Brittany Murphy is no more. Some leave too soon, others overstay their visit.
Despite creating numerous chances, the Blues were held by Birmingham. It is a colder winter ahead, a wretched relegation struggle.
The Calamity is expected to worsen. They are outsourcing my entire department to some consultancy firm. Before long we will outsource our spouses, pets, mothers and fathers. My only satisfaction and consolation is that we will one day outsource Gawd, probably to some illiterate cheap labor in Sudan.
Some laughs for size...
Monday, December 21, 2009
Saturday, December 19, 2009
Another Improbable Escape
What a brutal season! Strained nearly to breaking point, being hard done by and struggling with problems on and off the field, it's been a struggle every step of the way. Overstretched resources and a poor start only made playing catch-up more difficult.
The run-in to the end of the league was particularly gruelling. No rest, only desperation and a sense of impending doom. It was like being stuck to the bottom of the table at Xmas, ten points off the pace and the pundits writing off any chance of survival. Admittedly my results are the worst so far. I only just escaped by the skin of my teeth, but if you offered me this result at the start of the season I would have shaken your hand.
I was chasing goal deficits in the final four games. Four games in a dozen days. I had to be mentally strong. I played like shite, was dominated in three out of the four. The ref was a fucking disgrace and every decision went against me. They camped in my half and put me under tremendous pressure. I could hardly get the ball off them. The numerous chances they created mostly found the woodwork or Row Z. Somehow I took the few chances that came my way, and then it was hanging on, massed defending and riding on luck.
I normally am not content with being poor but I shall toast my improbable escape with as much shamelessness I can muster. I am still as shell-shocked as I was during that hellish period. But deny it not, this has got to be one of the greatest escapes ever.
Next season will yet be another relegation scrap. When your back is against the wall, there is only one way and that is to go for a smash and grab.
The run-in to the end of the league was particularly gruelling. No rest, only desperation and a sense of impending doom. It was like being stuck to the bottom of the table at Xmas, ten points off the pace and the pundits writing off any chance of survival. Admittedly my results are the worst so far. I only just escaped by the skin of my teeth, but if you offered me this result at the start of the season I would have shaken your hand.
I was chasing goal deficits in the final four games. Four games in a dozen days. I had to be mentally strong. I played like shite, was dominated in three out of the four. The ref was a fucking disgrace and every decision went against me. They camped in my half and put me under tremendous pressure. I could hardly get the ball off them. The numerous chances they created mostly found the woodwork or Row Z. Somehow I took the few chances that came my way, and then it was hanging on, massed defending and riding on luck.
I normally am not content with being poor but I shall toast my improbable escape with as much shamelessness I can muster. I am still as shell-shocked as I was during that hellish period. But deny it not, this has got to be one of the greatest escapes ever.
Next season will yet be another relegation scrap. When your back is against the wall, there is only one way and that is to go for a smash and grab.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Enlightenment is Impossible Without Cynicism
They have been losing their marbles and they clearly still do not realize it. My colleague told me that her good friend in the our department has just received her marching orders. Another competent person gone. Eight years of hard work and exemplary service, and for naught.
We feel outraged and saddened that our boss is also leaving the company soon. I do not know to whom we will be reporting, but at this moment any speculation is useless. One could argue that being upset and infuriated at the inevitable is also pointless, but it takes a heart of stone not to feel a thing.
My boss does not deserve the axe. As a superior he is intelligent, hardworking, calm in the face of adversity, and demonstrates leadership quality. As a man he is understanding and cares about the people around him. He will be an asset to his next company, and an irreplaceable loss to this gulag.
To get rid of him when he is still limping from his knee surgery is damn despicable. What has he done to deserve this? This is a fucking disgrace! I hope those in top management stew in their own juices. Have they forgotten how we pulled off a miracle when we upgraded the business system and set up the online store in the space of weeks?
Our department is tiny enough. Now we are left with two to serve six countries’ worth of system problems. And there is no guarantee I will still be around come the new year. Good riddance to them then. Why not outsource the entire computer administration to Africa? That should save some pennies.
The grumbling aside, I want to thank him for taking the chance on me when nobody would. I wish more people in management will be open-minded like him, but I am on ‘I wish for world peace’ territory here. I hope he has a safe journey when he flies back to his homeland for the festive season. May he have a speedy recovery as well. I look forward to the day when I can stop him from scoring when we meet on the field.
For those who still insist that loyalty and wholehearted commitment to a company is a laudable quality can burn in the Hells. The company does not care about you. To them you are only a piece of meat that is good while it lasts. All the perks, bonuses, management speeches, town-halls mean nothing. They are but empty rhetoric, management’s thinly veiled excuses to reward themselves for their incompetence and lies designed to make you think you are loved so that they can squeeze every drop of blood from you. Lies. Nothing but lies.
We feel outraged and saddened that our boss is also leaving the company soon. I do not know to whom we will be reporting, but at this moment any speculation is useless. One could argue that being upset and infuriated at the inevitable is also pointless, but it takes a heart of stone not to feel a thing.
My boss does not deserve the axe. As a superior he is intelligent, hardworking, calm in the face of adversity, and demonstrates leadership quality. As a man he is understanding and cares about the people around him. He will be an asset to his next company, and an irreplaceable loss to this gulag.
To get rid of him when he is still limping from his knee surgery is damn despicable. What has he done to deserve this? This is a fucking disgrace! I hope those in top management stew in their own juices. Have they forgotten how we pulled off a miracle when we upgraded the business system and set up the online store in the space of weeks?
Our department is tiny enough. Now we are left with two to serve six countries’ worth of system problems. And there is no guarantee I will still be around come the new year. Good riddance to them then. Why not outsource the entire computer administration to Africa? That should save some pennies.
The grumbling aside, I want to thank him for taking the chance on me when nobody would. I wish more people in management will be open-minded like him, but I am on ‘I wish for world peace’ territory here. I hope he has a safe journey when he flies back to his homeland for the festive season. May he have a speedy recovery as well. I look forward to the day when I can stop him from scoring when we meet on the field.
For those who still insist that loyalty and wholehearted commitment to a company is a laudable quality can burn in the Hells. The company does not care about you. To them you are only a piece of meat that is good while it lasts. All the perks, bonuses, management speeches, town-halls mean nothing. They are but empty rhetoric, management’s thinly veiled excuses to reward themselves for their incompetence and lies designed to make you think you are loved so that they can squeeze every drop of blood from you. Lies. Nothing but lies.
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Another Friend Gone
My poly friend, whom I have not seen since we attended our polytechnic graduation nine years ago, suddenly called me and invited me to his wedding. This is most a terrible thing. I remember, with much nostalgia, of our time in school. We did not consider the week complete without skipping classes at least once. Now my friend, Prof, is getting married tomorrow and another guy we did our final year project with is actually already married!
Oh the horror! Unthinkable!
So with a heavy heart I shall attend this most tragic of occasions. Surely, his life is over, and as a friend, it is all I could do not to weep at the demise of his freedom and dignity, and at the passing of a life unremarkable but reasonably lived. It is my duty to be with him in this most difficult period, and offer him consolation in his transition to an existence imprisoned. If I were a theist, I would pray for his Deliverance. Marriage and death are the same: life-changing experiences which will ultimately end ignominiously in being food for the worms. His life is gone. He is no more. Another bites the dust. May he rest in peace, and if not in peace, then in pieces, for there is peace in oblivion.
Oh the horror! Unthinkable!
So with a heavy heart I shall attend this most tragic of occasions. Surely, his life is over, and as a friend, it is all I could do not to weep at the demise of his freedom and dignity, and at the passing of a life unremarkable but reasonably lived. It is my duty to be with him in this most difficult period, and offer him consolation in his transition to an existence imprisoned. If I were a theist, I would pray for his Deliverance. Marriage and death are the same: life-changing experiences which will ultimately end ignominiously in being food for the worms. His life is gone. He is no more. Another bites the dust. May he rest in peace, and if not in peace, then in pieces, for there is peace in oblivion.
Saturday, December 5, 2009
A Rant from an Unimpressed Business Student
The second wave of the Calamity occurred yesterday. A few more faces will be gone after this year. In all honesty I do not know what the top management are trying to do. You have a 80 million dollars deficit and your idea of reducing it is to cut staff and implement ‘re-engineering’. Nothing wrong with the latter of course. The way the business has been run, it is no surprise that it has posted losses for two consecutive years. Some business arms are clearly a waste of resources. Take for instance, those jokers in India. They have been misbalancing the accounts since August and now only they realized that they have an imbalance of some $800,000. I say that is real smart of them. It has been an eternity since Amazon, Borders and Kinokuniya started selling books online but the management, in their wisdom, only began to do it last month in this sinkhole. We are not talking about some obscure Chinese family-run operation., but an MNC with a history spanning over a century.
Assuming that each of the 90 laid off earns an average of $3,000, the gulag will save some $270,000 monthly. In a year this amounts to roughly 3.24 million. It will take maybe 24 years for this 'staff savings' to shave off the loss, and we have not even factored in inflation, raising costs and other economic factors. Meanwhile, there is absolutely no guarantee that the business will recover within the next few years. When you are posting an 80 million loss the rot must have been deep and any attempts must be strategic rather than tactical and short-term. The management probably justified that the people they are getting rid of are dead weight and with their shiny new ‘re-engineering’ process, they will be able to turn the remaining into human capital which they can exploit to their maximum advantage.
I think they are seriously deluded. Top management and academics are all alike. They live in their ivory tower and take reports and spreadsheets like gospel truth, never considering that things can fuck up and they almost always will. There are intangible things and these never show up on Excel spreadsheets and nicely drafted papers. How do you put a value on morale, leadership and relationships? You can’t. Whatever you come up with is only an estimate, and like forecasts, all estimates are inherently false.
They are closing one department in this sinkhole, only to set up another in Malaysia. I say, that is most brilliant of them. While I may have a low regard for Singaporeans in general, I must admit that when it comes to work, our neighbors are simply not in our class in terms of efficiency and effectiveness. In many industries, our mediocre would be average over there. And our average could jolly well look forward to a promotion if they ever choose to work across the border. Wages may be cheaper there, but lower costs do not necessarily translate to a more impressive balance sheet. We are not talking about labor-intensive jobs (which the said defunct department is not), but a skilled, service-oriented outfit. You just cannot compare it in dollars and cents alone. Skill, knowledge, ability and experience play a part too.
Anyone who read the news a while back may remember the accidents an Australian airline suffered in the space of two weeks after they outsourced their maintenance to Malaysia and Indonesia. Cheaper does not mean better performance. In this case, things ended up worse. Finally, setting up the same department in Malaysia does not mean it will make money. It could end up being another white elephant. Although our said department might not have been performing, their failure could well be due to the terrible economic conditions, and not on any fault on their part.
Americans are generally not known for their intelligence and in this case, their short-sightedness is there for all to see. In a recession, you should avoid retrenchment. Instead, you should think of ways to make your operations more efficient. You should not treat the people who have slaved for you like resources that you can jettison when things do not go right. By your callous treatment is your workforce demoralized, and business being like war, any commander will tell you that you may have the best technologies, tactics and strategies, but when your soldiers lose the heart to fight, you will lose the war. By making every effort to keep your staff, you send out a clear signal that they are valued. The improved morale will eventually translate into a better profit margin. By retaining them, you ensure that you have a ready workforce when the economy and your business recover. In a recovering market when people are looser with their purse-strings, the last thing you want is to have no capable people to tap into the customer pool. Not only do you need new hires, you have to expend time and resources training them. You will lag behind your competitors as a result.
If the gulag wants to get rid of dead weight, why not start from the TOP? The lower management and the rank and file DID NOT cause most of the astronomical losses. It is the hair-brained and flawed business strategies the ‘Peter Pans’ in corporate management that came up with. STOP blaming every fuck thing on the stupid economy. Most MNCs are having their revenues reduced; this gulag is not alone. But do take note that few companies outside of Wall Street had an 80 million loss. It is time those in corporate management take responsibility for their abject failures, instead of making other people suffer for their blithering incompetence.
Assuming that each of the 90 laid off earns an average of $3,000, the gulag will save some $270,000 monthly. In a year this amounts to roughly 3.24 million. It will take maybe 24 years for this 'staff savings' to shave off the loss, and we have not even factored in inflation, raising costs and other economic factors. Meanwhile, there is absolutely no guarantee that the business will recover within the next few years. When you are posting an 80 million loss the rot must have been deep and any attempts must be strategic rather than tactical and short-term. The management probably justified that the people they are getting rid of are dead weight and with their shiny new ‘re-engineering’ process, they will be able to turn the remaining into human capital which they can exploit to their maximum advantage.
I think they are seriously deluded. Top management and academics are all alike. They live in their ivory tower and take reports and spreadsheets like gospel truth, never considering that things can fuck up and they almost always will. There are intangible things and these never show up on Excel spreadsheets and nicely drafted papers. How do you put a value on morale, leadership and relationships? You can’t. Whatever you come up with is only an estimate, and like forecasts, all estimates are inherently false.
They are closing one department in this sinkhole, only to set up another in Malaysia. I say, that is most brilliant of them. While I may have a low regard for Singaporeans in general, I must admit that when it comes to work, our neighbors are simply not in our class in terms of efficiency and effectiveness. In many industries, our mediocre would be average over there. And our average could jolly well look forward to a promotion if they ever choose to work across the border. Wages may be cheaper there, but lower costs do not necessarily translate to a more impressive balance sheet. We are not talking about labor-intensive jobs (which the said defunct department is not), but a skilled, service-oriented outfit. You just cannot compare it in dollars and cents alone. Skill, knowledge, ability and experience play a part too.
Anyone who read the news a while back may remember the accidents an Australian airline suffered in the space of two weeks after they outsourced their maintenance to Malaysia and Indonesia. Cheaper does not mean better performance. In this case, things ended up worse. Finally, setting up the same department in Malaysia does not mean it will make money. It could end up being another white elephant. Although our said department might not have been performing, their failure could well be due to the terrible economic conditions, and not on any fault on their part.
Americans are generally not known for their intelligence and in this case, their short-sightedness is there for all to see. In a recession, you should avoid retrenchment. Instead, you should think of ways to make your operations more efficient. You should not treat the people who have slaved for you like resources that you can jettison when things do not go right. By your callous treatment is your workforce demoralized, and business being like war, any commander will tell you that you may have the best technologies, tactics and strategies, but when your soldiers lose the heart to fight, you will lose the war. By making every effort to keep your staff, you send out a clear signal that they are valued. The improved morale will eventually translate into a better profit margin. By retaining them, you ensure that you have a ready workforce when the economy and your business recover. In a recovering market when people are looser with their purse-strings, the last thing you want is to have no capable people to tap into the customer pool. Not only do you need new hires, you have to expend time and resources training them. You will lag behind your competitors as a result.
If the gulag wants to get rid of dead weight, why not start from the TOP? The lower management and the rank and file DID NOT cause most of the astronomical losses. It is the hair-brained and flawed business strategies the ‘Peter Pans’ in corporate management that came up with. STOP blaming every fuck thing on the stupid economy. Most MNCs are having their revenues reduced; this gulag is not alone. But do take note that few companies outside of Wall Street had an 80 million loss. It is time those in corporate management take responsibility for their abject failures, instead of making other people suffer for their blithering incompetence.
Thursday, December 3, 2009
2012
An email by our CEO shattered the lethargy of our lazy Thursday morning. It began by blaming the economic crisis and how it reduced our revenue. Due to this unfortunate turn of events, business processes have to be streamlined and ‘re-engineering’ be made. To facilitate this necessary but regrettable state of affairs, over ninety employees (commodities) across Asia have to be let go, but the company will do everything to help them to find employment. (Lies, lies and damned lies.) This is only the first round. There will be a second wave. Maybe even a third.
Everybody was demoralized by the announcement. Clearly this was not the news one would want to hear before the festive season comes into full swing. Miss Micky told me the gulag did exactly the same thing last year. Right after the annual company dinner, with its lucky draws. Pretty much like fattening the cows for slaughter. The mood in the gulag was one of disbelief and shock, a similar air of despondency and shock that persists after an air raid and the survivors looking dazed, shocked that their friends and families are dead while they have been inexplicably spared. Nobody felt like working. People were walking around and discussing this calamity in hushed whispers.
On my way to the loo I met the Feisty Bag Lady and we started to talk about the Calamity. She told me that in her two dozen years in this gulag she had never seen such a bad year. She went on, saying that the gulag, despite making redundant over 90 slaves across Asia, still had a lot of money. It is now up to those dead weights to ask for as such compensation as possible. It is only fair, I suppose, considering that the corporate management are so well paid they earn more in a month than what some of us make in a year. She quoted the example of one management guy who left us last year. He received a hefty severance package, returned to Australia, paid off his entire home mortgage with that kitty, with enough left to buy himself a new car, before rejoining the gulag in his own country. (Why am I not surprised?)
The Feisty Bag Lady also lamented on the deplorable state that life (in my esteemed opinion, existence) here is becoming. She has a relative who has been out of work since he was retrenched several years ago. She also narrated the case of someone she knows, a highly successful ‘somebody’ who became the object of his wife’s contempt after he outlived his usefulness to the gulag he so faithfully served. There was also one old guy who worked for a government (regime) arm and was induced to leave by some high-handed methods. He would be given nothing to do when he reported to work every day. This travesty went on until he decided it was enough and quitted the stupid slave house. If the organization fired him they would need to pay him compensation. Better he left, so that the money that would have gone to compensate him could end up lining the pockets of those swine in corporate management.
We both agreed that our existence is exacerbated by the presence of a totalitarian and merciless regime that profits from the blood, tears, sweat and soul of the complacent and bovine populace. The Dubai crisis may be the first of the many financial disasters since the collapse of the American markets. The recovery of the world economy, assuming such a thing is possible, will certainly be delayed and even curtailed. When you have a regime composed of easy credit, an obsession with short-term gains, and a willingness to use prevarication to achieve your means, shit is bound to hit the fan. It is just a question of when.
Back to home base. The Feisty Bag Lady asserted that it is going to be next to impossible to find full time employment these days. Companies are outsourcing because they do not wish to pay benefits that would have be necessary for employed staff. They are preferring contract and temporary employees for the same reason. They can get rid of you anytime they like. In addition, the massive influx of foreigners, many of whom are cheap labor and talentless, into this shithole will not only depress wages, but will deprive locals of jobs in what is already an ever shrinking job market. She and I are of the same mind that the regime’s claims that we are not filling enough positions in job sectors that are not cheap, dirty and dangerous are absolutely bollocks. So are their assertions that they need to give themselves huge salaries in order to maintain their own integrity. Madoff anyone?
We felt sorry for the people who would be leaving us, especially our finance director. A quiet unassuming man, devotes his life to the organization and look where it got him? Being overlooked for promotion is bad enough, to be removed from the position he has occupied capably for five years is a kick in the teeth. There is no point in selling your life for the company. Why should anyone do that when to the company you are just a commodity that can be discarded as it pleases? Since we were kids we had been told by our supposedly elders and betters that we should work hard, be productive and a useful person (Incidentally many of these ‘supposedly elders and betters’ are unemployed, having being left on the streets after devoting the best years of their industrious lives to a pipe-dream.)
My advice to anyone reading this is this: Nobody cares about us. The system does not care. The regime is never accountable to the people. The tripartite system (the regime, religion and the media) are but instruments to subjugate the masses for the personal gratification of a few select individuals. To deny this and to claim instead that a ‘benign authoritarian’ state is the best and only way is a sign of magical thinking. Speak softly but carry a big stick, says the regime, and the stupefied masses ejaculate all over themselves with adoration for this most profound piece. I offer a better solution: THROW AWAY THE STICK.
The only people we should care about are ourselves and those we like and whom in turn care about us. Anton LaVey, that most distinguished figure and founder of the Church of Satan said that the Satanist should not waste his time on psychic vampires. I agree with him totally. The Feisty Bag Lady said that she is going back to her law academy to hook up with her old course mates to see if there is anything for her. I wish her the best of luck. For all our sympathy for our expelled colleagues, we could be sympathizing ourselves in actuality.
It was really a very interesting conversation. After that horrible war of words in that horrible Saturday afternoon with equally horribly stupid people, to talk to one who is intelligent, is for once, a relief and if she were thirty years younger and looked like Natalie Portman – a most articulate specimen I assure you – it would have been an orgasmic experience as well. She was also positive, or tried to convey some positivity in spite of the occasion. I suppose that comes with age. Short of sudden violent death or illness, I still have about 45 to 50 years to go. And in this shithole, it is like five centuries in the Hells.
The only thing I felt ambivalent about when she said jokingly that it would not hurt to pray a bit to hasten the Old Dog Thief’s death. I replied I am an atheist, but she told me to take it with a pinch of salt. Maybe we will have another conversation again, this time on the wickedness of religion and the superiority of atheism.
Everybody was demoralized by the announcement. Clearly this was not the news one would want to hear before the festive season comes into full swing. Miss Micky told me the gulag did exactly the same thing last year. Right after the annual company dinner, with its lucky draws. Pretty much like fattening the cows for slaughter. The mood in the gulag was one of disbelief and shock, a similar air of despondency and shock that persists after an air raid and the survivors looking dazed, shocked that their friends and families are dead while they have been inexplicably spared. Nobody felt like working. People were walking around and discussing this calamity in hushed whispers.
On my way to the loo I met the Feisty Bag Lady and we started to talk about the Calamity. She told me that in her two dozen years in this gulag she had never seen such a bad year. She went on, saying that the gulag, despite making redundant over 90 slaves across Asia, still had a lot of money. It is now up to those dead weights to ask for as such compensation as possible. It is only fair, I suppose, considering that the corporate management are so well paid they earn more in a month than what some of us make in a year. She quoted the example of one management guy who left us last year. He received a hefty severance package, returned to Australia, paid off his entire home mortgage with that kitty, with enough left to buy himself a new car, before rejoining the gulag in his own country. (Why am I not surprised?)
The Feisty Bag Lady also lamented on the deplorable state that life (in my esteemed opinion, existence) here is becoming. She has a relative who has been out of work since he was retrenched several years ago. She also narrated the case of someone she knows, a highly successful ‘somebody’ who became the object of his wife’s contempt after he outlived his usefulness to the gulag he so faithfully served. There was also one old guy who worked for a government (regime) arm and was induced to leave by some high-handed methods. He would be given nothing to do when he reported to work every day. This travesty went on until he decided it was enough and quitted the stupid slave house. If the organization fired him they would need to pay him compensation. Better he left, so that the money that would have gone to compensate him could end up lining the pockets of those swine in corporate management.
We both agreed that our existence is exacerbated by the presence of a totalitarian and merciless regime that profits from the blood, tears, sweat and soul of the complacent and bovine populace. The Dubai crisis may be the first of the many financial disasters since the collapse of the American markets. The recovery of the world economy, assuming such a thing is possible, will certainly be delayed and even curtailed. When you have a regime composed of easy credit, an obsession with short-term gains, and a willingness to use prevarication to achieve your means, shit is bound to hit the fan. It is just a question of when.
Back to home base. The Feisty Bag Lady asserted that it is going to be next to impossible to find full time employment these days. Companies are outsourcing because they do not wish to pay benefits that would have be necessary for employed staff. They are preferring contract and temporary employees for the same reason. They can get rid of you anytime they like. In addition, the massive influx of foreigners, many of whom are cheap labor and talentless, into this shithole will not only depress wages, but will deprive locals of jobs in what is already an ever shrinking job market. She and I are of the same mind that the regime’s claims that we are not filling enough positions in job sectors that are not cheap, dirty and dangerous are absolutely bollocks. So are their assertions that they need to give themselves huge salaries in order to maintain their own integrity. Madoff anyone?
We felt sorry for the people who would be leaving us, especially our finance director. A quiet unassuming man, devotes his life to the organization and look where it got him? Being overlooked for promotion is bad enough, to be removed from the position he has occupied capably for five years is a kick in the teeth. There is no point in selling your life for the company. Why should anyone do that when to the company you are just a commodity that can be discarded as it pleases? Since we were kids we had been told by our supposedly elders and betters that we should work hard, be productive and a useful person (Incidentally many of these ‘supposedly elders and betters’ are unemployed, having being left on the streets after devoting the best years of their industrious lives to a pipe-dream.)
My advice to anyone reading this is this: Nobody cares about us. The system does not care. The regime is never accountable to the people. The tripartite system (the regime, religion and the media) are but instruments to subjugate the masses for the personal gratification of a few select individuals. To deny this and to claim instead that a ‘benign authoritarian’ state is the best and only way is a sign of magical thinking. Speak softly but carry a big stick, says the regime, and the stupefied masses ejaculate all over themselves with adoration for this most profound piece. I offer a better solution: THROW AWAY THE STICK.
The only people we should care about are ourselves and those we like and whom in turn care about us. Anton LaVey, that most distinguished figure and founder of the Church of Satan said that the Satanist should not waste his time on psychic vampires. I agree with him totally. The Feisty Bag Lady said that she is going back to her law academy to hook up with her old course mates to see if there is anything for her. I wish her the best of luck. For all our sympathy for our expelled colleagues, we could be sympathizing ourselves in actuality.
It was really a very interesting conversation. After that horrible war of words in that horrible Saturday afternoon with equally horribly stupid people, to talk to one who is intelligent, is for once, a relief and if she were thirty years younger and looked like Natalie Portman – a most articulate specimen I assure you – it would have been an orgasmic experience as well. She was also positive, or tried to convey some positivity in spite of the occasion. I suppose that comes with age. Short of sudden violent death or illness, I still have about 45 to 50 years to go. And in this shithole, it is like five centuries in the Hells.
The only thing I felt ambivalent about when she said jokingly that it would not hurt to pray a bit to hasten the Old Dog Thief’s death. I replied I am an atheist, but she told me to take it with a pinch of salt. Maybe we will have another conversation again, this time on the wickedness of religion and the superiority of atheism.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Nil Satis Nisi Optimum My Ass!
I sent this to Bluekipper. I don't think they will put it up though. To the Hells with them. The site is shite anyway.
Nil Satis Nisi Optimum? What delusional rubbish!
No player wants to sign for us. We have no money to spend anyway. We have to sell players before we can buy any. Over a century of history, and we are the undisputed paupers in the League. Maybe we should play a division lower. At least we get a real shot at winning something. Well, maybe not.
We are like the plague. Nobody with any money to invest would come near us. At least the Barcode Army had Mike 'Ratface' Ashley. We are nobody’s child, If Bill Kenwright and his board of functional retards have any self-respect, they should just sell the club to anyone with money. South American drug cartels, the Russian mafia, the Taliban, Singtel, I don’t give a damn. Just give us money. Money, money and more money.
Our chairman is skint, our board incompetent and from the business point of view, we could not sell an iced-tea in a desert. The club is so pathetic it is reduced to begging the Shite for ground-sharing. Would you share your wife with another man?
The city council are cretins, Shite supporters or both. They would never approve whatever building plans we come up with, even though it means losing the chance to create 1,000,0000,000 jobs. We could not get Stanley Park, Kirby is in tatters and before long they will throw us out of Goodison Park.
We could not hit a barn door from five yards and we never look like scoring in a whorehouse. Our most creative player is out for possibly the whole of this season, and our most solid centreback badly missed. Every cross into our penalty box is likely to result in a goal. For some reason our well-paid players either do not want to pass the ball, or cannot string together a few passes to save their own lives.
Our manager is too defensive at times, even against mediocre sides we want to defend, defend , defend and then hope to nick one from a mistake or set piece and then defend, defend, and defend until the end. Against passing sides we lose our balls in more ways than one. How many points have we taken off the ManUre, Chelski and the Arse in recent years? We are always moaning about how classy the rest are and that we are not ‘good enough’ or ‘lack cutting edge’. You do not hear Fulham moaning about how good Roma are. You certainly do not see SUNDERLAND going tortoise when they played the Shite, ManUre and the Arse!
It is long ball after long ball after long ball – whom are we trying to attract, American football investors? I know our goalkeeper is American, but this is freaking ridiculous!
Stop giving excuses that we have a long injury list. The Arse had an injury list but still played Standard Liege off the park. Our fit players are good enough to at least give a decent accounting of themselves but the only accounting consists of spiritless displays, dropped points, and prematch hot air.
Our stadium is just as charming as a piss pot. Its architecture is depressing, and the view is terrible. It is an eyesore; the sight of it is liable to give the elderly cataracts.
Our luck is wretched beyond description. Against the Shite, for once we started playing like a team. We dominated them, we scared the bejesus out of these whoresons, but they came away with three points. If the Shite were bad, we were worse. It was not the Merseyside derby last night, but the Miseryside farce. They may have been out of the Champions League, but at the rate we are going, we will be out of the Premiership before long. Misery loves company, and in the end we will be left to walk alone.
In the best interest of human dignity they should build a railway track across Liverpool for disgruntled Everton fans to end their despondency. I rue the day I became a Blue. Fourteen years of heartache, not a trophy in sight, shite football season after season, and a board that is so bloody useless. In the words of the immortal Didier Drogba, 'It’s a fucking disgrace!'
Nil Satis Nisi Optimum? What delusional rubbish!
No player wants to sign for us. We have no money to spend anyway. We have to sell players before we can buy any. Over a century of history, and we are the undisputed paupers in the League. Maybe we should play a division lower. At least we get a real shot at winning something. Well, maybe not.
We are like the plague. Nobody with any money to invest would come near us. At least the Barcode Army had Mike 'Ratface' Ashley. We are nobody’s child, If Bill Kenwright and his board of functional retards have any self-respect, they should just sell the club to anyone with money. South American drug cartels, the Russian mafia, the Taliban, Singtel, I don’t give a damn. Just give us money. Money, money and more money.
Our chairman is skint, our board incompetent and from the business point of view, we could not sell an iced-tea in a desert. The club is so pathetic it is reduced to begging the Shite for ground-sharing. Would you share your wife with another man?
The city council are cretins, Shite supporters or both. They would never approve whatever building plans we come up with, even though it means losing the chance to create 1,000,0000,000 jobs. We could not get Stanley Park, Kirby is in tatters and before long they will throw us out of Goodison Park.
We could not hit a barn door from five yards and we never look like scoring in a whorehouse. Our most creative player is out for possibly the whole of this season, and our most solid centreback badly missed. Every cross into our penalty box is likely to result in a goal. For some reason our well-paid players either do not want to pass the ball, or cannot string together a few passes to save their own lives.
Our manager is too defensive at times, even against mediocre sides we want to defend, defend , defend and then hope to nick one from a mistake or set piece and then defend, defend, and defend until the end. Against passing sides we lose our balls in more ways than one. How many points have we taken off the ManUre, Chelski and the Arse in recent years? We are always moaning about how classy the rest are and that we are not ‘good enough’ or ‘lack cutting edge’. You do not hear Fulham moaning about how good Roma are. You certainly do not see SUNDERLAND going tortoise when they played the Shite, ManUre and the Arse!
It is long ball after long ball after long ball – whom are we trying to attract, American football investors? I know our goalkeeper is American, but this is freaking ridiculous!
Stop giving excuses that we have a long injury list. The Arse had an injury list but still played Standard Liege off the park. Our fit players are good enough to at least give a decent accounting of themselves but the only accounting consists of spiritless displays, dropped points, and prematch hot air.
Our stadium is just as charming as a piss pot. Its architecture is depressing, and the view is terrible. It is an eyesore; the sight of it is liable to give the elderly cataracts.
Our luck is wretched beyond description. Against the Shite, for once we started playing like a team. We dominated them, we scared the bejesus out of these whoresons, but they came away with three points. If the Shite were bad, we were worse. It was not the Merseyside derby last night, but the Miseryside farce. They may have been out of the Champions League, but at the rate we are going, we will be out of the Premiership before long. Misery loves company, and in the end we will be left to walk alone.
In the best interest of human dignity they should build a railway track across Liverpool for disgruntled Everton fans to end their despondency. I rue the day I became a Blue. Fourteen years of heartache, not a trophy in sight, shite football season after season, and a board that is so bloody useless. In the words of the immortal Didier Drogba, 'It’s a fucking disgrace!'
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Capitalism A Love Story
Capitalism A Love Story is an unrelenting attack on the monstrous institution that has brought the world to its knees for the benefit of a plutonomy. In his typical provocative fashion, director Michael Moore details the history of capitalism, exposes its flaws and examines the recent financial crisis.
The documentary film begins with an advisory that it may not be suitable for people with weak hearts and that children must be accompanied by adults. It is then followed by a comparison of the US and the mighty - and fallen – Roman Empire, setting the tone nicely for the next two hours.
Moore shows the footage of a family who could not pay their mortgage loan, barricading themselves in their own house while the authorities smash their door down to evict them. A real estate dealer describes how he makes profits off the people losing their homes and says smugly that the difference between him and a vulture is that ‘he does not vomit on himself.’
Having gotten Catholic priests to condemn the evils of capitalism, Moore produces what is for me, the most hilarious part in the film. In ‘What would Jesus do?’, a dying man is brought to Jesus, only to be told by the Messiah that ‘I cannot heal him’. As the crowd looks on in stunned disbelief, Jesus explains, ‘You have a preexisting condition.’ A sly dig at the insurance companies in the US, and brilliantly executed.
In ultra-entrepreneurial America, you can securitize anything, and this is aptly illustrated with something called the ‘Dead Peasants’ insurance. Companies are free to take insurance policies on their employees without their consent. In short, an employee is of more value to his company dead than alive. Only a heartless capitalist i.e., Wall Street banker, would not be moved as two bereaved families recount how they could not get their departed loved ones’ companies to pay even a single cent to cover the outstanding medical bills and funeral fees.
Moore’s next efforts to portray the evils of capitalism are as entertaining as they are outrageous. He goes to AIG and attempts to make a ‘citizen’s arrest’ of its executives. He cordons off the US Stock Exchange Building with tape because it is a ‘crime scene’. He asks people on Wall Street what a derivative is, but is largely ignored. At last he manages to find a finance manager and a professor at Harvard University to explain it to him, only to find that they are just as lost as everybody else.
'Come out and step to the side. There is nothing to worry about.Federal prison is a nice place...'
Former US President George W. Bush is not spared in Moore’s condemnation of the administration that has been colluding with Wall Street for the past 30 years. He speaks to two state representatives about the politics that have led to the recent US$700 billion taxpayers’ bailout of the failed financial sector. He takes aim at financial regulators, politicians and bankers who have benefited themselves via a tripartite arrangement of backroom politics, pseudo-regulations and lack of business ethics. There is an expose of Citibank’s memo to three of its wealthiest investors, conveying their fear that 99% of the country, who own less wealth than the top 1% can be a threat because they have 99% of the votes.
Besides lambasting the corrupt capitalist system, Moore also suggests solutions to the problem. There should be more workers cooperatives in America - people who manage a company should be its workers. Democracy should be in the hands of the people, and should not be a privilege granted to a select few. The scenes of an entire neighborhood acting in defiance to the law to help a family who has been driven from their home by their bank is inspiring. So is the sit-in in Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago, that has prompted even President Obama to give his support to the workers.
Academics, the politically-correct, pseudo-intellectuals, oligarchs, and their ilk will criticize Moore for being one-sided, childish and strident. But there is no denying that Michael Moore’s loud and emotive displays and his willingness to play to the choir strengthens his arguments rather than diminishes his credibility. Although Moore may be too idealistic in his support for President Obama and his belief that the democracy will replace capitalism, hope, and hope for change, are precisely what the world needs now.
Capitalism A Love Story is definitely worth spending your last $10 on. Don’t waste money on trash like My Girlfriend is an Agent, and 2012. Capitalism A Love Story is the real deal and if you have brains and self-respect you should watch it.
Ratings: 4.5 out of 5.
Friday, November 20, 2009
Last Day of the Season
I finished my last ordeal of the season an hour ago. I was quite relaxed during the paper. I wrote what I could, but even the amount of drivel I managed seemed a pittance. As far as I am concerned, Fixed Income Securities is over and done with, and may it stay that way.
XH commented on my Facebook that he is betting he will fail more subjects than me. My bro is surely clinically insane. He needs medical help immediately.
XH commented on my Facebook that he is betting he will fail more subjects than me. My bro is surely clinically insane. He needs medical help immediately.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
The Devil - Unjustly Maligned
This has got to be one of the best shit I have ever read!
The original article can be found on the Atheist Foundation of Australia Inc.
The Devil - Unjustly Maligned
Author: Harry Edwards
Reading the Bible it is difficult not to come to the conclusion that the Devil has been unjustly maligned.
From the beginning of time the Devil has been blamed for anything and everything from warts to volcanic eruptions, from haemorrhoids to earthquakes and crop failures to plagues.
* It's the Devil's fault.
* It's the work of the Devil.
* Blame it on the Devil.
* He's possessed by the Devil.
* The Devil is evil.
* To the Devil with you.
Anything beyond the knowledge of the day was blamed on evil spirits or on the Devil.
His name has been defiled. His character besmirched. His reputation sullied. All without being given the chance to defend himself against those who bore false witness. So it's about time that someone defends him in the name of justice and present such evidence as is required to clear his name. I believe that far from being evil the Devil was in fact of good character, and an angel of good intent with high ideals who was sacrificed in the interests of political expediency.
Now before we debate the truth of my contention we must accept as fact that the Devil actually exists. God fearing Christians who believe in the existence of a creator God, heaven and angels must, by believing in the existence of supernatural entities, by logical extension also believe that the Devil and hell exist. I will therefore proceed on that assumption.
The most authorative source of information on the Devil and his abode is of course that weapon of mass deception - the Bible, and this shall be my prime source. As the Devil's dwelling abode is not the subject of this article we'll simply say that hell is a very inhospitable place.
In the Old Testament our alleged villain was referred to as Satan. Because of the vilification campaign and scurrilous attacks on his character he was forced to change his name and in the New Testament is known as the Devil. He has also been obliged to adopt other aliases such as Beelzebub and Lucifer.
Even back then some sympathisers were aware of the injustices, hence when referring to someone today who has been poorly or badly treated we use the expression "the poor Devil"
Satan is the Hebrew word for "adversary." Being an adversary simply means having contrary interests or opposing views. It doesn't necessarily imply evil or malicious intent.
In clearing the Devil's name I intend showing that the Devil's adversary is a perverse God who plays mind games and shifts the blame for his own shortcomings on to a third party. God's attitude towards his adversaries is not exactly benevolent. In the first book of Samuel 2:10 we read, " the adversaries of the Lord shall be broken to pieces and out of heaven shall be thunder upon them."
The word 'Devil' has many connotations, among them, a wicked or sadistic person, an evil spirit, the prince of darkness and a malevolent person. But it must be understood that these are the definitions in Christian theology and therefore represent the fundamental beliefs of millions who have never bothered to rationalise or to seek the truth. So let's put together a composite of the Devil with quotations from the Bible to ascertain a more benign picture of the Devil's persona.
In the second book of Peter, Chap 2 verse 4 the Devil is described as "Supremely beautiful and dazzling in brightness." We also read in Peter "the Devil was God's super archangel and right hand man who was trained to administer God's government." Now although bureaucrats aren't normally held in very high esteem this one came highly recommended and was hand picked by God himself.
The Devil's principal charge was to 'impart knowledge and enlightenment' So what went wrong in the Garden of Eden?
Genesis chapter 3 verses 1 to 21.
Picture the scene. A balmy evening in the Garden of Eden. A happy carefree nudist couple are strolling hand in hand through their vegetarian ecosystem. No high rise developments, no motorcars spewing pollution, no speed cameras. The birds are singing, bullfrogs serenading among the lotus blossoms, the perfume of many flowers permeating the air, and trees of every description bend under the weight of fruit. Truly a romantic self-sustaining paradise on Earth.
God decrees that the couple may eat of every fruit bar one on the pain of death.
Suddenly from a marijuana patch, up pops Satan wearing a snazzy snakeskin suit. Now this in itself is no mean feat.
Satan approaches Eve saying, "Hey little sister, try a bite of this apple, it'll flip your lid and give you good vibes.
The Devil was in fact only trying to do his duty to impart knowledge and enlightenment, He tells Eve that she won't die if she takes a bite, so she goes ahead and then, Oh my God, shock, horror she sees herself naked.
Now remember that God created everything that creepeth on the earth and had it seems the ability to change his super archangel into a long extinct species of talking snake. By forbidding Eve to do one thing and then telling his a creation to tempt her - God was playing mind games. So why should the Devil get the blame?
A further example of mind games can be read in Genesis 22 where God tells Abraham to barbeque his son Isaac. What sort of sick mind are we dealing with? It certainly wasn't the Devil's.
That people are prepared to sacrifice themselves or others for a particular belief doesn't necessarily make that belief true, right or good. Kamikaze pilots died for their emperor god and suicide bombers today have no compunction in killing innocents in the name of Allah. The Nuremberg trials in 1945-46 found the Nazi leaders guilty of crimes against peace, waging wars of aggression and crimes against humanity. Similar atrocities are detailed throughout the Bible and are directly attributed to God.
Nowhere is the Devil objectively cited as the instigator or the perpetrator of malevolent deeds.
Meanwhile back in the garden in a fit of tantrums, God turns it into a thorn and weed covered wasteland, condemns all women to painful childbirth, and tosses Adam and Eve into the wilderness.
Rumour has it, that armed with the knowledge that it is better to conceal than reveal, Eve went to Surfers Paradise where she opened a boutique and sold bikinis.
Now the hypocrisy of this story is that God, having implied that covering one's nakedness was wrong, he then makes the couple coats of skin (verse 21).
The poor Devil, alias the snake, having been made the fall guy, was then cursed and condemned to eat dust for all of the days of his life.
In that episode it can be seen that the Devil is portrayed as the guilty party when in fact he was the innocent tool of a third party. Right from the beginning of creation therefore the Devil has been unjustly maligned. What's more, having blamed the Devil and cast him out without any right of appeal, God condemns himself out of his own mouth. In Isaiah 45:7 God says, "I make peace and create evil, I the Lord do all these things." In Nehemiah 13:18 we read confirmation of God creating evil where it says," did not our God bring all this evil upon us?"
In a fit of bad temper and self-recrimination for the mess he's made of creation God says in Genesis 6 verse 7, "I will destroy man whom I have created and will send wild beasts among you which shall destroy you and your cattle".
And we're told that the Devil is the bad guy?
So scared of the truth coming out God even threatens debaters. In the second book of Romans, chapter 1 verses 29-32 we read that according to God "debaters are worthy of death." So much for the seekers of truth.
Now there's one interesting aside to the Garden of Eden story, which goes to show that the Devil's intent to wise up Adam and Eve was of more value to human kind than God denying them knowledge.
In Numbers 21:8-9 we read, "The Lord said unto Moses, "Make thee a serpent of brass and set it upon a pole and it shall come to pass that any one that is bitten -- when he looketh upon it - shall live." I put it to you, if you were bitten by a poisonous snake would you put your faith in the Devil's knowledge of anti-venin or God's brass snake on a pole?
Now you may remember that the Devil was condemned to eat dust for the rest of his days. This would no doubt have clogged up his vocal chords and made speech extremely difficult. However like a character in a soapie who dies this week and comes back to life the next the Devil evidently gets his voice back. In Job chapters 1 and 2 we read.
"Job was man of substance. He owned 7000 sheep, 3 000 camels, 500 oxen and 500 asses. He also owned a very large house on a vast tract of land. He was perfect and upright and feared God." By all accounts. a great man in the East. Every feast day he would get together with his wife, seven sons and three daughters and offer burnt offerings to the Lord. One day God called in Satan and asked for his opinion of Job saying "there is none like him on Earth, he is perfect and upright and feared God, what do you think?"
Satan, evidently now with full voice, gave a truthful answer by pointing out that God had given Job everything and that Job had nothing to fear.
Then out of the blue, God burns all Job's sheep and servants, sends the Chaldeans to carry away Job's camels and creates a cyclone to blow down his house killing all his sons. Naturally Job was a little peeved; he tore his clothes, shaved his head and fell to the ground. Instead of cursing God for doing this to him he said, "The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord." Not satisfied, God then commands Satan to smite Job with boils from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head.
Now it can be seen that once again the Devil gets the blame for doing the dirty work and yet in fact he was only carrying out God's instructions.
Most of you would agree that germs, bacteria and viruses cause disease. God created them all along with everything else that creepeth on earth. According to the Bible however, the Devil is the one who caused illness, sickness, infirmity and malformation. Luke 13 v 11-16 for example refers to a woman "whom Satan hath bound." Throughout the New Testament the cause of many diseases is attributed to the Devil and the various forms of mental maladies were all spoken of as being possessed by the Devil.
In the case of the plague or Black Death which took the lives of millions world wide it would seem that God must have cloned many devils. We now know that rats and fleas both of which were created by God carried the plague. But once again the Devil and his mates got the blame and so were unjustly maligned.
By giving us the means to attain knowledge the Devil has allowed mankind to achieve the standard of life we now enjoy. God on the other hand has presided over the worst excesses. The wholesale slaughter of the Midianites. (Numbers 31) The massacre of the whole nation of Heshbon. (Deuteronomy 2) The total destruction of the seven nations of Canaan. (Deuteronomy 7) The massacre at Jericho. (Josh 6) The assassination of Sisera. (Judges 5) and the murder of 185,000 Assyrians (2nd book of Kings) The list is endless.
When the Crusaders plundered and pillaged the Middle East they did so in the name of God, not the Devil. The Inquisition tortured and murdered hundreds of thousands in God's name, not the Devil's. Before suicide bombers press the button to kill innocents they praise God. not the Devil. More crimes against humanity have been committed by God or in God's name than any other entity in history.
In summary, throughout history the Devil has been made the fall guy for God's indiscretions, mistakes, shortcomings and crimes. He has been slandered and his character sullied in the most defamatory and libellous ways. He has been denied the right of reply. The right to defend himself. The right to debate. The right to state his case. The right to a fair trial and the right to free speech. Even Saddam Hussein accused of crimes against humanity and with the blood of thousands on his hands has been given the right to a fair trial, Why not the Devil? After all, his only 'crimes' have been to offer mankind wisdom and knowledge.
I appeal to you as understanding, tolerant and forgiving beings and in that great Australian tradition of giving a bloke a fair go, to grant absolution to the Devil, one who has without a doubt, been unjustly maligned.
The original article can be found on the Atheist Foundation of Australia Inc.
The Devil - Unjustly Maligned
Author: Harry Edwards
Reading the Bible it is difficult not to come to the conclusion that the Devil has been unjustly maligned.
From the beginning of time the Devil has been blamed for anything and everything from warts to volcanic eruptions, from haemorrhoids to earthquakes and crop failures to plagues.
* It's the Devil's fault.
* It's the work of the Devil.
* Blame it on the Devil.
* He's possessed by the Devil.
* The Devil is evil.
* To the Devil with you.
Anything beyond the knowledge of the day was blamed on evil spirits or on the Devil.
His name has been defiled. His character besmirched. His reputation sullied. All without being given the chance to defend himself against those who bore false witness. So it's about time that someone defends him in the name of justice and present such evidence as is required to clear his name. I believe that far from being evil the Devil was in fact of good character, and an angel of good intent with high ideals who was sacrificed in the interests of political expediency.
Now before we debate the truth of my contention we must accept as fact that the Devil actually exists. God fearing Christians who believe in the existence of a creator God, heaven and angels must, by believing in the existence of supernatural entities, by logical extension also believe that the Devil and hell exist. I will therefore proceed on that assumption.
The most authorative source of information on the Devil and his abode is of course that weapon of mass deception - the Bible, and this shall be my prime source. As the Devil's dwelling abode is not the subject of this article we'll simply say that hell is a very inhospitable place.
In the Old Testament our alleged villain was referred to as Satan. Because of the vilification campaign and scurrilous attacks on his character he was forced to change his name and in the New Testament is known as the Devil. He has also been obliged to adopt other aliases such as Beelzebub and Lucifer.
Even back then some sympathisers were aware of the injustices, hence when referring to someone today who has been poorly or badly treated we use the expression "the poor Devil"
Satan is the Hebrew word for "adversary." Being an adversary simply means having contrary interests or opposing views. It doesn't necessarily imply evil or malicious intent.
In clearing the Devil's name I intend showing that the Devil's adversary is a perverse God who plays mind games and shifts the blame for his own shortcomings on to a third party. God's attitude towards his adversaries is not exactly benevolent. In the first book of Samuel 2:10 we read, " the adversaries of the Lord shall be broken to pieces and out of heaven shall be thunder upon them."
The word 'Devil' has many connotations, among them, a wicked or sadistic person, an evil spirit, the prince of darkness and a malevolent person. But it must be understood that these are the definitions in Christian theology and therefore represent the fundamental beliefs of millions who have never bothered to rationalise or to seek the truth. So let's put together a composite of the Devil with quotations from the Bible to ascertain a more benign picture of the Devil's persona.
In the second book of Peter, Chap 2 verse 4 the Devil is described as "Supremely beautiful and dazzling in brightness." We also read in Peter "the Devil was God's super archangel and right hand man who was trained to administer God's government." Now although bureaucrats aren't normally held in very high esteem this one came highly recommended and was hand picked by God himself.
The Devil's principal charge was to 'impart knowledge and enlightenment' So what went wrong in the Garden of Eden?
Genesis chapter 3 verses 1 to 21.
Picture the scene. A balmy evening in the Garden of Eden. A happy carefree nudist couple are strolling hand in hand through their vegetarian ecosystem. No high rise developments, no motorcars spewing pollution, no speed cameras. The birds are singing, bullfrogs serenading among the lotus blossoms, the perfume of many flowers permeating the air, and trees of every description bend under the weight of fruit. Truly a romantic self-sustaining paradise on Earth.
God decrees that the couple may eat of every fruit bar one on the pain of death.
Suddenly from a marijuana patch, up pops Satan wearing a snazzy snakeskin suit. Now this in itself is no mean feat.
Satan approaches Eve saying, "Hey little sister, try a bite of this apple, it'll flip your lid and give you good vibes.
The Devil was in fact only trying to do his duty to impart knowledge and enlightenment, He tells Eve that she won't die if she takes a bite, so she goes ahead and then, Oh my God, shock, horror she sees herself naked.
Now remember that God created everything that creepeth on the earth and had it seems the ability to change his super archangel into a long extinct species of talking snake. By forbidding Eve to do one thing and then telling his a creation to tempt her - God was playing mind games. So why should the Devil get the blame?
A further example of mind games can be read in Genesis 22 where God tells Abraham to barbeque his son Isaac. What sort of sick mind are we dealing with? It certainly wasn't the Devil's.
That people are prepared to sacrifice themselves or others for a particular belief doesn't necessarily make that belief true, right or good. Kamikaze pilots died for their emperor god and suicide bombers today have no compunction in killing innocents in the name of Allah. The Nuremberg trials in 1945-46 found the Nazi leaders guilty of crimes against peace, waging wars of aggression and crimes against humanity. Similar atrocities are detailed throughout the Bible and are directly attributed to God.
Nowhere is the Devil objectively cited as the instigator or the perpetrator of malevolent deeds.
Meanwhile back in the garden in a fit of tantrums, God turns it into a thorn and weed covered wasteland, condemns all women to painful childbirth, and tosses Adam and Eve into the wilderness.
Rumour has it, that armed with the knowledge that it is better to conceal than reveal, Eve went to Surfers Paradise where she opened a boutique and sold bikinis.
Now the hypocrisy of this story is that God, having implied that covering one's nakedness was wrong, he then makes the couple coats of skin (verse 21).
The poor Devil, alias the snake, having been made the fall guy, was then cursed and condemned to eat dust for all of the days of his life.
In that episode it can be seen that the Devil is portrayed as the guilty party when in fact he was the innocent tool of a third party. Right from the beginning of creation therefore the Devil has been unjustly maligned. What's more, having blamed the Devil and cast him out without any right of appeal, God condemns himself out of his own mouth. In Isaiah 45:7 God says, "I make peace and create evil, I the Lord do all these things." In Nehemiah 13:18 we read confirmation of God creating evil where it says," did not our God bring all this evil upon us?"
In a fit of bad temper and self-recrimination for the mess he's made of creation God says in Genesis 6 verse 7, "I will destroy man whom I have created and will send wild beasts among you which shall destroy you and your cattle".
And we're told that the Devil is the bad guy?
So scared of the truth coming out God even threatens debaters. In the second book of Romans, chapter 1 verses 29-32 we read that according to God "debaters are worthy of death." So much for the seekers of truth.
Now there's one interesting aside to the Garden of Eden story, which goes to show that the Devil's intent to wise up Adam and Eve was of more value to human kind than God denying them knowledge.
In Numbers 21:8-9 we read, "The Lord said unto Moses, "Make thee a serpent of brass and set it upon a pole and it shall come to pass that any one that is bitten -- when he looketh upon it - shall live." I put it to you, if you were bitten by a poisonous snake would you put your faith in the Devil's knowledge of anti-venin or God's brass snake on a pole?
Now you may remember that the Devil was condemned to eat dust for the rest of his days. This would no doubt have clogged up his vocal chords and made speech extremely difficult. However like a character in a soapie who dies this week and comes back to life the next the Devil evidently gets his voice back. In Job chapters 1 and 2 we read.
"Job was man of substance. He owned 7000 sheep, 3 000 camels, 500 oxen and 500 asses. He also owned a very large house on a vast tract of land. He was perfect and upright and feared God." By all accounts. a great man in the East. Every feast day he would get together with his wife, seven sons and three daughters and offer burnt offerings to the Lord. One day God called in Satan and asked for his opinion of Job saying "there is none like him on Earth, he is perfect and upright and feared God, what do you think?"
Satan, evidently now with full voice, gave a truthful answer by pointing out that God had given Job everything and that Job had nothing to fear.
Then out of the blue, God burns all Job's sheep and servants, sends the Chaldeans to carry away Job's camels and creates a cyclone to blow down his house killing all his sons. Naturally Job was a little peeved; he tore his clothes, shaved his head and fell to the ground. Instead of cursing God for doing this to him he said, "The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord." Not satisfied, God then commands Satan to smite Job with boils from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head.
Now it can be seen that once again the Devil gets the blame for doing the dirty work and yet in fact he was only carrying out God's instructions.
Most of you would agree that germs, bacteria and viruses cause disease. God created them all along with everything else that creepeth on earth. According to the Bible however, the Devil is the one who caused illness, sickness, infirmity and malformation. Luke 13 v 11-16 for example refers to a woman "whom Satan hath bound." Throughout the New Testament the cause of many diseases is attributed to the Devil and the various forms of mental maladies were all spoken of as being possessed by the Devil.
In the case of the plague or Black Death which took the lives of millions world wide it would seem that God must have cloned many devils. We now know that rats and fleas both of which were created by God carried the plague. But once again the Devil and his mates got the blame and so were unjustly maligned.
By giving us the means to attain knowledge the Devil has allowed mankind to achieve the standard of life we now enjoy. God on the other hand has presided over the worst excesses. The wholesale slaughter of the Midianites. (Numbers 31) The massacre of the whole nation of Heshbon. (Deuteronomy 2) The total destruction of the seven nations of Canaan. (Deuteronomy 7) The massacre at Jericho. (Josh 6) The assassination of Sisera. (Judges 5) and the murder of 185,000 Assyrians (2nd book of Kings) The list is endless.
When the Crusaders plundered and pillaged the Middle East they did so in the name of God, not the Devil. The Inquisition tortured and murdered hundreds of thousands in God's name, not the Devil's. Before suicide bombers press the button to kill innocents they praise God. not the Devil. More crimes against humanity have been committed by God or in God's name than any other entity in history.
In summary, throughout history the Devil has been made the fall guy for God's indiscretions, mistakes, shortcomings and crimes. He has been slandered and his character sullied in the most defamatory and libellous ways. He has been denied the right of reply. The right to defend himself. The right to debate. The right to state his case. The right to a fair trial and the right to free speech. Even Saddam Hussein accused of crimes against humanity and with the blood of thousands on his hands has been given the right to a fair trial, Why not the Devil? After all, his only 'crimes' have been to offer mankind wisdom and knowledge.
I appeal to you as understanding, tolerant and forgiving beings and in that great Australian tradition of giving a bloke a fair go, to grant absolution to the Devil, one who has without a doubt, been unjustly maligned.
One More.
I finished my Political Economy of ASEAN paper a while ago. I wrote all I could. The two hours did not allow me to express myself to the fullest extent, but my aim was to secure a positive and not necessarily spectacular result.
Three down, one to go. I am on my last legs. I can go on no more.
Three down, one to go. I am on my last legs. I can go on no more.
Friday, November 13, 2009
Singing the Relegation Blues
It is Friday the 13th and I am singing the relegation blues.
I followed up the debacle of two days ago with yet another dismal display. Although it was an open-book examination, I was not afforded the time to finish all my questions. I had a twenty mark question consigned to Gehenna, just over half of the first question done, and produced a truckload of rubbish for the remaining theory questions (worth 30 marks).
From the reaction of the mob around me, I knew that this time the Curve is not going to be good enough to pull me from relegation. When you lose games and your fellow battlers win theirs, it does not argur very well for your prospects of staying up.
It could have been worse, but I had the consolation to indulge in a bit of voyeurism before kick-off. Her face was okay, but her boobs were...stimulating. Even with my blurry vision and from ten metres, I enjoyed the sight of her rack walking around, putting things into her back and making her way back to her seat. My ogling calmed me down somewhat, although it may not matter towards the end, at least it was not a complete loss. 99% yes, but not 100%. It is a pity I am unable to shag her. Oh well. Life is a twat and then you die.
Having finished two of my most hated modules ever (besides my engineering subjects in poly of course), I can now prepare myself for the remaining two in a comparatively stable state of mind. I had been a bit tempted to emulate the unfortunate exploits of the equally unfortunate - and missed - Robert Enke, but the thought of my carcass being photographed by those motherfuckers we call our journalists brought me back to my senses, or at least what was left of it.
My Political Economy of ASEAN is a mixed bag really. While its course notes are little more than thinly veiled propaganda for our despicable and high-handed regime,the course itself is still more bearable than that thrice-damned HRM module, which I had the misfortunate of taking. Unlike my instructors for HRM, my Political Economy lecturer - as far as I know, since I only attended two lecturers out of six - chose to concentrate on political and economic principles, rather than pander to the regime. I respect him for this, and not simply because he gave me FULL MARKS for my essay. To be frank, it didn't deserve that kind of marks, considering it was hastily churned out, had many grammar mistakes and more than a few broken references. At the most I would have given it a 70. But the season is hard and when you have got the rub of the green you got to take it and be thankful.
But I am digressing. This module is particularly fascinating because I am in the unique position of either failing it flat, or getting a distinction for it. What will it be? Seriously, from the egoistic point of view it would be nice to have a distinction, but the way this season has gone I would gladly settle for 40 marks for my examination. Being relegated is tragic enough. To be relegated and losing ALL your games as well is surely of West-Brom-esque proportions.
Fixed Income Securities seems more theory than calculation, which suits me fine. Still, this kind of obfuscating subject is nothing to be sniffed at. Since the world of stock, bonds and their valuation remain largely incomprehensible to me, the best I could do is to write as much drivel as possible. Shoot on sight, hit 20, 30 shots, surely a couple will go in... Desperate yes, but when you are pretty much like Bolton, physical but little skill, you got to get in their faces and try sneak something from anywhere.
I followed up the debacle of two days ago with yet another dismal display. Although it was an open-book examination, I was not afforded the time to finish all my questions. I had a twenty mark question consigned to Gehenna, just over half of the first question done, and produced a truckload of rubbish for the remaining theory questions (worth 30 marks).
From the reaction of the mob around me, I knew that this time the Curve is not going to be good enough to pull me from relegation. When you lose games and your fellow battlers win theirs, it does not argur very well for your prospects of staying up.
It could have been worse, but I had the consolation to indulge in a bit of voyeurism before kick-off. Her face was okay, but her boobs were...stimulating. Even with my blurry vision and from ten metres, I enjoyed the sight of her rack walking around, putting things into her back and making her way back to her seat. My ogling calmed me down somewhat, although it may not matter towards the end, at least it was not a complete loss. 99% yes, but not 100%. It is a pity I am unable to shag her. Oh well. Life is a twat and then you die.
Having finished two of my most hated modules ever (besides my engineering subjects in poly of course), I can now prepare myself for the remaining two in a comparatively stable state of mind. I had been a bit tempted to emulate the unfortunate exploits of the equally unfortunate - and missed - Robert Enke, but the thought of my carcass being photographed by those motherfuckers we call our journalists brought me back to my senses, or at least what was left of it.
My Political Economy of ASEAN is a mixed bag really. While its course notes are little more than thinly veiled propaganda for our despicable and high-handed regime,the course itself is still more bearable than that thrice-damned HRM module, which I had the misfortunate of taking. Unlike my instructors for HRM, my Political Economy lecturer - as far as I know, since I only attended two lecturers out of six - chose to concentrate on political and economic principles, rather than pander to the regime. I respect him for this, and not simply because he gave me FULL MARKS for my essay. To be frank, it didn't deserve that kind of marks, considering it was hastily churned out, had many grammar mistakes and more than a few broken references. At the most I would have given it a 70. But the season is hard and when you have got the rub of the green you got to take it and be thankful.
But I am digressing. This module is particularly fascinating because I am in the unique position of either failing it flat, or getting a distinction for it. What will it be? Seriously, from the egoistic point of view it would be nice to have a distinction, but the way this season has gone I would gladly settle for 40 marks for my examination. Being relegated is tragic enough. To be relegated and losing ALL your games as well is surely of West-Brom-esque proportions.
Fixed Income Securities seems more theory than calculation, which suits me fine. Still, this kind of obfuscating subject is nothing to be sniffed at. Since the world of stock, bonds and their valuation remain largely incomprehensible to me, the best I could do is to write as much drivel as possible. Shoot on sight, hit 20, 30 shots, surely a couple will go in... Desperate yes, but when you are pretty much like Bolton, physical but little skill, you got to get in their faces and try sneak something from anywhere.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Slave Management is Slave Propaganda
I just finished my Human Resources Management (more appropriately known as Slave Management) examination. I am still recovering from my trauma.
Getting pasted in an examination is one thing, but being robbed is quite another. I thought my Business Law II examination was bad, but at least from a charitable point of view what happened could be attributed to administrative incompetence. The HRM examination was not just robbery. It was overt political indoctrination, entirely off-topic and therefore a fucking disgrace.
For starters, much of the material found in the textbook was not really tested. No job-design, recruitment, retention and human development strategies. There were ten chapters, but half of the questions in the examination focused on merely the one chapter on diversity. I was particularly gutted with this unbalanced approach, considering that I practically spent my efforts studying for ALL TEN CHAPTERS.
One may argue that as undergraduates we cannot expect straight questions in examinations. I do not disagree with that. In fact, I support this notion. While I have no complaints about having questions that are application-based (fitting concepts to a case scenerio), the fact that some questions negate this principle gets my goat. How many concepts, from how many areas in the field of HRM can you possibly dump onto questions that are based on just ONE chapter, especially when the line of questioning was so narrow? Of course, it would still have been possible to apply different concepts to even the narrowest question. I am not saying it is cannot be done. A good writer could do it. But when the examination was only two hours long, you didn't even have time to read and analyze the questions, let alone write enough material, and in a coherent fashion. No disrespect to my esteemed lecturers and professors. If they were in my shoes they would struggle too. After all, I am a BETTER writer than they are, judging from the course notes they wrote (I am arrogant, so bite me). Questions should focus on different areas, and not just on one chapter and then expect people to APPLY concepts from other chapters. Since they insisted on it, they should have given us three hours instead. Examinations should test a student's knowledge, not their writing speed.
As far as I am concerned, a university education should provide three things: a degree that leads to increased future earnings, knowledge pertaining to your chosen field, and a development of independent thinking. If my university were a student, it would have received a provisional pass for the first (a UniShit degree is only recognized locally), a B for the second, and a straight F for the third.
I know that our regime has been going ad nauseam about how good foreign talent are (in their eyes, every foreigner is a talent; notice they never refer to the locals as 'local talent'), but do they have to do that in school as well? Surely our *excellent* local state-controlled media is doing a fine enough job of indoctrinating 'approved' values to the populace! We do not really need any more of this. I AM NOT being xenophobic. I agree we need foreigners, but let us be balanced about it. We should focus on quality, not quantity, and we certainly do not have to convey this most pressing of needs like a broken record.
I know the regime supports my university financially, and this means that technically UniShit cannot be strictly considered as a private university. While it is understandable they would want to respect their sugar daddy by including the regime in their case study notes, to over-do it and become fawning sycophants goes beyond any standards of decency.
Every time I attend my fucking HRM classes, it was like attending the bloody National Day rally. It's 'we have a great regime', 'we have a great cuntry', 'we need to work ourselves to the ground and take lesser pay to maintain our competitive advantage', 'we need more foreigners because we don't have enough talented local people', blab blab bra abracadabra. ENOUGH ALREADY!
True, globalization and managing diversity are key concerns in the human resources field. I am not denying their importance, but surely they should not take precedence over the other areas I mentioned previously. Is it not true that irrespective of the composition of your workforce, there are certain principles, such as job design and satisfaction, job and business process design, recruitment and retention etc, that will always apply? If we do not even consider these to merit sufficient discussion, then who are we to talk about manageing a diverse workforce and 'coping with the challenges of globalization?' Want to look far, get your own backyard in order first, mate.
I would rather my lecturers concentrate more on HRM from a globalized perspective, rather than look it from merely a local and narrow-minded point of view. If they like to talk about globalization and its challenges so much, they should also talk about what goes on in other countries. Why not have some consistency? I had said it and I will say it again. Contrary to what our regime would have us believe, our nation IS NOT the centre of the universe. The world does not revolve on its axis for our benefit. There are lots of things beyond our tiny and unimpressive shores, and we should be aware of these instead of sucking on our kiddie blankets and repeating the mantra 'we are the best we are the best we are the best' like some religious retard from the Pure Land sect.
And the textbook - let me go off-topic for a while more because I need to rant - is another fucking disgrace. Not only does it exhorts the virtues of our national system like a Social Studies textbook, the sheer number of grammatical errors it contains is absolutely shocking! I have never read pedantic trash like this! For all their doctorates, the writers had absolutely no sense of editorial integrity, and not only that, they were too cheapskate to pay for an editor. (It could have been due to the unsavory circumstances of their births i.e., their fathers were too cheapskate to pay for a whore and their mothers were free of charge, who knows?)
I want to say for the record that I regret signing up for this wretched course in this wretched univesity. If I had money I would quit straight away. I am disgraced by my affiliation with this flophouse and this affiliation feels like an affliction. It is like a cancer, a malignant growth, and it will get worse the longer I stay. To all the Hells with this craphouse!
Getting pasted in an examination is one thing, but being robbed is quite another. I thought my Business Law II examination was bad, but at least from a charitable point of view what happened could be attributed to administrative incompetence. The HRM examination was not just robbery. It was overt political indoctrination, entirely off-topic and therefore a fucking disgrace.
For starters, much of the material found in the textbook was not really tested. No job-design, recruitment, retention and human development strategies. There were ten chapters, but half of the questions in the examination focused on merely the one chapter on diversity. I was particularly gutted with this unbalanced approach, considering that I practically spent my efforts studying for ALL TEN CHAPTERS.
One may argue that as undergraduates we cannot expect straight questions in examinations. I do not disagree with that. In fact, I support this notion. While I have no complaints about having questions that are application-based (fitting concepts to a case scenerio), the fact that some questions negate this principle gets my goat. How many concepts, from how many areas in the field of HRM can you possibly dump onto questions that are based on just ONE chapter, especially when the line of questioning was so narrow? Of course, it would still have been possible to apply different concepts to even the narrowest question. I am not saying it is cannot be done. A good writer could do it. But when the examination was only two hours long, you didn't even have time to read and analyze the questions, let alone write enough material, and in a coherent fashion. No disrespect to my esteemed lecturers and professors. If they were in my shoes they would struggle too. After all, I am a BETTER writer than they are, judging from the course notes they wrote (I am arrogant, so bite me). Questions should focus on different areas, and not just on one chapter and then expect people to APPLY concepts from other chapters. Since they insisted on it, they should have given us three hours instead. Examinations should test a student's knowledge, not their writing speed.
As far as I am concerned, a university education should provide three things: a degree that leads to increased future earnings, knowledge pertaining to your chosen field, and a development of independent thinking. If my university were a student, it would have received a provisional pass for the first (a UniShit degree is only recognized locally), a B for the second, and a straight F for the third.
I know that our regime has been going ad nauseam about how good foreign talent are (in their eyes, every foreigner is a talent; notice they never refer to the locals as 'local talent'), but do they have to do that in school as well? Surely our *excellent* local state-controlled media is doing a fine enough job of indoctrinating 'approved' values to the populace! We do not really need any more of this. I AM NOT being xenophobic. I agree we need foreigners, but let us be balanced about it. We should focus on quality, not quantity, and we certainly do not have to convey this most pressing of needs like a broken record.
I know the regime supports my university financially, and this means that technically UniShit cannot be strictly considered as a private university. While it is understandable they would want to respect their sugar daddy by including the regime in their case study notes, to over-do it and become fawning sycophants goes beyond any standards of decency.
Every time I attend my fucking HRM classes, it was like attending the bloody National Day rally. It's 'we have a great regime', 'we have a great cuntry', 'we need to work ourselves to the ground and take lesser pay to maintain our competitive advantage', 'we need more foreigners because we don't have enough talented local people', blab blab bra abracadabra. ENOUGH ALREADY!
True, globalization and managing diversity are key concerns in the human resources field. I am not denying their importance, but surely they should not take precedence over the other areas I mentioned previously. Is it not true that irrespective of the composition of your workforce, there are certain principles, such as job design and satisfaction, job and business process design, recruitment and retention etc, that will always apply? If we do not even consider these to merit sufficient discussion, then who are we to talk about manageing a diverse workforce and 'coping with the challenges of globalization?' Want to look far, get your own backyard in order first, mate.
I would rather my lecturers concentrate more on HRM from a globalized perspective, rather than look it from merely a local and narrow-minded point of view. If they like to talk about globalization and its challenges so much, they should also talk about what goes on in other countries. Why not have some consistency? I had said it and I will say it again. Contrary to what our regime would have us believe, our nation IS NOT the centre of the universe. The world does not revolve on its axis for our benefit. There are lots of things beyond our tiny and unimpressive shores, and we should be aware of these instead of sucking on our kiddie blankets and repeating the mantra 'we are the best we are the best we are the best' like some religious retard from the Pure Land sect.
And the textbook - let me go off-topic for a while more because I need to rant - is another fucking disgrace. Not only does it exhorts the virtues of our national system like a Social Studies textbook, the sheer number of grammatical errors it contains is absolutely shocking! I have never read pedantic trash like this! For all their doctorates, the writers had absolutely no sense of editorial integrity, and not only that, they were too cheapskate to pay for an editor. (It could have been due to the unsavory circumstances of their births i.e., their fathers were too cheapskate to pay for a whore and their mothers were free of charge, who knows?)
I want to say for the record that I regret signing up for this wretched course in this wretched univesity. If I had money I would quit straight away. I am disgraced by my affiliation with this flophouse and this affiliation feels like an affliction. It is like a cancer, a malignant growth, and it will get worse the longer I stay. To all the Hells with this craphouse!
Friday, November 6, 2009
Dear Miss Emo II
If you are underage, politically correct, prone to nausea, or just plain stupid, please leave this page immediately. The Philistine takes no responsibility for the trauma you may suffer as a result of reading the entry below. If you are unsure, do not proceed further. You may close this browser, click on the Back icon, or click here, here or here.
Dear Miss Emo II,
Although my reasons for writing this letter are not of your concern, for the sake of charity I shall now deign to divulge them. First, I have heard so much about you that I feel that you deserve to be lambasted within an inch of your miserable existence. Second, I have been under a lot of stress and I feel that I ought to channel my frustration in the right way. While beating up some deserved whoreson provides a certain satisfaction, it also runs the risk of incurring a crippling fine and/or a lengthy incarceration. By abusing you, I am able to kill two birds with one stone.
The fact that you may never get to read this letter deters me not. What is more important to me is that after reading it, people who are suffering from their unfortunate association with idiotic parasites like you would be sufficiently inspired to abuse your ilk. Anyway, you are probably too stupid to understand my letter. If you happen to read this, do get someone to explain it to you, preferably using simple words.
You, Miss Emo, are the most wretched specimen your equally wretched country has ever produced. Your intelligence is as flat as your chest. Do not bother to wear a bra. There is nothing to support or cover. Your face is as plastic as you are spastic. The number of times it cracks daily is probably the same as your single digit IQ score. If you were in Nazi Germany, you would have been exterminated on the grounds of being morally, physically and mentally unfit, and the Nazis would have been – solely in your case – perfectly justified in doing so.
The reason why you still breathe is because it is illegal to kill you. The reason you even exist at all is because your father was so pathetic he was turned away by the cheapest whore, and your mother was so grotesque she could not get any other man to invade her cunt. Their untimely and shameful union was a pestilence upon the earth and a desecration of all moral values, and the end product of their many vulgar intercourses none better and a thousandfold worse.
Your parents should have drowned you the moment you were spawned. Your brood mates should have devoured you and have themselves killed to end this wretched lineage. Your parents should be sterilized, your mother made to work in a cheap whorehouse and your father deported to Afghanistan as cannon fodder in the War against Terror.
You are an utter disgrace to all Communications students. You know nothing about the world beyond your 10 inch thick push-up bras and your irregular and messy periods. You are so retarded that you could have beaten Ris Low, Dawn Yang, Xiaxue and Jamie Yeo on the stupidity scale. What possessed you to think that Mexicans speak Mexican? Perhaps you thought that ‘Singaporeans speak Singaporean’? The fact that you have managed to survive in your university course for so long is a vicious and damning indictment of our education system. One cannot imagine the horrendous amounts of taxpayers’ money squandered in funding the university education of functional retards like you. How many times have you spread your legs for your lecturers, how many times have you given them head, so that you could stay and stink up your faculty with your malodorous presence?
The male reptilians that surround and look upon you with adoration are sorry bastards and degenerates of the worst kind. DO NOT, even for a moment, feel flattered. They swarm you because they want a free fuck, and like your father before them, they are too cheapskate to pay for a cheap whore. Either that or they are myopic, pity you or have unresolved emotional issues that drive them to destroy themselves.
It was a pity that your dim-witted mother refused to allow you to attend your school's Halloween party. If you had gone, you would have won Best Costume, even without any makeup. It was incredible that you did not think of lying to your mother, since she was thousands of miles away and would not have known if you had opened your legs to your lousy boyfriend and/or the entire faculty including the teaching staff. Then again, knowing that you are mentally deficient, perhaps that should not have come as a surprise.
If you could not even hold onto your boyfriend’s micro-penis with both hands and your mouth, what made you think you could carry your friend’s camera and not let it shatter on the floor? You should compensate her for damages and refrain from touching any of her things. You are a hazard and a walking time bomb. You cannot even walk farther than a tortoise without wailing like you are being raped by ogres.
STOP torturing my friend. For once in her life she has a chance to get away from her intellectually bereft country. Please do not spoil it for her. Consider it an honour that she is your roommate. You should kiss the ground on which she walks. She is too good for you. Please do not touch her things, and keep away from her bed. She has enough difficulties breathing as it is, what with the poison you exhale. She does not need to be flea-infested as well.
Please do not procreate. Your very presence is already a blight upon the land, and that festering creature you call a boyfriend is not just an eyesore, but a disgrace to the male species. I do not, for a moment, believe that you are a virgin. You are a harlot, a whore, a strumpet, a slut, a brazen hussy and a trollop. Your idea of womanly virtue is to open that yawing and flea-bitten maw of a cunt to all those desperate enough to risk disease for the price of an orgasm. Just like your mother, you would have allowed the dead to hump you, had they been sufficiently ambulatory to bury themselves in your wet, eager and reeking crevice.
I beseech you. I implore you. I come to you with the most desperate of entreaties. KILL YOURSELF. Are you so wretched you do not even have a shred of decency left in what passes for your heart? Have your conscience been devoured by dogs? Then why do you not end it? End it now. Make it stop. Make the pain go away. I beg you. KILL YOURSELF.
Regards,
The Philistine.
Dear Miss Emo II,
Although my reasons for writing this letter are not of your concern, for the sake of charity I shall now deign to divulge them. First, I have heard so much about you that I feel that you deserve to be lambasted within an inch of your miserable existence. Second, I have been under a lot of stress and I feel that I ought to channel my frustration in the right way. While beating up some deserved whoreson provides a certain satisfaction, it also runs the risk of incurring a crippling fine and/or a lengthy incarceration. By abusing you, I am able to kill two birds with one stone.
The fact that you may never get to read this letter deters me not. What is more important to me is that after reading it, people who are suffering from their unfortunate association with idiotic parasites like you would be sufficiently inspired to abuse your ilk. Anyway, you are probably too stupid to understand my letter. If you happen to read this, do get someone to explain it to you, preferably using simple words.
You, Miss Emo, are the most wretched specimen your equally wretched country has ever produced. Your intelligence is as flat as your chest. Do not bother to wear a bra. There is nothing to support or cover. Your face is as plastic as you are spastic. The number of times it cracks daily is probably the same as your single digit IQ score. If you were in Nazi Germany, you would have been exterminated on the grounds of being morally, physically and mentally unfit, and the Nazis would have been – solely in your case – perfectly justified in doing so.
The reason why you still breathe is because it is illegal to kill you. The reason you even exist at all is because your father was so pathetic he was turned away by the cheapest whore, and your mother was so grotesque she could not get any other man to invade her cunt. Their untimely and shameful union was a pestilence upon the earth and a desecration of all moral values, and the end product of their many vulgar intercourses none better and a thousandfold worse.
Your parents should have drowned you the moment you were spawned. Your brood mates should have devoured you and have themselves killed to end this wretched lineage. Your parents should be sterilized, your mother made to work in a cheap whorehouse and your father deported to Afghanistan as cannon fodder in the War against Terror.
You are an utter disgrace to all Communications students. You know nothing about the world beyond your 10 inch thick push-up bras and your irregular and messy periods. You are so retarded that you could have beaten Ris Low, Dawn Yang, Xiaxue and Jamie Yeo on the stupidity scale. What possessed you to think that Mexicans speak Mexican? Perhaps you thought that ‘Singaporeans speak Singaporean’? The fact that you have managed to survive in your university course for so long is a vicious and damning indictment of our education system. One cannot imagine the horrendous amounts of taxpayers’ money squandered in funding the university education of functional retards like you. How many times have you spread your legs for your lecturers, how many times have you given them head, so that you could stay and stink up your faculty with your malodorous presence?
The male reptilians that surround and look upon you with adoration are sorry bastards and degenerates of the worst kind. DO NOT, even for a moment, feel flattered. They swarm you because they want a free fuck, and like your father before them, they are too cheapskate to pay for a cheap whore. Either that or they are myopic, pity you or have unresolved emotional issues that drive them to destroy themselves.
It was a pity that your dim-witted mother refused to allow you to attend your school's Halloween party. If you had gone, you would have won Best Costume, even without any makeup. It was incredible that you did not think of lying to your mother, since she was thousands of miles away and would not have known if you had opened your legs to your lousy boyfriend and/or the entire faculty including the teaching staff. Then again, knowing that you are mentally deficient, perhaps that should not have come as a surprise.
If you could not even hold onto your boyfriend’s micro-penis with both hands and your mouth, what made you think you could carry your friend’s camera and not let it shatter on the floor? You should compensate her for damages and refrain from touching any of her things. You are a hazard and a walking time bomb. You cannot even walk farther than a tortoise without wailing like you are being raped by ogres.
STOP torturing my friend. For once in her life she has a chance to get away from her intellectually bereft country. Please do not spoil it for her. Consider it an honour that she is your roommate. You should kiss the ground on which she walks. She is too good for you. Please do not touch her things, and keep away from her bed. She has enough difficulties breathing as it is, what with the poison you exhale. She does not need to be flea-infested as well.
Please do not procreate. Your very presence is already a blight upon the land, and that festering creature you call a boyfriend is not just an eyesore, but a disgrace to the male species. I do not, for a moment, believe that you are a virgin. You are a harlot, a whore, a strumpet, a slut, a brazen hussy and a trollop. Your idea of womanly virtue is to open that yawing and flea-bitten maw of a cunt to all those desperate enough to risk disease for the price of an orgasm. Just like your mother, you would have allowed the dead to hump you, had they been sufficiently ambulatory to bury themselves in your wet, eager and reeking crevice.
I beseech you. I implore you. I come to you with the most desperate of entreaties. KILL YOURSELF. Are you so wretched you do not even have a shred of decency left in what passes for your heart? Have your conscience been devoured by dogs? Then why do you not end it? End it now. Make it stop. Make the pain go away. I beg you. KILL YOURSELF.
Regards,
The Philistine.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
To the Hells with Michael Ruse!
Some philosophers and atheists ought to be drawn and quartered. One example is the idiot who gave us the following article.
The original bullshit can be found on The Guardian.
Dawkins et al bring us into disrepute
There's a schism alright, and I seem to find myself on the unfashionable side of it
o Michael Ruse
o guardian.co.uk, Monday 2 November 2009 12.00 GMT
o Article history
The question: Is there an atheist schism?
As a professional philosopher my first question naturally is: "What or who is an atheist?" If you mean someone who absolutely and utterly does not believe there is any God or meaning then I doubt there are many in this group. Richard Dawkins denies being such a person. If you mean someone who agrees that logically there could be a god, but who doesn't think that the logical possibility is terribly likely, or at least not something that should keep us awake at night, then I guess a lot of us are atheists. But there is certainly a split, a schism, in our ranks. I am not whining (in fact I am rather proud) when I point out that a rather loud group of my fellow atheists, generally today known as the "new atheists", loathe and detest my thinking. Richard Dawkins has likened me to the pusillanimous appeaser at Munich, Neville Chamberlain. Jerry Coyne, author of Why Evolution is True, says (echoing Orwell) that only someone with pretensions to the intelligentsia could believe the silly things I believe. And energetic blogger PZ Myers refers to me as a "clueless gobshite" because I confessed to seeing why true believers might find the Kentucky Creationist Museum convincing. I will spare you what my fellow philosopher Dan Dennett has to say about me.
There are several reasons why we atheists are squabbling – I will speak only for myself but I doubt I am atypical. First, non-believer though I may be, I do not think (as do the new atheists) that all religion is necessarily evil and corrupting. This claim is on a par with golden plates in upstate New York. The Quakers and the Evangelicals were inspired and driven by their religion to oppose slavery, and a good thing too. Of course there has been evil in the name of religion – the pope telling Africans not to use condoms in the face of Aids – but as often as not religion is not the only or even the primary force for evil. The troubles in Northern Ireland were surely about socio-economic issues also, and the young men who flew into the World Trade Centre towers were infected by the alienation and despair of the young in Muslim countries in the face of poverty and inequalities.
Second, unlike the new atheists, I take scholarship seriously. I have written that The God Delusion made me ashamed to be an atheist and I meant it. Trying to understand how God could need no cause, Christians claim that God exists necessarily. I have taken the effort to try to understand what that means. Dawkins and company are ignorant of such claims and positively contemptuous of those who even try to understand them, let alone believe them. Thus, like a first-year undergraduate, he can happily go around asking loudly, "What caused God?" as though he had made some momentous philosophical discovery. Dawkins was indignant when, on the grounds that inanimate objects cannot have emotions, philosophers like Mary Midgley criticised his metaphorical notion of a selfish gene. Sauce for the biological goose is sauce for the atheist gander. There are a lot of very bright and well informed Christian theologians. We atheists should demand no less.
Third, how dare we be so condescending? I don't have faith. I really don't. Rowan Williams does as do many of my fellow philosophers like Alvin Plantinga (a Protestant) and Ernan McMullin (a Catholic). I think they are wrong; they think I am wrong. But they are not stupid or bad or whatever. If I needed advice about everyday matters, I would turn without hesitation to these men. We are caught in opposing Kuhnian paradigms. I can explain their faith claims in terms of psychology; they can explain my lack of faith claims also probably partly through psychology and probably theology also. (Plantinga, a Calvinist, would refer to original sin.) I just keep hearing Cromwell to the Scots. "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken." I don't think I am wrong, but the worth and integrity of so many believers makes me modest in my unbelief.
Fourth and finally, I live in the American South, surrounded by ardent Christians. I want evolution taught in the schools and I can think of no way better designed to make that impossible than to spout on about religion, from ignorance and with contempt. And especially to make unsubstantiated arguments that science refutes religion. I never conceal my nonbelief. I defend to the death the right of the new atheists to their views and to their right to propagate them. But that is no excuse for political stupidity. If, as the new atheists think, Darwinian evolutionary biology is incompatible with Christianity, then will they give me a good argument as to why the science should be taught in schools if it implies the falsity of religion? The first amendment to the constitution of the United States of America separates church and state. Why are their beliefs exempt?
Back in 1961, in the depths of the cold war, terrified as we were by the threat of nuclear annihilation, John Whitcomb Junior and Henry Morris published The Genesis Flood, a six-day-creationist account of origins. Because of its dispensationalist message – God clears things out every now and then, as he did at the time of Noah, and we should expect the next (literal) blow up fairly shortly – it became the fundamentalist bible. But don't worry. It's all part of God's plans, even the Russian bomb. Today, nearly a decade after 9/11, terrified as so many still are by the terrorist threat, the atheistic fundamentalists are finding equally fertile soil for their equally frenetic messages. It's all the fault of the believers, Muslims mainly of course, but Christians also. But don't worry. In the God Delusion, we have a message as simplistic as in The Genesis Flood. This too will solve all of your problems. Peace and prosperity await you in this world, if not the next.
Forgive me if I don't sign on.
The original bullshit can be found on The Guardian.
Dawkins et al bring us into disrepute
There's a schism alright, and I seem to find myself on the unfashionable side of it
o Michael Ruse
o guardian.co.uk, Monday 2 November 2009 12.00 GMT
o Article history
The question: Is there an atheist schism?
As a professional philosopher my first question naturally is: "What or who is an atheist?" If you mean someone who absolutely and utterly does not believe there is any God or meaning then I doubt there are many in this group. Richard Dawkins denies being such a person. If you mean someone who agrees that logically there could be a god, but who doesn't think that the logical possibility is terribly likely, or at least not something that should keep us awake at night, then I guess a lot of us are atheists. But there is certainly a split, a schism, in our ranks. I am not whining (in fact I am rather proud) when I point out that a rather loud group of my fellow atheists, generally today known as the "new atheists", loathe and detest my thinking. Richard Dawkins has likened me to the pusillanimous appeaser at Munich, Neville Chamberlain. Jerry Coyne, author of Why Evolution is True, says (echoing Orwell) that only someone with pretensions to the intelligentsia could believe the silly things I believe. And energetic blogger PZ Myers refers to me as a "clueless gobshite" because I confessed to seeing why true believers might find the Kentucky Creationist Museum convincing. I will spare you what my fellow philosopher Dan Dennett has to say about me.
There are several reasons why we atheists are squabbling – I will speak only for myself but I doubt I am atypical. First, non-believer though I may be, I do not think (as do the new atheists) that all religion is necessarily evil and corrupting. This claim is on a par with golden plates in upstate New York. The Quakers and the Evangelicals were inspired and driven by their religion to oppose slavery, and a good thing too. Of course there has been evil in the name of religion – the pope telling Africans not to use condoms in the face of Aids – but as often as not religion is not the only or even the primary force for evil. The troubles in Northern Ireland were surely about socio-economic issues also, and the young men who flew into the World Trade Centre towers were infected by the alienation and despair of the young in Muslim countries in the face of poverty and inequalities.
Second, unlike the new atheists, I take scholarship seriously. I have written that The God Delusion made me ashamed to be an atheist and I meant it. Trying to understand how God could need no cause, Christians claim that God exists necessarily. I have taken the effort to try to understand what that means. Dawkins and company are ignorant of such claims and positively contemptuous of those who even try to understand them, let alone believe them. Thus, like a first-year undergraduate, he can happily go around asking loudly, "What caused God?" as though he had made some momentous philosophical discovery. Dawkins was indignant when, on the grounds that inanimate objects cannot have emotions, philosophers like Mary Midgley criticised his metaphorical notion of a selfish gene. Sauce for the biological goose is sauce for the atheist gander. There are a lot of very bright and well informed Christian theologians. We atheists should demand no less.
Third, how dare we be so condescending? I don't have faith. I really don't. Rowan Williams does as do many of my fellow philosophers like Alvin Plantinga (a Protestant) and Ernan McMullin (a Catholic). I think they are wrong; they think I am wrong. But they are not stupid or bad or whatever. If I needed advice about everyday matters, I would turn without hesitation to these men. We are caught in opposing Kuhnian paradigms. I can explain their faith claims in terms of psychology; they can explain my lack of faith claims also probably partly through psychology and probably theology also. (Plantinga, a Calvinist, would refer to original sin.) I just keep hearing Cromwell to the Scots. "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken." I don't think I am wrong, but the worth and integrity of so many believers makes me modest in my unbelief.
Fourth and finally, I live in the American South, surrounded by ardent Christians. I want evolution taught in the schools and I can think of no way better designed to make that impossible than to spout on about religion, from ignorance and with contempt. And especially to make unsubstantiated arguments that science refutes religion. I never conceal my nonbelief. I defend to the death the right of the new atheists to their views and to their right to propagate them. But that is no excuse for political stupidity. If, as the new atheists think, Darwinian evolutionary biology is incompatible with Christianity, then will they give me a good argument as to why the science should be taught in schools if it implies the falsity of religion? The first amendment to the constitution of the United States of America separates church and state. Why are their beliefs exempt?
Back in 1961, in the depths of the cold war, terrified as we were by the threat of nuclear annihilation, John Whitcomb Junior and Henry Morris published The Genesis Flood, a six-day-creationist account of origins. Because of its dispensationalist message – God clears things out every now and then, as he did at the time of Noah, and we should expect the next (literal) blow up fairly shortly – it became the fundamentalist bible. But don't worry. It's all part of God's plans, even the Russian bomb. Today, nearly a decade after 9/11, terrified as so many still are by the terrorist threat, the atheistic fundamentalists are finding equally fertile soil for their equally frenetic messages. It's all the fault of the believers, Muslims mainly of course, but Christians also. But don't worry. In the God Delusion, we have a message as simplistic as in The Genesis Flood. This too will solve all of your problems. Peace and prosperity await you in this world, if not the next.
Forgive me if I don't sign on.
Friday, October 30, 2009
A Meaningless Chapter
My dreary existence expands in scope and develops a whole new intensity. These days I have been pondering the meaning of existence, and found the exercise to be meaningless. The fact that classes had ended for this season does not improve my mood greatly. In fact, the prospect of failing all my examinations has a cold and sobering effect. I can expect my agony at my flophouse university to be prolonged and more expensive. I conclude that the best thing for me to go for it and see where my efforts take me. It sounds like a football team who are playing against vastly superior opponents and expecting the worst, but when you are skint, tired, uninspired and back to the wall, going for it is the only option. Either that, or it is go to the ground, spread your legs like a whole and asked to be raped…gently.
I have been testing out the upgraded version of my company’s computer system for the past week. I must say it has been an excruciating as it has been fascinating. In view of the many problems, excruciating seems the right – and only – word. It is also the only word my overworked brain can think of right now so yes, excruciating it is.
Although the new version is supposedly to be slightly more advanced than the previous one, it looks like a whole new different beast altogether. For starters, a substantial portion of the original interface seems to have been changed. The options that were so intuitive (comparatively speaking) have been replaced in a variety of ways. Either they are now in a different position, or have different or newer functions. Compare MS Word 2003 to the crap 2007 version and you have an idea of what I mean.
At least MS 2007 works. The new program is riddled with bugs. We are finding new bugs and program errors ‘for fun’ and we are not even halfway through this infernal program. It does not help matters that the company that designed this integrated business system has such mediocre support. Their technical support staff does not even know how to run their own program, and the material in the CD they provided is useful only if you have a year to sort through the thousands of pages’ worth of instructions. Engineers and technical people tend to be poor writers. These buggers can never be concise if their paltry existences depend on them keeping it short and sweet. To compound our misery, we are not even informed of the exact features the new version has. It has been all trial and error and it is virtually impossible not to miss out anything.
There are only three of us, my boss, my senior, and I. We are like the Special Forces. Besides our daily tasks of providing support to our users from SIX different countries (in particular those inept jokers from India), we have to (i) liaise with our foreign colleagues (ii) help the other IT team in their inquiries (iii) provide training to our other colleagues on how the damn thing works, its unreliability notwithstanding (iv) assist our dear colleague in Malaysia in resolving technical issues she should have been able to solve with her 20 years of experience, (v) test out and troubleshoot the program, and (iv) communicate with our two programmers on what we want.
So little time (20 days to get the damn thing up and running) and such paltry resources. It is little wonder I have been losing what is left of my strength and sanity. Before long I may lose more money because I have no time to study for my bleeding examinations and I would have to spend money repeating the shit that I flunk. Every day has been like nine to nine, and I am not even a permanent staff to begin with. By the time I reach home I would be so damn exhausted I could barely keep my eyes open. Long hours of staring at the computer screen have affected my eyesight. My perfect/almost perfect vision is going to the Hells. Hitting the books with the sort of inferior lightning my house has only exacerbates my agony. At this point of writing, I have finished the cursory round of studying for my Political Economy of ASEAN. I was to commence on Human Resources tonight but I only left the office close to ten. There is no way I am going to burn the midnight oil for a fourth consecutive night without risking collapse. Still, I still harbor ambitions – or desperation – of finishing the foregoing mentioned subject by Sunday. Two subjects in one week, and then it’s the Finance modules – which I expect to fail. Life could hardly be more fun.
Speaking of fun, I did mention about my trials and tribulations being fascinating as well. Here are the reasons. My company is a most unusual company. For an American company you would have expected that its employees would have had more work/life balance. Hell no! If it had not been for the highly informal organizational culture, one would be forgiven if he had thought it a Chinese firm. It is not unusual for people to stay a bit longer after office hours, and hardly rare if they stay considerably longer. My boss was still working in the office at 2am a few months ago. When we left tonight, a few colleagues were still hard at work. In fact, the only people who get to have a life are the expatriates in corporate management. I remember one bloke telling us about his Mandarin lessons and how he hoped to impress his pretty instructor. How sweet. I wish I had the time to take up a foreign language after work, and possibly take the opportunity to take my bootylicious instructor to bed for some engaging pillow talk. I got nothing against the bloke. He seems like a nice chap. It is just that things are, to quote from Buddha, thus.
Having said that, I wish that some of those in management would have some brains. On an ordinary day our integrated business system is already riddled with bugs and quite few users are experiencing difficulties with the damn thing. To expect us to make the new version work within such a short span of time, with such scant resources, is absolutely ludicrous. And let us not forget that we are implementing our online store. We were supposed to get it up for people to order items, but we are a month overdue and even now, despite the combined efforts of the Australians the Americans, us, and possibly the Taliban, it is still NOT FUNCTIONAL.
I don’t understand why in the Hells must the management rush us like this. What is the point of having an unreliable system and a dodgy internet site just to meet some unreasonable deadline some managerial Peter Pan had set? When shit happens, as it surely will, the company will definitely lose more money. First, given the fact that only THREE of us are supporting the IT for SIX countries, it would be IMPOSSIBLE to prevent a reduction in efficiency should just ONE person from EACH country encounters a technical problem at the same time. What are the rest going to do when they cannot print documents, when the customers want something done and they cannot log in or access some function, when the system hangs and they are left stranded?
Second, when you cannot even get your internal processes in order, how are you going to handle the competition and your prospective customers? When your competitors are swiftly implementing their business strategies and you are still bogged down by internal deficiencies, it stands to reason that they are going to get a head start. When your customers want to order items online and the site just cannot work, do you think they will stay with you long enough to develop customer loyalty? The failure of the business to generate revenue, coupled with its propensity to work its employees to death, will surely contribute to loss of customer confidence and employee motivation, resulting in high turnover, attrition rates and resources wasted. Indeed, for all the eloquent rhetoric of our CEO, the fact remains that only a whole new outlook in corporate strategies and effective human capital utilization will pull the company out of its mire. For this I offer a simple solution: PUT ME IN CHARGE.
Fuck. I just wrote a short essay on Human Resource Management. Talk about not having the time and energy to study. Writing is not only therapeutic, it is educational as well. I will be writing more after my examinations. Cry me a river.
I have been testing out the upgraded version of my company’s computer system for the past week. I must say it has been an excruciating as it has been fascinating. In view of the many problems, excruciating seems the right – and only – word. It is also the only word my overworked brain can think of right now so yes, excruciating it is.
Although the new version is supposedly to be slightly more advanced than the previous one, it looks like a whole new different beast altogether. For starters, a substantial portion of the original interface seems to have been changed. The options that were so intuitive (comparatively speaking) have been replaced in a variety of ways. Either they are now in a different position, or have different or newer functions. Compare MS Word 2003 to the crap 2007 version and you have an idea of what I mean.
At least MS 2007 works. The new program is riddled with bugs. We are finding new bugs and program errors ‘for fun’ and we are not even halfway through this infernal program. It does not help matters that the company that designed this integrated business system has such mediocre support. Their technical support staff does not even know how to run their own program, and the material in the CD they provided is useful only if you have a year to sort through the thousands of pages’ worth of instructions. Engineers and technical people tend to be poor writers. These buggers can never be concise if their paltry existences depend on them keeping it short and sweet. To compound our misery, we are not even informed of the exact features the new version has. It has been all trial and error and it is virtually impossible not to miss out anything.
There are only three of us, my boss, my senior, and I. We are like the Special Forces. Besides our daily tasks of providing support to our users from SIX different countries (in particular those inept jokers from India), we have to (i) liaise with our foreign colleagues (ii) help the other IT team in their inquiries (iii) provide training to our other colleagues on how the damn thing works, its unreliability notwithstanding (iv) assist our dear colleague in Malaysia in resolving technical issues she should have been able to solve with her 20 years of experience, (v) test out and troubleshoot the program, and (iv) communicate with our two programmers on what we want.
So little time (20 days to get the damn thing up and running) and such paltry resources. It is little wonder I have been losing what is left of my strength and sanity. Before long I may lose more money because I have no time to study for my bleeding examinations and I would have to spend money repeating the shit that I flunk. Every day has been like nine to nine, and I am not even a permanent staff to begin with. By the time I reach home I would be so damn exhausted I could barely keep my eyes open. Long hours of staring at the computer screen have affected my eyesight. My perfect/almost perfect vision is going to the Hells. Hitting the books with the sort of inferior lightning my house has only exacerbates my agony. At this point of writing, I have finished the cursory round of studying for my Political Economy of ASEAN. I was to commence on Human Resources tonight but I only left the office close to ten. There is no way I am going to burn the midnight oil for a fourth consecutive night without risking collapse. Still, I still harbor ambitions – or desperation – of finishing the foregoing mentioned subject by Sunday. Two subjects in one week, and then it’s the Finance modules – which I expect to fail. Life could hardly be more fun.
Speaking of fun, I did mention about my trials and tribulations being fascinating as well. Here are the reasons. My company is a most unusual company. For an American company you would have expected that its employees would have had more work/life balance. Hell no! If it had not been for the highly informal organizational culture, one would be forgiven if he had thought it a Chinese firm. It is not unusual for people to stay a bit longer after office hours, and hardly rare if they stay considerably longer. My boss was still working in the office at 2am a few months ago. When we left tonight, a few colleagues were still hard at work. In fact, the only people who get to have a life are the expatriates in corporate management. I remember one bloke telling us about his Mandarin lessons and how he hoped to impress his pretty instructor. How sweet. I wish I had the time to take up a foreign language after work, and possibly take the opportunity to take my bootylicious instructor to bed for some engaging pillow talk. I got nothing against the bloke. He seems like a nice chap. It is just that things are, to quote from Buddha, thus.
Having said that, I wish that some of those in management would have some brains. On an ordinary day our integrated business system is already riddled with bugs and quite few users are experiencing difficulties with the damn thing. To expect us to make the new version work within such a short span of time, with such scant resources, is absolutely ludicrous. And let us not forget that we are implementing our online store. We were supposed to get it up for people to order items, but we are a month overdue and even now, despite the combined efforts of the Australians the Americans, us, and possibly the Taliban, it is still NOT FUNCTIONAL.
I don’t understand why in the Hells must the management rush us like this. What is the point of having an unreliable system and a dodgy internet site just to meet some unreasonable deadline some managerial Peter Pan had set? When shit happens, as it surely will, the company will definitely lose more money. First, given the fact that only THREE of us are supporting the IT for SIX countries, it would be IMPOSSIBLE to prevent a reduction in efficiency should just ONE person from EACH country encounters a technical problem at the same time. What are the rest going to do when they cannot print documents, when the customers want something done and they cannot log in or access some function, when the system hangs and they are left stranded?
Second, when you cannot even get your internal processes in order, how are you going to handle the competition and your prospective customers? When your competitors are swiftly implementing their business strategies and you are still bogged down by internal deficiencies, it stands to reason that they are going to get a head start. When your customers want to order items online and the site just cannot work, do you think they will stay with you long enough to develop customer loyalty? The failure of the business to generate revenue, coupled with its propensity to work its employees to death, will surely contribute to loss of customer confidence and employee motivation, resulting in high turnover, attrition rates and resources wasted. Indeed, for all the eloquent rhetoric of our CEO, the fact remains that only a whole new outlook in corporate strategies and effective human capital utilization will pull the company out of its mire. For this I offer a simple solution: PUT ME IN CHARGE.
Fuck. I just wrote a short essay on Human Resource Management. Talk about not having the time and energy to study. Writing is not only therapeutic, it is educational as well. I will be writing more after my examinations. Cry me a river.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Saturday, October 17, 2009
My Birthday
18 days after my birthday, my group of infidels came together to celebrate it. 18 = 6 + 6 + 6. 666. The Omen.
We met at the Newton train station. Pearl was the earliest. She whiled away the time at a nearby mall. That is standard operating procedure for females. Either you are ‘fashionably’ late, or you are ‘shoppingly’ early. The Lass wore a flowery dress which was quite eye-catching. She does have the ‘Shinegal’ look.
You have the Warner Bros, and then you have the Liang Brothers. As usual, XH was suffering from one of his chronic bouts of stomach upsets and was putting his impressive abdominal muscles to the task of gastric relief. XR and his BIG BAG, the latter for which I was particularly grateful (I needed to stash my Political Economy textbook somewhere) also turned up.
Xinyao brought a friend along. Her name is Weiling and she proclaimed herself an agnostic. Being of similar built and attire, they shared a sisterly resemblance. Still, I must say XY is the prettier of the two. Atheism has a beautifying effect. Anyway, WL seemed like the articulate type. Neither standoffish nor a shrinking violet, she asked us about our little atheist ragtag band. XH did most of the talking. An infidel in the making? I would not bet against it.
After everybody was there, we made our way to Newton Circus. Along the way, we talked among ourselves, to work up an appetite and to catch up with one another. We soon reached the Promised Land, settled down at a table, and were immediately accosted by very zealous food sellers eager to squeeze every buck out of us. We ordered a few dishes that were suitably delicious and artery-clogging, and resumed our pattering while waiting for the food to arrive.
The slop came and we dug into it with gusto. Fried vegetables, prawns, egg omelets, meat and sugar cane drinks were the order of the day. In between mouthfuls we talked among ourselves. The Lass did not eat the dishes we ordered, preferring to order separately. She does not take sea food. She does not know what she is missing.
XH explained to WL the difference between an atheist and an agnostic. Infidelism does not take a holiday. I could imagine my bro giving her tuition on the subject. WL and I talked briefly about football writing. I told her of my contempt for the substandard mob who writes football columns for the New Paper and she agreed that the paper was basically trash. I was quite impressed. She is a smart girl and once she becomes a true infidel she will be smarter yet.
XR and the Lass talked the least. Not to say that they didn’t talk much but compared to us chatterboxes they were like nuns in a whorehouse. XR ought to loosen up a bit. He was sitting next to a few women, and being a HOT-BLOODED MALE, he should have made more conversation.
The Lass stared into space at random intervals. She has such an endearing habit. Too bad sexy Goh was not around for her to stare into his eyes – or elsewhere. Anyway, she presented me with a sketch of me, which I proudly showed to the rest of the gang. I am touched! Now, this is high art indeed, fit for putting up in government offices. (By the way, I laminated it.)
The President, by the Lass.
I had a wonderful time teasing XY. One of these days I will overstep the line and end up being hacked to pieces by an enraged woman. Pearl said that I should learn to play mahjong. She said she would be willing to teach me, provided I put in ‘investment’. She better be careful what she wished for. I might just win back my school fees from my master. Either that or it is just me and my undies.
XH and XY then got into a ‘confrontation’ about English. English! XH was daring her (jokingly of course), to test his English. It must have been some in-joke when they were still in the same gulag teaching little monsters. I wish I was there. I could have made a pretty good slave-driver, I mean, um…discipline master.
There were still some prawns left by the time we were done and XY cleared ‘em with such vigor. It was refreshing to see a woman eat like she did not give a damn about her weight. I am almost ashamed of myself. My vision of gaining an additional 20kg will come to nothing, like our goal of qualifying for the 2010 World Cup, unless I – pardon the pun – pull my weight up.
As the night was still young, we decided to chill out somewhere else. We went to Orchard Road and found a Hong Kong restaurant.
Pearl, XH and I had great fun speaking and abusing one another using Cantonese, much to the bemusement of the Lass, who could not understand what we idiots were giggling about. We should organize a trip to Hong Kong one of these days. It will be fun enjoying the scenery, the places of interest, and murdering the Hong-Kongers’ language in front of them. The Lass would enjoy the shopping malls there.
XY and WL ordered one gigantic ice kacang. It was the biggest ice kacang I had ever seen and it was as majestic as Mount Everest. I didn’t know they sell icy desserts in a Hong Kong restaurant. XH, who was sitting next to the two sisters, did the gentlemanly thing and helped them polish off that chunk. I wager it did help him polish his conversation as well.
We ‘jio-ed’ XY for a hike in December. It was more like a dare, and I think we got her to accept it. Time to get the air tickets! I look forward to experiencing nature and making my toilet in the wilderness.
Imagine my surprise when my birthday cake came. It was not a cake – it was actually bread topped with an overly generous helping of peanut ooze. I nearly fainted when they said it was all mine. ALL MINE. I attacked it with determination, but the massive size of the thing, coupled with the scrumptious dinner I ate earlier, left me defeated. I came, I saw, and I surrendered to the OOZE. Still, I had a lot of fun eating it. The Ooze was dripping happily and I was amusing the Lass, who sat across from me with my slovenly table manners. They should have taped it down and sent it to Animal Planet.
The OOZE.
Prior to eating the Ooze was the customary birthday song and wish. Pearl and XH tried to give me a Cantonese rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’, but our Cantonese, like my ultimately unfinished cake, required polishing. In the end, XH went Pavarotti and I made my birthday wish. I asked for an additional 10kg on top of the 20kg I wished for on my actual birthday. 30kg in all! That is half my weight. It is unlikely that I will hit the happy figure of 90kg of course, but they say in life, you should aim high so that even if you fail, you will still land somewhere near the target. I will be quite happy with 80kg.
Me and the OOZE.
Where's the OOZE?
We even took a group photograph. The poor waitress had difficulty with XH’s camera phone and had to ‘NG’ twice. Maybe she was awed by my immaculate presence.
Infidels!
It was around ten when we left the restaurant. We thought we would do some window-shopping but apparently XY and WL had their own plans. (Who could fathom the mysteries of the female mind?) We tried to ‘psycho’ them into joining us but they were obviously very much into each other. (It must be some kind of Female Conspiracy.)
So the Liang Bros, Pearl, the Lass and I walked around Ion Orchard. It is a mutha of a shopping mall, the shopping mall of all shopping malls. While Vivo City is probably larger than Ion Orchard, at least it feels like a shopping mall. Ion Orchard, on the other hand, is like a dungeon. Where a dungeon reeks of mold and decay, it overwhelms your consciousness with its suffocating materialism, shameless capitalism and vulgar marketing, the very air itself seemingly compelling you to shop, shop, and shop until you bankrupt yourself. And it is so easy to get lost in that place.
While walking around, the Lass suddenly squealed twice. I thought I had accidentally elbowed her but she said sparks flew from my arm to hers when I brushed against her. She got Pearl and I to touch elbows with her. She said one of us would get sick. I always knew I had an ELECTRIFYING personality but this really takes the OOZE. Two days later I was down with food poisoning. A coincidence? I now resolve to listen more to women.
The five of us got out of Ion Orchard and looked up the less than starry heavens (this is Singapore after all). I read somewhere that a star represents hopes and dreams. It is quite obvious we haven’t any in this cuntry. It was a bit disappointing because it was still around the Mid-Autumn Festival and we expected to see a full moon. No moon but the haze and the monstrous screens showing commercials.
Even without the night scenery, I had a wonderful time. Thanks to my friends for making this happen. Next stop: The Lass’s birthday bash at Zouk on Halloween night.
We met at the Newton train station. Pearl was the earliest. She whiled away the time at a nearby mall. That is standard operating procedure for females. Either you are ‘fashionably’ late, or you are ‘shoppingly’ early. The Lass wore a flowery dress which was quite eye-catching. She does have the ‘Shinegal’ look.
You have the Warner Bros, and then you have the Liang Brothers. As usual, XH was suffering from one of his chronic bouts of stomach upsets and was putting his impressive abdominal muscles to the task of gastric relief. XR and his BIG BAG, the latter for which I was particularly grateful (I needed to stash my Political Economy textbook somewhere) also turned up.
Xinyao brought a friend along. Her name is Weiling and she proclaimed herself an agnostic. Being of similar built and attire, they shared a sisterly resemblance. Still, I must say XY is the prettier of the two. Atheism has a beautifying effect. Anyway, WL seemed like the articulate type. Neither standoffish nor a shrinking violet, she asked us about our little atheist ragtag band. XH did most of the talking. An infidel in the making? I would not bet against it.
After everybody was there, we made our way to Newton Circus. Along the way, we talked among ourselves, to work up an appetite and to catch up with one another. We soon reached the Promised Land, settled down at a table, and were immediately accosted by very zealous food sellers eager to squeeze every buck out of us. We ordered a few dishes that were suitably delicious and artery-clogging, and resumed our pattering while waiting for the food to arrive.
The slop came and we dug into it with gusto. Fried vegetables, prawns, egg omelets, meat and sugar cane drinks were the order of the day. In between mouthfuls we talked among ourselves. The Lass did not eat the dishes we ordered, preferring to order separately. She does not take sea food. She does not know what she is missing.
XH explained to WL the difference between an atheist and an agnostic. Infidelism does not take a holiday. I could imagine my bro giving her tuition on the subject. WL and I talked briefly about football writing. I told her of my contempt for the substandard mob who writes football columns for the New Paper and she agreed that the paper was basically trash. I was quite impressed. She is a smart girl and once she becomes a true infidel she will be smarter yet.
XR and the Lass talked the least. Not to say that they didn’t talk much but compared to us chatterboxes they were like nuns in a whorehouse. XR ought to loosen up a bit. He was sitting next to a few women, and being a HOT-BLOODED MALE, he should have made more conversation.
The Lass stared into space at random intervals. She has such an endearing habit. Too bad sexy Goh was not around for her to stare into his eyes – or elsewhere. Anyway, she presented me with a sketch of me, which I proudly showed to the rest of the gang. I am touched! Now, this is high art indeed, fit for putting up in government offices. (By the way, I laminated it.)
The President, by the Lass.I had a wonderful time teasing XY. One of these days I will overstep the line and end up being hacked to pieces by an enraged woman. Pearl said that I should learn to play mahjong. She said she would be willing to teach me, provided I put in ‘investment’. She better be careful what she wished for. I might just win back my school fees from my master. Either that or it is just me and my undies.
XH and XY then got into a ‘confrontation’ about English. English! XH was daring her (jokingly of course), to test his English. It must have been some in-joke when they were still in the same gulag teaching little monsters. I wish I was there. I could have made a pretty good slave-driver, I mean, um…discipline master.
There were still some prawns left by the time we were done and XY cleared ‘em with such vigor. It was refreshing to see a woman eat like she did not give a damn about her weight. I am almost ashamed of myself. My vision of gaining an additional 20kg will come to nothing, like our goal of qualifying for the 2010 World Cup, unless I – pardon the pun – pull my weight up.
As the night was still young, we decided to chill out somewhere else. We went to Orchard Road and found a Hong Kong restaurant.
Pearl, XH and I had great fun speaking and abusing one another using Cantonese, much to the bemusement of the Lass, who could not understand what we idiots were giggling about. We should organize a trip to Hong Kong one of these days. It will be fun enjoying the scenery, the places of interest, and murdering the Hong-Kongers’ language in front of them. The Lass would enjoy the shopping malls there.
XY and WL ordered one gigantic ice kacang. It was the biggest ice kacang I had ever seen and it was as majestic as Mount Everest. I didn’t know they sell icy desserts in a Hong Kong restaurant. XH, who was sitting next to the two sisters, did the gentlemanly thing and helped them polish off that chunk. I wager it did help him polish his conversation as well.
We ‘jio-ed’ XY for a hike in December. It was more like a dare, and I think we got her to accept it. Time to get the air tickets! I look forward to experiencing nature and making my toilet in the wilderness.
Imagine my surprise when my birthday cake came. It was not a cake – it was actually bread topped with an overly generous helping of peanut ooze. I nearly fainted when they said it was all mine. ALL MINE. I attacked it with determination, but the massive size of the thing, coupled with the scrumptious dinner I ate earlier, left me defeated. I came, I saw, and I surrendered to the OOZE. Still, I had a lot of fun eating it. The Ooze was dripping happily and I was amusing the Lass, who sat across from me with my slovenly table manners. They should have taped it down and sent it to Animal Planet.
The OOZE.Prior to eating the Ooze was the customary birthday song and wish. Pearl and XH tried to give me a Cantonese rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’, but our Cantonese, like my ultimately unfinished cake, required polishing. In the end, XH went Pavarotti and I made my birthday wish. I asked for an additional 10kg on top of the 20kg I wished for on my actual birthday. 30kg in all! That is half my weight. It is unlikely that I will hit the happy figure of 90kg of course, but they say in life, you should aim high so that even if you fail, you will still land somewhere near the target. I will be quite happy with 80kg.
Me and the OOZE.
Where's the OOZE?We even took a group photograph. The poor waitress had difficulty with XH’s camera phone and had to ‘NG’ twice. Maybe she was awed by my immaculate presence.
Infidels!It was around ten when we left the restaurant. We thought we would do some window-shopping but apparently XY and WL had their own plans. (Who could fathom the mysteries of the female mind?) We tried to ‘psycho’ them into joining us but they were obviously very much into each other. (It must be some kind of Female Conspiracy.)
So the Liang Bros, Pearl, the Lass and I walked around Ion Orchard. It is a mutha of a shopping mall, the shopping mall of all shopping malls. While Vivo City is probably larger than Ion Orchard, at least it feels like a shopping mall. Ion Orchard, on the other hand, is like a dungeon. Where a dungeon reeks of mold and decay, it overwhelms your consciousness with its suffocating materialism, shameless capitalism and vulgar marketing, the very air itself seemingly compelling you to shop, shop, and shop until you bankrupt yourself. And it is so easy to get lost in that place.
While walking around, the Lass suddenly squealed twice. I thought I had accidentally elbowed her but she said sparks flew from my arm to hers when I brushed against her. She got Pearl and I to touch elbows with her. She said one of us would get sick. I always knew I had an ELECTRIFYING personality but this really takes the OOZE. Two days later I was down with food poisoning. A coincidence? I now resolve to listen more to women.
The five of us got out of Ion Orchard and looked up the less than starry heavens (this is Singapore after all). I read somewhere that a star represents hopes and dreams. It is quite obvious we haven’t any in this cuntry. It was a bit disappointing because it was still around the Mid-Autumn Festival and we expected to see a full moon. No moon but the haze and the monstrous screens showing commercials.
Even without the night scenery, I had a wonderful time. Thanks to my friends for making this happen. Next stop: The Lass’s birthday bash at Zouk on Halloween night.
Friday, October 16, 2009
A Long Rant
I finally finished my paper for Political Economy of ASEAN. At roughly 4,500 words, the diction was rambling and at times choppy. The referencing was messy, and the content haphazardly thumped up. It was, in short, a fucking disgrace of an assignment. I endured a torrid time doing it and the best I could wish for is a borderline pass. I wish I had the opportunity to take Film Art instead of this thinly-veiled attempt at propaganda.
The people who designed this course ought to be made to take an IQ test. The module is called ‘Political Economy of ASEAN’. When I flip through the notes what do I see? The amount of material on Singapore was probably enough to cover half the notes. Read these and you will read about how capable our regime is in turning Singapore into an economic power, the various measures they use to alleviate the economic crises, about how great the tripartite system is at resolving issues betwjavascript:void(0)een the unions, the management and the regime, and the justification for lowering wages and incorporating a variable pay component into our already stagnant wages. What the fuck?! I signed up the course to learn about the POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ASEAN. If I wanted to learn about the POLITICAL ECONOMY OF SINGAPORE, I would have gotten a SOCIAL STUDIES textbook from a Popular bookstore. Five dollars for a brain-wash is still a lot cheaper than paying $500 for this module and BEING CHEATED AND BRAIN-WASHED. It is like a rapist forcing himself on a woman and then making her pay for the ‘service’ rendered. Obscene, diabolical, shameful, and a fucking disgrace!
I am not too impressed with the textbook either. According to the textbook, Goh is still our Prime Minister and Megawati is still the President of Indonesia. This is YEAR 2009. The textbook, which was printed in 2004 or 2006, is clearly outdated and to give it to us is absolutely reprehensible. It is like going to a restaurant and getting served LEFTOVERS. UniShit clearly enjoys treating its students like beggars.
The author Lim Y.C ought to take a professional writing course. I expect a doctorate holder to produce better quality writing than the choppy diction that characterizes his sloppy piece of work. I admit I am being arrogant, but I think my writing skills are better. And that comes from a guy who has only a worthless diploma! Mr. Lim may be an expert in his field, but he would have done better with a team of professional editors and ghost writers.
After suffering food poisoning and having to rush my Finance report during my convalescence, I was left with six days including the submission date to finish a 4,000 – 5,000 word report that I had not even started my research on. It would still have been manageable for a full-time student, but I had to work and the poisoning stole much of my strength. I only started on Saturday afternoon because I was so bloody drained I slept until lunch.
I had to force myself to focus; such was the fatigue that plagued me. I spent the entire afternoon doing research online. I Googled, tried my university’s online resources, which offered little (why am I not surprised?) and then dragged my sorry ass to the nearby library. I tried writing at night, but really, I still did not have much to work with. Oh sure, you can jolly well find some information on economic crises but many came from informal sources and I could not jolly well quote from these could I?
I did manage to find something on the Falling Demand Crisis of ’85. It was from a book published in the 1980s and I was glad the library staff kept it after all these years. I returned home and started to write after dinner and bath. There was not really much to write about, even with the data in the course materials, the pages I had photostated from the Library and another excellent article I found online. And I still had to do research on East Asia countries and analyze their growth rates. Obviously you just cannot go to Wikipedia and copy everything there. You cannot really comment academically on the economic situation in a country unless you have a reasonable understanding of their government (regime for some), the people (or workforce), the GDP, export and import partners, trade agreements (if any), natural resources, the relationship between their domestic, regional and international engines, the infrastructure and how investment is utilized, social-economic factors and other areas. While the textbook and notes were useful to some extent, they were Singapore-centic and touched only briefly on ASEAN countries. Plenty of material about crops, rubber and oil in ASEAN countries but little I could use in my assignment. Not much help there about China and Japan as well. I decided to delay the writing and finish all my research first.
While surfing the Net using like seven browsers and twenty odd tabs, I saw Gabby online and knowing he studied Economics in university, asked him about the economic crises in 1985-1986 and 1997 to 2003. The replies I got were nothing short of idiotic. First he said that our regime CAUSED the 1985-1986 crisis, and then, when asked about whether he knew anything about the aforementioned recessions, he said no. It was in the middle of the night; I was freaking tired and desperate for material; the last thing I wanted was this kind of bullshit. I wonder if all FASS students are like this. I don’t know if he was trying to be funny. If he wasn’t, maybe the next time I see him I should ask where he bought his Economics degree. Why should I suffer three bloody years in a flophouse university when I could just order a degree online? I dare say it would be a lot cheaper too.
The Book Guy came online and I tried my luck. J-school students do learn some history after all. He recommended several ways of doing research, most of which I had already tried. He knew a bit about the economic crises I was basing my report on but what he knew I knew even more. When he suggested helping me with my research, I declined. First, I did not want him to waste his time on my fucking assignment, and second, there was not much time left. I appreciated his offer though.
The fact that I had asked my friends clearly showed my level of desperation. Not that they were incompetent, but when you are firing blanks and hitting walls every time you turn, anything else seems like a good idea.
On Sunday I continued with my torture. I was doing research and typing out my report like my life depended on it. A perfectly good Sunday reduced to cinders…I should have been napping. I managed to finish most of the bullshit on the economic crises and wrote a few paragraphs on what EGOIN, Triple C Theory and S-Curve are. And of course, research. Sunday was just…work and trying to keep myself from doing anything…foolish.
On Monday I met XH at our university after our work. He took one look at my report and was like, wtf? He thought that it was impossible and coming from a teacher, although bringing me a tiny measure of satisfaction, brought me no further relief because I had still to finish the fucking thing and my overburdened mind was working overtime to assimilate all the information I could find about East Asia countries and trying to link them into something coherent while paraphrasing frantically to avoid being hauled up for plagiarism.
XH told me that his most of his classmates were either fucktards or arrogant whoresons. At least he had a couple of good-looking classmates to ogle. Fuck, even his lecturer is decent-looking and his Head of Programme looks good enough to have an affair with. What do I have? ZERO. NOTHING. ZILCH. HOSTILE SCENERY. Nothing to take the edge off, to occupy my hebetudinous mind with while I try to make sense of what the lecturer is saying. And I am in a fucking Business course. XH said his lecturer was quite disappointed with the lack of response from her class. Only XH bothered /was capable of answering her questions. The rest of the mobs either talked like Ris Low (the fucktards) or refused to answer and acted cool instead (the arrogant whoresons). We are talking about FILM ART! What in the Hells is so difficult about commenting on movies?! Arts students tend to be known for being ‘emo’ bastards and that sorry lot are no different. Hell, I can be ‘emo’ too. Am I not being strident, militant, extreme, raging and EMO as we speak?! Fuck. I should have been in his class. There are actually Business students in his class and why in the Hells did they not give me the option? This is a travesty! I am going to complain when I do the course assessment.
After slop with my friend, I returned home and worked until 3am. The next day I went to work and my colleagues said I looked like a zombie. They were absolutely right of course. When I got home I was left with a few paragraphs to do and tons of referencing to finish. The former I settled soon enough; the former nearly caused me to do myself in. I was looking at about 40+ citations to settle and even after removing some which were from my course materials I still had around 24. To add to my agony, the links I downloaded them from and my printed notes were all over the place, and I had an excruciating time piecing them to the correct passages. It might have been all right, but I was tired from work, I had no break after a hastily eaten dinner, the glare from the lighting hurt my eyes, and I had a few hours before the 12am timing. I kept getting the sequence wrong and had to redo the damn thing several times. Having used endnotes (Chicago style) for the first time, it was a test of my vision to see the little [xx] at the end of each sentence/paragraph. The first time they allowed us to use endnotes and I cocked it up. APA referencing might have been more familiar to me, but if I had used that I would still have puked my guts out in frustration. The fucking problem with the APA style is that it offers no in-text citation format for online sources. You can try www.apa.org I could not find it – maybe you will have better luck. These bloody English Language/Scholastic academics or whatever you call their ilk ought to make up their mind about language usage. First, these grammarians cannot agree with one another about grammar, and then these eggheads came up with so many rules and versions for academic referencing that you wonder if they might have been better off being lawyers. And all they know is to wail about the falling standards in English. Maybe they should look at themselves first before criticizing everybody else. If these nimrods cannot even convey their ideas effectively, then why should anyone waste their time deciphering their lingo?
Anyway, I was close to doing myself in when I finally sort of finished the accused thing. My referencing was shite – it looked like some article from Wikipedia and I think a couple of the numbering did not tie with the correct references. As XH told me the night before, ‘just fuck it lah!’ And I did. I submitted it five minutes before full time. I expected the bloody Blackboard to fail but miraculously it worked. I nearly took out my Bible and praised the Lord. Then I remembered if there were a good Gawd I would not have to go through this shit and I started to blaspheme. I cannot ask for much for this assignment. I would be quite happy with 40 marks.
After Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards, Royston Tan should emulate him and make SORRY BASTARDS. No prizes for guessing who would be starring in it. SEE? I KNOW FILM ART!
The people who designed this course ought to be made to take an IQ test. The module is called ‘Political Economy of ASEAN’. When I flip through the notes what do I see? The amount of material on Singapore was probably enough to cover half the notes. Read these and you will read about how capable our regime is in turning Singapore into an economic power, the various measures they use to alleviate the economic crises, about how great the tripartite system is at resolving issues betwjavascript:void(0)een the unions, the management and the regime, and the justification for lowering wages and incorporating a variable pay component into our already stagnant wages. What the fuck?! I signed up the course to learn about the POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ASEAN. If I wanted to learn about the POLITICAL ECONOMY OF SINGAPORE, I would have gotten a SOCIAL STUDIES textbook from a Popular bookstore. Five dollars for a brain-wash is still a lot cheaper than paying $500 for this module and BEING CHEATED AND BRAIN-WASHED. It is like a rapist forcing himself on a woman and then making her pay for the ‘service’ rendered. Obscene, diabolical, shameful, and a fucking disgrace!
I am not too impressed with the textbook either. According to the textbook, Goh is still our Prime Minister and Megawati is still the President of Indonesia. This is YEAR 2009. The textbook, which was printed in 2004 or 2006, is clearly outdated and to give it to us is absolutely reprehensible. It is like going to a restaurant and getting served LEFTOVERS. UniShit clearly enjoys treating its students like beggars.
The author Lim Y.C ought to take a professional writing course. I expect a doctorate holder to produce better quality writing than the choppy diction that characterizes his sloppy piece of work. I admit I am being arrogant, but I think my writing skills are better. And that comes from a guy who has only a worthless diploma! Mr. Lim may be an expert in his field, but he would have done better with a team of professional editors and ghost writers.
After suffering food poisoning and having to rush my Finance report during my convalescence, I was left with six days including the submission date to finish a 4,000 – 5,000 word report that I had not even started my research on. It would still have been manageable for a full-time student, but I had to work and the poisoning stole much of my strength. I only started on Saturday afternoon because I was so bloody drained I slept until lunch.
I had to force myself to focus; such was the fatigue that plagued me. I spent the entire afternoon doing research online. I Googled, tried my university’s online resources, which offered little (why am I not surprised?) and then dragged my sorry ass to the nearby library. I tried writing at night, but really, I still did not have much to work with. Oh sure, you can jolly well find some information on economic crises but many came from informal sources and I could not jolly well quote from these could I?
I did manage to find something on the Falling Demand Crisis of ’85. It was from a book published in the 1980s and I was glad the library staff kept it after all these years. I returned home and started to write after dinner and bath. There was not really much to write about, even with the data in the course materials, the pages I had photostated from the Library and another excellent article I found online. And I still had to do research on East Asia countries and analyze their growth rates. Obviously you just cannot go to Wikipedia and copy everything there. You cannot really comment academically on the economic situation in a country unless you have a reasonable understanding of their government (regime for some), the people (or workforce), the GDP, export and import partners, trade agreements (if any), natural resources, the relationship between their domestic, regional and international engines, the infrastructure and how investment is utilized, social-economic factors and other areas. While the textbook and notes were useful to some extent, they were Singapore-centic and touched only briefly on ASEAN countries. Plenty of material about crops, rubber and oil in ASEAN countries but little I could use in my assignment. Not much help there about China and Japan as well. I decided to delay the writing and finish all my research first.
While surfing the Net using like seven browsers and twenty odd tabs, I saw Gabby online and knowing he studied Economics in university, asked him about the economic crises in 1985-1986 and 1997 to 2003. The replies I got were nothing short of idiotic. First he said that our regime CAUSED the 1985-1986 crisis, and then, when asked about whether he knew anything about the aforementioned recessions, he said no. It was in the middle of the night; I was freaking tired and desperate for material; the last thing I wanted was this kind of bullshit. I wonder if all FASS students are like this. I don’t know if he was trying to be funny. If he wasn’t, maybe the next time I see him I should ask where he bought his Economics degree. Why should I suffer three bloody years in a flophouse university when I could just order a degree online? I dare say it would be a lot cheaper too.
The Book Guy came online and I tried my luck. J-school students do learn some history after all. He recommended several ways of doing research, most of which I had already tried. He knew a bit about the economic crises I was basing my report on but what he knew I knew even more. When he suggested helping me with my research, I declined. First, I did not want him to waste his time on my fucking assignment, and second, there was not much time left. I appreciated his offer though.
The fact that I had asked my friends clearly showed my level of desperation. Not that they were incompetent, but when you are firing blanks and hitting walls every time you turn, anything else seems like a good idea.
On Sunday I continued with my torture. I was doing research and typing out my report like my life depended on it. A perfectly good Sunday reduced to cinders…I should have been napping. I managed to finish most of the bullshit on the economic crises and wrote a few paragraphs on what EGOIN, Triple C Theory and S-Curve are. And of course, research. Sunday was just…work and trying to keep myself from doing anything…foolish.
On Monday I met XH at our university after our work. He took one look at my report and was like, wtf? He thought that it was impossible and coming from a teacher, although bringing me a tiny measure of satisfaction, brought me no further relief because I had still to finish the fucking thing and my overburdened mind was working overtime to assimilate all the information I could find about East Asia countries and trying to link them into something coherent while paraphrasing frantically to avoid being hauled up for plagiarism.
XH told me that his most of his classmates were either fucktards or arrogant whoresons. At least he had a couple of good-looking classmates to ogle. Fuck, even his lecturer is decent-looking and his Head of Programme looks good enough to have an affair with. What do I have? ZERO. NOTHING. ZILCH. HOSTILE SCENERY. Nothing to take the edge off, to occupy my hebetudinous mind with while I try to make sense of what the lecturer is saying. And I am in a fucking Business course. XH said his lecturer was quite disappointed with the lack of response from her class. Only XH bothered /was capable of answering her questions. The rest of the mobs either talked like Ris Low (the fucktards) or refused to answer and acted cool instead (the arrogant whoresons). We are talking about FILM ART! What in the Hells is so difficult about commenting on movies?! Arts students tend to be known for being ‘emo’ bastards and that sorry lot are no different. Hell, I can be ‘emo’ too. Am I not being strident, militant, extreme, raging and EMO as we speak?! Fuck. I should have been in his class. There are actually Business students in his class and why in the Hells did they not give me the option? This is a travesty! I am going to complain when I do the course assessment.
After slop with my friend, I returned home and worked until 3am. The next day I went to work and my colleagues said I looked like a zombie. They were absolutely right of course. When I got home I was left with a few paragraphs to do and tons of referencing to finish. The former I settled soon enough; the former nearly caused me to do myself in. I was looking at about 40+ citations to settle and even after removing some which were from my course materials I still had around 24. To add to my agony, the links I downloaded them from and my printed notes were all over the place, and I had an excruciating time piecing them to the correct passages. It might have been all right, but I was tired from work, I had no break after a hastily eaten dinner, the glare from the lighting hurt my eyes, and I had a few hours before the 12am timing. I kept getting the sequence wrong and had to redo the damn thing several times. Having used endnotes (Chicago style) for the first time, it was a test of my vision to see the little [xx] at the end of each sentence/paragraph. The first time they allowed us to use endnotes and I cocked it up. APA referencing might have been more familiar to me, but if I had used that I would still have puked my guts out in frustration. The fucking problem with the APA style is that it offers no in-text citation format for online sources. You can try www.apa.org I could not find it – maybe you will have better luck. These bloody English Language/Scholastic academics or whatever you call their ilk ought to make up their mind about language usage. First, these grammarians cannot agree with one another about grammar, and then these eggheads came up with so many rules and versions for academic referencing that you wonder if they might have been better off being lawyers. And all they know is to wail about the falling standards in English. Maybe they should look at themselves first before criticizing everybody else. If these nimrods cannot even convey their ideas effectively, then why should anyone waste their time deciphering their lingo?
Anyway, I was close to doing myself in when I finally sort of finished the accused thing. My referencing was shite – it looked like some article from Wikipedia and I think a couple of the numbering did not tie with the correct references. As XH told me the night before, ‘just fuck it lah!’ And I did. I submitted it five minutes before full time. I expected the bloody Blackboard to fail but miraculously it worked. I nearly took out my Bible and praised the Lord. Then I remembered if there were a good Gawd I would not have to go through this shit and I started to blaspheme. I cannot ask for much for this assignment. I would be quite happy with 40 marks.
After Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards, Royston Tan should emulate him and make SORRY BASTARDS. No prizes for guessing who would be starring in it. SEE? I KNOW FILM ART!
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