The Time Is Different

My friend, Mark Mykleby, who works in the Pentagon, shared with me this personal letter to the editor he got published last week in his hometown paper, The Beaufort Gazette in South Carolina. It is the best reaction I’ve seen to the BP oil spill — and also the best advice to President Obama on exactly whom to kick you know where.
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

“I’d like to join in on the blame game that has come to define our national approach to the ongoing environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. This isn’t BP’s or Transocean’s fault. It’s not the government’s fault. It’s my fault. I’m the one to blame and I’m sorry. It’s my fault because I haven’t digested the world’s in-your-face hints that maybe I ought to think about the future and change the unsustainable way I live my life. If the geopolitical, economic, and technological shifts of the 1990s didn’t do it; if the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 didn’t do it; if the current economic crisis didn’t do it; perhaps this oil spill will be the catalyst for me, as a citizen, to wean myself off of my petroleum-based lifestyle. ‘Citizen’ is the key word. It’s what we do as individuals that count. For those on the left, government regulation will not solve this problem. Government’s role should be to create an environment of opportunity that taps into the innovation and entrepreneurialism that define us as Americans. For those on the right, if you want less government and taxes, then decide what you’ll give up and what you’ll contribute. Here’s the bottom line: If we want to end our oil addiction, we, as citizens, need to pony up: bike to work, plant a garden, do something. So again, the oil spill is my fault. I’m sorry. I haven’t done my part. Now I have to convince my wife to give up her S.U.V. Mark Mykleby.”

I think Mykleby’s letter gets at something very important: We cannot fix what ails America unless we look honestly at our own roles in creating our own problems. We — both parties — created an awful set of incentives that encouraged our best students to go to Wall Street to create crazy financial instruments instead of to Silicon Valley to create new products that improve people’s lives. We — both parties — created massive tax incentives and cheap money to make home mortgages available to people who really didn’t have the means to sustain them. And we — both parties — sent BP out in the gulf to get us as much oil as possible at the cheapest price. (Of course, we expected them to take care, but when you’re drilling for oil beneath 5,000 feet of water, stuff happens.)

As Pogo would say, we have met the enemy and he is us.

But that means we’re also the solution — if we’re serious. Look, we managed to survive 9/11 without letting it destroy our open society or rule of law. We managed to survive the Wall Street crash without letting it destroy our economy. Hopefully, we will survive the BP oil spill without it destroying our coastal ecosystems. But we dare not press our luck.

We have to use this window of opportunity to insulate ourselves as much as possible against all the bad things we cannot control and get serious about fixing the problems that we can control. We need to make our whole country more sustainable. So let’s pass an energy-climate bill that really reduces our dependence on Middle East oil. Let’s pass a financial regulatory reform bill that really reduces the odds of another banking crisis. Let’s get our fiscal house in order, as the economy recovers. And let’s pass an immigration bill that will enable us to attract the world’s top talent and remain the world’s leader in innovation.

We need all the cushions we can get right now, because we are living in a world of cascading and intertwined threats that have the potential to turn our country upside down at any moment. We do not know when the next Times Square bomber might get lucky. We don’t know how long the U.S. and Israel will tolerate Iran’s nuclear program. We don’t know if Pakistan will hold together and what might happen to its nukes. We don’t know when North Korea will go nuts. We don’t know if the European Union can keep financing the debts of Greece, Hungary and Spain — and what financial contagion might be set off if it can’t.

“It is not your imagination,” says corporate strategy consultant Peter Schwartz — there is a lot more scary stuff hanging over the world today. Since the end of the cold war and the rise of the Internet, we’ve lost the walls and the superpowers that together kept the world’s problems more contained. Today, smaller and smaller units can wreak larger and larger havoc — and whatever havoc is wreaked now gets spread faster and farther than ever before.

That is why we have to solve the big problems in our control, not postpone them or pretend that more lobby-driven, lowest-common-denominator solutions are still satisfactory. A crisis is a terrible thing to waste, but a reprieve and a breathing spell — which is what we’re having right now — is a really terrible thing to waste. We don’t want to look back on this moment and say: How could we have gone back to business as usual and petty political gridlocks with all those black swans circling around us? Then we will really kick ourselves.


Okay comrades, this is an article from the famous New York Time columnist Thomas Friedman published digitally on June 11th. As being part of this whole planet, we may just take some responsibilities on making it better. Well, maybe it's your fault as well as mine. right?

8th Grade Google site: F451

Just came across this site of F451 discussion, brought back good and retarded memories :) :

http://sites.google.com/a/tas.tw/ms-8-lit-circles-johnsene-p7-8-group3/group-3-lit--circle-4

Haha, now thinking back, I should had enjoy 8th grade even more, now people have so much homework they don't even have time for VOR :(

But I promise you, if we continue to post, this blog will be one of our best memories when we look back from college (if this blog by the time is not flag by blogger as inappropriate)

Have a good day comrades!

Admin,
Eddie You

The Dumbest Generation (1)- Crazy students and Nerds

Students these days (Vor, chris, nelson...)

"[Lots of students these days] have only one thing on their minds, SUCCESS, and one thing in their hearts, Anxiety. Trapped in a mad "culture of overachiever ism," they run a frantic race to earn an A in every class, score 750 or highter on the SATs, take piano lessons, chalk up AP courses on their transcripts, stay in shape, please their parents, volunteer for outreach programs, and, most of all, win entrance to "HYP" (Harvard-Yale-Princeton)"

This is lol. expecially the HYP part.

VOR, change you need :)

COMMON DICTATOR

In the manner of some other fellow vigil-holders, I am going to plagiarize my work for social studies (I realized after submitting the assignment that we were supposed to write only one paragraph):

Comparison of Holocaust and Oppression of Uyghurs

To fully understand certain entity's act, one must also evaluate its motivation in performing such an act. I think the Holocaust's purpose was simply to appease the general anti-semitism. Jews at the time were generally wealthier than the common German. Being of socialist roots, the Nazis associated, in demagogue fashion, the poverty and weakness of Germany to the affluence of Jews (a common bourgeois tactic of attaching actual social relations to irrelevant social constructs). Thus, the common Nazi depiction of Jews is that of some fat, well-dressed industrialist. As such, other artificially set-apart groups, such as Catholics, homosexuals, and communists, were also persecuted as a result of this German-centrist populism. The separation of these people from the human-ness of the majority Aryans, allowed for the countless atrocities that occurred during the Holocaust.

In the case of the Uyghur oppression, however, the ultimate goal is not of separation, but integration. The official Party rhetoric is not of Han superiority but rather of national solidarity. There are no propaganda posters showing rich Uyghurs stealing a poor Han peasant's money (though in reality the rich Han is probably stealing some poor Uyghur's money). The word "Chinese" in Party-speak does not refer to only the Han, but is instead an all-encompassing term integrating all 56 ethnic groups in China. In Xinjiang, children are taught Mandarin but are barred from any religion - does the exact same treatment not befall all other children in all other provinces? The Uyghurs in some areas are even "more equal" than the Han, being allowed more than one child per family. The Chinese unity, however, was intrinsically contradictory to the Uyghur traditions. The Amnesty International report states that "In the mid to late 1990s, Uighurs in the region experienced a sharp reversal in policy". This "reversal in policy" was caused by nothing else than actual separatist terrorist attacks such as the 1997 bus bombs in Urumqi. Attacks were quite frequent, including the recent riot again in Urumqi. The state uses these attacks as a reason to continue repression, sparking more unrest - continuing the justification for constant sinicization and erosion of traditional Uyghur culture.

However, while the Nazi/Gestapo/SS sought to end Semitic heritage through directly mass-murdering millions of Jews, the PRC is slightly subtler. Firstly, it establishes an "autonomous region" (which in effect is still under direct control by CPC bureaucrats). Also, news of the concentration camps slowly leaked out during the course of WWII, even when the SS worked hard to censor the murders. The PRC, on the contrary, simply ascribes the Uyghurs executed to be terrorists. On another level, while Jews were denied basic living necessities like water (Mrs. Ban went for forty days without water) or shelter (Mrs. Ban's family had to fit in another few families into their small home), Uyghurs are denied things higher on the Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Symbolically, Noemi's mother had her menorah forcefully taken from her, when in the Uyghurs' case the chance of religion is not even there. Public prayer and other expressions of Islam like head-coverings are banned. Also, the Uyghur language is suppressed in the prime arena of indoctrination of school. Culture in general is being washed away with masses of Han worker migrating to Xinjaing (the majority of the capital city Urumqi's population is Han). Also, the Nazi opposition to Jews and other "reactionary" groups were based solely on their inherent identity; the PRC suppression is a more utilitarian control of anything anti-PRC (such as underground churches or Falun Gong, in addition to Uyghur traditions). Still, with evaporated national identity, the Uyghurs then become part of the Chinese nationalism complex: both Jews and Uyghurs have been subject to the tyranny of the majority - or at least some misrepresentation of this majority.

PARADE OF DEGENERATES

The Taiwan "Pride Parade" takes place this year on October 31. Being quite imaginative, it will start from 凱達格蘭大道, just like all other major parades: http://fridae.com/newsfeatures/2009/10/01/9031.taiwan-pride-parade-oct-31

This just further affirms how liberal "democracy", left unchecked, grows into a tumor. People mark themselves off as "LGBT", mostly because it is trendy and cool. In the "democratic" bourgeois society, almost everyone does things because they are trendy and cool. Oh what irony! Opponents to reason often point out how communism is anti-family. Yet, what has our beloved capitalism brought us? This absurd self-categorization is an inherent characteristic of bourgeois society. What better way to distract the proletariat from the real problem, than to offer them a chance to go to fun and colorful parades?

(The rainbow colors of mental degeneration, staining the streets of Taipei.)

Do you agree with the actual methods of how the Mongols ruled the Yuan Dynasty?

Overall, I agree with the main action of the Mongol while they ruled the Chinese: Mongols were separated from the Han Chinese to present the existence of social difference. I think one of the most correct and effective way that the Mongols did that shows their social status against the Chinese was to forbidden intermarriage. Not only does this keeps Mongolians well separated from the Chinese to show "who is the boss", but also makes the babies as tough as our pass generations. If we have a "Half Chinese and Half Mongolian" baby, they will learn "both" from Mongolian and Chinese, which not only will not make them as strong as the full Mongolians, but also transfer the weaknesses of a Chinese onto them. I agree that Mongolians should be treated higher than Chinese, if we perform the same crime, a Chinese should have harsher punishments than Mongolians, yes this is unfair, but unfairness sometimes is a necessity. I agree with the single coinage and currency option, since the system proved successful even in now modern days. I disagree with Kublai Khan's action of letting his son be educated under Confucius's philosophies, this only made him weaker under such educations, which I believe led to a weak education to Kublai Khan's grandson. So when his grandson ruled the Mongolians, he fails to execute necessary tasks and orders efficiently, which led to the fall of the Yuan Dynasty. In final Conglomeration, Kublai Khan was extremely successful in ruling his empire, but he lost when he allowed the philosophies of Confucius to reach his son.

NUCLEAR PEACE

It is commons sense that weapons cause war; war is bad, so weapons are bad. Nuclear weapons, being the most destructive of weapons and capable of complete annihilation, are then obviously the worst -

- as according to the often fallacious logic of today's liberal bourgeois, thinking like all reactionaries without actually understanding the issue.

Nuclear weapon capability has in recent decades has spread faster than one could say "nuclear disarmament". In proper reactionary fashion, nations have chosen to get rid of these nuke-abilities through UN resolutions, sanctions, and helping spread anti-nuclear sentiments among the general public .

Yet, the very basic premise that nuclear weapons and world peace are mutually exclusive, is FALSE. The first nukes - dropped onto Japan - were a main contributor to the end of WWII, saving thousands of lives that would have been lost through conventional warfare. Throughout the Cold War, the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) along with both superpowers possessing nuclear capability, ensured that none of the thousands of nuclear weapons were actually used. Yes, there are more parties involved in today's nuclear arena, but the game theory is still the same. Not only would MAD prevent nukes from being used, it would prevent any conventional war - saving uncountable lives. In addition, nuclear weapons would shield smaller nations from foreign imperialistic infringements on sovereignty.

The same idea was (more eloquently) iterated in an old Newsweek cover article by Jonathan Tepperman: http://www.newsweek.com/id/214248

COMMUNIST CONFUCIUS - 大同

"大道之行也　天下為公　選賢與能　講信修睦　故人不獨親其親　不獨子其子　使老有所終　壯有所用　幼有所長　矜寡孤獨廢疾者　皆有所養　男有分　女有歸　貨惡其棄於地也　不必藏於己　力惡其不出於身也　不必為己　是故謀閉而不興　盜竊亂賊而不作　故外戶而不閉　是謂大同"
(from: http://zh.wikisource.org/zh-hant/%E7%A6%AE%E8%A8%98/%E7%A6%AE%E9%81%8B, 禮記大同篇)

When the Great Dao (Tao, perfect order) prevails, the world is like a Commonwealth State shared by all ... This is the ideal world – a perfect world of equality, fraternity, harmony, welfare, and justice. This is the world called “Da-Tong (Dah-Torng)”.
(immigrant-styled translation from: http://www.cd.org.tw/english/download/Dao/Documents/6%E7%A6%AE%E9%81%8B%E5%A4%A7%E5%90%8C%E7%AF%87_%E7%99%BD%E8%A9%B1%E8%A8%BB_The%20World%20of%20Da-Tong.pdf)

The first few lines of the text - 大同篇 of Confucius's 禮記 - could be seen almost everywhere with Taiwan ROC patriotism. From the engravings in front of Sun Yat-sen's statue in the Sun Yat-sen Memorial, to the words on your 100NT bill, to the placard on the San Francisco Chinatown gate, to the Datong electronics company - Confucian ideological influence is profound.

The basic idea of 大同 is of equality and - simply - perfection. Call it what you want to - democracy, true freedom, tyranny, or impossibility - you cannot deny that 大同 would be classless with all social enslavement broken. Holding on to the true meaning of communism, 大同 is very much communist indeed.

Furthermore, we could compare 大同 with the 小康 society explained contrastingly right after 大同:
"今大道既隱　天下為家　各親其親　各子其子　貨力為己　大人世及以為禮　域郭溝池以為固　禮義以為紀　以正君臣　以篤父子　以睦兄弟　以和夫婦　以設製度 　以立田裡　以賢勇知　以功為己　故謀用是作　而兵由此起　禹　湯　文　武　成王　周公　由此其選也　此六君子者　未有不謹於禮者也　以著其義　以考其信 　著有過　刑仁講讓　示民有常　如有不由此者　在埶者去　眾以為殃　是謂小康"
(from: http://zh.wikisource.org/zh-hant/%E7%A6%AE%E8%A8%98/%E7%A6%AE%E9%81%8B, 禮記大同篇)

You can find the translation for this somewhere. But this is essentially the same as Confucius's prior explanation of 大同, except that private interests are before unity and that social bindings are more than present. This is capitalism.

Yes, 禮記 is missing all the cool class analysis as in dialectical materialism, so not much could be learned about capitalism itself from reading Confucius. However, one would have to admit Confucius was quite ahead of his time.

(to be continued)

DEFINITION HIJACKING

Today in social studies class I managed to bring up communism in the discussion about ancient kingdoms. I commented how the criteria for an economy's "greatness" could change over time, and that communism is not necessarily inherently unable to achieve such "greatness". At that my bourgeois-liberal teacher commented how communism is a political system.

This brings me to a point I have been insinuating at through many of my previous posts. Communism is, by its original definition, a classless society. It is not a democratic and economically equal welfare state, nor is it a despotism with forced collectivization. COMMUNISM IS SIMPLY A CLASSLESS SOCIETY.

Yes, people are entitled to form their opinions of how communism could be reached or why it should not be (in fact I will post sometime in the future about the communist nature of Confucius). However, it seriously becomes a definition hijacking when one takes for granted his or her own views on something, as its basic definition. This is highly akin to the Newspeak of 1984 (I am selectively critical of the government of Oceania), where words are deleted en masse from the dictionaries, grabbing from the people the power to think. Words generate thought, and thought generates power. When bourgeois oppressors take away the true meaning of words, we have to be careful about when, perhaps, "freedom" has come to mean the number of cars you have or whether or not you are deluded enough to think communism is an inherently political system.

















Hijackers the Quran, hicjackers of definitions.

(terrorist image: http://nicedeb.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/terrorist.jpg)

UNIVERSAL LIBERALIZATION

The world has steadily become more and more left-handed (left-leaning and weaker like all lefties) in terms of political entropy - i.e. more trash floats around in the media. Created then, is a disturbing blending of factual information with idiotic falsities. A good example is all the current "science" shows on TV with no real science involved.

Another example comes from juxtaposing the current content of our blog with that of the good old days before VOR corruption: http://vigilsofreason.blogspot.com/2008/12/universe-trivia.html#comments. Then, even a mildly stupid post could be subject to my Big Brother treatment. Now, all chaos runs amok.

Up with Big Brother.

DEATH OF NATIONALISM

As Eddie wants only posts about current news, I will post about my comments for a required essay for English which I recently read. The essay is "Mulatto Millennium" by Danzy Senna in Half and Half. It talks about the rising status of mixed people in American popular culture. Read it yourself if you want to as this post is not really about the essay.

In Taiwan today, the minds of the youth is dominated by popular culture - a black messy mix of brainlessness from various countries. Globalization is clearly evident - from the popularity of manga to the failed interpretation of rap to the US-democracy-fetish. Nationalistic patriotism is nowhere to be seen but the names of some streets and districts. Even the street names though, fail to retain any sense of patriotism. I recall conversing with a Chinese restaurant owner in San Francisco. Trying to tell me where she used to live in Taiwan, she was not able to remember what the street name is: "什麼孝東路的". The loyalty to one's nation - 忠 - is corrupted and replaced by globalist capitalist erections.

But you might say, "But you're a Trotskyist internationalist!" (or maybe you might not as I have not posted anything about this yet). However, we should consider the analogy of Sun Yat-sen in his 民族主義:

從前有一個苦力，天天在輪船碼頭，拿一枝竹槓和兩條繩子去替旅客挑東西。每日挑東西，就是那個苦力謀生之法。後來他積存了十多塊錢，當時呂宋彩票盛行，他 就拿所積蓄的錢買了一張呂宋彩票。那個苦力因為無家可歸，所有的東西都沒有地方收藏，所以他買得的彩票也沒有地方收藏。他謀生的工具只是一枝竹槓和兩條繩 子，他到什麼地方，那枝竹槓和兩條繩子便帶到什麼地方。所以他就把所買的彩票，收藏在竹槓之內。因為彩票藏在竹槓之內，不能隨時拿出來看，所以他把彩票的 號數死死記在心頭，時時刻刻都念著。到了開彩的那一日，他便到彩票店內去對號數，一見號單，知道是自己中了頭彩，可以發十萬元的財。他就喜到上天，幾幾乎 要發起狂來，以為從此便可不用竹槓和繩子去做苦力了，可以永久做大富翁了。由於這番歡喜，便把手中的竹槓和繩子一齊投入海中。
(from http://zh.wikisource.org/zh-hant/%E4%B8%89%E6%B0%91%E4%B8%BB%E7%BE%A9/%E6%B0%91%E6%97%8F%E4%B8%BB%E7%BE%A9%E7%AC%AC%E4%B8%89%E8%AC%9B)

It is not that we should become racist or be isolated in North Korean Juche. Simply, our national solidarity and unity must NOT be sacrificed for globalization. We can still be Chinese while retaining economic power (especially in collaboration with the mainland).