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.