The Angel without A Halo

It would be hard not to get smothered when reading newspapers. I believe this is a common phenomenon globally, an epidemic that plainly degrades human mentality. The virus in fact is not a lethal strain, but a lot of humans are prone to its effect, for they are devoid of the immunity - rationality. Contrary to many economists, philosophers, scientists and, needless to say, theologists, a lot of humans are still animals but are worse in that they have been deprived of the instinct on which animals rely to survive and thrive. The deprivation, regrettably, was, long time ago, given by rational humans who assimilated their irrational counterparts, albeit unconsciously and accidentally.

If one who has been educated asks, 'is today's news a truthful account of the day's events?', he must be an idiot (naive and uncynical, both attributes should be worth my appraise). When Heroic Capitalism is doomed, capitalism per se is hallow and open to invasion of undesirable elements, of which one is greed. This is sometimes still misunderstood, misrepresented or mistaken as what was depicted in the movie Wall Street. It is not. The reason is not obvious when today's news reporting singularly fails to bring out any truth other than the very incident itself - and sometimes it fails this one too, which is utterly saddening but inevitably accepted by us who are rational and clear in their mind. Perhaps 2 decades ago, I was told, very well, by popular TV series, that a journalist was an unhaloed angel. A journalist had the responsibility to bring out the truth, report the truth and reveal the injustice if such the truth behind the incident caused the injustice. A journalist endeavoured to dig out the truth and made justice be done. Very simple, direct though innocent way of thought. Indeed it was noble and ought to be respected but not looked down upon as a lot of us do today. So today, should there be certain standards, or golden rule, of journalism in news that a decent human, a decent professional journalist should follow and admire? Perhaps we should cite a plausible definition of news. Who can define news? Let me see if Jack Fuller, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Chicago Tribune journalist and former President of Tribune Publishing, is perhaps a qualified person. Mr. Fuller best defines news as a report of what a news organisation has recently learned about matters of some significance or interest to the specific community that news organisation serves. Journalism today is not the same as it was over half a century ago, very well. Jim Squires says that journalism 'even at its worst and most unfair... once had as its goal a quest for accuracy and perspective that would eventually provide truth. News, itself, is best defined by the Hutchinson Commission on freedom of the pres in 1947 as a truthful, comprehensive, and intelligent account of the day's events in a context which gives them meaning. On top of that, a responsible newspaper must judge what defines the significance of the news but only what the readers want to read. Only and want are italicised, for the conditionals are important and should not be twisted in order to get oneself the pretext to go wrong.

It would hardly not be frustrated, in addition to being smothered, after learning of these brilliantly described rules in journalism and reading newspaper of today's. But what has gone wrong in fact? I should say it again, when Heroic Capitalism (I recalled that Lord Clark said of Heroic Materialism in his landmark TV documentary Civilisation) is dying and becomes defunct, our world goes back to the Dark Ages, only this time we do not have Thomas Acquinas, Duns Scotus, Francis Bacon .... to name but a few.

Quoting A Letter to the Idiot dated 17 July 2008

Life on the Verandah is about philosophical aesthetic and nourishing of philosophical temperant. Explosive literatures should be put somewhere else. The reason I wish to put A Letter to The Idiot, which I wrote on 17th July 2008 is it, in a sense, serves the purpose of Life on the Verandah, by pointing out that evolutionary pressure is necessary to put humanity in good cause. The artificial parameters or spirits cannot bring Good to human alone. They must be helped by Natural Elements (capitalised because they are defined specifically).

Dear Idiot,

Are you a spiteful person? Are you sick? Do you have a diseased liver or brain? I am not disposed to ask questions naturally. But I raise questions when facing an idiot, and obviously I have the answer to all my questions respecting idiots. Are you a spiteful person? You are, for you definitely do not know where this question comes from, and you definitely do not bother where it comes from, and you are only concerned that you can take off on time and join other idiots in the karaoke bar. Are you sick? Terminally. Sickness may be treatable yet I do not wish a cure be available. Do you have a diseased liver or brain? Your liver is diseased, but your brain deceased. Let me tell you, Idiot, I am not like you, an idiot. This is evidenced by my behaviour and my habits in daily life not only entirely different from yours but totally in contrast with yours.

I am puzzled when you queued up for hours for a pair of rubbish sandals with a monkey sign on them. Let me ask you, Idiot, did you read Critique of Pure Reason, in the hours you squandered queuing downstairs of the monkey shop, with the company of other monkeys, chimpanzees, bums, scums, imbeciles and primate-like entities in the form of a long queue. I think not. Kant's masterpiece is reserved for the brilliant minds, not you. You need not be worried as you have not heard of Critique anyway and you will not feel ashamed if asked why you did not read it. 'None of my business.' you think. But where did the time go? You wasted it? Well, I give you the peace of mind. No, you did not waste it. You never treasured your time so one cannot say you wasted the time, as if time was precious and you mistakenly used it in the wrong manner. Not at all, you queued up for your pair of rubbish sandals and time went on with you as well as other useful people. But even though your time was taken, it was not accounted for as though it had not been taken.

When you had lunch, alone or with other bums, scums and imbeciles, did you think of the food you ate? Was it good or bad? What did you talk? Did you debate Morality and Amorality as a reality of collective good or simply a standard naturally derived from behaviour of human being? No, you did not. All you did was to talk about why your employer did not raise your wage (I can answer this for you, for you are just an idiot, which has not been worth the money you have been kindly bestowed as you begged for it disgracefully, sneezed even by the monkeys who are starving for bananas). Why did you occupy the whole table when your nauseating bum friends had not even left their shitty office? Did you want to demonstrate your idiocy to such great extent that the Useful World had to shovel you away? Well, I tell you, I teach you The Idiot. But you will not listen. I am sure. I tried to tell a monkey of The Idiot. It ate bananas and ignored me. So I must say, you will not listen to me. The protagonist in The Idiot does not resemble you. I cannot find anything in common with you in him, Prince Myskin. The world believes Prince Myskin an idiot and calls him an idiot, but he is not. Myskin is not like you. This is blasphemous to compare Myskin with you. You ate or devoured junk food and consciously refused to accept my telling of a brilliant story. You queue up for scandals but are ignorant of the Corpenican Revolution in philosophy. Your consciousness is as idiotic as your being, which should have not been created from the outset. The Christian intellectuals feared Feurebach for his philosophical brilliance and eloquence. You do not in the same manner you are afraid of no junk food. Will you every think about the Good and attempt to differentiate it from the Bad? I think not.

You spend so much time eating junk food, going to karaoke bar with monkey friends, drinking low-quality alcoholic drinks. Have you ever introspected and realised what you have done is worthless? Not only that, are you conscious of the plight that your own being hinders the Useful World's development? Do you understand that such nonsense as equal opportunities or anti-discrimination or anti-racists or political correctness or pan-democracy is as detrimental and evil as the Inquisition and the Assassins? Do you see that it is because of you idiots, anti-discrimination becomes discrimination - against talents, against the Useful, against the Good? Do you smoke cigar? Do you enjoy Havannas or non-Cubans? Would a Dominican Davidoff satisfy your palette? Can you smell the floral fragrance burning out of a Cohiba Esplendido? I do not even expect you to ask why, reason being that you are worse than the monkeys who can choose good bananas and throw away bad ones. Your bad mouth can only hold Marlboros but throw out Ardberg or Oban or Miltonduff. Your shitty hands can only hold cheap cigarettes. Your ghastly eyes see not Evil, as they are too blind to see such brightness, such stretching of the amplitude of life; they see only tabloids which publish pictures of 2nd class B-movie actressess going to discotheques. They can't read but only see. Your unlubricated brain think of having sexual intercourse with them (her) every night but all you can do is to jerk off in front of your cheap PC.

Oh yes, I almost forgot, a PC, a machine that you idiots love to embrace. You must be a big fan of those MSN, ICQ, Skype or Facebook. What a socialite! What good is it that you socialise with only idiots? How can your brain not become paralysed and deceased, if you are exposed in prolonged periods to MSN, ICQ, Skype or Facebook, those objects that promote idiocy under the disguise of cleverness. So, Idiot, I admonish you, you are becoming devolved into worse than a giant jellyfish whose ancestry dates back the very primordial age, but giant jellyfish conquest humankind. Idiots do not know of its existence, nor does jellyfish know of idiots. But the prolonged exposure to Facebook obviously turns you into some kind of jellyfish, only that you do not share the strong survival 'instinct' evolved through millions of years and perfected through sporadic changes on Earth. You are apparently a giant jellyfish bound to be eaten by Chinamen.

So, Idiot, I have to answer all questions in one go: The only place for an idiot like you is the gas chamber.

I remain, Idiot,

Heroic Capitalism

At the time capitalism came to pass, that is, I would say, after World War II, it started maturing and up to around 1960's, capitalism was a fully fledged young man, matured, sophisticated with more decency than cynicism. I call it Heroic Capitalism. It is Heroic Capitalism that constructed the framework of development in the 1970's where Japan was in its Showa golden years, the US was reborn after the Vietnam war, and Europe was having a rethink of socialism (whether it was a good cause). The power and confidence of this young man was bound to crush the ossified, moribund old man, who, having swallowed too much of the communist travesty, had his days counting. The Thatcher-Reagan offensive, a term I coined to refer to the way these hawkish conservatives chose on dealing with their supposed diabolic neighbour in the East, served, utmost, a catalyst but not a necessary condition. Totalitarian communism was too rotten to live on by the late 1980's.

Same as any other ideology or system of thought, Capitalism follows the same path as it grows old and gets lost on its origin, the heroism that dictates capitalism, not the other way round as many economists and apologetics of this cause had understood. I think, of course, with hindsight, this started when Thatcher and Reagan enticed the entire capitalistic world to follow the pattern of (simplistic speaking) Anglo-Saxon ideology (ASI). And ASI ruled the following decades successfully to the extent that as naive as many people of preceding eras, people began losing the alert that history changed. When they grew and expanded, one day they were bitten back by their own success. I Ching refers to this situation as the regretful dragon that goes overlimit, which happens after a prolonged period of booming and satisfying life.

I was (am still am) skeptical of the lasseiz faire advocates (those economic liberals, for example) who criticised Japan's interfering habits throughout the lost decades. Not long ago, I still heard them moaning on Japan's showering the economy with money, and not so long ago, these people turned mute because their very own governments had started pouring liquidity in the same way the Japanese did a decade ago. My view is, Japan's malice lay on the delayed diagnosis and treatment in the early 1990s and not the wrong treatment of quantitative easing. Japan raised interest rate too high but too late when the bubble became too large. It got a stroke and would never be recovered, from the perspective of Western economists. But some people such as the late Miyazawa and even myself beg to disagree, as no one should necessarily be required to see through the eyes of a Westerner and live according to the standard of the West. Somewhat Keynesian, Miyazawa died prematurely, in the late 1990's, to see if his postulation could work in a way, in the long run, better than Koizumi's ASI which, in the aftermath of the recent financial crisis, short-circuited the longest prospering period of Japan. Again, I shall not singularly point out that it is Koizumi's fault to follow a liberal view and act accordingly. Japan never buys into that. Still Japan had its own bubble in the expanding period in the first decade of the 21st century, but this time it was different.

The bubble burst is not easily seen in Japan. The bubble lay clandestinely in the swelling factories in different areas in nation. The GDP growth, though very mildly at 2-3% p.a., reflected the gradual expansion of production capacity built up to feed the world's devouring demand for goods (China and eventually the US). This is globalisation. We have reason to blame it. Liberals, a warhorse being The Economist, vigorously sell globalisation. The basic rationale of it I do not abhor. The Economist presumes it is Heroic Capitalism that pushes globalisation and the decent elements in the system would make globalisation a truly reliable and fair means to eradicate poverty and create value to the whole mankind. But the presumption becomes groundless empirically when we observe the capitalist societies around the globe. But with demand free-falling, does the Heroic Capitalism in Japan (I believe that Japan still has it) survive the torrent of darkness? In particular, the ASI in se has bad seeds and they now prevail at a rate unimaginable to those who naively believe in the capitalistic good. I believe in Japan's ethos that a corporation is not merely a profit-maximising entity but a social one that bears responsibilities not only for shareholders but for employees, which explains the life-long employment system that flourished in the Showa years. The greed and unceasing pursuit of interests and profits, those bad seeds, sour the whole fertile land of capitalism. As it grows old and frailty prevails, decency makes way for greed and excess. There should be two consequences - either a volatile, revolutionary scenario in which the diabolical capitalism is violently overturned or a more benign one in which the good elements among the bad seeds reinvigorated capitalism.