Category: Current Events

Look familiar?

Is this the fate of all political parties when they hold power for any length of time?

Oct 6, 2005 Taipei Times Editorial

After almost six years in power, the performance of the DPP administration has disappointed a number of pan-green diehards, with some gloomily wondering whether the DPP is losing its ideals and ability to improve itself. It has also alienated a large segment of the party’s grassroots supporters, the very people who had helped to elect the then 14-year-old DPP in 2000.

Some supporters are beginning to wonder whether the DPP has turned into the equivalent of the old Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) regime it used to fight against — a corrupt party leading a corrupt government. This kind of sentiment was especially prominent in the wake of the recent spate of scandals plaguing the DPP administration — one of them being Kaohsiung’s problematic MRT project. An Aug. 21 riot, ignited by Thai laborers protesting against their poor living conditions, unexpectedly brought to light a complex influence-peddling scheme in which ranking government officials apparently exploited Thai workers while pocketing money from the project’s construction funds.

January 9 2005 Washington Post article:

Democrats and some Republicans, troubled by the moves, cite parallels between today’s Republicans and the Democrats who lost their 40-year hold on the House in 1994 after Gingrich and other conservatives campaigned against them as autocratic and corrupt, and gained 52 seats.

“It took Democrats 40 years to get as arrogant as we have become in 10,” one Republican leadership aide said.

Julian E. Zelizer, a Boston University history professor who edited the 2004 anthology “The American Congress,” said Republicans used the past week to “accelerate the trend toward strong, centralized parties.”

“This is a move toward empowering the leadership even beyond what you saw in the 1970s and 1980s,” Zelizer said. “They have been going for broke.”

Now you know why I registered to vote as an independent.

Justice denied: The evil Adam Richards gets a plea bargain

Child Abuser Gets Reduced Sentence
Baby Left With Brain Damage, Skull Fractures

CINCINNATI — A woman whose son was left brain damaged by a child abuser is trying to petition Congress for stricter regulations, News 5’s Sheree Paolello reported.

Adam Richards was sentenced Monday to five years in jail as part of a plea bargain. Richards could have faced up to 20 years in jail, but he had no prior record of abusing children like Dillon Cloud.

Cloud was left in a coma, suffering skull fractures and brain damage after Richards spent two weeks baby-sitting him.

During that time, police said, Richards slammed Cloud into his crib — and even held the infant by his ankles and then dropped him.

“[Doctors] had to keep him ice cold so he didn’t have a fever so his brain wouldn’t swell,” Meghan Cloud, Dillon’s mother, said. “He was helpless. He was laying on the bed and we couldn’t do anything.”

She spent weeks in the hospital, and told Paolello she and her family prayed that they would get some closure when Richards was sentenced. Instead, she said, he was let off the hook.

“It flabbergasts me that there are so many cases of this that the prosecutor has to go this route for a plea deal,” Jay Voline, Meghan’s father, said.

Now the family is trying to get a law passed that would require child abusers to register their addresses, in an effort to stymie the type of suffering Dillon has undergone.

“He doesn’t walk — he doesn’t even try to walk,” Cloud said. “He didn’t crawl till he was 11 months old. He struggles to do everything.”

God that is sad. The poor kid!

The son of a bitch that did this really needs to change his name.

Robot camel jockeys

Like horse racing in many Western countries, camel racing is a popular sport in many Middle Eastern countries. Also like horse racing, jockeys are chosen for their small stature, so as to be less of a burden on the animal, and allow it to race more quickly. Unlike horse racing, the jockeys in camel races tend to be children, and they often suffer serious and even fatal injuries.

A BBC story has more information:

The risk of serious injury, disability and death is shockingly high among child jockeys in camel races in Gulf countries, a report shows.

Researchers in Qatar looked at 275 boys, many younger than nine and some as young as five, treated for camel racing injuries at a local hospital.

Seventeen of the boys treated between 1992 and 2003 were left with permanent disabilities and three died.

Although the sport using child riders, many of them trafficked from South Asia, has been banned in many countries, including Qatar since 2005, experts fear many children continue to be at risk.

If reports are accurate, at least 16,000 camels race at the 17 official tracks in the United Arab Emirates.

While the use of child jockeys for sport is now illegal in most places, the law is often ignored, but growing compliance threatens to doom the sport. What can fans to do to save their sport from the claws of crazy anti-childkilling human rights activists? As with most of life’s problems, robots are the answer.

The Wall Street Journal reports that fans of camel racing in the small, rich nation of Qatar have hired a Swiss firm to design them custom camel-racing robots, roughly the same size and weight of a small child.

The WSJ is subscription only, so I’ll reproduce just the directly robot related part of the article below.

“The first thing we knew we had to do was study the behavior of camels, understand their psychology,” Mr. Al-Thani says. After speaking with breeders, trainers, racers and psychologists, the committee summarized the relationship between the camel and jockey in a detailed report, noting crucial elements of camel behavior. Camels’ eyes, for example, roll back far enough to see directly behind them. This meant any robotic jockey would have to bear some resemblance to a human. Camels also have exceptional hearing and might be spooked by mechanical sounds, they determined.

The committee concluded that what was needed was a remotely controlled robot with a human form and voice. Early in 2004, K-Team was called in and offered the $1.37 million contract.

A K-Team delegation arrived in Doha with a battery of digital cameras, taking hundreds of pictures to document the subtle interaction between jockeys and their camels. They shot from every angle, in different race situations, to capture the movements and the reactions of both jockey and camel.

Back in Switzerland, it took months at the drawing board to adjust balance and shock-absorption and to protect against heat. Camels race at around 25 miles an hour — about 10 or 12 miles an hour slower than racehorses — in temperatures well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. “We conducted 100 hours of testing with 20 prototypes,” says Mr. Al-Thani.

The final product is a 59-pound, human-shaped droid. Mechanical arms and legs help it lean, balance and pull at the reins. The robots are fixed to the special camel saddle, equipped with straps, hooks and clips to keep them in place. They receive orders from trainers riding along behind via a remote-control system attached to the back of the camel.

Equipped with a global positioning system, cameras and microphones, the devices allow trainers to track the animal’s heart rate (170 to 172 beats per minute is a camel’s maximum), the sounds they make and even their facial expression. And the trainer can use a microphone to deliver such exhortations as the typical “haey hej’in!”

The camel trainer uses a joystick on a laptop-size control box to give commands: pulling back to tighten the reins and slow down the animal, forward to ease up on them and left and right for turns. The robot can also operate a whip, and a button on the joystick sends a signal to pull the reins sharply for an emergency stop.

Watch your language

First, the story as reported by The Japan Times:

Police arrested four members of a rightwing group Thursday on suspicion of defaming the chief priest of Meiji Shrine last autumn by claiming in loudspeaker truck protests that he had embezzled money.

Toshio Takahashi, 60, head of Kokubo Doshisha (Group to Defend the Country), and group members Kei Sasaki, 69, Shin Sasaki, 34, and Osamu Nakagawa, 33, were arrested on suspicion of slandering the shrine’s chief priest, Katsushi Toyama, 73, police said.

Investigators believe the acts were connected to Meiji Shrine’s erroneous failure to use on invitation cards the appropriate honorific language to describe a visit by Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko last April.

The shrine, dedicated to Emperor Meiji (1852-1912), used the phrase “ryo denka” (“their highnesses”) instead of “ryo heika” (“their majesties”).

The shrine’s mistake drew criticism from various nationalist groups. A senior member of another group was arrested in February for allegedly breaking windows at Toyama’s home in Setagaya Ward.

According to police, Takahashi and the other three paraded in loudspeaker trucks in the shrine’s vicinity last September and October.

Their speeches featured slanderous claims, including that the chief priest had pocketed income from Meiji Jingu Stadium, investigators said. Between last September and February, the group paraded near the shrine in loudspeaker trucks some 150 times, according to police.

What exactly were the right wingers so upset about? What do these titles even mean?

Meiji Jingu accidentally referred to the Emperor and Empress as ryou-denka. (両殿下) Denka (the prefix simply means ‘both’) in modern usage is a proper way to refer to the princes and princesses of the Imperial family. In earlier times it was also, beginning with the time of the Emperor Daigo (reign 897-930), used to refer to the Fujiwara clan regents who held much of the political power, and eventually by the Shoguns who ran the government during the Muromachi and Edo periods.

The term that the shrine should have used is Ryou-heika (両陛下). Heika is the correct term of address for the Emperor, Empress, the previous Emperor’s wife, or the Imperial Dowager.

According to various Japanese language articles, there was also a second reason for the right-wing protests.

In august of last year, after some sort of quarrel (I haven’t read about the details), the Meiji Shrine withdrew from the Jinja-honchou (神社本庁) in August of last year. It was actually at that time that the right wing groups began their campaign of harassment, which they were ordered to stop by the courts in October. The Jinja-honchou is the nation-wide Shinto organization that was established following the post-war dissolution of state-Shinto. Approximately half of all Shinto shrines in Japan currently belong to the association.

For reference, here is what one of the trucks from one of Japan’s other fascist organizations looks like. Notice the large Japanese flag on the right side, and on the left the chrysanthemum seal of the Imperial Family with the character, 自( short for 自由, meaning ‘freedom’) in the middle. The slogan on top reads ‘Establish an independent constitution,’ which of course means one that does not limit Japan’s military activities, and I would hazard, also isn’t so hung up over protecting the civil rights of Japan’s foreign population.

BBC reports on the beginning of a disturbing trend

Satellites to monitor panda sex

Scientists in China plan to use satellites to track pandas to learn more about their sexual behaviour.
A Chinese-US project will use Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites to monitor panda movements in a reserve in remote Shaanxi province.

It is part of an attempt to understand the panda’s poor breeding record.

To summarize-

Stage 1: We us satellites to track the sexual habits of pandas and calculate the best ways encourage their reproduction.

Stage 2: The panda population explodes.

Stage 3: Our panda masters use satellites to watch US having sex.

Nikkei’s editors take a stand

Today’s English Nikkei has this forcefully written editorial. (Subscription required, so no link and just an excerpt.)

Military Dolphin Training, If It Exists, Must Stop

The newspapers say the dolphins that escaped during the hurricane have been trained to attack suspicious individuals with darts, but it is unclear how much truth there is to this tale. We sincerely hope that military attack dolphins do not really exist.

Mutant Frog Incorporated Reveals Secret Correspondence

UPDATE: Nichi Nichi also has a “sorry for not posting” post. Parallel lives!

Posts to MF have recently slowed to a trickle due partly to my increased level of employment and also the general busy-ness of others involved in this vital project. So in an effort to break of a little something for the peoples every now and again, I have decided to yank open the curtain of shame and reveal to you just what kinds of links writers from Mutant Frog Travelogue, Coming Anarchy, and Nichi Nichi (otherwise known as “Japan’s Gaijin Brain Trust”) e-mail each other back and forth:

First, a completely random picture to help broaden your horizons:

Found in an image search for “persistently.” This man is a member of the Motorcycling Amateur Radio Club. Their motto is “two great tastes that taste great together.” That guy looks really happy to have discovered a club that combines his two favorite and completely related things! It seems like it might be dangerous to take your hand off the bike to check in with your HAM radio buddies.

But what’s this? If you look closely at the photo you’ll see A GUY ON A CELL PHONE!!! This must be considered no less than blasphemy in a group of people who cling to obsolete technology, shocking beer bellies and tacky motorcycles.

But enough mean-spirited ranting. On to more links:

This was icky:

WARNING: EXPLICIT CONTENT (NSFW):

THE STORY:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8589349/

THE VIDEO:
http://www.jegergrim.dk/video/mrhands.mpg

I read that Kansai Electric is reporting something similar now:

Thursday, September 8, 2005

‘Cool Biz’ Saved 1 Month’s Power For 240,000 Homes: Tepco

TOKYO (Nikkei)–The Japanese government’s Cool Biz campaign, which encourages workers to dress lightly during the summer, saved the equivalent of a one-month supply of electricity for 240,000 households during the June-August period, Tokyo Electric Power Co. (9501) said Thursday.

For Tepco, the saved 70 million kilowatt-hours translated into a 0.08% loss in the volume of power sold, or 700 million yen in lost revenue, for the three-month period. It also contributed to a 27,000-ton reduction in carbon dioxide emissions at its fossil fuel power plants.

The firm estimated that the lost revenue would have little impact on its profit, given that the cost of power generation also dropped.

Cool Biz was implemented in an estimated 40% of office buildings during the summer, according to Tepco. Men were encouraged not to wear neckties. On average, rooms were kept 1.4 C warmer than usual, the company said.

(The Nihon Keizai Shimbun Friday morning edition)

Miss Nippon!

Strange headline: 在韓日本人、１０年で倍増　半数、統一協会関係者か
“Japanese Residents of Korea Double in 10 Years, Half Are Members of [Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s] Unification Church”

Anyone know any more about this? If so, do tell!

Muneo Suzuki, internationalist politician known for A) Hiring an African Secretary (pictures included) B) Bribing voters with rice balls stuffed with 5000 yen notes and C) Getting re-elected to the Diet this year even after being convicted of accepting bribes!

That’s all for now. Must catch bus home.

A Zen koan

If a country elects their legislature through free and fair elections, but they spend their sessions physically fighting each other and don’t actually pass any bills, is the country still a democracy?

Photograph and caption from the Taipei Times:

DPP Legislator Wang Shu-hui, left, attacks KMT Legislator Kuo Su-chun, right, after Kuo tore up a copy of Premier Frank Hsieh’s policy report that he was scheduled to deliver yesterday at the opening of a new sitting of the legislature.

Oh, and please, please don’t refer to Taiwanese politics as ‘kabuki.’

This Asbestos thing is way more complicated than I thought…

Ishiwata? Sekimen?
Looks like Japan isn’t the last country to figure out asbestos is bad for you after all:

Friday, September 9, 2005

Japanese Labor Unions Ask Canada To Stop Exporting Asbestos

TOKYO (Kyodo)–Three Japanese labor unions including one comprising construction workers requested in a joint action on Friday that Canada, the biggest single supplier of asbestos to Japan, stop exporting the carcinogenic mineral, union officials said.

Representatives of the unions delivered a letter of request to the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo saying that ”60 percent of asbestos used in Japan is imported from Canada. We would like the export promotion policy to be terminated, given the hazardous nature of white asbestos has been confirmed.”

Canada is the third biggest producer in the world of white asbestos, a type of the mineral known to be relatively less carcinogenic than other types.

The request was made by the All Japan Construction, Transport and General Workers Union, National Confederation of Trade Unions and the Liaison Conference of Public Promotion of Public Works Related to People’s Life.

The embassy told the unions that they will refer the matter to Ottawa and promised to offer a reply in writing, according to the union officials.

The move was part of a global action by labor unions belonging to the Trade Unions International of Building, Woods and Building Materials Industries. Similar requests have also been filed with Canadian diplomatic missions in 12 countries including Australia and Colombia.

The All Japan Construction, Transport and General Workers Union, which led the action on Friday, has 46,900 members. It is affiliated with the two other unions.

Asbestos is a fibrous mineral used in buildings, among other things, which is known to cause diseases such as mesothelioma and lung cancer even many years after being inhaled.

Where is Dick Cheney?

I have been wondering for several days, ever since the appalling announcement that President Bush had not decided to end his vacation early until after New Orleans had already been devastated, where exactly the Vice President has been. Now, Cheney is well known as an unusually secretive VP, known for avoiding the spotlight (sidenote: vampires are well known for avoiding sunlight), but this absence is going far even for him.


Even after 9/11, when Cheney was famously spirited away to an undisclosed location, presumably the underground bunker from which the shadow government* would operate in the event of the death of the President and other top officials, he still issued statements to the media to prove that he was still alive. Now, in the time immediately after 9/11/2001, when a plane had crashed into the Pentagon and another was possibly aiming for either the White House or Capital Hill, this was not an unreasonable precaution. Clearly there were people out there who wanted government officials (and other people) dead, and there was a serious expectation of followup attacks, in some form or another.
*(Keep in mind that I don’t mean ‘shadow’ in a conspiracy theory sense, just ‘backup’ as in the ‘shadow cabinet’ in some parliamentary systems.)
Why is Cheney hidden away this time? Is he scared that the terrorists will aim another hurricane at him? Is he on vacation? Is the application of artificial skin over his glowing radiated body flaking off at faster and faster rates, prohibiting him from appearing publicly?

Andrew Sullivan’s latest article in The Times points out that “The vice-president was nowhere to be seen.” confirming that I am at least not the only person on Earth to have noticed this fact.

An article from the New York Times gives what seems to be the only tantalizing speck of information regarding Cheney’s whereabouts at any time since August 18.

In interviews, these Republicans said that the normally nimble White House political operation had fallen short in part because the president and his aides were scattered outside Washington on vacation, leaving no one obviously in charge at a time of great disruption. Mr. Rove and Mr. Bush were in Texas, while Vice President Dick Cheney was at his Wyoming ranch.

My last sentence may be surprising, but in fact, according to my search on Google News, there hasn’t been a single public appearance or statement by Vice President Dick Cheney since the 18th of August, when he appeared at a meeting of the “73rd National Convention of the Military Order of the Purple Heart in Springfield, Mo.”

There are a number of articles about that event, but they all give pretty much the same dry account of Cheney’s statements to the veteran’s group. Here is one typical example, written by a member of the American Forces Press Service.

WASHINGTON, Aug. 19, 2005 – The U.S. military will not relent in its effort to track down terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere, Vice President Richard Cheney said Aug. 18.

“This is not a war we can win strictly on the defensive. Our only option against these enemies is to find them, to fight them and to destroy them,” he told the 73rd National Convention of the Military Order of the Purple Heart in Springfield, Mo.

“These enemies hate us, they hate our country, and they hate the liberties for which we stand,” he said.

“They have contempt for our values. They doubt our strength. And they believe that America will lose our nerve and let down our guard. They are sorely mistaken.”

Seriously, where has Cheney been? What does he actually do? How can he possibly stay invisible at a time like this? Was he being kept alive all this time by New Orleans voodoo mojo that has now been disrupted by the storm? We all know about the long connection between New Orleans and voodoo zombies after all. It’s the only scenario that makes any kind of logical sense to me. After all, the Vice President couldn’t just be on vacation during the worst natural disaster the country has seen in living memory, right?

[Edit]: An op-ed piece by a Washington Post staff writer in the September 6th edition asks:

Anybody seen Dick Cheney?