Singaporean Joke Fest!

Thanks to the internet, Cancel Culture has gone global, as New Yorker Jocelyn Chia discovered to her dismay. A mild quip about the divorce between Malaysia and Singapore (after the British left sixty years ago) got her in trouble. She writes:

On June 5, the Comedy Cellar posted a clip from a show I had done in which I depicted Malaysia as the ex who broke up with Singapore—the country I grew up in—and Singapore was now having a "glow-up".

The clip was performing very well, but when I posted the same one on my social media on Tuesday morning, things started to take a nasty turn.

I first saw someone sharing my clip in an Instagram story—the words were in Malay which I didn't understand, but ended with a "wow!" Funnily enough, thinking it was a compliment, I reposted the story. However as negative story shares and comments rapidly piled up, I soon realized that "wow!" had not been meant as a compliment.

Next time, use Google Translate. No word on whether divorced people were offended.

I was in elementary school in the Midwest when the "divorce" happened. Lee Kuan Yew became Prime Minister of Singapore, an ethnic Chinese bastion with a Muslim Malay minority, a sizeable population from the Indian subcontinent, and a residue of Anglos. He ran the place -- it's fair to say he ran it -- from 1959 to 1990. He took "spare the rod, spoil the child" seriously: caning was a punishment. It functioned like a family firm with the patriarch using a firm hand -- near as I could tell from the far side of the World.

Singapore Inc. thrived and was often cited as a model for America by advocates of an "Industrial Policy" that picks economic "winners and losers" from the comfortable confines of D.C. office blocks and Ivy League campuses. Even as a kid, comparing a mid-sized city (less than two million inhabitants at the time) to a continent-sized nation didn't make much sense. At the time, Mayor Richard Daley's Chicago was called "the City that Works" (corruption greased the development skids), but no one suggested running the USA like Chicago -- until the Obama administration. Under Biden, it's Chicago all the way down.

This is not to knock Singapore. Long ago I spent a few weeks there and really liked it.

Malaysia took a different turn. The Malays were the majority but considered themselves an economic minority. In the 1970s, they launched the Bumiputera movement, an affirmative action program for the native Malays. Apparently, the better-off Bumis have learned to game the system.

I once had an extended conversation with an important figure in that movement. I stood in the Malaysian Business and Tourism office in Bangkok in 1981 when a nervous official came over and asked if I was an American. I said I was and he invited me to meet a fellow who had taken over his office for the occasion. Curious as to whether I would be arrested or offered some honor, I agreed.

He was an older fellow and introduced himself as a minor functionary when the anxious behavior of the local staff said otherwise. He wanted to know the attitude of ordinary Americans toward security in Southeast Asia, and I was the closest ordinary American. You see, "Cambodia Year Zero" became "Cambodia, population Zero" a few years earlier. The Vietnamese invaded and knocked over the skull racks. Refugees flooded into Thailand. The Cambodian communists were so bad that the Vietnamese communist looked good. It ended with a powerful army of veteran warriors poised near Thailand. When I headed for Asia, a friend asked me how far Bangkok was from the border. I said, "It's a two-day drive -- by tank."

During the conversation, I told my interlocutor that ordinary Americans don't care about Southeast Asian security. They tend to hear the "Americans go home" message and like the idea. That applies to the rest of the World too, except for Canada, Mexico, and Caribean vacation spots. As for Europe, well, if we leave they'll start fighting each other again and drag us into it so we stay. However, Americans will help their friends, so be friendly.

In return for my Geopolitical insights, I received a ticket to a luncheon in honor of Mahathir bin Mohamad, the new Malaysian Prime Minister -- destined to become a force in Malaysian politics for decades to come. It was free food, so I went.

They stuck me at a table full of correspondents from major Western media organizations (The Wall Street Journal and such). They were curious about why I was with them. I told of my happenstance encounter at the tourism office. Turns out he was Mahathir's guy (actually, it sounded the other way around), they all wanted to talk to him, but he wasn't giving interviews. It was a "pearls before swine" moment for them -- me being the swine.

The good news: I ate my fill. Mahathir was asked about the ethnic and racial divisions in Malaysia and he said we'd know it's solved when everyone starts marrying everyone else. I can't say he remained so open-minded going forward. Often politicians need those divisions.

Well, as is so often the case, it's a good joke if you know the history.

France's Summer of Love

 France’s Demographic Blindspot: Racial Inequality || Peter Zeihan

A police shooting sparked riots in France similar to the "Summer of Love" we experienced in the USA in 2020. The French do throw a good riot. Peter Zeihan gives a quick overview of the ethnic strife involved.

Here is a less nuanced take on what is going on.

The "Summer of Love" moniker was provided by the Mayor of Seattle after rioters took over an area of her city and declared it the "Capital Hill Autonomous Zone" (CHAZ). She predicted it would result in a "Summer of Love" -- until the murder and mayhem happened.

Got Ham?

When you get right down to it, Gotham and Metropolis are the same place -- a setting for superheroes with an unsettling resemblance to New York City on a really bad day.  Gotham is a nickname for NYC, first applied to the future Metropolis at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century by Washington Irving (Of Sleepy Hollow and the "Headless Horseman" fame). It wasn't meant as a flattering appellation -- it means "Goat Town" (not GOAT town) -- but caught on nonetheless. After decades of hypergrowth, the five boroughs were merged into a great big Metropolis at the end of the century.

I recently watched Zack Snyders treatment of Batman and Superman, where Gotham plays Newark to NYC's Metropolis. The two movies -- Batman V. Superman (Ultimate Edition) and Zack Snyder's Justice League -- are available on Max and are quite long. They took about a week to watch, although I did take some breaks for sleep and such.

I thought bringing the two cities together worked about as well as bringing Batman and Superman together -- by which I mean not well. Batman is a regular man (an especially good one) who battles regular human criminals (the especially bad ones -- who may have been goosed with this or that toxic juice). Toss him at high velocity against reinforced concrete and he's done, no matter how good his armor is. In the fight scenes with Superman, that happened quite a lot, though the Supe' fought with a kryptonite handicap. In the end, they became friends and took on a big -- I don't know what the hell it was, but it was big -- something or other. Wonder Woman shows up to help. "I thought she was with you," was the best line in the movie.

Not to ruin it (I don't think it will), but Superman dies at the end of the first movie and comes back to life halfway through the second. I thought it was another bad choice. It's ridiculously hard to kill the guy and when it happens it should mean something. Of course, I knew it couldn't last since he was going to be in the second movie. 

Originally, Gotham was a metropolis in its own right, with its High Society, uber-wealthy, and widespread corruption. It got downgraded into a depressed, hollowed-out, post-industrial has been. Its character changed, and so did Batman, who became less of a detective and more of a Gatling gun.

The Justice League was so long that towards the end I began rooting for the Vile Henchman and his Flying Monkey minions (an homage, I presume, to a much better film, The Wizard of Oz). Quite simply, I wanted planet Earth to be put out of its misery -- and the rest of the multiverse with it (talk about high stakes). Then there is the small matter of the epilogue. A couple of minutes to round things up wouldn't do.  Instead, we launched into another bizarre movie, and a very confusing one -- except it turned out to be a bad dream, a Batman bad dream.

By this time I zoned out and the credits began to roll, backed by a soft piano instead of a mighty orchestra. I reached to turn it off but stopped. I wondered: Is that Hallelujah? I hadn't heard the Leonard Cohen song in a few decades and the piano piece was more of an improv. But a few minutes into it the Lady sang:

I've heard there was a secret chord

That David played, and it pleased the Lord,

But you don't really care for music, do you?

Well, it goes like this, the fourth, the fifth

The minor fall, the major lift

The baffled king composing Hallelujah

And so on. I don't know what that song had to do with that movie, but it was the best part.

Allison Crowe - Hallelujah

And some bonus Superhero introspection:

Superman's Song

They Unleashed the Demon in Demography

 

New Chinese Demographic Data = Population Collapse || Peter Zeihan

Could it be worse than bad? Yep.

In 1982 I worked as a consultant for the United Nations Population Fund for Asia in Bangkok. I wrote summaries of population studies and was glad when that project was over.

One night in a bar in Hong Kong, I talked to a fellow who worked on the "One Child Policy" that the CCP installed on the mainland. I kept my own council but thought the idea was a bit screwy -- but not because I thought they would fail. The iron law of government institutional immortality says that once they built a giant bureaucracy around the "One Child Policy," it would roll on well past its "should die" date, resulting in something like an upside-down population pyramid.  One insight I picked up from my work at UNFPA was that population growth falls as economies develop and infant mortality declines, so recovery from any "overkill" would be hard. The data from China's urban areas bears this out.

But at least the bureaucracy can survive, switching from forced abortions to forced births as they launch a thirty-year effort to right the list before the ship-of-state rolls over and sinks.

Bloody War Catch-up

 And Now We Return to Our Regularly Scheduled Program (Ukraine War Updates)

Peter Zeihan looks at Ukraine's counteroffensive as it enters its fourth week.

When Putin launched his invasion, I didn't expect it to go well because the iron law of armed conflict is that wars are easier to start than to stop -- although there are notable exceptions to the rule.

In the 1930s, Ukrainians were "starved into submission" by Moscow (Putin's a veteran of the "security service" that carried out that particular genocide). They suffered rough treatment immediately before and after WWII -- during which large armies engaged in brutal combat rolled over the area twice. As a result, Ukrainians could expect a Russian victory to be followed by a heavy hand holding a mallet.

Because of Moscow's previous rule over the country, numerous fifth columnists were in place (the Russian thrust out of Crimea went surprisingly well). As the effort stalled, the worm -- and the Ukranian nation -- turned.

Unfortunately, Russia grabbed a lot of territories, and taking it back is a long and bloody process, even with Western Military aid -- a fraction of which, delivered before the invasion, would likely have prevented it.

The Dastardly Motive behind the Russian Coup Attempt.

This whole coup attempt was staged by Putin to divert the world's attention from the January Sixth Insurrectionist window-breaking incident at the Capitol in D.C., as well as the many crimes of Donald Trump. Putin, who is not known as the forgiving type, graciously pardoned everyone involved in the "Militarized March on Moscow," just to make Joe Biden and the Democrats appear petty and vindictive in their pursuit of justice. If he can forgive the downing of high-tech spyplanes and attack helicopters, the Dems can forgive a few broken windows. It is Russian interference in our Judicial System, plain and simple.

Limp Noodle

Prigozhin has called off his march on Moscow. Previously, I wrote that Noodles Romanov wanted to become Tsar Romanov.  But now he's just all wet.

He should stay away from windows and swimming pools. I suggest a world tour -- make that an anonymous would tour after plastic surgery.