Stupidity reigns supreme.

I have lost what little faith I had in the general populace having any form of brain what-so-ever. The most recent example of the stupidity of the masses is the US Beef protests in Seoul. In a nutshell (help, help, I'm in a nutshell) the situation is thus: Korea and USA signed a free trade agreement which pretty much boils down to Koreans being able to export cars more freely, in exchange for re-opening their doors to US beef.

The FTA was signed by the now-unpopular new president (who was voted in with an overwhelming majority, and is now the most hated man in Korea for doing exactly what he said he would do...) and the opposition decided to rally the Anti-American spirit to force their hand. So, they used the "journalists" (who have never heard of research and only report what their superiors tell them to, and wouldn't know a fact if it jumped up and bit them in the arse) and planted false stories and internet rumours that US beef was just rampant with MAD COW!

This is a disease that the WHO (W standing for WORLD) downgraded to a NON-issue 3 years ago. Anyway, the Korean public is now convinced that if they eat US beef they will immediately get Mad Cow disease, which is, according the them (but not anyone else) contagious and airborne. Never mind the fact that the majority of Americans chow down on beef regularly and there has not even been ONE case of Mad Cow in humans in America... Oh, and, the US would specifically be sending it's diseased meat to Korea, and not the good stuff. Because that's what you do with allies and trading partners - try to poison them.

THEN! A foreign company bought a Korean bank, then sold it at a profit. This is business, right? Well, because they were foreigners, they were arrested for making a profit. So, shockingly, foreign investors are pulling out of Korea and my hard earned won is quickly becoming as valuable as, say, the Thai baht or the Vietnam Dong... BOO!

To top it all off, I was stupid enough to read the public comments on various internet news articles, such as Dr. Morgantaler being awarded the Order of Canada for his dedicated fight for women's reproductive rights, and I see the small-minded, bigotted, 18th Century opinions being posted by a supposedly educated group of people, and it just makes me want to drop out of the human race... Can there be any hope at all for people who equate a doctor fighting for women's choices and safety to Hitler?

Needless to say, as scary as the next few months will be, I am *really* looking forward to a change of scene, a change of pace and a change of the types of stupidity I'm faced with. There is no escaping it, but new forms of stupidity might not be quite so annoying for at least a while...