John Linton We again broke our journey to and from Europe in Singapore in a not very successful attempt to minimise the jet lag affects and to escape the boredom of 24 hours of sitting in an aircraft's passenger seats for almost a day. I remain amazed at the efficiencies of Singapore generally and their airport procedures in particular - within 20 minutes of our aircraft doors opening we were in a taxi heading to our hotel. The majority of that 20 minutes being taken up by a brisk walk from the gate to immigration which again had no queue and our bags were on the carousel within a minute or two of reaching it - no queue for a taxi either. Despite the preparations (many road closures) for the Grand Prix on Sunday we reached our hotel without much delay.
Singapore, like Tokyo, is a very, very clean city with very impressive buildings (including the bizarrely designed new casino) and the other buildings being built in that area of the city. The only 'strange' experience was our inability to find a Laksa for dinner either in the hotel's cafe or in the food court of the adjoining shopping mall. Perhaps Singaporeans are becoming too sophisticated in their culinary tastes because the majority of the food outlets were Japanese, Korean or 'Formosan' (Taiwanese). So we settled for eating Chinese in the hotel's restaurant which was of exceptional quality and a different taste experience to any thing I have had in the past. Apart for a haircut (for me) and a drink in one of the hotel's bars watching the last half of the South Africa v Namibia match that was all we had time for in the 16 hours we were in Singapore.
As we get closer to home, Australian issues become more dominant in my thinking and I read some of the communications 'news' from the Australian media while we were in Singapore. Not that there was much but I realised that I needed to get my head around what little there was that I could understand. Perhaps it's the perspective engendered by three weeks of complete absence from the Australian communications and business media but I couldn't help but get the impression that the 'news' I read was largely an invention of the various commentators responsible for writing the various items. After a little over an hour the sum total of the 'news' was that nothing at all had happened but that many tens of thousands of words had been written about that lack of events. Perhaps that is always the way but I just don't notice.
The business news, unlike the 'communications news' does seem to have changed and the direction of change seems unequivocally clear - it appears to be very definitely 'fin de cycle'....the cycle being in this case not a century but the experiments with social democracy as epitomised by the Greek situation where taxes are not adequate to pay either pensions or any thing else in their 'social benefit programs'.....and the same problem was evident in the UK and France based on the media reportings while we were in those countries. No-one, at least no-one with a realistic view of life generally can ever argue with the aims of social democracy but equally evidently no-one has ever found a way of delivering those aims. It appears to me that human genetic makeup can never be reconciled with human social aspirations - we are an irretrievably selfish and warlike species with no real hope of ever delivering on social democracy manifestos.
Despite great men like Wilberforce et alia humanity depends on an Hitlerian 'underclass' and no legislative process appears to be able to change that, self evident, situation.
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