Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • Tony, Toni, Tone

    One nice thing about our apartment is that we get BBC World on the TV. We mentioned before how much nicer it is to watch real news on TV.

    Last night we watched Tony Blair address the Labour Party congress. It makes us sad to think about how backwards our country is. Our president has latched onto the word “freedom” like it’s a life raft, making vague promises about what he will do if he gets elected president. (Note the infuriating subtext here.) Tony Blair talks about seven and a half years of overwhelming progress in British society. Our president claims that the economy is “getting better.” Tony Blair cites seven and a half years of economic growth, a massive drop in crime and unemployment, a doubling in the percentage of poor Londoner students passing through high school, and a 200% increase in the efficiency of Britain’s government-funded public health system. Our president wants to amend the founding document of our society to include a provision that prevents loving same-sex couples from being treated just like everyone else. Tony Blair proudly proclaims that the New Left has forced the Lib Dems and the Tories to accept gay rights and to openly compete with Labour for the gay vote. Our president has nothing to say about minorities except for that he appoints them to cabinet posts. Tony Blair notes the changes in the past decade–racial relations are not “political correctness,” but rather an issue that all Britons must accept as a key issue in British society.

    Now let’s be clear. Poor Tony glossed over a bunch of troubling economic problems, including the failure of Britain to join the EU–a massive defeat that will harm Britons in the long term. Poor Tony still refuses to acknowledge the flip side of “I’m Not Going to Apologize for Removing Saddam,” which is “It Is Not the Case that Anything Is Better than Saddam.” But still.

  • First Full Day

    After a hectic afternoon and evening yesterday, we finally started our first real day’s worth of work today. We both stayed at the Freedom Institute, with a brief interlude to find bed linens and money from an ATM that worked. However, things are good, and we’ve had no problems to speak of.

    Except for the three mosques that woke us up at 4:15 this morning with their morning call to prayer. It’s not that we don’t like the mosques and the calls to prayer; in fact, we think that they are pretty. The problem is, there’s no standard call to prayer, so three at once quickly disintegrates into cacophony. We also had fun trying to work the washing machine this morning–when we return this afternoon, we will be able to tell if we have succeeded (or, alternatively, assess the damage).

    The findings from today’s research: The Indonesian economy is one corrupt place. Bank Duta, for example, lost $419 million dollars in 1990, a fact made all the worse by the fact that its total asset portfolio was valued at a bit over $200 million dollars. Strangely, nothing happened, despite the fact that Bank Duta was Indonesia’s second biggest bank at the time. The major shareholders decided to float it a “grant,” and the stock market plugged along all hunky-dory. A totally unrelated side note is that Suharto owned three “charitable organizations” that each owned a third of the stock in the company.