This song is GREAT! Certain parts sound quite 牽強 though, but it's still powerful!
yo.
I was flipping through my Psych readings, and found this article. Thought it was absolutely hilarious (was sniggering in the study den as i read it), so I poked around online a bit, and managed to find it. It's not meant to be taken seriously, so do read with a pinch of salt...
yesterday... was incredible.... O_O my heart! oh it wells with music!!! NOBUO UEMATSU IS A GENIUS!!!!! OMG!!!!! never again will i ever be able to listen to another brand of music without feeling heartache! oh!! to hear the strains of one-winged angel in its full orchestral glory once more! to see nobuo uematsu in PERSON again! him! the god of FF music!!!! standing a few metres away from me!!!! words cannot describe the meaning of good music! it speaks to the soul!!! ahhhhhh!!!!!
The freaking tagboard refuses to reflect the website... There you go. That's the official release date for Singapore...
My friends here just say I am anti- social! haha, everyone do tell me to what extent this is true
Hey guys! happy new year. Wish everyone to be safe and happy for the year to come. No STRESS! All take care. Me doing DO duty now.
How to win at politics
Machiavelli admiringly relates, in his classic political manual The Prince, how Cesare Borgia "sacked" a minister, Remirro de Orco, whom he had appointed to clean up the large region of central and eastern Italy that he had recently conquered. Remirro was a "cruel and effective man", who imposed order and sorted out the brigands, but he also made himself - and therefore his boss, Cesare - hated. So when Cesare was satisfied that the Romagna was under control, he took measures to rid himself of his redundant associate. Remirro was discovered early one morning in the town of Cesena, "cut in two pieces on the piazza, next to a block of wood and a bloody knife", says Machiavelli. "The ferocity of this spectacle ensured the people were simultaneously satisfied and stupefied." With one stroke - although it took several, probably, to cut someone in half with a knife - Borgia enhanced his authority, and proved he was responsive to public opinion.
Machiavelli tells this story gleefully and with approval. It typifies the advocacy of ruthlessness that has made his masterpiece The Prince - a thin, sharp stiletto of a book - and his other, longer masterpiece, the Discourses on Livy, both published in the early 1530s after their author's death in 1527, scandalous.
The way Blair, Brown and their respective cohorts never choose to do something straightforwardly and in the open if it can be done behind closed doors and with a smirk makes them true and accomplished Machevills, to use the word popularised by the Elizabethan dramatist Christopher Marlowe, himself a spy, who has Machiavelli appear on stage to introduce The Jew of Malta. Translations of The Prince in the 16th and 17th centuries come with Christian health warnings not to be seduced by the "poison" and "atheisme" of Machiavelli.
Still, today, he is outrageous. Think about this: how amazing, that anyone's ideas should be controversial after five centuries. Machiavelli expressed a certain attitude to power - it's a good thing, and the problem is how to get and keep it - so well that he has never become out dated. Marx and Nietzsche both repeat his ideas, while Lenin was being a pure machiavellian when he said the question about power is "Who? Whom?". One contemporary anthropological theory has it that social intelligence - the ability to achieve goals through the manipulation and deception of one's peers - was the earliest kind of intelligence to evolve. The Cambridge University anthropologists who concocted this idea base it on research showing that chimpanzees trick and basically screw one another over in the competition for food and sex. Inevitably, they call their theory "machiavellian intelligence". The cover of their book has a Ralph Steadman cartoon of a chimp dressed in Renaissance clothes, running away with a banana got through skulduggery.
Machiavelli's name has a fire-and-brimstone resonance that makes it live like few others from the past. His manual quite clearly describes the rituals of pretence, backbiting and mutual aggression that have driven the relationship between Blair and Brown for a decade now. Not only that, but Machiavelli would have approved of their behind-the-scenes dastard liness, seeing their peculiarly artful hatred as entirely natural, human, and - crucially - productive. Yet neither Blair nor Brown nor any practising politician is honest or perhaps clever enough to take the description machiavellian - the word, according to the OED, needs no capital - as a compliment. That doesn't mean they don't read him or at least, like chimps, prove his theories. Machiavelli said what others conceal. As Christopher Marlowe has him sneer, "Admir'd I am of those that hate me most."
The first rule of the Machiavelli club is never to mention Machiavelli. Working politicians, from the conspirators and assassins of Elizabethan England to our own time, have found that it is better to read The Prince in private. Now, however, is the time for Niccolò to speak to us directly, without a mask, as the potential saviour of politics in our time.
We live in times of total contempt for the machiavellian art of the politician. Backstairs deals, spin and chicanery are abominated. Any gulf between public statement and private reality is reviled, as if we had caught our parents in bed. When it comes to politics, we have reverted to a Victorian virginity: if the moral criteria professed by modern electorates were taken seriously, no government could last more than a week.
Machiavelli saw beauty and truth in what we now despise as sleazy cynicism. Perhaps the key to his thinking is that not only did he become a character on the Elizabethan stage but he himself was a dramatist. The writing that gave him his greatest success in his lifetime, and a partial rehabilitation in Medici Florence, was his play Mandragola, one of the funniest comedies in the Italian language, still a classic alongside Pirandello and Dario Fo. Machiavelli's instinct for drama is crucial to understanding him. He wrote his play Clizia for a performer he fell in love with, the singer and courtesan Barbera Raffacani Salutati. He relished a good performance - and politics for him was just that.
We need to start thinking like this again, just a little bit. It is absurd for citizens of a democracy to be so wilfully naive about politics as to see in every gap between ideal and action, every decision of a less than utopian nature, the operation of Satan in the world. Which is what we imply when we condemn all politicians as liars, manipulators and spin merchants. Isn't that their job? Would we want to be governed by moral zealots, like the Jacobins who came to power in France after 1789 and ended up massacring everyone, including themselves, in the pursuit of an absolutely authentic political voice?
Machiavelli advises the Prince to lie and dissimulate. This is a far more subtle recommendation than it seems to those it horrifies. What he is trying to get at is the opacity and irony of human affairs. Between cause and effect falls the shadow. There is such distance between you and the people, he counsels the Prince, that they can only judge you by your remote image, and do not know what you really are. You can project any image you want. Machiavelli's description strangely anticipates the media age - this inability to know the real person behind the fixed smile is exactly what makes politics so repulsive now.
But Machiavelli's honesty might also be the antidote. Politicians need to stop concealing their debt to him. They need to speak his name. They need to praise his lack of hypocrisy, and emulate it, by revealing the dirty -- and, in many cases, necessary and explicable - truth about what they do.
Tony Blair has more to gain than most. A Christian, whose political style is sincerity, he has come to be seen as a hypocrite who led Britain into an imperial war, much as the pious liberal Gladstone took us into Egypt in the 19th century. And this time it isn't even our empire. The public Blair is a Gladstonian humbug. The private one is almost certainly more human.
"A prince should never join an aggressive alliance with someone more powerful than himself," cautioned Machiavelli. "This is because if you are the victors, you emerge as his prisoner."
Of course you can't turn Machiavelli into an anti-war voice. He liked war. At any rate, he thought it necessary. And the long-dead Machiavelli did indirectly advise Blair to go to war. It was reported that Philip Bobbitt's book The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History (2002) was required reading for Blair and his circle as they prepared to make war on Saddam Hussein. Bobbitt, an experienced White House adviser who argues that we cannot choose whether to fight the wars of our epoch but can decide when, is a disciple of Machiavelli, taking 826 pages to give advice that Machiavelli delivered in a pithy paragraph.
"Political disorders can be quickly healed if they are seen well in advance," Machiavelli says in The Prince. The masters of such foresight were the ancient Romans, who "saw when troubles were coming and always took counter-measures. They never, to avoid a war, allowed them to go unchecked, because they knew that there is no avoiding war; it can only be postponed to the advantage of others."
I'm not saying this is why Blair went to war. But some such machiavellian reasoning must have lain behind his decision. If only he would say what it was. He will not, of course. All politicians fail in the end, said Machiavelli, because human beings are "obstinate", and cannot change their natures.
Machiavelli knew this because he was, himself, not a smooth success at all. He was an idealist who suffered for his beliefs. He believed profoundly in republicanism, the right of a people to decide its own form of government, and loyally served the government of the popular republic of Florence for 14 years. But in 1512 the Medici family, expelled in 1494, returned to power and took vicious revenge on their enemies. Machiavelli, suspected of plotting against them, was imprisoned and tortured. After his release he was excluded from public life. This ambitious 43-year-old had no choice but to retire to his farm outside Florence, where he wrote The Prince and Discourses in a mood of deprivation and loneliness. Used to chatting to ambassadors and generals, he was suddenly spending his days - he wrote to a friend - playing cards with local yobs in the village pub. At night, however, he entered a world of his own. After dinner he went into his study, put on his courtly robes, and talked about politics with his intellectual peers - Cicero and Livy, Aristotle and Alexander the Great. This imaginary political discussion nourished Machiavelli with "the only food that is mine".
Politics was, literally, his cibo , his food; in another letter he mentions how he and his friends, denied statecraft, pretend they are alive. Machiavelli lived only for politics, and after 1512 never got enough of it. This is why The Prince is such a wonderful read. It is his love letter to statesmanship, to the adult fun of working for the administration - its appeal resembles that of The West Wing, or more accurately Primary Colors. This contrasts deeply with the hatred most people nowadays have for those who enter the inherently impure realm of political action. Machiavelli could never have shared our moral disdain - it would have left him with nothing to talk about. He cannot discuss the wool and silk trades like other Florentines, he says in apology for a letter dispensing unrequested advice. He can only reason about the state.
For him, the feud between Blair and Brown would not have been a thing of shame and embarrassment. It would satisfy him like a bleeding slab of Tuscan steak. This is it, he might tell the Labour MPs frightened for their futures; this is the life you chose. Try to relish it, washed down with a nice glass of chianti. As for what Brown said to Blair - what a prude it exposes Brown to be. The chancellor is reported to have told the prime minister that there is nothing Blair could ever say now he will believe. Is this supposed to be criticism, Machiavelli might ask? Because a true politician would savour it as praise.
· Jonathan Jones's book on art and politics, In Machiavelli's Florence, will be published later this year.GROWING PAINS
ONE of Singapore's core values is meritocracy, a system in which advancement is based on individual ability or achievement.
This is shown by the increased number of bond-breakers in recent years and the stories of disgruntled scholars clamouring for greener pastures.
Unfortunately, with the overriding emphasis on academic records and co-curricular activities (CCA) before prospective scholars are granted interviews, many candidates fall through the cracks.
The problem with academic meritocracy is it is only useful to recognise a certain kind of talent. It favours students who are good at fact retention, essay writing, CCA participation and taking up leadership positions, regardless of their effectiveness in those roles.
Not surprisingly, while the system turns out students who are excellent at studies, many lack communication and organisational skills required by administrators in the civil service.
If our scholars deserved to be compared to each other based on such extreme benchmarks, the Government would be spoilt for choice when it comes to recruiting talent. But sadly, it is not.
Singapore has continually had to attract foreign talent to complement Singaporeans, which suggests there are some qualities missing in students here.
The system also fails when it comes to identifying other characteristics that lie beneath the surface of an academic record.
Qualities such as problem-solving abilities, being able to think on the spot, innovation, creativity, risk-taking and true leadership ability cannot be determined accurately by a 25-minute scholarship interview panel or a one-week leadership camp.
Academic meritocracy needs to be replaced by a more idealistic yet practical version - one that values experience, character and ability in both an academic and non-academic sense.
First, scholarship selection criteria should be modified to recognise polytechnic diploma holders and equivalent qualifications more favourably.
CCAs and other activities in which students participate should be considered on an even footing compared to academic achievement. This will allow a greater variety of students to get past the first round of screening.
Next, local universities need to be more transparent in their student admission process. Instead of merely assigning weights for project work and A-level achievement, they should consider students based on a wider variety of criteria.
While some universities have experimented by reserving a few hundred places for students with exceptional non-academic achievements, such criteria should be applied across the board to provide a platform for academic excellence to be compared directly with non-academic achievements.
Finally, an approach to re-engineer the primary school syllabus by adding more components into Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE) results will ensure our youngest minds learn the importance of activities outside the academic realm.
This can be done by including a CCA component in the PSLE score, and awarding bonus points for community service or activities outside of school.
The reality in life is that most things are non-examinable. Instilling in students a false belief that examinations are a sufficient indicator of success will only set them up for disappointment further down the road.
The writer is a second-year Informations Systems Management student at the Singapore Management University.
harlow! hey! let's go watch Howl's Moving Castle together!!! by Ghibli STudio! hee!
