Poagao's Journal

Absolutely Not Your Monkey

Jan 21 2003

Now this is depressing. This article in today’s Ch…

Now this is depressing. This article in today’s China Post, “Over 10,000 protest plastic bag ban“, actually contains the following sentence: “TSU legislative caucus convener Liao Ben-yan (¹ù¥»·Ï) accused the EPA of trying to destroy the plastics industry in the name of the environment.”

The EPA should have issued an official reply of “Well, DUH!”

From the Taipei Times article on the subject: “Liao, one of several opposition legislators who joined the march, said the new policy was conceived too quickly and does not look to the long-term.”

So according to this guy, plastics are the future! Maybe the EPA could say, “OK, well, everyone just take their discarded plastic articles over to the Liao place and dump them there. He seems to like them well enough.”

Again from the Times: “Protesters said that the image of plastic materials had been blackened because the EPA did not provide the public with correct scientific information. To increase environmental awareness of the production of plastic materials, protesters distributed three truckloads of plastic dinning utensils to the public in front of the Presidential Office.”

Ok. “Here, have a dozen sporks! Now, don’t you feel environmentally aware?”

These people must be living in some other dimension, in a Taiwan that is pristine, full of clean lakes and rivers, fresh air and spotless beaches. Perhaps they’ve lived with discarded plastic bags clogging the sewer-like waterways and old plastic plates strewn across the landscape that they just can’t imagine what life would be like without them. Or maybe they’re just selfish bastards with no sense of the inherent irony in claiming that a plastics ban is shortsighted. Whatever their problem is, I wish they’d just seek psychiatric help instead of clogging the streets in protests that are simply another kind of pollution, albeit a far more frightening kind.

I’d add a link on the subject to the DPP Propaganda Pamphlet, aka “the Taiwan News”, but as usual they’re too busy kissing Lee Teng-hui’s ass to do any actual reporting, preferring instead to run shit articles like “Clueless French Person Thinks Cross-strait Conflict Could be Interesting as Long as He is in France”. I especially love the shit-eating grin he’s wearing in the picture. Yeah, just keep munching on your glasses, Froggy, as long as you think it makes you look like you know all about Taiwan after your “short trip to the island” to “enlighten the natives.”

You see, this is why I take so long to come up with articles for my News from the Renegade Province section. It’s becoming more and more difficult to make up things as ludicrous and downright silly as the “real” news these days.

Turning to other news, and by “news” here I mean “stuff that actually happened”, Kirk came over last night to show me his latest set of tattoos, including the American Express logo with wings on his back, some kind of Thai/Egyptian(?) dancing figure and something like an Aztec figure on his arms. He also helped me take a look at the edited Chinese-language version of my book. As I predicted, he finished going over it in a couple of hours, and that included stopping every so often to discuss various points.

His conclusions are basically the same as mine. He doesn’t have a particular problem with the length, but he did note that the story didn’t make any sense because so much of it had been cut out, none of the remaining references meant anything. I am meeting with the publisher tonight to discuss how we can improve the situation.

posted by Poagao at 2:04 am  

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