; judging from the menu a great deal of the chef's work is figuring out new things to do to them. It had a great view, looking out over the farm to the water to some rolling hills. Everywhere in Tasmania has a great view of this kind, it seems.

The Jetstar bastards decided to stick me in the last row with non-reclining seats, of course. You will not be interested to know that it was the exact same aircraft, VH-VQV, which I originally took from Sydney, which now flew me to Melbourne. And if you are wondering why someone who notices the registrations of his planes doesn't seem to know how many stops the Kangaroo route took in the 1970s or that Qantas didn't fly Lockheed Constellations, (or that Lockheed didn't make the Constellation which I honestly can't be arsed to research right now) get a life you crazed aerosexual.

Poll sees hope in West-Islam ties

2007-02-19T00:42:00.000Z

(BBC, 19 Feb 2007)

Most people believe common ground exists between the West and the Islamic world despite current global tensions, a BBC World Service poll has found.

In a survey of people in 27 countries, an average of 56% said they saw positive links between the cultures.

Yet 28% of respondents told questioners that violent conflict was inevitable.

It's heartening that most people around the world see through the extremist rhetoric - on both sides. But of course, 28% is still a very large proportion. Still, the fact that 64% of people in the United States, the epicentre as far as the idiotic spewing about Muslims wanting to destroy the West, are insidiously destroying American Christianity, etc., is concerned, what with Fox News, right-wing radio, et. al. Like those Latin abbreviations? Of course you do.

It's also quite understandable that the numbers are lower in Muslim countries, which see themselves as the less powerful and the victimised in the "conflict" and are thus more likely to buy into the extremism. That would explain why Indonesia, a country which probably has a right to feel very put down by both Western (read: American) imperialism and by Western (read: American-led-IMF-Washington-Consensus-World-Bank) capitalism, is the country which most feels that conflict is inevitable. Americans prop up a brutal dictator for decades and then wreck their economy in the 1998 crisis - how do you think they feel?

In reality there isn't any conflict and there doesn't need to be. It's a fabrication of extremist Islamist and neoconservative elements and has nothing to do with the regular Joe, or the regular Achmed. And that sounds like a subject for a longer article.

What's all this about?

2007-02-15T13:45:00.000Z

There's a world container with your name on it, and a billion ways to go beserk

This is mainly about politics and current affairs, with side dishes of aviation and hockey, as well as writing about personal experiences, and occasionally stuff done just for laughs. And since I also live in Singapore, a strange place which really boggles the mind, at least from my perspective, you'll see a bit of the absurdities in the politics on what I unaffectionately call the Isle of the Damned. For more details, well, that's what the blog is for.

THE NAME

"World Container" comes from the name of the 2006 album of The Tragically Hip, who happen to be my favorite band. It's not my favorite of their work, for me Phantom Power is tops. But a "World Container" is kind of descriptive of who I am and what the blog is.

I got the name from the album more than the title track, but the lyrics of World Container are as follows:

There's a world container with your name on it
And a billion ways to go beserk
When the country quits on you it must be dinner
and the Himmler on this one is there's no dessert
(He's the one who couldn't imagine
all the people livin' life in peace)

Yoohoo! Good news, you get to vanish
Go to Cleveland, be an indie smash
The good news is now you're smaller
The bad news is you could be smaller than that

Go suck some souls, be a reader, get used
Laugh at a funeral or two
Laugh and laugh till all the chameleons turn black
Laugh and laugh till you're told, "Please don't come back"
Then fake incredulous, say "I just can't believe!
How'd it get this late so early?"

Say "ain't life a grand, I'm in awe of y'all"
Then drop into your haunted bunk
Go to your touchless times, out where the water's drying
Go past the "No Attractions Past This Point" sign
What you'll find there are all flaws in progress
Where all songs are one song and that song is, Don't Forget

Yeah, I faked incredulous, said I just can't believe!
How'd it get this late so early?"
Said "ain't life a grand, I'm in awe of y'all"
I dropped into my haunted bunk
Been to the touchless times out where the water's drying
Been past the "No Attractions Past This Point" sign

What we have here are all flaws in progress
Where all songs are one song and that song is, Don't Forget
Where all songs are one song and that song is, Don't Forget
Where all songs are one song and that song is, Don't Forget.

Stephen Harper's Flimsy Facade

2007-02-15T03:40:00.000Z

In my mind Stephen Harper's extensive political pandering is sickeningly obvious and I hope this is something that voters think of when the votes get cast, as they will, almost definitely, sometime this year.

The Quebec nation motion, the pork barrel dole-outs, and above all, how everyone is supposed to suddenly believe that he is the right man to protect the environment! Harper is supposed to have "strong leader" as an asset. But this isn't leadership, it's cynical pandering. It's very hard to see what he stands for or what his agenda is anymore.

On one level, this would be good. It seems like whatever it is bringing about this situation - the minority situation, the election everyone is expecting at any moment, democratic will is forcing the leadership and government to listen and do what the people want. But this isn't what's really happening. What is happening, in my belief, is a powergrab. Harper's conservative agenda he's tried to bury in the past to make himself a viable candidate, whether it's that letter where he says the Kyoto Protocol is a "socialist scheme" or the authoritarian-conservatism he espoused in the past. He wants a majority, obviously.

What will he do with a majority? There have been accusations that in last year's election, the Liberals stoked fear about "Harper's hidden agenda" for their benefit. But the agenda isn't really hidden. It's the usual right-wing stuff, the usual conservative stuff - look south of the 49th parallel for a taste. Is that scaremongering? I don't think so. He openly promised to reopen the gay marriage debate, and has now quietly dropped it - again, because it's not politically convenient - is getting rid of gay marriage not part of the expected conservative agenda?

Once again, I'm just speculating. But if he gets that majority there will be none of this Stephen Harper the guy doing what the people of Canada generally want. It will be more like dusting off the old to-do list of social conservatism and right-wing economic policies. There are things like Medicare he may not be able to completely eviscerate, but North might start looking a lot more like South. This isn't scaremongering. It's a perfectly reasonable assumption.

Meanwhile, though, Harper is building a dishonest facade. Given his history you would have to be mad to believe he is suddenly the man to protect the environment or tackle the global warming/climate change problem; and incidentally, blaming the Liberals for the past decade doesn't solve problems for the next decade. Neither, in my belief, does he really think Quebec is so awesome and wonderful. He's trying to remake himself and his party's policies into a non-repulsive one, and yes, it would be incredibly stupid of him with the environment top of Canadian issues to stay the course on his previous stance of "screw the environment, oil sands are lovely!". But quite simply, how on earth can he or his party be trusted?

The Isle of the Damned - a brief summary

2007-02-14T14:40:00.000Z

What drives me nuts about Singapore?

I had a lot of posts on a previous blog about this subject. Some of them were pure rant. Others were maybe more reasoned. It's hard for me to work out and to state simply my feelings about Malaysia's Booger, but here's a summary.

--
Forum letter in The Sunday Times, August 29, 2006
Free speech must be earned

The recent case of a young woman who was flamed and victimised on the Internet for voicing support for the People's Action Party once again highlights the fact that many Singaporeans clamour for freedom of speech, many do not use it wisely.

Freedom of speech and self-expression are an essential cornerstone of any democracy, but it serves the national interest only if people are willing to use it responsibly and engage in civilised discourse without resorting to abuse.

Freedom, like respect, has to be earned.

Clearly, Singaporeans have a long way to go to earn the freedom of expression they yearn for so dearly.

- Ng E-Jay

---

Insights from David Marshall, Singapore's first Chief Minister and the only non-PAP leader Singapore's ever had - http://thinkhappiness.blogspot.com/2006/08/meeting-david-marshall-in-1994.html

---
September 16, 2006, during the IMF and World Bank meetings being held in Singapore.

I never thought I'd see the day when things Paul Wolfowitz said would actually meet with my approval. But perhaps it's because of the juxtaposition, because the article with his quotes in it was right next to the article quoting Lee Kwan Yew.

"You've seen the candidates who have turned up. If they win, this place goes down. And nobody doubts it."

I think Low Thia Kiang is perfectly capable of being Prime Minister. We won't know if he's better than your little boy unless we try. And, evidently, 33% of voters doubt it. OMG DEFAMATION!!!111

Oh, and:

"Run the system properly on the basis of merit, not nepotism, and you will always find a way out of the problem."

Of course, any publication which explicitly makes the blindingly obvious counter to that remark will get banned, like the Far Eastern Economic Review.

And the Straits Times today ran a section of foreigners' views of Singapore. Right after the paragraph dealing with criticism of the authoritarian nature of the government and other obvious insults to the glorious meritocratic might of the illustrious People's Action Party, who successively ensure the survivalness of the brilliant shining Singapore, they decided to quote an Argentinian who didn't have a problem with it. The heading of this paragraph was "Seeing sense".

I'm so thankful to be free from freedom.

---

"One day they will wake up and they'll find the opposition is the government, a miscalcuation." By then it will be "too late to regret", he added.
- Lee Kwan Yew, quoted by The Straits Times, 19 August 2006.

---
Blog post on August 8, 2006

This year, National Day coincides with the Hungry Ghost Festival. So why not burn a Singapore flag so your ancestors can celebrate National Day in the afterlife?

---

Front page of The Sunday Times, February 12, 2006

96% OF SINGAPOREANS SUPPORT DEATH PENALTY

---
From blog post on November 27, 2005

The thing is the columnist today and the letters from the forums are all getting it wrong. They keep talking about how he has a duty as a "proud Singaporean" to learn how to kill people in order to preserve the power of the powerful elite who run the place. But this pianist guy isn't a Singaporean. He's British, a fact which seems to escape everyone. Everyone bitches about how he got away because they're jealous they couldn't have done the same. Two years of your life is no joke, especially two of the best ones where other people of the same age are boldly stepping out into the adult world (or spending their freshman year of university getting shitfaced, depending on the person) and you're going to be bitter that he got away with it and you didn't. I know I would.

The fact of the matter is this. At this point, conscription is just unnecessary. If it really were so important to the security of the country the government would make a much bigger deal about it and maybe try to get him for something else so he spends years in jail, just to set an example. Though I guess they are constrained by the possibility of the British going apeshit since the pianist guy is a British citizen. This shows that the government acknowledges to themselves that it's just not worth it throwing the book at draft dodgers because the only function the military serves now is cultural assimilation and a really expensive extension of "National Education".

And for my readers who wonder why the hell he didn't just go for conscientious objection, the answer is that conscientious objectors are thrown in jail until they give up their personal morals and agree to serve. That's why Jehovah's Witnesses are practically outlawed.

"Isn't that a violation of human rights and Constitutional freedom of religion?" you might wonder as well. Well, Singapore's constitution is worthless as a protector of rights. It does little more than pay lip service to them while provide for all kinds of reasons they can be violated. Wonderful little booger-sized country, eh?

Do go on and take a look at how freedoms are protected. It's pretty much "rights are guarenteed until the government feels like taking them away." This one's my favorite.

14. —(1) Subject to clauses (2) and (3) —

(a) every citizen of Singapore has the right to freedom of speech and expression;

(b) all citizens of Singapore have the right to assemble peaceably and without arms; and

(c) all citizens of Singapore have the right to form associations.

(2) Parliament may by law impose —

(a) on the rights conferred by clause (1) (a), such restrictions as it considers necessary or expedient in the interest of the security of Singapore or any part thereof, friendly relations with other countries, public order or morality and restrictions designed to protect the privileges of Parliament or to provide against contempt of court, defamation or incitement to any offence;

(b) on the right conferred by clause (1) (b), such restrictions as it considers necessary or expedient in the interest of the security of Singapore or any part thereof or public order; and

(c) on the right conferred by clause (1) (c), such restrictions as it considers necessary or expedient in the interest of the security of Singapore or any part thereof, public order or morality.

(3) Restrictions on the right to form associations conferred by clause (1) (c) may also be imposed by any law relating to labour or education.

Pipe Nightmares

2006-12-31T18:21:00.000Z

There are two very important things that the recent pipeline explosion in Nigeria, which killed about 260 people, should make us think about in 2007.

The first of these is the most obvious: oil. The reason the pipe exploded and killed so many people, according to most trustworthy sources, is that people had gathered round a leak - perhaps deliberately made, but that's not the point - to get at the precious oil. One member of a panel of people who discussed what we can expect in the 2007 global economy on the BBC World Service yesterday also voiced the expectation that oil could reach $100 a barrel next year.

One hundred dollars a barrel. That is what it's coming to. The fact of the matter is that we can't live without oil, and we literally eat oil because it's what fuels all the tractors and machines that make the unprecedented agricultural productivity possible, which in turn makes it possible to feed six billion people. And oil is what we make plastic and polyester from. A world with no plastic or synthetic materials is just unimaginable. Without oil we are, to put it delicately, majorly fucked.

There is some promise as far as vehicle engines are concerned and a viewing of the movie Who Killed The Electric Car? does give hope, ironically, because at least we know a very good, in fact, a better replacement is possible. What there is to worry about is what we don't have a replacement for. Obvious to me is airplane petrol, which to my knowledge we aren't even close to having a good alternative for, and airline travel isn't something that can be substituted with something else. And the other one is obviously plastics and other things made from oil.

The second thing to think about is the why of the pipe explosion. It's not the first time it's happened and the reason so many were killed is simple. It's the huge income inequality and the reason it exists is capitalism. People are very poor in Nigeria and, in a textbook illustration of the meaning of the economic principle of demand, they want and need oil but can't afford it. Or put into economic jargon, the demand for oil is very low in Nigeria because while there is a great willingness to pay, there is no ability to do so.

So when a leak happens, either by accident or when someone decides to break the pipeline, people gather round. They push and jostle to get at the free oil they need and want so badly. Meanwhile, petrol fumes accumulate in the air and the moment there is a spark, as anyone knows, combustion takes place and kills people.

There are, of course, many things to blame for the fact that incidents like this occur and that 2,000 have died in similar incidents over the years. There is never just one cause of a problem. The finger can be pointed at Nigeria's government, at its political climate, at corruption, or at various other inadequacies at the local level. But in reality, I believe larger forces than that are in play. In reality, even national governments in Africa and most of the Third World are essentially powerless to improve the lives of their people.

Instead, the accusing finger must point at the international system that has created this horrific state of affairs. It is international capitalism that dictates that Africa's largest oil producer should have a domestic fuel shortage. And it is capitalism which should claim responsibility for what in different circumstances could easily be considered a terrorist attack.

This is not to say that local conditions and other issues such as government corruption or the lack of strong and good leaders in Africa, or the other chronic conditions (many of them also which can be directly blamed on the international capitalist system) which prevail in the Third World. You can point to Hugo Chavez as an example of a Third World leader who does actually have power to improve the lives of their people, but Chavez is the exception rather than the norm and his power derives from oil money. Without it he could do little more than any other essentially powerless Third World leader. Perhaps Nigeria's oil wealth may also create the conditions for an African version of Chavez, but would that actually solve anything? Not unless the international system itself is changed drastically.

The victims of the pipeline explosions are victims of the global capitalist system, and of its failure to deliver on its promises - it is questionable if the system and policies as defended by the champions of free trade and free markets are even capable of delivering in the first place. We should all recognise that it is both bad economics and bad politics which has created this disaster, and will create more disasters.

Tasmania, Part 2

2006-12-26T15:19:00.000Z

The first encounter the vast majority of us will have with the Tasmanian devil is Taz, the Looney Tunes cartoon character. At least that's how it was for me. The weird thing is that Taz looks nothing like a Tasmanian devil. Nonetheless, even without the help of cartoons, the devils have a reputation for being real tenacious bastards, ravenous and vicious, but it isn't really the case. They, in fact, are just SO cute. Especially for an animal which mainly eats carrion. I mean, look:

He's cool, he's just chillin', dude. He ain't no hater.

The thing about animals is that people play upon their reputation and tend to inflate it. For instance, we hear about maybe ten shark attacks, but not about the millions of sharks (if there even are a million sharks left, anyway) which are not out for human flesh. People see photos of Tasmanian devils snarling and baring teeth, so they focus on that image. In reality all of it is posturing and show, to scare off bigger animals from their meals (such as the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, which I'll get to later) and for fun.

When they fight with each other they bare their teeth but don't actually use them. It's all mock play-fights as a way of showing the females who really da man, which you have to admit is a hell of a lot smarter than stabbing each other to death with antlers/horns as other animal are apt to do. Unfortunately, recently this has really not helped the devils' cause since it also spreads the facial tumours which have devastated the wild population. Devil Facial Tumour Disease has killed off half the population in some areas and it's a pretty bad way to go - the tumours make the mouth so deformed that the animals die from starvation rather than from the cancer itself.

Add to that the fact that they tend to assume that the dogs which bite them to death just want to play, and that a lot of carrion is roadkill in the middle of busy highways and the prospects for the species don't look so good. However, they do have one thing going for them: they're famous, they've worked their way into human culture, and Tasmanians are generally quite environmentally conscious from what I've seen - when you live somewhere so nice you don't want to trash it up. So it's not like they're going extinct or anything, but they are in bad shape.

The place I went to see them was Bonnorong Wildlife Park, which is a very nice wildlife park as far as wildlife parks go. The fences are kept to a minimum and since kangaroos, unlike humans, care not for capitalised instructions to KEEP TO THE PATH!, you get to go very close to them, always keeping in mind that they can disembowel a man with a single kick. You also get to see an entire group (or mob, to use the proper term) of them decide on a whim to go bounding off to another side of the park. But they're cool. They'll even eat the supplied animal feed right out of your hand and leave you with all your fingers. Bonnorong has some friendly staff well-versed in the ways of marsupials, their clothes well-chewed by the wombats who also go for shoelaces, and dedicated to the mission of guarding and educating about the wildlife. So it was pretty sad later, upon returning to Hobart, to open up The Mercury and discover that it was for sale.

Tasmania, Part 1

2006-12-18T14:29:00.000Z

To be honest, I wasn't particularly excited about visiting Australia again. Having been to the main places already gives it a kind of "been there, done that" feel, and it's nothing special to say you've gone to Australia in Singapore because people go there all the time. Perth is actually closer to Singapore than it is to Sydney. And after last year's massive 18-hour imprisonment en route to New York, 7 hours to Sydney which turned out to be six-and-a-half thanks to tailwinds was short. The exoticness just wasn't there, despite the fact that in their new tourism ads, the girl on the beach at the end is mindblowingly hot. However, that wasn't a motivating factor. I bring this up because while I was complying with her wishes and visiting Australia, an Aussie rules football player was allegedly having an affair with her and getting it all over the news.

But I think the most amazing thing that made me realise I was in another country was that it's actually okay to be nice to people here. In Singapore, saying "hello" to strangers and thanking people who are paid to serve you is behaviour limited to recently escaped lunatics. It wasn't until the woman who sold me a sandwich in Sydney Airport gave the most genuine "you're welcome, deah!" that I realised you could say "hello" to random people in Australia and not have them respond with a suspicious "Do I know you?" or call the police.

So indeed, it was a different country after all. But the main problem with Tasmania, I realised, is the diverging interests between me and my parents, who were the ones who decided on Tasmania. In my mind I was thinking of wilderness, hiking, whitewater rafting, etc. I have no idea what they were thinking, but it's safe to say that wasn't it. Stuff I'd like to do when confronted with a foreign city would include hanging out and taking advantage of whatever local cultural scene there was. Instead I'm staring longingly at the posters for rock concerts and live performances in the cafe, and going into student art galleries while they wait impatiently outside. I'm getting to the point in my life where I really need to go on holidays with other people my own age. At least in New York my sister was around to prod the parents into MoMA.

Hobart is a nice little city of about 100,000. It feels smallish, but perhaps that's because I'm used to big cities. To give you an idea of where it fits into the scheme of things, the Westpac building, the local offices of the bank, has a plaza outside with an elaborate fountain/sculpture. It looks like a nice Hobartian landmark until you go up and read the inscription that tells you that it was moved here from Sydney, apparently when the Sydney office got tired of it, and it instead becomes a bit of a commentary on how small cities are in the big scheme of things.

Digression warning, what on earth possessed Daihatsu to make a car called "Applause"? What a stupid name. I imagine they were ecstatic when it was able to move under its own power. "Applause! It is work! The much workness is not in uselessness!"

Sorry.

Another thing you will probably never do in Singapore is have a real conversation with service staff on matters completely unrelated to buying what they're selling. It's so unexpected that they don't even try, and if one is successful, their boss is apt to fire them for "I pay you to waste time like this is it? Got other customer you know?" You would not discuss the best snowboarding places in the world, police reaction to skateboarders, the health of your respective economies, or university ambitions, for example. But in Hobart they're perfectly happy to do so. This isn't "service", "customer satisfaction", or even "doing your job", it's being a normal human being and approaching other people on equal terms, and it's what Singapore really lacks.

One thing which me and the folks could agree on, however, was food. Hobart has some amazing seafood places, even if they insist on battering and frying everything. Besides an endless availibility of oysters and crayfish and lots of different fish, they also have something called a scallop pie, which is delicious and pretty self-explanatory. It makes me cry just thinking about my current lack of proximity to Mures. I need a moment, so I'll continue this later.

Great Leaders

2006-10-31T14:27:00.000Z

Here's a short story from a while ago that I got stuck on for lack of any idea of what plot to tack on. It is not meant to be an allegory, it was just inspired by the news videos a few weeks ago of thousands of people in Pyongyang holding up candles in the shape of Korean words to signify their love of the Great Leader's illustrious Songun might of revolutionary Juche ideaness, as well as their lack of electricity. Be good, y'alls.

---
"We shall build a great socialist bonfire,
And place the Great Leader inside.
So he may be filled up with fervour,
And lead us into victory!"

Felix watched the parade, filled with great patriotic fervour, but at the same time also wondering about the national songs he'd learnt since he was in the Pre-School Children's Educational Communes. While it was clearly a metaphorical image, the idea of setting the leader of the nation on fire wasn't something the Party should have been keen to encourage. It was almost as if some secret agent had written them and slipped these meanings inside the songs, which was exactly the case. A British secret agent had submitted several patriotic songs when a competition (or "Great Co-operative Submission Endeavour") had been held sixty years ago and secret people in MI5 who knew about it had a tendency to erupt into titters every time they heard the song being sung on People's Media Corporation TV Channel. The poetic image of the people burning their leader alive was in fact meant to be completely literal.

Still, it wasn't likely for that to be put into practice anytime soon. The government's hold on the minds of the people was very strong, appealing to their basest senses of patriotism and nationalism to keep themselves in power. They said America was the devil, and Felix had dutifully demonstrated outside the embassy and hurled rocks at the luxurious SUVs in the compound's car park. Decades earlier, they had called upon the people to welcome Western technology, and his parents named him after Felix the Cat.

"Our blood is red,
Redder than the red of victory.
Let us make our country
As red as can be!"

Felix figured that at some point, that song would be accompanied by a mass suicide as the Young Vanguard, in a beautifully choreographed routine, produced razors and slit their wrists. The songwriter evidently had little sense of context (or was an MI5 agent).

Popular Culture of the Stupid Ages

2006-09-25T12:55:00.000Z

MARS UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF THE ARTS
Popular Culture of the Stupid Ages - subject code A3230/2
Mid-Term Exam: Fall 3006

Answer any three questions. Use the writing paper provided.

"He should be put into a rocket and shot into the Sun." Discuss the extent to which the people of the Stupid Ages were too tolerant of Bill O'Reilly.

To what extent do you agree that Friends was the masterwork of the situational comedy genre?

"A desperate attention whore." Do you agree with this assessment of Survivor's Boston Rob?

"Music for retarded fuckheads who should just kill themselves already." Discuss this assessment of the Emo music genre.

In which season did The Simpsons begin to decline? Justify your answer.

Account for the degeneration of punk rock as played by The Ramones/NoFX to the "punk" played by Simple Plan/Good Charlotte etc.

"Ann Coulter: nutcase." Discuss.

To what extent is Hentai excused by the atomic bombings of Japan?

Green Day never gives us any satisfactory reason for the suicide of St. Jimmy. Discuss this interpretation of American Idiot.

To what extent does the viability of reality television explain why we call it the Stupid Ages?

"An unparalleled masterwork, underappreciated by the people of the Stupid Ages." Is this a fair assessment of Futurama?

Days of Infamy

2006-09-11T12:41:00.000Z

The attack on Pearl Harbor, declared Franklin D. Roosevelt, was "a date which will live in infamy".

Time has dulled the memory of that day, though. December 7th passes without much pomp or memorialisation. At the most, it gets mentioned in "on this day in history" segments radio hosts sometimes do. When the anniversary hits a round number it perhaps gets a mention in the news as a ceremony is held there to memorialise it.

But this is all sixty years later and generations past. And in sixty years, let us hope September 11th is treated in a similar way.

That might sound a little insensitive in 2006 with barely five years gone. It's hard sometimes to remember that so much time has passed because the consequences have lasted. But if we can forget it, it will mean the tragedy is indeed past and that the wound has healed - and it will, as all wounds do. How well it will heal is still an open question.

I believe the "war on terror" has been the most negative effect of September 11th, 2001. It is what has made the horror of that day last. Afghanistan, directly connected, and Iraq, fraudulently connected, are the threads that connect September 11th, 2006, to September 11th, 2001. Every day Afghans and Iraqis live the horror, and every day we who are lucky not to be caught in it are reminded that the tragedy five years past is not over and the poison has not run its course yet, as the bodies pile up in those two nations.

And we in the developed world fear for the future. The clash of civilisations, shown in the Danish cartoon controversy, is now what we fear. We fear governments abusing their authority to erode civil liberties, and what our future will be like. Paranoia is an everyday experience. I went to Changi Airport just a few hours ago and was struck by the notices posted at the check-in counters, advising of security measures for U.S.-bound passengers, who still aren't allowed to pack liquids of a non-essential character in cabin baggage.

I visited Ground Zero last December. It's a strange experience which cannot really be described. A cartoon in Time this week did a very good job of it, though. The hushed words, "Did you get a picture of the cross?", the tourists gathered at the fence on the street outside Trinity Church, the closed Cortland Street subway station, the man inside the PATH station holding his video camera over the top of the fence, panning slowly to take it in. (you can see also what I wrote purely about my visit) The grip it has on the imaginations of everyone that day will release us eventually, but not for a long while yet. It's not something easily forgotten.

The tragedy endures and the suffering is not over. Often, commemorative objects are printed with words to the effect of "Always Remember". But let us hope we can forget, because it'll mean it has ceased to matter, and that the tragedy of that day has been laid to rest.

There's a cruel crumpling sound from over yonder by the steeplechase
It's a sound of coming down like horses slamming on the brakes
It's the sound of a crowd, of an equine crowd in the vacuum of its age

It's a sound coming down of an entirely different race
It's a sound coming down like Il Palio
Sent splayed and sprawling into a cafe in an explosion of table legs and trays
It's the sound coming down like a chuckwagon when it strays
A little too far from the stampede days
And slams into the butterfly chase

That's the sound coming down

GORDON DOWNIE - "STEEPLECHASE"

Feedback Form: National Day Propaganda Extravaganza 2006

2006-08-09T12:14:00.000Z

Please give us your honest feedback. Remember, your response is secret and there is no way we could possibly trace you by matching the serial number on this form to our list of names, addresses, and NRIC numbers. Feel free to say anything you wish, but always remember to be responsible and accountable, especially when you are in court being charged with sedition.

For each question, indicate 1 if you "strongly disagree", 2 if you "disagree", 3 if you "agree" and 4 if you "strongly agree".

PART 1 - STUFF WITH CUTE LITTLE CHILDREN

Seeing young people jumping around on BMXs ignites my hope for Singapore's future.

The yellow capes worn by the choir momentarily gave the impression that they had superpowers.

I found the children dancing around waving sticks and reflective shields made from cardboard profoundly idiotic.

PART 2 - GIANT MILITARY SHOW-OFF

I found the whiteness of the contingent of MPs blinding. The government should have installed some kind of shade thing.

I Just Can't Wait To Be King would have been more appropriate music to play for the entry of Lee Hsien Loong.

I felt sorry for the soldiers and people who had to stand perfectly still while the choir sang weird songs.

The F-16s were OH MY EARS MY EARS

I hoped that the President would decide not to proceed with the march-past or the inspection of the guard of honour, screwing up everything.

The amount of waving the President did was sufficient and appropriate.

(Foreigners only) The parading of military might has made me less likely to encourage my government to invade Singapore, raze its buildings, plunder its stores, and make its streets run red with blood.

PART 3 - DANCING AND PRETTY LIGHTS

The Traffic Police standing on their bikes and riding "no-hands" sets a bad example for our youth.

People running around making formations with lights never gets old no matter how many times they do it.

The Propaganda Extravangaza taught me that anything can be a symbol of anything you want.

I found the metaphyiscal imagery particularly effective.

I was constantly rolling my eyes during this segment.

Especially because of the things the commentators were saying.

PART 4 - FIREWORKS

The fireworks were really really awesome.

I only watch the PE for the fireworks and ignore everything else.

I would consider causing a major accident on the Benjamin Sheares Bridge to get a good view of the fireworks.

The fireworks display could have been improved by playing Tchaikovsky's 1812 overture in the background while they formed a "V".

PART 5 - BROADWAY MUSICAL

I have noticed the increasingly strident "please don't emigrate, at least not permanently" theme to the newer National Day songs.

The patriotic songs and waving of red objects reminded me of another event which took place in August 1965, namely the beginning of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

OVERALL

The parade did not in any way carry fascist overtones.

I enjoyed the parade.

I enjoyed the parade because of the fascist nationalist overtones.

I would be more likely to die for Singapore because there are such great national day parades here.

The commentary refrained from being extremely trite and meaningless.

I would reccomend the Propaganda Extravaganza to all my friends.

(Malaysian citizens only) The one we do for Malaysia Day is so going to pwn your asses, you splitters.

Naruto Proof Doom

2005-11-11T14:24:00.000Z

The same theatre frontage that provided the title for my last visit to Bangkok provides the same function for this one, though the movie titles didn't have the same poetry of "DON'T MOVE HOTEL RWANDA" or "CRYING OUT LOVE IN THE CENTER OF THE WORLD", they were a lot more surprising. Such as a movie I'd expected to have, at most, a cult following among anime nerds being among the big attractions for the cinemas of Siam Square. It's like that friend of yours who's in a rock band, and you know the band's pretty good, but it still surprises you when you walk into HMV and see their CD on the shelf.

I learned some new things, then. First, manga/animè (I have learnt to use the accent thingies, and I'm very proud, even if it turns out I probably used the wrong one) are even bigger in Bangkok than they are in Singapore. This can be deduced from, of course, Naruto getting top billing and four daily showings in a theatre, and the fact that some of the most prime retail space in the city was occupied by manga shops. Wall to wall, floor to ceiling with Japanese creative excretions and literally packed with the traditional manga audience of 20-somethings with way too much Gatsby products in their hair.

Also, I learned the proper pronounciation of "Siam" on the Skytrain. It's roughly "See-Umm", two syllables. Good to have that cleared up. Thai is actually a very soothing language to listen to. I could have spent all day on the SkyTrain listening to the recorded voice announce "Sala Daeng", "Ratchadamri", "Saphan Taksin", "Surasak" over and over, and those are just the stations on the way from the hotel. "Sala Daeng" is my favorite. The woman says it with such apparent relish that it makes you want to get off there just to see why she seems so happy to say it. The soothing lilt of the Thai airport announcements also helped make the Immigration Queue From Hell marginally easier to endure. I will say no more about the Immigration Queue From Hell beyond that it is an apt description without any exaggeration.

Bangkok was the same way it usually is. Hot, dusty and familiar, yet exotically exciting for some reason you can't quite put your finger on. Such as the guy at the night market with a Vicks Vapourub sticking out his nose hawking factory-reject jeans for 300 baht.

There was some serious driving done on this trip by our local friends who took us to the floating market at Damnonsaduak, the holiday palace of King Rama II, and the beach resort town of Hua Hin, which is also the site of the holiday palace of King Rama IX, who evidently has a much better sense of what constitutes a good time than his ancestor. It is actually possible to drive in Thailand if you don't know Thai. English translations are on all the signs which tell you where you're going. Some signs are entirely in Thai, however, and you can't help but wonder if the fairly wordy, but also completely indecipherable sign that whizzes past at 120km/h says "Preserve the environment. Keep our highways clean and green" or "WARNING: This highway is used by the military as a rocket launcher target range."

Leaving, as always, was slightly heartrending. The Changi Airport immigration queue is always the killer, because it is the symbolic end of your good time. There was so much left unseen and I felt a twinge of regret as I left the baggage trolley on the curb and got into the taxi home. Then a trolley collector with a Vicks Vapourub crammed up his left nostril took it away.