Idiot Generations

If we watch television, and who does not, we know that bad food habit and mismanagement of personal finance are two of the major evil of our North American world. It is safe to say that infomercials, particularly the late night kind, are the mid-tech con games of our time. It is easy to see that the religious infomercials are after money and not souls. The rest is either about making money or making, eating, or not eating food. Even in major news programs, the financial crisis and increasing obesity of our society occupy vast portion of the time slot. We are told that this present world wide financial crisis happens because devious bankers lent money to us, a bunch of mortgage-delinquent idiots. We are also told that we, the same bunch of idiots, and our children are duped by devious food manufacturers to buy over processed, over packaged, and over priced food that not only contain next to no nutrition but make us obscenely fat, give us all kinds of deceases, and eventually kill us well before our life expectancy. After being thoroughly frightened and worried, we cannot sleep and look for help in late night infomercials. The success of the informercials testify to this sad state of affair. No one though ask why this is the case? We are on average more educated than people from any previous generations. Yet, we know nothing about the two most important things to our survival in our world. We do not know the basis of our bank accounts, mortgages, and credit accounts not to mention stocks, commodities and all their derivatives. It is not better when it comes to food—all we do is look at a colourful plastic box and go “yummy.” How do we come to this? We learnt how to read, write, calculate, sciences, history and all the other things in school but nothing about managing our own lives. How is it possible? Is it because our school is there not prepare us for life but to prepare us for work. We learnt the skills to work but we do not learnt what to do with the rewards of our work. In the end, even the best of us become nothing but highly skilled idiots working hard, eating badly, worring all the time, watching infomercials and being blamed and pitied for causing the evils of our world. Oh, isn't that cubic zirconium ring just as lovely as can be?

Gang War

There is a gang war going on here in Metro Vancouver and shootings are happening in Vancouver and Surrey and places in between. Like most gang wars these days, this too is fuelled by drugs and the fight over markets for them. This in and of itself is nothing new—with the thriving drug trade, on both the production and the consumer fronts, wars break out every three or four years. The government's reaction to these wars and the economy of illicit drugs is fairly minimal as if they are hoping that the bad guys would kill each other off and everything would return to normal soon with transactions limited to a minimal number of streets and closed doors. Herein lies one of the big different difference between the two governments in North America—The US overreacts and the Canadian under-reacts. South of the border they declare war on every little thing and one of the first ones is drugs. Which mis-reaction is better is hard to say, since neither seems to be effective. One thing that is sure is that gangsters need to have their eyes checked and target practice more. It is embarrassing how often they hit the wrong people by either mis-identifying the target of missing it entirely. I think the minimal the provincial government should do is to bring back free eye checks and open some video arcades.

Down to Hot Air

The (financial) world has come to this--a few empty word from the premier of China and the world stock market jumped. Wen Jiabao said he was confident that China will have 8 percent growth this year, a level general considered to be the mark of China financial progress and social stability. If you live in the export oriented industrial area, or once worked in those areas, you may be excused to think that confidence as a lot hot air. And if you are a foreigner doing business in China, you may be similarly excused. The truth is nobody in their clear mind would accept Wen's declaration at face value. Like injecting vast amount of money into the economy, Wen's hot air is an injection of vast amount of hopefulness into the psyche of the economy. One of the unexpected thing about this recession/depression is the realization that money really means nothing, a trillion here, a trillion there, still nothing. Half a year ago, free market theory failed; now it is also becoming increasing clear that New Deal is at best ineffective. The world is now looking towards a pseudo-communist country to rescue them from of their capitalist failure. And the leaders of this pseudo-communist country are down to hot air. This is what the world has come to.

Very Conservative Media Policies

Looking at John McCain in this campaign is enough to turn anyone who had any hope for their politicians into a total cynic. For decades, McCain carefully cultivated an image of a straight talking maverick. It had gotten him wide respect from the people and some fellow lawmakers. It had also gotten him rejection from his own party when it came to primaries. It is clear so far in this campaign that he has fallen in line with the powers of his party and employed the same tactics he had opposed for decades. Even his slogan-famous straight talk is no more. Right now he is more Stephen Harper then Straight Talk Express. Maybe this why Harper has to up his game and use his RCMP protection team to keep vetted reporters away from him and Conservative candidates around him. I cannot help but wonder what these people are hiding. In this time of reports famously not asking the tough and the real questions, politicians, in the right particularly, act as if they were con men facing 60 Minutes. But then, come to think of it, maybe that is precisely the case, and they are such con men that they are even afraid of the weakest pool of reporters in history.

It takes one...?

With all the bailouts from the U.S. in the last week or so, I have not seen or heard anyone on TV or radio or print questioning the credential of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson as the one to lead the rescue and sit as the de facto CEO of the financial market. Before Paulson was appointed Treasury Secretary, he was the CEO of Goldman Sachs. One may be relieved that Goldman is one of the two investment banks that did not fail outright. It is still hard to overlook the fact that he was the head of investment banking, then COO, then CEO of one of the major players that caused this present market crisis. It is under his watch that the instruments that made such a horrific impact in the last few months was created. It is safe to say that if anyone should know the details of these instruments, Paulson is the one. So, even if we were to leave his culpability as the former head of Goldman Sachs out of the question, as the Treasure Secretary he should still understand the risk and the deceptive nature of these practises in the investment banks and acted to control them. For over two years Secretary Paulson did nothing to curtail these dangerous practises; in fact, he encouraged it. Now that the system he helped created crashed and is taking everyone with it, he proposes to have the U.S. government buy up all the bad debts and even the investment banks. This would make Paulson the King of the United Kingdom of investment banks and insurance companies. A promotion indeed. The question though is whether he is the right person for the job. His link to the institutions he is spending a lot of the government's money to save and his part in creating this crisis are serious questions on his qualifications. Should the con who set up the game be the one to save the world after the game almost destroy it? I am no so sure.

When Politicians Talks About the Fundamentals, We Are In Trouble

I forgot who said it but it is very true. When it comes down to dressing things up to make themselves look good, politicians in power are not picky—anything would do. 'Fundamentals' come up only when there is nothing at all good to say about the economy. So, when I see the economy campaign advertisement from Stephen Harper consists of nothing but “the fundamentals are strong” I really know we are in serious trouble. What are the fundamentals really? Most people probably do not know and that is why they like to use it. I am guessing that they are the growth of the Gross National Product, the health of the financial institutions, the level of unemployment, the financial health of the government, the relative strength of the currency, the inflation rate, the level of worker's wage, etc. There is no such thing as a bad economy with good fundamentals. A bad economy is one that has decreasing growth or even shrinkage on the GDP, reduced lending abilities from financial institutions, increase in unemployment levels, increase deficit from the government, devaluation of the currency, higher inflation, lower wages, etc. There is no such thing as sound fundamentals and miserable economic life. No wonder McCain got into such problem and had to redefine this most fundamental of economic terms. By redefining economic fundamentals as the workers (their continuous employment? Looking shakier and shakier. Their health? No employment no insurance. Their continuous existence? Well, no news of massive dying off yet, fingers crossed.), McCain is certainly challenging Bill Clinton (the meaning of 'is' and 'sex' for example) in who has greater impact on revolutionizing both the English language and the basic concepts in life.
While I do not support the candidacy of Stephen Harper, I am nonetheless praying (to whom? I am not sure) that he does not have to do the same bad semiotic magic as McCain. When they bring out 'fundamentals' they are wearing nothing but the last dirty loincloth, I really really do not want to see that gone. Otherwise, I may have to dig a bomb shelter and become a survivalist.

Oh, sorry dad, got something better to do...

In every election parties have a 'family value' ad that portrays their candidate as a family man/woman. In the last election, we saw Stephen Harper playing with his young children. And now, we are seeing him in an ad called 'Family is Everything' telling us about how he plays card games and go to the movies with his son despite his now teenage son's increasing reluctance. This is very nice, very 50's, very warm and fuzzy. Harper even looks the part, a little awkward, a little amateur-actor-ish. This sort of things must be useful or they wouldn't be bring it out every election. I am not sure though this has much relevance in an election. It is about value, they, particularly the parties on the right, would say. What kind of value it it? If we take the ads as the honest truth, we learn that the candidate love his family and want to do right by them. That is very nice indeed. But what does it have to do with being a prime minister or a president? It is safe to assume that all the candidates, and indeed most people with family, do love their family and want to do right by them. It would indeed be an insult to suggest otherwise without convincing evident. If we were Confucian and believe in a paternal political system, then this 'good-father-ness' is important. I would to think that we don't think about our elected officeholders as or want them to be, our fathers. We want them to work for us, not to feed us, to entertain us or to discipline us. If he is the best father on earth but useless as a politician, I have no use for him in office. If he is a good politician but is found wanting as a father, his paternal shortcomings are none of my business. To evaluate a Prime Minister, I have but one question, what is he/she going to do to/for our country as a whole. What kind of family he/she has, or even if he/she has a family, is not something I care about. But then we have trained to value the warm and fuzzy over the complexity of reasoning. Now that we have Harper's family ad, Dion's and Layton's can't be far behind, and we can just sit and watch some very lovely and comfortable wool being pulled over our eyes.