Did you see that? The IRS has always had, as a written rule in their operations manual, to read emails 180 days after they’re sent! Oh my god, have mercy on this country!

So, now, my blog readers, are you pleased that we’ve passed the legislations to regulate domestic spying punitive measures? Think of it! We can take the IRS down for the count, think of it! a Federal Privacy Tax Credit! When ever the feds, any feds audit our emails or other personal information, we’ll just get an automatic tax credit based on how much privacy was lost.

Even if we follow the weakest definition of privacy: The privacy loss is only non-zero if information was gained through clandestine activity and that we didn’t commit the crime for which the clandestine agent was trying to prove; even if we followed this definition, we’d be really really rich! And it is a tax cut to us! The law should be retro-active and we should get interest on owed back-privacy-tax-credit.

So… this weibo thing, is being referred to as the Chinese Twitter. I thought Weibo, 微博, were the two Chinese characters for the word microblog, which was concept originated in Korea? Kinda sad that it had to be imported from Korea, and then even sadder that American media try to claim credit for being the one being imitated… I wonder if this is a hint about twitter IPO or something?

So about that car thing I discussed several posts back. Why is it so painful that American car maker is being defeated by the Japanese car maker? Take a quick look at these two stats:

Life expectancy in 2010

Homocide rate per mm capita in 2009 (data from the UNODC)

So what does this illustrate? Well, I wouldn’t want to be the one to go public about the relationship between money and life expectancy and education and crime prevention, but it looks like the Japanese has governance figured out. I mean look at their lives, it’s longer, and most likely happier. The homicide, btw, is premeditated murder. There are a whole 4.96% of US population that thought about, planned, and then executed a murder that their Japanese counter part did not do.

Again, I don’t want to suggest that money had anything to do with it. And I don’t want to suggest that I am envious of a country where people live happy and long lives. But let’s take our chin back to where it belong and think hard about our own country. Here, we labor our people to their graves driving Japanese cars that we pay for. The money when it leaves my hands ends up in a Japanese company’s hands and it goes to pay taxes to Japan, it also pays salary of many Japanese nationals in America and of course in Japan. That money is then spent towards health and happiness and keeping one’s self away from killing somebody.

The country is blindly handing money to foreigners that gives them much much higher quality of life than us. I don’t care how you add the numbers up, or average, or median, or total, or percentage, In most ways we can measure those people live better lives than us, and the union of those better lives is a society, and again, I hate to suggest that they are better than us, but the whole is usually even greater than the sum in society.

I am not suggesting that we all start hating Japanese people, the country, and anything that says “made in Japan”. But for god’s sake, can somebody just for once choose an American car? Or any other car. Why feed a pampered fat person more when the human are starving over here?

Okay okay, I hear the sudden uproar of “this is capitalism”. Fine, it is, but we are people. We are intelligent thinking beings. Let’s think about this. I hand money to a Japanese car maker, he gives it to Japanese government, and he pays a japanese person, and the Japanese live long happy lives without much crime. For the most part, the buyers are probably left working to pay off a debt (aka “Car Loans”). I struggle and I stress and I become disgruntled and ill from working to pay off a debt. It is a vicious cycle our dearly beloved capitalism has entrapped us with. There is no way out, in 5 years, the current car will be too old too inefficient to worth driving, I’ll have to go into debt and buy another car and do the same thing again. I am essentially borrowing money to make a Japanese person’s life better when I buy a Japanese car. And then I work to pay off that debt in a life that is not as good as that japanese who sold me the car.

But wait, let me say this one more time. just to be sure I got it right. I borrow money from financial agency run by the Japanese, I put that borrowed money in a Japanese car company to get a car from them so I can drive to work with it to pay the interest to the Japanese company who loaned me the money and the debt. The Japanese takes that money and spends it on their country improving people’s’ lives and their people end up happier and living much longer than me. And I can see no change, next car, something will happen.

… ugh I want to say that again. What am I missing here? If I say it one more time, will it sound like it’s the way things are supposed to be?

Wait, wait, let me write something to blame the American banks being irresponsible and I can write about how repressive it is in China with that Great Chinese Firewall, then I’ll feel better about my predicament as I drive home in my Japanese car.

Read this fascinating opinion piece on techcruch tech news blog site today. While it’s not clearly labeled as “Opinion” piece on a “News Blog”, from the tone of the article it is clear that the author did not intent it to be informative. This flame bait deserves no response, except for that I learned a lot reading the responses to it.

For one thing, did you know that Benjamin Franklin said:

Those who give up their liberty for more security neither deserve liberty nor security

That is so powerful a statement, the mind of this country’s founding fathers is clear. The other refreshing thing is that it is fairly surprising that somebody would say that the threat in China is imaginary and that threat in the US is real. I am 100% sure that Chinese state monitoring is _not_ fake. I have personally tested it on my poor unsuspecting aunt’s computer. Searched for cults and discover that about 30 seconds later the internet connection went down for the night. The bad part is she participates in another group that I feel is a religious cult, but one that, AFAIK, is less outlawed than the one that I searched for. She never mentioned it to me, but I’m sure she got an earful from her local monitors.

Now, the pervasive monitoring that takes place in America (and perhaps restricted to people like myself, namely those not born here and those that have not demonstrated/proclaimed their undying love for the country without requiring inspecting the ethics of its goals and practices) is as yet unproven. I have my suspicions, convenient but not consistent degradations in internet performance makes me wonder, out loud, on my blog, regularly. But it is a little more advanced than those in China. The information that I am presented with on the Internet, the speed and order at which it arrives, are all suspicious. But none of these can be proven reliably as the case of the Chinese Great Firewall.

And also, it’s really nice to see an image of the shield of the Chinese Liberation Army instead of some silly cartoon on these articles that techcrunch posts. It shows respect–in fact proper respect for a worthy competitor. I also hate to mention, it probably strikes fear in to a lot of people who have been mentally damaged from the tight physiological monitoring/control/manipulations exerted by the authoritarian Chinese government.

Like everything else in the world, you can say that the version we use today was invented in the west, but you will probably find that FUD has been in wide use in Chinese civilization long before the west invented the letters F, U and D. If you think I’m mad, just make a few Chinese friends and you’ll know, these people are much more oppressed and suffers much more than what I have ever describe here about myself

(I should quickly postfix that so that I am not persecuted for being a “China Lover”. I, unlike many other people, do not feel that being oppressed or having suffered credits a person with extra credit in society. Bombing Japan was in reaction to Pearl Harbor, Japanese Americans should not receive extra help today in America because of that. I truly believe in America, it is a country where one generation’s debt do not carry to the next).

Btw, kudos to Google images search. I downloaded that picture and uploaded to google images search(images.google.com). and it suggested searching for “PLA ARMY” and that search confirms that the shield is indeed the symbol used by the PLA. This shouldn’t be very easy considering the background of that photo is a grainy desk and it’s a slanted 3D object where as the top search results are drawings of flat objects. I wonder if they did OCR in Chinese? I have to say, also, that TechCrunch makes the PLA looks better than the PLA makes PLA look. Is this one of those, “you can do the job but I make it look good” thing?

Oh, okay, I guess Greg Ferenstein actually did do his research, maybe bought this cap from eBay and ripped off the insignia and took a picture on his desk or something.

There was this one time, when everybody around me suddenly started acting weird: “Stay Calm Huan!” one person yelled holding both of this hands out palm facing me as if to keep me at distance–I was more than three arm lengths away from him at the time.

What do you mean stay calm? The only thing really upsetting that day up to that point was him saying that to me. The next most infuriating thing? a second person walks up to me and says: “Huan! Let’s take a deep breath and calm down!”

wtf? I didn’t even say anything to that person, what do you mean calm down? You seem more agitated than I am. Your muscles tense, and even if it is in preparation to pounce on me when I try something physical, it is uncalled for, there is absolutely no reason for that–at least not at my provocation.

I take the elevator, and conveniently each time a building security person or a fat coworker rides with me. wtf? Are they like following me today?

Stay Calm! he says…

wtf? What The Fuck it is about me that make you think I am not calm ?

I find that I am more easily agitated since these events at work some years ago.

Anyway, I thought I’d write these sensations down. Some moments, when I think back, and wonder if those densely packed meetings weeks leading up to that moment were these people accuse me of being agitated were scheming up the details of how to agitate me so that it would seem I  acted inappropriately?

Because if there were audio recordings of events that day, and I’m not saying there is, it would sound like I had a gun in my hand and all these scared people are trying to stay alive–I didn’t have any weapons and I certainly did not think of hurting any of those people. And after they did that to me, I still don’t want to kill any of them.

The fear and stress coming from their voices scares me: I fear that they may kill me someday. They already feel scared of me and acted under coordination  to “keep Huan calm”. Surely this fear, untreated, will bring some other man-made disaster to me in our future encounters.

People who do this kind of stuff should stay in movie studios, when this kind of stuff come to live, to one’s own person, to one’s own ears, mind, one’s reality starts to splinter.

All these nice wonderful people…

But one thing for sure thing. I am here, today, to announce, that for the length of my time on earth, and beyond if I exist, I will never do this to another fellow being. I will never organize it, and I will never participate in it, and I shall make vigilant effort to stay out of it.