July 18, 2016

Well, the Turkey coup has fizzled out. I was initially rooting for it to succeed, but the ramifications would have been worse if it had, at least globally, and Erdogan's recent peace overtures to Russia would have been undone. But spare a thought for the poor soldiers: you are ordered to take your tanks to the streets, probably being told it's just a drill, you encounter protesters on the streets who, well, protest, and you hold your fire in spite of the provocations; realizing the true situation, you surrender to the civilians, and end up suffering indignities such as getting beaten up, or, even worse, lynched. And, if you haven't been lynched, probably facing a death sentence anyway.

Pop quiz: how do you put together, in a span of 24 hours, a list of 2700 or so judges who were involved in the coup attempt? Answer: You don't, you simply pull out the list of dissidents you had put together in the preceding weeks and months and use the Allah-given opportunity to get rid of them.

The Hindu chimes is as usual with its hemming and hawing. My late father--and others of his generation--had a colourful Tamil phrase, vazha vazha kozha koza (wishy washy), to describe The Hindu. The paper is still living up to this deserved reputation.

Speaking of The Hindu's opinions, I've always been at a loss as to how best to characterize this, notwithstanding the above apt phrase. Then it hit me: Grand Maester Pycelle in The Game of Thrones. Picture Pycelle speaking the words from The Hindu's editorials in his querulous and quavering voice, with liberal usage of "On the one hand..." and "On the other hand...", and you'll see what I mean.

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It was bound to happen, and it did. The lemmings are at it again, this time it's Pokemon Go. The craze in the west is understandable, sort of: kids who grew up with Pokemon in the 90s are now young adults with disposable incomes, and Pokemon Go is a way for them to reconnect with the past. What's the lemmings' excuse?

July 1, 2016

Must-watch interview of Mark Blyth. You know we as a species are fscked when a video like this has only 12,534 views while Gangnam Style exposes overflow problems in the hits counter variable. The money shot (even better to hear it from the man himself, with his charming--Scottish?--accent):

...It's not going to sustain itself. So, you know the Germans have this thing that we don't want it to become a transfer union. What do you think you're in? Right? At the end of the day, you're transferring labour, skills, responsibilities, it goes with the gig. And you did an undervalued exchange rate by having your super-efficient economy buried in all these less-efficient economies so that you can sell more BMWs to the Chinese.

And this has relevance to what I mentioned yesterday about allowing malls to be open 24 hours a day (as in, this is the argument you should be using, and not the dishonest and cynical stuff):

Here's the problem: What do you mean by reforms? Some abstract notion that you should get into the pharmacy monopoly. Let's fuck pharmacists. I can now buy my meds over the counter in a supermarket which got deregulated hours so it's cheaper so we can all buy drugs at ten o'clock at night. Please tell me how that invigorates an economy that has lost 30% of its GDP. This is a fantasy.