What the hell, people?

I leave you alone for a week, and what do you do? Claim that the Patriot Act didn't go far enough and let a Senate committee pass a bill allowing even more wiretapping, surveillance and all around snooping on Americans.

Then the Attorney General claims that he needs ISPs to give up information on all their users to catch child pornographers. I'm sure that there's very few people who want to defend child pornography. But just between you and me, I've never actually met a child pornographer; I don't get around enough, maybe. And I suspect most producers of said materials aren't going to hand out business cards that say "Kiddie Porn." And most of them aren't going to fill in "Child Smut Producer" in the occupation section of any sort of questionnaire. And I'd be willing to bet that 99% of them would operate outside of a country that requires a law like 18 USC 2257. Incidentally, this law requires everyone the producers to get proof of id from anyone who is visible in a porn film, nude or otherwise, and keep it available for the attorney general of the US. Presumably so he can, y'know, check they're all 21 or something, and not just to cruise for names and phone numbers and stuff.

Now, in all fairness, this hasn't just been to make the DOJ look cool. As a matter of fact, just this month they arrested some guy for importing some rather nasty videos.

But they weren't child porn. They didn't even claim to be. It was just a bunch of adults who seem to have a thing for excretions that most people don't like. Now, does this bust make your life any worse? Probably not. But it does mark one more fringe group that has been separated from the herd and picked off at leisure. The main reason these guys got busted? Their product was "obscene."

You know the classic legal definition of obscenity, don't you? Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, when speaking of what could be considered pornographic, said "I know it when I see it."

That's all we have to go on: the opinion of a person who isn't even elected by the citizens of the country. And in this case, it's a person who was appointed over the objections of a great many people for his views on, among other things, who was and was not suitable for normal treatment as opposed to "special handling."

Sorry. I've gone on a bit long here. My point is this: the current administration has already clamped down on professors and teachers with politics and home countries they don't like, now they're going after people who like things in their bedrooms that this administration doesn't like.

What's to say you're not next?

Onwards and, er, overwards...

All right, as you may or may not know, I spent the last four and a half years in Japan. Really, about as good a place to be made to feel like an alien as any. Safe, clean, and brimming with societal norms that have no logical level of correlation with the norms I was raised with. Sure, "Sayonara, Robocop!" correlates one to one with "Goodbye, 8 Man!", but there's absolutely no correlation between the English "that'll be difficult" (this is where you bribe me) and the Japanese "that'll be difficult" (Are you stupid or just foreign? No.)

So it was an exercise in trying to adapt.

And I'm not done yet. This will be my last post from the US for a while. Next stop: Merry olde Eng-lande. I'll be trying to restart my official-type education there, so from now on, replace "outskirts of Tokyo" with "outskirts of London" and "Konichiwa, biatch" with "Cheerio, biatch."

New island.

New language.

Same old dumbass Datsun. See you in Soho, suckas!*



*Note: actual presence in Soho not guaranteed.

It's a Miracle...

The birth of a baby boy for the long-suffering Japanese imperial family means a couple of things, in my own humble opinion:
a) We can stop listening to jackass throwback neanderthals talk about the need to protect the throne from the enervating effect of women1,
b) We can listen to a bunch of people whose job it is to make noise about things make a lot of noise about how this will be the thing that inspires Japanese families to finally start having more kids to reverse the population decline,
c) An all-important return to the news that really matters: Killing kittens, the value of Pluto and which half of T&A is more naughty than the other2.

1. "I'm glad it's a boy," said Ryoji Inoue, 33, a salaryman interviewed at a subway station here. "I want the male succession to be maintained. That's because Japanese society is still led by men. I hope a couple of more boys will be born. The imperial law can be changed when we don't have any choice in the future."
- For Japanese, their prince has finally come, By Norimitsu Onishi The New York Times, September 6, 2006

2. "Our earlier request to cover the photo [of a naked, pregnant Britney Spears] from the waist down was because of nudity, not because we had anything against pregnant women," he said, adding that officials later decided that censoring the photo would be inappropriate. -Tatsuya Edakubo, Tokyo Metro spokesman
-Tokyo Subway to Display Naked Spears Ad, By MARI YAMAGUCHI, Aug 24, 2006 (AP)

Surprised?

Workers lose traction over past 10 years
Despite strong productivity growth, wages don't keep pace and fewer workers receive health and pension coverage.
By Jeanne Sahadi, CNNMoney.com senior writer
September 2 2006: 8:56 AM EDT

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Working for The Man may never have been an overpaid joy, but it has offered a decent way to make a living.
Yet it's become less decent, especially considering how strong productivity growth has been, according to findings from the 2006 edition of The State of Working America from the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal nonprofit research group.
Between 1995 and 2005, productivity -- a measure of the quantity and quality of what workers produce per hour -- grew 33.4 percent. But hourly wages rose only 11 percent, with almost all of that increase coming during the late 1990s, according to EPI.
Looking back even farther, the disparity is greater. Since 1979, productivity rose 67 percent, while wages rose only 8.9 percent.

So, if productivity, which is supposed to be a quantifiable measure of the value of work, is up one third but wages are only up about one tenth, where's the value of all that extra work going?

Hmmm.

This is a tough one.

Who could possibly have an answer?