The Story of Survival at Koh Surin from the Killer Tsunami

A few years ago, I happen to have the pleasure to visit one of the world's most famed shallow water coral reef at Koh Surin. If you haven't heard about it, Koh Surin is a name that is used to refer to a small chain of island a few hours of transit by boat off the coast of Phang Na - which houses one of the world's most famous snorkeling destination. During my 4 day stay there, I had a great time of snorkeling around different places around the island chain, seeing massive amounts of coral reef, local fishes, turtles, and on some occurrences some other strange marine animals (such as sharks!). Other than the unspoilt scenery, marine life, another tourist attraction there was that there was a village of natives called the Morgan tribe that lived in one of the islands off the island chain. During our time there, we were asked if we wanted to visit their island. As I and our crew didn't want to disturb the local populace by inpolitely staring at their primative and mudane lifestyle, we decided to decline the invitation and spend most of our effort on touring the island.

Forwarding a few years into the present, as you may have heard, a huge earthquake off the coast of Indonesia has triggered killer Tsunami waves. An illustration below shows the area affected by the Tsunami wave, and as you can notice, the whole coast of the western seaboard of Thailand was affected - including Koh Surin.



If you noticed, Japan is a world leader in Earthquake detection and prevention as their country is earthquake prone. During the earthquake at Indonesia, their country has been informing countries in South Western Asia to evacuate the citizens from the coastal area as soon as possible. The Tsunami waves requires a few hours to reach those destinations. In some areas with bad infrastructure such as Sri Lanka, India and some other countries in South Asia, it would have been close to impossible to evacuate. However in tourist areas such as Phuket in Thailand, where there is high IT and infrastructure penetration (our PM used to toy with the idea of Tourist and IT City), the evacuation of popular tourist sites in Thailand could have been done early to minimizes loses. However as Thailand - known more for their remedy instead of prevention, decided to sit back on its seat, saying that the fears were unfound. No evacuation was called, and within a few hours, hell froze over. One of the worst natural disaters that happened to our beautiful country happened because of the complentency of our agencies that place a higher emphasis on the green back of the tourist industry than the value fo the lifes of the individual people.

Meanwhile just a few hours before the killer Tsunami hit the island of Koh Surin, the water has subsided to a awfully strange low level. During this time the majority of ignorant tourists finding the strange phenomenon intriguing decided to walk upon the sea bed looking at the coral reef like it was a garden. Unknown to most of the people there, that the beautiful colors of the reef had an eerie ring to it.

However just accross the island at the Morgan tribe, the local tribes people when seeing the water subsided to a strange low level, quickly evacuated its village up to the top of the island. They have consistently passed tales from their ancestors down and one of them told them - "If the water rescides to a low level in the ocean, a huge calamity will happen. Head straight to the highest peaks". So with that folklore, the whole village along with most of the tourists visiting has quickly climbed the highest peak of the island.

Within a few hours, it was all over. The Tsunami Island hit the whole chain of Koh Surin, killing and injring a huge majority of tourists. The people who escaped rather unscathed were the Morgan tribe and the visitors that were lucky to be there at the right place and time.

It is painful, but this provides a great reminder of one of the greatest paradoxes about the advancement of our society. As our society becomes more advanced, we have hugely forgotten about our ancient forelore and knowledge, that we then to discard and take lightly - like the primative natives off the Morgan tribe. However in this instance, we can see that the knowledge handed from generations before through forelore has been more authorative than many of the agencies and authorities here. Where as the government has tried to completely uproot their way of life, in this sad episode, it has given me a lot of appreciation for their way of life.

After the episode unravels today, with the Government suddenly in full PR gear and suddenly talking about putting up a Tsunami alert net at no cost bound, I would never forget the failure of our authority in protecting our citizens - much like how they treated our people with contempt as in the Avian Flu epidermic. This utter comtempt for human life is masked by the glitzy PR work done at this moment - in which at the conclusion of this, I will trust the native tribes with their simple way of life more than pretty words of influential people.

For the rest of us, I would like to congratulate us for our unselfishness. The donations of the individual citizens from all around our country and around the world is going to make the difference. I do want to remind that there is still alot to do, and many in the far flung areas have yet to receive much aid.

Based on this, I do want to point out some obscure facts that should turn out heads regarding this event. I want our readers to have the chance to visit and read through the following blog:
Asian Tsunami Blog.

I'll like to show some interesting excerpts:

Australia has pledged $35 million despite spending close to a $1 billion on the Iraq war so far. In contrast to this the ordinary people of Victoria had pledged almost as much as the British Government in one day.

The aid that US has pleged the Asian countries were a paltry $35 million dollars, which is the amount US spends in 3 and a half hour in the occupation of Iraq to protect the oiling industry.

With such figures, it is only natural to have a heavy heart...

Tsunami Help Blog

I was just browsing around, and I just can't help notice that there is a blog that tries to combine all the news regrading the Tsunami, about the relief efforts in the affected country, and how our international community can help:

http://tsunamihelp.blogspot.com/

Some Interesting IT Articles

I've just posted a few interesting websites based on technological issues here as I find them to be very interesting:

How to Take Down Copycat Site (Case Example)
http://www.xequte.com/fraud/

Mother of All CPU Guide:
http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20041221/index.html

My Random Tale about our Tsunami Relief Effort

During the last few days, I've been trying to help coordinate and promoting with Bic about the need of helping out our grief stricken neighbors downsouth who were hard hit by the Tsunami, that I've mentioned alittle earlier a few days ago. Today, I've compiled all the stuff in my home that we plan to donate, and I was supposed to meet up with some more stuff Bic brought along. We were planning to go straight to P' Nut, who is a veteran rescue officer who we know personally to combine our donation with his load.

Since I had a very busy day today, I met up with Bic nearly 9:00 PM at my home. As you notice in the below picture, we were posing in the picture with a few of the donation. What we carried were sanitized gloves which was in huge demand, and the second one is paracetemol which we learnt later that is useless down south.




Anyway on a surprise twist, my big brother John decided to come along so we all bundled our stuff together and went to P'Nut's home.

In a short while we were there, and we loaded our stuff into P'Nut's car. He would soon be loading the new list of donations into the C130 transport train the first plane out of Bangkok tommorrow and would be going to help the relief effort down south. As you notice, the below picture lists the three musketeers with the donations.



After the quick photo, we decided to go up to P' Nut's house and talk with a little about how stuff were like and he shared many tales of strange and odd things that happened. In the next picture it shows P' Nut and Bic discussing about some of the things they heard from the HAM radio.



Anyway, since its very late today, and I am seriously lacking sleep, I'll update my blog a later day. When I finally do that, I want to recollect a few of the interesting tales we've discussed today which some of them displays the huge paradox in today's society based on the lessons we learn from this Tsunami.

Relief For Tsunami Victims

Currently there is a huge campaign to provide relief for Tsunami Victims. Food, clothing, and blood is required, and as one of the country member of one of the Tsunami affected area, I would like to reiterate to all of us that in times of dire need, we should try to do the best we can to help our brothers and sisters down South.

There are many ways you can help donate, which includes donation boxes at department stores, universities, governmental agencies, and NGOs. Please spare all you can.

At the moment I'm current going through the closet rummaging for clothes, bags, and other accessories that would be useful and I'll meet up with Bic with the list of items. Bic is currently coordinating the donation for our group because one of our senior (who is a distinguished rescue volunteer) would be going down south to help in the relief effort.

What if I was a Character in an RPG Game?

Based on the same website, I just decided to do another simple quiz which asks what if I was a character in an RPG (Role Playing Game). This one is just more accurate - RAWRRRR!!!






Take the What Role Playing Character are you? quiz, and visit Castle Diqueria.

What is your Song?

I just decided to do a "What is Your Song" personality quiz for fun. Big problem is I just feel that the author of the quiz were focusing too much on modern pop. Hey I'm a Jazz-New Age guy, not a junkie :P






Take the What's Your Song? quiz and visit Castle Diqueria.

Tradegy Off Paradise Island

During the last few days, I had this dreadful hunch something bad was going to happen. Whenever my nose gets itchy, it means there are bad things coming up. Today in the morning, I've heard news that a killer Tsunami hit off the southern coast of Thailand - mainly around Phuket that was triggered by a huge earthquake off Indonesia.





Story Copied from Here

Casualty toll reaches 84 dead, 400 wounded so far after tsunamis hit southern Thailand
Published on Dec 26 , 2004


BANGKOK, Dec 26 (AFP) - At least 84 people were killed and more than 400 wounded Sunday in southern Thailand after a series of tsunamis caused by a massive earthquake off Indonesia struck the kingdom, officials said.

"There are now 35 people who have died on Phuket, both foreign tourists and Thais, and 355 injured," an official in the governor's office of the popular resort island told AFP.

A police officer said at least six of the dead were foreigners who drowned on Karon beach on Phuket's west coast.

The death toll was likely to rise with several officials reporting over Thai radio and television that beachgoers and villagers had gone missing.

Police said 31 people had died in nearby Krabi on Thailand's southern mainland, at least 11 were killed on the small tourist island of Phi Phi, and seven fishermen died in Satun province bordering Malaysia.

A maritime police officer who asked not to be named said the casualties in Phi Phi could be far higher as the huge tidal wave decimated much of the development on the small island.

"Everything was washed away except two large hotels on Phi Phi Don island," the officer said after speaking with a Phi Phi resident by telephone.

Reuters reports that more than 100 tourists on diving holidays are missing on islands off southern Thailand following Sunday's tsunamis, about 70 of them in the famed Emeral Cave, a tourist official said.

"We don't know whether they are dead or alive," the official told Reuters from the southern city of Trang.

The Emeral Cave, which contains a tiny white sand beach and water turned emerald by sunshine through a hole in the top, is a major attraction for divers who have to swim underwater to get into it.

During the news broadcast, I was talking with my mother who told about her friend's daughter who was on holiday at Phi Phi Island, who was lucky to survive as she was sightseeing at the highest spot of the island. She said the Tsunami wave has simply covered all of the island taking everything along with the waves. Another tale related with the naming of the Tsunami, according to ancient folklore, they said that the mighty Mongol Invasion of Japan was foiled when the whole Mongol Naval fleet was decimated by the Divine Wind (Wave) - or Tsunami. We can see that up to today, these Tsunami can cause huge destruction and woe to humankind eventhough how advanced our society are - a clear lesson that we should never take Mother Nature lightly as we are doing these days.

Commercialization of Christmas

Today is Christmas Day. I'm not very excited. To be exact, I'm sick with fever right now.

Anyway in today's ramdom rambling, I do want to point about the perversions of the Christmas tradition into a sameless excuse for self-indulengce that we see today. How many of your friends go out to parties, and get drunk today? How many of your friends spend alot of money on buying themselves with the latest gadget in their Christmas shopping? How many of your friends actually spend time to do good today?

Sometimes I pity how much Christmas has been changed from a religious event into the consumerized event that we see today. Also I pity how the original Christmas has been changed by the Roman Catholic Church in their campaign to convert over the Pagean religions in the earlier period of the Church. Somehow I do feel that people have lost track of what Christmas really stands for, and after generations and generations of celebration, it just seems that we completely lost track of it.

Anyway, not to end this in a sour note, I do want to point alittle about the Christmas period. The main beauty about Christmas is that it emphasizes on giving, not taking, and this is one tradition that I do want it to continue. Giving is not just giving fancy and expensive gifts to boyfriend/girlfriend, but I do believe that giving the appreciation to all your friends/loved one is something that we all should never forget to neglect on this day.

Though I'm not a Christian, best wishes for all of you, and I hope you all have a Merry Christmas :)

Japan, Refutation of Neoliberalism

I think this article is very interesting economic article worthy of reading:

Japan, Refutation of Neoliberalism
By Robert Locke

No-one wants to talk about Japan these days. The conventional wisdom is that the bloom went off Japan’s economic rose around 1990 and that the utter superiority of neoliberal capitalism was vindicated by the strong performance of the American economy during the 1990s. Furthermore, everyone is now convinced that China – whose economy is 1/8 the size of Japan’s – is the rising economic power and therefore the appropriate object of attention.

But Japan is, despite everything, still one of the master keys to understanding the future of the world economy, because Japan is the clearest case study of why neoliberalism is false. Simply put, Japan has done almost everything wrong by neoliberal standards and yet is indisputably the second-richest nation in the world.

This doesn’t mean that neoliberalism is wholly meritless as an economic theory or as a development strategy, but it does mean that its claim to be the only path to prosperity has been empirically falsified. Japan’s economy is highly regulated, centrally-planned by the state, and often contemptuous of free markets. But it has thrived.

What follows is for space reasons necessarily a sketch and exceptions, subtleties, and refinements have been left out. Facts have been homogenized and caricatured to make structural fundamentals clear. But a reader who bears this in mind will not be misled, as detail analyses are available elsewhere.


Are We Lied to About Japan?

Contrary to popular opinion, Japan has been doing very well lately, despite the interests that wish to depict her as an economic mess.

The illusion of her failure is used by globalists and other neoliberals to discourage Westerners, particularly Americans, from even caring about Japan’s economic policies, let alone learning from them. It has been encouraged by the Japanese government as a way to get foreigners to stop pressing for changes in its neo-mercantilist trade policies. It has been propagated by corporate interests who gain from free-trade extremism with respect to Japan. And it is promoted by ideologues committed to the delusion that only a laissez-faire economy can prosper.

This is a formidable set of potential liars, equipped with money, technical expertise, transnational reach and state power. The Japanese government is centralized, elitist, and quite capable of fudging statistics if it wants, particularly since there are few Westerners who understand Japanese accounting. National accounting is notoriously susceptible to creative accounting anyway, as the world learned at the time of the Asian Crisis of 1998. So the assumption that the standard published figures about Japan’s economy are true is dubious at best.

Japanese culture puts a premium on maintaining “face” and other forms of polite public presentation that constitute literal falsehoods, or at least fictions, so it is a natural instinct for the Japanese to tell the West what it wants to hear about Japan’s economy. Japan’s government is heir to a Confucian tradition in which the public is told only what the rulers deem it should know. Journalists and academics, who in America or Europe would have challenged its version of the economy by now, are loyal collaborators of the system, not its critics. So from a Japanese point of view, there is nothing immoral, unusual, or terribly difficult about misrepresenting Japan’s economic performance. In fact, because it is in the national interest, it would be unpatriotic not to.


A Crisis Invented to Fit a Theory

The idea that Japan is thriving is not so different from the received wisdom as one might think. The Western press has over the last few years been full of stories about Japan’s deep gloom, but in point of fact, the admitted state of the Japanese economy – let alone its actual state – is simply not that bad and in any other country would be producing mild expressions of concern, not brazen crowing about a crisis sufficient to force change in the fundamentals of the system.

Even the Japanese government admits that Japan is not actually declining economically, but rather growing at about 1% a year (which has ticked up to 2% since these words were first written.) This is a better performance than many other nations in recent years. So even if one accepts the official statistics, Japan is not in anything like the death-spiral that laissez-faire mythology supposes. It is, at absolute worst, accepting all the public mythology, stuck in a gentle stagnation of slow growth. And that it may now be emerging from this simulated rut (partly because the truth was getting too hard to conceal between the cranes on the Tokyo skyline) only reinforces this argument.

And this stagnation, even if one believes in it, is (or was) at the top of a very high plateau of aggregate and per-capita GNP, so Japan is hardly suffering by any reasonable international standard. It is, even according to the official figures, the second-richest country in the world. It is doing far better than other economies which get better press because they conform more closely to the globalist model of what an economy ought to be. It is a vastly richer nation, for example, than Britain, which globalist magazines like The Economist like to depict as an economic leader because it genuflects, at least in theory, to the right neoliberal theories.

Furthermore, the Japanese system is deliberately designed to contain the usual forms of economic stress that produce shocks to the political system, like inflation and unemployment, so Japan’s (quite mild, really) economic problems are miles away from having the political consequences needed to cause the radical revision of the system that see-what-they-want-to laissez-faire ideologues suppose. Is 5% unemployment, in the context of a family structure more intact than in any Western nation, a crisis? In what other nation would 5% be considered a crisis level?

Nevertheless, we are fed a neoliberal fantasy that Japan is in a state of economic crisis and that this crisis is forcing her to revise her economy to conform to the world-conquering American version of capitalism.


Penetrating the Illusion of a Failing Japan

It is not hard to see through the illusion of a failing Japan if one knows where to look. The key is to look at indicators not susceptible to manipulation by the Ministry of Finance in Tokyo. First among these are export statistics, which are hard to conceal as they show up as imports in the statistics of other nations. Some key facts, not denied by the mainstream media, that make clear that Japan’s economy is thriving:

1. Japan’s net exports for the decade of the 1990s, when she was supposedly in decline, were 240% of those in the decade of the 1980s, when everyone admits she was booming. How is this possible if her economy is falling apart? We are being asked to believe that in an export-centered economy, exports are booming and yet the economy as a whole is failing.

2. The standard of living in Japan rose significantly during the supposedly stagnant 1990’s, so that the Japanese are now among the world’s greatest buyers of high-end consumer goods of all kinds, a fact visible in the shopping districts and parking lots of every Japanese city.

3. Japan's foreign assets have continued to grow rapidly. IMF figures indicate they nearly quadrupled in the 11 years to 2000, an inevitable consequence of her relentless trade surpluses.

4. Although a declining Japanese economy would imply a declining yen, the reverse has been the case.

5. Japan is the world’s largest exporter of capital, enabling her to play the leading role in shaping the development of other nations. Americans ideologues who crow about the “spread of capitalism” ignore the fact that in large areas of the world, including its fastest growing region, East Asia, it is Japanese-style capitalism that is spreading, largely through the subsidiaries and suppliers of Japanese corporations.

6. Japan's supposed problems with its government budget are in a category all their own when it comes to misunderstanding. First, Japanese government accounting is very different from European or American government accounting, and that what have sometimes been reported as deficits are in fact surpluses. Second, although Japan’s ratio of national debt to GNP is indeed somewhat large, it is not grossly out of line with other nations whose economies are not characterized as being in crisis, and given Japan’s higher savings rate, she can finance this debt easily.

7. Western press reports about the supposed crisis in the Japanese banking system are based on the false assumption that Japan’s banks are similar to banks in the US and Europe. Because of their complex structural relationships to Japanese industry and to government, explained below, they are nothing of the kind. They have sources of stability to tide them over temporary difficulties that Western banks do not, and their rare failures cause far less disruption.


Japan’s Economic System Only Makes Sense as a Whole

The Japanese economic system does not make sense when viewed in parts, as the significance of any one part of an economy is determined by its relations with the other parts. Westerners naturally assume, when looking at one part, that it exists in a context similar to the one it would inhabit in the American capitalist economy. But in Japan, it frequently does not.

For example, the Tokyo stock market, unlike the New York one, is an economically-minor sideshow to the real action, because most capital is allocated by banks, even when they use the stock exchange as a forum to execute this. Its failure to be a real capital market is made clear by the fact that the Ministry of Finance has on occasion forced the shares of individual companies to hover at arbitrary levels for various reasons.

The key to understanding the Japanese economic system is that it is not just a system of economics, but a system of political economy. This term – Adam Smith never used the word “economics” – is an older one and enjoys the key advantage of not covertly implying that the economic system is an autonomous sphere of human activity operating, at most, within a loose cage of politically-enforced property rights. This erroneous conception tends to further the laissez-faire delusion that state power is something alien that intrudes upon economic activity from without, and that the only important economic choice is between more and less state control.


A Non-Socialist Centrally Planned Economy

Japan is something that is virtually impossible by definition within the frame of reference of neoliberal economics: a non-socialist state-directed system. To over-simplify a bit, it is a centrally-planned capitalist economy.

Neoliberal economists are dimly aware of the fact that fascist and Nazi economics were centrally-planned but not socialist, but they tend to dismiss these economic systems because of the attendant political horrors and have made precious little effort to develop rigorous theoretical accounts of how they worked. As we shall see, the Japanese system has achieved many of the things the fascists wanted.


Modeling the Japanese System

The best way to model the Japanese system is to start from the conventional models of free-market capitalism and centrally-planned socialism and discuss how it differs from both.

In order to grasp what the Japanese have done, it is worth comparing it to Western attempts to achieve the same thing. For example, the Japanese have understood that the ambition of the advocates of the “mixed economy,” like Hugh Gaitskell in the UK, to socialize the “commanding heights” of the economy, has some rational basis, in that it embodies the desirability for some government direction of the economy without a total Gosplan-style takeover.

But this aspiration was misinterpreted in classic socialism, which understood the commanding heights to be basic industries like coal, steel, and railways. The problem with this, however, is that these industries do not command anything. Important though they are, they do not constitute a lever by which the economy as a whole can be controlled; they do not issue orders to the rest of the economy which determine how it behaves. The supply of capital to business, however, does, and this is under state control in Japan. One way to think of the Japanese system is as a capitalist economy with socialized capital markets.


Capitalism Without Plutocracy

Another case in point: does capitalism require plutocrats? The classic capitalist answer is that somebody has to own productive assets with a view to maximizing their profit, some of those who do will succeed brilliantly, therefore somebody must be rich.

But the Japanese see this as wasteful, so their system is designed so that corporations, in essence, largely own themselves. Even when there are nominal outside owners, corporations are managed so that the bulk of the wealth generated by the corporation flows either to the incomes of present workers or to investment in the future competitive strength of the company, making the workers and the company itself the de facto or beneficiary owners.

Most corporate capital in Japan is owned by banks, and the banks are principally owned not by shareholders, but by other companies in the same keiretsu or industrial group. And who owns these companies? Although there are some outside shareholders, majority control is in the hands of the keiretsu’s bank and the other companies in the group. So in essence, the whole thing is circular and private ownership of the means of production has basically been put into the back seat.

Actually nationalizing the means of production would produce all the problems that led to the wave of privatizations in many nations in the last 20 years, and is unnecessary anyway. The Japanese system makes a sly mockery of both capitalism and socialism.


Forcing Growth by Forcing the Accumulation of Capital

One key way in which the Japanese system differs from American capitalism is that it squarely faces a fact that neoliberal economists admit, but tend to do nothing about:

The rate at which any economy – capitalist, socialist, feudal, fascist or what have you – can grow is dependent on how much of its production is saved and invested, rather than consumed.

America does almost nothing to increase its very low savings rate. Japan has a very high savings rate and this is a result of deliberate government policy and the lynchpin of the entire system.

How do they do it? The architects of the Japanese system understood that the socialist and communist way to produce high savings, i.e. outright confiscation of wealth, is destructive of people’s incentive to work (not to mention its other problems) so they did not implement it. They understood that by definition, savings = production – consumption, so they focused on repressing consumption.

This means, for example, deliberately restrictive zoning policies that keep Japanese houses small, and it means not having the various devices in place by which America subsidizes borrowing and makes debt easy to assume. As a result, the populace of Japan is forced to save a far higher percentage of its earnings than Americans do.

It is a mistake to attribute Japan’s savings rate, or many of its other key aspects, to “culture,” as Japan had the same culture before WWII, when her savings rate was low. It is the interaction of culture with deliberate state policies, not culture itself, that is key. The use of “culture” as a catch-all explanation by foreign analysts of Japan is an evasion of serious analysis.


Controlling the Economy by Controlling the Accumulation of Capital

The Japanese government deliberately channels savings into a limited number of financial institutions under its control simply by making sure there is nowhere else to put the money. For example, it has seen to it that the Japanese cannot just open a brokerage account at Merrill Lynch and invest their money in the American stock market.

This huge torrent of savings flows to a handful of major banks, which the government has under its thumb because banking is extremely regulated in Japan, enabling regulators at the Ministry of Finance (MOF) to crack down on any bank at any time they see it doing something they don’t want it to. So the banks are subject to the whim of the government, which then controls the economy by controlling how the banks allocate all this capital.

The net result is that the world’s second-largest pool of private investable capital is subject to the control of a few hundred elite bureaucrats in Tokyo. The leverage they exert by controlling where this capital goes is the key to all their power.


How Japan Avoids the Problems of Soviet-Style Central Planning

The real genius of this system is that it is so indirect. These MOF bureaucrats are not stupid. They have read von Hayek, watched the Soviet Union struggle, and understand perfectly well that classic Gosplan-style central planning is unworkable. So they do not even remotely attempt this.

They understand quite well that the day-to-day detailed operation of the economy is best left to the invisible hand, just like Adam Smith said. They do realize, however, as Adam Smith didn’t, that it is possible to manipulate an economy that is 99% capitalist into being, essentially, a centrally-planned economy if the state controls the right 1%. And this “right 1%” is the allocation of capital, especially big capital.

The MOF uses its stranglehold on the allocation of capital to make the banks into willing servants of its mission to control the Japanese economy. The banks, which in this respect (but not others) function similarly to the classic universal banks of Germany, handle almost all the detailed work of figuring out which companies should be loaned money and for which projects. The MOF essentially sits back, audits their performance, and rewards or punishes as appropriate.

This elitism in the MOF’s control of the Japanese economy explains why so many outside observers fail to see it at all, though if one approaches the literature on Japan with this in mind, one quickly sees which observers have grasped the game.

In the early days of the Japanese system, the government had to be more involved in the details of deciding which industries to finance, because the banks had not developed the necessary sophistication, and so a far larger role was played by the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, the famed MITI, which actually did perform the classic industrial-policy functions of picking winners et cetera. But as Japan’s private-sector banks have become more sophisticated, the need for this has diminished, and the MOF has become the key to the system. (MITI is still around, because there are some more speculative parts of the economy that the banks are not expert in and so the government still needs it sometimes.)


What is All This Capital Seeking?

As noted above, the MOF’s key role is to audit the performance of the banks in allocating capital. But what counts as performance? In a conventional capitalist system, that’s an easy question: maximizing return on capital. But in the Japanese system, this is not so.

For a start, the capital in question, although nominally privately owned, is “captive” capital in that it has nowhere else to go if it is unhappy with its return. This seemingly minor fact changes the whole dynamic of the entire economic system, because it means that capital, rather than chasing the highest return, can be made to obey political directives. Obviously, from the point of view of enriching individual investors this makes no sense, but this is not the MOF’s objective. The investors don’t have their money stolen from them – Japan is not a Marxist society – and they certainly get some return, but they do not get the maximum possible return.

What the MOF does want is to supply huge quantities of cheap capital to Japanese industry to build up its long-term productive capacity. The MOF wants capital to be paid a low return so that Japanese companies will enjoy the competitive advantage of access of cheaper capital than their European, Asian, and American competitors. In capital-intensive industries like the advanced manufacturing in which Japan specializes, this is a huge advantage.

From the MOF’s point of view, neoliberalism is designed to selfishly benefit the investors at the expense of the nation as a whole. And the investors themselves lose in the long run as their greed for high returns bleeds industry by imposing on it a high cost of capital, undermining these industries in the long run. In the Japanese analysis, the return to society as a whole of having strong industries (high wages paid, secure employment, a strong balance-of-payments) is more important than returns to individual investors, though these must be respected to some extent.


A Successful Planned Economy

The natural question a neoliberal economist asks at this point is, how can the MOF make rational capital-allocation decisions? Isn’t it an article of faith, vindicated by years of experience, that governments are bad at this and markets good?

Well, yes, which is why the MOF intervenes at only the very highest levels of this process, most of the work being done by banks and the large corporations beneath them in this hierarchical system. Banks in Japan are attached to large industrial groups called keiretsu, meaning that they are both tied into sophisticated networks of industrial expertise and have several layers of administration below them to do the detail work.

Much of the Japanese system operates similarly to similar corporate structures in the West, though it faces a deliberately altered set of incentives. Because these incentives are just a fact of life to most of the corporate managers facing them, they don’t even have to know where they came from or why. Most of the system doesn’t even know that it’s centrally-planned, and doesn’t need to.

If there is any question as to whether they have been able to make these high-level decisions correctly for the last 50 years, one has only to look at Japan’s relative economic performance, which has made her by all accounts the second-richest nation in the world and possibly soon to be the richest.

Simply put, laissez-faire theory is just plain empirically wrong: a planned economy can work. Period. Empirical facts trump abstract theories.

Unfortunately for the political left, Japan’s success equally makes a mockery of socialism, which may explain why her system has attracted so little affection in the West. It does not flatter anyone’s ideological religion, left or right.


Wall Street Works, But Isn’t It Awfully Expensive?

Essentially, the architects of the Japanese system looked at the classic capitalist economy and reached the exact same conclusion as the average member of the Western world: that most of it is rational, but that an absurdly high proportion of national income is wasted rewarding the tiny elite that performs the capital-allocation function. Wall Street types do their jobs reasonably well, but why not replace them with elite bureaucrats who will perform the same function for $90,000 a year apiece, rather than people who earn ten, or even a hundred, times that? After all, one can teach bureaucrats the same technical skills of economic analysis.

In the Japanese view, investment banking is a business which, because of its structural monopoly on extremely valuable information, tends to produce grossly excessive returns for those engaged in it. The capital allocation function is irrationally priced because the intrinsic bottlenecks of information make it impossible for new entrants to drive down returns. Therefore the market cannot be relied upon to rationally price it. Capitalism, paradoxically, is rational except at its very pinnacle.


But Aren’t All Bureaucrats Idiots?

At this point in the argument, neoliberal ideologues object in one of two ways:

1. By making some snide comment about the rule of elite bureaucrats.

An acceptable point, but one should not confuse the effectiveness of economic bureaucrats with the cultural and social mischief perpetrated by bureaucrats in other areas of government. The cold fact is that even the economies of those nations that most closely conform to neoliberalism, like the United States, are regulated by elite bureaucracies such as the Federal Reserve Bank, the Financial Accounting Standards Board, the Treasury Department, and the Interstate Commerce Commission.

2. By claiming that without paying the elite bureaucrats at the MOF huge returns directly proportional to the performance of the businesses they allocate capital to, they have no incentive to do their jobs well.

This is just empirically false. The performance of the Japanese economy shows that they do their jobs very well, and the key to this is something the architects of the Japanese political economy have understood that American economics tends to lose sight of:

Economic rewards are not the only effective incentives for economic action.


Exploiting the Power of Non-Economic Incentives

The Japanese are well aware that a successful economy requires the motivating effects of pay differentials and opportunities to accumulate private wealth. They are not living in a hippie socialist fantasy. But they have understood, as neoliberal economists, with their purely economic view of the economy, have not, that economic rewards operate in a social context and that social rewards for economic achievement can be as effective as cash.

In fact, because of the diminishing marginal utility of money, it is irrational for an economic system to rely on purely economic incentives. If all you pay people in is money, it gets awfully expensive to maintain their motivation as you go up the income scale. How much money does society have to dangle in front of a billionaire to get him to allocate another five hours a week from leisure to the work needed to run the part of the economy he owns?

That is to say, money is an efficient motivator (measured in terms of what society has to pay relative to what it gets for its money) under some circumstances, which is why we have capitalism, but inefficient under extreme conditions (which is why the Japanese deliberately limit it.) It is no accident that Japan has one of the lowest levels of economic inequality of any major nation at the same time as it has one of the most hierarchical cultures. The incomes of the top fifth of the Japanese population are only 2.9 times that of the bottom fifth, compared to 9.1 times in the US.

The income differential between a Japanese CEO and an assembly-line worker in his company is much less than in America, but the social-status difference is much greater. This does not consist in a system of static class differences not identical with economic differences, as in Britain, which the Japanese rightly see as producing class antagonisms which harm social cooperation. It consists in a dynamic social status system embodied in such oddities as the fact that Japanese grammar itself expresses the difference in status between the interlocutors, the Japanese reverence for hierarchy, and a lot else.

The Japanese have understood that what people are largely pursuing in the workplace is not so much money as the respect of the people around them, and therefore maintain a sophisticated – indeed, bizarrely over-elaborate to the Western eye – economy of respect in addition to the economy of money. They have understood that a large part of what money-seeking individuals really want is just to spend that money on purchasing social respect, though status display or whatever, so it is far more efficient to allocate respect directly.

Did you really think people as obviously intelligent as the Japanese were doing all those odd-looking bows for nothing? Sure, these behaviors are derived from tradition, but there’s a reason they kept these traditions and the West hasn’t. Interestingly, this understanding on their part of the need for unapologetic status differentials contradicts the emphasis in Western socialism on a culture of equality.

It also follows that if society is to maintain status differentials without suffering withdrawal of social cooperation due to the resulting resentment of low-status individuals, society must contain these status differentials within strong overarching sentiments of social unity. Naturally, the Japanese are famous for this, too. It all fits.


Platonic Guardians of an Eternal Japan

Why are Japan’s bureaucrats so effective? Well, an American can start by looking at those American bureaucrats who are generally conceded by most people outside the far left to be effective: the military. The two salient characteristics of the military hierarchy in the US are that it has a governing ideology of nationalism and it is motivated by non-economic rewards. Japanese bureaucrats at the MOF are the same. Like 5-star generals, they are no more than reasonably paid, but their real reward is in the form of status: they are recognized everywhere as outranking people hundreds of times richer than they are. They can demand to be recognized as equals by anyone in their society and as superiors by all but a few.

Plato would have recognized such men as Platonic guardians, who were produced in his Republic by a process the Tokyo University men who run Japan would recognize: an elite education, followed by long apprenticeship and combined with relative material asceticism, ruthless scrutiny by the other guardians, a tight in-group esprit de corps, and a guiding ideology of nationalism. Anyone who knew the pre-1960s Jesuits will also understand what is going on here.


The Long Time Horizon

One of the key advantages of Japan’s system is that it enables the imposition of an exceptionally-long time horizon on economic decision-making. Few American corporations think more than 5 years ahead; the Japanese routinely think 15 years ahead and the architects of the system obviously thought 50 years ahead. Because capital is allocated, at the end of the day, by MOF bureaucrats and not impatient shareholders and mutual funds, there is no pressure for short-term returns. MOF bureaucrats know they will be judged by whether they succeed in building up Japanese industry in the long term, so this is what they aim for.


What Does it Mean to Build up Industry?

The key thing the Japanese have understood, which America, among others, has forgotten, is that a nation’s long-term ability to pay high wages to its citizens depends on its having a strong position in monopoly industries. Monopoly industries are industries that have the strongly-entrenched competitive positions that enable them to charge superior prices on the world market. Boeing and Microsoft are the classic examples in the USA.

The core Japanese belief is that the benefits to society at large – in the terms of classical economics the positive externalities – of having these industries are so large that the free market on its own will misprice their value and not produce enough of them. Therefore it is rational for government to artificially direct capital into them, whether or not they produce the best short-term return to investors.


The Usefulness of Cartels

If one’s objective is a strong competitive position for the industry as a whole, cartels immediately recommend themselves as a means to this end. Cartels are a device of industrial policy that has essentially been repudiated by neoliberal economics, for two reasons:

1. Within a neoliberal framework, profits from a cartel will just be captured by private interests, so there is no public interest in allowing them.

2. Neoliberal economics has an a priori obsession with vindicating free competition as the best policy.

Because the Japanese system, as noted above, forces the profits of monopoly industries into either paying its workers well or building up the industry so it can do so in future, reason #1 is inoperative, and reason #2 simply never interested them. Once one has these two factors out of the way, the many benefits of cartels can be tapped into:

1. They enable the individual firms in a monopoly industry to avoid fratricidal competition that would only benefits foreign customers, not the Japanese producers.

2. They enable the extraction of additional investment capital from the domestic consumer market by imposing higher prices.

3. They enable scale economies in research and development and standards-setting, crucial advantages in high technology.

4. They enable Japanese industry to avoid bidding wars in buying foreign technology and raw materials.

5. They enable Japanese industry to share out scarce sales in times of recession, avoiding bankruptcy of weaker firms. Naturally, these firms will pay a price in terms of losing control and will be whipped into shape, but they, and their workers, will not incur the traumas and layoffs of bankruptcy.

6. By enabling government-led control of prices and profits, they enable the government to pump in subsidies to favored industries with the confidence that these will go to building up the industry and not simply “wasted” as private profits to the shareholders.

Naturally, the Japanese are wise enough to the benefits of some competition that they don’t simply agglomerate entire industries into “national champions,” as several European nations have sometimes tried to do. A regulated cartel delivers the best of both worlds.


Manipulating Corporate Behavior Through Corporate Structure

Japan’s key banks each sit at the apex of a pyramid of cross-shareholding companies called a keiretsu. This has a number of important consequences, each coordinate with the overall aims of the system.

1. Because each keiretsu links companies with their upstream suppliers and downstream customers, this biases customer-supplier relationships towards long-term relationship-based, rather than short-term transaction-based, profit-seeking. The former is a key advantage in high-tech industries in which companies must make huge irrecoverable investments in research and development that will only pay off if they can count on stable relationships with customers and suppliers. Compare this to the American bias in favor of short-term business relationships, a bias that then leads to short-term business thinking that is mutually-reinforcing.

2. The keiretsu system helps force companies to select their suppliers from within the keiretsu, not from foreign companies who may offer lower bids. Although this is superficially inefficient, because it deactivates the “exit” option American-style companies have in their dealings with their suppliers, it is in the long term efficient because it enhances the “voice” option Japanese companies have to enlist the aid of the entire keiretsu in whipping an underperforming supplier into shape.

3. Because each keiretsu contains within itself companies in a wide range of industries, the bank at its apex can draw on a wide range of reliable and proprietary expertise concerning appropriate allocations of capital.

4. Because each company in the keiretsu is on a leash to its bank, policies that the bank (puppet of the Ministry of Finance) wants imposed, can be. For example, policies to keep desirable high-value-added jobs in Japan. When Japanese jobs move to China, they are jobs that the MOF wants Japan to shed so her workforce can move up into ones with higher value-added and thus higher sustainable incomes. Naturally, pressure from the bank alone isn’t enough to bring this about, and this policy depends on all the other policies that combine to make it economically feasible to pay Japanese wages for these jobs.

5. Because the keiretsus in effect create a monopsony for the purchase of elite executive labor, they can avoid the problem that American companies have of getting into expensive bidding wars for executive talent. This helps drive down economic inequality without all the problems of redistributing income through taxation. The emphasis in Japan on teamwork and consensus decision-making also helps prevent the accumulation of valuable proprietary knowledge inside any one head, which would then have excessive leverage to extract wealth.


Taking State Capitalism Seriously

State capitalism (of one degree and structure or another) is not unique to Japan. What is unique to Japan, or taken to its greatest extreme there, is serious thinking-through of what state capitalism means and what is required to make it work.

The French government, for example, would dearly love to be able to order companies to keep their plants in France open to serve its full-employment goals. But, consciously or unconsciously infected with a socialist class-struggle mentality, it considers the cost of doing this “the company’s problem,” not its own, with the predictable result that it barks orders at companies that simply cannot afford to do what the government wants them to.

The Japanese government, by contrast, understands that if it expects companies to provide full employment, it must provide them the wherewithal to achieve sustainable competitive advantage, and it does so by guaranteeing them a supply of cheap capital, as explained above, by protecting them from foreign competition, and by other means.


Sustainable Competitive Advantage In Hard Industries

I have thus far only described Japan’s economy in the abstract. The concrete consequence of her policies is an emphasis on advanced manufacturing as a sector, because:

1. Advanced manufacturing is that sector which is most able to pay sustainably high wages to ordinary workers.

2. Advanced manufacturing is that sector which is most susceptible, because of the proprietary know-how involved, to the acquisition of sustainable competitive advantage.

3. Advanced manufacturing is that sector whose produce is most exportable, a key consideration for a nation that must import most of its raw materials and energy.


Lifetime Employment Aligns Incentives

Japan’s famed lifetime employment system for core workers seems to the neoliberal eye inefficient, as it supposedly interferes with efficient hiring and firing. But it has a key benefit in a system designed around maximizing long-term rather than short-term success: it aligns the interests of the worker and the company to a much greater degree than under a hire-and-fire system. (Of course, Japanese companies have ways of disciplining bad employees short of firing them.) And since their long-term orientation leads to an emphasis on maintaining sales, not profits, in slack times, they tend to avoid the layoff cycles that Western companies endure.

Lifetime employment also gives companies an incentive to invest in giving their workers expensive technical training, since they know the workers won’t just jump to a competitor once they have it. Since a highly-trained workforce is one of the absolute keys to success in any advanced sector of the economy, this is very important. And lifetime employment forces executives at the company to care about its long-term success, rather than just to pump the company for quick profits during the few years they are there.

Furthermore, the architects of the Japanese system understand that as a sociological and political matter, providing lifetime security to a core group of male “breadwinner” workers confers stability to society as a whole, especially when combined with a traditional male-dominated society that has stronger inter-generational obligations (to care for the old, for example) than most contemporary Western nations.


Ending the Marxist Curse of Alienation

Lifetime employment helps nourish the emotional bond between the worker and the company, which is also expressed by such things, which seem silly to Western eyes, as company songs. These make perfect sense within the context of Japanese culture.

Americans tend to forget that Marx wrote so much about alienation, (which we tend to associate with teenagers with purple hair, not with serious economic questions) for a reason: he saw this as the key psychological phenomenon, in the head of the individual proletarian, that makes him a revolutionary. Alienation is important.

The Japanese were acutely aware of the Marxist challenge to capitalism, and they internalized this problem by taking seriously the elimination of alienation. The West really has not, choosing to smother it with consumerism while doing nothing about the phenomenon itself, resulting in the central weirdness of Western culture since the 1960s: the fact that our culture, from rock music to academia, is centered on the institutionalization of rebellion.

Unsurprisingly, Japan had no “60s” on our scale, and maintains levels of traditional morals (their traditions, remember, not ours) and deference to authority that remind most Americans and Europeans of the 1950s. This achievement is under certain stresses, as Japan is not immune to the corrosive forces of modernity any more than any other society, but it remains intact to a remarkable degree.


Fascism Without the Fascism

If the use of non-economic incentives sounds familiar, it is because the last time this issue was seriously addressed in the West in the context of a modern economy was by Peter F. Drucker in his 1940 book The End of Economic Man, which discussed how the Nazi system was based on creating a non-economic power structure to resolve the social conflicts that had been irresolvable within capitalist European society. This, in his view, was the sick genius of Nazism and the reason it had been able to come within a hair’s breadth of creating a world-conquering social system.

The political economy described above is the product of thinking that originated among Japan’s colonial bureaucrats entrusted with the industrialization of Japan’s colony of Manchuria in the 1930’s. They published their Economic New Structure Manifesto in 1940 as a result of their experience of the inefficiency of traditional capitalism as a development strategy. In the short run, the elite Zaibatsu capitalists of Japan vetoed their ideas, but in the long run, partly as a result of the American occupation’s assault on the big property owners, a product of their New Dealers’ conviction that industrial concentration was an abettor of fascism, they were able to triumph.

One way to describe the Japanese achievement is to say that they have achieved what the Nazis wanted to achieve but didn’t, largely of course because they were mad serial killers obsessed with a lot of things other than economics. Ironically, Asiatic Japan comes closer than any nation on earth to what Hitler wanted. It is a socially conservative, hierarchical, technocratic, orderly, pagan, sexist, nationalist, racially pure, anti-communist, non-capitalist and anti-Semitic society.

Of course, it would be unfair to describe contemporary Japan as Nazi-like in any of the senses that are notorious (though one cannot help observing that she has never been contrite about her WWII actions the way Germany has.) More correctly, the architects of the Japanese system learned from their disastrous experience in WWII that the kind of society they wanted could not be achieved through a totalitarian predator-state and they calculated that it could be achieved through the forms, though not the content, of liberal democracy, which is how Japan presents itself.


The Japanese Model Makes Democracy (Almost) Irrelevant

One of the consequences of Japan’s long-term orientation that is least palatable to the Western liberal mind is that it has the effect of making democracy almost superfluous. The reason is simple: if the objective of the government is the long-term well-being of the nation, the means to this end have already been figured out, and execution has been entrusted to a bureaucracy with a track-record of success, then there is very little for democracy to do. What is there for the elected representatives of the people to debate? Particularly since serious debate about these questions turns on economic expertise they do not possess.

As a result, the Japanese Diet is essentially relegated to the “Tammany Hall” functions of a democracy: interceding with the bureaucrats on behalf of individual citizens and co-opting potential troublemakers by dispensing corruption. In fact, the bureaucrats, who control the spigot that dispenses the grease, like to keep the elected officials corrupt so that they can be disciplined at any time by the threat of running to the police. As a result, the supposed “democracy” in Japan is a trivial and compliant rubber stamp for the bureaucratic elite, who operate under enabling laws that give them the legal basis to do as they see fit. Since anyone seriously interested in running the country went into the bureaucracy long ago, there are few representatives in the Diet with any inclination to challenge this system, which gives them the perks and popularity that elected officials really want.


Japan is not Really a Liberal Democracy

In terms of the fundamentals of contemporary political philosophy, the key issue this all raises is whether Japan has refuted the idea that running an advanced society requires freedom. This assumption, which is not without evidence, is the absolute cornerstone of the contemporary Western assumption that the increasing economic development of the world may be presumed to have an ultimately benign political outcome. It impinges on a whole host of crucial issues too numerous to discuss here.

Japan has preserved, of course, the nominal forms of liberal democracy. But she has systematically drained them of content, just as she has drained capitalist institutions like the stock exchange of content. But if these forms are not necessary to the system, then both Peter F. Drucker, who has argued that an advanced society must be a free society, and Francis Fukuyama, who has argued that liberal democracy is the ultimate state of human ideological evolution, are wrong. The significance of this is incalculable.

Japan is thus a far more important example of the famous Asian “soft-authoritarian” model made famous by Singapore, and the challenge of this model is far more profound than people realize. This is particularly so given that China is desperately trying to construct a sustainable regime without risking the national disintegration that she quite reasonably fears attempted democracy would cause.


Theoretical Implications

Not only has economic history not stopped, but the range of alternatives exceeds the conventionally assumed one between capitalism and socialism. Perhaps the Japanese system is capitalism of a sort, but if so, it is a capitalism in which private capital is not the dominant organizing principle of the economy, so I would dispute this.

As nationalists, the Japanese only want their system to serve them and have no interest in winning ideological arguments. They will not make significant efforts to disabuse foreigners of their economic theories, especially when these theories make foreign nations accept their trade surpluses.

Japan’s economic achievement refutes the proposition that neoliberalism is the only route to economic success. This does not mean, however, than all neoliberal theory is false. Clearly, within rationally-defined limits, much of it is true.


Practical Implications

This does not all mean that nations setting economic policies can ignore neoliberal prescriptions willy-nilly and expect not to pay a price. The Japanese system is a sophisticated construct that requires some of the world’s most skilled economic managers. Outsmarting capitalism is not a game for amateurs.

The Japanese system is a system, so one cannot just copy any piece of it and expect it to work outside its original context. But some pieces depend upon things that are sufficiently similar in other economies that they are plausibly imitable. For example:

1. Any nation can usefully increase its savings rate, not necessarily by Japan’s means.

2. Any nation can prop up working-class wages by not importing cheap foreign labor.

3. Advanced nations can benefit from carefully relaxing anti-cartel laws to allow cooperative R&D, as in the Sematech consortium in the US.

Other policies, like lifetime employment and cartel price-fixing, would clearly be a disaster if simply imposed, because they need constraints supplied by the rest of the system to ensure that the benefits are socially diffused and not just captured by narrow interests.

The lynchpin of the system, politicized capital allocation, probably cannot work in a democracy, as it would just result in plants being built in the districts of powerful parliamentarians and would not make investments whose payoff exceeded one election cycle. Naturally, kleptocratic oligarchies wouldn’t be good at it either; politicized capital allocation is only likely to work under highly Platonic systems like the MOF. And even then, there is no guarantee: power still corrupts and one can easily imagine such a system becoming inbred and perverse. Japan’s achievement is an empirical fact, not a guarantee to all eternity.

Other policies fall in between the imitable and the inimitable, like the emphasis on advanced manufacturing, an extremely complex topic.

Still other policies, like protectionism, can only be rationally evaluated in the context of a general debate on the topic of which the Japanese case is but an important part.

Pretty Lame ASCII Christmas Tree I Made:

---*---
--o*o--
-o*o*o-
o*o*o*o
---|---
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A pretty lame ASCII Christmas Tree I made. Since the fonts are variable length fonts, it doesn't come out straight!

So the moral of this story?

Bah Humbug!

What do you Classify this Person?

I just had a talk with my little bro's friend who just came back from USA. One of the curious topics we talked about is when he told me about one of his most colorful teachers at his University.

Before I go into a little more detail on what it was about, let me recap a few terms.

First of all, if a person is a homosexual, and the guy likes a guy, we call that a gay. If a person is a homosexual and the gal likes the gal, we consider that to be lesbian. A heterosexual is the normal classification by most people's classification. We consider people who like both sexes to be bisexual. Another type of classification that is in rage at the moment is what we call metrosexual which are males with a strong aesthetic sense who spends a great deal of time and money on his appearance and lifestyle. Other type of sexual classification are people who are transexual. These people undergo sex change operation so that they can feel more secure by being the same sex physically as they are mentally - by the usage of surgery to correct a few "physical organs". This though caused a few problems as its hard to classify them as either a he or a she, in which I'll leave this discussion for later. The last variation of classification of sexual orientation that I want to discuss are what people call "she-male" or people who have both Male/Female characteristics. That means most of these "she-males" are technically male, but have some sex change operation that are usually limited to the addition of breast to the male body but retaining the bottom part. These group of people are usually bisexual in nature, and are considered a rather strange breed of sexually confused people.

Anyway, I'm not going to debate about the moral issues of being sexually different, but I just have a hard time keeping up with the classification system with so many types of people coming out of the closet. Anyone with suggestions with this?

What happens if a man feels he is a woman trapped in male body and decides to go for a sex change operation. After the operation, the new person felt comfortable as a she. However after many failed dates with males, she suddenly feels the urge for a female partner not a male partner and then goes off with a female partner.

Is it a transexual that decided to be lesbian? Or do we consider it to be a heterosexual who happen one of the partner to be transexual? Hmm... What do we consider this type of people to be? Or is there a new term for the classification of these people? Just curious...

Drafting my New Year Resolution

In today's blog I wanted to post about one of the New Year resolution I plan to promise myself to do with the up and coming New Year.

The first resolution I've planned is to live a more healthy lifestyle. After graduation, I had this nasty habit of staying all-nighters working on projects making me develop a love for fatty snacks and softdrink during the late and early hours. After I've started to sleep earlier, the habit persisted, and I just can't seem to stay away from them. Though eating some snacks or softdrink is okay, I found that lately I've been consuming insane amounts of softdrink and sweets, that I've suddenly felt its a good time to change.

A very good indicator would be my body weight. I am about 175 cm tall, so the highest weight I should be would be about 75 kg. After graduation, I was about 50 kgs. During the years I've been gaining weight like 5kg per year, and just a while ago, I've been hovering around the 75 kg mark, which is the threshold of what weight I should fix myself to. I believe the weight bloat has been caused by constant munching and softdrinks.

The second resolution is to exercise more regularly. At the moment, I've been exercising very little. The saving grace is that I usually walk alot, in an average day, the transit from my home to the bus stop is about 5km walk, so it does count as good exercise. However, I'm planning to turn back to more intensive exercise with sports like basketball or tennis. The safest way to lose weight and maintain a healty lifestyle is to eat normally, but exercise more. Some people who use pills or Atkin's diet run into serious health problems after weight lost, and that is not one that I'm planning to do.

Anyway, I've been working on these two resolutions already for about a month or so. I've limited my softdrink (sugary drinks) to about a glass a day from 3-4 glasses before and cut down alot of the snacks - which includes icecream after lunch - which has been a usual habit for years. Talking about it, yesterday, I went to the International Jazz Festival, and I didn't even had a drop of alcohol or softdrink!

The result? I'm feeling alot better physically, and I'm down to 72.5 kg. Not bad, 2.5 kg in a month, and being fitter in the process!

Oh well, thinking about it, I guess I should think of some other resolution for this New Year and do it for the betterment of myself and hopefully also this world :)

Why Post Count Is Not Updating

A few blogs ago, I was complaining that my post count and word count hasn't increased since I changed my template since last November. After that I've tried a few things - including changing the template back, editing the template, doing a few hacks, and none of this managed to fix that problem.

It was only up until today that I finally figured what went wrong when I went to the Blogger Support page and checked on Known Issues.


Pretty embarrasing for me I do have to admit :P

Known Issues
This is a list of currently-known Blogger bugs/issues (and workarounds, if available). We hope to fix all of them in time, so thanks for your continued patience!

- In Mac versions of Internet Explorer, certain buttons are not appearing, such as the buttons for signing in, creating accounts and blogs, and saving profiles. The best thing to do until we fix this is to simply use a different browser, such as Safari or Firefox. For cases like signing in or saving a profile, you can also just press Return to submit the form.
- Stats collection has been temporarily turned off, so you will not see your post count increasing on your dashboard or profile. We plan to restore this functionality in the short term but have needed to stop collecting the information for now in order to stabilize the database servers.

Coming out of Retirement to Play Starkingdoms

During the last few years, I've been playing a quirky text based game called Starkingdoms as a way to quickly waste time when I'm online. I practically got addicted as the game promoted player to player interaction over power leveling which I liked alot. However, after a few years, and practically accomplishing much I've set up to do, I've quit the game and went into retirement.

A few weeks ago, two of my RL friends (Bic and Badee) decided to play the game. Since they are in need of some guidance, I thought maybe its a good time to rejoin the group and play the game. I hope I'm not too rusty, but I'll report how this forray amounts to :)

Anyway, related with an earlier blog, perfume does make mosquitoes go away! Now I've got a new mosquito repellent ;)

Interesting Ways to Cheat in A Computer Exam

On Sunday, I was one of the proctors involved in proctoring for a computer programming course. In this course, we have regular lab exams - which is a big change from before when we based most of our scoring on paper based examination. This is a better gauge of a student's programming ability as we can check how they can do problem solving with real compilers instead of imagining things up and writing their program in paper.

Though this has been a big advantage, I do want to point out that there are many challenges that are faced with holding regular computer examination and there would be many interesting ways they plan to cheat.

A few years ago on my first lab exam proctoring, I've noticed alot of students attempted to use the Internet by using email/chat clients/ftp servers to share their answers. Some of the traditional methods such as using floppies and thumb-drives to copy work is also used. With that earlier observations, we have concluded before this exam that we are going to disconnect the Internet Connection by blocking all outgoing connections to the internet.

At first it seems that this approach is good, but fortunately early on the exam, we had figured that some of the students had strange configuration in the computers. What we noticed was they were using the Network Sharing and they just simply shared the whole drive of their computer. As the computers are accessible in the local network, we found out early that the students have yet found another creative idea in how to cheat in our lab exam again.

So without further hesitation, we just simply pulled out every single RJ45 cables from the computer before any damage could have been done.

Concluding in this lesson we proctors have learnt that many of the students will always find creative ways to cheat in their exams but will smirk at the thought of studying and practicing hard for it.

Oh well... Just a short tale to share to all of us readers. I'm flaberghasted at the thought of this.

and let me just share one of the examples that we proctors have concluded as one likely case scenario.

How to Twart Mosquitos?

Yesterday, in the common room, I had a discussion with my brothers about mosquitos. I was rather mad because I had a dozen or so mosquito bites divided between my arm to my legs - with very big red bitemarks that frighten alot of people when I shown the pictures. My little brother was bit a few times and he complained alot. My bigger bro, said nothing and told there weren't any mosquitos in the room.

After a short talk, we suddenly came up with the discussion of how to twart mosquitos. One of the common methods used were like DDT or anti-mosquito potions that can be applied to the skin - which campers usually use. However those earlier solutions are toxic, and hardly anything we want to be exposed in a long run. We later came to ask on the case of body smell and its relationship with the amount of mosquito bites. I had the most bites, and the last bath I had was in the morning. My little brother just had a bath, and he had a few bites. However my elder brother disproved this hypothesis as he took a baht during the afternoon, and way before my little brother. Body smell doesn't seem to directly be lated with the frequency of the bite. On an interesting note, we just noticed our brother was laced with colonge which was still strong after he came back from eating with his friends. My little brother doesn't use much colonge, and I don't use it as I am rather uncomfortable and somewhat allergic to strong unnatural smells (such as perfume/colonge).

After some small deliberation, I concluded that it may be possible that colonge/perfume could serve as a good deterrant against mosquitos, and currently I'm starting my experiment on that. In a few more weeks, I'll write again to figure if that works.

Angels Photographed?

Another article about strange spiritual photographs. As usual I do feel rather unconvinced by them. Let me tell you the reason why I always remain rather skeptical to spiritual photographs:

I'm a amateur photographer. I do want to point that sometimes the film I use have defects, and some of the film are not perfect, so they show strange dustmarks/streaks when developed.

One other note is that taking pictures in darkness, it tends to have many strange effects due to how the film reacts to light at dark places, and does show many strange behaviors.

I also learnt about taking multiple exposure pictures that will allow me to superimpose pictures on the same frame, and with a little creativity, I can really make interesting pictures.

I've also learnt that alot of miracles people claim to see captured on film are much more on the person's imagination. Like one local example, one person claimed that he saw spirits because his camera captures strange auras when photographing a religious event. It turned out to be that the aura was caused by excessive dust particles that were exagerated with the light system set up for the fair.

I would suggest more study on the picture before drawing to any conclusions. People are imaginative people, and this is the reason why we should approach these things with reason than to quickly join the bandwagon like a herd of cow.

The Great MP3 Collection

During the last weekend, I was down for a count with a very bad case of stomache flu and vomitting. Pretty nasty stuff.

Though I was really unproductive through the weekend, I just decided to start my long process in converting all my CD collections into MP3. Though it mights sound absurd, but I just can't stand changing the CD from the CD/MP3 player at home. I think 7 hours of non-stop music in MP3 would certainly be better as I don't have to move my lazy bum to change the CD ;)

Anyway I don't support piracy, I buy license CDs. Though I don't like the recording industry and organiziations like RIAA, its unfortunate that the only way we can pay the artists that create these great music is by buying the original CDs. Do your part. If you listen to MP3 of artists that you like, don't hestitate to buy the original CD. I think that the MP3 revolution certainly has given the choice back to the consumers by allowing customers to really sample the album before buying which is a good step forward. Gone are the days in which the music industry can package 10 crummy along with 1 good single and expect it to sell.

I don't want to go to deep lengths today about the reasons and rationale why you should or should not buy those CDs - its partly got to do with a foul mood from a weekend of illness. Hopefully things will turn up for the better and I can start to get back into doing something serious.

Vocal about Your Relgion?

I've been engaged in a rather heated debate with a few other forum members and real life people in a number of topic which sparked huge exchange of viewpoints. One of the things that evoked the most response was when we were presented with a question - how much show of your own faith is in good sense?

In our modern society with many major religions vying for higher number of membership, we see a number of establishments engaging in various forms of media advertisement. Related to the earlier question, what type of recruitment strategy would be adequate and not deem excessive?

If you have been taken in by a certain religious faith, how much should you profess your belief of your own faith to friends and family members? Should you actively campaign and ask them to join you, or should you be less proactive, and let things go its course?

Your are your feedbacks on this issue?

Something Wrong with the Post and Word Count

On an interesting note, I've just noticed my post and word count isn't updated in Blogger as it should. Might be something wrong. I guess it got to do with my template variation, but I'm not sure, I'm going to double check again to see what is wrong in a short while.

Low Softdrink Diet

I would like to point out a few things about my previous diet. Normally, every day I would drink about 4 bottles of softdrink everyday. I would have a bottle of Ice Tea in the morning. During the lunch, I usually like to cap off 2 bottles of softdrink, which may include Coke and another drink. In the evening I would like to order one more. To cap off, I usually drink around 4 x 280 cc of softdrink everyday. That makes up to 1120 cc of softdrink. That was a typical day.

Anyway, I was just watching this documentary called Super Size Me which suddenly make me rethink some of my diet. After seeing through the film, I started to be rather alarmed with the massive amount of sugar that was consumed - which came mainly from the softdrinks that was consumed every day. I've noticed that about 5% of the softdrink is sugar which means that I consume about 56 grams of sugar from softdrinks alone! That doesn't include the amount of tea, coffee, cakes, sweets, and other stuff I eat on a daily basis. Thinking about it, I think one of the reason why lately I've been rather easily tired and irritatable is partly due to excessive amount of sugar in my body.

I decided that from today onwards, I am planning to cut sugar consumption especially from Softdrinks to a minimum level. I want to notice if there would any change on disposition or health in any way - and hopefully it would be for the better. Whatever happens I'll post it in this blog again.

Psychological Foundations of Religious Belief

Here is one very interesting article I found in the SK General forum, so I decided to post it here as it does have a few interesting theories here:

Psychological Foundations of Religious Belief

UBC Professor Ara Norenzayan probes the psychological foundations of religious belief in his research. At issue, how and why people believe in the supernatural.

Sigmund Freud, possibly the world’s most famous psychologist, argued in his book Civilizations and Its Discontent that religious belief ought to be classified as a mass delusion.

While much of Freud’s writing has been left behind, his dismissal of religion persists in much of academia today. In what became known as the "secularization hypothesis," many academics believed that religious belief would die off as society became more advanced.

Professor Ara Norenzayan, a social psychologist at UBC, is out to show that religious belief still has a powerful effect on those who believe. Armed with $105,000 over three years from Canada’s granting body, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), Norenzayan is using psychological experiments to show how and why people believe in the supernatural.

"The idea is that, with the growth of science and technology and affluent societies, religions have become less and less powerful," says Norenzayan, who came to UBC in 2002 from the University of Illinois.

"Many great thinkers in social sciences, from Hume to Freud, have speculated that, as people become more exposed to science and their lives get better economically, religion would become less of a grip on people’s minds. Except, it seems that all the evidence shows that that is not the case."

Indeed, with the religious overtones to violence in Iraq, Palestine and Israel, as well as countless other places, the grasp that religion wields on contemporary society is still very potent. But while religious belief can lead some to kill, Norenzayan believes religion can also motivate people to dedicate their lives to humanitarian causes.

"I am most interested in the question of why is it that some aspects of religiosity lead to hatred, violence, war, [while] other aspects of equally strong religiosity may lead to peaceful, tolerant kinds of attitudes towards the world."

He cites a recent study by Jeremy Ginges — a researcher at his alma mater, the University of Michigan — that looked at support for suicide bombers in the Palestinian Territories. What the study found was that support for bombings was related to the frequency with which a person attended mosque, but unrelated to how often a person prayed at home.

"It goes to show, in a very important social issue like this, that these kinds of questions are very important to learn about," he says. "It’s the communal aspect of religion which seems to be much more the issue and not the devotional side."

Norenzayan’s research has already looked at this issue. One particular study, conducted with graduate student Ian Hansen in Canada and Malaysia using Buddhist, Christian and Muslim university students, studied at different forms of religiosity. He found two distinct types: devotion, or faith, and religious exclusivity, or how much people privileged their own religion over others. He found that devotion promoted tolerance, whereas exclusivity, not surprisingly, led to intolerance.

He mentions a quote by prominent British biologist Richard Dawkins who once argued that, along with the atomic bomb, the belief in God was one of the greatest dangers to world peace.

"What I would say to Dawkins is, it’s not the belief in God that seems to be the culprit — it’s something else. It’s the social cohesion aspect of religion that gets entangled in real life with the belief in God, but that belief — in and of itself — does not seem to be the origin of the connection between religion and intolerance."

Another study that Norenzayan conducted asked: what psychological factors motivate the belief in supernatural agents? He set out to prove that, at a fundamental level, religious belief was tied to a fear of death.

"In a series of studies," he says, "we found reliable evidence that the more you remind people of death, the more likely they would be to say they believe in God, the more likely they are to say that they’re religious."

More striking was Norenzayan’s findings in regards to people’s openness to belief systems from other religions. While he concedes that atheists remained unfazed, Christians, for example, were more willing to believe in Buddha and ancestor spirits.

"The reason this is very striking is that this shows that the connection between thoughts of death and belief in a supernatural world is not simply identification with your own culture," he says. "There seems to be an openness to the supernatural that is triggered by the thoughts of death… In a strange way, it is an interesting and hopeful finding that people could become temporarily open-minded about other worldviews."

Norenzayan has several more years of research planned for this topic. His next goal is to study religious fundamentalism, for which he plans on traveling to parts of the world where radical religious movements are thriving.

He says a big factor in his move to UBC was the University’s position as a leader in the growing field of cultural psychology. "My interests are in understanding how is it that individual psychology relates to the larger collective processes in which people live," he says.

"For a long time psychologists weren’t involved in understanding or studying culture or cultural differences, assuming that psychological processes are universal anyway. Now there is a growing movement in psychology to acknowledge and examine these issues and UBC is one of the centres of this field."

Shame on Advertisers !

I just can't help but be exasperated at the tendacity of marketers to market their products every way possible that at times its really tasteless. Here is one example on how they are using Blogger to advertise their products: homeloans

... Pretty shameless advertising isn't it?

Metal Gear Solid 3

I just found out the next episode of one of my favorite game series, Metal Gear Solid 3 is finally out. Just to make a long matter short, bye bye world. I've got to rescue this world for the next few days and can't be disturbed ;)

Role Model ?????

I'll translate some of the major points in the news report posted above just incase one of the international viewers decided to visit:

Joy, one of the pair from the popular and sexy duo Triumph Kingdom, that used to hit the airwaves in Thailand many years ago, was caught in polic sting operation as an agent selling amphetamines.

Sigh... I always used to remind myself other than the glitzy life they live, movie stars and singers make very bad role models in general. Other than a few socially responsible stars such as Bono of U2 (pictured below), I suppose I find that most of them are aloof and rather cynical in nature. Talking about it, another popular local singer - Mos, who has a clean boy image, was awarded an anti-drug award for his contribution to the Thai society in the fight against drugs. On an interesting follow-up, a few years later, he was featured prominently in one of the advertisements for those energy-drinks - which is considered as a type of drug. Ironic isn't it?





Thinking about it, I guess I'll just leave this latest ramble as it is, and wait for people to flame me for making cynical remarks about their role models in general ;)

Paper Crane for Peace?

During the last few days, I was surprised to see so many people I know suddenly out of the blue been folding paper cranes like the picture I've posted below:





In our society where many of the younger generation choose to enjoy going to department stores, going to movies, playing video games, and other modern joys, its strange to see alot of people going back to the fine arts of paper folding or origami. Anyway, I've just got to the bottom of it when I just finally figured that this fad happened because our government annouced a peace initiative in which they will fold paper cranes inorder to show that they are trying to find a peaceful solution to the trouble southern provinces. In part of the speech, our PM made a reference to air-dropping all the paper cranes made by the rest of the country over Southern Thailand.

As usual, as being a rather skeptical person to unpractical ideas, I'll explain why this is not desirable. The first issue I want to raise is that air-lifting paper cranes over the southern border is dangerous to people living below the airdrops. I remembered distinctively about a newspaper report about the US airforce air dropping reasons to turn against the Talibans in Afganistan, in which they mentioned that some of the airdrop were done in densely populated areas in which some of these make-shift homes where literally destroyed by the weight of the paper stacked on the roof collapsing the whole structure. The second major issue I do want to raise is that air-dropping tons of paper cranes will pose a serious problem of litter down south as people has to clean up the mess from all the paper cranes. The last issue that I want to raise is that I do think it would be more well worth if the people in Bangkok would engage in recycling used paper instead of using paper in this rather wasteful show of support. However as typical to the current regime, I've learn to be rather tolerant of such media circus, and I'm not that cynical considering this one has the least dent on the tax-payer's money compared with many of the earlier policies implemented before.

Seriously I think there are many other ways of showing support. Holding mass peace rallies is one example. Having different institutes do collective petitions for peace and understanding is another cheap way to get it started. There are so many ways to show support, and I wonder why its all about paper cranes? Maybe I'm just out of touch with the current trends and fashion, but oh well, that is my viewpoint on this issue.

Anyway, I do think the show of love by our brothers and sisters in our country should help make the life down south more tolerable as it shows that no matter what the government, the police, the army, and all the seperatists are doing, the people of Thailand are still the people of Thailand, and it would take more than just a group of misguided gung-ho group of seperatists and terrorisms to divide this land.

Duo Language

Yesterday when I was strolling back home from the Silom area (a business hub where there are lots of foreigners) I happen to stumble upon a very interesting exchange between a fruit vendor and a farang (slang for foreigner).

I'll transcribe the conversation here:

*The Farang walks towards the fruit vendor*

Fruit Vendor (in broken English): What do you want?
Farang (in Thai): เอา Papaya (I want papaya)


*The Fruit Vendor looks confused. The Farang then points at the papaya*

Farang (in Thai): เท่าไร? (How much?)
Fruit Vendor (in English): Ten Baht.

*Transaction takes place*

The funny part about this exchange is that if you didn't notice, the Thai fruit vendor was trying very hard to converse in the English language, but the Farang in the inverse was trying to speak the native tongue to the vendor which lead to a rather odd converstion I have to conclude ;)