In a post on the Somalian piracy issue, the folks at NPR’s Planet Money point out how odd it is that some ships fly the flag of landlocked Mongolia (it comes down to tax/regulatory incentives), photo courtesy our own Joe Jones!
He’s got a bunch of other great photos on his Flickr site.
Though it may be an online-only podcast, Planet Money is fast becoming my favorite NPR program after This American Life and On The Media. They slow everything down and give context to the news, avoid shorthand and jargon, and generally make the day’s developments imminently accessible and understandable. Too often the news seems out of context and complicated, and no doubt turns away a lot of people before they can really even try and get a handle on things. Their approach is refreshing and sorely needed in other areas of the news!
The show originated as a spinoff of the amazing work they did for TAL, which is a must-listen to get a decent idea of what’s happening with the financial crisis:
Bad Bank (A follow-up made in February that similarly explains the developments of the financial crisis and what should be done with the banks)
Scenes from a Recession (This is a more traditional This American Life episode that takes a man-on-the-street approach to see how the recession is affecting people)
I’ve said it before, but I really can’t recommend these enough for anyone who’s not a “finance expert” but still wants to know what the hell is going on. In essence this stuff is really simple but made intentionally complicated by industry insiders.
Tsuyoshi Kusanagi was arrested by Akasaka police for drunken nudity!
At 3am in Hinokicho Park just outside Tokyo Midtown in Roppongi, police found a naked Kusanagi dancing wildly making a scene (apparently not “dancing” exactly). When they told him to calm down he refused saying “What’s wrong with being naked?!” So they had no choice but to arrest him. He resisted and had to be “wrapped in a sheet” to be taken to the station. He is so ubiquitous on Japanese TV that the stations have been thrown into chaos today, in danger of having to cancel a good portion of their programming schedule and commercials (why? for some reason it is standard operating procedure to systematically blacklist a talent who runs afoul of authorities or even is caught cheating on a spouse).
Kusanagi is (was?) a member of SMAP, the pop group that gained popularity through wide-ranging appearances in variety shows, survived through the 90s into today despite numerous scandals, rumors, and accusations. Their popularity also engendered no small amount of sour grapes and cries of unfairness who felt their talent agency Johnny’s Entertainment abused their market power to set inconceivably favorable terms for their acts. But they got away with it thanks largely to their bottomless capacity to bring out their fanbase to generate ratings/sales. With this incident all those who hated on SMAP over the years have something to hang their hats on.
The SMAP members are well-known to have their lives fairly closely monitored and managed by talent agency Johnny’s Entertainment. Perhaps Kusanagi just couldn’t take it anymore as the group entered their mid-30s and industry observers wondered how they could adapt even as middle aged “ossan.”
If anything Kusanagi chose a nice park to stage his downfall in. Hinokicho is clean and boasts a “Japanese but modern and artistic” feel. Mrs. Adamu and I have enjoyed its tranquil (though crowded) lightup around Christmastime.
Japan’s government may halt advertisements promoting digital TV after the incident, as the campaign features Kusanagi, said Hideo Harada, an official in the terrestrial broadcasting section at the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications.
A person who answered a call to Kusanagi’s management agency, Johnny’s and Associates Inc., said there were no officials available to comment on the case. She declined to give her name or position at the company.
SMAP’s music is sold by a label under the control of JVC Kenwood Holdings. JVC Kenwood shares fell as much as 8.3 percent in Tokyo trading today, and finished the morning session 6.7 percent lower at 56 yen. The Nikkei fell 0.5 percent.
After coming back from a high school exchange in Japan and attending a semester of community college, I suddenly decided that I needed to get out of Connecticut and transfer to a four-year univserity as soon as possible. A combination of a lack of preparation, a burning need to get out of my hometown, and plain ignorance of how money works led me to forego cheaper options and attend a private university funded almost entirely on student debt (in a ratio of around 75% variable rate private debt and 25% fixed rate direct federal borrowing). At the end of it I was many tens of thousands of dollars in the hole, but today less than 4 years later I am two months away from being debt-free, all thanks to “borrowing my way out.”
At the end of my education I had a degree in “International Relations” – essentially a liberal arts program. I left the system without much in the way of skills, but college did give me two things that would come in very handy later on – a bona fide college degree and the time and impetus to dedicate to accumulating knowledge (a good portion of which came through classwork) and compulsively studying Japanese, all without any immediate need to make ends meet.
But without any directly marketable skills and no immediate job prospects, I stayed afloat in Washington DC after graduation through multiple part-time jobs (at one point I was working for four separate companies), occasional parental assistance, and deficit spending with one of those “pre-approved” credit cards they were always sending me back then. I also deferred my student loan repayment to the last possible moment, a decision that added another $10,000 in piled-on interest by the time I started paying.
But I kept at my jobs and eventually landed a gig translating for a law firm. Though I already had some translation skills before starting (documented in early MF posts!), the office experience, from the basic administrative duties of a “legal assistant” to keeping up with the high-paced research activities of my boss, was a very uphill learning curve, and the salary was just barely enough to survive on and pay a $1000 a month minimum payment.
But I somehow managed to stay afloat, and while I left that firm to follow Mrs. Adamu to Thailand, I continued working and improving as a freelance translator. When I eventually made my way to Japan, I easily landed a much better paying job (at a time when the JPY-USD exchange rate was at its most favorable in a decade) that put me on the path out of debt bondage.
So by dint of this experience I know that with a little luck knowing how to learn from people and ask for and accept help, perseverence, development, and talent can end up paying big dividends, as long as you are willing to invest in yourself. My own experience was not ideal as I made some “bad” decisions initially (though I do not regret the path my life took since otherwise there would be no Mrs. Adamu), but then neither is this recession. While many representing the underdeveloped economies argue for sustainable growth free from major-power exploitation, America has been in the grip of the “cult of progress” for more than a century. Our future prosperity is tied to economic growth, so in the bad times we seek to limit the downside through deficit spending and a series of debt rollovers.
I wonder if any of the protesters have had similar experiences. Perhaps it is tough to relate big, nationwide events to everyday life, but I am shocked that so many are ready to throw common sense to the wind and buy into idiotic catch phrases no doubt orchestrated by Astro Turfers who view them as nothing more than pawns that are useful to serving an end entirely removed from the actual protesters’ interests. There is nothing explicitly liberal or offensive about public works spending, so it doesn’t make sense to oppose in such and ugly and kneejerk way just because it doesn’t come from the right wing’s preferred sectors like the military. And Obama’s budgeting actually improves the tax burden of most families. It is really hard for me to understand people like the “Obama is a fascist BECAUSE HE IS!!!!” guy:
But perhaps Matt Taibbi has it right when he calls these people the peasant class, always ready to hate an external enemy rather than face their own lots in life:
The really irritating thing about these morons is that, guaranteed, not one of them has ever taken a serious look at the federal budget. Not one has ever bothered to read an actual detailed study of what their taxes pay for. All they do is listen to one-liners doled out by tawdry Murdoch-hired mouthpieces like Michelle Malkin and then repeat them as if they’re their own opinions five seconds later. That’s what passes for political thought in this country. Teabag on, you fools.
After all, the reason the winger crowd can’t find a way to be coherently angry right now is because this country has no healthy avenues for genuine populist outrage. It never has. The setup always goes the other way: when the excesses of business interests and their political proteges in Washington leave the regular guy broke and screwed, the response is always for the lower and middle classes to split down the middle and find reasons to get pissed off not at their greedy bosses but at each other. That’s why even people like Beck’s audience, who I’d wager are mostly lower-income people, can’t imagine themselves protesting against the Wall Street barons who in actuality are the ones who fucked them over. Beck pointedly compared the AIG protesters to Bolsheviks: “[The Communists] basically said ‘Eat the rich, they did this to you, get ‘em, kill ‘em!’” He then said the AIG and G20 protesters were identical: “It’s a different style, but the sentiments are exactly the same: Find ‘em, get ‘em, kill ‘em!’” Beck has an audience that’s been trained that the rich are not appropriate targets for anger, unless of course they’re Hollywood liberals, or George Soros, or in some other way linked to some acceptable class of villain, to liberals, immigrants, atheists, etc. — Ted Turner, say, married to Jane Fonda.
But actual rich people can’t ever be the target. It’s a classic peasant mentality: going into fits of groveling and bowing whenever the master’s carriage rides by, then fuming against the Turks in Crimea or the Jews in the Pale or whoever after spending fifteen hard hours in the fields. You know you’re a peasant when you worship the very people who are right now, this minute, conning you and taking your shit. Whatever the master does, you’re on board. When you get frisky, he sticks a big cross in the middle of your village, and you spend the rest of your life praying to it with big googly eyes. Or he puts out newspapers full of innuendo about this or that faraway group and you immediately salute and rush off to join the hate squad. A good peasant is loyal, simpleminded, and full of misdirected anger. And that’s what we’ve got now, a lot of misdirected anger searching around for a non-target to mis-punish… can’t be mad at AIG, can’t be mad at Citi or Goldman Sachs. The real villains have to be the anti-AIG protesters! After all, those people earned those bonuses! If ever there was a textbook case of peasant thinking, it’s struggling middle-class Americans burned up in defense of taxpayer-funded bonuses to millionaires. It’s really weird stuff. And bound to get weirder, I imagine, as this crisis gets worse and more complicated.
I feel the need to record the extreme case of the jibblies that this news brought on:
In about two weeks, Meiji Dairies Corporation plans to release a teeth-cleaning milk called “Milk de Recaldent.”
Basically, this is nothing more than a new type of milk with tooth-fortifying “recaldent,” a product of the Cadbury company which they explain is “an effective ingredient that rebuilds the tooth by replacing the minerals where cavities can begin to form and leaves teeth more resistant to plaque acids.”
But in Japan, the brand “Recaldent” is almost inextricably linked with sugar-free gum, so I can’t help but think they are making trying to make my milk taste like minty gum for the added dental benefits, thanks to commercials like this one:
The release explains that the milk’s flavor won’t change, but by the time I saw that I was already jibblied out.
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Check the Adamukun blog for Adamu’s shared articles and recommended links.
It has been a while since I highlighted an Adam Richards of the world, but I couldn’t ignore this fashion triumph. An Adam Richards in Montana has apparently joined a campus trend of rolling up one pant leg to protect against bicycle chains:
Adam Richards, a communications studies graduate student, said that although he sports the bike leg when it’s warm, he uses a rafting strap to cinch his pants to prevent wind from drafting up his leg during the cold months.
“It works fine,” Richards said, adding that the cold may be too much with rolled up pant legs.
“Maybe I’m just a wuss,” he said.
Even with this alternate approach to keeping pant legs intact, Richard still admits that sometimes the strap isn’t enough.
“I’ve ruined a couple pairs of pants,” he said.
Two things:
This article features something I have had to deal with all my life – people thinking my name is “Richard” instead of “Richards.” Either they think my first name is Richard, or they forget my last name ends in “s.” This is something I am sure all Adam Richardses of the world can agree on.
I sometimes see people in Tokyo with the “bike leg”, but it’s generally unnecessary since most bikes here come with metal guards over the chains.
Of course, the female population could simply be falling more or less in line with the overall population, but let’s not let that get in the way of an anonymous ministry official’s speculation (thank you Kyodo and Nikkei):
Population Of Women In Japan Sees 1st Decline On Record
TOKYO (Kyodo)–The number of females in Japan fell for the first time on record as of October last year, the Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry said Monday.
The female population was estimated to be 65.44 million as of Oct. 1, down 20,000 from a year earlier to mark the first decrease since 1950, when comparable data were first recorded.
”More Japanese women are going abroad for extended periods, and this is thought to be one of the reasons,” a ministry official said.
This might be a good time to tell you that I very much enjoyed attending Patrick Macias’ lecture on otaku culture held a couple weeks ago at Temple University Japan. You can listen to it in full on his website. The lecture is a broad overview of the development of Japan’s otaku culture and the American obsession with it. Within, he notes:
Densha Otoko, the dubiously true story of an 2-Channeler otaku who falls in love with a normal woman, follows the storyline of an “interracial romance,” and
The ubiquity of erotic elements in anime and gaming indicate that otaku are leaving normal female companionship behind, in a phenomenon he compares to the “post-humans” of sci-fi anime such as the Gundam series.
In the late 1990s Kim brought a team of Italian pizza chefs to North Korea to instruct his army officers how to make pizza, a luxury which is now being offered to a tiny elite able to afford such luxuries in a country that cannot feed many of its 24 million inhabitants.
Despite the food shortages high-quality Italian wheat, flour, butter and cheese are being imported to ensure the perfect pizza is created every time.
“Our people should be also allowed to enjoy the world-famous food,” the manager of the Pyongyang eatery quoted Kim as saying, according to the Tokyo-based Choson Sinbo newspaper.
There are times when I want to just quit my job, lock myself in an Internet-connected bomb shelter, and spend all my waking hours reading updates from the troubled mind of Benjamin Fulford:
The exposure of Satan worshippers accelerates as the Federal Reserve Board heads for collapse.
This confession confirms other sporadic confessions and a few rare historical court cases describing human sacrifice among Satan worshippers pretending to be Jews or Christians. As the Federal Reserve Board heads for collapse many more of the Satan worshippers who are often found amongst the super rich are sure to be exposed.
An aristocratic Satan worshipper contacted me to say that “Satan has gone to heaven,” and ask “what are we to do now?” My answer is they should abandon the Western concept of an eternal clash between Good and Evil and replace with the Asian concept of Yin and Yang or harmonious opposites. They can then also start worshipping life instead of fooling themselves about some sort of war between Satan and God.
We are likely to see many more horrendous confessions over the coming months and years. In order to have a fresh start for the planet I think we need to forgive those who confess.
This guy David Icke, a promoter of the idea that “reptile people” are in secret control of the world order, called Benjamin Fulford a “disinformation artist” because Fulford says he needs proof before he’ll believe the Illuminati are actually reptilian Here Icke feverishly denying that money really exists:
More Benjamin…
About the Bush-China connection
The Skull and Bones drug dealing syndicate was a major player in the opium trade so they have been dealing with Chinese mobsters for over 150 years. However, while the two sides did business, they were also enemies who did not fully trust each other. The Bush family were heavily involved with China and the Chinese mob. They were also blackmailing top Chinese power brokers over illegal slush funds they had. Papa Bush’s brother Jonathan Bush lived in Beijing and had high level contacts. However, the Bush, China connection has since been severed because the Chinese figured out it was the Bush faction that was trying to depopulate China with Sars and Bird Flu etc. The Chinese were planning all-out warfare against the US because the US elite were planning to kill 80% of the world’s population. That plan has been stopped and there are now negotiations on to build a win-win permanent world peace.
On the DPJ Ozawa scandal:
Japan’s prosecutors ordered by US to trump up charges against opposition leader Ozawa’s secretary
The US criminal regime ordered the current Japanese puppet/slave colonial government to trump up charges against the secretary of opposition Democratic Party of Japan’s leader Ichiro Ozawa, according to senior sources in the Japanese secret government. The reason was that Ozawa said “the only US forces we need here are the 7th fleet.”
As the US secret government comes to an end it is using every dirty trick in its book both in Japan and the US in a desperate but doomed effort to stay in power. No matter what they do they will not be able to con the Japanese people like they did during the last lower house election that was held on September 11 4 years ago. For one thing they no longer have any money so they will not be able to bribe the TV stations to run their propaganda. Furthermore, if members of the current slave regime continue to betray their people with dirty tricks like this they will surely end up in jail.
The Japanese Democratic Party promises to renegotiate the US/Japan security treaty once they come into power. If the US carries out any more dirty tricks it will hurt them in the negotiations. The Japanese opposition would like to retain a US presence as a counter-balance to China but they might change their mind if the US continues to abuse this country.
It is my pleasure to report that the Mutantfrog team has graciously granted me the priviledge of joining this blog. While I have regularly written at ComingAnarchy.com for more then 4 years, and will continue to do so, I have Japan-specific material that is more appropriate for MF. Accordingly, my quirky Japan material will be posted on these pages, and I will do my best to build on the existing theme, character and material of this blog. So without any further ado…
Uri Geller, the Israeli-British psychic who gained worldwide fame in the 1970s with televised claims to be able to bend spoons with the power of his mind, now wanders around the world as an independently wealthy mystic. The man has even joined the 21st century media trend and writes at his own blog. And recently, he took a trip to Japan to visit some old family friends:
I first met Shinzo Abe, a brilliant man from one of Japan’s leading families, in 1973, when he was 19 years old. His father was then leader of the Liberal party. Now Shinzo is Japan’s youngest ever Prime Minister. He is also a best-selling author, and I’m enjoying the copy of his chart-topping book Towards A Beautiful Nation… though it’s hard work for me to read Japanese.
That pretty far-out statement, both on the relationship with Abe and the ability to read Japanese. (The post came out in September 2007, the month Abe resigned). But like a lot of Geller’s blog, and his claims of psychic powers, the idea that he can muddle through reading Japanese smacks of puffery. That brief paragraph alone shows that accuracy is not his strong point — first, Abe’s Dad was in the Liberal Democratic Party, not the Liberal Party; and second, he served as the foreign minister and agricultural minister, among other posts, but never as head of the party. But the photo of Uri Geller and Abe, complete with spoon, is priceless. (And forgive me, but I can’t help but think that the horizontal and vertical creases in Abe’s shirt suggest it just came out of a box. So much for Japan’s aristocracy.) There is also a curious revelation about the research pursuits of one of Japan’s largest companies:
Japan’s foremost electronics company [Sony], which pioneered miniaturisation and invented the Walkman, had set up a psi research unit of five scientists to test the reality of extra-sensory perception. They carried out tests with psychics to find hidden objects, to see colours blindfolded and to sense which glass of water among a tray of ten had been infused with healing energy. After thousands of experiments, the psychics were scoring impossibly better than mere guesswork could ever do, with a 70 per cent success rate. And the scientists were in despair. What use was this power? They couldn’t distill it into batteries (though how they had tried!). They couldn’t use it in market research or recording studios. Sony were stumped.
Wow. I really, really hope that Sony ‘were’ just having Geller on about this, but regardless, I hope Stringer is including a review of all research departments as he cleans house and takes names over the coming weeks.
As an interesting sidenote, one of the key people who exposed Geller as a fraud was James Randi, a stage magician who made a second career of debunking the paranormal and the occult. Geller sued Randi and his affiliate organization CSICOP, with countless suits in multiple jurisdictions, with little success. However, the one jurisdiction where he successfully won a judgement against Randi was in Japan. The story of the case begins with an interview with Randi in 1989 published in Days Japan, in which Randi called Geller a “socipath,” among other derogatory statements. Geller chose to file suit — which was his typical reaction to Randi’s statements — but what made the Japan case different was that he won.
How? Japan litigation is notorious for being infamously time-consuming, with years required to reach a ruling, resulting in only paltry monetary damages. But for Geller, Japan was a key jurisdiction to file suit because it has a broader legal definition of the concept of libel and defamation. Japan has run-of-the-mill “defamation” (meiyo kison), but also the concept of “insult” (bujoku), which is both an explicit criminal violation and a civil claim that derives from a defamation claim. Geller sued on this basis, which Randi ignored (he wrote to the judge saying he couldn’t afford to hire local counsel). Instead of granting immediate summary judgment for Geller, or throwing out the case, true to stereotype the court considered the case for more than three years without resolution. Finally, the judge concluded that Randi “insulted” Geller and orderd him to pay JPY500,000 (about US$4,400) in damages. Although I can’t prove a negative, I cannot find any other suit that Geller won against Randi.
Randi refused to pay the amount, stating that the legal concept of “insult” did not exist in the United States. In a later settlement with Randi’s organization CSICOP, in which Geller paid large amounts to settle legal disputes, Geller agreed not to further pursue claims against Randi in Japan. The suit ended, but Geller still had one piece of good news — Kodansha, the publisher of Days Japan, settled with Geller and paid him the equivalent of several thousands of dollars.
Thousands of frogs were found dead in a pond last fall in Japan’s first confirmed case of the amphibian-destroying ranavirus, a researcher said Friday.
The death of American Bullfrogs occurred in a man-made pond in September and October, said Yumi Une, associate professor of veterinary science at Azabu University in Kanagawa Prefecture.
The dead frogs had symptoms unique to a ranavirus infection, such as bleeding on the surface of the skin and loss or deformity of toes or webs, Une said, adding that the virus was detected in their cells.
Une did not reveal the location of the pond but said more than 10,000 frogs are believed to have died there.
[…]
A new type of ranavirus was found in American Frogs in Taiwan last year, and a gene in the virus found in the dead frogs in Japan resembles one from the virus in Taiwan, Une said.
Doesn’t “American Frogs in Taiwan” sound like the name of a community association or ethnic activist organization? I suppose they’re banding together to lobby for increased government spending on anti-frog plague research.
