Far East

Another Rant

This time, unrelated to work. Yay! When you have a cellphone in Taiwan, you can opt for the telecom/get a monthly phone bill in the mail-type, or you can get an 'IF' (pronounced EE-FU) card; the 'IF' card can be bought at any convenience store (7-11, etc., about ten different choices in that department) and then your cell can be recharged with these paid calling cards by a handy-dandy toll-free phone call to the seller of the 'IF' card.

Nice Work

If you can get it. One last bit of venomously bile-filled rant to expunge, and then I'll be back to regularly scheduled blogging.

Smackdown

Serious spanking delivered by Tom Engelhardt in Immoral Relativism :

It is perhaps not an irony but a kind of inevitability that, having worked so hard to avoid Vietnam (and its "mistakes") all those years, they now find themselves tightly gripped by a situation of their own making that has a remarkably Vietnam-like look to it; and, worse yet, they find themselves acting as if they were now, after all these years, back in the 1960s fighting the war in Vietnam rather than the one in Iraq. In his testimony before the Senate last week, Donald Rumsfeld even managed to get the classic Vietnam word "quagmire" and the equivalent of "light at the end of the tunnel" into a single sentence: "There isn't a person at this table who agrees with you [Senator Ted Kennedy] that we're in a quagmire and there's no end in sight."

Irony is dead. Karma is the new irony.

Midi Ochre

Location, location, location. In today's world of Bushibans in Taipei, it's not everything, but it's vewy, vewy important. Another thing with a wee bit of import attached is quality management and teaching. And customers in Taipei nowadays are much more discerning when it comes to such; it used to be enough if you had a white face and a North American accent, but with the outsourcing of much of Taiwan's industrial base, and the comcomitant tightening of the local economy, folks are much less forgiving to poor quality operations.

Close Call

Whew. Just missed out on teaching a summer course that was looking to be a nightmare. Thanks to the gross incompetence of the so-called 'manager' (whatever is he paid for?), not enough students signed up for an eight-week session. And when you consider that summer is the prime time for kids to study English, then you have to be f***ing up really badly to have so few enroll.

Weebles Wobblin'

And this looks like this one might be at the Tipping Point.

You can keep spinning just so long before you fall flat on your face. The administration's insistence that things are on track and all it must do is stay the course is beginning to grate. US efforts to reshape the world through a policy of pre-emption have been buttressed by an attempt to remould reality through the power of assertion. Since Vice-President Dick Cheney claimed that the insurgency was "in its last throes" 77 American soldiers and about 600 Iraqi civilians have died. His tortured explanation, late last week, that "if you look at what the dictionary says about throes, it can still be a violent period", adds insult to injury.

You can be the 'War President', and you can 'fudge' the facts to get in, but don't you dare lose. Cos Americans will take anything except a loser. Now we're going to go over the things we ignored when we wanted to get this war on, and it feels like... Albatross. Better to go for a Panama or a Kosovo if you want an easy mark in the 'win' column, and not get over-ambitious.

What has been striking in the last couple of weeks is the amount of straight-up truth told about how we got in, and how bad things really are; no matter how much you want to perpetrate the ol' 'stab in the back' myth, people aren't going to go for it this time. The Germans of 1918 didn't have RSS or Google. Get ready to reap the whirlwind, baby.

Back From Purgatory

Been offline the last few days, trying to explore how the other half lives. No, I didn't go to a red state; I attempted to repair a completely ownzered windoze box. I simply can't understand how folks put up with the constant intrusions, meltdowns and restarts that are so common with (at least) XP. Finally got it working after several multi-hour sessions. Now I need to take a shower. Ugh.

Reclamation Project

Just spent seven hours trying to reclaim a windoze box from the dead. Just when I thought I had it, I made the mistake of connecting it to the internets. Bamm! More trojans and viruses flooded in, and it was rendered inoperable again. I cleaned out (or so I thought) seven different viruses, 277 different adware programs, and something like 10,000 infected files. Not to mention the lovely keystroke logger and various other spyware. Time to find a landfill. Have to get this rotting crud out of my house.

Ducks In DC

There's a discussion taking place over at TPMCafe on the current trendlines in American life. Are we becoming more secular and liberal? The obverse? Just thought I'd throw in my two cents from a distance, as it were.

As US society becomes more exposed to the outside world, folks living comfortably in their bubbles have reacted with horror. That's what's behind alot of this 'values' talk; a desire to shift life back to a 50s style 'Pleasantville', where the man rules the castle and the woman stays meekly at home, hoping for crumbs of favor from her lord and master. And the 'other', be it brown, red, yellow, or somewhere in between, shouldn't hope for any human rights, nosirreebob.

One of the commenters at The Next Hurrah (I think it was empytwheel) put it best: just because they're making the most noise doesn't mean they represent the majority of citizens. It's kinda like the kindergarten class with the one ADHD kid who runs around and refuses to sit still for two seconds, and will not be told to what to do, no matter how hard you try. In the case of the US, however, he has access to all the levers of power, which makes the rest of us a tad nervous.

Go Here Now.

And Download the story here. Simply amazing writing. Very funny, too.