Monthly Archives: February 2012

So, it’s all gone quiet on the capsizing ship front.  It seems the Captain of the doomed Italian liner, Costa Concordia fell off the ship and into a lifeboat!  Francesco Schiettino says he was at the helm when disaster struck but later fell into the sea and couldn’t get back on board. He actually sat on the rocks and watched the rescue operation, so he didn’t run that far really, he swam I suppose.  But who are we to doubt the sincerity of his statement? Well me actually, being a cynic.

That’s old news, why is he ranting about that shit?  You may have asked!

“Cos I got to thinking about another ships’ captain who did a runner.   Dateline 1991, ships name Oceanis, sank off the coast of South Africa.  In this case the captain also left the ship before the passengers and you can watch the you tube video here.

The Captain was accused of abandoning passengers on the ship, Captain Yiannis Avranas had this retort though: “”When I give the order abandon ship, it doesn’t matter what time I leave. Abandon is for everybody. If some people want to stay, they can stay.”

Avranos later claimed that he returned to ship and that he only left so as he could get help and organize the evacuation from a helicopter, which in fact he did –  well he returned and watched from a helicopter at least.

Oh where was the spirit of the Birkenhead with these guys?  Was Capt. Smith the idiot for not treading on women and children on his way to the lifeboat as the Titanic slowly slipped to infamy?

Now it’s just not in my nature to offer a plausible explanation for the behaviour of either the Italian or the Greek, and of course I would never indulge in coarse stereotypes, I’d never rip both apart as incorrigible cowards and refer to a WWII rifle, never fired, only dropped twice.

If you’ve ever been involved in a traumatic situation where you felt your life was in danger, you may be familiar with a twitching in your leg, an increase in your heart rate, an increased awareness of all around you.  This is the ‘fight or flight’ mechanism, a trait we inherited from our ancestors, mostly to save us from the ravages of a really scary predator such as Jehovah’s witnesses or an elderly Madonna, or even a raptor from Jurassic Park.  It’s located in the cortex, the reptilian part of our brain, and can only be overcome by training.

Is it just possible that both of these captains shit themselves, due to their innate fight or flight mechanism kicking in?  And that later, realizing the ramifications of their actions, both sought to get closer to the scene of abject failures, in Avranos’s case, by returning in a Helicopter, and in Schiettino’s case, by sitting on the rocks barely 50 meters from his failure.

Fight or flight, and the adrenaline rush it brings, can be controlled, but only through repetitive training and awareness of what is actually happening to the body, then it can be channeled and used, but without that training, we’re all putting on our fastest Asics and heading for the hills.

Should we judge them? Yes, because they are supposed to be above the naked reaction stage, that is left for passengers.

This guy gets the Muesli onto the the Newspaper every morning, well afternoon actually, I’m not an early riser.

He writes an article in the SCMP 3 or 4 times a month, always, always licking the arse of Beijing, the concept of balance is alien to him, but just who the hell is he?  His byline states he is a member of the Basic Law committee of the NPC Standing committee and also a member of the Commission on Strategic Development. ( Is there Strategic Development in Hong Kong? Could have fooled me, I thought they just did what they were told!)

I have meant to tear into him before as every time he leaves me speechless, or at least unable to type. This morning he was writing some shit about how the University of Hong Kong, his alma mater,  is dying, I have no interest in that.  At the end of his bullshit, he inserted this wee gem, I’ll repeat it here out of the context of the ramble because in fact, it was completely out of the context of the ramble: “Divorced from national suffering, history and humiliation since the opium war, there is no Hong Kong history, and subsequently there is no soul or salvation.”

So no history in Hong Kong! How’s about this Mr. Bejiing Running Dog, here’s a quote from, arguably, the founder of modern China, Dr. Sun Yat Sen:  “I saw the outside world and I began to wonder how it was that foreigners, Englishmen, could do such things as they had done, for example, with the barren rock of Hong Kong, within 70 or 80 years, while China, in 4,000 years, had no places like Hong Kong.” He then went on to say that Hong Kong, and especially its University, were his intellectual birthplace.  This is the same University that Lau attended and is the central subject of his article.

Hong Kong has a history, the British created an environment that allowed generations of Chinese to flourish and thrive, whilst on the Mainland their counterparts history involved mass state sponsored starvation, indoctrination and cultural suicide via the Cultural revolution.  These generations in Hong Kong, sought, at every opportunity, to help their families on the mainland with food and money to help them survive, all courtesy of their own hard work, again, in an environment solely created by foreign devils. On the mainland meanwhile 50 million people died because Mao was only 3/5th’s right, or was the 3/4′s or one tenth right!  Certainly while China’s great leap forward was going backwards, a juggernaut crushing the life out of countless millions, a few lucky millions were building their future prosperity in Hong Kong.

So I’ll rewrite the final paragraph for him: ““Divorced from national suffering, history and humiliation, Hong Kong thrived, and it’s subsequent history saw generations find salvation and create a unique chinese culture with its own soul.”

Every time he writes some shit I’m going to tear it apart, because he is just so easy to take apart.

Who he is! http://www.ideascentre.hk/wordpress/?p=1755&language=en

Here is another blogger commenting on another of his insane writings: http://sinocentric.co.uk/?tag=lau-nai-keung