Yes, we’re finally back in the land of the virtually connected. With three machines up and buzzing around the Intertubes, life can finally start getting back on an even keel. In the meantime, lots has happened and I’m just sorry I missed out on commenting on so many great articles from people like Liane (congrats on your new Dorchester profile, Liane!) and Maria (and on your revamped website and always great ideas, M!), just to name two. With lots of additional links to follow, I’m going to be busy for the next few weeks.

What happened, you may ask? Before I continue, you need to know something. J is the reasonable, calm one in our relationship. I’m the person you probably wouldn’t like too much if you met me, especially if you annoyed me over something. After running through what little patience I had on the whole connection thing, I wrote a pithy email to whatever Time dot Com managers I could find suggesting, among other things, that their golf games were obviously more important than something as trite as “customer service”, and suggesting an alternative motto for their company. Within one and a half hours of that email being sent to the capital, Kuala Lumpur, four people were at our Johor house (a few hundred kilometres away), trying to correctly set up our connection. In the end, it didn’t come good till the following night but, while I still consider the upper management of Time to be gross incompetents (for reasons other than what’s detailed here), their people on the ground have, without a doubt, been courteous, friendly and helpful beyond measure. Thanks to the technicians who pulled significantly more cable than anticipated, and still completed the job on time, and to the Project Officer, Tahawi, who has to bear the brunt of customer complaints, in person, more than he should. Having said that, we still don’t have a phone (don’t ask), but at least we have the internet and Skype, so all’s not lost.

I also read about the launch of Apple’s iPhone, content to be an amused bystander watching the Apple lemmings rush their way to the store, and never thinking that we would get caught up in the iPocalypse ourselves. (We detest Apple, for Steve Jobs’ management style, for their arrogance, their closed architecture, their exploitative pricing policies, and other things that will come to me once I have another coffee inside me.)  You see, there’s some poor lady floating around Malaysia somewhere who somehow got J’s Malaysian mobile number and was under the mistaken impression that we were the local Apple store. She called, she sent SMSs, all to help with her iPhone, and didn’t quite believe us when we told her we were just private people and not part of the hospital-antiseptic-white brigade. We’re half-expecting another call from her later today, judging by the scepticism in her voice when she rang off last time.

And, just to finish, I know I’m behind with the Radio Free Bliss podcasts and will be initiating a more aggressive schedule and start sending out schedules and interview questions to all June and July participants this week. I’m baaaaaack!

We made an overnight trip to Kuala Lumpur on the weekend, thus providing enough material for a few blogs. While we were away, MIL babysat Lotus Street, looking forward to two days of peace, serenity and contemplating the pond. Poor poor woman. This is what happened.

On our first day away, she was busy catching up on her letter-writing, when she noticed Fluff and Squeak jumping around an extension cable near the front door. Curious, she rose to find out what the problem was and, as she neared the door, realised that it wasn’t a cable the cats were jumping around. After all, extension cables aren’t brown, a metre long, half upright, and hissing.

With the cats keeping the snake penned to the area just by the front door, she rushed off, returning with a walking stick … and a can of mosquito repellent. While she was relating this story, I commented to J that, if I was that snake, getting mosquito spray in my eyes would have probably pissed me off even more. Anyway, between the three of them, they killed the snake. MIL bagged it and threw it away in the rubbish bin. Even two hours later, when talking to J over the phone, she was still (understandably) shaken, and looking around desperately for some chamomile tea/valerian/industrial-strength morphine to calm her down.

This is what we figured happened. After much haranguing and gnashing of teeth, the telecommunications guys finally fronted up to our place late last week and began laying cable. In the process, they discovered blocked ducts, indicating infrastructure that had been laid years ago, but left untouched since then. In our carport is a small pit for the connection of said cable. Usually, it’s covered with a solid concrete lid, but it was askew to assist the telecommunications guys with their work. And it’s about two metres from our front door. So, all three of us figure that the cable-laying disturbed the poor snake and it decided to go looking for another place to live. And guess where it ended up?

There are no winners in this story. I like snakes. I like their “you don’t bother me, and I won’t bother you” philosophy, which I think the rest of the world could do well to emulate more. I doubt there are more serene animals in the world. I think the one that met its unfortunate fate in our house was probably a Bronzeback, which is not venomous, are very common in this region, and mostly go after frogs and small mammals.

And as for my MIL … well, imo, the woman deserves a medal at the very least. Here’s a Polish grandmother who’s travelled halfway around the world to a foreign-language, tropical country and is alone in the only inhabited house in the area. She is confronted face-to-face, for the first time in her life, by a majorly annoyed, loudly hissing snake in classic threatening posture, with her son and family hundreds of kilometres away. She said that Fluff and Squeak were on that snake in an instant, and provided invaluable help despatching the reptile. (The next day, Squeak undid part of his goodwill bonus points by eating one of our pond fish. I think he thinks he’s invincible now.)

Which all sounds great. Except, I wouldn’t subject most people I know to the kind of stress involved in confronting a pissed-off snake. And, of course, it would have to happen on the one night we were away from the house. When we got home, J also checked under the hood of our car (we took public transport to and from KL), in case there was another snake that took refuge in another favourite snake spot, but it looks like there was just the one hapless animal.

And that’s our most recent snake story.

CONNECTIVITY UPDATE: All cables are connected on our side, but we’re still not getting access. The telecommunications guys (Time dot Com, in case you were wondering) are going to have “a meeting” to “discuss the situation”. The sound you hear is my head hitting a solid surface. Repeatedly.

So you already know about J and myself. And our two kids, The Wast and Little Dinosaur. But we have two other well-loved family members, nicknamed Fluff and Squeak.

Fluff is a blue-point Ragdoll, a grumpy and morose cat with an unhealthy attachment to J. Despite his lack of any sense of humour, Fluff has earnt his place in the family by rescuing The Wast from morning after morning of screaming fits when our son was three years old. Driven to distraction, we introduced the Ragdoll kitten and The Wast was transformed. Fluff let himself be dragged from place to place, hoisted onto bunk beds, buried under blankets at night, all with incredible good grace. The Wast settled down and the screaming fits ended.

Squeak is the Maine Coon we introduced to keep Fluff company. We called him that because he couldn’t meow properly as a kitten. Now, however, he can Maine Coon trill with the best of them. If Fluff is the grumpy one that prefers to fall asleep on J’s feet, Squeak is the life of the party, carrying his favourite toy in his mouth as he moves from room to room, and noisily and enthusiastically playing with it when he reaches a spot he likes. For all his overt cockiness, however, he’s a shy and surprisingly timid 7-kg ball of fluff. He loves the kids, often sitting on a bed and keeping them company while they play, and they love him. The idea of him keeping Fluff company didn’t work out so well (Fluff being a sullen bastard at the best of times), but Squeak’s an entertaining and intelligent cat and we’re happy we got him.

We keep both cats indoors and are lucky enough to have a walled courtyard garden here at Lotus Street, so they can get some fresh air and munch on leaves (then throw up on the tiled floors * sigh *) while still remaining safe and not harming any of the local squirrels or bird life. I’ve read that, here in Malaysia, keeping smaller cats indoors is also recommended due to monkey kidnapping! It appears that, if you live near a tract of established trees, monkeys have been known to drop into a garden and make off with the family pet. Knowing monkeys for the deliberately ill-mannered and implacable animals that they are (I’d much rather keep a pet snake than a pet monkey), I can imagine what fate await the poor, stolen felines.

And there’s some human-initiated kidnapping of pets that I’ve heard also happens, although I don’t know what happens to the victims in such cases. (I know what you’re thinking. As a riposte, I can relate an anecdote about my (Eurasian) mother, after coming back from her first grocery shopping trip in Australia. “These people eat cats!” she wailed. “I saw them skinned in the butcher’s shop!” Further investigation led to the conclusion of rabbits rather than cats, but she never went back to that shop again.)

So, Fusion Despatches would like to extend a warm acknowledgement to the existences of Fluff and Squeak, as I join the legion of authors who keep cats instead of dogs.

I know, I was supposed to be back online by Wednesday past, but it just didn’t happen. And it’s still not happening. At the moment, I’m on a borrowed machine on a borrowed connection, after J had some interesting conversations with the General Manager of a nationwide telecommunications company. He promises us a solid connection … but only in two weeks’ time. So, if anybody out there has sent me an email, you’re out of luck. Our borrowed wireless internet connection client only works on Windows and, with a few tweaks, on Mac and I am — of course — on Linux. Curses.

Still, I should have Chapter Seven of War Games up on my site by the end of today and Chapter Eight will appear the day after tomorrow, with much apologies and bowing and scraping.

With the exception of dozens of boxes still littering every room of the house, life in Lotus Street is starting to look … well, let’s just say that if you could see to the horizon of a forseeable future, it would look kinda nice. Apologies are also due to JoSelle and Maria for running so late with the June Radio Free Bliss interviews that it won’t be June any more by the time I get to them. So much for having boundless faith in human resources and high technology.

Gotta go but will probably drop by with a quick entry on Wednesday, just to let you know that I’m still alive and that War Games is still serialising.

According to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, I should have died at the age of 8.9. Here’s the proof, in case you were wondering:

This is part of a Greenhouse calculator in the children’s “Planet Slayer” section of the website. Actually, when I first ran the quiz, I found out I was going to live forever. The next time I ran it, I tried to pick a carbon footprint that was a little bigger than the Average Australian (Pig) to see what would happen. And it told me to commit seppuku at 8.9 years of age.

Now, I don’t consider myself a particularly warm and squishy, Care Bear type. But telling CHILDREN that they should die at a particular age because they’re emittingresponsible for too many greenhouse gases is a bit … um … perverted? Also, although the way Planet Slayer is set out is geared towards kids, the questions are obviously aimed at adults. I mean, how many children you know travel by air on business? Or spend x thousand dollars a year? Or divide their annual expenditure according to “ordinary stuff”, “stuff that’s better for the environment” and — get this — “ethical investments”?

Not only, in my opinion, is this questionnaire in utter bad taste but it also commits a bigger crime of tarring all leftist types with the broad brush of lunacy. Even across the equatorial line, I can almost hear conservatives in Australia decrying the project using the usual tired lament: “Look at what these PC socialists are doing with public money! How irresponsible! They want our children to kill themselves, the immoral, godless, tree-hugging do-gooders!”. And, once more, people like me are lumped in with emotionally immature types that think A Message gives them permission to trample all over other people’s sensitivities.

“But I think that Greenhouse Calculator is entirely the wrong way to approach the subject,” I decry.
“But you think we should all be more sustainable, don’t you?” Conservative Superior snarls.
“Well, yes,” I splutter, “but not, not like thi–”
“You bloody greenie, bleeding hearts are all the same, using taxpayer’s money to come up with that drivel. You lot should be jailed.”

How can a sane socialist win? Here’s the article in the New York Post if you’re interested. The Creative Director, Bernie Hobbs, says: “We wanted to put the important things in perspective, and have a laugh along the way.” You chuckling yet?

For my slice of Internet bandwidth, I think The Three Trillion Dollar Shopping Spree handles another controversial subject in a much better manner that is more entertaining and educational than an exploding pig.

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And, as a footnote, Chapter Six of War Games is up.THE STORY SO FAR: Cheloi can’t fight the attraction she feels for her driver, but her lust is tempered by the knowledge that her entire mission could unravel if she is discovered. After four nights of stolen passion, she knows that — for her own and Garza’s sakes — she has to end the affair.

I was reading about the Olympic torch as it traverses its way across the world. It appears that Coca-Cola is the major sponsor of the Olympic torch relay and that it “donated” US100 million for the sponsorship. I put that word in quotes because there really is no such thing as selfless corporate altruism. Companies always expect some larger revenue bounce from these acts. In fact, I also think there really is no such thing as selfless personal altruism. There is always a pay-off, even in terms of feeling good afterwards. Now that I have established my cynicism credentials, I’ll move on.

We have all heard about the situation in China. And people are picketing Coca-Cola to say that corporate sponsorship of such a significant Olympic event, bearing in mind certain human rights abuses, is unconscionable. In fact, this is not the first time that Coca-Cola (a company founded in the United States) has been associated with a controversial Olympics, because it was also a major sponsor of the 1936 Olympics, held in Berlin. That’s right. Yet another American company and Nazi Germany (*). There’s enough material around on the topic to satisfy even the most curious among you. Just search on 1936, olympics, coca-cola.

Can I share one insight with you, from climbing up and tumbling down a number of corporate ladders over the decades? Companies are totalitarian. The guy at the top says something, and everyone below scurries to do his bidding, regardless of whether it makes any sense. This is not the mark of a democracy. This is how totalitarianism operates. You have some outlet for frustration through suggestion boxes, rewards for performance, cutesy competitions to win iPods, and employee bulletin boards, but that’s just whitewash. The truth of the matter is, corporations are strictly hierarchical entities that get on better with other strictly hierarchical entities … such as Nazi Germany or China. It’s like friends meeting up. Each knows, and appreciates, how the other thinks and operates. With a handful of top decision-makers in one body only needing to talk to a handful of top decision-makers in another body (without all of that democracy, rights of citizens, we-the-people nonsense), it makes communication between them easy, efficient and effective. It’s a win-win.

With all this mind, I really don’t get why the protests are happening. The pairing of Coca-Cola and China all sounds completely natural to me.

(*) Because you already know about the Nazi regime and IBM and the Ford motor company, don’t you?

POSTSCRIPT: In case anyone comes up with the observation that most companies are, in fact, at the mercy of their shareholders and thus do not have the kind of tyrannical iron grip I’m suggesting, may I suggest that you read the Annual Reports of several public companies? If you flick to the back and start reading the list of majority shareholders, you’ll find that companies are ruled by … other companies. (Mostly banks and various funds.) The cases of a group (or even one, in the case of Carl Icahn) of concerned shareholders rallying behind one cause to change company policy are few and far between.

I haven’t done one of these grab bags for a long while, so here’s what tickled my fancy this past week.

Firstly, I won second prize at agent Jenny Rappaport’s blog, celebrating the second anniversary of Lit Soup. The idea was to come up with an opening paragraph containing the following words: kerfuffle, whit, lenticular, wimple, and flabbergasted. You can read the three winning entries here. I gets books! And outside the United States, too! Thanks Ms Rappaport. Ah, a lovely start to the day.

Cracked magazine has the top 7 conspiracies that actually happened. It may be a reflection of my general knowledge / conspiracy theory-ness / political breadth / fund of questionable facts that I already know all of them, and assumed other people did too.

This YouTube offering on Hillary Clinton (beware, there’s lots of written profanity), titled “Hillary’s Downfall” is one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a while.

And I wonder what Romancelandia is going to make of the latest research into male and female orgasms that’s currently published in Scientific American (via Boing Boing)? Essentially, neuroscientist Gert Holstege, said that (last sentence of page 3, if you’re reading the article): “At the moment of orgasm, women do not have any emotional feelings.” Uh-huh. Climaxing robots. T’riffic.

Have a good weekend, all.

There’s a small resort nestled in the curve of a sandy bay. We’re talking sandy beaches, palm trees, and tropical weather. It has a supermarket, cinema, bowling alley, some fast-food joints, a golf course and, of course, the obligatory souvenir shop. It’s a bit exclusive, but — and, let’s face it, you normally never see this word in conjunction with “exclusive” — cheap. How cheap? From what I’ve read, US$42 (SG$58 / EUR28) will rent you a self-contained apartment for the night. We’re talking several bedrooms, kitchen, bathroom, and air-conditioning. It’s not in Hawaii. In fact, it’s surprisingly close to the US mainland. Interested?

The name of the resort is the “Taliban Towers”. And it’s situated in the sun-drenched curve of Guantanamo Bay. The Guantanamo Bay concentration detention camp is part of the US Navy base at the southern end of the bay, so I suppose this little pearl of holiday merry-making must be further north. If you were one of the 3,000 construction workers involved, or one of the 1.5 million servicemen and servicewomen within the US military, you can travel to Taliban Towers for a holiday with your family.

The t-shirts you can buy at the souvenir shop have slogans such as:

• The Taliban Towers at Guantanamo Bay, the Caribbean’s Newest 5-star Resort
• Greetings from paradise GTMO resort and spa fun in the Cuban sun
• The proud protectors of freedom

You can get a mug with the slogan “Honor Bound To Defend Freedom”. Here’s a selection of the souvenirs:

I understand that service personnel are humans. I understand that they need time to unwind. But I really wonder at the mentality that enables its soldiers to, not only frolic with their families, near this:

but then also emphasises it by allowing the production of tacky souvenirs with slogans of questionable taste. And by “mentality”, I’m not talking about the soldiers’ mentality, but the mentality of the senior military personnel who made the decision to allow such a thing in the first place.

The full article on this “resort” is here.

As a civilian, I am repulsed by everything Guantanamo Bay represents, and the thought that there may be families swimming in the surf, while people — against whom no charges have been laid for 6 years — are force-fed food through unlubricated and dirty plastic pipes shoved down their throats, a couple of hundred metres away, is enough to make me ill.

As someone with passing familiarity with the military, I am also repulsed by the kind of screwing-over being inflicted on the soldiers, and their families. The handling of prisoners is a very serious matter. There are rules and processes governing this kind of thing. You do not trivialise it (especially if you’re supposedly dealing with “the worst of the worst”) by producing ghoulish dust-collectors for some young child, or non-combat adult, to take home.

Unless…. Unless you don’t agree that War is a nasty business. Unless you want to demean a particular section of the human population and present them as sub-human, and thus not worthy of consideration. If you wanted to, say, start brainwashing the next generation about the superiority of your own country and citizens over everyone else in the world, then I think “Taliban Towers” is an excellent way to do it.

Personally, I don’t think the genius who okayed this decision was really that smart. I can easily imagine a number of senior officers sitting around, saying, “Hey, we could have a place for the soldiers to relax. Y’know, bring their families. Enjoy a little downtime.” And someone else suggesting flippantly, “We can have souvenirs.” The entire room erupts in laughter. “Freakin’ souvenirs! Why not?” And then the next two hours are spent brainstorming the most atrocious strings of words you can put on little dolphins, keychains and t-shirts.

The problem is, what may have started as a joke can easily turn into psychological manipulation. How do you explain the bright and shiny holiday items next to the barbed wire and shuffling, brown-skinned men? Hell, there is even barbed wire on the holiday items themselves, so it’s not like you can run away from it.

What other inference is there but that the brown-skinned men are inferior to you — cowed and beaten. They don’t “deserve” better treatment. They don’t “deserve” any vacation time at the bowling alley or catching “Iron Man” at the cinema. None of these men — lack of charges withstanding — “deserve” to be free. These spouses and children will not only be taking back photos from their holidays at Guantanamo Bay, but also a moral dilemma that they will have to rationalise one way or another. As a student of history, I know which way these rationalisations tend to sort out. And it’s Not Good.

For the kind of holiday shots you can expect from the resort, go here (ironically courtesy of a United States Army officer). And here’s the accompanying article.

I read in The Register last month that a week-long clerical seminar with the goal of increasing confessional throughput was held at the Vatican in Rome. The result is that many sins that were previously defined as “venial” (a temporary loss of grace that “does not result in a complete separation from God and eternal damnation in Hell” — source, Wikipedia) have now been promoted to “mortal” (your ass is toast ad infinitum — source, Kaz Augustin).

Among the new mortal sins are drug trafficking, pollution, social injustice and genetic manipulation. Now, this is a fairly nebulous list, and I sincerely hope that the Vatican is applying its usual exactitude to this problem so we may all breathe easier. After all, these were the guys who really figured out how many angels can dance on the head of a pin (infinite, but they’ll all need a good foot massage afterwards).

Using generally known principles, if you litter because you’re a forgetful slobasaurus, then that’s a venial sin. Three Hail Marys and we’re sweet. However, if you look around for a bin, can’t find one, don’t want to put your candy wrapper in your pocket/handbag because it’s sticky, and end up flicking it onto the ground when you think nobody’s looking, then that’s mortal, baby … and don’t let the door hit your backside as you descend into the eternal fires of the damned.

Likewise, genetic manipulation. Doesn’t matter if you’re trying to take over the world and turn all humans into mindless automata who’ll obey your every whim, or find a cure to some rare congenital disease. God hates you.

The problem with increasing the moral weight of particular sins is that the minute you upgrade your list, the number of ambiguous situations start multiplying like rabbits in a warm, secure warren. If pollution is a mortal sin, is using a 5-star energy-saver washing machine only a venial sin? What about smoking a cigarette? Are we talking lung cancer and Hades here? Seems a bit harsh, even for a non-smoker like me. What about priests who drink beer (and God knows (no pun intended) there are a few of them around)? Will they go straight to hell because alcohol is a drug, never mind if it’s more socially acceptable than, say, marijuana? Or do they get a special Get Out of Hell card because they’re on the ecclesiastical payroll?

I love lists like this. They are bit like the blog on inflation I penned some months ago. (That is, inflation is only 3% if you don’t own or drive a car, buy insurance, seek medical care, have kids still in education, pay rent, pay rates, own a property or rent a property, use electricity, town water, etc.) If drugs, pollution, social injustice and genetic manipulation are now mortal sins, then you’re okay, as long as you don’t drink tea, coffee, herbal tea or alcohol; don’t breed animals or plants, not even for that local Terrific Tomato Festival; don’t own a single electricity-inefficient appliance; don’t drive anything bigger than a scooter; don’t buy from supermarkets or businesses whose owners are rich; don’t smoke cigarettes; don’t go for relaxing drives in the countryside; and, to be honest, don’t breathe because, really, you’re nothing more than a carbon dioxide emitter when all’s said and done.

Of course there’s an easy out to all this and it’s actually provided by the Vatican itself. One of the differences between a venial and mortal sin is the amount of deliberate intent there is in your soul. So, if you deliberately cultivate ignorance of everything in life (and, say, forget you ever read this blog), you’re well on the way of needing only a couple of rosaries to get off scot-free. Meanwhile, for the rest of us, it’s just as well that our souls are incorporeal or it’ll start to get crowded Down There real quick.

DISCLAIMER: This blog is no substitute for authentic theological advice. In situations of ambiguity, please consult your local cleric. Alternatively, you could also try thinking.

I love Australia. The country is breathtakingly striking, and the people are breathtakingly complacent. They are also inveterate optimists, which has its good and bad sides. Take the last Federal elections. Wine was flowing in the streets following John Howard’s (well deserved) defeat. However, I have to say I wasn’t as hopeful regarding the incoming government. Call me a cynic. But, the year has barely begun, and already something’s happened that smacks more of Howard than A New Beginning under Kevin Rudd. From an article in The Age, dated 14 April (you have to be quick with these news items; some of them have the tendency to disappear off the paper’s website awfully quickly) … Now, before I continue, if you’re after the really important news in Australia, don’t look at the front page of the newspapers. All the important stuff is buried elsewhere, usually in the Opinion pages. This one was buried in the Technology section:

COMPANIES will be able to intercept the emails and internet communications of their employees without their consent under new laws being considered by the Federal Government to protect the nation’s critical infrastructure from a cyber attack.

The Attorney-General, Robert McClelland … [states that] … “There’s no question that breaches of both government and private sector computer networks have occurred already - in some instances as a result of mischief, in some instances to obtain security-sensitive information and in some cases to obtain commercial information.”

He cited an attack by hackers in Estonia last year that, in effect, shut down its Government for almost two weeks … They used thousands of computers controlled through viruses - known as botnets - to simultaneously access an Estonian Government website, overwhelming the server and crashing its entire network.

And monitoring employees’ email is going to stop a similar attack … how? What is the government expecting? An email like this?

Dear Piotr,
I’ve spoken to Boris and it’s all set. Starting tomorrow, at 6am, Moscow Standard Time, we hit Estonia with all we’ve got. Make sure the local high school chess club has been clued in and have synchronised their watches. I’ve also spoken to the guys in charge of the Storm botnet, and they’ve said this project is eligible under the “charitable griefer” category that they have budgeted for each year. So it all looks good to go! I’ll txt you later. Btw, how’s your sister? I know a great club a few blocks away. Tell her I’ll be happy to meet her there next Saturday.
Maks

Legislation written to monitor the emails of company employees shows an ignorance of how botnets, or even basic security, operate. The truth is, you don’t even need email to crack a company, as various social engineering experiments have shown.

If I may have a word to the Anglo, English speakers among the audience for a moment. Ahem. Those of us of a duskier hue and/or accented voice have a very sensitive ear to machinations such as this. You just have to go up to your local mature-aged 7-Eleven proprietor and say something like, “Hey, Ram, what does it mean when the government is thinking of monitoring everyone’s emails to stop hacker attacks?”

“Stop hacker attacks?” Ram will reply. “How can they stop hacker attacks by reading Sanjay’s aunt’s vadai recipe? More likely they are trying to monitor everyone to see if someone is speaking ill of the government. Ashish’s second cousin’s nephew, who works in Bangalore, told my wife, that a call centre chum recently discovered …” and so on.

You see, our sensitivity to bullshit like this has been honed for generations and, for us of the Global South, it has become an almost genetic trait. “Cut out corruption? Get rid of the other guys so you can put your own cronies in place, more like it!” “Eliminate estate tax? Yes, and increase VAT on staple goods so the poor people end up starving!” “Reinstate the judiciary? Ah, all but one, so you can still shaft the most influential judge!” “Save trees and emissions by changing to Booksurge? Yah, and it also happens to strengthen an impending corporate monopoly! Pfft!”. (Oops, how did that get in there?)

We are your barometer. Where we have been, you are now going. Welcome.