Cosplay at EOY 2010
Well the Singapore cosplay scene isnt as dire as what most people make it out to be. There are some pretty promising ones actually. I’m cosplaying as Firo Prochainezo from the anime series Baccano! Only one person is able to recognise my character which goes to show how obscure and underrated the series is. Here’s some pictures:
Well I didnt update as much as I should have
I’m still alive. But I’m busying studying for JLPT and reading japanese novels that I have really no time to rant and stuff. I’ll still drop by here to muse here and there but probably nothing substantial.
Root Canal Politics
DEATH NOTICE: The Tooth Fairy died last night of complications related to obesity. Born Jan. 1, 1946, the Tooth Fairy is survived by 400 million children living largely in North America and Western Europe, known collectively as “The Baby Boomers.” “We’ll certainly miss the Tooth Fairy,” one of them said following her death, which coincided with the 2010 British elections and rioting in Greece. The Tooth Fairy had only one surviving sibling who will now look after her offspring alone: Mr. Bond Market of Wall Street and the City of London.
Sitting in America, it’s hard to grasp the importance of the British elections and the Greek riots. Nothing to do with us, right? Well, I’d pay attention to the drama playing out here. It may be coming to a theater near you.
The meta-story behind the British election, the Greek meltdown and our own Tea Party is this: Our parents were “The Greatest Generation,” and they earned that title by making enormous sacrifices and investments to build us a world of abundance. My generation, “The Baby Boomers,” turned out to be what the writer Kurt Andersen called “The Grasshopper Generation.” We’ve eaten through all that abundance like hungry locusts.
Now we and our kids together need to become “The Regeneration” — one that raises incomes anew but in a way that is financially and ecologically sustainable. It will take a big adjustment.
We baby boomers in America and Western Europe were raised to believe there really was a Tooth Fairy, whose magic would allow conservatives to cut taxes without cutting services and liberals to expand services without raising taxes. The Tooth Fairy did it by printing money, by bogus accounting and by deluding us into thinking that by borrowing from China or Germany, or against our rising home values, or by creating exotic financial instruments to trade with each other, we were actually creating wealth.
Greece, for instance, became the General Motors of countries. Like G.M.’s management, Greek politicians used the easy money and subsidies that came with European Union membership not to make themselves more competitive in a flat world, but more corrupt, less willing to collect taxes and uncompetitive. Under Greek law, anyone in certain “hazardous” jobs could retire with full pension at 50 for women and 55 for men — including hairdressers who use a lot of chemical dyes and shampoos. In Britain, everyone over 60 gets an annual allowance to pay heating bills and can ride any local bus for free. That’s really sweet — if you can afford it. But Britain, where 25 percent of the government’s budget is now borrowed, can’t anymore.
Britain and Greece are today’s poster children for the wrenching new post-Tooth Fairy politics, where baby boomers will have to accept deep cuts to their benefits and pensions today so their kids can have jobs and not be saddled with debts tomorrow. Otherwise, we’re headed for intergenerational conflict throughout the West.
David Willetts, a British Conservative candidate and the author of a new book, “The Pinch: How the baby boomers took their children’s future — and how they can give it back,” told me that the Tories’ most effective campaign ad was a poster showing a newborn baby under the headline: “Dad’s eyes, Mum’s nose, Gordon Brown’s debt.” Beneath was the caption: “Labour’s debt crisis: Every child in Britain is born owing £17,000. They deserve better.”
What is most striking about the British election, said John Micklethwait, editor in chief of The Economist, was that it may be the first Western election “based on pain.” All the leading candidates warned voters that “cuts are coming,” but none were even close to honest about how deep.
Here is how The Financial Times described it on April 26: “The next government will have to cut public sector pay, freeze benefits, slash jobs, abolish a range of welfare entitlements and take the ax to programs such as school building and road maintenance.” Too bad no party won a majority mandate in the British elections to do this job.
After 65 years in which politics in the West was, mostly, about giving things away to voters, it’s now going to be, mostly, about taking things away. Goodbye Tooth Fairy politics, hello Root Canal politics.
It’s no fun. Just ask Greek parliamentarians, who, in the wake of announcing radical austerity measures, found their Parliament besieged by rioting anti-austerity protestors reportedly chanting, “Burn it down! That brothel Parliament!”
My takeaway is that U.S. and European politicians — please don’t laugh — are going to have to get a lot smarter and more honest.
To be the Regeneration, they’ll have to figure out how to raise some taxes to increase revenues, while cutting other taxes to stimulate growth; they’ll have to cut some services to save money, while investing in new infrastructure to grow economic capacity. We have got to use every dollar wisely now. Because we’ve eaten through our reserves, because the lords of discipline, the Electronic Herd of bond traders, are back with a vengeance — and because that Tooth Fairy, she be dead.
Maureen Dowd is off today.
How the baby boomers bust Britain: Self-indulgence has left the country financially, socially and even morally crippled
How the baby boomers bust Britain: Self-indulgence has left the country financially, socially and even morally crippled
By Dominic Sandbrook
Last updated at 1:31 PM on 15th March 2010
The baby boomer generation are the luckiest people in history
They are the luckiest people in history: the richest, most secure and most powerful generation the world has ever seen.
While their parents scrimped and sacrificed through the Depression and World War II, they basked in the long boom of an affluent society.
The first were children in the prosperous Fifties and teenagers in the Swinging Sixties.
They bought their first homes in the Seventies and saw their mortgages wiped out by inflation.
Others made their money in the Eighties and Nineties, and are now looking forward to a long, healthy and well-remunerated retirement.
Welcome to the world of the generation born in the two decades following World War II: the baby boomers.
From free school milk and handsome benefits, to cheap holidays, women’s liberation and the shopping revolution, they have enjoyed comforts their parents could barely have dreamed about.
For more than half a century, the generation of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown has been living it up, borrowing and spending in the conviction the money wouldn’t run out.
But even as the first baby boomers are retiring and looking forward to their hefty pensions, the cost of their 60-year spree is becoming unpleasantly apparent.
As everyone who has ever thrown a party knows, there comes a point when somebody has to clear up. And, according to The Pinch, a new book by David Willetts – one of the more thoughtful Tories in the Shadow Cabinet – that moment is upon us.
While Britons lucky enough to be teenagers when the Beatles were in their heyday can congratulate themselves on their timing, those of us born after 1965 face a rather more disturbing prospect.
For, if Willetts is right, we will not only be picking up the bill for our parents’ surging healthcare and pension costs, we will also be paying off their public debt for decades.
All of this seemed a distant prospect back in the mid-1940s, when the baby boom began. With the war over, reunited couples were planning their prosperous futures.
In 1947, the birth rate hit an unprecedented one million a year and, though it dipped in the next ten years, it reached another one million peak in 1964, before entering a long decline.
Those lucky enough to have been teenagers when the Beatles were in their heyday were born at just the right time to reap the benefits of the generation. Pictured are a group of the band’s fans being held back outside Buckingham Palace
Those lucky enough to have been teenagers when the Beatles were in their heyday were born at just the right time to reap the benefits of the generation. Pictured are a group of the band’s fans being held back outside Buckingham Palace
Readers born during that 20-year boom may not think themselves particularly blessed. Most have probably had their fair share of disappointments.
And to judge them all by the shallow standards of Tony Blair – born in 1953, the first baby boomer prime minister, with his affected Estuary accent, fondness for ‘sofa government’ and semi-detached relationship with the truth – would be grossly unfair.
And yet Harold Macmillan’s famous remark that ‘most of our people have never had it so good’ (made in 1957 when many baby boomers were turning ten), makes the perfect motto for a generation brought up on heedless affluence.
The baby-boom generation, Willetts argues, never learned to ‘defer gratification’.
Brought up in an age of surging living standards, they were not prepared to wait for jam tomorrow. They wanted it today, tomorrow and forever – and they raised their children in their own image.
It was the baby boomers, with their ‘me generation’ values, who spearheaded the sweeping social changes of the late Sixties and Seventies, when the illegitimacy rate almost doubled from seven to 13 per cent, the annual abortion tally leapt from 24,000 to 170,000, and the divorce rate almost quadrupled.
And four decades on, we are living in the world they created.
Britain has the highest rates for divorce and illegitimacy in the EU. And government figures show the proportion of single mothers has surged from ten to 25 per cent in the past 20 years.
Born in 1953, Tony Blair was the first baby boomer prime minister
Born in 1953, Tony Blair was the first baby boomer prime minister
As Willetts points out, the result is that single mothers turn to the state for what they should be getting from their children’s fathers. A typical teenage mum gets £173 a week from the taxpayer in income support, child tax credit and child benefit – but only £25 a week from the father of her child.
The tragedy is that, in the long run, everybody loses. To handle the number of cases, the state gets bigger; to fund the benefit system, the taxpayer forks out.
Worst of all, the children lose out. Research shows children of single parents are more likely to do badly at school, suffer poor health and be unemployed as they grow up.
Yet the decline of the nuclear family – for all its flaws, still the best arrangement for love and support ever devised – is only one symptom of the culture of self-indulgence inculcated by the baby-boom generation.
For the boomers are not only bequeathing a more individualistic, selfish, atomised society. They are also handing over a Britain addicted to spending and crippled by debt – public and private. The figures showing our terrifying national debt are well known. In January alone, the Treasury borrowed a staggering £4.3 billion, putting it on course for a record £178 billion deficit by the end of the year.
It is hardly surprising that the markets are losing confidence in Great Britain PLC.
And yet behind this, Willetts notes, lies not only Gordon Brown’s profligacy and the nightmare of the bank bailouts, but a national culture of living on the never-never.
In 1990, when Mrs Thatcher – who was born in 1925 – stepped down as prime minister, the average British household saved four per cent of its annual income. By 2000, it saved virtually-nothing and by 2008 the rate was minus 4.4 per cent. Instead of saving, most people were now borrowing.
We cannot even console ourselves that everybody else is doing the same – we have become the worst savers in the Western world.
Today, French baby boomers save 12 per cent of their income and the Germans 11 per cent.
Even the supposedly gas-guzzling, burger-munching Americans save two per cent of theirs – making us look like spendthrifts by comparison.
In the medium term, the obvious solution to the debt crisis is to slash spending and raise taxes, an unpleasant diet that might feel awful but would get the deficit down and roll back the frontiers of the centralised nanny state.
And yet, as Willetts notes, the baby boomers have another nasty surprise in store for taxpayers over the next 30 years.
For this year marks the point when the first male baby boomers are due for retirement, which means that not only will we lose the tax revenue on their incomes, but they will also be looking forward to collecting their pensions.
Nobody, of course, should begrudge people who have worked hard for half a century a prosperous retirement – they were promised it: they deserve it. The only problem is somebody has to pay for it.
Quite apart from the yawning black holes in many private pension funds, the reality of Britain’s ageing population – particularly in the bloated state sector, with its guaranteed, inflation-linked pensions – is a terrifying time bomb for the rest of us.
But instead of successive governments putting money aside to fund those state pensions in the fat years, we – both politicians and individuals – borrowed and borrowed, spent and spent.
And as families have broken up, so our increasingly elderly baby boomer population will look to the state for help when they fall ill or become infirm.
Even now, we spend an estimated £50 billion on healthcare for pensioners and a further £75billion on benefits.
The Treasury’s projections of future public spending on the baby boomers is chilling reading.
Spending on the elderly – from long-term care to public service pensions – is predicted to rise from 20 per cent of GDP today to almost 25 per cent by 2040 and 27 per cent by 2060.
That might not sound like much. But over 40 years, it means an extra £60 billion in public money.
Indeed, in ten years our ageing population is likely to suck up an extra £20 billion in public spending – and this at a time when the Government is bound to be desperate to make cuts.
There is not much point in whingeing. It is the mark of a decent society that it looks after its elderly, even if we might privately wish they had foregone all those rock concerts and ill-advised leather trousers in the Swinging Sixties and put a little more aside for their retirement.
But the unfortunate reality is that the people who will be paying the bills – the young – are the least equipped to do so. For, in perhaps what is the most shocking section of his book, Willetts shows how in the world the baby boomers made, our youngsters have been cut adrift.
Thanks to the sheer size and power of the baby boom generation, they have maintained an unprecedented monopoly on jobs, houses and income, effectively shutting out their juniors.
Since New Labour came to power, the net financial wealth of a couple in their early 30s has fallen by two-thirds, while the wealth of people in their late 50s has almost trebled.
What is more, the baby boomers’ monopoly of the property market means youngsters find it harder than ever to get their feet on the ladder.
Most experts recognise that home ownership is one of the keys to a stable, prosperous, hard-working society. Yet, since 1997, home ownership among people in their 20s has fallen.
On top of that, the baby boomers’ enthusiasm for immigration has kept wages for British youngsters at an unprecedented low.
As a result of competition from eastern European workers, income for British 20 to 30-year-olds remains far lower than it was for their parents.
Their baby boomer employers may be rubbing their hands now. But who do they think will be paying for their pensions in a few years’ time?
Fast-forward to Britain in 2045 – a century after the baby boom began – and you have a disturbing prospect.
With the last baby boomers still drawing pensions and benefits, paid for by the taxes of millions of immigrants, Britain could be a distressingly hectic, threadbare and overcrowded place.
EU figures project that by then we will have the largest population in Europe, soaring towards 77 million in 2060.
And while optimists insist that more people will mean more money for everybody, the reality may be different. Already the Western economy is beginning to buckle under the pressure for natural resources.
By 2045, total global demand for staples such as meat and water is likely to have doubled – meaning prices will shoot up and millions will have to go without.
The most alarming thing of all is that there are few obvious solutions to this chilling combination of debt and demography.
Cuts will have to be made, yet we still have to find the money, somehow, to pay the baby boomers’ pensions.
While Willetts suggests a revival of the family, the most basic and effective welfare system of all, might provide the answer, you wonder whether generations steeped in self-indulgence will be able to learn the self-discipline necessary to turn back the clock.
The truth is the baby-boomers’ party went on too long. They ignored the warnings of their parents and were enjoying themselves so much they could barely hear the cries of their children.
They thought they were as rich as Croesus, the ancient king reckoned by the Greeks to be the wealthiest man in the world.
But they forgot what the philosopher Solon said when Croesus asked what he thought of his riches and good luck.
‘Call no man happy,’ said Solon drily, ‘until he is dead.’ He was right. Croesus eventually lost his money, his family broke up and he died in squalor.
The baby-boomers have to hope that their story turns out rather differently.
For if their luck runs out, then, like Croesus, they may end up with nothing but their memories to console them.
Random stuff
Reminder to self: Check out Barbara Ehrenreich’s writings.
http://www.skeptic.ca/New_Age_Rubbish.htm
It’s way beyond ironic that a place called the Holy Land is the location of the fiercest most deeply felt hatred in the world. accredited to Carlin.
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Why In The Long Run, Those People Doesnt Matter Anymore
Life this month has certainly been enlightening. I didnt know that meditation would bring about this sense of inner knowing about myself and other people. I’ve also began to realise that there are certain trends that people exhibit and there’s usually a pattern in how they behave. But yeah, there’s a bunch of illusions about myself and friends that I’ve released and I think I finally realise what I wanna do in life, what I want for myself and sorta have a little glimpse who my true authentic self is. There’s no hurry in learning who I am and what I want, I just got to keep working at it.
Sigh… Talking with Meiyi if taught me anything, it’s that life isnt about winning or grabbing awards (even though those are always fun.) And this is where I truly think we neighbourhood kids have it better than the elites. In ten years down the road, no one’s going to care what school you come from or how many As you scored. We have tasted the bitterness of falling down, being stepped on, abused, laughed at with our faces walloped in mud. And then there’s that sourness of relationships gone wrong and the occasional bout of sweetness when something finally went right. We are able to talk to cleaners, plumbers, gangsters and realise that they had some of the strongest, noblest heroes we had ever met. We may not be executives, lawyers or politicians when we grow up, but damn we are a lot more happier than many of them.
Dun ever let them tell you are not as smart, intelligent or anything less than you are. We have learnt that life is not about how many times we achieve, but rather how many times we pick ourselves up. Life is not about having as many friends as you can, but rather having friends that allow you to be who you truly want to be. When everything crumbles in ashes right before your eyes, we are able to stand proud and declare that we are going to build our lives again, somehow. That’s because we’re not bred for success, we’re bred for greatness. And hence we laugh at the hollowness of the petty paper chase, the insecure elitism that plagued so many that stepped on us.
Because Life's a Klassian dream 