This is for anybody

who hasn't been to Vietnam lately. Who is wondering how exactly it works here, with a Communist Government in charge of a runaway 8-9% annual growth economy, fresh into WTO membership, entrepreneurial in-your-face marketing going on in every street, everybody wants to work hard and get rich... From the news, this little paragraph just made me smile.

The Vietnamese government is now trying its utmost to speed up
administrative reform. As of November this year, Dung’s cabinet has issued 72 out of 135 new relevant decrees in a bid to complete and streamline, or make transparent, legal framework to facilitate its market-oriented economy on the socialism track.

It's the facilitating that gets me, you have to facilitate it, whatever it is. If you put socialism, or most anything for that matter, at the end of a sentence like that, it can't really make all that much difference! That's how it works.

A good BBC article on Vietnam, in the present and the future, not the Apocolypse Now Vietnam.

AND a movie I saw last weekend, The Prairie Home Companion Movie, which, yes is a bit incestuous, being a movie about the making of a radio show ... ... but it was amusing anyway and I don't hear that many American accents that often here, so it was funny.