Category: Current Events

Just cuz this shouldn’t go unnoticed — Japan Just Lost to NK in Soccer


First NK shuns Japan at the 6-party talks, now their soccer team is making Japan look like a bunch of fancy boys. I gotta say, the North Koreans sure know how to make someone feel unwelcome:

Japan stunned by N. Korea at E. Asian c’ship

Monday, August 1, 2005 at 07:38 JST
DAEJEON — Japan’s hopes of lifting their first east Asian championship title suffered an unexpected blow on Sunday after a shock 1-0 defeat to North Korea on the opening day of the four-team tournament in South Korea.

Kim Young Jun capitalized on some poor defending to strike the decisive goal in the 27th minute at Daejeon World Cup Stadium as North Korea avenged their recent 2-0 defeat in the Asian zone qualifying competition for next year’s World Cup finals.

I couldn’t find any pictures from the game but this was linked on Xinhua’s site:

Yowzer!

People are going to find this article on search engines for all the wrong reasons and that scares me

GTO, my favorite manga of all time, featured a teacher who got caught doing exactly this except it was more of an outhouse instead of a church:

Pastor Allegedly Videotapes Women, Girls With Hidden Camera
Four Girls On Tapes Were Under Age 10

GREENVILLE, N.C. — A North Carolina pastor is charged with sexual exploitation and peeping after investigators found videos of women and girls at his church undressing and using the bathroom.

The 54-year-old minister, Leon Harris, has been released on bond, but was ordered to stay away from Rose Hill Free Will Baptist Church.

Pitt County detectives said at least eight females were videotaped on June 9, including four girls under the age of 10.

The arrest warrant said the videos are believed to have been recorded by two miniature cameras installed in a church bathroom.

Ew.

WTC site

A couple of days ago I posted a small set of photos of the impromptu memorials that had sprung up around the World Trade Center site one year after the attacks.

For those wondering what the site is like today and how progress is going on the construction of the new complex, the best place to turn is always the New York Times. Today they have a good article summarizing the current state of affairs.

Below Ground Zero, Stirrings of Past and Future

[…]
For now, there is nowhere else at ground zero where time is more palpably suspended than in the tubes and tunnels and truck bays that once served the World Trade Center and, before that, the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad, predecessor to PATH.

Almost four years after the attack, signs still command truck drivers who have long since vanished: “No Idling.” “Not for Service Vehicles.” “30 Minute Parking Only for Deliveries. Offenders Will Be Autoclamped and Fined.”

Within the cavernous gloom of the deeply ribbed 15-foot-3-inch-diameter tubes, the quiet is broken every few minutes by the disembodied rumble of a PATH train passing nearby.
[…]
Mr. Ringler said elements of this subterranean realm – perhaps some cast-iron tube rings, certainly some ornamental flooring – would be salvaged.

The authority is committed to preserving the travertine-clad hallway leading to the E train terminus at Chambers Street. It plans to relocate the cruciform steel column that was found at 6 World Trade Center. What the authority does not save, it will document in written descriptions, drawings and large-format photographs.

“It’s important that we attempt to preserve some of this for history,” Mr. Ringler said. “This is part of the story. It is not necessarily integral to 9/11, but there is history here.”

French teachers give Ishihara homework

The Japan Times has a cute followup to the Ishihara/French teachers incident I translated an article about recently.

French teachers give Ishihara homework

French-language instructors at Meiji University on Tuesday gave French textbooks and a dictionary to Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara, who has been targeted in a lawsuit for allegedly remarking that the French language “cannot count numbers.”

A group of 13 instructors from Meiji University presented the gifts to an official of the metropolitan government’s office for accepting citizens’ views. Ishihara is on vacation.

The gifts were accompanied with a letter saying, “Please learn this as homework during the summer vacation so you can count numbers in French.”

According to the lawsuit, filed July 13 with the Tokyo District Court by a French-language school principal and other people, Ishihara said last Oct. 19, “I have to say that it should be no surprise that French is disqualified as an international language because French is a language which cannot count numbers.”

The Japan Times: July 27, 2005

Try reading this story in a Russian accent


Be fit with the help of video-player

18:32 2005-07-14
Lots of people dream of becoming fit and slim. Some of them keep to various diets, others prefer to exhaust themselves with endless physical exercises.

But in Japan people lose weight by playing video games. Dance Dance Revolution, a popular Japanese video game makes players leap around on a platform as instructed by arrows – up, down, right or left – to a throbbing techno beat. The moves get faster and harder as players get better, making the game arduous, addictive and inadvertently aerobic.

Matt Keane, now 21, became addicted by Dance Dance Revolution less than a year ago. At the start his weight was 209 kilograms. Dancing at the game platform he lost 68 kilograms.

A recent Pennsylvania study of 35 adolescents found that, on average, Dance Dance Revolution elevated players’ heart rates to double their resting level over a 45-minute period, according to one of the study’s coordinators, Stephen Yang.

“There is no doubt the games are great exercise,” Yang said, “but first and foremost, they’re fun.”

Usually a sedentary activity, video games might seem an unlikely weapon in the battle of the bulge. Earlier video games were blamed even for mass suicides. But over the past few years “exertainment” – a merging of exercise and electronic entertainment – has helped the industry’s image as well as its profit margins, says the AP.

With dance simulation video games making exercise fun and hip, parents, teachers and doctors are starting to pay attention. And manufactures are hoping to capitalize.

Obesity is quite a problem for many societies. Experts differ in ways to struggle obesity. Some of them advise to drink milk, others suggest not to watch TV, but now we know the correct answer – Dance Dance Revolution is the answer to all the health problems.

Jewish populations

I spotted this article in the English language edition of Haaretz via this very cool website, which presents links to and translations of foreign press clippings about attitudes towards the US from around the world.

srael will have the largest Jewish population in the world by 2006, when it will surpass the United States for the first time in history, the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute said Monday.

Planning institute director general Avinoam Bar-Yosef presented the research group’s annual report on “the situation of the Jewish people” to the Knesset Immigration and Absorption Committee on Monday. The institute, which is partly funded by the Jewish Agency, concluded that the State of Israel is the single guarantee of the Jewish people’s continued existence. Bar-Yosef will submit the report to the government next week.

Today about 5.28 million Jews live in the U.S., with 5.235 million living in Israel.

For some reason this makes me a little uneasy. I’d always been a little bit relieved that Israelis were the minority of the world’s Jewish population. With there finally being more Jews in Israel than the US, will it be harder for people to accept that non-Israeli Jews like myself don’t necessarily have any particular bond to the country, support for their policies, or desire for them to have laws granting me special rights and privileges.

The article also notes that are are only about 1 million Jews left in Europe today. As we all know about 6 million Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis, and of those who survived a huge proportion emigrated, becoming much of the aforementioned Israeli and American Jew populations.

To see the aftermath of the virtual disappearance of Jews from Eastern Europe, we turn to this fascinating article from the Boston Globe.

”How — if there were no Jews — the world would be enraptured!” she wrote. ”The people that stood at Sinai to receive a desert vision of purity, the people of scholarly shepherds, humane prophetic geniuses, dreams of justice and mercy” — how admired they would be. In a world without Jews, the memory of Jewish civilization would be endlessly fascinating. ”Christian ladies,” Ozick imagined, would ”study ‘The Priceless Culture of the Jews’ at Chautauqua in the summertime” or create Jewish prayer shawls at ”a workshop on tallith making.”

Well, Jews haven’t vanished from the world. They have, however, all but vanished from Poland. More than 90 percent of Poland’s Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, and most of those who survived emigrated long ago. The result is that a land that once was home to 3 million Jews — 10 percent of Polish society, the largest Jewish population in Europe — is now more than 99.9 percent non-Jewish. Millions of Poles have never knowingly met a Jew. But, oh, how enraptured they are with the genius that was Israel!

I arrived in Krakow near the end of the annual Jewish Culture Festival, a nine-day extravaganza of concerts, lectures, films, and exhibitions — all with the aim, to quote a festival brochure, of ”presenting Jewish culture in all its abundance.” An elegant catalog, 160 pages long, lists a dizzying array of offerings: lectures on ”Talmudic thought” and ”Jewish medical ethics,” forums on European anti-Semitism and the Hebrew poetry of Haim Nahman Bialik, concerts of klezmer music, liturgical music, and ”Songs of the Ghettos and Jewish Resistance,” workshops on Jewish cooking, Hasidic wedding dances, and celebrating Hanukkah with children.

I suppose it’s kind of sweet in a macabre sort of way that they find us so fascinating now that we’ve vanished from their country, but wouldn’t it have been nice if there had been a little bit of apprecation in Poland for Jewish culture say, between 1900 and 1945?

Karl Rove accused one year ago

I just got around to listening to last week’s episode of Off The Hook, the hacker radio show affiliated with 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, and heard something pretty interesting about the current mess with Valorie Plame, Karl Rove, et al. They played a brief clip from a presentation given by a Robert Steele almost exactly one year ago at the Fifth Hope hacker conference in New York City.

I don’t normally write anything about US politics, and I’m not even going to offer any comments this, aside from the fact that it’s kind of cool. However, I did attend this same conference in the year 2000, where I actually met Robert Steele, so let’s just say this falls under my blanket mission of writing about places where I’ve been.

The July 13, 2005 episode of Off The Hook can be downloaded in mp3 form from their web site. The following transript begins 40 minutes into the show.

Bernie S: You mentioned a while ago the need for a national traitor intelligence system. On that subject, what’s your take on the whole Valeie Plame outing, and who do you think did it?

Robert Steele: I think Scooter Libby in Dick Cheney’s office did it with Karl Rove’s explicit approval and Dick Cheney’s explicit concealment after the fact.

Bernie S: What are your feelings on it?

Robert Steele: I think it has the potential to be Al Capone’s tax return. It really does.

Bernie S: Do you think that this will ever be- where do you think this investigation will lead, regardless of who’s found to have done it?

Robert Steele: Well, part of our problem is that the Republicans control both houses of Congress and the moderate Republicans are being intimidated by the extremist Republicans and the people haven’t spoken. Right now the people don’t care about Valorie Plame’s outing. Inasumch as the vice presiden’t office, in my humble opinion, very flagrantly and deliberately violated a national law, I would like to see them brought to justice. i would like to see Dick Cheney brought to justice for sole-sourcing billions of dollars to Haliburton. you know these guys are bending or breaking every rule they can find. and the outing of Valorie Plame is i think one of the things that George Tenet simply had to be honest about and it let to his eventual resignation.

The man asking the questions is Bernie S, co-host of Off The Hook. Here is his official mini-bio from The Fifth Hope conference web page.

Bernie S. has been hacking computers, phones, radios, and the authorities for over 25 years – sometimes pushing the envelope too far. In 1995 he was imprisoned for one and a half years by the Secret Service for possessing hardware and software they said had the potential for abuse. Later the U.S. government admitted “there were no victims in the offense” and that they were more concerned about his exposing their covert activities. Bernie continues to investigate and report on communications technologies and government activities.

The man giving the talk is Robert Steele. His bio from the same web site reads:

Robert Steele is the author of On Intelligence: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World and The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political. He is the founder and CEO of OSS.Net, a global intelligence partnership and network that excels at both teaching and performing legal ethical intelligence collection, processing, and analysis. In the course of a 25 year national security career, Robert has served as a Marine Corps infantry officer and service level plans officer; fulfilled clandestine, covert action, and technical collection duties; been responsible for programming funds for overhead reconnaissance capabilities; contributed to strategic signals intelligence operations; managed an offensive counterintelligence program; initiated an advanced information technology project; and been the senior civilian responsible for founding a new national intelligence production facility. He was one of the first clandestine officers assigned the terrorist target on a full time basis in the 1980s and the first person, also in the 1980s, to devise advanced information technology applications relevant to clandestine operations.

Robert Steele’s web page is here.

Robert Steele’s entire presentation, from The Fifth Hope conference, along with those of every other speaker (and there is some great stuff in there), can be found in mp3 format on the web. His presentation is entitled “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Spying, 9-11, and Why We Continue to Screw Up” and is well worth a listen.

Rutgers Proposal for Colleges Meets Alumnae Resistance

Rutgers Proposal for Colleges Meets Alumnae Resistance
By GEORGE JAMES

A Rutgers University task force is recommending creation of a college of arts and sciences that would standardize admissions criteria, graduation requirements and other procedures. Under the proposal, some Rutgers colleges would function as campuses, but no longer by name as colleges.

The suggestion, which is part of a 175-page report that is scheduled for release on Monday, was criticized yesterday by the Associate Alumnae of Douglass College, which introduced a Web site earlier in the day, savedouglasscollege.org, calling for the measure’s defeat. The group said the proposal would mean the end of Douglass College.

The university president, Richard L. McCormick, said in a telephone interview last night that the report would undergo months of discussion. He noted that the plan was not calling for a merger; the colleges would retain their distinct qualities.

“It recommends creating something that every other research university has, a college of arts and sciences,” Dr. McCormick said. “And it recommends calling our residential campuses what they are: residential campuses.”

He created the 75-member Task Force on Undergraduate Education in April 2004 to guarantee that in emphasizing research, Rutgers does not shortchange undergraduates on courses and access to faculty members. In addition, Dr. McCormick said, he wanted to bring unity to what he called “a patchwork quilt” of schools and programs situated in New Brunswick and Piscataway.

Besides Douglass, which is an all-women’s college, Rutgers College, Livingston College and University College would all be affected.

“What it does, it effectively ends Douglass College,” said Sheila Kelly Hampton, class of ’70, who is president of the Douglass alumnae group. “By calling it a campus, they just are talking about where someone happens to live. They don’t address many of the student life issues and program issues.”

Dr. McCormick disagreed. “Douglass will be as it is now, a women’s-only campus, and will continue to have its signature courses on women, retain its distinctive mission and continue to reflect its unique history,” he said.

Each individual college now sets its own criteria in certain areas, including admissions, honors programs and graduation requirements, and none have faculties of their own; they are served by a general faculty of arts and sciences, he said. A new college of arts and sciences, under a unified structure, would simplify standards for students, faculty and administrators, and get faculty members more involved with students, he added.

But the executive director of the alumnae, Rachel Ingber, class of ’83, said: “Eliminating colleges does not bring faculty closer to students. It creates one huge university where undergraduates don’t have small colleges where they can get academic advice on curriculum programs and the unique mission that Douglass College provides for women.”

This may be removed from our usual topics, but since I am a Rutgers graduate, and I know a number of other Rutgers alumni read this blog, I just wanted to point out this important development concerning the school.

The current president of Rutgers University previously managed to scuttle a recent plan proposed by our former governor James McGreevey to merge Rutgers university with the states other medical and research oriented universities. This plan would have done little to improve the quality of medical education or research, while confusing the organization of the university as a whole. The previous plan was entirely based around the medical and research divisions of the universities involved, which included Rutgers, UMDNJ, NJIT and possibly others, while providing no reasonable plan for the administration of liberal arts and undergraduate departments. This current report seems to be a response to that, confirming that undergraduate education must be a priority at public universities.

I haven’t yet read the actual report (although I intend to), but after spending four years at Rutgers, New Brunswick I’m rather familiar with the organizational structure of the university. As it currently stands, Rutgers New Brunswick is actually a network of several nearby campuses in the neighboring towns of New Brunswick and Piscataway, linked through a system of free buses. As a large university, Rutgers consists of several different colleges, and each college is associated with a different campus. Each college has a unique history and origin, and today there are five liberal arts colleges, which share a common faculty of arts and sciences, and a number of specialty schools, each of which has their own faculty for their specialized programs. Students in specialty schools (such as Engineering, Pharmacy, Mason Gross School of the Arts etc.) also take at least a basic number of liberal arts classes as well, which are the same classes that members of the five liberal arts colleges take.

Here is a brief summary of the history, characteristics, and my thoughts on the future of the four liberal arts colleges, in chronological order of their founding:

Continue reading Rutgers Proposal for Colleges Meets Alumnae Resistance

Correction: Government only sort of asking people to use their real names on the Internet

Japan Media Review follows up on earlier Kyodo reports that the Japanese government was trying to end anonymity on the Internet by teaching them to use their real names on blogs from a young age, information that I passed along earlier.

Turns out the government has a slightly more nuanced take on the situation:

Later Monday, however, an anonymous blogger who calls his Weblog a “Diary of a Kasumigaseki Bureaucrat” (Kasumigaseki is the Tokyo district where most government offices are located) took the trouble of leafing through the panel’s draft report that had been published online earlier in the month and discovered that many of the Kyodo report’s descriptions didn’t match what the panel actually said in its report.

For instance, the blogger noticed that nowhere in the report did the panel actually advocate calling on people to use their real names in cyberspace, or to drop using screen handles. Rather, it outlined a more subtle argument. It noted that the prevalence of anonymity in Japan has led to an atmosphere in which many feel that it doesn’t matter what they do or say in cyberspace so long as they are not caught. To that end, raising the credibility of the Internet in Japan will require an improvement of general public “morals” online. Consequently, the report said, “It is necessary to teach [children] how to interact naturally with each other in cyberspace, using either their real names or some kind of assumed name.” Thus, he noted, the Ministry accepts anonymity, so long as it is practiced with good “morals.”

Moreover, business journalist Hiroyuki Fujishiro, writing his own column about the blogging world for Nikkei BP, checked the 86-page final draft of the panel’s report that appeared Tuesday. He noted that much of the rather inflammatory writing in the original Kyodo article, in which the Internet is called a “hotbed of evil” or “hotbed of dangerous information” and where anonymity is linked somehow to online suicide sites or to online information about bomb-making, does not appear in the report. He did find, however, that the panel displayed considerable concern about the “dark side” of the Internet, one feature of which was the irresponsible behavior that stems from anonymity.

I highly suggest that you check out Japan Media Review if they’re at all interested in Japanese and wants to read news about Japan or in Japanese. Their analysis is great and they offer a good set of links as well. Especially now that I don’t have the time to exhaustively check Japan news myself, I may end up depending on their coverage to keep up with media happenings. Thank god they’re funded by the US government.