Beyond This

peace be with you.

after over two years of blogging, i think it is time to call it the end. i am no longer working abroad, nor am i traveling, so the salacious tales i have been dispensing no longer hold the captivating appeal that they used to.

this blog was meant to keep my friends up to date with what goes on in my life. but i never posted much about my life per se; i tend to rant on about other things, which might not always be interesting to everyone. besides, those who know me can always keep in touch through other means.

therefore, i, hereby, with salutatory humility, inform you that this blog, effective immediately, will be adjourned until further notice. i still hope to hear from you beyond this era of rapturous blogging.

and with you peace be.

What An Achievement!

Well done, America! What an achievement!

I feel like i have to blog on this historic day. A day that indeed renewed America's faith in itself and others' toward it. Obama's acceptance speech used the story of the 106-year old black lady to remind us of how far the country has come. And it has come a long way. Americans can now be proud of their country once again, and, judging from the fact that the majority of the world support Obama, America has regained some of the respect lost during the past few years.

Of course we dont know if Barack Obama will be a great president or not, but this much is sure: he certainly injected the nation with much needed hope for the future. In his speech this evening, it was appropriate for the president-elect to remind his people that there are numerous obstacles ahead that his new administration will face. I guess i dont really need to list them since they are so obvious. As a UBC professor said today when I was on campus watching the election on big screen TV at the Liu Centre for Global Issues: within months criticisms of Obama and disappointments with his administration will start to appear. That is probably true.

One of the greatest things is that this election had energized american voters to the level that as a canadian i can only dream of something similar happening in our sad political system.

Certainly a President Obama will not solve all problems, but that is for tomorrow. Tonight, America, at least 52 or so percent of it, can continue to drown in euphoria.

I wish i could be with my all my american friends right now. Not only because i miss you all, but also because it is your election and you are the more political of my friends, which mean we probably can talk about this election all night.

Middle Class Poverty

Talks of recession have been buzzing for the past few weeks. The media certainly plays a good part in spreading the fear and panic - one simply cannot read the paper or turn on the radio without hearing doom and gloom.

Being at the lower end of the economic scale, i gotta say that i havent really felt it. I dont have a mortgage, car payment, weekly spa appointment, or "needs" of weekend getaways and rock concerts. You think i am joking but not really, not according to the lifestyles of the people i just watched on the news.

Can someone please come and hit me on the head hard so that i know i am not detached from reality in some invisible way? But really, i am shocked at people's lifestyles. Do you seriously need a professional financial planner to come and tell you "ok, you budget is tight, may be buying an $18,000 trailer is not the right move at the moment"? "oh, but we need it to get away and de-stress!" Right, because being in more debt often gives one the peace of mind!

I didnt know that people needed financial advisors to tell them to make a list of incomes and expenses and make sure the balance is not in the red. I thought that was just money sense. No wonder so many people are in trouble the instant the economy slows down.

Apparently it is normal for a family of 4 with close to $300,000 in asset to be worrying about having to cut back on lobster dinners. "Honey, we are in a recession. I know it is sad but we will have to make do with tuna steaks from now on."

Boy, i have been having a rather deprived life.

Decency In Recession

I have not posted since the election. it's not that i was still recovering from the results, i just never seemed to find the time. before i fall asleep every night something usually comes to mind and i tell myself, ok i will do that sometime tomorrow. and when i get up the next morning i just dont remember that thing. then it comes to mind again that evening... posting certain things fall into that 'remembering just before i sleep' category.

things have been happening in my life. i have noticed how decadent western societies are. and i think i am officially disillusioned with academia.

on decadence. since when is showing as much skin as possible a sign of liberation, beauty, or independence of the mind? as i walk from the skytrain station to the hotel where i work on weekend evenings, i pass by night clubs with people lining up waiting to get in to pay ridiculous amounts of money to have their eardrums blown up. among the cool crowds, there are always many young women who, by the way they dress, would fit more on the beach somewhere than downtown vancouver on an autumn night. i mean, really, who wants to go to town on a night out in practically a swimsuit?

am i too conservative, old fashioned? but have they no decency? i really dont need to see their breasts threatening to fall out of flimsy bras. nor do i want to see the ass cleavage! ok, you must be thinking, mongolnomad, it is because you are not into women. but it has nothing to do with gender for me. i just wish people had more respect for themselves.

i had this culture shock after coming back from my travels earlier this year. most of the countries i went through have very decent dressing customs for both men and women. most people's image of muslim countries is one of oppression, especially toward women. that certainly is not always the case. there, people are just a lot more modest. coming back, good lord, cleavages everywhere! and our people carry this shameful tradition to other countries when they go with little regard for local sensitivity. i was on a beach in sinai. it was a beach, but come on dont take off your bras then walk into the water half naked!

on academia. i got my paper back from one of my classes and one of the comments the prof wrote was 'you are being too one-sided', because i did my research using very credible sources on the violent expulsion of palestians out of palestine. this comes from a prof who showed us a video, made by abba eban, israel's first foreign minister, who claimed that israel bore no responsibility for the thousands of palestinians kicked out of palestine in 1948 because they left on their own accord! there was no time for discussion after the movie and it was never mentioned in the next class. this comes from a professor who constantly sells the official version of history propagated by the israeli government with almost no presentation of the challenging views, except by scantingly mentioning names of the dissenting voices within israel.

if 'the ethnic cleansing of palestine' written by ilan pappe, an israeli historian who used to teach at haifa university but fled the country after receiving death threats, was a graduate dissertation, it would definitely receive a passing grade if marked by, say, benny morris, and certainly a failing grade if marked by this respectable professor of mine.

so it is not about the work or academic integrity but the politics of the person in power that counts. you think i am exaggerating? there was a graduate student in israel who wrote his ph.d. disseration on an arab village destroyed by jewish militia during the war of 1948, his work quality was fine, but it was rejected and he failed!

i guess i have just been too naive to think that academia would be this free environment for thinking and all academics' top goal is to search for the truth. i forgot that they too are simply human beings with histories, emotions, agenda, and biases.

i am glad i was offered a job with cbsa, because the last thing on my mind right now is to go to grad school. and i suspect i never will.

All I Can Do Is Sigh...

the results are in and we have a winner: the right honourable stephen harper will continue to be our prime minister, albeit a minority one, but a much stronger one this time - only 12 seats shy of majority in parliament.

here is the breakdown, out of 308 seats in parliament:

conservative: 143 seats (from 37.6% of popular votes)

liberal: 76 seats (from 26.2% of popular votes)

bloc quebecois: 50 seats (from 10% of popular votes)

new democrat: 37 seats (from 18.2% of popular votes)

independent: 2 seats (from 0.6% of popular votes)

green: 0 seat (from 6.8% of popular votes)

other: 0 seat (from 0.4% of popular votes)

Now, if you have any active brain cell working then you must be confused by those numbers, i.e. how come the green got close to 7% of popular votes and yet no seat in parliament. That, my friend, is the beauty of the skewed canadian electoral system.

Let's look at the hypothetical situation in which the seats in parliament are divided according to popular votes. In this system, we would have:

conservative: 116 seats ( - 27 seats)

liberal: 81 seats (+ 5 seats)

bloc quebecois: 31 seats (- 19 seats)

new democrat: 56 seats (+ 18 seats)

independent: 2 seats (unchanged)

green: 21 seats (+21 seats)

other: 1 seat (+1 seat)

of course, this is only a dream for the canadian left, especially the greens, who must be drowning in sorrow and frustration right now. and i dont blame them.

clear and simple, our electoral system does not accurately represent canadian voters! and the parties that usually stand to win are the conservative and the liberal, so when they get to power, they wouldnt do a damn thing about it. the bloc always win in this system; that is the only way they as a provincial party can get substantial seats in parliament. the one to lose are the new democrats and the greens.

this election was a waste of money! it returns to parliament another minority government. and voters' turn out was the lowest in history! do i need to repeat that, the lowest in history!

sad, sad state of affairs...

Damnation

An excerpt from a recent Globe and Mail travel editorial:

"...“We don't care about history or politics – just about being Western,” says Nguyen Huu Duc, who is 26.

Duc is our guide to Vietnam, both the old and the new. He has spiky hair and doesn't get along with his father (“too old-fashioned”). He and his friends admire America – its personal freedoms, its technology, its cheekiness and material success. They devour its pirated movies and its counterfeit name brands. They speak the universal language of consumerism. Their little sisters wear Barbie Fashion backpacks. In one home where we had tea, the customary portrait of Uncle Ho faced off against an enormous Disney poster, featuring Mickey and Minnie..."

Civilisation!

Now, is it just me, but i dont understand this swing from one extreme end to the other. On the one hand you have the idiotic, naive and disastrous ideology of communist totalitarianism, and on the other you have the equally indoctrinating and destructive ideology of brainless capitalist consumerism. Dont people realise that there is a more balanced and sensible way of living/governing/conducting business out there? That you dont have to be either or?

The alternative to abject poverty and dictatorship is not consumerism, but rather sound economic measures, legitimate governance and compassionate social policies. Emulating western decadent consumerism isnt going to make you smarter, more appreciative of life, or a fuller human being. It is so sad that people equate the obtaining of a new cell phone to be the symbol of ultimate civilisation, or the purchasing of a new barbie doll to be an expression of parental love.

Backwardedness!

"...North Vietnam is home to dozens of ethnic tribes... The Hmong women wear huge, elaborately embroidered skirts, and the little girls are taught to sew as soon as they can hold a needle. The families live in dark, two-room wooden houses – one big room for sleeping, and one small, smoky room for cooking...

Duc thinks the Hmong are backward. They don't care much for education, and they aren't very clean..."

This is another disturbing thing: the view that anything non-western or in line with the majority is backward, primitive, uncivilised. This in-grained racism toward the minorities is maddening. It just angers me so much that people who face racism and discrimination would routinely turn around and do the same thing to another group.

I guess the world is a place crowded with competing interests and people see the way forward in pushing their agenda is to degrade the others. Somehow diversity is considered by some to be unsettling; we all need to conform, we all need to consume massive amounts of goods, we all need to be tuned into western civilised way of life.

Well, more and more people hold that to be true then we will all be damned.

Thanks For The Generous Tip!

A lot of attention has been paid to the proposed bailout of Wall Street investors by the US government lately, and rightly so because what happens there affects not only the US but also Canada and probably the world since the American economy is still the biggest. I think the House of Representatives just voted against the bailout. I agree with that!

Now, before you jump on me (which i wouldnt mind, if you are a man) and call me an idiot (which i would mind), allow me to explain. The problem with the bailout is not only because it is massive and will add another burden onto the taxpayers, who are already in massive debt. Why do taxpayers have to pay for wall street's greed? i am sure this is a question on a lot of angry americans' mind. And what is maddening is that i dont think the investors lose anything substantial (not their cars, not their mansions, not their pensions) unlike the common people who have been screwed over by their insatiatble quench for money. They will continue to frequent expensive restaurants, thanks to part of the wage of their server that went into the bailout, which they no doubt would use to tip her, generously too!

Worse yet, they see their is money to be made out of the bailout! It is just nature of capitalism, you see profit you jump on it regardless of the source. Nothing wrong with that in and of itself. The problem is the lack of regulations. But oh no, get the government out of private businesses, we are not a communist country here!

It drives me over the wall when a Conservative in the riding that covers UBC said that we need limited government, minimal government interference with businesses! Lady, dont you read the news? How can you propose what is failing as we speak??

Dont get me wrong, i am not proposing centralised economy, god help us if that happens, but the government has a role to play and not necessary a minimal role. I guess this is where the convervatives and i disagree.

I have always thought that the role of government is to govern, but times have changed i guess.