Yesterday was totally marked by a win insofar as the following card was befittingly posted to my friend's wall on Facebook:



Such deprivation of a life has amounted to such forms of entertainment as synchronizing the time at which the e-card was to be sent with the stroke of midnight in Seoul (CST +14 hours)...give or take about a minute or so.

Also a win is the fact that the temperature is supposed to aestival heights (the 80-degree range) for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. The wherefores of my deeming this a win, other than the fact that it is a swift and glorious rebound from a(nother) piercingly cold (for the springtime), depressive front, are not really consciously available atm.

Meanwhile, to rain on my own parade, victims of displaced frustration are on the rise 13 hours east of here in Taiwan. The baby scalded by a dare (see the previous entry or two) did not survive (the father is being charged for murder, and now the mother apparently was in absentia during the enactment of her dare...she's still being arrested for "incitement of murder"), and now a father is being charged for mauling his two-year-old daughter to death with a broomstick. The mother, who apparently had heard her husband beating their daughter, resumed her nap thereafter...only to find her daughter lifeless after her beauty nap. Apparently it hadn't occurred to her to interfere in this beating of their two-year-old daughter! Unlike the aforementioned mother, this mother didn't incite such cruelty, but is she not guilty as well? Or was this some contrivance to hedge the risk of lapsing into destitution due to the increasing ronin-ization (multilevel wrongage right there) in Taiwan? As the 45-to-64-year-old cohort has been most afflicted by the hike in unemployment, collateral damage is being done in the private sphere via this perceived depotentiation of breadwinners. The recession and unemployment are not to serve as excuses for ridding the world of one's offspring--especially daughters in this case (notice how the victims of both of the cases were daughters). Furthermore, reconsideration in resolution policy needs to be done because

• Long/life prison sentences or the death penalty would not as significantly curtail such violence.



• A more direct route for reporting (possible or known) child abuse must be provided.



• Obligatory post-marital anger management and child education courses would likely encourage childless marriages without considerable compensation.

Resolving the growing problem will not be easy, but as Chiu's suggestion of focusing on the preclusion of child abuse needs to take precedence to the penalties. Generating jobs or some sort of profitable reincorporation into the public sphere would seem to help.