It was a day which had weather.

(The title is cause I couldn't remember what the weather was like today, and I wanted to do those 'it was a dark and stormy night' crap)

It started out nicely. It promised to be a goodish day. I did my work. I didn't annoy too many people. I was much too selfish. Sex is annoying. Damn German kid. Ancient is cool! mmmm, political intrigue and mischief! Goodness.

I came home with work to do. Little did I know the arduous task that lay forth before me. See, people, this is why friends are a problem. A gratuitous problem which must be eliminated! *ahem* I mean, woo! Go friendship! Antics mentions them, must be good, right?

WRONG.

nah, right.

Piskorz was an epic. 5 hours. It took over 5 freaking hours. I hate to say it like this now, I like him too much. There is nothing as physically tiring and draining as a emotional duel. But I did it. I got through it. Slowly, oh so slowly, teasing, coaxing, playing, sometimes rough, sometimes sweet, sometimes nice...God I wish I were describing sex. It was quite satisfying though. I think that's how sex should be though. It would be great.

I can't believe it. There's post-angst. There actually is. This fricken counts as my therapy experience. If this is what sessions are like, I will be ROLLING IN IT.

Then, after that, he realises what an ass he was. *eye twitches, leading to irregular blinking*

I deserve labu. and sex..u.

how was your day?>
'

Lasers!

Akira was coolness! Sub-Orbital Laser!

Dave Barry is quitting. I'm going into mourning.

Had a goodish day today, fricken tired, yet managed to keep up myself awake and ready, and was cheered up only in that way that spending times with friends can. Sorry for being so mean. I didn't mean it :(

But yeah, I have a freaking lot of work to do! damn it, it's not too hard but still! It was a smart move to drop out of ancient. I have to read a FUCKLOAD of stuff and summarise it. Crazy.

Anyway, off to learn more French and do work! Au revoir and a bientot!

Finally

A solution to the homosexual problem.

Among others:

"Marriage is not sacred. Marriage is for wimps and sissies!"

"Polygamy fell out of favor! Women were no longer mere pieces of property belonging to men! Next these uppity women demanded the right to vote! Families could no longer own slaves! ... Where will it all end? Will history never cease to unfold?"

Having a...very interesting week. It's really quite odd. People, stuff, French, more stuff...really weird. Should be good though.

Lain is so artsy. What the hell? Eh, bye bye.

S'ok.

Really best way to describe it.

Why is Google Desktop being distributed as a torrent?

Ciao.

More delicious, nutritious quotes!

Mr Morris is so bitter:

" Recently, we had an election. Bunch of clowns! Well, some of them atleast. Don't have much time for politics."

"5 years ago, I said that we would be accessing the Internet through our phones. But they didn't listen to me, did they!? "

Funny stuff:

Again, Mr Morris: " In Communist Russia, they had little plots in their backyard where they grew some vegetables and hogs, or pigs as they call them over there. "

Read on the back seat of a bus: " Being gay is gay. "

Heard on a cartoon (X-men, if you must know): " Did you hear that?! It sounded like an explosion! "

In my English class:
Motherwell: " Some women turn to HRT to combat menopause. "
Student: Holden Racing Team!

On the Chaser Decides (which you all should be watching avidly! AVIDLY!) : " It's such a waste of paper giving out those how to vote forms. Especially those how to vote Democrat forms. "

And last, beauty: " Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion. "

Screwed it up a bit with the Korz!, really should have been more sensitive. No real damage though. Just my reputation :P Eh. You take of it min-taec.

Sleep!

EDITO (pronounced ehh-di-toh) : Wah!? Edelstein loves it. Ebert hates it.


Guess which movie. Utterly freaky.

Neurotic

Inspiration.

There's some things needed to be said. Yes, needed. I'll get to it, I think.

I had a nice, long talk psychology wise with min-taec. There was no motivation for this. In fact, that's been an overriding factor in most of my recent life. Some people have incredibly strong backbones, reliance, strong as a rock. I go the other way. Completely and utterly weak, a wisp to be blown around, gently if possible, enjoying whatever comes through. There's always more to this, though. But you know that already don't you?

YAB is...fun. YAB is nice. YAB is just YAB. Don't make any distinctions about it. I've understood it's occupants. It's an interesting world. I don't really want much of a part of it. You know how I work, individuals, not groups. The only way I value groups is for the precious, beautiful way you don't have to talk much. You listen. You hear and understand, comprehend. You don't have to talk though. I don't like responsibility much.

You should have noticed. Yes, I have been distant from everyone for a while. I've finally committed myself to that oath that I would not hurt my friends. Whether I do this out of love or some other arcane reaction is suspect. If this means that I have to omit the truth, fudge it, evade or outright lie, I am willing to do it. It means too much to myself not to.

Yeah, it's probably right that it would probably be very unlikely to whom I could relate. I wish I could find that person. I wish that I could love that person, and they love me. I mean really love. Love so deep and strong that it makes my heart hurt. Love so deep and strong that it makes my heart hurt all the time. Love so strong that it makes you reel and stagger. It already does. The thing is, I thought/think that I found that person. But I don't believe I understand love. I don't know enough, I haven't experienced enough love in my life to realise what it is. Do you need to? To quote the Flips, what does it matter?

But yet, this poses a problem. Having such a yearning, such a love for a person, it burns inside you. This fire burns ragged holes inside of you, charred-edges of a scarred landscape. It hurts abominably; it doesn't matter. It's not like it's a bad thing. You want to fill that void. Music. Art. Humour. Pain. Beauty. Remember my earlier point about the wisp? Not being beholden to something means that I can't really let myself into it. I can't just let something overtake me, overwhelm me and give me release. Salvation. All those things last for a while. A while only though. Basically meaning your entire meaning of life is constructed by distraction.

I've seen writing that absolutely overwhelms me. Seeing such beauty, such...emotion. Just pure emotion, conveyed so beautifully it moves me to laughter and tears. I wish I could so such a thing. Or the other way around. So perfectly constructed that everything is ordered nicely. This, this, this and then this. Dot points. Numbers. Alphabetised. I wish I could lay everything out like that too. Or either.

I don't mind being alone anymore. I don't see what's so bad about it. I've learnt to enjoy things. I've also learnt to let go. That's the scary part. I wonder how far I can let go. For a good while recently, i've been very suicidal. It was a long-term thing. A project. Declassify myself from existence. No longer a member of a family. No longer a member of the human race. No longer a friend. Go slowly. Alienate everyone. End of year 12, do a angsty piece, leave. Perfect. I realised it was pointless. By my own self-contempt, interestingly.

Ultimately, I may initiate a plan soon that would lead to my eventual downfall. Grandiose words indeed. It would work. I'll die from it, but hey i've had a good run. Life being life showed me that. Maybe I won't start it. Maybe i'll never start it. Do you really want to bet on that?

To summarise: To anyone and everyone who reads this blog, you may NOT ask me questions on my family life. On my personal life. Or my emotions. These three things shit me beyond belief. I absolutely hate these three things. I am not dealing with them. That is how I work. I influence, certainly, not outright deal though. Please don't worry about me.

I'm sorry. I know i've broken things here. But I do believe that truth in small doses is good for you. Atleast that's the way I see this truth.

Also! I can't believe I am saying this, but Christianity helped me plug up a hole I had in one of my theories that i've had for a while and discussed only a little. Okay it wasn't Christ, it was one of his followers. And really it was an accident. And now that I think about it, not a hole, just another argument ^^

Enough of this long post, i'd feel safer if you sorta overlooked it ^^. So will do shifty covert thing. Tchuss!

Nothing's wrong, I'm just fine, i've realised I just don't like jokes...(8)

Feel like a longish post today, sated after a good bowl of ramen.

Fact one: Never, ever, get in the way of a ramen addict when they have not had ramen for a while.

Fact two: I am such a person.

Fact three: I am however, easily placated by random Asian snacks involving wafers and nutella. mmmm.

I've got to think a lot of stuff out. That sentence should explain things.

Day of election: Why did my dad vote for Howard?

First day of election: Nothing seems different. The world hasn't stopped spinning. Everything seems to be the way it was....Damn.

Second day of election: See first day.

First day of school: Disorientating, to say the least. Did well in eco. Did alright in english. Did alright in business. Heat was baaaaaad. Listened to lots of music. Beck is just SEXY.

Forming networks is HARD. It's even worse when you've got to readjust to the different sleeping patterns, lack of eating patterns, school, and the general idiocy and obnoxiousness of people. I really forgot about that.

The holidays have thrown me off. I've got to realign goals, readjust some of the mood swings, readapt eating, sleeping, thinking, life patterns, lotsa of pointless crap. And please, spare me the humanity. It's degrading.

Piskorz, or peesh-corshe as i've dubbed him seems like an interesting character. He seems to have emotional depth, but seems unable to understand it? deal with it? I sorta feel like manipulating him to the point of opening him up, but nah. That's risky as is, and i'm not really in the mood to put myself through torture again.

I'm finding it very hard to joke around people now. I mean real joking, not some faux-joke crap to satisfy people. There's only a few people left. I dunno, i'm sure there's more, and it's a lot more complex than I make it out to be, but from this little viewpoint, that's how it is.

Thankfully, made up my mind on almost everything. Might not be the right decisions, might not be the wrong ones, but hey, there is no such thing as right and wrong, right?

Everything interconnects.

Otherwise, let's see how the rest of life plays out, live whatever you can, and au revoir! Zorrolie shall save us all.

Generalisations.

Ok, this is probably a little mean and more than a little useless, but it's something that I should get rid of. To make myself look smart, I will use the word oft and an oft-used analogy: it's like one of those wounds that you have in your mouth that you know you shouldn't tongue, because you know that if you do, it'll take longer to heal, but it's there, and you just can't help yourself. That remark about generalising too much made such a wound on me, and i'm trying to apply the salve of explanation to it.

I can't particularly see how you can generalise too much. Everybody's view of life is a generalisation. Does anybody actually understand every single aspect of life?

To generalise, the number of facts for a hypothesis is INFINITE.

If anybody can prove to me that they perfectly understand any one object, that is, every single attribute that the object could possibly have, I will try and stop generalising for a year.

There. Badly worded, poorly written, but my mind is a bit clouded. Sayonara!

We're going back and forth, back and forth, and back (8)

*sigh* Elections are over, Liberals won with a good majority. Hell, they even managed to pull in another seven seats. Damn it, I was hoping for a minority government here just to see how they react. No-confidence votes annoy me.

Apparently, Family First is the hip new minority party this year. They've been stealing votes from the Greens. Similar policies, they were against the Iraq War, better treatment of refugees, environmental concerns, etc. Only thing is they're Christian, which pulled in the votes. Another damn it.

Encouraging news in the form of the greens though, even if they've lost their only House seat. They've secured nearly 1,000,000 votes, which in the context of 13,000,000 voters is hella good.

The Senate elections seem to be a little more interesting, there's news floating around that Family First may help the Coalition win the Senate as well. That would be not good. The Greens are expected to do well in the Senate, let's hope they do.

Having a grand time from the littlest things, off to watch Eat Carpet. Bai Bai!

The tune you'll be humming forever (8)

Having nice, nice days, going to stick around for a little while longer and see what happens.

Strangely enamoured with Mass Romantic, it's finally latched on to my brain and begun that obsessive process that I know so dearly and love. Still listening to Dismemberment Plan though. Mucho good lyrics do that ^^

Holidays are nearly over! *in shock* It's been alright. Self-aware, in a different sort of way...I don't even know what that means. But i'm sure something will cure me of that. Something shiny and flashy, like on TV! Yayyyyy.

Resuming onto my old habits as i've completed the newer ones, nevermind the fact that I haven't done the important stuff. Bah humbug, who needs it. Anyway, read MT and Bai Bai!

Two links today

Instead of just one, cause I can.

Or that I read a really good article :P

I'll have to copy paste one here probably, as it's from the NYT, which seems to have that characteristic of producing a gem out of a LOT of TRASH, and also that characteristic of being stupidly overanalytical over little things (they did a 10,000 word article on what could be best summarised as this: Bush, Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld were announcing to the American public that aluminium tubes were slam-dunk evidence of Iraq's nuclear ambitions, they already knew that there was completely overwhelming evidence that the tubes were just for artillery rockets [as Iraq said] and that the tubes were totally unsuitable for use in centrifuges. {Taken from Slashdot...there's over 2300 comments on this article! Plastic got nothing on these bitches. Daim.} Wtf?)

And that whole registration thing, which is getting more and more recalcitrant. Grrr. rr.

First piecetoday is a lovely little piece about the whole consumerism culture thing, but more in relation to the university arena. Good analytical piece, well written. It's odd how i'm identifying with the people mentioned :P

Second piece leads me to think that I've going to become one of these guys and end up working for some big giant creepy organisation like the IMF or The World Bank. This one is about how you should democratise first, then develop the economy, contrary to the popular opinion that you should do it the other way around. Relies a LOT on empirical evidence. It's pretty much all empirical. Something I find a little shifty, but well researched, thorough they are. I've posted it below to read if wished, beware though, mother of an article. I haven't really gone through it very thoroughly, read most of it, seems good. Sorry if I missed a gaping hole, it's late at night. Well, not really, but I like to think it is.

*sigh* Something I haven't done for a while. Loving my music and my ipod, but I wish I loved other things too. Seems too selective. Heh, go the angst. Sorry for the poorly written post, doing something like this should make me get angry more often. Tired, and i'm missing words.

In a little while,
I'll be gone
The moment's already passed
Yeah, it's gone

and one last thing to keep you distracted, Capital punishment!

DISPELLING A MYTH

"Economic development makes democracy possible" asserts the U.S. State Department's Web site, subscribing to a highly influential argument: that poor countries must develop economically before they can democratize. But the historical data prove otherwise. Poor democracies have grown at least as fast as poor autocracies and have significantly outperformed the latter on most indicators of social well-being. They have also done much better at avoiding catastrophes. Dispelling the "development first, democracy later" argument is critical not only because it is wrong but also because it has led to atrocious policies-indeed, policies that have undermined international efforts to improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people in the developing world.

Those who believe that democracy can take hold only once a state has developed economically preach a go-slow approach to promoting democracy. But we and others who believe that countries often remain poor precisely because they retain autocratic political structures believe that a development-first strategy perpetuates a deadly cycle of poverty, conflict, and oppression.

Why has the development-first myth prevailed? First, it rests on a common-sense notion, put forward by political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset and others some 45 years ago, that economic growth creates the necessary preconditions for democracy by expanding literacy, creating a secure middle class, and nurturing cosmopolitan attitudes. Second, it fits comfortably with the demands of the era of its origin, the Cold War, when about a third of countries qualified as democracies and very few of them were poor. Governance patterns appeared stuck, with countries trapped in opposing magnetic fields created by the Soviet bloc and the West. Pinning hopes for progress in the developing world on seemingly exceptional democratic examples such as India, Costa Rica, and Colombia appeared unrealistic under such conditions. Besides, the West was happy to bolster authoritarian governments that were not controlled by the Soviet Union to prevent them from turning communist.

The development-first thesis-which subscribes to the notion of an authoritarian advantage-has persisted in the post-Cold War world, despite the abysmal economic records of Latin American military governments, the "strongman" rulers in Africa, and the communist states in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. This is largely because of the dazzling economic performance of certain eastern Asian autocracies: Singapore, Indonesia, South Korea, Taiwan, and, lately, China. Based on these countries' experiences, a variant of the development-first thesis has gained particularly wide appeal: strong, technocratic governance, insulated from the chaos of democratic politics, is the best way to pursue efficient and farsighted macroeconomic policies. According to this view, the experience of Russia in the 1990s and the faltering performance of young democracies in eastern Europe, Latin America, and Africa demonstrate the folly of attempting democracy too soon.

STRONGER, NICER, CALMER

As compelling as the development-first thesis sounds, the empirical evidence is clear: democracies consistently outperform autocracies in the developing world. But before proceeding, it is important to establish what we mean by democracy. Democracies are political systems characterized by popular participation, genuine competition for executive office, and institutional checks on power. We put this definition into practice using the Polity IV democracy index, devised by Ted Robert Gurr of the University of Maryland in 1990. The annual index gives each country a score between 0 (least democratic) and 10 (most democratic) based on the extent to which it exhibits the democratic characteristics listed above. To compare distinctive governance types, we categorize countries that score between 8 and 10 on this scale as democracies and those that score between 0 and 2 as autocracies.

Because everyone agrees that the most prosperous states in the world are well-established democracies, and because the real debate is over whether low-income democracies are capable of growing at a rate comparable to that of low-income authoritarian governments, this discussion is limited to countries with GDP per capita of under $2,000 (in constant 1995 dollar terms). We thus compare two groups of countries: low-income democracies and low-income autocracies.

The data, compiled from the World Bank's World Development Indicators from 1960 to the present, reveal a simple truth: low-income democracies have, on average, grown just as rapidly as low-income autocracies over the past 40 years. Outside of eastern Asia (about which more will be said later), the median per capita growth rates of poor democracies have been 50 percent higher than those of autocracies. Countries that have chosen the democratic path-such as the Dominican Republic, India, Latvia, Mozambique, Nicaragua, and Senegal-have typically outpaced their autocratic counterparts, such as Angola, the Republic of Congo, Syria, Uzbekistan, and Zimbabwe. Moreover, because 25 percent of the worst-performing authoritarian regimes, including Cuba, North Korea, and Somalia, have failed to document their performance, the growth shortfall for autocracies is even larger than the available data indicate.

The advantage poor democracies have over poor autocracies becomes even more apparent when the debate moves from growth rates to broader measures of well-being. Development can also be measured by social indicators such as life expectancy, access to clean drinking water, literacy rates, agricultural yields, and the quality of public-health services. On nearly all of these quality-of-life measures, low-income democracies dramatically outdo their autocratic counterparts.

People in low-income democracies live, on average, nine years longer than their counterparts in low-income autocracies, have a 40 percent greater chance of attending secondary school, and benefit from agricultural yields that are 25 percent higher. The latter figure is particularly relevant because some 70 percent of the people in poor countries live in the countryside. Higher levels of agricultural productivity mean more employment, capital, and food. Poor democracies also suffer 20 percent fewer infant deaths than poor autocracies. Development practitioners should pay particularly close attention to these figures because infant-mortality rates capture many features of social well-being, such as prenatal health care for women, nutrition, quality of drinking water, and girls' education.

Careful review of the data suggests that low-income democracies have another powerful advantage: they are better at avoiding calamities. Since 1960, poor autocracies have experienced severe economic contractions (falls of 10 percent or more in annual GDP) twice as often as poor democracies. Seventy percent of autocracies have experienced at least one such episode since 1980, whereas only 5 of the 80 worst examples of economic contraction over the last 40 years have occurred in democracies.

Viewed through this prism, many of the periods of rapid growth enjoyed by poor autocracies, which are frequently cited by development-first advocates, were little more than spurts to make up for ground lost during hard times. Consider Chile. Although often touted as a model of autocratic growth for its 13 years of economic expansion during Augusto Pinochet's 17-year rule, Chile also suffered two acute economic crises during this time: a 12 percent decline in GDP per capita in the mid-1970s and a 17 percent contraction in the early 1980s. It took until the mid-1980s for Chile to sustain a per capita income level higher than that of 1973, the year Pinochet seized power.

The frequent criticism that democracies pander to populist-driven interests to the overall detriment of the economy is demonstrably false. Poor democracies have, on average, not run higher deficits over the past 30 years than poor autocracies. Similarly, both poor democracies and poor autocracies spend almost the same on education and health. Democracies have just used their resources more effectively. Not coincidentally, low-income democracies typically score between 15 to 25 percent stronger on indices of corruption and rule of law than do autocracies.

Democracies also do a better job of avoiding humanitarian emergencies: the 87 largest refugee crises over the past 20 years originated in autocracies, and 80 percent of all internally displaced persons in 2003 were living under authoritarian regimes, even though such systems represented only a third of all states. The Nobel laureate and political economist Amartya Sen once famously observed that no democracy with a free press has ever experienced a major famine.

Some hold that "premature" democratization in low-income countries is responsible for enabling opportunistic politicians to fan ethnic and regional resentments, even armed conflict. According to this point of view, the iron fist of an autocratic leader can keep a fractious society intact. But this argument, too, fails to withstand empirical scrutiny. Poor countries fall into conflict often-about one year in every five since 1980. But poor democratizers fight less frequently than do poor authoritarian nations. In sub-Saharan Africa, where most civil conflict has occurred recently, countries undergoing democratic reform have experienced armed conflict half as often as the norm in the region.

Although the data show that poor democracies do a better job of generating material benefits for their citizens than poor authoritarian countries, there is, of course, variation in each category. Some democracies flounder; a few authoritarian regimes, especially in eastern Asia, have flourished. The latter cases show that development under authoritarian systems is possible. Yet this class of authoritarian governments is far from representative of most autocracies around the world. South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Indonesia encouraged the private sector, pursued export-oriented growth strategies, and were heavily influenced by Western democracies when they adopted their particular economic and political institutions. Moreover, as China demonstrated by its appalling economic record through the late 1970s (when it began to adopt market-oriented economic policies), authoritarianism is not the distinguishing characteristic of its growth. (This is a point underscored by the disastrous economic performances of other eastern Asian autocracies: North Korea, Burma, Cambodia, and the Philippines under Ferdinand Marcos.) Thus, although exceptional cases exist, it is the preponderance of experience that should guide development policy. And the overall evidence is overwhelming: poor democracies have had a consistent development advantage over poor autocracies over the past 40 years.

The complementary assumption of the development-first argument is that democracy will eventually follow economic progress. Specifically, as a country emerges into middle-income status-Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria and others have touted per capita income levels of $6,000 as the target income threshold-the increasingly sophisticated population will inevitably call for greater political participation, leading to a successful democratic transition. Yet there is a serious practical problem with testing this assumption: few authoritarian countries have attained the middle-income category. Since 1960, only 16 autocratic countries have had per capita incomes above $2,000. Of these, only six-Taiwan, South Korea, Spain, Portugal, Greece, and, debatably, Mexico-adopted democracy in the aftermath of economic expansion. This provides scant basis to apply a development-first model to the entire developing world. For that matter, the $6,000 benchmark would suggest that all but 4 of the 87 countries currently undergoing a democratic transition, including Brazil, Kenya, the Philippines, Poland, and South Africa, are unfit for democracy.

CONCEPTUAL UNDERPINNINGS

Having highlighted the superior performance of poor democracies over poor authoritarian regimes, we turn to the conceptual underpinnings of this pattern. Poor democracies outperform authoritarian countries because their institutions enable power to be shared and because they encourage openness and adaptability.

Democratic leaders have incentives to respond to the needs of common citizens. Otherwise, they find themselves out of office. And because ordinary people care about bread-and-butter issues, these concerns figure prominently in candidates' agendas. By contrast, the narrow clan-and patronage-based support on which autocratic leaders often rely for power gives them little incentive to focus on the general well-being of society.

The developmental advantage of democracies also stems from the checks and balances that characterize self-governing political systems. Power is not monopolized by any one individual or branch of government, even though a national leader may claim a popular mandate. Although democracy is a more cumbersome process, it reduces the scope for rash, narrowly conceived, or radical policies that can have disastrous economic consequences. Federated systems also place checks and balances on the various levels of government, thereby guarding against an overconcentration of power at the national level while allowing for flexibility to address local priorities.

Authoritarian regimes, by comparison, often turn political monopoly into economic monopoly. Only businesses and individuals closely tied to the ruling party are able to acquire the licenses, permits, credit, and other resources needed to succeed. Such preferential treatment diminishes competition and innovation and therefore reduces economic efficiency. Consumers get fewer choices and higher prices. When political allegiances also dictate access to education, housing, career options, and social status, the spectrum of opportunities available to political outsiders is severely narrowed. An integral virtue of democracies, therefore, is that they provide a sphere of private space, which, protected by law, nurtures inventiveness, independent action, and civic activity.

Democracies are open: they spur the flow of information. Organizations in and out of government regularly report findings, educate the public, and push political leaders to consider a full range of options, spreading good ideas from one sector to another. The free flow of ideas, every bit as much as the flow of goods, fosters efficient, customized, and effective policies. Put this way, development is an exercise in educating a population: to wash hands, improve farming techniques, eat nutritious food, or protect the environment, for example. And societies that promote the free flow of information have a distinct advantage in these efforts.

Information is best communicated through multiple and independent channels. For example, it was the active public-education campaign undertaken by the Ugandan government and nongovernmental organizations in the 1990s that dramatically reduced the transmission of HIV/AIDS in that country. Uganda was once the world leader in percentage of adult population infected, at roughly 30 percent, but by 2003, that rate had declined to 7 percent. By contrast, attempts to suppress information during the SARS epidemic in China allowed the disease to spread before the public became aware and concerted action could be taken. Once the epidemic was acknowledged, distrust of the government led many Chinese in infected areas to violate the government's quarantine. This example also confirms a larger proposition: democracies do a better job of correcting errors. Once private or public authorities make decisions in open societies, the results become known and corrective action, if needed, can be taken.

Openness also reduces the scope for corruption. An independent, investigative media creates higher expectations regarding transparency and disclosure of potential conflicts of interest. Paradoxically, greater openness in newly democratizing societies may at first lead to the perception that corruption is worsening. In Kenya, for example, a survey by Transparency International found that the perception of corruption was worse in 2003-the first year of the democratically elected government-than in the late 1990s, under the authoritarian rule of Daniel Aap Moi. Yet the same organization found that Kenyans paid an average of nine bribes in 2003, down from 29 in 2002, saving roughly 10 percent of their annual income.

Transparency does more than cut the cost of bribes, which, technically, merely transfer money from one citizen to another and do not thereby reduce average incomes. The World Bank estimates that corruption, which acts as a tax on legal commerce and makes returns less certain, costs the global economy five percent of its total value, or $1.5 trillion a year.

Adaptability is another beneficial feature of democracies. Democracies enhance political stability by establishing clear mechanisms for succession. This allows them to adapt smoothly to the death or electoral defeat of a leader, minimizing the scope for extralegal or coercive tactics to attain power. Development momentum is thus sustained even though specific policies change from one administration to the next.

Adherence to established means for transferring power reflects a commitment to the rule of law under a democracy: leaders can gain legitimacy in the eyes of the people only if they ascend to power through democratic processes. Political legitimacy grounded in the rule of law, in turn, provides the foundation for the application of legal norms in the conduct of government and business, and a rules-based regulation of the economy.

Finally, democratic structures adjust well to changing circumstances. Because policies in democracies flow from an elaborate process of trial and error, they can adapt to realities on the ground. When there is a constant flow of policies and ideas, there is pressure to amend, drop, or replace initiatives that do not work. Elections are the most distinctive junctures around which these adjustments occur. But even during a given leader's tenure, constant fine-tuning takes place. Democracies are distinctive, therefore, not because they always identify the best policy but because they institutionalize the right to change leaders or policies when things go poorly. This capacity for revitalization explains why citizens of established nations such as Argentina, Guatemala, Kenya, and South Africa spoke of living in a "new" country after recent democratic changes in leadership.

All in all, then, democracies present an enormously powerful set of institutions that propel development. The more representative, transparent, and accountable those governmental processes, the more likely policies and practices will respond to the basic priorities of the general population.

FIVE STEPS

With the case for supporting democracies so compelling, it may come as a surprise that the United States, other industrialized democracies, and international financial institutions have not shown greater preference to countries on the path to democracy when providing economic assistance. Instead, existing rules have typically prevented democratic criteria from guiding funding decisions. As a result, as much official development assistance (as a percentage of GDP) has been provided to autocracies as to democracies. This is not just a Cold War phenomenon; the same patterns have applied since 1990. Nor does it reflect disproportionate levels of humanitarian assistance to crisis-riven autocracies; the lack of distinction survives even if only non-emergency assistance is considered or the poorest countries are removed from the sample. Despite increased rhetoric and funding for democracy-promotion projects, the simple fact is that the West does not tilt its development assistance to democracies. This can and should change.

The U.S. government and the multilateral financial institutions should adopt five new policies to prioritize democracies. First, a principle of "democratic selectivity" should be embraced. Countries that develop democratic institutions, and thereby adopt power-sharing arrangements, should be given preference when allocating development assistance. Tilting aid to democracies would not only enhance the effectiveness of that aid, it would give clear, powerful incentives to nonrepresentative governments to shift course.

The Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) proposed by President George W. Bush and created by the U.S. Congress in 2004 is a major step in the right direction. Under the MCA rules, democratic governance, transparency, existence of economic rights, and investments in health and education are held up as qualifying criteria for countries to receive assistance. Funding distributed by the MCA should be increased, as originally proposed by President Bush, and the MCA board should continue to exclude nondemocratic countries, even if they meet other eligibility criteria.

But the MCA alone is an inadequate development strategy. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), still the major development actor in the U.S. government, should also offer preferential treatment to democracies and target its assistance to help countries undertaking democratic reforms. The United States should, of course, continue to respond to humanitarian crises, but these funds should be more closely circumscribed than at present so as to avoid inadvertently propping up repressive regimes.

Second, the charters of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the regional lending institutions should be amended to favor democratic regimes. Democracies should qualify for larger levels of funding, and their leaders, as legitimate representatives of their societies, should be granted considerable flexibility in identifying development priorities and strategies.

Under the articles of agreement signed at Bretton Woods in 1944, the World Bank and the IMF are currently prohibited from considering democratic legitimacy when making financing decisions. Thus, although a growing number of reformers in these institutions have come to appreciate the fundamental role that democracies play in enhancing development and economic stability, they are handcuffed from rewarding political reform. Moreover, because many of the multilateral development banks and bilateral donors take their lead from the World Bank and the IMF, the effects of this agnosticism have been amplified. To its credit, the World Bank in particular has supported more government-reform projects in recent years. But these projects focus primarily on improving the efficiency of the civil service, regulatory agencies, and control of corruption. Although commendable, they are insufficient because they overlook the reality that the foundation for a system of rule of law is the legal basis on which a society chooses its leaders.

The Bretton Woods provisions that prohibit using political criteria when disbursing aid were originally introduced to entice, albeit unsuccessfully, the Soviet Union into participating and to minimize the role of politics in macroeconomic policymaking. However, there is a major difference between "playing politics" in trying to influence the selection of a particular leader or political party and encouraging a country to adopt institutions that are representative, accountable, and responsive to its population. As the data above make clear, the latter political characteristics have an unambiguously positive impact on the very development goals prioritized by international financial institutions. Taking them into account, moreover, makes more geopolitical sense today than during the Cold War. Two-thirds of the world's states are now either democracies or on a democratic path, double the percentage in 1944. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the only regional development bank established since the end of the Cold War, explicitly considers democratic governance as an overarching objective, along with promoting market economies. The EBRD's profitability is proof that considering democratic orientation in financing decisions is an effective strategy.

Third, "democracy impact statements" should become an integral part of international development assistance. Much like environmental impact statements, such statements would include assessments of all major development initiatives to determine the extent to which they support or undermine democratic institutions and processes. After all, aid policies are not enacted in a political vacuum; economic reforms can damage political and social institutions. Adopting an otherwise smart economic reform that winds up throwing democratic reformers out office, for example, makes little long-term sense. These threats need to be taken into account, especially in fledgling democracies, since most backsliding occurs within three years of a transition to democracy.

The intertwining of politics and economics points to the importance of timely and customized assistance in countries that have recently started down a democratic path. Democratizers need to deliver tangible benefits-a "democracy dividend"-to the general citizenry during the early years of the transition. Democracy impact statements would better equip development agencies to help. Of course, even with a democracy impact statement in hand, the challenges facing reformers are complex. Building pro-growth, pro-democracy coalitions is made more difficult by the highly skewed distributions of income and power typically inherited from narrow autocratic systems. And for many societies emerging from autocracy, coalition building is a first-time experience in collective action.

Fourth, aid provided for security purposes should be separated from aid for development. The need to support authoritarian allies on security grounds, including gaining their cooperation on antiterrorism measures, continues to act as a significant constraint on a broader U.S. commitment to democracy-even after the Cold War. Washington's political and economic backing of General Pervez Musharraf's government in Pakistan is a case in point. Although justified on the grounds of enhancing regional stability, this kind of Faustian pact overlooks the reality that autocracies are at the heart of most instances of civil conflict, governance failures, transnational terrorism, and nuclear proliferation-the very perils the United States most wants to prevent.

At the very least, the United States should set up separate funding streams for security and development. When support for an autocratic government is deemed to be vital to U.S. security interests, aid should be committed explicitly by the president in the form of a time-limited "security waiver." Because the justification for such support would be security, funding would be drawn from defense rather than development accounts. Such clear earmarking of funds would make the tradeoffs involved more explicit and minimize situations in which the United States aligns itself with autocratic leaders at the expense of tolerant, forward-looking reformers. The crucial underlying message would be that democracy is Washington's default policy.

Fifth, the United States must create a cohesive development strategy. The goals of alleviating poverty and advancing development involve political, social, and security, as well as economic, considerations. Currently, the Treasury Department, working through the multilateral financial institutions, sets U.S. development policy-and predictably emphasizes economic stability. But development involves much more than macroeconomic policies. Putting development concerns center stage will require the steady involvement of agencies such as USAID, the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), the State Department, the Trade Development Authority, and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, all of which have a focus on development. The policies of a number of other U.S. agencies-including the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Labor, the Environmental Protection Agency, the CIA, and the Department of Defense-should also be taken into greater account, since they have direct, and sometimes damaging, impacts on development and democracy.

Fashioning an integrated, effective development strategy will require reconciling diverse and often competing interests. To do so, a Development Policy Coordination Council, an executive-level interagency council, should be created. This body would comprise four standing representatives: the secretary of state (who would chair the council), the secretary of the Treasury, the head of the MCC, and the administrator of USAID. It would formulate U.S. development policy, provide guidance to multilateral institutions, and reconcile the aims of all U.S. government agencies whose actions affect the developing world.

DEMOCRACY FIRST

We reject a "development first, democracy later" approach because experience shows that democracy often flourishes in poor countries. Moreover, evidence reveals that countries frequently remain poor precisely because they retain autocratic political structures. A development-first strategy thus risks perpetuating the deadly cycle of poverty, conflict, and oppression.

By contrast, a democracy-centered development strategy presupposes not only that poor countries can successfully democratize but also that democracy brings political checks and balances, responsiveness to citizen priorities, openness, and self-correcting mechanisms-all of which contribute to steady growth and superior living conditions. Establishing domestic institutions that hold leaders accountable to their citizenry, moreover, has the potential to shift the burdens of oversight for development initiatives from international institutions to national political structures. Such a transfer of responsibility would alleviate the administrative burden faced by international agencies and foster development strategies better adapted to local needs.

Alleviating poverty and advancing democracy are long, difficult processes susceptible to periodic setbacks. But these struggles should be contrasted with the incomparably worse hardships frequently suffered under autocracies: economic stagnation, humanitarian crises, and conflict. In helping the developing world rid itself of these scourges, the United States and other industrialized countries must make democracy central to their development agendas.

QT's diary and news and Shouts and Murmurs Oh My!

Where did the wonderful timestream slip off too?

If the lack of bloggage concerns thee, get better priorities I say. It's a goddamn blog, aight.

Have to keep up my political count ^^

Laughing at Whose line, reliving and slightly amazed at childhood prompters and Everybody seems to think I’m lazy. I don’t mind, I think they’re crazy...Don't waste the holidays! Important!

You should make a movie about dolphins. Dolphins are God's majestic creatures. Dolphins rule the planet and are smarter than you or me. Bow down to dolphins the mighty creatures of God's heaven and earth of the dolphin land! Please make a movie about dolphins, maybe gangster dolphins, I'll act in it for you you know.

- Jodie Miller, a dolphin fan

Right on! Wow, I really lack material. I STEAL material from famous people to pad out my own. How low can I go?! NO, does not refer to limbo or other sexually-related material, as much I want it to be...

Ciao Ciao!

Al-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz Malcolm X

Or Spike Lee's masterpiece.

As the long name suggests, I watched Malcolm X today! Absolutely mind-stunning oratory they had back then. Really well-done piece, even the credits were damn good. I didn't think i'd be able to sit still through a !(# minute movie (guess the numbers!), but it's a good movie.

I have like 30 eps of Whose line to watch!!! Far far too much. LMT it tomorrow! I have to bring HGTG for peesh-course.

Words of love and words so leisured,
words are poisoned darts of pleasure

GAH! apparently, Call your mother, she's worried about you, is spliced in backwards in Michael. I never noticed! These headphones rock. Anyway, bye bye.

it's Girl O Clock!

Great song.

Had a surprisingly...good day today? I dunno, life surprised me a little bit in a realistic sorta way, it's a bit offputting, but good.

I got musik! yay! deposited more money, go fiscal solvency! hehe. Watched Safron, watched a great ep of Whose line (season 6 ep7).

My respect for certain people has gone up like 40 notches, which places the average squarely at about...one of the upper layers of hell.

Nothing more, free time roxors! Night night.

This kicks so much ass

Explain how!

Ohaiyo!

Having a mahvelous couple of days, absolutely great. Yesterday was annoying at first, what with the heat and the LOSING OF THE WALLET ON THE BUS and all, but all that melted away in Audrey Tatou. She's so cute! Now my favourite foreign starlet replacing, umm, that girl with the whale. Yeah.

Today, went and got my wallet back...like that. It was creepy. Then, went and got my shiny new debit card! Yayyyyyy! it's so shiny *gleams* After that, I went and filed my Youth Allowance form! Bureacracy is a rabid, rabid beast. Are you a 9 year-old father? If so, please get Mod F, for freak. But atleast now it's out of the way, and I get free money from teh government! yay.

Rented DVD's! I got teh Kube, and Malcolm X. More fun movie watching. And that's not even the best part.

I went to the Asian Grocery to get some melona, and the person was like, 'Umm yeah, that one is a bit squished...You can have it.'

FOR FREE!

How awesome is that?! Free melona! (It was squished, but still delicious, and that's all that really matters.)

Happiness is a free melona.

*sighs in content* Sayonara!

Oh Goody Pilgrim! Where fore art thou, Goody Pilgrim?

I watched Millers' Crossing! yay!

I have thoughts on it, cannot be bothered to air them. or dry them...hmmm, maybe I require a better cleaning service.

No more exams! no more school! aren't roses just lovely?

Off to umm...something.

Goddamn it

I need to talk with my inner therapist.

I'm reading some of my older posts, and it's...weird. Some posts i've sorta proud of, and other posts are absolutely shocking, but it's not really that that's bothering me...Just when I read some of the posts, it feels alien. Like I didn't write it. I read them and think, 'My god, I wrote that? When I did write like that? And use those words?'. It's...scary, but it doesn't matter...*sigh* it's been a mind-blurring couple of years, my sanity is only being chipped away oh so slowly.

Shakazulu!

Go brak Go!

You're not very bright are you?
Who's asking?

Watching cool tvs shows, watched American Beauty, really good movie...quite sweet too.

Saw GITS with god-awful subtitling, nearly ruined the movie it did. *grumbles on further about god-awful subtitling*

Are you saying you don't love me?

Tchuss tchuss!

w00t! to the power of w00t!

That's a little maths humour there for you maths folk.

Ok let's play a game where you ask me which substance i'm on, and I scream loudly, and then you ask why I screamed loudly, and to respond I scream back louder!

I love that game!

Have a bitchin' time. I finished a game which I had been meaning to finish for a while, under my new must finish crap i've started policy. I just borrowed four movies which i've harassed, that's right, been harassed to see, with those four being Amelie, Millers Crossing, Ghost in the Shell and American Beauty. I come home and find that it's time for my brother to do one of those cool things that he just seems to do, which means he's got a bootlegged DVD of Shrek 2. I fuckin' loooooove communism. I know that has nothing to do with Shrek, but hell. Thought I should mention it here.

Muhahahahaha! The video store will rue the day they gave me a rent one, get one free card! *more evil laughter*

As i'm typing this up and getting ready to snuggle up for some animated fun, I think to myself, damn it, if only I had some ramen or some icecream for this situation. Aw hell, any sort of weird food. Then I remembered that I bought chocolate wafers from the asian grocery! WOOOOOO!

What a odd coincidence. I usually feel really shitty on the day that I have an Ancient History exam, but it's always turned out to be like super-incredibly good. So awesome.

Giving blood in little under 14 and a half hours, then going to go see lesbian sex under the guise of Mulholland Drive, and then going to enjoy having a four day weekend. How much more rockin' can this get?!

Yay yay yay yay yay yay yay yay yay yay yay...

Crême glacée, chocolat et d'autres consolations

Salut!

Watched cute little french movie on SBS. I didn't see any chocolate on it though. It had a nice fable and a very cute cat on it, so it's alright.

The price of my wellbeing has gone up astronomically! Before, all it took was a 80-cent packet of ramen. Now, it takes $3.00 dollars worth of cookies and ramen to do the same! Outrageous.

I have lots of free time and things to be discouraged from. Au revoir!

No reason really

I'm posting more about of habit than any sort of need to post...That's not good.

Why won't my fox remember my favicons? *slight rage*

wooshness! Should I start using lip balm again?

Learnt some things, realised some things, ended up generally being a bitch. One's own selfishness can astound you, though it shouldn't.

yay! lack of school! allows me to catch up on other things! woo!

Everybody gets screwed over in life, some to a greater extent, some to a lesser. The only thing you can really control is how much you get screwed over.

Sayonara all!

Eek! the cat

Does anyone remember that show?! I found a torrent for the second season! YES!!! childhood memories, in torrent form!

Been going manic and dling torrents like crazy, finding all these cool random things that I used to love but somehow disappeared. Like Earthworm Jim. YAYNESS!!!

I'm on the edge, and I would like you to push me off, but that seems too mean...*sigh*

Explain!

WTF? you get an SMS about a terrorist attack!? they couldn't fucking call!? how the hell would you word that?! how would react to an SMS telling you about a terrorist attack!?

Something deep and meaningful, but angsty. Tchuss!

Richard Simmons

Has anyone seen the Richard Simmons episode of Whose line is it anyway? So goddamn funny.

Spilt some ramen *gasp*, watched some TV, did some cleaning, did some organising, dled Antics stereo (yayness to the max!), and now blogging.

Goodness indeed. Night.

w00t!

One break!

And several fucking let downs. Yes you heard right, Let downs.

but yeah, annoying, but it's clearing up...*SIGH* it's only gonna get worse though.

Me being the good little communist I am, just finished watching a documentary by Oliver Stone on Castro and the Cuban revolution in general. Hell of a guy Castro.

Oh right, exams...crap.

véale más adelante!

Preppiness

Apparently, Brad and Jennifer are planning to adopt. Not are they both astonishingly good-looking, they're also morally respectable. That's something you DO NOT see in Hollywood. Fuckin' A.

See your investment almost every night!

made a niceish day, I bought some ramen and had some melona! yayayayayayay. Mmmm melona.

Off to watch tv...on my computer!

iPod!

Now that I have your attention, i'll get on with this.

Watched Coffee and Cigarettes! yayyyyy. The ratings been changed from R to M15+, hope they didn't cut something out for that. Good movie anyway, classic, classic film noir. Granted, this is my first film noir, but this just oozes it. Onto to Miller's Crossing.

Good movie, good company, turned out to be a good day. Off to Beck's sweet, sweet voice I go!

question = ( to ) ? be : ! be

Yes! Nerd-dom!

I finished teh Pi, it's pretty trippy. *sigh* Exams, work, holidays coming soon. I'm so woefully underprepared and unprepared. Ah well. Ciao!

Why isn't Slobodan Milosevic incarcerated?

It's been 2 goddamn years!

Ok, who's been slipping weed into my drinking water?

I heard Beck! on TV! It was Odelay! The good song on it, Where It's At! and...*drum roll* it was on Gilmore Girls!

Good moon out.

*insert ending here*

Robots?!

FLCL is teh random. Great line from it too:

"There are rumours that it was an arson."

"Yeah, it was probably some housewife, stressed out from doing chores."

So true.

While over a hundred sex abuse claims have been settled at a cost of nearly $50 million - or 800,000 collection plates - the Archdiocese still faces dozens of cases, explaining why Portland's host wafers have been replaced with blessed ramen noodles.

Huzzah! You called me crazy, but I knew it was going to happen! My time has come! Muhahahah

The Daily Show rocks.

The album of my life.

*screaming*

*awkward silence*

*talking*

*crying*

*gashes*

*talking*

*silence*

Au revoir!

The entity formerly known as God.

Nothing will come out that won't be angst. Goddamn.

And so, a little diversion:

In the control room next door are Steven Quartz, a Caltech neuroscientist, and Colin Camerer, an economist, who are looking inside my brain to help understand some of the most vexing problems in postmodern society—irrational market bubbles, intractable Third World poverty and loser brothers-in-law who want to borrow $5,000 to open a franchised back-rub parlor. My brain was helping science explain why, despite centuries of progress in economic theory since Adam Smith, actual human beings so often refuse to behave as equations say they should.

For all its intellectual power and its empirical success as a creator of wealth, free-market economics rests on a fallacy, which economists have politely agreed among themselves to overlook. This is the belief that people apply rational calculations to economic decisions, ruling their lives by economic models. Of course, economists know that the world doesn't actually work this way; if it did, you wouldn't need a financial adviser to remind you to save for retirement. But until recently the anomalies were chalked up to the pernicious influence of emotions, emanations from the primitive regions of the brain, a kind of mental noise interfering with the pure, rational expression of economic self-interest.

The new paradigm sweeping the field, under the rubric of "behavioral economics," holds that studying what people actually do is at least as valuable as deriving equations for what they should do. And when you look at human behavior, you discover, as Camerer and his collaborator George Loewenstein of Carnegie Mellon have written, that "the Platonic metaphor of the mind as a charioteer driving twin horses of reason and emotion is on the right track—except that cognition is a smart pony, and emotion a big elephant." The fMRI machine enables researchers in the emerging field of neuro-economics to investigate the interplay of fear, anger, greed and altruism that are activated each time we touch that most intimate of our possessions, our wallets.

Economists have many ways of demonstrating the irrationality of their favorite experimental animal, Homo sapiens. One is the "ultimatum game," which involves two subjects—researchers generally recruit undergraduates, but if you're doing this at home, feel free to use your own kids. Subject A gets 10 dollar bills. He can choose to give any number of them to subject B, who can accept or reject the offer. If she accepts, they split the money as A proposed; if she rejects A's offer, both get nothing. As predicted by the theories of mathematician John Nash (subject of the movie "A Beautiful Mind"), A makes the most money by offering one dollar to B, keeping nine for himself, and B should accept it, because one dollar is better than none.

But if you ignore the equations and focus on how people actually behave, you see something different, says Jonathan D. Cohen, director of the Center for the Study of Brain, Mind and Behavior at Princeton. People playing B who receive only one or two dollars overwhelmingly reject the offer. Economists have no better explanation than simple spite over feeling shortchanged. This becomes clear when people play the same game against a computer. They tend to accept whatever they're offered, because why feel insulted by a machine? By the same token, most normal people playing A offer something close to an even split, averaging about $4. The only category of people who consistently play as game theory dictates, offering the minimum possible amount, are those who don't take into account the feelings of the other player. They are autistics.

The fMRI machine shows how all this works inside the brain. A low offer stimulates activity in the brain's insular cortex, a relatively primitive region associated with negative emotions including anger and disgust. This appears to compete with the more highly evolved prefrontal cortex, the locus of the rational impulse to take the dollar and go buy a soda with it. The more activity in the insular cortex, the more likely subjects were to reject the offer. This is a big step toward being able to see on a screen what people actually want, rather than what they say in focus groups or interviews. Would brain-scan-assisted matchmaking or employee headhunting be more efficient than the way these have been carried out until now? Or would the fMRI merely ratify the judgments of intuition? Psychologists can hardly wait to find out.

And for their part, economists can hardly contain their glee at the research horizons this opens up. "Imagine if you could go on the floor of the stock exchange and see what was going on in traders' brains," says Camerer. "We kept hearing during the bubble that people were behaving as if they were in a delusional state. Well, were they or weren't they?" People don't save enough for their retirements because of a phenomenon known as forward discounting: they value money more in the here and now than 20 years down the road. If we could understand how this process works in the brain, says Paul Glimcher, a leading neuroscientist at New York University, we would have a head start on figuring out how to overcome it.

Much of Glimcher's work is with monkeys, which can be implanted (safely and painlessly, he stresses) with electrodes that can detect in real time the firing of a single neuron. By contrast, the fMRI only indirectly tracks brain function by measuring blood flow. This is an imprecise indicator both spatially—it deals with regions of hundreds of thousands of neurons—and temporally, since it lags several seconds behind the neural activity it reflects. Monkeys, obviously, don't save for their retirements, and you couldn't expect them to grasp the rules of the ultimatum game. But they do have a rudimentary concept of economic choice, and researchers have discovered a medium of exchange—Berry Berry fruit drink—that can usefully stand in for money in a monkey's mental life.

To illustrate how monkeys make economic decisions, Glimcher's former colleague Michael Platt, now at Duke, has investigated how they value status within their troop. Male monkeys have a distinct dominance hierarchy, and Platt has found they will give up a considerable quantity of fruit juice for the chance just to look at a picture of a higher-ranking individual. This is consistent with field observations, Platt says, which have found that social primates spend a lot of time just keeping track of the highest-ranking troop member. It isn't known exactly why monkeys do this, but the finding might help explain the behavior of human beings who pay $1,000 just to sit in a hotel ballroom with the president. You can draw whatever conclusion you choose from Platt's finding that there is no quantity of juice sufficient to get a male monkey to look away from the hindquarters of a female in estrus.

Glimcher is trying to piece together the building blocks of economic choice in the brain, starting at the most basic level of a single neuron. In weighing options—a gamble on a roulette wheel, say, or the purchase of a bond—economists invoke the concept of "expected value." It is the potential payoff of a given course of action, multiplied by the chance of collecting it. Hence the expected value of flipping a coin to win $1 is 50 cents. A more sophisticated mathematical function called "expected utility" takes into account most people's inborn aversion to risk, and appears to more accurately reflect how people actually make these choices. Tossing a coin for $10 million or getting a guaranteed $5 million both have the same expected value, but a different expected utility—and most people who aren't already millionaires would take the sure thing. (Or so economists believe. No one has come up with the funding to test the hypothesis.) In his monkey research, Glimcher has isolated individual neurons that fire in response to the expectation of getting a drink of juice. By manipulating the odds of getting the drink and the size of the drink, he has shown that the rate at which these neurons fire is proportionate to the expected utility of the juice payoff. The implication is electrifying, especially to economists: an abstract, mathematically derived formula appears to be literally hard-wired into the primate brain.

And that, in turn, is a step toward the holy grail of marketing: being able to figure out how people will make choices that haven't been offered yet. The same tools that can answer deep questions about primate behavior can also be used to get people to sign up for more cell-phone minutes than there actually are in a month. A handful of researchers in the United States and Europe are already using fMRIs to test how product brands are represented in the brain. The goal of every consumer marketer is to have people "identify" with a brand, to develop the kind of loyalty that goes far beyond a utilitarian preference for, say, one kind of pickup truck over another. Emory University psychologist Clint Kilts scanned subjects as they looked at a variety of products, from cars to soft drinks, and found that this sense of brand identification elicited a strong response in the medial prefrontal cortex. This is the brain area associated with what psychologists call the "sense of self," one's self-constructed identity. His insights are now being offered to the corporations of the world through the BrightHouse Neurostrategies Group in Atlanta, a pioneer in the emerging field of neuromarketing. "There's a pretty big gap in our understanding of consumers, which neuroscience can help close," says Justine Meaux, a researcher at BrightHouse. But—well aware of the Orwellian implications of this work—she hastens to add that "there's no 'buy button' out there to be found. We're not going to subvert free will. This isn't about screwing the consumer."

Glimcher has thought about these questions, too. Based on his research into choice and preference, he says, "If a corporation came here and said, 'We want to be able to tell the lowest salary a candidate will accept for a job,' I wouldn't do it. But given six months or a year, I think it would be possible." Of course, he admits, you couldn't scan people's brains, practically or ethically, without their knowing it. So they would have to voluntarily submit to an fMRI scan. Would they? Well, Glimcher says, "how badly do you want the job?"

Inside the scanner at Caltech, I played a version of what economists call the "investment game." Quartz, in the next room, watched images of my brain while I manipulated a thumb switch and studied choices on fiber-optic goggles. At the same time his collaborator Read Montague was overseeing a subject inside a similar machine in his laboratory at Baylor University. The game is played thusly: at the start of each of 10 rounds, I am given an imaginary stake of $10. I can keep it all, or "invest" some or all of it with my opposite number at Baylor. Anything I invest gets tripled, and the other player then has the option of returning any portion of that amount back to me. If I keep $5 and invest $5, the other player has $15 to divide between us. He can keep it all and send me nothing if he chooses, but since in this version of the game we play for 10 rounds—there are also one-round variations—he obviously has an incentive to keep my trust. This game investigates one of the —hottest topics in behavioral economics: interpersonal trust. Observing that some societies are consistently richer than others, social scientists have invoked such ingenious explanations as "the Protestant ethic" (of working and saving for the future) or "the resource curse" (when an elite controls a valuable natural resource, such as oil, and has no incentive to encourage political and economic modernization). One of the newest explanations is "trust," which varies widely between societies and is strongly correlated with economic growth, says Paul Zak, an economist at Claremont Graduate University. Trust encourages savings and investment, and reduces the "transaction cost" of investigating the people you do business with. But, compared with well-studied behaviors such as aggression, relatively little is known about the biological basis for trust. (Zak's own research is not on brain function directly, but on oxytocin, a hormone that seems to promote trust. It is usually studied in relation not to the stock market but to lovemaking and breast-feeding.)

"If we knew what creates trust and could intervene to encourage it, we could do a lot of good for the world," says Camerer. Hence the investment game. Because the participants have no outside force to keep them honest, it represents an unusually pure test of interpersonal trust in a laboratory setting. And I was determined to ace it! I didn't get a seat on the subway to work for 39 consecutive days last year by trusting the other passengers to leave one for me.

My approach, it turns out, is consistent with some of the findings coming out of Quartz and Montague's research. The cingulate cortex, which processes both emotions and abstract thinking, becomes especially active after one player betrays the other by cutting back on how much he shares—as if the brain, or at least this crucial part of it, is "hypertuned" to detect betrayal. Quartz has also seen intriguing differences between men and women in the scanner. Men's brains tend to shut down after they've made their decision, awaiting a reply from the other subject. But women don't relax so easily; they show continued activity in at least three areas—the ventral striatum (the brain's center for anticipating rewards), the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (which is involved with planning and organizing) and the caudate nucleus (a checking and monitoring region, sometimes associated with obsessive-compulsive disorder). Women, says Quartz, seem to obsess more over whether they did the right thing—and how the other subject will react to them.

There's one other intriguing discovery coming out of this work, which has even the scientists baffled: with approximately 85 percent accuracy, the subjects, separated by the distance from Los Angeles to Texas, can guess whether they're playing against a man or a woman. They appear to be picking up on subtle clues in the interactions that the scientists themselves haven't identified.

So here was my strategy. In total defiance of the social norms that should incline me toward cooperation and trust, I pursued the single-minded goal of amassing as many points as possible. Recognizing that the more I invested the more money there would be for both of us to split, on each round I sent all $10 to my counterpart, who routinely returned $16 (of $30) to me—just enough over half to keep me going.

That is, until the ninth round, when, I calculated, the other subject could come out ahead by keeping the whole $30. So I got there first: I "invested" zero. I did the same on the last round and cleared a hypothetical $148 ($16 times eight rounds, plus $10 times two rounds) to her (or his) $112 ($14 times eight rounds). And I pulled off one more coup: I figured out, correctly as it happened, that I was playing against a woman. I reasoned that a man would have been just as competitive as I am, and guessed that I was going to betray him on the ninth round—so he would have kept all $30 to himself on the eighth round. (At least, most of the ones I know would have.) Out of such insights, scientists are constructing a model for some of the most intricate and sophisticated decisions a fully evolved human being can face in the modern world. And maybe, in some small way, if Camerer and his colleagues are right, making the world a more trusting and cooperative—and peaceful—place.

Early Post!

Yay! Now you can have my thoughts, only earlier!

I have a headache. Ouch. Make it stop.

I fucking hate the real world.

Had a moment of weakness today, I caught it and put it into a little jar, and now it makes a pleasant buzzing sound. It glows so prettily, like a firefly...

I have to thank someone/something for my life. I just don't know who/what. I can't very well thank a dead person/thing, especially when that person/thing is being raped/having consensual sex, depending on how you view that whole matter.

Sayo-nara.

Peaches and Cream

is pretty much what's been on my mind this day.

It's such a simple fail-safe. Whenever I know i'm going to be in a bad mood for the day, i'll cheat and resort to either angsting the day out or i'll try and distract myself with something. Often enough, it's sex, cause it's so much easier to think about, and more people are willing to talk about it. Joke about it, atleast.

And so now, with great gusto (Yes! No. 4) I present to you, The Paedophiliac's (ever wonder how large and unwieldy this word is? Damn the Greeks!) Handbook:

The Paedophiliac justification of politeness: It's rude to ask a woman her age.

The Paedophiliac justification of legal defense: The word 'prostatot' was invented for a reason. Use it.

The Paedophiliac justification of civic duty: Sexy children are a disease, we are the cure.

The Paedophiliac justification of seduction: If they're wearing anything made by the Olsen twins, they're asking for it.

That's all for now in the The Paedophiliac's Handbook, there may be more to come! I'm sure we're all looking forward to that.

I laughed A LOT today at school, mostly at pointless random crap that kept my mind off things. Among the things that I laughed at include:

'Hey how's your girlfriend?'

'Oh I don't know, she changed her e-mail address.'

Hah! Clever reference! Can you spot it? It's in the above sentence.
Okay, it's not really that clever.

I got to use the word 'ignoble' today! Go me. I have several problems. Including this.

I believe this can attributed to your fathah. Go home and talk to him. In fact, go home and talk to all your relations. It saves me the bother of having to listen to you BITCH.

There, didn't that make me feel much better? That'll be 30 dollars.

One seeks either knowledge or love or death. If one is unsuccessful in obtaining either of the first two, one usually seeks the third one.

Anyway, i'll go before the sugar high wears off and I sink into my moray of depression and angst...Tchuss!

EDIT: Wha??!? What happened?! Where you heathen devil, where from did you spawn from, demon child of the deep?! Goddamn it, something is seriously wrong if i'm feeling this energetic. Maybe if I torture a child...or two...

Finally

A decent day, where I didn't have to work so fucking hard. The expletive in that was probably unneeded. Fuck that shit.

Saw Jersey Girl, nice movie really, overly kitschy at times, but meh. Had the trademark Kevin Smith dialogue, produced many great lines. Only he could use the word impugned that well.

"I'm tired of being your geisha."

Attention: Prices are subject to customers attitude.

Increased my little circle of trust, I've got so much work to do. Why did no one inform me! *sigh* I'll be good for it.

Something's wrong cause my mind is fading,
Cause everywhere there's a dead end waiting

Tchuss!

Interesting!

I couldn't think of a better title.

I have books! Good ones to boot.

And in other news, China ownzed Korea in the doubles table tennis.

Meh.

Oh good.

This means that I can revert back to being a callous bitch, and not feel guilty about it.

It's so much more satisfying to read a soap then it is to watch one. Atleast with reading, you sorta have to force yourself to follow, and the writing style is that housewife English-style, which i'm really starting to like. It seems cool, i'll finish it and all.

ummm, yayness!

oh what the hell? suddenly i'm happy and shit. Where the hell did this come from? damn emotional attachment! *sigh* don't worry, i'll deal with it...

Don't ask.

Had a mostly shitteh day today, had it's moments. Like pizza.

Slept off for about a minute on the train, just long enough for me to miss my stop, and end up going all the way to Strathfield. Kinda ironic that I woke up to 'Remember...'

I have FLCL! Joy.

Rose will arrive soon, yay, Faye will have someone to talk to. She's ever so tired of pleasuring me.

Eh, aside from that, have fun, be good, etc, etc. Noight.

Possibly Maybe...

Probably not...

More Lucky and Unhappy really.

Last couple of weeks have been hella tiring, especially last couple of days. Like, fuck, i'm so tired that i'm having trouble sleeping tired. Either expect me to something incredibly radical or absolutely nothing at all.

I would sigh but that's so passe :P

People are always telling you that change is a good thing. What they're really telling you is that something you didn't want to happen at all has happened.

Joie de Vivre, I guess...

Life looks good.

And that's all it seems to be.

Like everything sorta seems to be in place. I have an iPod. I have news on it. I'm getting it all fixed. Did I mention iPod?

Home seems alright, school is sorta annoying, and...iPod, I guess...

I'm starting to like positive notes. not good.

Anyway, night people.

Finally.

"Then a band like this Australian band Jet, who I have seen... They don't have anything. They're nothing. They can't play. I mean, the drummer kind of can play, but he's a drummer. They don't have any songs, and they're boring to watch, and they don't look good. But they're playing around the world because they play this normal rock music. I mean, it's unfortunate that people are being forced to like that, for a kind of Rolling Stones fix, as opposed to [The Witnesses] which may be as good."

- Matt, of The Fiery Furnaces, in an interview to Pitchfork.

Bahahahahahah.

Mostly a nothing day, been watching fuckloads of Naruto. I knew I shouldn't have started. Damn it.

Umm...I should, like, do something...But my mind is, like, stopped. Take care anyway :)

WOAH

I just heard Interpol - TOTBL.

But not just anywhere. It was on a Ten Sports ad!!! heard the beginning and then, 'We can cap the old times...' Cut out there.

That was trippy.

Had an amazing day today. Honestly, just amazing.

I've haven't felt this way in ages; it's just the feeling of being relaxed, calm. It's not happy; for me that's more characterised by giddiness, the feeling of having blood rush through your body. But just serene, not really paying attention to things, but noticing them anyway. It's like looking at a sunset, and going "what a nice sunset..." and that's it. Just that.

Had a very good day, with the brewhahahing, and the talking, and just...niceness.

I know that I should say everything that happened, but it just feels so nice. I just want to sit here and sort of melt into the bliss...

The only people who write about ethics are the only people not to have them.

mmmmm, ramen...

Sounds of silence, eerie yet comforting, leaving you exactly where you were...

I have Naruto! bye.

May our bodies remain...

Another painful, stressful day, but it's getting better.

I'm resorting to my unhealthy, unhealthy coping strategies to deal with stuff, but that's the point, they're coping strategies, not long-term solutions.

I had some icecream, had a very nice jar of olives, wanted some more but I didn't have any :(...Oh well, it was probably for the best, I felt kinda sick after it anyway :P

And yeah, about my coping strategies. I'm using comfort foods, music, exercise, art and some of the milder forms of masochism to get through all this, so don't be alarmed if you see mild injuries on me.

I should do a more detailed post explaining what all this really means and what i'm talking about, but I'm gonna try and sleep. It's been my first day in a while that I haven't had stress crippling me entirely, and I'm trying to take advantage of it.

Anyway, if I have time and I can meet you all in person, and you can be bothered to ask me what all this means, I'll be happy to explain a bit further. Otherwise, night. Take care :)

Err yeah, I'm probably going to stop this thing soon...

Yeah but nobody searches
Nobody cares somehow
When the loving that you've wasted
Comes raining from a hapless cloud
I myself may look upon your face
Disappear in the sweet, sweet gaze
See the living that surrounds me
Dissipate in a violent waste

Can't you see what you've done to my heart
And soul...
This is a wasteland now

We spies, we slow hands
Put the weights all around yourself
We spies, oh yeah, we slow hands
You put the weights all around yourself

I submit my incentive is romance
I watched the pole dance of the stars
We rejoice cause the hurting is so painless
From the distance of passing cars

But I am married to your charms and grace
Just be crazy like the good old days
You make me wanna pick up a guitar
And celebrate the myriad ways that I love you

Can't you see what you've done to my heart
And soul...
This is a wasteland now

I'm probably not going to post very often on this, as it seems to be that the majority of the posts just involve me being stupid...I wish for a lot of things. I need to stop.

I don't know. I just don't. I'm sorry.

Nobody ever talks about death in a supermarket.

It's not going to be an eventful post. It's not going to be an eventful day.

The sun will still rise in the east, set in the west, and otherwise bathe us in light.

Motherfucker.

The undertaking of a new action brings new strength.

Night all.

Damn it, why do I have to make decisions now?

Difficult. Just Difficult.

Not really sure what to do right now, I have some things in mind, but they didn't work before so yeah....

Fuck.

*sigh*

Quotes!

I got lost on the road of life.

What's the point of having a home if you don't have a homeless person to drive past to get there?.

The greatest love affair I've ever had was with myself.

What a grand thing, to be loved! What a grander thing still, to love!

I only know two pieces. One is 'Claire de lune', and the other isn't.

I can't listen to too much Wagner. It makes want to invade Poland.

Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought him back.

It is the duty of the old to worry on the behalf of the young. It is the duty of the young to scorn the anxiety of the old.

Never miss a chance to keep your mouth shut.

The birds hung in the air the way bricks don't.

Whenever you feel like crying or running away, sing.

A diplomat is a person who can tell you you're going to hell in such a way that you're looking forward to it.

You must lose a fly to catch a trout.

You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.

When in doubt, lie. When not in doubt, lie anyway. You get a better price.

It's OK to sell out. At the right price.

Hope, like the gleaming taper's light,
Adorns and cheers our way;
And still, as darker grows the night,
Emits a brighter ray.

He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife.

The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.

Assume a virtue, if you have it not.

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

I have several castles in the air. Would you like to join me?

I saw a couple of cute girls, so I had to dance for them.

Ignorance is bliss.

All perception of truth is the detection of an analogy.

I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.

Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

Pain is just your body's way of saying something is wrong.

I've never been fond of overly political music or overly musical politicians.

Nothing encourages sin as so much as mercy.

Wheresoever you go, go with all your heart.

I love acting. It is so much more real than life.

Seek not happiness too greedily, and be not fearful of happiness.

Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I can't change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference.

If hope is all a man has, do not take it from him.

If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.

Death solves all problems - No man, no problem.

He who has never hoped can never despair.

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.

Man can never use sex to get what they want. Sex is what they want.

A witty saying proves nothing.

I got lost on the road of life.

Kakashi is sooo cool.

Man, Naruto is hyper-addictive, and i'm up to the chuunin test! and I now know who Gaara is! ooh *spooky music*

My first real day of depression today, I'm such a classic case. Hopefully this doesn't happen too much more.

Yes, that was stupid :P Bye all.

I love technology. Editing is so much easier.

Military quotes!

When Bismarck asked the Swiss Ambassador what the 250,000 Swiss Army would do if 500,000 Germans invaded, his reply was "Shoot twice, then go home."

"So, what do you wanna do?"..."I dunno, what do YOU wanna do?"..."I dunno, what do YOU wanna do?," etc. COL (DIA) describing the way OUSD(S) develops and implements their strategies.

"It was seen, visually." LTC (EUCOM) during a Reconnaissance briefing.

I WILL PERSONALLY HUNT AND KILL THE PEOPLE WHO DECIDED TO BRING SASUKE BACK.

You cannot do shit like that and get away with it. Seriously.

Anyway, I think I will do a good, long post detailing all the shit that's happened this holidays, considering how amazingly crazy it's been.

But not right now :P

Yeah, that was pretty stupid, but yes, I will try my best to cover these holidays soon.

I was really using this post as an excuse to post cute little military quotes anyway. Here's the link.

Au revoir all, and please for gods sake, enjoy yourselves! I cbf'ed thinking of a beautiful speech here, but have fun in life as much you can.

A mixed bag really.

Of Anime that is.

First off, something a little serious: I never realised how much of an asshole I could be. Really really sorry to person involved.

...

Sasuke (or Sasky, as Peesh-Corshe calls him)...No...NOT SASKY!!!!

And he had just become Sharingan...*wipes lots of anime tears off face*

Bahahahahah bowling.

Mallrats was teh awesome, though possibly the worst of Jay and Silent Bobs. I have now seen all Jay and Silent Bob. I feel proud.

Ummm...Damn it. *draws blanks*

Okay, okay, this is stupid, But:

You know one of those moments where you don't quite feel right and you really want some chocolate but there's none around, and you think, dammit, you can never get chocolate when you want it? You know one of those?

Well, I just had one of those, and I was scouting for chocolate, when I open my freezer and find: Chocolate Entice!

YES!

My brother actually did something cool for once.

Lotsa little things.

I actually consumed some of the other varieties of donuts that Krispy Kreme offers. I never knew that sugar comes in so many different shapes and colours.

Now that I think about it, really there was only one. Clear.

NARUTO!

Lying in the sun
everyday feeling all of the magic in life
and the wonder...

I've having a decentish holidays, I'm starting to get that feeling of lack of doing productiveness which I so love/loathe, so am organising to do things. I just don't know what. Meh.

See, whenever I come to do this, I've have lots of things that I will want to say, but can't remember as i'm doing this, but remember just after I finish doing this. It's annoying. Or indicative of something. Hopefully something stupid.

Either way, I'll go read my LoTR (I'm up the Mines of Moria! yay! Gandalf just 'died'). I sorta kinda want to do review/thoughts on it, but cannot be fucked. It's more or less like people say. I'll do something later after i've done like the first book or something.

Man, I procastinate too much.

I hate election years. Goddamn propaganda.

Night all.

Wow.

My teenage angst bullshit is actually start to piss me off.

Life has been good, in its own warped, fucked up sort of way.

I'm far stupider than I could ever realise, and that makes me happy.

I now know what the tube for KY Jelly looks like.

My mum is leaving for the States tomorrow. Well, technically today.

This writing style is starting to annoy me, as do I.

I'd better stop wasting posts.

Bye.

I'm posting about posting. Somebody shoot me.

I'm like in the mood but not in the mood to post.

I have lots of things that I need to get off my chest and things to examine and think about and I have no fucking idea what to do.

I had a prolonged blast of fun just then, i'm paying for it physically and mentally. Jesus that's annoying.

Read. Eat. Sleep. Possibly one of the most true things ever said.

Aleatoric: Something characterised by chance; random.

By digitizing thunder and traffic noises, Georgia was able to create aleatoric music.

Goddamn it i'm being really indecisive right now. Fuck it, i'm not gonna bother posting something decent.

Has anyone seen my sexually perverse photographs involving tennis rackets?

My teenage angst bullshit has a body count.

I wish you all happiness.

Welcome to the human race. You're a mess.

That's almost exactly how I feel.

It's been...confusing? painfully debilitating? mildly uplifting? I'll have to wait a little while longer I guess.

How long do you have to wait...

In other news, Maria Sharapova beat Serena Williams 6-1, 6-4 to win the 2004 Wimbledon championship.

In related news, the skirts seem to be getting shorter (by this, I mean non-existent) and Sharapova is quite good-looking.

Worse things could happen I suppose. bye bye all.

I probably have lost something.

Was not a very good day, certain people are getting really really annoying. Ok, maybe not that annoying, but ANNOYING nevertheless.

So in order, you can have this:

Once upon a time and a very good time there lived three little pigs. These pigs were no ordinary pigs; no, they were veterans of the Vietnam War. They were bitter and resentful about the fact that half the people in the world didn't even know where Vietnam was. For you see, in this world, Vietnam was on another planet, and the pigs were fighting an alien race, bent on the enslavement of this worlds baby animals. It was just a happy coincidence that the world of the alien race was called Vietnam.

Nowadays, these pigs lived out in the open country, where they could be free and happy and wallow in their own filth, if they so wished to do so. One of the piggies was lying in a hammock and reading one of his favourite novels, Cervantes by Don Quixote. The novel went a bit like this:

A long time ago, in faraway Romania, there once lived a man called Cervantes. There has been some dispute over that name; some people claim it to be Cervanto, while others claim it to be Cervantoeosa; but for the sake of pronounciation, we shall call him by his popular name, Cervantes.

Cervantes was by no means a interesting character, so therefore we shall move on to his lovely and beautous wife. His wife was a beautiful woman, who had some very odd interests; she adored tulips and was absolutely smitten by cats. She kept many cats around her, but was unable to procure tulips, as the harsh Romanian climate prevented her from doing so.

One day, Cervantes was coming back from a long day in the tofu fields, only to find himself being cuckolded by no less than the buxom and blonde milkmaid.

'Alas!' He cried. 'Alack! Apain and awoe!' He moaned. He chased out the two scantily clad women onto the street, much to the cheering and delight of onlookers.

'Cuckolded!' Cervantes raged. 'By no less then the buxom and blonde milkmaid!'. He yelled and screamed and broke things till his voice was hoarse, and he had run out of things to break. He mumbled bitterly to himself and sat down to ponder his unfortunate fate.

At this point, the pig was tired, and so promptly went off to sleep.

Meanwhile, another piggie was sitting in his room, cleaning and polishing his large collection of fully loaded, fully functional sniper rifles. He was cleaning the barrel of one his favourite ones right now: The Sig Sauer SG 550. This semi-auto, gas operated baby fired .223 bullets and had a 650mm barrel. The piggie was sitting and cleaning his rifle, when his sensors picked something up. It was that damn bitch Cinderella again, selling her infernal Girl Scout cookies. He only liked the Thin Mints; oh sure, he had the occansional box of the Lemon Pastry Crèmes, but those were low-fat. She kept pestering him to buy her rotten cookies, but now she had gone too far. The piggie resolved to solve this once and for all: he picked up his Swedish-made PSG-90 and picked up the bi-pod. This little piggie was really not feeling too well; he decided to use the sabot case. The sabot case is a 4.81mm tungsten carbide round fired in a sabot case. This round exits the barrel at over 4400 fps (feet per second). He didn't care about the degradation of accuracy, he just wanted her dead.

He set up the bi-pod, set her in the Hendsolt 10x42mm sights and pulled the trigger...

Part 2 coming later. Because i'm lazy.

Nice? Shite? Average? Why? Send your opinions and questions to: ME.

This is what happens when you leave things alone. Have fun all. Night.