Saturday, December 6, 2008

Astronauts, Judges and Feckwits

Wasn't in the best of moods today and then made the mistake of having a look at the front page of the South China Morning Post which was a veritable smorgasbord of feckwittery.

First up was the main headline "Astronauts confident HK can weather financial turmoil". Hard to know what aspect of this headline is worse. Is it the fact that the CCP sees fit to insult our intelligence with the kind of 'patriotic education' that the astronauts' visit represents (patriotism of course meaning for the CCP our continued acceptance of the rule of a bunch of corrupt fascists rather than the more common meaning of love of one's country)? Or is it the idea that we are taking economic advice from freakin' astronauts? Or is it rather that the SCMP is so far up the CCP's arse as to go along with the idea that this kind of PR bullshit represents some kind of news story?

Next to the astronaut story was the story about your friend and ours, Judge Pang, chairman of the Electoral Affairs Committee and also chair of the Advisory Committee on Protecting Institutionalised Corruption (or the Advisory Committee on Post-service Employment of Civil Servants to give its official title) recently in the news for approving the former housing director's application to work for a property developer he had made some rather unusual arrangements with. This time he made a ruling in favour of overturning a magistrate's conviction against a manufacturer for operating unsafe machinery and then forgot what he had ruled in his written summing up and argued for the opposite. The key sentence in the article was "It said no action would be taken against Mr. Justice Pang." We're surrounded by feckwits I tell you.

Under the article sharing the sage words of the rocket-driving economists was an article praising the fact that Beijing was moving towards a free market because it was using a slightly different system of price-fixing for fuel.

Finally, the page was completed with an advertisement for a freakin' watch with the tagline "Introducing the first talking watch from IWC: it says everything about its owner." Now don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against people buying nice things but the idea that buying an expensive watch says anything about a person other than "I've just bought an expensive watch" requires a particularly shallow and simple-minded kind of feckwittery. So if you wish to purchase a watch that says "I'm a stupid feckwit" IWC would seem to be the brand for you.

Here endeth today's rant, I feel much better now.