Tag: CNN

To beat a dead horse

Even to this day, people still using the Vietnam War as a figure of speech: “Syria will be another US‘ Vietnam” etc…

It was meant to be the new Boogeyman. To scare off the children. To conjure bad imagery and bring back nightmares.

In Rambo, Stallone’s rare line was “where they call Hell, I call Home”.

Occasionally, we read about the Powell Doctrine (purportedly derived from Vietnam War) i.e. if engaged at all, finish it quickly.

Not to beat a dead horse, Vietnam War has been like the Wave, in a football stadium. After a while, it dies down. Don’t try to start one yourself, without feeling silly. It’s like the Bee Gees “I started a joke”.

The irony is, both Kerry and Hagel were by-products of US involvement in Vietnam (not to mention McCain).

A generation comes of age in “Hell”. Trial by fire, baptized by fire.

Hot war on cool medium. America first Television War (pre-CNN era).

Now we got Al Jazeera, whose host died yesterday (David Frost – so, tell me, Mr Nixon, when a president does something, it’s not illegal?). It’s like the Vietnam War got covered by South East Asian News Network. “Unbias” and In-depth coverage.

After all, it’s their region and they know the conflicts as the back of their hands.

With that kind of money buying out Current TV, A J Network is poised for the new theater of war.

The gods of vengeance has moved from Europe to Asia, and now onto the Middle East. I don’t smell the smell of jasmine.

Nor do I smell napalm. This time, you can’t see nor can you smell anything.. Just drone and precision striking.

Powell doctrine + powerful broadband. Yet they still use Vietnam as a figure of speech. For fear of being dragged in.

For fear of war fatigue. I hear the other side saying “So what you’re gonna do about it” ( I used chemical weapon, so what?).

Go ahead, and call 911. It will be another Vietnam for you e.g. quagmire, divided nation, deficit, and post-traumatic disorder.

Where they call “Hell” you shouldn’t call “Home”. But then, can you sit still when your neighbors keep beating the kids, not with stick, but by spraying deadly poison. Wouldn’t you call 911 and to Hell with it. Another Vietnam? So what! Let it be.

The Remains of Print

The Post is now under new ownership. So is the iconic Newsweek. Both incidentally got taken over by jungle-like entities like Amazon and the Beast, respectively. New world order (or jungle order). The “barbarians” are once again at the gate.

New totem pole. New titanic shift, from analog to digital, from print to online.

I prefer to see this change-over than seeing the Washington Times taken over by  a then cultic figure (Moon).

Big play. Big players. The game of influence. of Soft Powers and soft-wares.

It’s the other shoe that drops (from the time of the Reformation, with the advent of the printing press).

Back then, it was the free circulation of the Bible among the mass ( oral and scribal tradition).  Now, it’s the viral popularity of an Islamic scholar studying the life of a “political”  Jesus

With Al Jazeera (the other CNN) and Amazon, we got the complete set of opinion leaders for our world.

Want to know something? go on Wikipedia.

Want to hear something? plenty of cable channels.

Want to buy something? go on Amazon.com.

Jeff was telling interviewers that his favorite book was “the Remains of the Day” (about a butler who saw the change or more likely, the decline of aristocracy in the West).

Now, he finds himself amidst another real-life decline, a paradigm shift. And all that remains of print are those Google’s scanned pages (our modern equivalent of microfiche) for researchers of historical facts.

We process information differently. In print, we interact with those fonts and we turn the pages.

Online, we are glued to the screen, and before we know it, we might click on porn pages.

Just one of the many differences.

As creatures, we have yet learned how to handle the beast.

Massive inflow of content. Sheep among wolves.

Sleepy eyes and desensitized filters.

7 billion souls, one web site (Google).

We search that which reinforces our prejudice (a priori), or when lazy, let the SEO bots dictate what we are exposed to.

All that remains are stove-pipe thinking. More alliances and armed comrades are formed. But less in original thinking.

We need another generation or two before we can handle this new change (by then, it’s a new norm).

No more memoirs in print. Just sensational up-to-the-minute expose on celebrity and consumerism.

Those who have built good “filter” will become great curators of this new information explosion.

Those who don’t, won’t.

The new divide (information gap) won’t be geographical. It will be content-rich and content-poor folks.

The the twain shall never meet.

All that remains are for the brokers to exploit, and the pipe deliverers to profit in this new “jungle” whose sole law is survival of the smartest.

In this post-print environment, we need to say farewell to prejudices. We need to learn to be childlike, to soak in new and uncomfortable piece of news. To be changed and change-agent. It will be a tearful farewell to “home”, where each morning we expect to see sunrise and newspaper delivered on the front lawn. All that remains is a new You, with all the changes in one’s life time, more than our great grandparents and later generations have ever experienced.

That’s how important this tectonic shift is. It’s a bookend to a long overdue, but necessary re-structuring: modernity and progress.

 

What’s eating the man up inside

Instead of more career choices, he now faces 20 choices of jeans.

People are debating about a gender-free society (painting nail polish on his son’s toes).

When he finally got his tie collection under control, they went “business casual” on him (Steve Ballmer couldn’t cope with this).

Even though it says “Facebook”, most people just post a long-shot photo of themselves.

The financial crisis is now a film treatment i.e. we can now objectify the pain with some distance in between since. Money crisis, job crisis, health crisis, environmental crisis, security crisis and even marital crisis.

That’s what’s eating the man up inside.

Still he rises to the occasion. He is after all our 21st-century man. Armed with I-pod and I-pad, he can be a Spartan against the invading army of machines (see my other blog on “machine and me”).

He can text, chew gum and walk at the same time.

He shows up at the gym at first light.

Talks to no one in particular (men are not chatty, although they don’t mind leaving you a voice mail).

He is the opposite of Barbara Streisand (in a Star is Born). He wants to conquer, but frustrated because the Colosseum is now packed with competition: foreigners inshore and BRICS that chip away business, machines with intelligent softwares that cut down work load, material sciences that lessen the heavy lifting, women in NFL, ESPN, NASCAR, Air Force commanding (Libya), and worst of, advances in bio-med which prolong life (he can’t die, just get eaten up inside).

So, the rise of the rest (no offense, but I can’t help noticing Indian faces on TV, from PBS to CNN). There are discussions about “outsourcing blog”, a logical extension of what is digitized can be outsourced.

Obama, during his state visit to Britain, even commented on the rise of China and India. Something to do with “America leadership is now” (instead of passe).

Luckily, there is a phenomenon called “middle-income trap”, which kept countries like Malaysia and Thailand at bay, for a while.

What’s eating up the man inside? He hit the ceiling. Too soon and too fast (at least previous generation of boomers got a good run, starting from 1950 until now). He couldn’t cope with role reversal ( Palin’s husband Todd holding the baby at press conference to denounce rumors of cheating “look, he has been home watching the kids all along).

So our man goes target-shooting. At least, it gives him something/someone to focus on.

The rest, the rise of the rest, are hard to pin down.

He can’t quite put his finger on it. The phenomenon is once called Future Shock is here now.

It’s like Bush hearing the news on 9/11 morning, in a state of shock and stillness in that Elementary classroom (incidentally, he got another shock when a recent ball player followed an out-of-bound ball to get within inches).

The doctor can’t tell what’s eating the man up inside. He wants more tests done.

He wants to put on the white glove. More trips to the pharmacy. More waiting. Agitating. That’s what eating the man up inside. He is inherently impatient. The business of “the beginning of the end” sidelines him (CIA officers tend to die within their first year of retirement).

Like America, our man wants action, heroism, around the clock (24-hours like Jack Bauer).

Unfortunately, the rules have changed. It’s time for drones not drills, nation building not “terminating”. He can’t “be back”. He has to father one more. He can’t even be put and stay in jail. The Supreme Court says “No”, you can’t double up prisoners. Triple up on the outside is their business. But not inside.

So the unwanted prisoners in California got off early and easy (whoops, per computer errors). All dressed up, and no place to go.

21-century man scratches his head. He doesn’t understand the rationale behind 20 choices of jeans, while there are only a few career choices (being a nurse or a teacher has traditionally fallen under the domains of female and gay, while construction of new home or soldiering are both winding down). Maybe he should start painting his toe nails. And accept the fact that we are moving toward a gender-free society. Eat, pray and love. Text, chew gum and walk. 21st-century walking man walks on by.

3D and 4G

At the most elementary level, we got the chip set.

That is about to change, from “flat like a sheet of paper”” to 3D chip, announced Intel (which made Applied Materials jump to its 3.9 Billion acquisition of Varian Semiconductor to keep pace).

Our world is about to change once again, not to the tune of 10 Billion by 2100, but 10 Billion people communicating at the speed of thoughts. At this rate of growth, we can see 3D printing soon to be a norm.

You think that self-check-out at Wal-Mart is bad. Think again. Someday, we might end up ordering an item, only to have it print out at home (watch out UPS).

We’ve got “make your own stuff animal” stores and self-serve ice-cream machines.

Our homes are about to become mini-factories, and stay-at-home dads, in-sourced blue-collar workers (Dad, I want fresh bread. Dad, please squeeze the OJ. Dad, grind the coffee beans, please).

It’s only fitting that the last known WWI vet died leaving behind a changed world.

The US itself, in order to stay in the lead, will have to become world incubator of innovation and ideas.

CNN’s United States of Innovation (51 ideas from 51 states).

Think heat-sensor technology, facial recognition, speech recognition, drone, SPAM prevention, social marketing, Facebook/Skype , Utube and YouTube. None had been around when Bill Gates penned “At the speed of thoughts” (as of this edit, MSC announced it would buy Skype at the tune of 8 Billion dollars).

Now we have professors talking about $300 houses for the bottom 2 Billion (the last time, they couldn’t make a $300 computer). Incidentally, the Hyundai’s Excel got its start in the US at the price of $5,000 where the Nano’s starting price is.

To sustain innovation, we need clusters (and luckily, from the trajectory of history, our times seems to be one of those according to Steven Johnson in “Where good ides came from”). Clusters such as Seattle, San Francisco and Austin.

A little dose of music, art and literature, mixed with a heavy dose of tech, geeks, and flower children (rebellious streak).

Ironically, people who are into their own world (eccentric) are not people who can soup up for a fund-raising session with VC’s.

For now, commoners like me can’t wait to see what comes out of 3D chip set and 4-G broadband.

When all those dark fibers got lit up, and cloud servers turned on , let the show begin.

Like Back-to-the-Future scene, we might get blown away. I suspect that won’t be the case. Change will come sporadically, with an app peppered here, and a tweaking there. Before we know it, we can design and print our own T-shirts at home.

That’s  what makes Chinese authorities awake at night. What are they going to do with the over-invested infrastructure we now call, world factory. And all the men, unemployed, then, already experienced a bite at the proverbial apple (the middle-class life style). History always reserves its best twist of plot for the end. I wish I be around to witness it, like our WWI last known pilot. RIP man of the greatest generation who lived and fought in a pure mechanical universe. We all need to have 2-D chip before 3-D, PSTN before Skype. “Hello, if you hear the sound of your own recording, you are on, for free”.

Unsung Peacemakers

In the wake of a huge catastrophe, we tend to rely on experts, in this case, geologists to lecture us on aftershocks, fault line, Pacific Ring of Fire etc…

We tend to miss the human dimension of unsung heroes, the peacemakers.

There were a Japanese crew, earthquake experts, in New Zealand trying to help out in anyway they could. Little did they know, more abrupt crises awaiting them at home.

Venturing beyond one’s border for the sakes of others, to pay forward.

That’s the mission of a peacemaker. During the Haiti quake, then Gov. of FL refused to let relief efforts to use his home state as a base of operations.

On CNN, we witnessed a Vietnamese doctor ferrying out dying victims on a private chartered plane. Actors like John Travolta also chipped in.

Those who cross the cultures (Euro-centric to Pacific Rim for instance, or in the case of our current United Nations Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon  from Korea, who has his hand full of crises) encounter both culture shock and reverse culture shock.  Those who return from war abroad also face Post-Traumatic Disorder syndrome (the Deer Hunter, Born on the Fourth of July) being misunderstood and marginalized (De Niro played a returning veteran who asked the taxi driver to keep going, pass his welcome-home party).

This week, CNN showed a short video of “soldier surprised daughter at school” in Idaho.

The 9-year-old said it was like in a dream (upon spotting her still-in-uniform Daddy

show up at school after finishing his tour of duty).

The scene has been repeated many times in American history

(children running to the tarmac greeting returning fathers – You Tube

video for Reflections of My Life by the Marmalades).

We now have a second generation – children of  Vietnam era  and nemesis i.e.- flower children – both wanting to to know what’s it like for their fathers to leave the comfort of the then-Middle class environment to engage in unpopular battles  on the other side of the world.

Even when trying hard, they could only walk a mile in their shoes, albeit as backpacking tourists.

(recently two young American females died along with many others in a tourist boat accident. )

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/world/vietnam-halong-bay-boat-accident-kills-11-foreigners-list-of-names-51466.html

Three and a half decades after it ended,  this war still has some legs. Last month,  Prime Minister of Australia pledged more money to support a Vietnam Memorial Center, to bring world attention to the hefty price Australians paid during this “American war” as known in Vietnam. No one said it better than John Savage, one of the four main characters in the Deer Hunter ” I don’t fit in” (back on a wheel chair , playing Bingo in a  Pittsburgh nursing home).

So once again, we rely on musicians to help us sort through our conflicting emotions. In said movie, it’s a guitar piece from the Shadows.

Blessed are the peacemakers. For they gave their lives and limps for the idea and ideal of freedom taken for granted by us here in the West.

Oil and Water

Oil price backed down as tsunami water gushed up to Japanese shores.

The two shall never mix.

Middle East rising. Pacific falling.

News of a thousand deaths abroad eclipsed news of petty thefts at home.

Statistically, street crime is down while cyber-crime up.

I admire Net Gen’s speed to mobilize relief efforts e.g. People Finder by Google,

Gaga’s wrist bands.

Celebrities should leverage their popularity, from being trend setters to thought leaders. Jet Li has been outspoken about one’s mission in life (has been sighted to give blood etc…), Angelina Jolie as UN Ambassador and Robert Redford pushed the Green button.

It turns out that while Oil and Water don’t mix, celebrities can take up a cause without damaging their brand. Charity actually can deepen their personal growth, give them more satisfaction as human being, and stretch their empathic fibers.

We are “born this way” i.e. to feel others’ burden.

I saw a photo of an old Japanese lady (the graying demographic) in front of her house-turn-rubble due to Earthquake, and I couldn’t continue with the evening news.

9/11 and Katrina added together.

Ocean view turned nightmares.

Beautiful water gushing in the wrong place.

CNN kept reporting that on that only road leading up North, they couldn’t spot military or emergency vehicles. Perhaps they cut down on first responders,

or they used choppers more than four-wheels.

Whatever the case, there is no play book when it comes to disaster-handling.

A nation can only go so far in emergency preparation.

Just like our personal act of locking our doors at night.

Mostly for assurance. When hit with 8.9 magnitude that, according to an eye-witness ” buildings stray back and forth like trees in the wind”- people froze.

Video footage from the 2004 tsunami showed people ran away from gushing water. Japan was on the verge of building world’s tallest cell tower.

I am not sure this catastrophe will cause them to reevaluate earlier stress estimates.

In my earlier blog, I referred to the warmth of human comfort and bonding through crisis.

I hope nature-causing suffering be relieved in part by human relief efforts.

I hope world rally to rescue won’t turn too soon to compassion fatigue.

Strike when the iron is hot. But don’t burn it out.

And you don’t have to wait until you have fame to start sharing a piece of yourself. In “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest” we find the Native American character offers his bunkmate some chewing gum.

(Jack turned mischievous when discovering that that supposedly deaf and dumb man could actually talk).

I understood now that while the taste lasts much longer than the gum, it’s the first step that counts. And the comfort of strangers often times warms the other-wise hardened heart. Soft healing power of shared empathy in random disaster. Oil and Water don’t mix, but can co-exist. As close as the elements are allowed to.

flat “pyramid”

Viewed from above, the Pyramid in Egypt looks flat,  almost origami-like. And viewed from where I am sitting, the 18-day Revolution looks protean: leaderless, collaborative and spontaneous.

Although not the first to use Twitter ( Iranian post-election was), last week’s protesters showcased coordination and team work only digital natives can pull off.

First, they understood the power of organization i.e. the means (self-organized citizen patrol),

the mode (social media) and the manner (being kind to soldiers, just stop short of ” wearing some flowers in your hair”).

Second, they staged their demonstrations to appeal to Western media, their conduits to the developed world, Mubarak‘s entrenched base of support ( note the use of sound bites, and visual symbolism e.g. burned effigy).

Third, collaborative model. They built tents in the square, make-shift first-aid stations etc… like  Woodstock without the mud slide.

And they were young, urbane, well-conversant in English ( to offer comments on CNN, BBC and Al Jazeera).

The tipping point was when their expat counterparts flew back to join them while Westerners, American “non-essential” community, were evacuating for fear of the worst .

In The Future Arrived Yesterday, the author argued for the Protean Organization (boundary-less with a soft core). To unseat the Pharaoh who sat on top of the Pyramid takes a lot of thumbing (texting) (in 1989, they had to use electric saws to cut down the Wall).

This youth revolution, despite being leaderless, wasn’t disorganized. Its flat “org chart” was in contrast to the traditional command-control style.  It accommodated many sub-cultures (tech, youth, urban, westernized, pro-democracy) and world views, secular and religious. Their future arrived not a day sooner.

In all, they managed  to un-brand the leader (dictator) and throw a red carpet in front of the new flat pyramid for Nobel-prize winners from abroad and Muslims albeit Brotherhood Muslims at home, and any one in between (including a Google executive).

Even the author of the World is Flat was taken by surprise when he witnessed his ideas jump off the page into the middle of the Square, Tahrir Square.

Vantage point

The cut-aways (filmed after the interviewed subject had left), the backstage steady cam sneak peeks, the studio bird-eye-view shot showing anchors walk away from the set while credits roll and music fade out….

We are a society privileged with multiple vantage points , given us the illusion of omnipresence. When film and television cameras were fighting for dominance, little did they know that the disruptive element came much later. Now we got I-pad camera ,

traffic camera, security camera, webcam and robotic camera that assists in prostate surgery.

When TV producers mention the word “camera”, they meant the studio camera that stands still, with white balance and lighting all set (the mark). CNN started with night-vision coverage of the first Iraq war, thus setting the stage for the likes of jitter images, but live nonetheless.

From today’s vantage point we can look back (like TIME and Life) to images of the past, personal and collective. Those of us who can relate to still shots in Black and White remember where we were when JFK or J.L. got shot.

Our life is a narrative with karma as an underlining theme.  Like a slide show, it proceeds from left to right, alpha to omega, in a continuous loop.

No “pause” button.

Someone says aptly that we are what we repeatedly do. Habits die-hard.

To change, one needs to practice a new skill no less than 10,000 hours.

(almost 8 hours a day, for 3.4 years weekends included).

The alternative is much easier: just take the path of least resistance.

In “All the devils are here” (about Sub-prime debacle) by the same author who penned “The smartest guy in the room” (about Enron), we learn about unchecked institutional behavior cascaded and led up to recent financial tsunami.

We know now, from our vantage point, that we need multiple check points,  speed-bums and SEC of SEC.

The present is oftentimes better understood from future vantage point. Hence, the importance of visualization.

Of imagining, of inventing and reinventing. We got the mirror, we got the camera. Now we just need an honest look at ourselves via those lenses and view points. See if we can handle the truth. Technology is one thing. Honesty and courage is quite another.

Against the tide of commoditization

In Selling Professional Services to the Fortune 500, Gary Luefschuetz warns against mix and match people and rates of various service tiers, which will compromise the rate structure. In short, swim against the tide. IBM got it. Cisco follows suit. And HP is moving in that direction.

The Economist takes an in-depth look at IT future. One dominant theme is ” smart” infra-structure e.g. buildings,water, electricity, appliances… even cows). First, we were glad to get our white bread sandwich neatly cut and refrigerated. Then we want it toasted. Finally, we want the toaster to beep like our microwave oven.

The key to all this is inter-connectedness. From blue-tooth to Blu-ray, RF to RFID, we are moving up the value chain.

Years ago I remember watching a demonstration of hologram at Penn State. Professor Roy Rustum was there among the observers. He later was quoted as saying “I felt the chill in my spine” when his crew at Material Sciences Lab discovered electricity conductivity in water. Now we got 3-D hologram to watch the re-release of Star Wars.

At the high-end of the OSI model is the application layer. This is where our imagination pays dividend.

The physical layer move their facilities off-shored to accommodate better rate structure.

Samsung is slated to be a strong contender in the tablet space against the I-pad with huge facility in North of Vietnam.

I also remember watching the young CNN news gathering crew (in black T-shirts) back in the early 80’s. CNN manages to stay above the fold in the cable news business. That business gets commoditized as well since we can now access hundreds of them.

For CNN, the secret sauce has been their first move advantage, and continuing risk-taking (Gulf war). David Brook of the NYT puts it simply “branding is an effort to decommoditize commodities”.

While companies are in a race to produce “smart” applications, schools and companies should retrain people. Smart people created smart appliances. And smart people take calculated risks. Leaders of India and Ireland saw the hand writing on the wall. They moved swiftly to retrofit their nations for the  21st century, not only in IT, but with new ways to solve existing problems e.g. micro lending, mobile banking, cheap automobiles etc…(see The Miracle).  I read the review of Chevy’s latest small car, the Cruz. It took GM, once the largest corporation under Alfred Sloan, 40 years to reduce its automobile size. May the best car win.

The temptation to compromise and mix the different tiers of services led to the downfall of many sectors, especially telecom.

(South Asian agents and resellers first question was normally, “what’s the rate”).

So I wasn’t surprised to read in Fortune magazine about Verizon’s soon-to-be-rolled out Android perfect phone. Can you hear me now.The old GTE has swam hard against the tide, to become the premier wireless company.

Choose your battle, pick your turf, and retrench at the highest service level.  Who wants to stand next to those robots who don’t get sweat or take smoking break.  And I am sure, after the next round of cost cutting, they still stay until robot 2.0 version displaces them.  At Twitter, those guys didn’t even use up the allotted 140 characters. They tweet simply “Be helpful”. I take that to mean swim against the tide, to offer relevant and helpful service to a market gluttered with commoditized services.

Our VHS future

Beta was more superior. Yet VHS won out.

The market (in this case, movies on tape) dictates the terms. At the present time, it wants all things mobile. In other words, our knowledge and skill set need an upgrade (But I thought technologically, Beta gave crisper resolution!?!! Sorry Sony.)

While on tour for his book “After Shock”, Robert Reich mentioned on Charlie Rose that despite Obama’s ability to synthesize every one’s opinion earlier in his campaign, he now fails to connect the dots i.e. to tell a narrative of America’s vanishing middle class.

Silicon Valley has reinvented itself once again, this time, into a Mecca of clean tech (just about time, because Chinese IT companies are forming clusters in TX to compete against India’s counterparts right in the heart of America) and mobile/cloud/social network (zynga-like). Between Detroit, Disney and Dell, America can still do it, with better choices and better counsels.

Again, the global market will decide winners in each group (VHS 2.0) and don’t be surprised if it might not be you, even when your mother thinks you are her most beautiful baby.

I have heard of re-engineering, reinvention, and recession. Then we came up with soft power, thought leadership and self branding.

Meanwhile, all attempts to dress up old concepts won’t mean a thing to the lady in Las Vegas outskirts who is the last on the block to stay in her house. Or the Lonely tenant in Miami condo high-rise.

I notice a significant drop in day laborers in Orange County. And I heard rumors that Vietnamese in CA now migrated en mass to Houston, where housing is more affordable, and unemployment rate lower (in the early 80’s, the movement was reverse due to Texas oil crisis). The story of Vietnamese immigrants in America is tied so much to the rise and fall of technology companies in the Bay areas (electronic and chip industries). As soon as those jobs got shipped overseas, America’s immigrants decide to go home (after Indian IT professionals who went home to India, or Vietnamese American applying for Intel recent facility in Vietnam). After all, the future belongs to automation or hybridized version therein.

It’s market demand which dictates supplies, including labor supplies. First shipping jobs overseas, then automating the marketing side of the equation. I have blogged about migration movement, automation and death of the salesman. In doing so,

I stumbled upon a narrative. It’s America’s. It’s the new America, whose future is staked upon its choice to go Beta or VHS, metaphorically speaking. And it has nothing to do with Beta’s superior resolution. As of this edit, it is facing a choice to arm to send boots to Syria. Soft or hard boiled? Since when it is easy to be King of the Hill? Good luck to those who “think out of the box”, instead of getting out of it altogether.

P.S. Fareed Zakaria‘s article on TIME featured “How to restore the American Dream”. At least, he listed a few pointers worth considering e.g. “benchmarks” which are take away from other countries’ policies. After all, other countries have tried to reverse engineer the American way of life for decades. Upon CNN 30th anniversary, I saw an ad for Singapore. When CNN started out in Atlanta, Ted Turner couldn’t even conceive its network celebration would be underwritten by Singapore, then an emerging country. One must wonder about its 40th, if there will still be a Cable News Network. What a struggle between television and telephony. The jury is still out for whoever can be on the go, with better softwares.

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