Category: Rant

Great things; sucky things; boring things; stupid things…

Death Penalty and Social Justice

I ranted on Jason’s blog about Tookie’s execution. I thought I might as well get into it while it’s still fresh on my mind…

Personally I think death penalty is an inefficient system of getting rid of people that the society is tired of dealing with. First of all, it takes years of waiting in line just to be executed because the death row is so backed up that a criminal would basically need take a number and wait. But partially it’s also because most people file for appeals to either get their sentences reduced, thrown out of court or just to buy more time. It’s not unusual to sit on the death row for 20 or even 30 years before someone on the death row is executed. And this is what I have trouble with: With all the time and resources spent on locking those prisoners up in maximum security prisons, why not spend that exact same amount to help them become better people? It’s alarming to see that prison constructions are being more aggressively funded than higher education these days… Not to mention that United States has the highest prison population in the world. Even more interestingly, some people have come up with the brilliant idea to make profit off of the prison system (more prisoners a private prison can lock up, more money the company gets from the government). What the hell? It’s turned into an industry of its own!!

A better solution to reduce crime and prison population is education. Invest on educating in early childhood education (many educators believe this is when personalities are developed); invest on educating the parents to take better care of the kids so that they don’t mistreat the kids and turn them into social f*uck ups; invest in facilitating individuals who are casted as “social misfits” and help them fit in!!

Again, NPR aired a fascinating insight on the topic with Sister Helen Prejean (author of “Dead Man Walking ) and Lawrence C. Marshall, an activist against the death penalty.

United State is a very Christian country. I mean, virtually all of its presidents are Christians of some kind. It’s so Christian that when President Kennedy, a Catholic (the Original Christians, I call them) was elected president, it was a big deal (WTF?!). The country is so Christian that the word God appears everywhere (or so it seems)… It’s in the Pledge of Allegiance (ver. 1.1, where the words “under GOD” were added in 1954), in currency (In God We Trust. God forbid that money is fake.), when one swears into court (put your hand on the Bible… blah blah… so will help you God. What if a Muslim wants to be sworn in on a Koran? Would they let him do it?), and when George W. Bush was elected twice into the White House under the pretense that he’s a reformed born-again Christian (what bull… more on him later).

For a Jesus and God loving nation, it sure as hell acts like one (the “hell” part). Would Jesus himself pull the electric switch?

The Bush family… ah~ what a lovely household:

Jeb and George W. Bush, among many others, have also expedited the appeals process, to execute as many prisoners in as short a period of time as possible, which increases the likelihood of error. As Governor of Texas, George W. Bush was the most active executioner in the nation, killing on average one prisoner every other week (The Nation, January 8-15, 2001).

Source: The Nation

I highly recommend listening to this broadcast hosted by KQED.

Getting Ready for Tax Season

As the year draws to a close, I am also getting ready to get all my receipts in order for the year-end write offs. I spent the weekend entering everything my one-man company has for the past year into QuickBooks Pro 2006. I was relieved to have found a Mac version. Now I feel much better about myself having completed the company finances. Despite the fact that I started the weekend not knowing anything about QuickBooks and virtually nothing about accounting (let alone corporate accounting), I’d say I did okay with the help of QuickBooks Community. An accounting class is definitely in order though… I don’t want to waste time trying to figure out how to book a stupid PayPal sales refund using appropriate accounting practices AND learning QuickBooks at the same time.

Up next, personal finances with Quicken for Mac.

I do have to rant about QuickBooks for a brief moment though… The shipped-as-is version sucked big time. It’d crash for no reason in about every 10th thing I did… I’d be happily reconciling credit card charges, and POOF!!, the damn thing crashes… And I’d have to set up the whole environment again (that is if previously entered data was even saved). Thank god Intuit has an update file I can download to fix most of the crashes. But that’s modern commercial software sales for you… Get it out of the market with bugs first to get market share — fix the bugs with patches and updates later. Microsoft, more or less, perfected that method with Windows and its Office suites. Apple has been accused of similar charges when it first released Mac OSX… It had no DVD driver!!

Worst American President, EVER!

Yahoo is running an article on why some Americans (and historians) consider George W. Bush the worst American president EVER! Even worse than the previous worst president, James Buchanan, which some argue that is a very tough record to beat.

Some of the reasons why GWB is being considered the worst of the worst:

  • He has taken the country into an unwinnable war and alienated friend and foe alike in the process;
  • He is bankrupting the country with a combination of aggressive military spending and reduced taxation of the rich;
  • He has deliberately and dangerously attacked separation of church and state;
  • He has repeatedly “misled,” to use a kind word, the American people on affairs domestic and foreign;
  • He has proved to be incompetent in affairs domestic (New Orleans) and foreign ( Iraq and the battle against al-Qaida);
  • He has sacrificed American employment (including the toleration of pension and benefit elimination) to increase overall productivity;
  • He is ignorantly hostile to science and technological progress;
  • He has tolerated or ignored one of the republic’s oldest problems, corporate cheating in supplying the military in wartime.

The article ended in saying:

Besides, many of the historians note that however bad Bush seems, they have indeed since worse men around the White House. Some say Buchanan. Many say Vice President Dick Cheney.

Yeah, I am not sure about that dickhead, I mean, Dick. He’s one shady son of a biatch. Speaking of shady characters, the entire Bush cabinet is f*cked up (with the exception of Colin Powell whose legacy was ruined by lying on behalf of GWB in front of the United Nations to make the case for the war in Iraq. Let’s face it, GWB just wanted to make his dada proud by kicking an ass that his father couldn’t. Ah~ the Bush Dynasty… America’s very own monarchy in the making.

Speaking of Dumb and Dumber, U.S. Rejects New Talks on Climate Change.

I am shocked! Say it ain’t so…

Brian Rediscovered

After almost two months missing in action, Brian finally called today to catch up. We chatted for about an hour about all that has happened in the past two months. I also realized that about 1/4 of our conversation was about our kids! I mean, you would NOT find us talking about children back in the college days when we were hanging out at Gallery Expresso while playing a fine game of chess as Brian drank coffee and I indulged in my cup of hot cocoa. I mean, the topic of children would not even be close to near the vicinity of what we would be talking about. And yet today, we were all over the place about the education systems in Europe, America and Asia. How Brian and Birgit liked Laura’s preschool, and I shared with him that only 3% of all preschools and daycare centers in America are considered decent by NAEYC (National Association for Education of Young Children)… etc.

Dang it… time has changed. In a blink of an eye, so have we. Both Brian and I have transformed into parents who’s obsessed with our children’s success, much like our parents did with us.

Life’s a Struggle

I came across a Taiwanese rapper last year (宋岳庭, Shawn Soong). He died at the prime age of 23 as his music was just beginning to take shape. I should also mention that his music was only discovered after he died of cancer. The lyrics are blunt, raw, dark and reveals a side of life that popular Taiwanese pop’s lack of sophistication can’t compare. The topics are so sophisticated that the rest of the Taiwanese music industry seem like a big joke compared to his most acclaimed single “Life’s a Struggle”.

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Environmentally Friendly Conumption

Last year Grace’s mom gave us a gift basket from Bath & Body Works. In it were a couple of bottles of foaming hand soaps. The design of the bottle is such that when you push down the dispenser, the liquid soap foams on its way out of the bottle to your hands. The system works great; the combination of little things for this bottle is just right — each push at the dispenser generates just enough soap, not too much, not too little; the foaming liquid soap never hardens at the exit point of the dispenser (like traditional liquid soaps), which if it did, would then block the flow of the liquid soap, forcing the user to push the dispensing mechanism harder, making the dispenser to dispense more soap than needed, which then creates waste (on both the soap and the water needed to wash it off); the foam is easy to wash off and leaves a rather pleasant scent on your hands.

But of course, nothing can be this perfect when it comes to corporate interests v.s. human interests. As it turns out, the dispensing unit won’t foam any kind of liquid soap other than the specific formula supplied by Bath & Body Works. Sure this is to make sure people don’t buy the dispensing unit they invented and fill it up with someone else’s product inside. I can understand and relate to the market strategy. But surely, they make refills for those wonderful, perfectly working dispensing bottles!

F*&k, no. And that’s the part that really ticked me off about Bath & Body Works. They put all that R&D into coming up with this wonderful dispenser (or maybe they just hired some two-bit Chinese factory to do it) and a foaming formula that works, but they’d rather people throwing away perfectly working dispensers than to sell refill bottles for those units. Is it corporate greed or just plain stupidity? I am inclined to say B&BW is the latter.

In some European countries, providing refillable bottle designs and supplies is part of the recycling legislation. Simply recycling millions of bottles consumers throw away every year is no longer enough to curb millions of tons of perfectly reusable bottles going to waste. This was something that Brian shared with me when he started noticing Austria’s recycling policies. The United States, being the number one consumer waste generator in the world, should take a page from Austria’s recycling program in that aspect. Like Brian, I hate it every time we throw a perfectly reusable bottle away. Unfortunately I don’t see this as something that will ever be legislated in the U.S. because of powerful lobbying efforts driven by greedy corporate interests. What a shame.

E.T., Canada Wants You

Former Canadian Minister of Defense, Paul Hellyer, joins NGOs and asks the Canadian Parliament to engage in holding formal political relations with advanced alien life forms. Apparently, this broadcast had a huge effect on his decision to speak his mind.

In a separate news, the world’s ugliest dog died.

Worst TV Shows and Bad English

Taiwan makes some pretty bad teen dramas, especially those that feature the latest young idols the record labels or model agencies try to make money off of. One of them was “Meteor Garden” featuring the famous F4 boy band. The show effectively demonstrated that not only can’t the members of the band sing, those guys can’t do much else except looking pretty. But apparently the show was so popular that it became the first Taiwanese TV drama to have been imported to Japan and Korea, which was a big deal in itself. Before that, the relationship was one way: Korean and Japanese soaps have made millions of dollars from clueless and gullible Taiwanese teens for decades.

But just the other day, my theory that Taiwan makes the worst TV shows in Asia was broken. Singapore, despite its self-proclaimed better-than-the-rest-of-Asians status in the world, makes absolutely the crappiest and worst TV show ever. “The Hotel” (【 大 é…’ 店】) has a faithful following with an active forum (Simplified Chinese only) of fans with bad taste. The stereotypes and awful acting, script writing and pretty much everything else makes the sitcom impossible to sit through.

The good news is, Singapore’s investment on a bold new series “The Singapore Short Story Project” paid off with some decent acting and script writing. One thing I would like to comment on the project, though, is that I’d forgotten just how funny “Singlish” sounds (not to say that Taiwanese English is anywhere close to being better; but Singlish is, hands down, WAY funnier). Apparently Singlish is now a “recognized” slang of English that everyone knows what it is. Embarrassed, the Singaporean government is now trying to push for proper English to rescue its image.

Since I am on the topic of making fun of Singaporean English, there’s also “Manglish“, referring to Malaysian English. It’s just about as funny as Singlish but with a lot more “flavors” added in (Malay, Hokkien, Mandarin, Tamil… etc). Because parts of it you can’t understand, it’s not quite as funny as Singlish. Another funny (maybe funnier than Singlish) variation of English spoken in Asia is “Engrish“, really really terribly bad English spoken by the Japanese. I mean, Japanese is a serious, no non-sense culture. Naturally, they take language learning seriously. So mostly, Engrish is just a series of misunderstandings, misinterpretations or misuses of the English language by the Japanese when they attempt to reinterpret Japanese meanings using inappropriate English words or pronunciations. And sometimes it’s funny as hell. Engrish.com is a famous site with countless funny examples (tip: try not to laugh out loud at work). Austin Powers has its fair share of puns on Engrish.