Wednesday, October 14 2009 @ 03:08 AM CDT
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 1,630
Outside of the Islamic sphere, sodomy does not constitute a crime. And yet
"conservatives" in non-Muslim countries, especially the U.S., are untiringly insisting that homosexuality is a sin. This is really ridiculous; there cannot be any moral implication in people's sexual orientations.
As far as I know, the only American "conservatives" who rarely talk about the gay issue are Ron Paul and Sarah Palin. Certainly they know homosexuality is not a moral issue, let alone a political one.
It seems to me that conservatives' allegation against gays is essentially self-contradictory because the word "homo," almost by definition, indicates that gays are downright conservatives. They fear anything new and different, and feel at ease only when there is no challenge for change. To them life is unbearable if it has to be a voyage in uncharted waters.
For that reason, they always choose to stay with people of the same feather or same gender. The last thing you can expect from them is to accept, let alone initiate, new ideas or innovative ways of doing things.
In recent years, self-proclaimed "liberals," too, have started
raising their voices, as if gays are not conservatives in nature, to demand special privileges be given to them just for being gays.
In truth, however, homosexuality is not a vice, let alone a virtue, but a deadly disease that disables its sufferers to change. The only privilege these sick and sickening people really deserve is confinement in mental hospitals.
With the gay issue constantly politicized these days, I can't but feel pity for straight Americans. On the one hand liberals are depriving them of their right to openly express disgust toward disgusting things, and on the other, conservatives are forcing them to feel obliged to invent phony moral grounds every time they say they don't like tomatoes, or whatever it is they don't like.
To make the pathological issue a little more complex, the two different sexual orientations often coexist in one person. Such a case is sometimes called bi-sexuality, but a more
vulgar way to refer to it is AC-DC.
The U.S. president, for one, is an AC-DC.
On October 10 he attended
the annual dinner of the Human Rights Campaign where he reaffirmed his
commitment to ban the discriminatory treatment of gays in the military.
According to a wire report by Associated Press, the president received a standing ovation
from the crowd of 3,000.
This is an unmistakable sign that Obama did not really mean it when he said, as he did thousands times, that he would bring about change in America.
The best thing the American people can expect from their leader is a mere
metamorphosis. Underneath the "change" on the surface, the progression
of the American disease will further accelerate. Most probably by the
end of Obama's first term, America will have fallen terminally ill.
For my part, I am 120% hetero.
Throughout my life I have always distanced myself from homos and AC-DCs
because I have believed that the change-disabling disease is highly infectious.
When looking back on my adulthood, I realize all anew that not a single
man could cause a change in the course of my life.
As I have always maintained, young women often remain unassimilated at the bottom
of "the chain of oppression" in this helplessly male-dominated and supposedly homogeneous nation. Small wonder that men have never outshone women in Japan, although
the opposite has not always been true. That is why I could encounter a certain number of Japanese women whose charms were so irresistible that I tried hard to change myself to deserve them.
It was through these relationships that I learned you can really change only when you become involved, in your entirety, with someone who is potentially your change agent. To be more explicit about the word "entirety," you've got to be committed to your mate from brain to genitals. Without internalizing the challenge facing you this way, you can't change yourself, let alone the country where you live.
Admittedly, though, some of my male friends and kin, especially my late father, have had a certain influence on me. But in the absence of romantic attachment to them, they have never been a major driving force for change. · read more (121 words)
Each era has its own way of thinking. In history a new way of thinking has always started with abstraction of things because almost by definition a new era cannot be a mere extension of the old one. If you just "reset" the past without conceptualizing it, as the U.S. President habitually does, you are doomed to see history repeat itself.
The beginning of the American Century
roughly coincides with the emergence of the philosophical movements generically
called pragmatism.
According to my American Heritage Dictionary the word is defined like
this:
Philosophy. The theory, developed by Charles S. Peirce and William James, that the
meaning of a proposition or course of action lies in its observable consequences,
and that the sum of these consequences constitutes its meaning.
Simply put, usefulness is the value. This was a very straightforward
manifestation of the American way of thinking. We used to admire the American people for this directness - but not anymore. Where can we find it in Obama's fake socialism?
The first book written by John Dewey, one of the founders of pragmatism, was published in 1903 under the title of Studies in Logical Theory. It is said that Dewey authored 40 books in his lifetime, but after him, not a single American to date has thought it necessary to update, let alone overhaul his thoughts or other pragmatists'. This intellectual laziness has taken a serious toll on the cultural and political climate of the United States. As a result pragmatism has now been reduced to a mere representation of ignorance and arrogance.
I have nothing against their obsession with usefulness. Yet I don't want to agree to their way of thinking until I ask them an important question: "Usefulness is quite OK, but useful for whom and what purposes?" In the past the Americans
could readily find a convincing answer. But these days, most of them make believe they don't hear me. If I insist that my question should be answered, all they can say is: "Who knows? Who cares? We are too busy to toy with philosophy. It's totally irrelevant to real life".
The vulgar answer simply indicates that pragmatism itself has long outlived its usefulness in America.
Although it remains to be seen what kind of philosophy will supplant pragmatism,
it's high time for the Americans to demonstrate their ability in abstract thinking. If they don't wake up to the fact, say, by 2016, that only through abstraction can they come up with a new set of values most everyone can share, they will certainly see the final curtain fall on the American Century, and we non-Americans will scornfully say that these guys with defective brains really deserved their demise. · read more (414 words)
Like Abraham Lincoln or Karl Marx, I am a firm believer in physiognomy.
As anyone with an unclouded eye can tell, a person's integrity, or absence of it, never fails to surface over time. Not only that, most of the time you notice it at first glance. At least it doesn't take as long as 48 months to unmask a person you are dealing with. Virtue, or vice for that matter, is not something
that is solidly encased in the crust. And underneath the skin, there are only flesh and bones - nothing else. In short, what a human being looks
is what he or she really is - no more, no less.
Early last year, Samantha Power, then-top aide in Obama's campaign office, likened Hillary Clinton to a monster. Admittedly this Power woman had a keen eye. But I don't want to be sued by the Monster Anti-Defamation League which then issued a statement complaining that "being lumped together with Hillary Clinton is really a low blow." So, I will try to use politically correct words here to describe the new U.S. Secretary of State. Otherwise, an anti-defamation league of monsters or lxars might take me to court.
From the viewpoint of this Japanese blogger, she looks like Madame Pinkerton
as much as she deserves to be called those un-PC names.
In Puccini's opera "Madame Butterfly," a U.S. naval officer by the name of Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton comes over to Nagasaki aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. Soon after he marries a geisha and fathers a boy named "Sorrow,"
Pinkerton gets repatriated. When departing, he promises to return
"when the robins nest in the spring." He does not abide by his
promise. When he finally comes back, the spring is long gone, and he brings along his real wife Kate. The geisha disembowels herself with
her father's sword. · read more (516 words)
Saturday, January 03 2009 @ 02:38 AM CST
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 1,087
The November Mumbai incident has enlivened crisis-thirsty political pundits in America
and the rest of the world because the terrorist attacks on the luxury hotels in India's largest city reignited the six-decade-old hostility between India and Pakistan. Some panic-mongering analysts warn that we might see an unexpectedly serious fallout should the fourth war (some say it's the fifth) break out between the two Asian nuclear powers.
In late December American journalist Nathan Gardels interviewed Zbigniew Brzezinski
over how Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser had briefed Barack Obama on crucial geopolitical issues in Southwestern and Southern Asia during the presidential campaign.
In this interview, Gardels asked: India has said they have the right in
self-defense to strike militant sanctuaries in Pakistan if Pakistan can't,
or is unwilling to, do the job. This is what Bush has done; it is what
Obama has promised to do. Why should India not do the same?
Here's Brzezinski's answer: Theoretically, from a debater's point of view,
the argument you have laid out is correct. However, any sane person has
to ask "what has the U.S. gained by attacking these sanctuaries other
than inflaming Pakistani public opinion?" Have we destroyed the Islamist
networks? Why would India be able to do any better?
When the interviewer approvingly summarized his answer by saying, "In
other words, it wouldn't be wrong, but stupid," Brzezinski said, "Precisely." To be more precise, however, I would have paraphrased these arrogant remarks this way:
America is the only country that is allowed to make mistakes.
I have no idea about who has granted the U.S. the privilege to constantly err, but I'm sure he now feels like giving a second thought to his decision.
Aside from the question of why the two Americans think India should
be able to outdo their home country in dealing with Pakistan, both gentlemen should have asked
themselves these questions:
- Why did President Johnson sign the absurd (or hypocritical at best) treaty
meant for nuclear nonproliferation?
- Why did President Nixon ratify it?
- Why did President Nixon not do his best to stop India from pursuing its nuclear aspiration?
- Why did President Clinton not do his best to prevent Pakistan from acquiring WMD? · read more (531 words)
Saturday, December 20 2008 @ 10:06 AM CST
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 759
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. (Serenity Prayer of Alcoholics Anonymous)
The more the American people act like busybodies, the more the other peoples
act like crybabies. Busybodies often mix up the war on terror with something else. On the other hand terrorists and their supporters, emboldened by rightful "blowback" everywhere else, keep complaining as if they were the victims of terror.
Actually this vicious circle dates back as far as to the days of WWII when a Democrat
was sitting at the Oval Office of the White House. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that the next American President will
further ratchet up this busybody policy line, learning no lessons from the failures of his predecessors. This is more tragic than it seems at a glance especially because now is
not the right time for the U.S. to meddle in foreign affairs.
However, this is not
to say that in no event should America intervene in what is going on in the terrorism-sponsoring
countries. To the contrary, the U.S. should further intensify its diplomatic, economic and military pressure
on these rogue nations wherever the situation warrants. But at the same time, it should forget about the false mandate to overturn a dictatorship everywhere else only to rebuild that country from scratch on the one hand, and police the rest of the world on the other. Instead it should act more
unilaterally, more on a "country first" basis and in a more focused
fashion.
Bilateral or multilateral strategic partnerships and military alliances are quite OK only where such an arrangement is believed to serve the U.S. interest. In fact, though, you can hardly find an ally whose interest does
not conflict with yours in this intricate world. To form yet another buddy-buddy club and name it G-X in a convoluted world like this one, you've got to believe in a fairy tale that a friend of your friend is always your friend. Actually the only thing you can count on is the fact that an enemy of your enemy can sometimes be your friend. By the way: for any country Japan is the worst choice to make friends with because the "pacifist" nation has no enemy at all. Everyone thinks Japan is in feud with China. But the notion is totally imaginary because the country cannot afford to break ties with its big brother and neither can China afford to break up with Japan, though to a lesser degree.
Unfortunately for the American people, they should be prepared for the next administration still acting like a person suffering from ADHD (attention deficit hyper-activity disorder.)
In the Election 2008, an astounding 69.5 million people voted for Obama presumably because of the guilty conscience they have inherited from their slave-owning ancestors
- at least subliminally. Leveraging this sense of guilt, the President-elect
will cerainly prioritize aid programs meant for the poor and the colored at home. He will
even extend his benevolence to big businesses, as he is already doing, where their employees are taken hostage. Overseas, he will also deal very nicely
with underdeveloped/developing countries and even the world's 2nd and 4th largest economies simply because they were victimized by the "American imperialism" in the past.
I sometimes liken him to an unskillful plate umpire at a ballgame. He
once called an obvious strike a ball. Then in the next inning, he intentionally
calls an obvious ball a strike to make up for the previous mistake. But
actually he has committed two errors in a game, which fatally damages his reputation. I think that's exactly what the next President and his 69.5 million followers are doing.
Let me add something here about the next President's favorite pastime. I bet that Obama will spend a considerable amount of time at the White
House toying with the Lists he will have inherited from Bush. It must be fun to add a nation to the list of terror-sponsoring
countries only to delist it at the first sign of softening on the part of the
subject nation, or to place a sex-slavery practicing country such as Japan
in the State Department's "Tier 2 Watch List" only to remove it from there when an ineffectual anti-slavery legislation is enacted in
that country as a token of respect for the Uncle Sam. It's regretful to know that the President-elect does not seem to have learned
that the Lists have done more harm than good to both sides.
All in all the Harvard-educated Santa Claus will lead his people to drift further
away from the Founding Principles, instead of extricating them from the curse of the
original sin. Perhaps he is too philanthropic to say, "Whatever you do is none of our business unless you stand in our way. After all it's you that suffers the consequence of what you are doing." By the same token the President-elect does not seem to have the guts to say that the people of any country deserve their leader no matter whether they have actually
selected him by suffrage. · read more (614 words)
If you've lost your way between Wall Street and Main Street, why don't you leave your worries on the doorstep and hit the sunny side of either street? You may come up with a bright idea to get through the hardship that will last another four years.
According to the Russian news agency RIA Novosti, Kremlin-favored political analyst Igor Panarin said, "We must break the strings tying us to the financial Titanic, which in my view will soon sink." He based the provocative remark on his own crystal-ball in which he sees an imminent breakup of the United States into six independent states.
Aboard the imaginary Titanic, Gordon G. Chang flatly dismissed Panarin's prediction as hogwash in his recent piece posted on the Contentions website. Mr. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China, one of the most intriguing books published in the first decade of this
century. That makes his rebuttal to Panarin all the more convincing. If you still prefer to subscribe to Panarin's prediction just because you have been growing bearish over America's future since the breakout of the financial crisis, that would be turning the causal relationship upside down.
But this is not to say that it's a breeze for the Harvard-educated Santa
Claus to usher his country into the second American century. Actually,
if the President-elect does what he is saying he will as soon as he is
sworn in, nobody can rule out Panarin's malicious scenario no matter how
it looks counter-intuitive today.
At home, Obama's version of the New Deal is doomed to exacerbate, rather than turn around, the situation by chronicizing the disease because he is focusing on the wrong part of Franklin D. Roosevelt's package: the mechanisms FDR put in place just as temporary measures. For one thing, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation was founded based on the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. Roosevelt, the banker-turned President, is believed to have disliked the idea of building safety nets across the nation. But at the sight of some 4,000 banks going under, he thought the enormity of the problem would warrant a temporary deviation from his principle. That's why he reluctantly refrained from vetoing the bill as an emergency measure. Once the FDIC came into existence, however, it didn't take long until the organization, along with the mindset associated with it, became a going concern. · read more (747 words)
Throughout his second term in office, George W. Bush has been despised
as the second worst President of the United States only next to James Buchanan
who mishandled the secessionist demand for the independence of the Confederate
States of America. One and a half century after the Civil War and four
years after Bush's reelection, some 63.8 million learning-disabled Americans
picked the wrong person as their leader once again. Astoundingly, they claim that they
are making history.
On the morning of November 5 (JST) I was watching live the "historic
moment" on ABC's Vote 2008 program. The podium that President-elect
was going to take was fenced in with 2-inch-thick, 10-foot-tall bulletproof
glass walls as if it was a dictator who was about to
show up to declare the birth of a socialist regime. In his victory speech,
Barack Obama urged the huge congregation of blacks, whites, browns and
yellows to rally behind him for the cause of reconciliation between different
ethnic groups, classes, genders and generations, as if to echo Chinese
leader Hu Jintao who in recent years keeps preaching harmony among his
1.3 billion people.
A little before this took place in Chicago's Grant Park, John McCain gave
his concession speech in Phoenix, Arizona. His way of bowing out was a
little more graceful and sincere than Obama's way of wording his supposedly
touching address. But just the same, the Vietnam War hero failed to win
over people's hearts and minds in part because he is a Republican, but
more importantly because McCain's campaign could not afford to buy up the
seven TV channels for a 30-minute primetime "informercial"
at an estimated cost of $4 million. · read more (743 words)
Thursday, October 16 2008 @ 06:53 AM CDT
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 1,208
Japan's Finance Minister gives wrong tips in Washington
President Bush and Henry Paulson should have known that they couldn't afford
the time to ask the Finance Ministers from Group of Seven countries for
tips on how to turn around the situation for the following two reasons:
1) The financial turmoil triggered by the failure of Lehman Brothers is
a challenge primarily facing the American people. If this can be fixed
at all, it's none other than the Americans who can fix it. It's been proved
time and again that they can reinvent their nation all on their own.
2) Asking Finance Ministers of G7 nations for their advice on how to stave
off the total meltdown of the financial system, as Bush and Paulson did
last week, is a total waste of time. Especially Shoichi Nakagawa, Japan's
Finance Minister, told them the "success story" about how his
country could recover from the burst of the bubble economy in the 1990s
by injecting an enormous amount of "public funds" into dying,
sometimes dead, financial institutions. The bailout funds totaled 46.7
trillion yen ($458 billion in today's exchange rate). But the fact remains
that Japan's rescue plan did not work with the Japanese failing to learn
bitter lessons from the bust. Back home, Yamato Life, for one, filed for
bankruptcy protection on the same day Nakagawa was delivering his lecture
in Washington. The insurer's President Takeo Nakazono shamelessly attributed
his company's failure to the "unexpectedly fast depreciation of securitized
subprime loans." Bush and Paulson should have known that Japan's prescription
has been tested unworkable. · read more (531 words)
Saturday, October 04 2008 @ 11:23 AM CDT
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 988
In the wake of the near-meltdown of the entire financial system, the U.S. House of Representatives has passed into law the 700
billion bailout package presented by President Bush and Secretary of Treasury
Henry Paulson, with John McCain and Barack Obama fully supporting the plan in a truce
unprecedented in the history of presidential elections. Now it's increasingly evident that there are no fundamental differences between
the policy lines of the two camps. Neither do we see a major difference between President Bush and the self-styled maverick Republican.
These days we are asking ourselves: "Would
Governor Palin have voted for the bill if she were a congresswoman and
had not been picked by McCain as his running mate just to fill the '18 million cracks' Hillary Clinton had left behind?". Most probably she would have voted against it because the bailout plan
is one of those "bridges to nowhere" the Alaska governor is not inclined to subscribe. Palin's way of thinking now looks much closer to Ron
Paul's than to the Republican presidential candidate's.
Even after the bill was sweetened by the additional tax breaks and the cap on
the deposit insurance raised from $100,000 to $250,000, there still are 171 lawmakers in the House who think the emergency measure is unacceptably
"un-American" and nothing but a "financial socialism."
This indicates that America as a whole still has some resilience
with which to potentially get back on the right track on its own. Admittedly, though, we cannot expect
either McCain or Obama to bring about real change. · read more (212 words)
