Taiwan

Conrad is usually pretty sane, but I think his recent posts on Taiwan and the KMT are need a little distance. I mean "the KMT is a bigger threat to Taiwan's democracy than China"? Really? Must be all those KMT missiles.

I agree that the Lien/Soong crowd are in black helicopter land with their wacko assassination conspiracy charges, but I do think they might well have won the election, albeit by an even smaller margin than Chen apparently did.

What Chen should be asking himself is how his personal credibility came to be so low that half the population believes he's capable of faking an assassination attempt and tampering with ballots. Something is deeply wrong here.

Taking It Home II

The Israelis have once again reached out and touched someone. Sheik Yassin the "spiritual leader" and capo of the terrorist organization Hamas can now get a little first hand advice from the spirits.

Taiwan President Shot

Taiwan's President Chen Shui-bian and Vice President, Lu Hsiu-lien have both been shot while campaigning in the DPP heartland of Tainan in southern Taiwan. Conspiracy theories immediately beagn piling up like a grassy knoll. Surprisingly, most of them did not point fingers at the opposition Pan Blue team of the KMT and the People First Party. Rather echoes rumbling up to Cold Mountain were that Chen's people pulled this themselves as a desperation attempt to win tomorrow's election. Never mind the absurdity of that, there remain the hard facts that that Chen's DPP is far too disorganised and loose-lipped to even attempt a decent conspiracy.

The danger here is that hotheads in the Chen camp could spread rumours of KMT and/or Beijing involvement, leading to some potentially very ugly confrontations, especially in the soutrhern part of the island.

I vote to blame the French.

Guangzhou

Just came back from a business trip to Guangzhou (Canton to all you dinosaur Sinologists), the Paris of the Pearl River Delta, Goat City, probably the ugliest city in China, and that's saying something. Nonetheless I did have two fond memories of the place, one being the tall double gin & tonics made by Ricky at the bar of the White Swan Hotel and the other being happy hour at the long bar of the China Hotel. Many is the time my comrades and I slurped down G&T's while watching bloated dead pigs float by on the Pearl River and trying forget the 200 odd drooling, illiterate peasants we had to talk to that day. Sadly, Ricky has gone onto better things and been replaced by, you guessed it, a drooling illiterate peasant. After expalining the difference between tonic and Sprite for 11th time, my patience, already maintained only by generous doses of Prozac and Jameson's, snapped. I stalked out to a taxi without paying the bar bill and sped away to the China Hotel. Top of the escalator, left, then right, Noooooooooooo. The bar is GONE, replaced by a lingerie shop specialising in selling sleazy polyester knickers to the hookers from the Hard Rock Cafe downstairs. The place is probably run by a descendent of whatever cynical bastard introduced bras to China in the first place. See Conrad on this issue.

Spain

ETA? al-Qaeda? It doesn't really matter does it, the bloody results are the same.

Common Sense

We live in such a airheaded PC fog that any whiff of commonsense arrives like a cool breeze. All the more so when it comes from an unexpected quarter, the US Congress. The House of Representatives has voted to bar lawsuits against restaurants
by people who are too stupid to know that deep fried megaburgers are fattening and who are too lazy move their lardasses off the sofa and exercise. The link is here.

"Honest Judge, if I'd known those Triple Cheese Bomb Burgers were going to give me a butt the size of Montana, I'd have ordered the salad."