The North Koreans called it a "cruise ship" and tried to establish a business model to attract wealthy tourists from China, but to the New York Times reporter on board in September, the 40-year-old boat was more like a "tramp steamer" on which "vacationers" paid the equivalent of $470 to "enjoy" five days and nights at sea. More than 200 people boarded the "dim" and "musty" vessel, "sometimes eight to a room with floor mattresses" and iffy bathrooms. The onboard "entertainment" consisted not of shuffleboard but of "decks of cards" and karaoke. Dinner "resembled a mess hall at an American Army base," but with leftovers thrown overboard (even though some of it was blown back on deck). The trip was capped, wrote the Times, by the boat's crashing into the pier as it docked, knocking a corner of the structure "into a pile of rubble." [New York Times, 9-13-2011]
Sometimes you have to wonder about the free world, though:
Though South Korean children score among the highest in the world on standardized reading and math tests, their success comes at a price, according to an October Time magazine dispatch. They supposedly suffer "educational masochism" -- punishing themselves by overstudy, especially in high school preparing for university admissions tests (a process so competitive that even test-coaching schools are picky about accepting students). Earlier this year, to curb the "masochism," the government began enforcing a 10 p.m. curfew on coaching-school activities, and in Seoul, a six-man team conducts nightly after-hours raids on classes that run late-night sessions behind shuttered windows. (Ironically, Time acknowledged, American educational reformers want U.S. students to study harder, like Asians do, but Asian reformers want their students to relax, like American students.) [Time, 9-25-2011]
In America, the quest for perfectly straight teeth can lead to orthodontia bills of thousands of dollars, but in Japan, a dental "defect" -- slightly crooked canine teeth -- makes young women more fetching, even "adorable," say many men. Women with the "yaeba" look have canines pushed slightly forward by the molars behind them so that the canines develop a fang-like appearance. One dental salon, the Plaisir, in Tokyo, recently began offering non-permanent fixtures that replicate the look among straight-toothed women. [CNN, 9-30-2011].........We have a great new PN helper who is part Cajun. She recounts vacation trips from SC to her ancestral New Orleans area growing up: the return if these kinspeople to rural Lousiana would be celebrated with a week-long party. They were highly musical folks, so she was living Zydeco long before it became a fad for desperately jaded aging yuppies in the 1990s. These Cajuns would catch their own seafood, cook it up and have real jambalay', catfish pie, big fun on the bayou." I was incredulous that crayfish would ever work as serious eating, but she made me a believer just by her description. C's father was one of 16 children and their lust for living bade to overcome great tragedy: their father died when C's father was only eight years old.
She readily affirms that the only thing that killed New Orleans in 2005 was the ruin-by-neglect of the levees off NOLA's coast.... and that this was no accident or "act of God" but the result of decades of planned, systematic, deliberate, knowing negligence on the part of the authorities.
For a great many years, she said, both people and some politicians had called for the levees to be maintained properly, but to no avail. Other "public servants" had other ideas, and as seems to happen most of the time nowadays, the latter prevailed against all common sense, decency and law. You know, sort of like how ameriKa's bridges are falling to pieces and her schools are turning into mere indoctrination centers while "our" noble troops work every day to shore up (and blow up) infrastructure in half the countries of the Mideast? (While also building and bombing schools in those places.)
If Obummer is really president, Hurricane Katrina is really to blame for the temporary death of New Orleans, Biloxi and other Gulf Coast spots. Sure, it might seem foolish to have developed and inhabited an area so far below sea level and so close to the sea.... if we were still using the technology of ancient Rome. But we're not, so if the bureaucrats had done their jobs right, Katrina might have been just one more Gulf hurricane that year.
C pointed out that one or more lowland countries in Europe have lived just fine via land reclamation for generations, so the the nature of New Orleans' development is not the culprit. Alas for us, ameriKan politicians don't work for the intrinsic good of their constituents -- quite the contrary. I fear Holland's and Denmark's politicians have got the same brain-killing bug and those countries will soon be in danger of having Katrinas of their own soon.
And yes, C said, this murderous negligence by the authorities has meant the wrecking of old ways of life. The old family properties are simply gone where her cousins used to live, work, play and revel; many of them left for Houston and other refuges during the crisis, and can only visit the wholesome Eden they knew in memory.
This, too, is the nature of communism. It dreams great dreams and launches great world-girdling crusades, but what happens to the home front? The people that built the nation that makes these dragon-slaying adventures possible are dislocated and deracinated almost as much as if they were refugees racing half-naked on foot from North Vietnam to South in during that "conflict". It would be nice to call the New Orleans crisis unthinking neglect on the part of our overlords but they clearly love nothing more than wiping the middle class out.
The way the middle class applauds its own annihilation must be rich reward indeed for these vampires.
Oh -- on a friend's TV tonight a talking head actually said the word "communist" in a news spiel. Wonder how many viewers had any clue what she was talking about?
/\/.\/\/. 864-356-9966 torpenhow@charter.net
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