I’ ve been getting emails alerting me to the fact that the Chinese characters to the right of the date, which are supposed to mean “sliced duck,” are incorrect and actually mean “opium.” I’ll have to have a long talk with Brainy Smurf the friend who supplied me with this odd cast of characters.

While my writing may have an opiating effect on some (and at times they even put me to sleep), I promise this was strictly a typographical error and will be fixed as soon as I get a jpg with the right characters.

If it’s an opium blog you’re looking for, go here (and let me know what language that is; Polish?).

Update: The hyperactive Brainy, who has obviously been drinking too much Chinese tea of late, has written a droll parody of this entire debacle.

Wow. Hauntingly beautiful post on the death of the Brothers Hussein, the butchers of Baghdad, as seen through the eye of their loving dad. Unforgettable.

[Via the foreign devil of HK.]

Exceptionally well-written and evocative post over at Daily Koz, that really brought a lump to my throat. While I may not agree with him on all issues, I do agree that the willingness with which the president’s men smear and ruin anyone who stands in their way has been unforgivable, and ultimately these sins will catch up with him.

A brief sample:

There are 20 year olds with prosthetic legs who aren’t getting past anything about Iraq. Its altered their lives permenently. If you ask for sacrifice, the reasons at least need to be sound. But with each passing day, you don’t get accountability from the White House, but the nastiest slurs and innuendo. Joe Wilson’s wife is exposed as a CIA officer, ABC reporter Jeffrey Koffman is smeared as a gay Canadian on Drudge, despite the fact that he did a big interview with the nation’s leading gay magazine, the Advocate.

Here’s a simple question for the White House political staff: do you think your smears hold the same power as the story of a young officer who’s lost both his limbs and is seeking to recover his life?

There’s much more. For the best analysis of the smearing, check this much-cited post by pro-Iraq war blogger Mark Kleiman. Brilliant and scholarly, as usual.

And I mean it. Go here at your own risk.

Singapore’s King Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew wants to assure everybody there’s no cause for alarm and that, although all the jobs are going to China and India, things will be rosy again:

In two, three years, if we make the right decisions now, we will see sunshine through the clouds.

[….]

Let me assure you that the ministers have thoroughly studied all the options and know that the best approach is to meet the challenge head-on, even if this calls for painful measures. They know what they are doing.

As always here, it is the ministers, the government, that will take care of it. This isn’t criticism, but an acknowedgement — it’s just the way things are done here, and as I’ve said before, it’s worked amazingly well, at least so far.

Lee didn’t make any reckless promises, and he made it clear that there will be periods of reduced wages and fewer jobs, but that there will also be light at the end of the tunnel. And the government, of course, will be holding the flashlight.

As a relative newcomer, I still marvel at how everyone’s fate is in the hands of the government, and at how happy the citizens are to have it that way. It’s worked so far, so why shouldn’t they be? It’s just such a far cry from Hong Kong where, at least when I was living there, no one cared much at all about the government and wanted it to be as laissez faire as possible. An interesting and dramatic contrast.

I just watched with some amazement the BBC news report on the death of the Brothers Hussein. The main point of the report was why the US used such massive force against 3 men and a teenager in a little house. Nothing about why this was such an important victory.

I am all for asking questions, but why are they so obsessed with making the US appear to be worse than devils like the Husseins?

I thought this was bad, until only moments later I saw– courtesy of Conrad — an article by the infamous Robert Fisk. You literally have to read it to believe it. Here’s a random sentence; tell me what you think:

And American intelligence – the organisation that failed to predict events of 11 September, 2001 – was also responsible for the air raid on a Saddam villa on 20 March, which was supposed to kill Saddam. And the far crueller air raid on the Mansour district of Baghdad at the end of the air bombardment in April which was supposed to kill Saddam and his sons but only succeeded in slaughtering 16 innocent civilians. All proved to be miserable failures.

I mean, isn’t this bizarre? Yes, I dislike Bush and I think there have been lots of duplicities for which he and his buddies need to be made accountable. And accidental deaths are a terrible thing. But he is making it sound as though the “slaughter” was an intentional act of malice. It’s friggin insane. The bold prejudice — a mission isn’t a failure, it is a “miserable failure.” How can they publish this cockeyed drivel?

He then questions whether the whole story is another lie by the US military:

And in a family obsessed, with good reason, with their own personal security, would Uday and Qusay really be together? Would they allow themselves to be trapped. The two so-called “lions of Iraq” (this courtesy of Saddam) in the very same cage?

Finally, he closes the article with a brilliant prophesy:

If he [Saddam] and his sons are dead, the chances are that the opposition to the American-led occupation will grow rather than diminish – on the grounds that with Saddam gone, Iraqis will have nothing to lose by fighting the Americans.

I have a lot of misgivings about the war, but articles like this truly are, as Conrad says, “beyond parody.”

Predictably, the Singapore government’s sudden about-face on its traditional policy of not hiring gays is creating a backlish, according to The Straits Times:

The Government’s change of policy in hiring gays is causing a stir in the Christian community. So far, it has prompted a meeting led by the mainstream National Council of Churches of Singapore and an online campaign against homosexuals by another group.

One local pastor put up a post on his church’s Web site titled Don’t Be Silent:

‘We cannot stand idly by. Homosexuality is a sin and it is far more rampant, militant and organised than most of us actually believe it to be. The battle lines are now drawn and it is time for the Church in Singapore to rise up and make a stand.’

(The article also cites another religious group that urges tolerance and acceptance.)

The outcry is really a silly thing. They are deriding the government’s decision to hire gays, but I have bad news for them: gays are already there, just as they are in the military and just about every profession you can think of. To say they are forbidden is an exercise in self-deception.

These proteseters should also see that this has little to do with toleration or compassion. Only one thing matters now to the SGP government, and that is holding onto the international businesses it has here and wooing new ones. The no-gays policy has been a turn-off to some of these companies, and the last thing the government wants to do is turn any company off.

Singapore is in a terribly perilous position as US companies that previously would have set up their Asian headquarters here or in Hong Kong choose instead to skip the “stepping stone” and set up shop right in Shanghai.

This could literally suffocate the HK and SGP economies over time. It is no time to chase away potential business because of outdated and prejudicial hiring practices. So the government has made the correct and moral decision, even if their motivation had little to do with correctness or morality.

[Courtesy of a tip from Vaara.]

In case you haven’t noticed, The Peking Duck has been spiced up with some new graphics and features. My thanks to Sekimori for helping me out, and to my consultants (willing and un) Conrad, Adam and Jeremy.

There’s an interesting post over at Adam’s Brainysmurf about a topic of unmatched interest — me. Check it out, as well as my comment on it (which I still can’t believe I wrote).

Click to enlarge. [Via Tblogg]