The Greater Good

Are you a liberal imperialist? - by Stephen M. Walt | Stephen M. Walt

Tue, 21 May 2013 08:37:48 -0400

Are you a liberal imperialist? - by Stephen M. Walt | Stephen M. Walt:

#1: You frequently find yourself advocating that the United States send troops, drones, weapons, Special Forces, or combat air patrols to some country that you have never visited, whose language(s) you don’t speak, and that you never paid much attention to until bad things started happening there.

#2: You tend to argue that the United States is morally obligated to “do something” rather than just stay out of nasty internecine quarrels in faraway lands. In the global classroom that is our digitized current world, you believe that being a bystander — even thousands of miles away — is as bad as being the bully. So you hardly ever find yourself saying that “we should sit this one out.”

#3: You think globally and speak, um, globally. You are quick to condemn human rights violations by other governments, but American abuses (e.g., torture, rendition, targeted assassinations, Guantánamo, etc.) and those of America’s allies get a pass. You worry privately (and correctly) that aiming your critique homeward might get in the way of a future job.

#4: You are a strong proponent of international law, except when it gets in the way of Doing the Right Thing. Then you emphasize its limitations and explain why the United States doesn’t need to be bound by it in this case.

#5: You belong to the respectful chorus of those who publicly praise the service of anyone in the U.S. military, but you would probably discourage your own progeny from pursuing a military career.

#6. Even if you don’t know very much about military history, logistics, or modern military operations, you are still convinced that military power can achieve complex political objectives at relatively low cost.

#7: To your credit, you have powerful sympathies for anyone opposing a tyrant. Unfortunately, you tend not to ask whether rebels, exiles, and other anti-regime forces are trying to enlist your support by telling you what they think you want to hear. (Two words: Ahmed Chalabi.)

#8. You are convinced that the desire for freedom is hard-wired into human DNA and that Western-style liberal democracy is the only legitimate form of government. Accordingly, you believe that democracy can triumph anywhere — even in deeply divided societies that have never been democratic before — if outsiders provide enough help.

#9. You respect the arguments of those who are skeptical about intervening, but you secretly believe that they don’t really care about saving human lives.

#10. You believe that if the United States does not try to stop a humanitarian outrage, its credibility as an ally will collapse and its moral authority as a defender of human rights will be tarnished, even if there are no vital strategic interests at stake.

Yahoo buys Tumblr and other news

Mon, 20 May 2013 12:29:51 -0400

So Yahoo has finally acquired tumblr after much talk that Facebook was going to get the microblogging site. Well, it looks like that didn’t happen after all.

It’s been months since I made a public post on tumblr since I moved to Hong Kong SAR from the US of A. After living in North America for over 2 decades, I felt that it was a good time for a change after seeing my life implode in the span of 6 months in the first half of 2012.

Now, I am in the process of moving into a new apartment with a friend after spending nearly a year slumming it with my relatives in a cramped room with limited space, a cute cat that gives me allergies, and shitty internet reception. The new apartment has more space and better internet speeds but it is not that condo I joked about buying in an April Fools’ post that went wrong (people believed it).

The apartment move is almost finished now that the furniture is moved in. The only things left are moving my essentials such as clothes, personal items, and personalising the apartment. My colleagues joked that I should have a housewarming party to celebrate but still not too sure about it.

Don’t think I will be posting too often on tumblr now that it is becoming a Yahoo site. Other than reposts or liking friend’s content, I will most likely just write long notes on FB as usual.

Public Shaming: The Definitive "People Who Thought Chechnya was the Czech Republic" Collection

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 10:29:57 -0400

Public Shaming: The Definitive "People Who Thought Chechnya was the Czech Republic" Collection:

publicshaming:

Two brothers from Chechnya. That was the official word early morning on Friday April 19th, 2013 as to who were behind the Boston marathon bombings. “Chechens.”

So, naturally, who do some brilliant citizens of the United States of America blame? The CZECH REPUBLIC, of course!

Here are those…

In Case It Wasn't Obvious...

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 00:04:43 -0500

Via Simon Black of Sovereign Man blog,

Sometimes the writing on the wall seems painfully obvious. But occasionally it’s a good idea to step back and look at the big picture:

1) The Land of the Free is set to impose fresh restrictions on firearm ownership… to include a ban on assault weapons, increased background checks, psychological screenings, and criminalizing ammunition magazine clips with a capacity beyond ten rounds.

And if they can’t pass these measures by law, the President is prepared to enforce them by royal decree, i.e. executive order.

It’s amazing that people have become so fearful, they are now abdicating one of the most fundamental responsibilities of humanity— protecting and safeguarding our families.

Instead, many Americans are choosing to outsource this responsibility to the same folks who bathe them in radiation at airports, spy on their phone calls and emails, wage senseless wars in foreign lands… and have a horrible track record of screwing up everything they try to do.

Great idea, seems like a hell of a trade-off.

2) The German central bank has announced that they will begin withdrawing their massive gold holdings from the United States.

In what is likely to be the first move among many other sovereign nations, it’s clear that governments no longer trust each other, and that the goodwill of the United States is being viewed with increasing suspicion.

As gold holdings flee the United States, how long will it be before they ‘close the window’ and ban gold exports? Do you really want to find out first hand?

3) The United States government is just weeks away from defaulting on its mountain of debt. Having already technically breached the debt ceiling, their only temporary fix is to seize federal pensions and engage in fraudulent accounting tricks.

Obviously this forebodes a number of potential consequences— seizure of private retirement accounts, capital controls, etc. And yet, people in US will merely trust that their government is going to ‘fix it’, and do absolutely nothing to hedge their bets.

4) European politicians have declared an end to the euro crisis. Notwithstanding the wave of riots across the continent, or the record level of unemployment that was just reached this month, politicians are engaging in self-congratulatory back-slapping for their courageous handling of the crisis.

At this point, Europe has almost become a caricature… its politicians like monocled cartoon villains, twirling their moustaches in dark room.

Absolutely nothing has changed on a fundamental level. Most countries still have massively high debt burdens, pension obgliations, and deficits. And they’re still living hand to mouth on the backs of German taxpayers and quantitative easing.

Pretending that the situation has magically resolved itself is either the height of incompetence or intellectual dishonesty.

Curiously, most people seem to know this. Yet they will do absolutely nothing.

They know, for example, that a US default is an entirely feasible option on the table. They understand that the consequences would be disastrous. And yet, most folks will do nothing and simply hope for the best.

The best response is to take steps which make sense in either scenario… no matter what happens.

You won’t be worse off for taking control of your retirement account. You won’t be worse off for holding some of your hard-earned savings in a strong, stable bank overseas, in a jurisdiction where your politicians can’t seize it. You won’t be worse off for having some precious metals stashed away overseas… or owning productive land abroad.

All of these steps make sense no matter what. And it’s an important strategy to adopt.

Life of Pi Review - Spoiler Warning

Sat, 01 Dec 2012 09:57:46 -0500

Earlier today, I saw Ang Lee’s “Life of Pi” in 3D. I honestly did not know too much about the movie other than it is directed by Ang Lee and the main character is an Indian kid. Apparently it was based on a popular Canadian novel detailing the nature of faith vs reality and perception vs reality among other things.

The 3D effects for the movie were amazing. The film make sure the audience was able to experience the thoughts, feelings and hope that Pi had as he made the journey throughout the film.

The movie is essentially about Pi, an Indian boy who survives a shipwreck and the experiences he has trying to come to terms with what happened. Although this is the basic plot, it really does not justice to the film and I recommend people watch it as it is one of those films that must be seen to be understood.

Much of the story describes his extraordinary journey and the inherent goodness and beauty he sees around him, which was produced with a mix of advanced CGI and trick camera angles. One interesting bit about the movie is that much of the filming took place in Taiwan in addition to India and Canada. The vivid imagery and emphasis on brighter side of life becomes increasingly important as the film flashforwards in the “adult Pi” scenes and at the major scene in the movie.

SPOILER WARNING:

The story of Pi’s journey was a means for him to preserve his inherent goodness and faith in the world as he tries to come to terms with what happened and the problems surviving at sea. As he recounted his actual story to the Japanese insurance investigators, we learn that he was not the only person who survived the shipwreck. The cook, the Buddhist sailor really did make it to the life raft with him and they also found his mother drifting on a cargo of bananas.

The cook, played by Gerard Depardieu as an ugly Frenchman, tricked the survivors into killing the ill sailor to use his corpse as bait. He then wound up killing Pi’s mother over a fight after she realised what happened and to protect Pi from him. After everything that happened, Pi killed the cook and decided to live in the makeshift raft for a time to come to terms with what happened.

In the interview with the investigators, Pi kept making the point that the actual events corrupted his being and he felt the “evil in [him]” after he killed the cook for what he did. However, through his faith, he was able to preserve the good in him by masking the people as animals he knew, shift the focus of his outlook to only see the good and extraordinary in the world as the stunning scenes of his journey intended to portray, and use the tiger named Richard Parker to internalise his struggle with himself, the events and to give him purpose.

After telling the story, the investigators were kind enough to officially note the existence of the Tiger and emphasising that Pi survived an extraordinary journey without explicitly mentioning the circumstances. This act by the investigators only reaffirmed Pi’s belief in goodness that exists in society, and also instances where certain things should be only left to the heart (as noted in the dinner conversation between Pi’s parents).

The audience and the writer in the movie were able to see that this outlook on life helped Pi survive the worst and move forward with his life never looking back as Richard Parker did after they made it to shore. We see that this outlook continued in his life as he still maintained a relationship with his uncle, he married his girlfriend and continues to teach faith as a university instructor in his adult life. It was also implied that he eventually did come to terms with what really happened and uses the story of his struggle to teach others, like the writer, on the power of hope, positive thinking, and the importance of both reason and faith.

END SPOILERS

Overall, there was a great deal to take in after seeing the film and the overall theme expressed in different levels in the story. This is one of Ang Lee’s better films and the actors playing Pi did a wonderful bringing the character to life. This is indeed one of the “must see” films of the year.

Nice Donuts!

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 09:45:33 -0500

Nice Donuts!

He was talking about the iPad Mini… - Imgur

Sun, 28 Oct 2012 05:38:45 -0400

He was talking about the iPad Mini… - Imgur

The Non-Financial Cost of Stagnation: “Social Recession” and Japan’s “Lost Generations”

Sat, 20 Oct 2012 05:19:03 -0400

The Non-Financial Cost of Stagnation: “Social Recession” and Japan’s “Lost Generations” (August 9, 2010)

Japan’s stagnating economy and society are still operating on a postwar model which no longer makes sense. In response, its young generations are opting out of workaholic career paths, marriage and having children.

We in America are already getting a taste of the social costs of grinding economic decline. Young people who are graduating from college find a world of greatly diminished opportunities for full-time employment.

Many of the jobs that are available are free-lance/contract or other temp jobs, or part-time positions which pay one-third of what their parents earn.

Lacking sufficient income, young people are moving back home or staying at home because that is the only financially viable option open to them.

The cheerleaders cranking the hype machine shrilly claim that the U.S. economy will soon start growing smartly. But as this weblog and many others have documented over the past five years, that assumption has essentially no foundation in reality.

Much more likely is an “end to (paying) work” of the sort I have described here many times:

End of Work, End of Affluence (December 5, 2008)

End of Work, End of Affluence I: Cascading Job Losses (December 8, 2008)

End of Work, End of Affluence III: The Rise of Informal Businesses (December 10, 2008)

Endgame 3: The End of (Paying) Work (January 21, 2009)

Demographics and the End of the Savior State (May 17, 2010)

What happens to the social fabric of an advanced-economy nation after a decade or more of economic stagnation? For an answer, we can turn to Japan. The second-largest economy in the world has stagnated in just this fashion for almost twenty years, and the consequences for the “lost generations” which have come of age in the “lost decades” have been dire. In many ways, the social conventions of Japan are fraying or unraveling under the relentless pressure of an economy in seemingly permanent decline.

While the world sees Japan as the home of consumer technology juggernauts such as Sony and Toshiba and high-tech “bullet trains” (shinkansen), beneath the bright lights of Tokyo and the evident wealth generated by decades of hard work and the massive global export machine of “Japan, Inc,” lies a different reality: increasing poverty and decreasing opportunity for the nation’s youth.

The gap between extremes of income at the top and bottom of society– measured by the Gini coefficient — has been growing in Japan for years; to the surprise of many outsiders, once-egalitarian Japan is becoming a nation of haves and have-nots.

The media in Japan have popularized the phrase “kakusa shakai,” literally meaning “gap society.” As the elite slice of society prospers and younger workers are increasingly marginalized, the media has focused on the shrinking middle class. For example, a bestselling book offers tips on how to get by on an annual income of less than three million yen ($34,800). Two million yen ($23,000) has become the de-facto poverty line for millions of Japanese, especially outside high-cost Tokyo.

More than one-third of the workforce is part-time as companies have shed the famed Japanese lifetime employment system, nudged along by government legislation which abolished restrictions on flexible hiring a few years ago. Temp agencies have expanded to fill the need for contract jobs, as permanent job opportunities have dwindled.

Many fear that as the generation of salaried Baby Boomers dies out, the country’s economic slide might accelerate. Japan’s share of the global economy has fallen below 10 percent from a peak of 18 percent in 1994. Were this decline to continue, income disparities would widen and threaten to pull this once-stable society apart.

Young Japanese, their expectations permanently downsized, are increasingly opting out of the rigid social systems on which Japan, Inc. was built.

The term “Freeter” is a hybrid word that originated in the late 1980s, just as the Japanese property and stock market bubbles reached their zenith. It combines the English “free” a nd the German “arbeiter,” or worker, and describes a lifestyle which is radically different from the buttoned-down rigidity of the permanent-employment economy: freedom to move between jobs.

This absence of loyalty to a company is totally alien to previous generations of driven Japanese “salarymen” who were expected to uncomplainingly turn in 70-hour work weeks at the same company for decades, all in exchange for lifetime employment.

Many young people have come to mistrust big corporations, having seen their fathers or uncles eased out of “lifetime” jobs in the relentless downsizing of the past twenty years. From the point of view of the younger generations, the loyalty their parents unstintingly offered to companies was wasted.

They have also come to see diminishing value in the grueling study and tortuous examinations required to compete for the elite jobs in academia, industry and government; with opportunities fading, long years of study are perceived as pointless.

In contrast, the “freeter” lifestyle is one of hopping between short-term jobs and devoting energy and time to foreign travel, hobbies or other interests.

As long ago as 2001, The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare estimates that 50 percent of high school graduates and 30 percent of college graduates now quit their jobs within three years of leaving school.

The downside is permanently downsized income and prospects. Many of the four million “freeters” survive on part-time work and either live at home or in a tiny flat with no bath. A typical “freeter” wage is 1,000 yen ($8.60) an hour.

Japan’s slump has lasted so long, a “New Lost Generation” is coming of age, joining Japan’s first “Lost Generation” which graduated into the bleak job market of the 1990s.

These trends have led to an ironic moniker for the Freeter lifestyle: Dame-Ren (No Good People). The Dame-Ren get by on odd jobs, low-cost living and drastically diminished expectations.

The decline of permanent employment has led to the unraveling of social mores and conventions. Many young men now reject the macho work ethic and related values of their fathers. These “herbivores” reject the traditonal Samurai ideal of masculinity.

Derisively called “herbivores” or “Grass-eaters,” these young men are uncompetitive and uncommitted to work, evidence of their deep disillusionment with Japan’s troubled economy.

A bestselling book titled The Herbivorous Ladylike Men Who Are Changing Japan by Megumi Ushikubo, president of Tokyo marketing firm Infinity, claims that about two-thirds of all Japanese men aged 20-34 are now partial or total grass-eaters. “People who grew up in the bubble era (of the 1980s) really feel like they were let down. They worked so hard and it all came to nothing,” says Ms Ushikubo. “So the men who came after them have changed.”

This has spawned a disconnect between genders so pervasive that Japan is experiencing a “social recession” in marriage, births, and even sex, all of which are declining.

With a wealth and income divide widening along generational lines, many young Japanese are attaching themselves to their parents, the generation that accumulated home and savings during the boom years of the 1970′s and 1980′s. Surveys indicate that roughly two-thirds of freeters live at home.

Freeters “who have no children, no dreams, hope or job skills could become a major burden on society, as they contribute to the decline in the birthrate and in social insurance contributions,” Masahiro Yamada, a sociology professor wrote in a magazine essay titled, Parasite Singles Feed on Family System.

This trend of never leaving home has sparked an almost tragicomical countertrend ofJapanese parents who actively seek mates to marry off their “parasite single” offspring as the only way to get them out of the house.

An even more extreme social disorder is Hikikomori, or “acute social withdrawal,” a condition in which the young live-at-home person will virtually wall themselves off from the world by never leaving their room.

Though acute social withdrawal in Japan affect both genders, impossibly high expectations of males from middle and upper middle class families has led many sons, typically the eldest, to refuse to leave the home. The trigger for this complete withdrawal from social interaction is often one or more traumatic episodes of social or academic failure: that is, the inability to meet standards of conduct and success that can no longer be met in diminished-opportunity Japan.

The unraveling of Japan’s social fabric as a result of eroding economic conditions for young people offers Americans a troubling glimpse of the high costs of long-term economic stagnation.

There is even a darker side to this disintegration of the social fabric and convention: child abuse is on the rise as well. Sadly, people under long-term stress often take out their multiple frustrations on the weakest, most marginalized people–including children:

Record 44,210 child abuse cases logged in ’09

Japan hit by huge rise in child abuse

Both Japan and the U.S. alike desperately need a peaceful revolution in expectations, financial justice (i.e. the absence of fraud, collusion, looting, gaming the system and parasitic leeching by financial and political Elites) and in the social definitions of wealth, security, community, “growth” as a measure of well-being and prosperity, and ultimately, what constitutes meaningful “work.”

In effect, postwar Japan grafted a mercantilist export economy based on insane work-hours onto a traditional patriarchal society in which women were expected to sacrifice their autonomy and ambitions for the good of their children, husband and the husband’s parents.

The male “salaryman” was expected to sacrifice his life up to retirement to his employer, via 60-70 hour work-weeks and killing commutes. Children were expected to sacrifice their childhood and teen years to study, in order to pass hellishly demanding exams on which their future livelihood, career and income depended.

These extremes of sacrifice might have made sense or seemed necessary to rebuild the nation after World War II. But now, 65 years and three generations after the war, these sacrifices make no sense and are destroying the social fabric of Japan.

Men who work 70 hours a week have no real role in their children’s lives, nor are they able to be husbands and fathers in any meaningful day-to-day sense. Understandably, many young Japanese men are opting out of that life of absurd, fundamentally meaningless sacrifice to corporations or the government.

For their part, young women are opting out of the burdens of being in effect a single parent who carries the immense responsibility of guaranteeing the academic success of her son(s) and the marriageability of her daughter(s). Further, as in standard traditional societies, she essentially leaves her own family and throws in her lot with her husband’s family, as she is expected to care for his aging parents as a daughter-in-law.

Given these burdens, it’s no wonder a third of Japanese young women have not married and have no plans to marry. According to one female author quoted in one of the above articles, Japanese men sometimes propose to women with lines like: “I want you to cook miso soup for me the rest of my life.” Quelle surprise that Japan’s increasingly educated and well-traveled young women are not impressed with this offer of lifetime menial servitude.

Japan’s youth are opting out of its stagnating economy and traditionalist society for good reason: the sacrifices demanded are inhuman and no longer make sense.What Japan needs is 35-hour work-weeks and shared jobs, not 70-hour work-weeks for some and dead-end jobs for half its youth.

If Japan wants to encourage families and women to have children, then it needs to recognize that the sacrifices demanded of young men and women no longer make sense in today’s world.

Worst Analogy...Ever

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 09:00:44 -0400

The game was so memorable that President Obama used it as a metaphor for his strategy against Mitt Romney. “We’re the Miami Heat, and he’s Jeremy Lin,” Obama reportedly told an aide. Obama meant that they were going to try to cut off every avenue Romney has to win, the same way the Heat did to Lin. “I wish it wasn’t said,” Lin says now.

The United States, long considered the standard bearer for...

Sat, 13 Oct 2012 05:01:53 -0400

The United States, long considered the standard bearer for economic freedom among large industrial nations, has experienced a remarkable plunge in economic freedom during the past decade. From 1980 to 2000, the US was generally rated the third freest economy in the world, ranking behind only Hong Kong and Singapore. The ranking of the US has fallen precipitously; from second in 2000 to eighth in 2005 and 19th in 2010. By 2009, the United States had fallen behind Switzerland, Canada, Australia, Chile, and Mauritius, countries that chose not to follow the path of massive growth in government financed by borrowing that is now the most prominent characteristic of US fiscal policy. By 2010, the United States had also fallen behind Finland and Denmark, two European welfare states. Moreover, it now trails Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Estonia, Taiwan, and Qatar. The Fraser Institute’s massive volume on the Economic Freedom Of The World - based on the following five factors: Size of Government, Legal System & Property Rights, Sound Money, Freedom to Trade Internationally, and Regulation - covers 42 variables with the goal of quantifying the key ingredients of economic freedom.

"By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an..."

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 21:47:09 -0400

“

By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some.

The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security but [also] at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become “profiteers,” who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat.

As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.

Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose

”

- John Maynard Keynes

Polandball

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 11:08:54 -0400

Polandball

Disneyland with the Death Penalty

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 12:41:19 -0400

Disneyland with the Death Penalty

We sent William Gibson to Singapore to see whether that clean dystopia represents our techno future.

By William Gibson

“It’s like an entire country run by Jeffrey Katzenberg,” the producer had said, “under the motto ‘Be happy or I’ll kill you.’” We were sitting in an office a block from Rodeo Drive, on large black furniture leased with Japanese venture capital.

Now that I’m actually here, the Disneyland metaphor is proving impossible to shake. For that matter, Rodeo Drive comes frequently to mind, though the local equivalent feels more like 30 or 40 Beverly Centers put end to end.

;-)

Was it Laurie Anderson who said that VR would never look real until they learned how to put some dirt in it? Singapore’s airport, the Changi Airtropolis, seemed to possess no more resolution than some early VPL world. There was no dirt whatsoever; no muss, no furred fractal edge to things. Outside, the organic, florid as ever in the tropics, had been gardened into brilliant green, and all-too-perfect examples of itself. Only the clouds were feathered with chaos - weird columnar structures towering above the Strait of China.

The cab driver warned me about littering. He asked where I was from.

He asked if it was clean there. “Singapore very clean city.” One of those annoying Japanese-style mechanical bells cut in as he exceeded the speed limit, just to remind us both that he was doing it. There seemed to be golf courses on either side of the freeway… .

“You come for golf?”

“No.”

“Business?”

“Pleasure.”

He sucked his teeth. He had his doubts about that one.

Singapore is a relentlessly G-rated experience, micromanaged by a state that has the look and feel of a very large corporation. If IBM had ever bothered to actually possess a physical country, that country might have had a lot in common with Singapore. There’s a certain white-shirted constraint, an absolute humorlessness in the way Singapore Ltd. operates; conformity here is the prime directive, and the fuzzier brands of creativity are in extremely short supply.

The physical past here has almost entirely vanished.

There is no slack in Singapore. Imagine an Asian version of Zurich operating as an offshore capsule at the foot of Malaysia; an affluent microcosm whose citizens inhabit something that feels like, well, Disneyland. Disneyland with the death penalty.

But Disneyland wasn’t built atop an equally peculiar 19th-century theme park - something constructed to meet both the romantic longings and purely mercantile needs of the British Empire. Modern Singapore was - bits of the Victorian construct, dressed in spanking-fresh paint, protrude at quaint angles from the white-flanked glitter of the neo-Gernsbackian metropolis. These few very deliberate fragments of historical texture serve as a reminder of just how deliciously odd an entrepot Singapore once was - a product of Empire kinkier even than Hong Kong.

The sensation of trying to connect psychically with the old Singapore is rather painful, as though Disneyland’s New Orleans Square had been erected on the site of the actual French Quarter, obliterating it in the process but leaving in its place a glassy simulacrum. The facades of the remaining Victorian shop-houses recall Covent Garden on some impossibly bright London day. I took several solitary, jet-lagged walks at dawn, when a city’s ghosts tend to be most visible, but there was very little to be seen of previous realities: Joss stick smouldering in an old brass holder on the white-painted column of a shop-house; a mirror positioned above the door of a supplier of electrical goods, set to snare and deflect the evil that travels in a straight line; a rusty trishaw, chained to a freshly painted iron railing. The physical past, here, has almost entirely vanished.

Today’s Singapore is far more precisely the result of Lee Kuan Yew’s vision than the Manchester of the East ever was of Sir Stamford Raffles’.

In 1811, when Temenggong, a local chief, arrived to resettle Singapura, the Lion City, with a hundred Malays, the jungle had long since reclaimed the ruins of a 14th-century city once warred over by Java, Siam, and the Chinese. A mere eight years later came Sir Stamford Raffles, stepping ashore amid a squirming tangle of kraits and river pirates, to declare the place a splendid spot on which to create, from the ground up, a British trading base. It was Raffles’s singular vision to set out the various colonial jewels in Her Majesty’s crown as distinct ethnic quarters: here Arab Street, here Tanjong Pagar (Chinese), here Serangoon Road (Indian). And Raffles’s theme park boomed for 110 years - a free port, a Boy’s Own fantasy out of Talbot Mundy, with every human spice of Asia set out on a neatly segmented tray of sturdy British china: “the Manchester of the East.” A very hot ticket indeed.

When the Japanese came and took it all, with dismaying ease, the British dream-time ended; the postwar years brought rapid decay, and equally rapid aspirations for independence. In 1965, Mr. Lee Kuan Yew, a Cambridge- educated lawyer, became the country’s first prime minister. Today’s Singapore is far more precisely the result of Lee Kuan Yew’s vision than the Manchester of the East ever was of Sir Stamford Raffles’s. Lee Kuan Yew’s People’s Action Party has remained in power ever since; has made, some would say, quite drastically certain that it would do so. The emblem of the PAP is a cartoony lightning bolt striking within a circle; Reddi Kilowatt as the mascot of what is, in effect, a single-party capitalist technocracy.

Finance Data a State Secret

SINGAPORE: A government official, two private economists, and a newspaper editor will be tried jointly on June 21 for revealing an official Singaporean secret - its economic growth rate.

Business Times editor Patrick Daniel, Monetary Authority of Singapore official Shanmugaratnam Tharman, and two economists for regional brokerage Crosby Securities, Manu Bhaskaran, and Raymond Foo Jong Chen, pleaded not guilty to violating Singapore’s Official Secrets Act.

South China Morning Post, 4/29/93

Reddi Kilowatt’s Singapore looks like an infinitely more liveable version of convention-zone Atlanta, with every third building supplied with a festive party-hat by the designer of Loew’s Chinese Theater. Rococo pagodas perch atop slippery-flanked megastructures concealing enough cubic footage of atria to make up a couple of good-sized Lagrangian-5 colonies. Along Orchard Road, the Fifth Avenue of Southeast Asia, chocka-block with multi- level shopping centers, a burgeoning middle class shops ceaselessly. Young, for the most part, and clad in computer-weathered cottons from the local Gap clone, they’re a handsome populace; they look good in their shorts and Reeboks and Matsuda shades.

There is less in the way of alternative, let alone dissident style in Singapore than in any city I have ever visited. I did once see two young Malayan men clad in basic, global, heavy metal black - jeans and T-shirts and waist-length hair. One’s T-shirt was embroidered with the Rastafarian colors, causing me to think its owner must have balls the size of durian fruit, or else be flat-out suicidal, or possibly both. But they were it, really, for overt boho style. (I didn’t see a single “bad” girl in Singapore. And I missed her.) A thorough scan of available tapes and

CDs confirmed a pop diet of such profound middle-of-the-road blandness that one could easily imagine the stock had been vetted by Mormon missionaries.

“You wouldn’t have any Shonen Knife, would you?”

“Sir, this is a music shop.”

Although you don’t need Mormons making sure your pop is squeaky-clean when you have the Undesirable Propagation Unit (UPU), one of several bodies of official censors. (I can’t say with any certainty that the UPU, specifically, censors Singapore’s popular music, but I love the name.) These various entities attempt to ensure that red rags on the order of Cosmopolitan don’t pollute the body politic. Bookstores in Singapore, consequently, are sad affairs, large busy places selling almost nothing I would ever want to buy - as though someone had managed to surgically neuter a W.H. Smith’s. Surveying the science fiction and fantasy sections of these stores, I was vaguely pleased to see that none of my own works seemed to be available. I don’t know for a fact that the UPU had turned them back at the border, but if they had, I’d certainly be in good company.

The local papers, including one curiously denatured tabloid, New Paper, are essentially organs of the state, instruments of only the most desirable propagation. This ceaseless boosterism, in the service of order, health, prosperity, and the Singaporean way, quickly induces a species of low-key Orwellian dread. (The feeling that Big Brother is coming at you from behind a happy face does nothing to alleviate this.) It would be possible, certainly, to live in Singapore and remain largely in touch with what was happening elsewhere. Only certain tonalities would be muted, or tuned out entirely, if possible… .

Singaporean television is big on explaining Singaporeans to themselves. Model families, Chinese, Malay, or Indian, act out little playlets explicating the customs of each culture. The familial world implied in these shows is like Leave It To Beaver without The Beave, a sphere of idealized paternalism that can only remind Americans my age of America’s most fulsome public sense of itself in the mid-1950s.

“Gosh, dad, I’m really glad you took the time to explain the Feast of the Hungry Ghosts to us in such minutely comprehensive detail.”

“Look, son, here comes your mother with a nutritious low-cholesterol treat of fat-free lup cheong and skimmed coconut milk “

And, in many ways, it really does seem like 1956 in Singapore; the war (or economic struggle, in this case) has apparently been won, an expanded middle class enjoys great prosperity, enormous public works have been successfully undertaken, even more ambitious projects are under way, and a deeply paternalistic government is prepared, at any cost, to hold at bay the triple threat of communism, pornography, and drugs.

The only problem being, of course, that it isn’t 1956 in the rest of world. Though that, one comes to suspect, is something that Singapore would prefer to view as our problem. (But I begin to wonder, late at night and in the privacy of my hotel room - what might the future prove to be, if this view should turn out to be right?)

Because Singapore is one happening place, biz-wise. I mean, the future here is so bright…. What other country is preparing to clone itself, calving like some high-tech socioeconomic iceberg? Yes, here it is, the first modern city-state to fully take advantage of the concept of franchise operations Mini-Singapores! Many!

In the coastal city of Longkou, Shandong province, China (just opposite Korea), Singaporean entrepreneurs are preparing to kick off the first of these, erecting improved port facilities and a power plant, as well as hotels, residential buildings, and, yes, shopping centers. The project, to occupy 1.3 square kilometers, reminds me of “Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong” in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, a sovereign nation set up like so many fried-noodle franchises along the feeder-routes of edge-city America. But Mr. Lee’s Greater Singapore means very serious business, and the Chinese seem uniformly keen to get a franchise in their neighborhood, and pronto.

Ordinarily, confronted with a strange city, I’m inclined to look for the parts that have broken down and fallen apart, revealing the underlying social mechanisms; how the place is really wired beneath the lay of the land as presented by the Chamber of Commerce. This won’t do in Singapore, because nothing is falling apart. Everything that’s fallen apart has already been replaced with something new. (The word infrastructure takes on a new and claustrophobic resonance here; somehow it’s all infrastructure.)

Failing to find any wrong side of the tracks, one can usually rely on a study of the nightlife and the mechanisms of commercial sex to provide some entree to the local subconscious. Singapore, as might be expected, proved not at all big on the more intense forms of nightlife. Zouk, arguably the city’s hippest dance club (modelled, I was told, after the rave scenes in Ibiza), is a pleasant enough place. It reminded me, on the night I looked in, of a large Barcelona disco, though somehow minus the party. Anyone seeking more raunchy action must cross the Causeway to Johore, where Singaporean businessmen are said to sometimes go to indulge in a little of the down and dirty. (But where else in the world today is the adjoining sleazy bordertown Islamic?) One reads of clubs there having their licenses pulled for stocking private cubicles with hapless Filipinas, so I assumed that the Islamic Tijuana at the far end of the Causeway was in one of those symbiotic pressure-valve relationships with the island city-state, thereby serving a crucial psychic function that would very likely never be officially admitted.

Singapore, meanwhile, has dealt with its own sex industry in two ways: by turning its traditional red-light district into a themed attraction in its own right, and by moving its massage parlors into the Beverly Centers. Bugis Street, once famous for its transvestite prostitutes - the sort of place where one could have imagined meeting Noel Coward, ripped on opium, cocaine, and the local tailoring, just off in his rickshaw for a night of high buggery - had, when it proved difficult to suppress, a subway station dropped on top of it. “Don’t worry,” the government said, “we’ll put it all back, just the way it was, as soon as we have the subway in.” Needless to say, the restored Bugis Street has all the sexual potential of “Frontierland,” and the transvestites are represented primarily by a number of murals.

The heterosexual hand-job business has been treated rather differently, and one can only assume that it was seen to possess some genuine degree of importance in the national Confucian scheme of things. Most shopping centers currently offer at least one “health center” - establishments one could easily take for slick mini-spas, but which in fact exist exclusively to relieve the paying customer of nagging erections. That one of these might be located between a Reebok outlet and a Rolex dealer continues to strike me as evidence of some deliberate social policy, though I can’t quite imagine what it might be. But there is remarkably little, in contemporary Singapore, that is not the result of deliberate and no doubt carefully deliberated social policy.

Take dating. Concerned that a series of earlier campaigns to reduce the national birth rate had proven entirely too successful, Singapore has instituted a system of “mandatory mixers.” I didn’t find this particularly disturbing, under the circumstances, though I disliked the idea that refusal to participate is said to result in a “call” to one’s employer. But there did seem to be a certain eugenic angle in effect, as mandatory dating for fast-track yuppies seemed to be handled by one government agency, while another dealt with the less educated. Though perhaps I misunderstood this, as Singaporeans seemed generally quite loathe to discuss these more intimate policies of government with a curious foreign visitor who was more than twice as tall as the average human, and who sweated slowly but continuously, like an aged cheese.

Singapore is curiously, indeed gratifyingly devoid of certain aspects of creativity. I say gratifyingly because I soon found myself taking a rather desperate satisfaction in any evidence that such a very tightly-run ship would lack innovative elan.

So, while I had to admit that the trains did indeed run on time, I was forced to take on some embarrassingly easy targets. Contemporary municipal sculpture is always fairly easy to make fun of, and this is abundantly true in Singapore. There was a pronounced tendency toward very large objects that resembled the sort of thing Mad magazine once drew to make us giggle at abstract art: ponderous lumps of bronze with equally ponderous holes through them. Though perhaps, like certain other apparently pointless features of the cityscape, these really served some arcane but highly specific geomantic function. Perhaps they were actually conduits for feng shui, and were only superficially intended to resemble Henry Moore as reconfigured by a team of Holiday Inn furniture designers.

But a more telling lack of creativity may have been evident in one of the city’s two primal passions: shopping. Allowing for the usual variations in price range, the city’s countless malls all sell essentially the same goods, with extraordinarily little attempt to vary their presentation. While this is generally true of malls elsewhere, and in fact is one of the reasons people everywhere flock to malls, a genuinely competitive retail culture will assure that the shopper periodically encounters either something new or something familiar in an unexpected context.

Singapore’s other primal passion is eating, and it really is fairly difficult to find any food in Singapore about which to complain. About the closest you could come would be the observation that it’s all very traditional fare of one kind or another, but that hardly seems fair. If there’s one thing you can live without in Singapore, it’s a Wolfgang Puck pizza. The food in Singapore, particularly the endless variety of street snacks in the hawker centers, is something to write home about. If you hit the right three stalls in a row, you might decide these places are a wonder of the modern world. And all of it quite safe to eat, thanks to the thorough, not to say nitpickingly Singaporean auspices of the local hygiene inspectors, and who could fault that? (Credit, please, where credit is due.)

But still. And after all. It’s boring here. And somehow it’s the same ennui that lies in wait in any theme park, put particularly in those that are somehow in too agressively spiffy a state of repair. Everything painted so recently that it positively creaks with niceness, and even the odd rare police car sliding past starts to look like something out of a Chuck E. Cheese franchise… And you come to suspect that the reason you see so few actual police is that people here all have, to quote William Burroughs, “the policeman inside.”

And what will it be like when these folks, as they so manifestly intend to do, bring themselves online as the Intelligent Island, a single giant data- node whose computational architecture is more than a match for their Swiss- watch infrastructure? While there’s no doubt that this is the current national project, one can’t help but wonder how they plan to handle all that stuff without actually getting any on them? How will a society founded on parental (well, paternal, mainly) guidance cope with the wilds of X- rated cyberspace? Or would they simply find ways not to have to? What if, while information elsewhere might be said to want to be free, the average Singaporean might be said to want, mainly, not to rock the boat? And to do very nicely, thank you, by not doing so?

Are the faceless functionaries who keep Shonen Knife and Cosmo anti- feminism out of straying local hands going to allow access to the geography-smashing highways and byways of whatever the Internet is becoming? More important, will denial of such access, in the coming century, be considered even a remotely viable possibility by even the dumbest of policemen?

Hard to say. And therein, perhaps, lies Singapore’s real importance. The overt goal of the national IT2000 initiative is a simple one: to sustain indefinitely, for a population of 2.8 million, annual increases in productivity of three to four percent.

IT, of course, is “information technology,” and we can all be suitably impressed with Singapore’s evident willingness to view such technology with the utmost seriousness. In terms of applied tech, they seem to have an awfully practical handle on what this stuff can do. The National Computer Board has designed an immigration system capable of checking foreign passports in 30 seconds, resident passports in fifteen. Singapore’s streets are planted with sensor loops to register real-time traffic; the traffic lights are computer controlled, and the system adjusts itself constantly to optimize the situation, creating “green waves” whenever possible. A different sort of green wave will appear if a building’s fire sensor calls for help; emergency vehicles are automatically green-lighted through to the source of the alarm. The physical operation of the city’s port, constant and quite unthinkably complex, is managed by another system. A “smart-card” system is planned to manage billings for cars entering the Restricted Zone. (The Restricted Zone is that part of central Singapore which costs you something to enter with a private vehicle. Though I suspect that if, say, Portland were to try this, the signs would announce the “Clean Air Zone,” or something similar.)

They’re good at this stuff. Really good. But now they propose to become something else as well; a coherent city of information, its architecture planned from the ground up. And they expect that whole highways of data will flow into and through their city. Yet they also seem to expect that this won’t affect them. And that baffles us, and perhaps it baffles the Singaporeans that it does.

Myself, I’m inclined to think that if they prove to be right, what will really be proven will be something very sad; and not about Singapore, but about our species. They will have proven it possible to flourish through the active repression of free expression. They will have proven that information does not necessarily want to be free.

But perhaps I’m overly pessimistic here. I often am; it goes with the territory. (Though what could be more frightening, out here at the deep end of the 20th century, than a genuinely optimistic science fiction writer?) Perhaps Singapore’s destiny will be to become nothing more than a smug, neo-Swiss enclave of order and prosperity, amid a sea of unthinkable…weirdness.

Dear God. What a fate.

Fully enough to send one lunging up from one’s armchair in the atrium lounge of the Meridien Singapore, calling for a taxi to the fractal-free corridors of the Airtropolis.

But I wasn’t finished, quite. There’d be another night to brood about the Dutchman.

I haven’t told you about the Dutchman yet. It looks like they’re going to hang him.

Man Gets Death For Importing 1 Kg of Cannabis

A MALAYAN man was yesterday sentenced to death by the High Court for importing not less than 1 kg of cannabis into Singapore more than two years ago.

Mat Repin Mamat, 39, was found guilty of the offense committed at the Woodlands checkpoint on October 9, 1991, after a five-day trial.

The hearing had two interpreters.

One interpreted English to Malay while the other interpreted Malay to Kelantanese to Mat Repin, who is from Kelantan.

The prosecution’s case was that when Mat Repin arrived at the checkpoint and was asked whether he had any cigarettes to declare, his reply was no.

As he appeared nervous, the senior customs officer decided to check the scooter.

Questioned further if he was carrying any “barang” (thing), Mat Repin replied that he had a kilogram of “ganja” (cannabis) under the petrol tank.

In his defense, he said that he did not know that the cannabis was hidden there.

The Straits Times 4/24/93

The day they sentenced Mat Repin, the Dutchman was also up on trial. Johannes Van Damme, an engineer, had been discovered in custody of a false- bottomed suitcase containing way mucho barang: 4.32 kilograms of heroin, checked through from Bangkok to Athens.

The prosecution made its case that Van Damme was a mule; that he’d agreed to transport the suitcase to Athens for a payment of US$20,000. Sniffed out by Changi smackhounds, the suitcase was pulled from the belt, and Van Damme from the transit lounge, where he may well have been watching Beaver’s dad explain the Feast of the Hungry Ghosts on a wall-mounted Sony.

The defense told a different story, though it generally made about as much sense as Mat Repin’s. Van Damme had gone to Bangkok to buy a wedding ring for his daughter, and had met a Nigerian who’d asked him, please, to take a suitcase through to Athens. “One would conclude,” the lawyer for the defense had said, “that either he was a nave person or one who can easily be made use of.” Or, hell, both. I took this to be something akin to a plea for mercy.

Johannes Van Damme, in the newspaper picture, looks as thick as two bricks.

I can’t tell you whether he’s guilty or not, and I wouldn’t want to have to, but I can definitely tell you that I have my doubts about whether Singapore should hang him, by the neck, until dead - even if he actually was involved in a scheme to shift several kilos of heroin from some backroom in Bangkok to the junkies of the Plaka. It hasn’t, after all, a whole hell of a lot to do with Singapore. But remember “Zero Tolerance?” These guys have it.

And, very next day, they announced Johannes Van Damme’s death sentence. He still has at least one line of appeal, and he is still, the paper notes, “the first Caucasian” to find his ass in this particular sling.

“My ass,” I said to the mirror, “is out of here.” Put on a white shirt laundered so perfectly the cuffs could slit your wrists. Brushed my teeth, ran a last-minute check on the luggage, forgot to take the minibar’s tinned Australian Singapore Sling home for my wife.

Made it to the lobby and checked out in record time. I’d booked a cab for 4 AM, even though that gave me two hours at Changi. The driver was asleep, but he woke up fast, insanely voluble, the only person in Singapore who didn’t speak much English.

He ran every red light between there and Changi, giggling. “Too early policeman….”

They were there at Changi, though, toting those big-ticket Austrian machine pistols that look like khaki plastic waterguns. And I must’ve been starting to lose it, because I saw a crumpled piece of paper on the spotless floor and started snapping pictures of it. They really didn’t like that. They gave me a stern look when they came over to pick it up and carry it away.

So I avoided eye contact, straightened my tie, and assumed the position that would eventually get me on the Cathay Pacific’s flight to Hong Kong.

In Hong Kong I’d seen huge matte black butterflies flapping around the customs hall, nobody paying them the least attention. I’d caught a glimpse of the Walled City of Kowloon, too. Maybe I could catch another, before the future comes to tear it down.

Traditionally the home of pork-butchers, unlicensed denturists, and dealers in heroin, the Walled City still stands at the foot of a runway, awaiting demolition. Some kind of profound embarassment to modern China, its clearance has long been made a condition of the looming change of hands.

Hive of dream. Those mismatched, uncalculated windows. How they seemed to absorb all the frantic activity of Kai Tak airport, sucking in energy like a black hole.

I was ready for something like that… .

I loosened my tie, clearing Singapore airspace.

William Gibson’s Neuromancer made cyberpunk a household word. His new novel, Virtual Light, was just published. “Disneyland” is his first major piece of non-fiction.

What Is Your Amateur Porn Telling Employers About You?

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 01:57:27 -0400

What Is Your Amateur Porn Telling Employers About You?

Xhibit Explains the ongoing Diaoyutai-Senkaku Islands dispute...

Sun, 30 Sep 2012 10:54:00 -0400

Xhibit Explains the ongoing Diaoyutai-Senkaku Islands dispute among China/Hong Kong SAR/Taiwan vs Japan.

The Japanese Have Grown Dramatically Poorer

Sat, 29 Sep 2012 04:30:45 -0400

Wolf Richter, Testosterone Pit

“Pauperization,” the word, became infamous when three executives of huge consumer products companies voiced it as the new challenge in Europe.

To market their products successfully, they changed their commercial strategies and applied what worked in poor countries [The “Pauperization of Europe”].

In Japan, a similar process has hounded the economy, but for much longer. And nothing shows this better than the plight of the ubiquitous but hapless “salaryman.”

He is a cultural phenomenon. He enters the formidable corporate hierarchy upon graduation and struggles within it till retirement. Most of the time, the career trajectory flattens sooner or later. Often enough the aging salaryman is shuffled aside to a “window job” where he might not even have the tools to work, such as a phone.

His life is defined by commutes in packed trains and long hours at work. After work, at restaurants and bars, the informal part of work begins with clients or coworkers to hash out inter-office issues, price differences, design problems, or product failures under the influence of alcohol—the official excuse to be direct in a culture that prizes vagueness.

In return for his labors, the salaryman hands his paycheck to his wife. She manages the household budget, pays the bills, buys what is needed, and makes investment decisions. Stories abound of the Japanese housewife who blew the couple’s lifesavings on leveraged investments that no one understood. And she’s known for her impeccably wrong timing [The Japanese Are Dumping Their Gold].

She also gives her husband a monthly allowance, kozukai, to buy lunch, dinner, drinks, etc., though regular visits to “soapland,” due to their higher costs, would have to be covered by special company cash bonuses. Now a lot of these structures are loosening up, and lifetime employment is no longer the ground rule, nor is marriage, but for those who end up married, especially if the wife stays at home, the allowance still applies.

In 1979, Shinsei Bank started one of the most insightful polls into consumer spending habits, or rather into male consumer spending ability—the Salaryman Pocket Money Survey. Back then, the average salaryman’s allowance was ¥47,175 ($590) per month. By 1990, the peak of the bubble when money grew on trees, wives indulged their husbands with an allowance of ¥77,725 ($971) per month. Then it crashed. By 2004, it landed on the ¥40,000 mark.

This year? ¥39,756.

And those with kids receive ¥15,000 less than those without kids.

The bursting of the Japanese bubble, now in its third decade, has ravaged salaries, bonuses, household budgets, and thus allowances—and spending. The zero-interest-rate policy that the Bank of Japan has perfected, extensive quantitative easing, and two decades of stimulus budgets that have left Japan saddled with the worst debt-to-GDP ratio in the world … all conspired against the hapless salaryman. He works harder and longer than ever before, for less pay, and even his lunch money is getting cut.

In 1992, the average salaryman spent ¥746 ($9.32) on lunch; this year, ¥510 ($6.38). Back then, when everybody was still assuming that this was just a temporary lull in the excitement, the average salaryman took an almost leisurely 27.6 minutes to eat lunch; this year, he inhaled it in 19.6 minutes. After-work drinking took the biggest hit: in 2001, the average salaryman forked over ¥6,160 ($77) when he went out to drink. That’s a serious amount of beer. Hence the image of a midnight train stuffed with drunken and barfing guys. This year, he spent only ¥2,860 ($35) per drinking excursion.

The beer industry caught the brunt of it. Beer shipments, a closely watched index based on data from the five major brewers, dropped by 3.7% in 2011, the seventh straight year of declines. Only 442.39 million cases were shipped, the lowest EVER in recorded Japanese beer history. But this August, a miracle occurred. For the first time in years, there was an uptick in beer shipments for the month of 2.8%.Where there is beer, there is hope.

Or maybe not. Eating out got slammed. Again. In 2010, 22.6% of the salarymen said they didn’t eat out at all; in 2011, 35.8% weren’t eating out; and this year, 37.9%. If this trend keeps going, it will destroy the core of Japanese social life. (But those are the lucky ones. The number of welfare recipients set a new record: 2.115 million individuals and 1.543 million households, according to the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare.)

This has got to be the icing on the Japanese cake. The website of the Japanese Ministry of Finance, more specifically the FAQ page on government bonds, has been catapulted to stardom on Facebook and Twitter. It posted the question: “In case Japan becomes insolvent, what will happen to government bonds?” Incredibly, it answers with a terse action plan for when the Big S hits the fan. Read…. Japanese Ministry of Finance To Japanese Bondholders: You’re Screwed!

Language differences!

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 10:14:53 -0400

Language differences!

This music video of filled with epileptic energy!

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 11:42:13 -0400

This music video of filled with epileptic energy!

Homer votes for Mitt Romney because he invented Obamacare

Sun, 23 Sep 2012 13:05:24 -0400

Homer votes for Mitt Romney because he invented Obamacare

Nicely shot commercial

Sun, 23 Sep 2012 02:06:20 -0400

Nicely shot commercial