Never mind the bollocks, this is Indonesia mate!

There is a palpable excitement in the air at the moment and everyone in Jakarta seems to be doing what they can before the holy month of Ramadan gets underway. For the wellish-off that means eating out and visiting insipid shopping malls after work. Cue total gridlock. But why bother? Much better (and cheaper) food can be found in the city’s small streetside restaurants and hastily assembled warung. But that is Jakarta. Nothing seems to make much sense anymore. Like the government’s kneejerk response to a spate of very disturbing child rapes across the archipelago: chemical castration!

But why stop with the rapists? It’s such a great fucking idea the cops should be armed with antiandrogen full syringes to deal promptly with the lunatic motorists as well – and there are many of them I can tell you - who jump the red lights or fail to stop at zebra crossings. Hell, just castrate all criminals. The prisons would be empty in no time and Jokowi, in a rather strange twist of fate, would have won his war on drugs by using drugs. And why not castrate the commies as well? After all, these lowlifes are making a comeback and the cops even arrested a few who crawled out of the woodwork recently. Except they weren’t commies. They were Indonesian Coffee Lovers…

Meanwhile, the price of beef is skyrocketing and no one know why even though any economics undergraduate will tell you it’s probably not a good idea to get back at those pesky Aussies by heavily restricting and taxing imports of their beef. Also on the economic front, international ratings agency S&P reaffirmed its rating of Indonesian debt as “junk”, just one notch below “investment grade” with nothing apparently in between the two ratings such as “not too bad” or “half-frigging decent”.

Over in Bali, all is not well either: there were large-scale protests involving tens of thousands of people opposing a ludicrously out-of-character land reclamation project at Benoa Bay. Unfortunately for the protestors, though, the project’s owner – a certain TW - has close connections with all the sorts of nefarious characters who could help get the green light for a project like this. Especially as he has reportedly already forked out up to Rp1 trillion for the project – for purposes “unknown”.

Finally, former Indonesian dictator Suharto has been shortlisted by a government committee as a possible candidate for national hero. If this happens, he will join the esteemed company of other former Indonesian presidents who have already been named national heroes, including rather ironically Sukarno, the man who Suharto ousted, and who had contentiously supported leftism through his nasakom (nationalism, religion, communism) doctrine. Well, it’s all swings and roundabouts to me. And time for a bintang - which if you look at the label also has a bloody red star on it! Communism everywhere! Arggggg!