America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy
- John Quincy Adams
On July 9 Dr. Lee Seung-hun, physics professor at the University of Virginia, spoke at a conference sponsored by Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan.
Truth always hurts. And since nobody wants to get hurt, it never sells
even when it's a giveaway like mine.
That is why I came up with the trivia format several month ago. I thought
facts can sometimes be substituted for truth because, after all, truth is the summation of internalized facts. I also thought by trivializing things, I would be able to make my blog pieces a little more entertaining to my predominantly American audience, and better yet, this way I would be able to help immunizing them against the pains inherent to truth.
Obviously I underestimated the brainpower of these highly-educated Americans. They instantly detected the trap I had set up on them.
Another thing I underestimated is their resolve to bury in oblivion the dark side of the history of their country.
By now I have learned from this experiment that these people have already had
one or more small fish bones stuck deep in their throats and to them that is more than enough.
This is why these guys are so allergic to truth or any clue to it. They always put the reality of Pax Americana before truth.
And this also explains why conspiracy theorists in North America have found a lucrative niche market so easily.
They peddle truth that does not hurt.
If you don't want to become hooked on the addictive substance truth-seekers are markeing, you resort to cynicism, the attitude toward truth typical of highly-educated Americans today. You just keep saying, "Who can tell where to find this thing called truth?" The all-too-familiar line always leaves me wondering whether there is any difference between a prestigious higher-learning institute in the U.S., such as Obama's alma mater, and yet another vocational school or Berufsschule in Europe.
In the past they, their parents and grandparents have gulped down so many fish, including the one from the Gulf of Tonkin where sea battles were fought between the USS Maddox and North Vietnamese torpedo boats in
August 1964. But among other things, the mysterious sinking of the USS Maine
in Havana Harbor in February 1898 is still weighing heavily on their minds, if only subliminally.
As anyone who has studied the history of the United States knows, the particular
incident prompted William McKinley to rush into the Spanish-American War, which
the President had previously wanted to avoid. As a result, the United States
could capture Cuba, instead of liberating it. Equally important, America
could also colonize Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines.
Despite the fact that these prizes were officially awarded to the victor
in the Treaty of Paris, the cause of the sinking of the Maine that triggered
the war has remained mysterious to date. Most recently, in 1998, to commemorate the 100th anniversary
of the war, National Geographic Magazine had Advanced Marine Enterprises conduct an investigation into
the explosion that sank the vessel.
The investigators of the institution could avail themselves for the first time of computer
modeling and simulation, the technique which had previously been unavailable.
Yet, they had to conclude: "The sum of [our] findings is not definitive
in proving that a mine was the cause of sinking of the Maine, but it does
strengthen the case in favor of a mine as the cause."
Before they could feel fully vindicated, the Americans went on an expedition to Vietnam. Afghanistan and Iraq followed decades later. And most recently, they started to ascribe the March 26 incident in the Yellow Sea to a North Korean torpedo.
Obama's response to the sinking of the Cheonan, a South Korean patrol ship, was irresolute and subdued even more than ever. He has been exercising self-restraint by reducing the sinking that claimed 46 lives
to a matter of empty rhetoric in part because he thought the causeless and endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are more than enough.
Obviously there must have been another reason. Most probably he couldn't be sure that the evidence produced by the Joint Investigation Group (JIG) on May 20 was genuine. The guy must have thought, "This can be yet another 'intelligence failure'."
That is the only way to explain why Obama, Clinton and most other
educated Americans have refused so frantically, sometimes even hysterically, the idea of reexamining evidence shown in JIG's report, which was released just in time for the June 5 local elections in South Korea, and amid the nation-dividing controversy over the relocation of the U.S. Marine Corps' air station in Japan.
Don't take me wrong, however. I don't care a bit about who was behind the Cheonan sinking. Neither do I care about whether the "provocative act" was actually a conspiracy.
What concerns me most is people's attitudes toward truth.
■ Does one always try to recompose truth by himself from given facts, instead of just swallowing someone else's ideology or theory? ■ Does he have commonsense to weed out fishy elements from given facts before deriving his own truth from them?
These are the questions I ask myself when I interact with anyone I do. Unfortunately, I can seldom answer my own questions in the affirmative.
Especially when it comes to those political racketeers based in the U.S., I don't know what to say.
These politicians and pundits don't normally swallow truth given by others because they have to differentiate themselves from each other for business purposes. But their supposedly proprietary theories or ideologies are all fake because they always take it for granted that any secondhand information that fits comfortably into their intellectual merchandise is genuine.
All I could tell them is that I was not born in the twilight years of the American Century either to warn these mainstream ideologues active and vocal there to adhere to the founding principles of their country, or to make a fortune myself doing conspiracy-mongering business such as antimainstream truth-seekers'.
At any rate I just can't wait until 2110 to know whether or not JIG's theory is substantiated by facts.
By now I have hypothesized that the habitual self-deception of the American people since 1898 has taken a devastating toll on their fate. So I just want to make sure, before I go, that the progress of America's decline is already irreversible. · read more (214 words)
The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn't hard to master. - from One Art by American poet Elizabeth Bishop
You don't have to be a good physiognomist to tell the Japanese can expect absolutely nothing from the new State Minister in charge of national strategy (国家戦略担当大臣) or the prime minister who has appointed the bastard to fill the key cabinet position
At first their arrogance made them learning-disabled. Then, as a result, they grew helplessly ignorant. Or it may have happened the other way around - I'm not sure. But that
doesn't really matter.
Time and again the Americans have failed to learn their lessons given everywhere they have been.
In 1945 they attempted to transform Japan into a sound and viable
nation just by hanging seven Class-A war criminals - if you don't subscribe to the conspiracy theory, that is. They virtually acquitted the Emperor of his responsibility for driving more than three million people to death, while in fact the bastard in the palace was the first one to have climbed the thirteen steps to the gallows. They thought it was enough to time the seven executions to the 15th birthday of the heir to the throne.
Sixty five years later they still refuse to admit that what their parents and grandparents did to Japan hasn't brought about any change at all. They certify Japan as a democracy.
Then they applied more or less the same method to Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, sometimes decapitating the regime, some other times showering defenseless peasants with defoliant. But they invariably ended up in equally disastrous results.
Still defying the obvious fact that their assumption is fundamentally wrong, they cling to the delusive idea that they have magical power to change foreign countries either by removing the upper layer of the existing regime or incinerating civilians.
If they have learned something from past failures, they have understood it in the wrong way.
In 2008 they thought that at least they should be able to change their own country by ousting Bush from power. Based on the same invalid assumption, they sent a man with a permanent sun tan, as the outspoken Italian prime minister named Obama, to the White House for the first time in U.S. history.
To their dismay they saw the same outcome when the black messiah proved unable to walk on the water, especially when it was covered with spilled oil.
The only thing they can do today is to look away from it all.
On the other side of the Pacific, Japan keeps struggling as if it still deserves a viable statehood.
After the four consecutive prime ministers left office through its revolving door in less than four years, Naoto Kan was automatically promoted from the deputy premiership in the Hatoyama administration.
As usual, initial indications are that Kan will serve out his term with the media fully determined to manipulate public opinion in favor of him.
Small wonder that self-styled Japan experts in the U.S. insist in concert that the country is quickly getting back on the right track with its health miraculously turning around overnight. To them the chaotic political situation before and after the transition of power from the Liberal Democratic Party to the Democratic Party of Japan was nothing but a spell of hiccups.
Breathtakingly stupid.
True, Kan will most probably withstand longer than his predecessor's. In fact, though, the longevity of an administration does not serve as an indication of the stability of a regime or the viability of a nation.
The overall quality of people does.
American pundits, who have quickly jumped at Kan on the pretext of his soaring approval rating, should explain why then they don't praise Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin and Fidel Castro as great leaders.
To that end they are determined to downplay the fact that in a matter of a week since its launch, the new administration was faced with formidable problems cropping up one after another.
For one thing Shizuka Kamei resigned as Minister in Charge of Banking and Postal Services in Day 4 of the Kan government, because of the feud between his People's New Party and Kan's Democratic
Party of Japan. Kamei complained that Kan had made him lose face over the re-nationalization of what used to be the Japan Post.
Aside from Kamei's departure, a couple other scandals have surfaced in the meantime.
One of the small-time thieves involved there is Satoshi Arai, State Minister
in Charge of Civil Service Reform and Declining Birthrate (photo on the top,) whose expense
statement was found filled with the vouchers for purchases of "NANA," manga (a cartoon) said to be popular among girls in
grade schools, lingerie items such as a sexy camisole and many other filthy and/or kiddie stuff.
As usual the media are trying to trivialize the revelation by asking their favorite legal "experts" and morons from law schools a false question: whether or not
these expenditures are legally reimbursable with taxpayers' money in the
light of Political Funds Control Law.
But actually nothing like that is really at issue. The real issue with Japanese policymakers lies in the fact that not a single one of them has integrity.
Kan's inaugural address of June 4 was an unmistakable sign that Arai's case is just the tip of the tip of the iceberg. It lacked integrity and was filled with empty and wornout words. If there was something not so banal there, it's a weird phrase with which he described his goal; he said he will bring about 最小不幸社会, or "a least unhappy society."
Needless to say, American pundits have shrugged off the series of
revelations as something for my Japan Trivia series on the pretext that these irregularities pale before the unscrupulous crime committed
by former Secretary General Ichiro Ozawa.
Incidentally, Ozawa's resignation as Secretary General of the DPJ means nothing. The "Shadow Shogun" is just sitting out until the dust settles.
Despite all these fallacies we hear on both sides of the Pacific, I see yet another evidence that the terminally ill nation is further sinking into the bottomless abyss.
The Japanese should know that they can't do anything about that anymore.
But at the same time they should ask themselves why on earth the American people cling so desperately to the same old delusion that the U.S.-Japanese strategic alliance is still functioning.
My answer:
You have to sink yourself to keep pace with a sinking partner.
Even though pundits have difficulty agreeing to the law of physics, a kindergarten kid can easily understand it.
The progress of the decline of the U.S. is also irreversible now. And the Japanese should feel responsible for that.
Ironically enough there's something the brain-dead Japanese still can do for the Americans in that respect: the United States can find an important lesson in its failing ally.
Whether or not the Americans feel like learning something there is a different story. I'm just tipping them off because I owe them so many things I've learned in my lifetime. Maybe I'm only talking about their parents or grandparents. They were people who had high self-esteem, and yet were open-minded toward new ideas. Among other things, I admired their inventiveness.
The lesson I am talking about is how to sink, certainly not how to avoid sinking deeper.
There is a universal truth about the beginning of an era and its end which can be summarized
like this:
You can do it in your way when you are on the rise, but you can't when
you are on the decline.
Another way to say the same thing is that you know when to rise, and how, but you can't
tell when to sink, and how. As a matter of fact, though, the Americans have grown too arrogant to admit they are no longer entitled to tell when and how the final curtain should fall
on them.
These days not a few Americans admit they are living in the twilight years of the American century. But nobody is ready to accept the idea that their nation's collapse is at their doorstep.
Take a look at the GDP race between the U.S. and China. If you apply rules of thumb and assume nominal GDP of the two nations to grow at an annual rate of 3.5% and 9.5%, respectively, you will know China will catch up with the U.S. by 2030. The American people think they still have twenty years to pull away from China.
In fact, though, you never know from statistics whether China rises while America stands still or
America sinks while China stands still. That's basically why I wrote we
should forget the showings in the Economic Olympics when talking about
the real standing and fate of a nation.
And who knows if America's downslide will not accelerate as was the case with Japan? All we can tell for sure is that it is very unlikely that the progress will decelerate. This is another law of physics.
If there is a little more comprehensive and relevant measure to quantitatively gauge nations' vigor, it's the showing in International Competitiveness.
There seem to be two or more different ways to indexize a nation's competitive edge. But apparently the method employed by IMD World Competitive Center based in Lausanne, Switzerland is considered the most reliable one.
Take a look at the following ranking table based on the IMD Yearbooks:
1990
2009
2010
United States
Not Available
1
3
China
Not Available
20
18
Japan
1
17
27
NOTE: I could not locate on the web the 1990 data for the U.S. and China.
Japan was an indisputable No. 1 back in 1990, just on the eve of the burst
of the bubble economy in the country. But by 2009 it had fallen to No. 17
and the latest IMD Yearbook further downgraded it to No. 27.
Some savvy economists here have termed what has happened in the lost 20 years "Japan's Galapagosization."
Actually, Japan's dramatic decline shown here holds two important lessons for the Americans.
Lesson 1:.All along the Japanese didn't realize that their relative position to
other countries was plummeting so rapidly. It's as recently as a couple of months ago that
they became aware even the Thais had outperformed them. · read more (527 words)
Saturday, May 29 2010 @ 03:50 AM CDT
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 668
Mizuho Fukushima, head of Social Democratic Party
Apparently it's Obama who first opened Pandora's Box. On its lid I see a fingerprint that looks like his.
Thus far so many unmanageable things have been unleashed from the Box, such as the immense buildup of nuclear arsenals in the five-plus-four Nuclear Weapon States (NWS), unstoppable proliferation stemming from the utter hypocrisy inherent in the NPT, and yet another quagmire in Afghanistan.
Obama has been digging out these problems, one by one, in an arbitrary sequence and haphazard way. It looks as though we can't expect the guy to understand they are inseparable from each other.
These things you find inside the Box are so entwined that you can't disentangle them unless you address the whole issues at a time using a comprehensive and systematic approach. That is something the cherry-picking president will never think about doing.
For one thing the chemical weapons possessed by North Korea and many other countries still remain to be dredged up from the bottom of the Box presumably because Obama thinks the issue is too sticky to be listed as his pet subject.
This way he is doomed to fail to identify, let alone solve, a single issue.
Or, perhaps, the U.S. president, himself, is just one of those unpleasant things that came out of the Box opened by someone else.
Yukio Hatoyama, famously dubbed the loopy prime minister of Japan, did not hesitate to follow suit although the two leaders are quite different personalities.
Hatoyama's maternal grandfather was the founder of Bridgestone Tyre Company. At the age of 63 he is still receiving from his mother a monthly "child allowance," as they call it, of 15 million yen, or $170K, free of tax at least until the recent revelation of the fact. When compared to the scion of the Bridgestone founder, Obama is a pariah who even has difficulty establishing his identity in an honest way.
And yet both men have one thing in common; they have the guts to open up Pandora's Box without caring too much about the consequences. It only takes first-rate arrogance and ignorance like Obama's to think about lifting the lid of the black box so casually.
On the other hand, Hatoyama can't do this without shedding tears over the series of nightmares from the past because he is not so arrogant as the U.S. president. But that doesn't really matter; he is ignorant enough to think his predecessors, including his paternal grandfather Ichiro Hatoyama, have done basically the right thing.
Actually, as recently as early this month, the Japanese people were taken aback when Hatoyama admitted that he had promised the Okinawans to relocate the U.S. Marine Corps' "helicopter" unit to somewhere outside of the prefecture simply because he was completely in the dark at that time about why it should remain deployed there. He added that as he looked into the subject of deterrence, it dawned on him in hindsight that it should stay there in Okinawa.
In fact, though, defense experts keep saying in concert that the prime minister still remains a geopolitical novice. Retired admiral Timothy J. Keating, for one, has told Japanese reporters that Marines don't necessarily have to be stationed in Japan from a purely military point of view.
In August Hatoyama's Democratic Party
of Japan won the snap election on the campaign pledge it had borrowed
from the Democratic Party of America. Hatoyama said he would play the role
of a change agent as if he hadn't known the Japanese people are totally
change-disabled.
After the fuss over relocation of the U.S. Marine Corps' Futenma Air Station, and many other ill-defined issues in the last eight months, the prime minister announced last evening, in between his signature apologies
to everyone, that earlier in the day Tokyo and Washington had reached an
agreement that was supposed to supersede the 2006 accord on the relocation plan.
He had to do that before the weekend simply
because the defense budget deliberations in the U.S. Congress are scheduled
to start in early June.
At the last minute, he looped back, like a boomerang, to a plan that is almost identical to that of the 2006 accord only after further entangling the problems
with the U.S.-Japanese "strategic alliance."
Although Hatoyama could meet the deadline, he had a lot of reasons
to sound apologetic.
As he almost admitted himself at the press conference following his announcement, the "new" plan would now be utterly unworkable in the wake of the recent upsurge of anti-American sentiments in Okinawa.
For one thing all these structures, including the V-shaped runways, need a Governor's permit which he says he would never give to the Hatoyama government.
Yet you can tell for sure that in his telecon with Obama earlier in the day, Hatoyama boldly said, "Trust me," for the third time.
It's small wonder the only sane person in his cabinet, Mizuho Fukushima
from the Social Democratic Party, flatly refused to sign the cabinet resolution.
Reportedly a tearful Hatoyama reluctantly gave her a pink slip. · read more (499 words)
Thursday, April 15 2010 @ 07:33 AM CDT
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 716
Fats Waller might have sung:
Two loopy peoples with nothing to share,
But too much in love to say goodbye
According to Washington Post columnist Al Kamen, some in the Obama administration have dubbed Yukio Hatoyama "the increasingly loopy Japanese Prime Minister." They are uncharacteristically right.
I always liken this nation to a state-of-the-art computer. The problem with this particular machine is that it has a bug-ridden program loaded in it and that it does not have a self-correcting mechanism built in there to locate and remove fatal logical flaws. Soon after you launch the program, the system starts looping and keeps coming back to the same step over and over until some external factor brings it to an "abend". (Abend is an IT jargon that signifies an abnormal end.)
The hapless Japanese have been caught in a loop for centuries because they have failed to learn any lesson from the previous incidents of abend - the A-bombs and the burst of the bubble economy. So there is no reason to single out Hatoyama. His predecessors were invariably like him.
Yet, it's good to know that the truth about Japan has started dawning on the
American people at long last. At the same time it's a shame that they still don't realize they are just seeing a mirror reflection of their own selves in the loopy Japanese.
· read more (239 words)
Saturday, March 27 2010 @ 09:24 AM CDT
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 603
I have nothing against Paul Potts or Susan Boyle, but I think it's fair to point out that while they used YouTube as a steppingstone to success in the mainstream, there are a small number of people to whom the video-sharing website owned by Google Inc. is the last straw.
Even though they can't expect any more than 5-digit numbers of viewers, perhaps with the remarkable exception of Ron Paul, that is as far as they can go in this insane world dominated by swindlers in governments and media-favorite crisis mongers.
The following are some of the results of my recent video mining:
To be able to listen to these voices of reason, you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist. All it takes is commonsense. There's no need to invent an evil network of Jewish cabals.
· read more (217 words)
Recently I have started to think I should not waste what little time left to me discussing what people call politics. So I will suspend my blog activity at least
for a while, or possibly for good.
Before doing so, let me talk a little about the relationship between the
nation-state and the citizenry living there from the perspective of the
18th century's social contract theories.
Some five years ago I finally terminated my contract with the Japanese government. At the same time, I also parted ways with some other institutions, that inevitably included my family as I briefly touched on in my May 1 post about the myth of Japan's technological superiority. (Speaking of family, I still stay in touch with some of my kin because friends do not necessarily have to share the same values.)
One of the reasons I disengaged myself from the country of my birth was because when I became a pensioner, I realized that
I had been ripped off by the Japanese government since 1959, the year I participated
in the national pension program (contributory type.) It reached my patience threshold when I found out that a good part of my beneficiary
right was gone.
I was forced to enter into the contract 74 years ago. But I am not quite
sure if "contract" is the right word here. For one thing it does not
have a termination clause presumably because it's totally inconceivable
for an ethnic Japanese to leave the relationship with the nation which
was supposedly founded on February 11, 2,669 years ago by Emperor Jinmu, a son of the sun goddess.
Just the same, I have since abandoned all the rights and obligations set
forth in the Constitution which is filled with empty promises.
My registration is still retained on the computers
of the central and municipal government. So I would be allowed to have my Japanese passport renewed if ever I wanted to. It is also true that I am paying the income taxes
on my annuities because they are withheld, at a provisional rate, from the peanuts I receive every
second month. Needless to say, I'm having to pay the tobacco tax in an estimated amount of JPY 270K, or more than US$ 3K, every year, along with other value-added taxes.
In return, I get absolutely nothing.
However, I have somehow managed to evade other taxes and dues. For one thing, I haven't paid the premiums for the mandatory medical- and nursing-care coverages with 70%-coinsurance clauses since my retirement in part because it's out of the question to put my life and death in the hands of those unreliable doctors and incompetent nurses. Neither am I
paying the "TV viewing fees" to NHK, the state-run broadcaster, in part because none of its programs are worth watching at all.
I have dozen other reasons for not abiding by laws, but I don't want to specify them for now. That is what I would do if and when I was taken to court. I'm sure I would win because I have nothing to lose.
Currently I still have a roof over my head. I also have some, if not many, good friends locally. But I mean it literally and figuratively when I
say I am stateless. Maybe you have difficulty understanding how it feels
to be in that status in the country where a pathological obsession with homogeneity has prevailed in the last thirteen centuries.
On the other hand, I am not really through with America, the country I might have migrated to. You will understand what I am talking about if you know separation by divorce or bereavement does not always put an end to your relations with former in-laws.
In the past I learned many things from American people, especially how
to do business and how to make my life enjoyable. I cannot just write off all these
years I was in love with America.
Moreover, I still feel I have yet to
settle old scores with some of them, including the literary agent who subtly,
but flatly turned down my proposal amid the 2008 presidential campaign. The agent treated me as if I was one of those wannabe writers who just wanted to be institutionalized there. But actually, my aborted book that would have been titled The Unviable Japan was about my deliberate refusal to become institutionalized in Japan or any other country.
The last telephone conversation between the agent and me took place on March 4, 2008, but it was already indicative of the American Disease getting into its terminal stage.
I think the Americans have long been predisposed to Obamitis due to the fact that the United States is a nation which was
built by immigrants.
People always recapitulate the American history that way. But I see some sticking point in this all-too-familiar statement; it overgeneralizes the nation's formative process. It is true that the early settlers should
be given credit for the foundation of the United States, but it is not true that the later crops of immigrants, let alone their descendants, deserve
the same credit.
These late-comers are just reaping the harvest from the seeds sowed by
the nation's founders. It is, therefore, totally unrealistic to assume that they have high aspirations to rebuild their failing country. All we can expect from them is to further
undermine the American value system which has its origin in the founding
principles.
The real problem facing the nation, however, lies with the posterity of the earlier crops of immigrants. Today these people are at a loss over
how to recapture the lost ground which they once inherited from their ancestors.
Simply put, that is because of their utter ignorance about the contractual
relationship they are in with their country. As I observe, they seem to have great difficulty
distinguishing between the statehood and individual citizens. Given the way the American society has developed in the past, this is quite understandable. But now is the time they should revisit the gist of the mandate their ancestors gave to their representatives 221 years ago.
They don't have to be reminded all anew that amid the Civil War, Abraham
Lincoln said, "The government of the people, by the people, for the
people, shall not perish from the earth." Obviously the 16th Presidents
of the United States could not foresee that his ideal would be largely
distorted by his remote successors a century later.
But I think that if the descendants of the nation's builders don't want to be duped by the state anymore, they should relearn the essence of the Gettysburg address which all came down
to the following principles:
■ individual citizens and the country where they live are two separate
entities,
■ individuals create, reform, or destroy their country - it's never the other way around.
It now all hinges on their willingness and ability to get back to the basics
of the social contract whether or not America will be able to demonstrate
its innate resilience before having to resort to the Second Amendment.
Unlike Obama, I didn't attend Harvard Law School. Yet, I do know, as a
seasoned businessman, that the Constitution of the United States, or any
other country's for that matter, is the master contract between the government
and the people. Also do I know that there is no such thing as a contract which is not terminable.
Some have already started seriously talking about impeaching Barack Hussein Obama applying Article II, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution, which reads: "The President, Vice President and all civil officers of the United States shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors."
I think their interpretation of the U.S. Constitution is reasonable. Things
the president has said and done thus far all fall on "high crimes." · read more (357 words)
Sunday, November 22 2009 @ 11:24 AM CST
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 1,640
In the previous session of the interview with Lara, Chen Tien-shi (photo), which
was devoted to precisely defining the word "stateless," I found
out that both of us are only technically Japanese and that the two stateless
citizens are pursuing basically the same end.
But this time around, it
was revealed that there are two fundamental differences between us, as well.
On some important points we are diagonally different. Yet I'm inclined
to say we are 360-degrees different, so to speak.
One of the differences lies with the fact that she is a dedicated person
of deeds whereas I am an intransigent man of words. The farthest things from us two, therefore, are those unprincipled, surface-scratching pundits on the one hand and half-committed, hypocritical activists on the other. As is the case with Shihoko Fujiwara, another doer I admire, Lara also knows she should often compromise on the principle she upholds as a first-rate researcher for the cause of giving a helping hand to needy people.
Normally I shut my mouth before these activists because every word
I utter there rings hollow. But this time I dared to go straight ahead with my questions without
deference to her dedication to the grassroots activism. I thought
only by doing so we would be able to benefit from our conversation.
The other point where we are divided is that she values family bonds over
anything else whereas I am an avowed loner. I wish I could look like one who values blood relationship and affinity, but I can't, simply because my family has long fallen apart as is
true with other Japanese families. I might as well have written a voluminous book to explain how that happened.
The following excerpts are a reproduction of our conversation that took place on Friday evening on a to-that-effect
basis:
Yamamoto: My question No. 2 goes like this: "Tell me exactly what end you
have been pursuing with respect to the issues with statelessness. In other
words, do you think the bigger the stateless population, the better the
situation, or the smaller, the better?" I knew this question sounds
stupid, but I wanted you to answer it anyhow because I got an impression
that the author of Mukokuseki - Stateless stresses the positive side of statelessness. Lara: As I told you last week, statelessness is a multifaceted issue. When
I deal with a social outcast, as I do practically every day, it does not
make sense to stress the positive side of the issue by saying, "Be
proud of your statelessness." That is why I am actually doing what
the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948,) the U.N.
Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness (1961,) etc. call for. Y: Don't you think these declarations and conventions have remained empty
promises most of the time just like our own Constitution has? I am opinionated
that the international organization which was founded when Chiang Kai-shek
was still governing mainland China has long been dead. That is why it always takes it for granted that there is nothing to be
proud of about being stateless. L: I agree that the U.N. hasn't lived up to our expectations. Otherwise,
these people wouldn't need us.
Postscript: We didn't discuss the raison d'etre of the United Nations more in detail, but actually I think it has created more problems than it has solved them. By comparison. the European
Union has by far outperformed the U.N.
Y: The next question was: "Do you think your solution to the problem
can be institutionalized in one way or the other?" I ask this question
because I don't think it's the right thing to institutionalize mutual support among individual citizens. As we have seen in the U.S. in recent years, that is
the surest way to kill people's innate spontaneity. L: I agree. The most important reason I can't institutionalize my activity is because the actual situation
facing stateless people largely varies from an individual to another. As
a matter of fact, I have launched a website named Mukokuseki Nettowaaku (Stateless Network) where people of various backgrounds share their experiences
and views. Aside from the website, we sometimes organize a forum to the
same end. The first forum was held in Tokyo on November 23, 2008.
These are as far as I could institutionalize myself. Without financial constraints I am under, I might be doing a little more. · read more (628 words)
Left: Ms. Chen Tien-shi, alias Lara, answering my questions Right: Lara on a study tour
It is something I am inclined to call a serendipity that the brilliant author
of Mukokuseki - Stateless (Shincho-sha, 2005) turned out to be my neighbor and that a restaurant
owned by her family is located just around the corner from my apartment.
Despite the differences in age, ethnicity and educational/occupational
background between us, we seem to have one thing in common: we are stateless
at heart.
Currently Chen Tien-shi, better known to her friends as Lara, spends weekdays
in Osaka as Associate Professor at National Museum of Ethnology (MINPAKU) but on weekends she comes home to spend time with her husband, son, parents
and siblings who are living in this neighborhood.
On Friday night I visited that restaurant without knowing Lara had already
flown back from MINPAKU. I ordered mapo tofu ("stir-fried tofu in hot sauce" as the Beijing Travel Bureau translated the name of the dish in 2008) for my late dinner. But when I was working
on my mapo tofu, Lara emerged from the innermost alcove typical of a Chinese restaurant, which I call a "family nook," and spotted me. She looked
a little tired from the hard-working week, but was kind enough to say,
"Let me answer some of your questions when you are through with your dinner." A couple of days earlier I had sent her six questions together
with my take on her book.
The first one was about how specifically she defines statelessness. You
don't have to define homelessness or joblessness, but when it comes statelessness,
it's not that simple. So I asked her:
"You wrote that according to the statistics compiled by the Justice
Ministry, there were 1,846 stateless people in Japan as of the end of 2003.
You went on to say that if you include unregistered people and those who
are 'unaware' of their real situation, the stateless population must be
much bigger. I can't agree more, but could you define these 'unaware' people
more specifically?"
Her answer: Obviously the biggest group that falls on this category is
found in Zainichi (Koreans living in Japan.) Especially, she added, a good part of their second and third generation belong in this group. Their parents and grandparents were recruited from the Korean Peninsula as forced laborers or "comfort women."
The population of Zainichi peaked at the vicinity of 2 million by 1945. After the war, some of them
chose to return to the Peninsula, but those who opted to stay on faced
the same difficulty that the Chen family encountered in 1972 when the Republic
of Korea came into existence in 1948 because, at the same time, the Korean
Empire-turned-Japanese colony ceased to exist. Yet the Japanese Justice
Ministry was unjust enough to issue their resident registrations just stating
they are "Koreans." Some of them found it unavoidable to become
naturalized in Japan - the very country that had inflicted unbearable humiliation
on them for 34 years from 1911 to 1945.
Ms. Chen thinks basically the same thing can be said of most refugees from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia because countries by these names have been nonexistent at least since 1975 when the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, the Lao People's Democratic Republic and Democratic Kampuchea (currently called Kingdon of Cambodia) were founded. To be more precise, there have never been such names. No matter whether they are fully aware that there is no "home country" to return to, they are stateless, literally and figuratively.
Japan has practically closed its door to "political refugees" because of its pathological obsession with homogeneity, and yet there are more than ten thousand such people living here with stateless status.
If you take account of "economic refugees," Lara concluded,
these 1,846 people certified by the Justice Ministry as stateless in 2003
must have been the tip of the iceberg. In my interpretation,
economic refugees include those the Palermo Protocol of 2000, or United
Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, termed "willing
participants in trafficking in persons," i.e. prostitutes.
Lara told me across the Chinese dining table that the definition of the
word statelessness should be given in a multilayered way - legally, factually
and from an inner angle.
In relation to my first question, I had also asked her where she classifies
herself and other "stateless citizens" including myself. She confirmed that as she
wrote in Mukokuseki - Stateless, she remained essentially stateless even after she acquired Japanese citizenship.
But she corrected me as to the particular part of my book review where I cited practical
consideration as the primary reason she wanted to become a legally
established citizen.
She said to the effect that that is only part of the reasons. "Most
importantly," she said, "I wanted to find out if my problem could
be solved just by legally establishing myself here. In other words, I wanted
to know exactly what it would be like for an individual to willfully enter into a
'contract' with a state." · read more (261 words)
Wednesday, October 21 2009 @ 01:18 AM CDT
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 1,809
Soren Kierkegaard, who is often labeled a Christian existentialist, was the first to have advocated smart mistakes
Mistake - NOUN:
1. An error or fault resulting from defective judgment, deficient knowledge,
or carelessness
2. A misconception or misunderstanding
- The American Heritage Dictionary
People say, "Everybody makes mistakes." But I have made too many mistakes in my 74-year life to find consolation in the banal statement.
Thus far, however, I haven't raped, robbed, or murdered anyone. But since the AHD clearly distinguishes criminal acts from mistakes, the absence of criminal records doesn't make any difference to the fact that I am extremely error-prone. To me this is something very hard to accept because I have sometimes suffered a prohibitively costly consequence from these missteps.
On the other hand, if one means
to say by this notion that everybody commits a crime or two at times, he is just admitting the society where he lives has already fallen apart.
To differentiate mistakes from wrongdoings more clearly, I think we should shed new light on man's innate proneness to errors. My way of doing that would be like this:
"Everybody is entitled or even encouraged to make a mistake on the premise that it is a result of taking a calculated risk. No matter whether his action turns out a failure due to 'defective judgment' or 'deficient knowledge,' that is the only way he can learn lessons from life."
Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) is one of the favorite
thinkers of American businessmen because his words, when wrenched out of
the total context, often seem to fit very well into actual business situation. I have heard dozen times American executives quote,
or requote to be more precise, Kierkegaard's words.
A retired businessman by the name of G. Kingsley Ward, for one, wrote in
his small book titled Letters of a Businessman to His Daughter:
"And in all likelihood, they would all concur with Soren Kierkegaard's
observations that, 'Life can only be understood backwards; but it must
be lived forwards.'"
Obviously Ward had been too busy to double-check the unabridged text of a
1843 entry in Kierkegaard's diary, which actually goes like this:
"It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood
backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be
lived - forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean
that life in the temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely
because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the backward-looking
position." (English translation by Peter P. Rohde)
Ward's compatriots find this passage particularly (re)quotable especailly when they just want to say, "Let's go ahead with our plan although there still are risk factors involved in it." Although Kierkegaard's thoughts have a little more profound implication than an American businessman would find in them, they think the citation will make their message more convincing to their colleagues.
I know American people, in general, are the world's second poorest thinkers,
only next to the Japanese, especially when it comes to abstract thinking.
Yet I suspect Ward might have been able to tell his daughter how to make smart mistakes
if he had bothered to read the entire text of the particular entry in Kierkegaard's
diary, and preferably yet, some other pieces in the same journal, as well.
Once upon a time, the American society was accommodative of risk-taking
individuals, especially when they were smart enough to run calculated risks.
In those days the people didn't even need the ability for abstract thinking.
Contextual thinking would always suffice. I think this climate was the
real reason behind their resilience and self-purification ability. · read more (352 words)
Thursday, August 06 2009 @ 07:40 AM CDT
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 777
Gullible people who swallow anything they hear from an authoritative figure
such as Alan Greenspan are now puzzled over how to interpret recent news stories that seem to indicate that the worst is over by now. It looks as though the global crisis has proved far more short-lived than initially expected. Maybe the former FED chairman just wanted to pull their leg when he exaggerated the enormity of the situation in September last year.
With stock prices seemingly bottoming out, analysts and investors
are upbeat everywhere and with financial institutions quickly ridding their balance sheets of tons of toxic assets, they are foreseeing rosy pictures based on their hefty second-quarter results.
Budget deficits are still ballooning and jobless rates
remain high all over the world, but never mind; these are side issues.
So, have the governments of the G-20 nations performed miracles? Or was it yet another cheap trick?
They call it a business cycle inherent to capitalism which is, like climatic changes, basically unavoidable, if can be alleviated to a certain degree. It's just that a handful of bandits in Wall Street aggravated the downtrend with their excessive greed. But I don't agree to this characterization of the downturn because in all likelihood this looks more like an artificial crisis than a cyclic one.
This perception naturally leads you to these questions:
■ who were shaken off in the course of the deepening of the crisis? ■ and who are poised to have the last laugh in anticipation of a handsome profit to be reaped from it.
Small wonder most journalists, pundits and professors agree to the greed theory because they always side with the real culprits whoever they actually are. This is the easiest and the most effective way to defend, or even boost their vested interests in the status quo. To that end, they always see a conflict where there is none.
Their pet subjects, therefore, are constant struggles
between two different groups of people, such as the working class v. capitalists,
producers v. consumers, whites v. colored, men v. women, creditors v. debtors, democracy v. autocracy, the West v. the East, the
North v. the South, Wall Street v. Main Street, and so on and so forth. In fact, though, none of these abstract groups represents any specific people. This is no way to deal with multifaceted issues in the current world order which is in the process of a total disintegration today.
To me these struggles are too stereotypical and more or less imaginary. I see the real battleground somewhere else.
For one thing, last fall we were supposed to see every participant
in the equity market panic-selling all the shares he had held. Although
no one seems to have doubted that was true, that wasn't true. You can't sell
if you don't find a buyer. And recent rebound in stock prices is an unmistakable sign that the ones, who sneaked into market using the "dollar-cost averaging method" or the like, have now started shifting to the selling side, if slowly and carefully, so individual investors can buy back at a "minimized" loss what used to be in their portfolios.
By the same token, banking business also takes two, like tango. You can't lend money so recklessly unless there are reckless borrowers at the other end.
This is a commonsense matter, but our regulators have always portrayed
the creditors as the victims. They have a good reason to distort the picture this way.
In the
October 13 issue of TIME Magazine, Niall Ferguson pointed out that as of
2006, American households were indebted as much as 100% of nation's gross
domestic product whereas back in 1980, their debts had only accounted for
20% of GDP. According to Ferguson, American banks and other financial institution
were even deeper in debt. By 2007, their indebtedness had accumulated to
116% of GDP.
In April, U.S. president showed a transparent gesture by asking
his friends in the 13 major credit card companies to refrain from "unfair" and "deceptive" practices with their debtors. Once again he failed
to address the real issue indicated by the fact that millions of card holders
are already "maxed out." for a different reason.
Actually tough disciplinary measures
should have been imposed on the credit card users as well - and more importantly
on their role model, president himself. His administration is habitually acting even sillier
than its debt-ridden supporters. In the absence of this awareness, not a few independent analysts have been warning that they see a credit card crisis on the horizon if the current one triggered by the subprime woes may subside before long.
Just listen to Elizabeth Warren, Harvard law professor, talking in this YouTube video about America's Debt Epidemic. It is these sick people incapable of living within their means that elected Obama as their role model.
Saturday, May 09 2009 @ 09:33 AM CDT
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 1,014
This is to provide my audience with some tips on how to deal with
Swine Flu in the wake of the announcement by the WHO that it raised the
alert level to the second highest Phase 5.
Rule 1: It was quite OK to call the disease caused by the H5N1 virus Avian
Flu. Don't ask me why. Also it was permissible to call Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy mad cow disease, thanks to the maturity and torelance shown by Hindus. But make
no mistake; it's wrong to call the new pestilence Swine Flu. If you break the rule, that will prompt Muslims to slaughter hundreds of innocent piggies, as Egyptians actually did a couple of weeks ago. Instead of putting the undue blame
on these pious Arabic people, you should strictly observe this rule. This is the only way to keep peace. By the way, the correct way to refer to the disease is H1N1 Influenza Type A.
Rule 2: Be courageous enough to expose yourself to those people, such as
Mexicans, who are likely to bring you H1N1 viruses. If you are American and dare to insist
to close the borders with Mexico, you will be labeled
a racist. If you are Japanese, don't refuse personal contact with
Americans just because they are most exposed to the viruses coming from the
south of the border. Always bear in mind that you are obliged to reciprocate
their favor of protecting your country against possible attacks from neighboring rogue nations at the cost of American lives.
Rule 3: Wash your hands every nook and cranny every time you came home.
If you don't know how to wash your hands, watch Japanese TV. Around the
clock every newscaster is repeatedly telling you the procedure you have to go through
in the bathroom very precisely. They invariably say you shouldn't be through
with the hand-cleansing ritual at least until 15 seconds elapse. But when taking into account the pathological obsession of the Japanese with cleanliness on the outside, I think 12 seconds are enough for foreigners. If you are Japanese and
break the rule, the consequence can be graver than just infected with H1N1.
You will be considered to have contracted more serious disease by the name
of Anti-Conformism. Most probably you will be detained in an isolation ward. As a matter of practice it will be like you are deprived of your nationality.
Rule 4: Don't fail to wear a mask whenever you go out. Here, too, you can count on Japanese newscasters for invaluable tips. They boldly assume that all the TV viewers know how to put on a mask. Yet they think it's expecting too much from the neotenized viewers to assume they are good at undoing it as well. So they quickly add this to their instructions: "When you are back home and removing the mask, never touch
other parts of the mask than straps, because its surface can be contaminated by H1N1." Maybe you just have to cross your fingers that straps are not contaminated. There is one thing that even attentive instructors seldom mention; the mask can also serve as a gag that prevents you from transmitting to others another deadly virus
named the truth. That is why many Japanese wear a mask throughout the year. · read more (221 words)
To almost all professional writers, the Key Performance Indicator is money.
Consequently, their Key Success Factor is artfully disguised prostitution. Let us face this fact very squarely. Otherwise we would be further undermining our freedom of speech.
I don't necessarily think it's wrong for one to make his living from prostitution. Basically it's none of my business. If I had to give him an advice, however, the following would be it:
Just stop writing, if once in a while, to think there were times when great
writers never chased after money, if sometimes money chased after them.
I would tell him this not because by heeding my tip, he would become a great writer, but because the worst type of prostitute is one who doesn't think he is a prostitute.
Believe it or not, I don't intend to tell my sour-grapes story here, but my KPI and KSF are 180-degrees different from professional writers'.
This is not to say I need not closely measure my own performance so that I can improve the quality of this blog. I do need to improve it both in terms of writing skills and content. That I don't habitually trade trash for cash, alone, doesn't mean I'm a great writer. And after all I'm not doing all this just for vanity's sake.
Because of some shortcomings involved in the statistical function of my
blogging software named Geeklog, I have been using a more advanced analysis
tool named Google Analytics (GA) since the beginning of this year.
Unfortunately, though, I can't afford the prohibitively high cost to take
an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) measure. So I've had to substitute
my own trick to improve the traffic every time I identify a problem. Over
time I've found out my cheap trick, such as using eye-catching (sometimes
un-PC) words and phrases, more often than not, outdo pricey SEO tools.
Another reason I don't go for an SEO software is because it tends to artificially
inflate access counts to make money-driven site owners happy.
Below here I'll show you how I am evaluating my own performance as an independent
Web journalist against my own measurement criteria.
Traffic Overview
Aside from the readings on GA, the stats page of Geeklog tells me that 1,086,068 people have "hit" my website since I launched it 56
months ago. It's true Geeklog tends to largely overstate my performance
in this respect because it can't exclude my own accesses as well as spammers'. Besides, by a rule of thumb, you can arrive at the number of visitors by dividing the number of hits by something like 3-5.
All in all, the reading on Geeklog is conservatively estimated to translate into 150,000-200,000 real visitors or 450,000-600,000 page views. Yet I think this is something when taking into account the fact that I have always avoided prostituting myself. More specifically, I have taken no-nonsense
approach toward socio-political issues and taken up issues
of lasting relevance, rather than just responding to media-salient topics of the time, which are often red herrings.
Analysis by Country
The largest number of visitors came from the United States. This is
exactly what I intended when launching my blog because freedom of speech
isn't really dead in that country. The following chart shows the top 10
countries in the last 3-month period:
Saturday, March 21 2009 @ 02:59 AM CDT
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 795
This is to follow up my previous post titled From a Psychiatric Perspective..... Here I just wanted to elaborate on my point that the projection strategy, which often leads you to a false objectivity, will not work to really solve any problem facing us today and what happens when it failed as it always should.
You can hardly name a war in history that was not ignited by Freudian projection. If you want to make sure that war is the unavoidable consequence of a futile attempt to externalize one's inner problem, TokyoFreePress recommends you read Occidentalism co-authored by Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit. This is an extraordinarily intriguing book. If there is a flaw, it's the fact that Buruma and Margalit one-sidedly analyze the Occidentalist trait whereas Occidentalism is nothing more than a mirror reflection of Orientalism - and vice versa.
Sigmund Freud died in exile in London, weeks after the breakout of WWII and a little more than one year after the annexation of his home country by Hitler. The Fuehrer hated Freud not only because he was a Jew but also because his theory about projection directly pointed to Hitler's mental illness. No one has ever substantiated it, but many biographers have pointed out that Hitler's paternal grandfather was a Jew. No matter whether the dictator was 25% Jewish, it's for sure he projected his self-hatred to something else.
There's more to it. It's just the kind of joke Charlie Chaplin would have liked to say that the Austrian psychiatrist should have sat the dictator on his couch. Although Freud was unable to explain why the madman could mesmerize so many people so efficiently with the help of his Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, the effectiveness of hypnotism hinges more on the suggestibility on the part of the general population than on the skills of the mesmerist. And one's inability to internalize things always underlies his susceptibility to a fanatic dogma.
With all this in mind, let's take a brief look at Japan's trail from the workout in its backyard countries such as China to the nuclear apocalypse at the end of the unwinnable war. · read more (457 words)
Thursday, March 19 2009 @ 07:26 AM CDT
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 1,498
Sigmund Freud theorized that projection is one of the self-defense mechanisms man turns to especially in the face of a crisis.
Some Freudian psychoanalysts explain: People, more or less, have the tendency
to project their own thought or emotion to someone or something else to avoid facing up to the real problem. The Freudian self-protection theory fell
short of clearly distinguishing a pathological projection from a "normal"
one. But that doesn't really matter because anything produced by projection is more or less delusional.
Basically you can substitute the word externalization for projection in the Freudian sense. But in this "information age,"
what you project is, more often than not something you have received from someone else. This is especially true of those who process information
on an ear-to-mouth, or eye-to-fingertip basis. So I think that it will
be more precise and relevant today to reword Freud's projection as the refusal
of internalization.
We are facing one serious problem that the Austrian psychiatrist did not know. He died in September 1939 in exile in London. In those days, there were no more than millions of pundits all over the world, I guess. But today, everyone is acting like
a pundit. Aside from innumerable people who make their living by writing
and speaking, hundreds of millions, or even billions, of self-styled pundits are discussing
political, economic and cultural issues. I always ask myself: "They
are as talkative as myself, but are they internalizing these issues before they talk about them?" Most of the time, I can tell they aren't.
That is evident from the way these know-it-all surface-scratchers are constantly relativizing values. They don't seem to have their own absolute values anymore. (By the adjective "absolute" I mean "internalized.") Islamic fundamentalists are no exception to this climate. In the absence of absolute values to uphold even at the cost of their own lives, these cowardly fanatics are constantly driving their children to martyrdom. Likewise, in more industrialized countries, professional and nonprofessional commentators alike, are passing around superfluous (i.e. non-value-adding) information about this value and that value under the guise of objectivity. Isn't this more than enough? · read more (887 words)
Tuesday, March 17 2009 @ 05:23 AM CDT
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 1,052
As most Americans, from conservatives to liberals, have fallen into an
absurd delusion that the Harvard-educated black Messiah can walk on the
water, I am quickly losing interest in politics. Originally TokyoFreePress
was meant to be a political blog, but now I suspect it no longer deserves
to be called one. I no longer share with these political pundits the same pastime of untiringly scratching the surface of what's going on in Washington, let alone in Tokyo.
I couldn't care less, indeed, what's to become of America or Japan.
But do you understand what I really mean when I say politics doesn't matter to me anymore? If you are Japanese or American, you certainly don't understand
the real implication of my political apathy. I'll tell you why I feel that
way.
Throughout my 73-year life, I have never belonged to a religious group
because I haven't been dumb enough to take part in the nationwide endeavor
to relativize values by saladizing various religions. Moreover, I suspect man's faith is something that should not be institutionalized in the first place. Hence, when I die,
I refuse to be incinerated and buried either in Buddhist or Christian format.
This, however, is not to say I haven't been influenced by the teachings of Jesus
Christ and Gautama Buddha.
Admittedly my take on Christianity is a little heterodox in that to me, Mary
Magdalene is the central figure in the life of Jesus. Some say she was
a prostitute. Some others hypothesize that she was Jesus's mistress, or even his wife.
I don't know exactly what she was. But I do know she was much more than
just a disciple of Jesus Christ. Other disciples are said always to have been jealous about her and kept asking Jesus, "Why do you love her more than all of us?"
I sometimes think God sent Jesus to save the beautiful woman, alone, or God
sent her to save Jesus.
Equally important to me is Buddhism. Among other teachings of Buddha, I
think his central tenet is this one: 色即是空. 空即是色.
You find these eight characters in one of the sutras translated into Chinese
from Sanskrit. One English translation of these words reads:
FORM IS EMPTINESS. EMPTINESS IS FORM.
A more explanatory translation goes:
EVERY FORM IN REALITY IS EMPTY, AND EMPTINESS IS THE TRUE FORM.
I would rather compress this tenet this way: NOTHING REALLY MATTERS. · read more (606 words)
According to Ron Paul, there are 90 million vacant houses in America
today. (At first I thought I heard the maverick Senator say there are 19 million unoccupied houses, which was already something that threw me into consternation, but a transcript reads 90 million houses are in that condition.) On the other hand there are
tens of millions of people who only have a house or apartment that doesn't
meet the minimum living standard, or no place to live in at all.
More than half a century ago, American Marxist Leo Huberman (1903-1968) pointed out that in America the
practice of dumping "excess" grain into the ocean was commonplace
when millions of people were combating malnutrition. He said this was something
inherent to capitalist society. That is not really true but just the same,
the same incongruous thing can happen in today's America when a supplier of goods or services teams up with the Federal Reserve to manipurate the market mechanism.
Basically there are three tested ways - almost always tested unworkable - for the government to handle an oversupply
situation:
1. Let the supplier destroy the goods while leaving the potential customer
unprovided with necessities.
2. Subsidize either side or both so that the excess products can find their way to consumers at a price substantially lower than market.
3. Destroy both.
Since it's too obvious that the first option is doomed to further widen
disparity, any government in history hasn't really encouraged suppliers to destroy
their goods.
Option 3 can be pursued most typically by means of a destructive war. Everyone knows the
Great Depression paved the way for the authoritarian and belligerent regimes
in Europe. But even for America, it took WWII to fully recover from the protracted downturn in economy since the 1930s.
Now that Obama, misguided by those multilateralists, has precluded the
warring solution, the Harvard-educated Santa Claus will certainly go for Option 2, which is the easiest, but the worst way (even more destructive than the warring option) to close or narrow the gap. Obama seems to believe this alternative is the only practicable course of action for
the United States, not only at home but also abroad. The president is right, on the premise that he is not really determined to seek a fourth way to bring about change. In fact he doesn't look prepared to step into an uncharted course. His lack of integrity prevents him from doing so. · read more (463 words)
Westerners still blindly believe in the myth that the hogwash disseminated by such dumbs as Mao Zedong or Joseph Stalin has something to do with Marxism. Presumably this ignorance has made the hotbed for Obama's cheap socialism.
Many books have been written on why and how Japan's bubble economy burst
in the early 1990s. Now a myriad of words are being spent on the meltdown
of financial markets in Wall Street and the global depression it allegedly triggered, to explain
why and how the most recent bubble bust.
However, we are learning practically nothing
from these lectures because it's an utter truism that any bubble is doomed to burst sooner or later. There is no such thing as a sustainable bubble.
The real question, therefore, is why and how the bubble had to form, to begin with.
Professional pundits who tend to scratch the surface would readily answer this
question by attributing the current crisis solely to the greed prevailing in the financial
market in Wall Street or anywhere else. But I think they are oversimplifying the issue.
My American
Heritage Dictionary defines greed as "a rapacious desire for more
than one needs or deserves." But do we know a person who doesn't have
greed as it is defined there?
Actually the core problem lies in man's desire, rapacious or not. But desire for what?
We all have desire for many worldly things, including money of course.
The materialist way of thinking is also centered around desire, but it cannot really explain the driving force of man's economic activity because materialists tend to get around the value issues. Although we are all drowned in
the endless chain of means, the ultimate object of our desire is the purpose
of life, which is sometimes referred to as "values."
I know that the Americans and Americanized people are not good at abstract thinking because they have an allergy to philosophy. But I don't think we can get around the question of what man's values are in the face of the ongoing crisis.
To make it even more difficult for these people to identify the real issues, they also have an allergy to Marxism. American Marxist Leo Huberman
(1903-1968) used to lament that all his compatriots knew about Marxism was that it was a horrible thing. Maybe they were, and still are, mixing up the
German political economist with such dumbs as Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin.
But I think I must cite some important thought on the value-creating chain
from Marx's writing because he is the first, and perhaps the only, thinker to have shed light on the basics of man's economic activity in the industrialized
world. So-called socialists see virtue in production, or labor, while they always use the word consumption with a negative connotation. At least they think consumption is a necessary evil. Marx's way of thinking is 180-degrees different from such a puerile asceticism. · read more (800 words)
Sunday, February 22 2009 @ 02:19 AM CST
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 1,015
Anna Politkovskaya refused to get gradually suffocated by Vladimir Putin. She paid the price for that in October 2006 when she was gunned down by an assassin hired by the Kremlin.
I categorically refuse to agree to socialist ideas if the word socialism
should be understood in association with the hogwash dessiminated by the likes of Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin. But among other types of socialism, I think what I call "creeping socialism" is its most perilous mutant. The reason I feel that way is twofold.
Firstly, since creeping socialism is not a product of methodical thinking, it does not have logically verifiable substance. It's nothing more than an elusive climate prevailing in a nation. You can't rebut this type of socialism on theoretical grounds even if you find something fishy in the vague compassion shown in public discourse toward the weak and the poor.
Take the Americans as a case in point. Obviously their empathy toward minority groups mostly stems from the guilty conscience they harbor on behalf of their ancestors who may have owned slaves, traded them or taken part in the colonization of underdeveloped nations. It's not Obama that started all this. It dates back to the early-1960s when John F. Kennedy used the words affirmative action for the first time. In the last 40-plus years since JFK, the American people rid themselves of all mental barriers to having a black or female president.
Yet there is a sticking point in the undercurrent of this climate. The last question they would dare to ask themselves is: "Are we really prepared for having a gay president in the near future?" I don't think how to address the spouse of the president would be the only problem. And what if a president has no living family, like myself? But again, you can't logically prove this tide to be wrong.
Although the moral code John F. Kennedy advocated may not have aroused suspicion among his contemporaries, there is no denying that he was going to make up for his father's immoral acts in Wall Street in the 1920s, at least subliminally. And he was simply wrong when he said, "Ask not what your country can do for you," because in doing so, the President was, in effect, urging the children and grandchildren of the victims of the likes of Joseph Kennedy, Sr. to ask what they could do to further sacrifice themselves for the American elite.
The bottomline of this hypocrisy is a constant relativization of values. Now it seems the entire value system is endangered in today's America. All along the American people have been conditioned to make believe it's a necessary evil to relativize values on the pretext that mounting conflicts between ethnic groups and genders would otherwise eat into the unity of the country.
Due to their intellectual laziness, another fallout from this trend, it never crosses their minds that they can possibly pursue the same end in a different way because god bestowed upon everyone a wisdom to exercise the right amount of tolerance while adhering to one's own values. In short, they are preserving national unity at the cost of their values. Ironically enough, the relativization of values has also resulted in a unique form of totalitarianism. Someone has exquisitely termed this climate "Digital Maoism." This makes one think that the negative tradeoff between national unity and values of each individual has taken a serious toll on America's strength.
Let me add something here in relation to the value issues. You may think I am mixing up a moral value with an economic value. But to me they are one and the same thing. Otherwise, every time you use the word, you would have to predefine which value you are talking about.
In the following installments of this series, I will spell out exactly how man's sense of values plays its role of the major driving force for economic activities and how specifically creeping socialism undermines the value system of a nation. · read more (374 words)
Wednesday, February 18 2009 @ 01:46 AM CST
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 914
In diplomacy, you sometimes turn to exchanges of symbolic gestures and nice but unbinding
words. But if you overdo it, or let the other side indulge in it, you will not only reduce international relations
to a ritual, but can endanger your own interests, typically by swallowing prohibitively
high costs today for benefits you may or may not reap tomorrow. This is how the Japanese reacted when Hillary Clinton chose their country as the first leg of her first overseas trip as U.S.
Secretary of State.
The Tokyo government flipped out over her maiden visit
because deep inside it felt Japan didn't deserve the honor especially
when the political turmoil and social unrest do not seem to come to an
end anytime soon.
For one thing, it came to the surface on Saturday in Rome that a wino was
at the wheel of Japan Inc. Shoichi Nakagawa, Japan's Finance Minister, was supposed to brief the press corps on the outcome of the G-7 Finance Ministers' Meeting. But he repeatedly fell asleep, and whenever he came to, all he could do was to mumble incoherent responses to reporters' questions in heavily slurred speech.
When forming his cabinet last fall, Prime Minister Aso handpicked Nakagawa as his Finance Minister although he knew very well the man had repeatedly made a scene because of his alcoholism. The media were also determined to hush up his mental illness. Amid Clinton's stay in Tokyo, Aso and Nakagawa tried to dodge criticisms by giving implausible explanations such as jet lag, overdose of cold medicine, etc. But finally he had to step down because the news had been repeatedly aired on TV and YouTube all over the world.
In early stage of the global crisis,
Nakagawa was giving the likes of Henry Paulson a lot of lectures on how
his country could "recover" from the burst of the bubble in the
1990s. Obviously the wino thought, like all of his intoxicated fellow countrymen, that the current distress was attributable solely to the sabu-puraimu mondai, or subprime woes, and the riiman shokku, or Lehman shock. The empty-headed Aso shared the same opinion that the crisis had long been gotten over in Japan with the ￥46.7 trillion (more than $500 billion) bailout measures taken by Koizumi and thus the current crisis is not homegrown. Based on the same misperception, he kept saying Japan would
be the first to come out of the depression this time around. But, in fact, their country now seems to be the last in getting away
from the crisis, either with or without a drunkard sitting at the wheel.
According to the data released on Monday, Japan's GDP shrunk by an annualized 12.7% in the last
quarter of 2008, while the U.S. and the Euro-zone countries only suffered
a 3.8% and 6% setback, respectively, in the same period. By now everyone
has realized that the Japanese government has been disseminating complete
hogwash, while doing absolutely nothing to counter the deepening crisis. · read more (723 words)
Thursday, February 12 2009 @ 08:50 AM CST
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 1,506
Nationwide and around-the-clock, people are cautioned over and over not to remit their money to the designated bank account until they positively identify the payee as someone they know in person
These days most of you must have grown increasingly puzzled over where Japan is heading. Where the heck will the wave of never-ending political fuss and social unrest wash these people ashore?
According to media-retained pollsters, Prime Minister Aso's approval rating
still keeps dipping after sinking below 20% soon after he took office. The popularity
that former Prime Minister Koizumi was enjoying seems to dwarf Aso's. It's nothing new that the media give exorbitantly high marks to a new PM, or PM-to-be, and then downgrade him to the bottom in a matter of months. But, can these figures still indicate something? Absolutely nothing.
Reasons:
1) These figures are utterly unreliable because they are unaudited. Even
if they were, still you couldn't be sure that they are not falsified. Japanese
auditors have time and again proved venal.
2) Pollsters never give their pollees a valid alternative. Respondents
must tick a leader they favor from among the same old figures such as Aso, Ozawa and Koizumi. There
is no such choice given in the questionnaire as "Whoever leads this
nation, Japan won't change for the better."
3) As a result, those who refuse to answer always outnumber other groups of pollees.
You should, therefore, look somewhere else for the true indication of where this country is
heading.
For one thing, Aso's most recent "gaffe" about the
postal privatization is somewhat intriguing in that respect. On February 5, the manga-loving Stanford-dropout
whose IQ is said to be 80, said out of the blue that he started to think
the Postal Privatization Law of 2005 might have to be thoroughly reviewed. Although the
law stipulates that the way to privatize and split the now-defunct Japan
Post into six independent entities in phases may be subject to adjustments
every three years, what Aso hinted at was possibly to reverse the privatization
process itself. Moreover, it was too late for the first triennial review
and too early for the second.
In order to justify his sleep-talk he is now saying that at the beginning
he was opposed to the privatization bill but finally convinced by Koizumi
to support it. Actually that means he made an aboutface for the second
time and is now making a third by quickly taking back the Feb. 5 slip of the tongue.
It's been an open secret that since there was more than $3 trillion at
stake in the privatization, U.S. policymakers who had vested interests
in American financial institutions salivated a lot in anticipation of a huge cut from the privatization
deal across the Pacific. That is why Washington put it high on the agenda
of the "U.S.-Japan Regulatory Reform and Competition Policy
Initiative" which had actually served as the one-way representations
of the U.S. demands from its far eastern ally since the
early-1990s. (As of today, there are signs that someone "suggested"
the Japanese Wikipedia entry about the policy initiative be deleted.)
It has to be a unilateral initiative simply because Japan is in a position
to one-sidedly reciprocate America's favor to shelter it with its nuclear umbrella although you can't tell for sure the U.S. will never take it back when
it actually starts pouring. This is basically why Japan's domestic and foreign
policies have kept wavering all the time without any internal necessity. Aso is no exception.
An independent Canadian journalist based in Tokyo theorizes that the Koizumi
administration railroaded the postal privatization bill to comply
with the undue demand by Washington. He says that Koizumi's finance minister
Heizo Takenaka is a disciple of Henry Kissinger, who, in turn, is a loyal
henchman of David Rockefeller. This may be yet another delusion we hear from those "truth-seekers." But where there
is no fire, there's no smoke.
The single most important flaw inherent to allegations made by conspiracy theorists is the fact that they always make believe those who repeatedly fall victim to malicious plots are innocent. Actually a victim is a politically correct way of naming an accomplice. In a sense, it's these morbidly suggestible and docile people that make otherwise decent people feel inclined to act like swindlers.
Let's turn our eyes to their domestic behavior. For one thing, take a look at the following numbers which
I recapitulated based on the statistics compiled by the National Police Agency:
Tuesday, February 10 2009 @ 02:43 AM CST
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 692
On Monday, U.S. military chief Gen. Walter Sharp called on North Korea
to refrain from further brinkmanship in reference to the recent moves which
are suspected to be the preparation for launching the Taepodong-2 ballistic
missile. He reportedly said, "Many, many countries around the world
are watching North Korea right now to see if it will act responsibly."
Give me a break, General. Haven't you learned that the right thing to do
in the face of a provocative move by Pyongyang is not to talk, and not
to watch?
When I was a canid-phobic kid, my mother used to tell me to avoid eye contact
with dogs while refraining from running away from them. For the 7-year-old
kid, it was quite difficult to observe this rule, but I don't think it's
too hard for a general to practice it, because any adult knows that a dog
that barks a lot will never bite. In 1939, Hitler invaded Poland giving
little signs of it beforehand. Two years later, Japan did the same in Pearl
Harbor, having been emboldened by the initial success of what its European
ally had named "blitzkrieg" or lightening war.
It's now obvious that Obama, Clinton, Gates and their generals should prepare their country for a possible lightening without talking too much about transient successes and failures in their Munich Conferences. · read more (307 words)
Sunday, February 08 2009 @ 11:42 AM CST
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 1,163
The maverick congressman looks to have grown haggard in his most recent video, but he still remains optimistic about America's future.
Currently I am working on a provisional closing of my earthly books. Soon
after I got started with the task, I realized that I should totally write
off sizable pieces of asset, both tangible and intangible, in which I have invested my time, energy,
money and emotions in the last 46 years. The junk that has hollowed out
my balance sheet is my Americanism.
I have studied, worked, made a family, fathered kids and destroyed
the family ties, all in a way an average American might have conducted himself in this country where civil liberty is an empty promise. I was Americanized from tip to toe, until that person of African ancestry
became the President of the United States.
Since WWII, every nation in the world has been more or less Americanized.
But no other sovereign nation has imported the American way of life as
thoroughly and quickly as my country of birth has. When two different
cultures meet, an allout conflict is unavoidable, most of the time. But that has never been the case with this country. Because Japan had
long lost its cultural identity since it got into China's cultural orbit
in the 5th century, it could absorb any foreign influence like a sponge in subsequent centuries. It was what I call a cultural salad that had paved the way for Japan's postwar Americanization.
I acquired my American way of thinking quite differently. Otherwise, I
wouldn't have thought about writing it off at this late stage of my life.
What I found intolerable with today's America was the fact that there are
unmistakable signs the vast majority of its people have been Japanized.
For one thing, the Obama administration decided to set aside $33 billion
for the State Children Health Insurance Program. Also the administration
is going to fatten unemployment benefits while at the same time artificially creating 3
million nonvalue-creating jobs out of thin air. All in all, the stimulus package would eventually cost every American citizen $6,700, if the burden were to be evenly distributed. Now Obama and his followers
are out of their minds. They wouldn't listen to the voices of reason, such
as the one from Republican Congressman Paul Ryan, who asked, "Must
we repeat Japan's stimulus mistakes?" · read more (1,353 words)
Now that America's Japanization has reached its final stage with the arrival of Obama, let us take
a relook at how the Japanese, and some other Asian peoples, escalate things. Admittedly, though, I know very little about the Indonesians.
Even apes utter a war cry before starting their scratching warfare. Small
wonder that the first thing the Japanese do when challenged is also to make a verbal response.
The problem is that everyone knows the Japanese will never scratch, or bite. What they call "diplomacy"
is nothing but an endless exchange of words for its own sake, if they sometimes turn to something else such as their thick checkbook.
They are silly enough to think that just hardening or softening rhetoric
will produce an intended outcome despite their past experience which has more often than not proved otherwise. The last thing that would occur to them
is that even in diplomacy, you lose unless you win in this world chronically
facing short supply of resources. As a result of oversupply of words, their
tactic seldom works.
Usually it takes quite some time, sometimes decades, for the Japanese to realize
that words produce nothing. By that time, they always miss the right timing
to take the right action. In ferocious international relations, the right timing, once missed, never visits you once again.
When they finally understand dialogue will not work, they "resort"
to symbolic gestures which they call "pressure." The most typical
way of putting pressure on the opponent is to refuse to draw a check. In dealing with the shrewd North Koreans, they have stepped up economic sanctions,
little by little. Each time they did so, the North Koreans could shrug
that off. They thought they could get by without Japanese aid primarily because they could always count on the deep-pocketed China to
make up for the resultant shortfall. · read more (320 words)
Monday, February 02 2009 @ 12:21 AM CST
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 658
I have nothing whatsoever against polyamory. Not only that, I have spent a little too polyamorous adulthood myself. But it's a different story when it comes to polygamy. And it's a natural thing to analogize a bilateral treaty to a marriage. If you don't think your marriage requires an exclusive commitment, why don't you discuss the matter with your spouse?
Being a country with a forked tongue, the Unite States has seemed to have two or more cornerstone alliances in Asia for quite a while. The political polygamy has been especially evident since the early 1970s.
Soon after the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty went into effect in 1970,
President Richard Nixon visited China to lay the groundwork for the normalization
of diplomatic ties with the communist country. The main reason Nixon abruptly changed his China policy was because he thought China, alone, could help America out of the Vietnam quagmire.
Unlike the docile Japan, China is a nation that doesn't do anyone a favor for nothing. Needless to say, Mao Zedong and Chu Enlai urged
their American counterparts to reciprocate. China's archrival Japan had
already become Asia's economic powerhouse and was still on a strong uptrend. Some historians
say that in Beijing, Nixon and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger
said, "Let us take care of Japan to your interests." We don't know if that is exactly
what they said, but everybody knows that they promised to make Japan's Prime
Minister Eisaku Sato expedite the ratification of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and to tell
him to further promote the hogwash about Three Nonnuclear Principles he had been
advocating since 1967 to eternalize the "nuclear allergy"
of the Japanese people.
When Nixon said he was sure that he could neutralize Japan forever, Mao must have thought, "Who could ask for anything more?"
The downright breach of trust upset the Japanese people at the beginning, but over
time they became inclined to forgive, or forget, the fateful act of betrayal on the part of the Americans. · read more (502 words)
In his inaugural address, John F. Kennedy eloquently said, "Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country." In 1961, I was too young to be moved by JFK's flowery language. Now that I've turned 73, I know I am too old to be impressed on this January 20 by the silver-tongued Obama any more than I was by Kennedy 48 years ago. Obama will be a president far less demanding, than Kennedy, of his people at home and allies and foes abroad. But that makes no difference to my apathy.
Like most of you, I have been living my life primarily for myself and my
loved ones - not for my country, or any other country for that matter. Equally important, the less I have to count on my country for our well-being, the more I feel comfortable. And as you would agree, in our everyday life, words do not matter as
much as deeds do. Democracy as against autocracy, civil liberty as against slavery and human rights as against indignity are all words.
As the economic, political and cultural crisis deepens, words that keep coming from professional
Monday morning quarterbacks, and prophets alike, increasingly ring hollow. But
my sympathy always goes to these pundits because it cannot really be helped
for them to keep churning out supposedly impressive, actually empty words.
They have to make their living as wordsmiths. · read more (384 words)
Friday, July 11 2008 @ 04:55 AM CDT
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 1,366
Ron Paul, who still remains in the 2008 presidential race, bases his non-interventionist
platform on the wrong assumption that everything happening outside of the
United States is a "blowback" resulting from the past interventionist
policies. Despite his naivete, however, there's no denying that a growing
number of American people have been inclined to relearn from the founding
fathers, be it George Washington or Thomas Jefferson. Their principles
all come down to this: "Let's mind our own business, nothing else."
Ron Paul seems to fret about his fellow countrymen mistaking his non-interventionism
for isolationism, but that is not an important issue.
The 34th G8 Summit was hosted by Japan from July 7 through July 9. Toyako
in Hokkaido was chosen as its venue because environmental degradation in
the northernmost island is not so serious as in the other part of the archipelago.
The 8 leaders, along with their counterparts from the European Union, China,
India, and some African nations, chitchatted over their pet issues
such as what measures to take to cut the greenhouse gas emissions and how
to cope with the global food crisis already affecting tens of millions
of Africans and about to hit the industrialized nations as well. To demonstrate
how the leaders in the developed countries are concerned about the worldwide
degradation of environment, the Summit's host even staged a tree-planting
ceremony on a lakeside ground.
Despite the Japanese media's acclaim for the success of the 3-day-long gathering, these
guys were just exchanging empty words and symbolic gestures. That being
the case, Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda was the best person to preside
over the pointless meetings. The Japanese people, for that matter, are
the best people to host the ceremonial Summit. · read more (334 words)
Monday, May 26 2008 @ 11:21 AM CDT
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 1,558
When I was doing my daily mining routine on YouTube late last week, I came
across some videos relating to Ron Paul. Actually there are 124,000 videos
posted by his campaign office and supporters. and some of them have been
viewed more than a million times. Until then, I hadn't known that the congressman,
R-Tex, still remains in the presidential race, because of the media blackout in and outside
the U.S.
From this Japanese blogger's point of view, the only candidate
who could make a difference is one who will pull the plug on the dead organization called the United Nations and give Japan the 1-year prior
notice to terminate the incongruous pact called the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation
and Security between the United States and Japan, as soon as s/he takes
office. In the light of these criteria, either Obama, Clinton or McCain
is out of the question. But since I came to know the obstetrician-turned-politician has persevered in the 2008 race on the "Libertarian" ticket, I have started thinking that for the American voters, hopes for real change may not have been thoroughly extinguished.
Admittedly, I am skeptical about the wisdom of categorically ruling out military or non-military intervention. No matter whether President Paul would opt to withdraw from WTO, his Secretaries of Commerce and Treasury Departments would have difficulty handling protectionist measures, including currency manipulation, China and some other country would certainly step up. His Secretary of Defense would face equally formidable problems, at home with defense contractors, and abroad with those nations whose Founding Fathers were, unlike their American counterparts, interventionists or even expansionists. Despite all these sticking points, I am inclined to buy into Ron Paul's philosophy because at any rate it precludes him from making America police the whole world with its overstretched troops deployed in 130 countries, let alone with the help of unreliable and overdependent allies such as Japan.
This afternoon, Amazon delivered my rush order for The Revolution: A Manifesto authored by the insightful septuagenarian. According to this book, Paul's
team could raise $4 million online on the single day of November 5, 2007,
and the record in the U.S. elections history was surpassed on December
16 when they could raise more than $6 million. This really indicates Ron
Paul and his colleagues are now gathering momentum for a real change. I
have a hunch that at latest by the time he, as well as myself, turns 85
in 2020, the American voters will send the real change agent to the White
House. It's hard, sort of, to visualize what it will be like under the
Libertarian administration, because we are too used to the false dichotomy
between the Republicans and the Democrats. But if you assume that Ron Paul
will most probably opt to put in place an Internet-enabled model of E-Democracy,
you can somehow envisage what his minimalist government would look like. · read more (182 words)
Thursday, June 28 2007 @ 04:54 AM CDT
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 1,543
At long last, the inexhaustible patience exerted by the five member states
of the six-party framework to beg North Korea to implement the first steps
promised on the "epochal" accord reached in Beijing on February
13 looks to be paying off. Today (June 28) International Atomic Energy
Agency Deputy Director General Olli Heinonen and his inspection crew are going
to visit, on a guided tour, one of the key nuclear facilities in Yongbyon to have a look - a look at whatever Kim Jong Il wants to show them.
Now every party thinks all the effort made by Christopher Hill, chief U.S.
negotiator, and his boss Condoleezza Rice, has led to a major breakthrough.
Congratulations to all of these gentlemen and the lady for the job well
done. But I cannot but add: "You have succeeded. But so what?". · read more (339 words)
Monday, January 31 2005 @ 01:30 AM CST
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 2,518
In a matter of weeks we have seen the very idea of democracy tested in
those four countries, with 180-degree different outcomes between Iraq/Ukraine
and China/Japan.
As for the Yushchenko's Orange Revolution, we saw the Ukrainians acting
as a courageous and mature people with high self-esteem, unlike Russians
who have increasingly been allowing the ex-KGB spy to act like a Czar. As a blogger
with a handle of raulkyyv puts it in his Orange Revolution website, it was quite something in the light of the fact that "millions
of people have died around the world in the past century for much less
than what is at stake here." · read more (566 words)
When I was doing my daily mining routine on YouTube late last week, I came
across some videos relating to Ron Paul. Actually there are 124,000 videos
posted by his campaign office and supporters. and some of them have been
viewed more than a million times. Until then, I hadn't known that the congressman,
R-Tex, still remains in the presidential race, because of the media blackout in and outside
the U.S.
In a matter of weeks we have seen the very idea of democracy tested in
those four countries, with 180-degree different outcomes between Iraq/Ukraine
and China/Japan.