Once again, I have let eons slip by between updates.  Let’s see, I’m in Korea with 2 months to go before heading home.  Keith and I have released The Unshow International 2 (and currently working on number 3).  Oh yeah, and I’m engaged.

Yes!  Engaged!  Can you believe it?

At the top of Mt. Bukhan, I popped the question and made her cry again, but this time the good kind of crying.  We are planning to head back to Australia together in early September.

But actually this has been a plan more than a year in the making.  When I arrived in China, I knew I had left something precious behind in Korea, and no matter how fun and awesome living in Shanghai was, I couldn’t escape that feeling.

All I can really say about the matter is, man do the years fly by.  Here I am on the verge of 30.  Me.  30.  How did that happen?  I have come a long way from 20.  Then, if you asked me about marriage I would’ve said that I didn’t plan on getting married.  I always wonder what would happen if I talked to my 20-year-old self.  Would I teach me all the valuable lessons or would the younger me lecture the current me about my lack of idealism?

Stepping toward 30 reframes your life, like it or not.  The equation changes, the factors change and shift their weights.  Things which weren’t important are important.  Things which were, aren’t any more.  Youthful idealism turns into mature pragmatism before you even really notice.  Yet the equation balances itself.  We find a higher plane on which to dwell.  We color our worlds with shades of nuance we were unable to see before.  I heard it said once that our eyes yellow as we age turning our world a different shade.  Is there also a yellowing of our intellects?  Of our sense of certainty?  Of our own perception of the meaning of life?

The trick is to perceive 30 as though you were really 40, looking back.  What lessons may I learn from that future me?  My thought is that the answer would be the same as my message to 20-me:  Be true to yourself.  It has worked well for you so far.

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America’s latest financial woes have seen many proponents of marijuana suggesting it be legalized. It was well publicised earlier that Obama has tried it, plus with the economy the way it is, taxing the sale of Mary J could generate a billion dollars in revenue yearly. I suppose lobbies have to push their causes, but I’m not sure that they have the strongest case.

When you rest your case on economic reasons, the other side will always accuse you of selling out your values. Then you have to give other reasons why it should be legalized. Sure, it would be nice to bring it into the open and generate more revenue, but this is not the reason why.

What we should be combating in society is the open hypocrisy and bias that drug laws create and enforce. Either we support people choosing to alter their perception or we don’t. We allow people to drink, to meditate, to even sit on their sofas all day watching TV and stuffing their faces with junk food. Yet altering your perceptions in other ways is illegal. This list of what’s legal and what’s not is arbitrary, not based on an empirical scale of danger.

There are various substances out there, all with different ways of altering people’s perceptions. Some are relatively benign, others are quite dangerous. Now here is the basis of drug laws. With a couple of notable exceptions, legislation is based on preventing pleasure instead of ensuring safety. This is a notable distinction because it is the source of the problems with drugs today.

If drugs are illegal, people must break the law to sell them. This raises the price due to the increased risk involved with getting the drugs to market. As such, organized crime, with it’s large networks, are the only groups with the power to pull this off. And, due to the dangers involved, the financial benefits of success are highly inflated. High street prices equals addicts with less money, which encourages crime. The secretive nature of drug transactions lowers the quality and safety of the product, putting users at far greater risk than if they were to buy a prescription drug. When alcohol was prohibited in the 1930s, these very conditions arose.

The way you drink a glass of wine is the same way a marijuana user wants to enjoy his or her joint. If we were able to research safer delivery systems for a wider range of drugs, people may be able to alter their perceptions in a relatively safe way and do less damage to their bodies than that wine is doing to your liver. In addition, many users feel different areas of their brain stimulated while smoking pot, as opposed to the feeling that your brain is being dulled when drinking alcohol.

However that argument is following the same mistake of arguing for a negative. When saying MJ is safer than alcohol or relatively benign, you are still promoting escapism, which is negative. As alcohol is already established in our cultures, we accept it. However if someone were pleading the case for alcohol they might sound as equally desperate as pot heads claiming MJ is safer than junk food.

The fundamental question we have to decide as a society is, are we going to allow people to responsibly choose whatever kind of pleasurable activities they so desire? Just because we disagree with other people’s lifestyle choices, doesn’t mean we can’t allow them to enjoy their own choices. This idea, that other people are free to live and control their own lives is essential to freedom. We must promote this idea from it’s opposite, the enforcement of a way of life through false claims of protection. For when they say that they want to keep society safe, they are actually saying that they want everyone else to share their personal choices. This ugly attitude is at the basis of homophobia, racism and religious intolerance as well.

America was built on the ideals of freedom from oppression. It’s really about time that someone pointed out to them what this actually means.

Popularity: 23% [?]

Well it’s 9:30 on a Monday and the temperature here has gone down to zero. There are no degrees left in the air to warm me. Across the northern hemisphere, a cold snap has forced people to rug up and fire up the heating sooner than normal. I am somewhat disappointed by these global warming folk too. It seems that they have miscalculated temperatures around the globe, temperatures which indicate that this winter is going to be colder than before. And here was me, hoping to spend my Winters sipping Pina Coladas by the pool and working on my tan. Well maybe we can realize that Earth does heat up and cool down. Remember that time when it was all lava?

The view from the English room at my school

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In a late political move, hoping to sway the voters who haven’t yet made it to the polls, my class of middle school girls have resoundingly endorsed the Senator from Illinois. Upon entering the classroom, the girls exclaimed, “Teacher… U.S. president who? Obama?” I pulled up the real-time election map on the screen, upon which the girls let out a squeal when they saw Obama had 175 electoral votes to McCain’s 61. They followed the squeals with energetic chants of “O-BA-MA!” However their fiery endorsements soon turned into suspicion. “Teacher… you like Obama?” their 14-year-old eyes glared. When I confirmed that I too liked Obama, they relaxed and went back to cheering.

The world is counting on you, America. Don’t screw it up.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Ah Alan Greenspan, your life reads like a tragedy. Bright young man, graduates summa cum laude from NYU, goes on to receive a Ph.D. Befriends a prominent philosopher and proponent of the free market ideology and writes articles in her books singing the praises of capitalism and the gold-standard. Subsequently awarded a Ph.D in Economics from NYU and then a successful career as an economic advisor, all the while slowly moving away from his free-market friend and mentor. Changing course, following a more political career, beginning to accept a level of government influence in the free market, being appointed as Chairman of the Federal Reserve, controlling the money supply, the interest rates. Compromising, following political expediency, admitting that one can’t be an idealist, all the while espousing free-market ideals. Setting up and presiding over a housing bubble, allowing easy credit, forcing the market to accept it, in diametrical opposition to his professed ideology. Then, passing the reigns over to a new chairman and a few years later seeing the fruits of his meddling come to fruition, with the full knowledge that it was his failed machinations which got them there. Even so, I might have let the old guy retire in peace.

And then he had to open his mouth and say this:

“I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms,” Mr. Greenspan said.

Referring to his free-market ideology, Mr. Greenspan added:

“I have found a flaw. I dont know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed by that fact.”

He goes against the free market then has the nerve to blame his mistake on the free market. If the free market had been allowed to work as it should, those loans would never have been made. It was precisely the compromise and eventual abandonment of his principles that was the problem. As his former mentor said “In any compromise between food and poison, only death can win.” This current financial crisis will be his ultimate legacy, and so the tragedy goes.

But when all these bad policy decisions were being made, when Washington was encouraging the Fed to keep interest rates low and to put more people in houses, were there voices of reason to be found? Yes, though no-one seemed to pay any attention. The very same person who ran for President this year and whose economic advice was resoundingly rejected as being “way out there” had this to say in 1999 over a piece of banking legislation that would supposedly deregulate the industry:

Today we are considering a bill aimed at modernizing the financial services industry through deregulation. It is a worthy goal which I support. However, this bill falls short of that goal. The negative aspects of this bill outweigh the benefits….

The growth in money and credit has outpaced both savings and economic growth. These inflationary pressures have been concentrated in asset prices, not consumer price inflation–keeping monetary policy too easy. This increase in asset prices has fueled domestic borrowing and spending.

Government policy and the increase in securitization are largely responsible for this bubble. In addition to loose monetary policies by the Federal Reserve, government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have contributed to the problem. The fourfold increases in their balance sheets from 1997 to 1998 boosted new home borrowings to more than $1.5 trillion in 1998, two-thirds of which were refinances which put an extra $15,000 in the pockets of consumers on average–and reduce risk for individual institutions while increasing risk for the system as a whole.

The rapidity and severity of changes in economic conditions can affect prospects for individual institutions more greatly than that of the overall economy. The Long Term Capital Management hedge fund is a prime example. New companies start and others fail every day. What is troubling with the hedge fund bailout was the governmental response and the increase in moral hazard.

This increased indication of the government’s eagerness to bail out highly-leveraged, risky and largely unregulated financial institutions bodes ill for the post S. 900 future as far as limiting taxpayer liability is concerned. LTCM isn’t even registered in the United States but the Cayman Islands!

…My main reasons for voting against this bill are the expansion of the taxpayer liability and the introduction of even more regulations. The entire multi-hundred page S. 900 that reregulates rather than deregulates the financial sector could be replaced with a simple one-page bill.

In other words, if a company knows that the government will be there to bail them out if they screw up and everyone else is making money while they can, you can’t blame them for taking full advantage of the opportunity. Blaming the free market for the favoritism of Washington all the while making the average taxpayer pay for this favoritism again and again is just too much. Are the right people being punished? No, once again it’s the free market run wild which is to blame.

What will inevitably follow this crisis is more regulation leading to more screw-ups down the line. But it’s not the screw-ups which are the biggest concern. It’s the systemic corruption that comes with regulation, for with restriction comes profit. Tie one side’s hands and the other is free to prosper. What we need is more education on what a free market really means, that money can’t be created out of thin air and that the market can’t be duped forever. Alan Greenspan had the opportunity to come clean and return to his roots, but instead opted to shift the blame, as so many douchebags have done before him and will do again. While the free-market (not so) gently crashes.

Update: It seems that Ron Paul had a comment or two to make on Greenspan as well:

Popularity: 4% [?]

I’m watching Chinese TV right now as they report on the hundreds of people who lost their homes to the recent earthquake. Of course, I can’t understand what they are saying, but the reporter is walking among sad-looking people who are packed into a sports ground. There are makeshift beds and classrooms and every so often the reporter will shove the microphone in front of someone who cries. I’m almost confident they are crying about the earthquake, though there is an outside chance it is a report about a national gypsy convention. If this is the case, then there is something very sad going on in the gypsy world.

A few days ago China stopped for 3 minutes to remember those who passed in the tragedy. Taxis and cars stopped in the street, people stood everywhere in silence, workers came out of their shops and buildings to stand together. This 3 minutes of solidarity would be nice to experience more often, were it not in remembrance of something tragic.

Popularity: 10% [?]