While the lily-livered, pie-in-the-sky bleeding hearts infesting that whore-ridden Babylon formerly known as California do their damndest to drag American values of decency, morality and piousness into the septic tank by openly considering the decriminalization of marijuana, it falls upon the so-called Third World to demonstrate how stoners, dope fiends, potheads and druggies of all shades ought properly to be handled.

578 addicts escape from rehab center in Vietnam

The Associated Press, 05/17/2010

Nearly 600 inmates in a Vietnamese drug rehabilitation camp overpowered security guards and escaped, an official said Monday. At least two-thirds of them were still at large.

Trinh Vuong Thuan, a security official at the rehabilitation center No. 2 in the northern port city of Haiphong, said 578 inmates overpowered security guards to break through the center’s gates on Sunday.

Vietnam’s strict laws on drugs allow the government to order addicts held for up to two years in rehabilitation centers, many of them boot-camp-style camps that include hard labor and communist “ideological education.”

In other news, Trinh Vuong Thuan, a security official at the rehabilitation center No. 2 in the northern port city of Haiphong, was sentenced to rehabilitation by drawing and quartering on Tuesday.

This can’t possibly bode well for those of us on the ground here:

Vietnam buys 12 fighter jets

VIETNAM has signed a contract to buy 12 versatile Russian fighter jets as part of a US$1 billion (S$1.42 billion) deal, Interfax news agency reported on Wednesday.Vietnam is buying the Su-30 fighters at a time when disputes with China over sovereignty in the South China Sea are increasing. Vietnam has said it views the disputes with concern.

‘Last week a contract was signed for the delivery to Vietnam of 12 Su-30MK2s in 2011-2012,’ the news agency quoted a military-diplomatic source as saying.

I for one would like to remind that your typical Vietnamese driver is public menace enough on a 150cc motorbike without guided missiles* and 9G load maneuverability. It’s only a matter of time until these aircraft are being used to haul construction materials around with baskets of live pigs tied to the fuselage, pilots madly text-messaging with one hand while steering/accelerating with the other. Brakes? Who needs ‘em? Slowing down for any reason is a sign of weakness, anyway.

The only thing that could make this more frightening is:

Additional arms deals, including the sale of six submarines, were announced when Vietnam’s Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung visited Moscow last December. — REUTERS

* Update: From Defense News, 9 Feb. 2010: “On 4 December 2009, it was reported that Vietnam was close to completing a contract for 12 Su-30 MK2s. The initial contract was for 12 aircraft but was reduced to 8 due to the financial crisis, and the contract did not include onboard weapons.” Clearly, this mitigates the potential threat to those of us at ground level. To say nothing of the Chinese.

Chúc mừng năm mới, friends. Or, as you say in the Western hemisphere, happy New Year!

Yes, yes, I know all of my American friends reading this are thinking, You fool, you addled ignoramus, you rice-besotted chucklehead, New Year’s Eve was more than a month ago, are you so deluded by life in that backwards, hopelessly unhip nation that you’ve lost sense of time altogether? The coming holiday is not New Year’s but Valentine’s Day, shit-for-brains. We know this because every retail establishment in America is assaulting us with that invaluable information every moment of our waking lives until Sunday, when it will all transform smoothly overnight into a full-scale marketplace offensive of behalf of Easter. So thanks very much, Captain Caveman, we’ve got a pretty good handle on which holidays are which over here. Go back to sucking on your boiled egg fetuses and leave us alone until you’ve got something intelligent or at least interesting to say.

Ah, the intimacy of true fellowship. What you fail to understand, my dear American friends, is that while in your indulgent corner of the world the coming Sunday is indeed Valentine’s Day, here in Asia the date of February 14 coincides this year with the Lunar New Year, known locally as Tết (yes, the same as that Tet). Tết in Vietnam is far and away the biggest and most popular holiday of the year, so much so that they’ve stretched it out to a full week or more. By this time tomorrow, Ho Chi Minh City will be a ghost town, all its transient residents returned to the countryside to spend the next week imposing on their families, participating in pointless and obscure rituals, exchanging gifts into which little or no thought went, overeating shamelessly and drinking more than is either safe or legal, and opening old wounds with relatives they’d not squabbled with since last year’s forced reunion. In other words, Merry Christmas and Happy Thanksgiving!

I’ll be spending Tết alone next week, as my girlfriend will be returning to her hometown, Hanoi, where she will ring in the Year of the Tiger with her loved ones in traditional fashion and very likely be forced to answer some difficult questions about why she is still dating an aging foreigner with a receding hairline and no trust fund. Dear heart that she is, she’s made me my very own Tết tree, trimmed with envelopes of ‘lucky money ’ – a compulsory part of every Vietnamese New Year. (And they call this a communist nation. Pah.)