Been a long time...

And I've been, well, less than myself. Too much work with far too little reward or meaning. But all that's over now, so I can get back to stuff that really matters. Like bitching about things that everyone else heard about months ago.

F'r instance, the UK police are getting the same sorts of powers assumed by the federal government in the US (that are a clear violation of the US constitution), that is, the authority to root through your computer without a warrant. Good thing that we're all so past 1984, and so done with references to 1984, and so bored with that show about living in a surveillance society, so that this is really a non-issue. I mean, it's not like the UK police have ever misused power, right? Not like those US types, anyway. Right

Who do you trust?

Okay, so it seems that the infamous '2 Girls 1 Cup' film is at the center of a court case to decide just how far the 1st amendment goes. And the judge responsible for the whole thing is taking some heat for a web site he maintained, which seems to have some smut of his own selection.

I don't know if his collection of naughty pictures represents some sort of conflict of interest. But I do know that I would have much more faith in a judge who knew a little something about the topic in question. I mean, you wouldn't trust a referee who'd never watched a game, you wouldn't trust a baker who only ate Wonder Bread, so why would you prefer a judge who'd never seen a money shot?

Condom Machine in a London Men's Room

Indefensible stupidity

Okay, I said that I was going to get to that state of Washington thing later. Well, it's later now. The case I found was Andersen v. King County, which seemed to reverse an earlier ruling that would have allowed same-sex marriages in Washington state.

Stop me if I've got this wrong, but I thought that at the state level the supreme courts are generally meant to ensure that previous rulings are in line with the constitutions of their states. If I understand this ruling, the decision to disallow same-sex marriages in Washington under the Defense Of Marriage Act was defensible for two reasons.

The first is that unless a law can be found to offer a positive protection to a discriminated-against minority, it should be subject to federal standards of equal protection. Am I too far off in thinking that means "it's okay to protect people who have been treated unfairly, but otherwise it should protect everyone equally"? But the court's ruling claimed that

"The plaintiffs have not established that they are members of a suspect class or that they have a fundamental right to marriage that includes the right to marry a person of the same sex. "

Because, you know, there's nothing at all indicating that same-sex couples in the US are treated any differently. And the reasoning here seems to be that this decision is constitutional because both men and women are equally prohibited from same-sex marriages. Shouldn't that also mean that legislating separate water fountains (or hospitals or schools) by race would be okay as long as each group was equally prohibited from using the others' facilities?

Bullshit.

The bulk of this claim seems to rest on the court's argument that the plaintiffs haven't shown that "homosexuality is immutable", that is, an unalterable part of a person's identity. Is there any other group of people who would be subject to such a ridiculous claim? I guess advances in prosthetics mean it's okay to discriminate against people missing limbs. If Michael Jackson can change his color, anyone can, so anyplace can have a whites-only policy. No Jews allowed? Of course, there's churches everywhere that are begging for converts. No women? Sex-changes!

Bullshit.

But leave that aside too, there's another claim that I find less stupid, but more unsettling:

"DOMA is constitutional because the legislature was entitled to believe that limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples furthers procreation, essential to survival of the human race, and furthers the well-being of children by encouraging families where children are reared in homes headed by the children's biological parents. Allowing same-sex couples to marry does not, in the legislature's view, further these purposes."

Let's just skip the arguments about biological-parent homes. Adoption, IVF, sperm donation and divorce apparently have no bearing here. That's too many points to try and argue about. But there's a much larger assumption that's got me worried.

At what point did we cede the safeguarding of the human race to any legislature? Is it honestly acceptable to claim that allowing same-sex marriages jeopardizes the future of the human race? If there is anyone who will honestly claim that people will stop having babies just because same-sex couples can get married, they don't have any business trying to represent people living on earth. Anyone so vastly out of touch with human nature shouldn't be trusted with authority over humans. Anyone with so little faith in the human race doesn't deserve to represent us. And anyone so stupid as to think that anyone will give up sex because other people with a different preference are doing it and still claiming to be married shouldn't be driving, much less making or interpreting law.

There may be all sorts of personal reasons to not marry someone. But I have yet to see an ethical, logical, humane reason to prevent some adult from marrying some other adult. It's just a lot of obfuscation and fear, and it cheapens the legal and legislative processes.

Surprised? You really shouldn't be anymore...

Dreams, huh? Freud would be proud...

I don't know how familiar you are with the US, but because the nation was formally defined by a bunch of merchants, tax-cheats, religious radicals and amateur philosophers, it lacks most of the a priori guarantees of integrity that most other nations take for granted; like some flavor of religious or historical justification, a tradition of familial rule, or even the actions of a "great leader". As a consequence, the definitions of the nation have allowed some flexibility of interpretation.

Which is why, every so often, questions like "what does the flag mean?" or "what does the statue of liberty mean?" or in this case "what is the American dream?" get tossed around. And like most questions, the answers wind up telling you more about the person speaking than the topic of the question.

So after reading the answers to the last question as posed by Forbes magazine to a bunch of celebrities and such, I found myself in the unusual position of wanting to side with a bunch of the old white capitalist guys and against the hardworking son of immigrants and the swimsuit/lingerie model.

Now, I can admit that I didn't care much for Ms. Banks' choice of words. I suppose saying "to the max" in any context isn't really that bad. But Gonzales' answer makes me taste blood. The arrogance of that man to frame an ideal for an entire nation in terms of his own personal experiences is appalling, but completely indicative of his inability to consider anything beyond his own interests. That a smug, pandering son of a bitch like him is allowed to interpret the laws of any nation is an insult. But the fact that he's allowed to act while under the auspices of protecting freedom and justice should make any conscious American sick and ashamed.

My American dream is that someday the American people will get their shit together so that duplicitous, disingenuous, amoral sons of bitches like the attorney general will be driven out like vermin they are.

I feel safer now...

It's about time the Justice department got down to protecting the American people from the true threats to the American way of life: teenage boys who are interested in looking at porn.

No, seriously. If there only would have been a direct link between him and the files found on the hard drive of his family computer, this kid could've wound up serving a 90 year sentence. As it stands, he just barely squeaked out of having to be registered as a sex-offender. At age 16. For looking at porn on-line.

Good job, Maricopa County DAs. Good job, Yahoo. Good job, America.



Bunch of freaking idiots...

The Fear

For a while there's been a big hoo-hah about a plan to introduce government ID cards that will be mandatory for all UK citizens. As it stands now, UK nationals are not required to carry any ID while just walking around in public.
Although there is no federal law in the US requiring people to produce ID on demand from police officers, there are a variety of statutes authorizing police to hold, detain or arrest individuals for failing to identify themselves on demand. Now, whether or not that goes beyond just giving one's name and address is not entirely clear to me. But the general rule is that in the United States the police do have the power to stop and search anyone at any time provided they can offer a reasonable justification to do so. While I think that agreeing to be searched, especially while at the business end of a gun or baton, seems like a ridiculous way to help keep streets safe, it would technically be at the request of an officer. And at least one state I know of specifically says that refusing to assist an officer is a crime.
All of which is to say that while you're not technically required to carry documents that support your claims of who you are while in the US, it is easily within the powers of an officer of the peace to make things rather unpleasant for you at any given time should you not produce those documents upon request.
I don't suppose that I should be too surprised, then, by the steps taken in the UK to start requiring non-UK citizens to carry ID. Not to over dramatize things, but I suspect that the rise in interest in keeping track of who's going where and when isn't going to subside any time soon. And this current shot is aimed at, surprise surprise, foreigners.
Should I be upset that, as an outside-type-person, I'd be required to carry id at all times in the UK? I guess that abiding by the laws of the land I choose to enter, as opposed to the one I'm born in, leaves me little ground for dissent. But I can't say I'm particularly pleased at the prospect of
1) toting around a card with detailed biometric information about me that seems to be easily hackable,
2) being made vulnerable to arrest and deportation simply for not carrying a card
3) being marked as separate from any other "law-abiding" person simply for being born somewhere else.
But then, I guess there are a lot of things that don't particularly please me...

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?

Cultural asset?

One of the things that is contractually a part of my job is to act as a person who can "help introduce students to foreign cultures." It's a nice little bit of lip service that got slugged into the ALT job description, and usually takes the form of explaining things like why people don't take their shoes off in a western home, or comparing notes on whatever Hollywood/MTV exports have become popular here. Occasionally we'll be asked to explain a non-Japanese holiday. Usually Halloween. Sometimes Thanksgiving.

But now I've been asked to assist in teaching a class on discrimination. A common image of Japan is that it is generally homogeneous, monolingual and monocultural. Let's leave aside the question of whether the nation of Japan, which has the vast majority of its citizens identifying themselves ethnically as (Yamato) Japanese as opposed to Ainu, Ryukyuan, "Korean person in Japan" or general foreigner-type, can be defined as homogeneous or not. That's a level of definition I'm not competent to make or inclined to attempt.

What concerns me is that I'm going to have to try and explain the concepts of discrimination and tolerance to a group with no real sense of the existence of "others" in their society or even as human beings like themselves. It'll be difficult partially because the students are 15 years old. No one has a whole lot of ability to think outside of their own experience at that age. But it's also where they live, what they've experienced and what they're likely to experience that concerns me. They probably won't have any sort of first hand experience with anything like this until well into their adulthood, if at all. It sounds like a very nice plan to teach them about discrimination, but without finding a way to get them to internalize the ideas, it'll wind up leaving them with a false sense that they understand the situation and therefore don't have to be concerned with it.

Hell. Maybe I'm thinking about it too much. But the odds are good that Japan as a nation is going to need to have more foreigners trying to immigrate in the future, and these kids will have to deal with it.

My Spidey-sense is tingling...

Did someone call for a precipitous lurch towards nationalism?

LDP, New Komeito OK 'patriotism' definition

The Yomiuri Shimbun

The ruling coalition agreed Wednesday to a definition of patriotism to be included in a bill to revise the Fundamental Law of Education, which the government hopes to submit to the current session of the Diet, sources said.

The issue over how to define patriotism--aikokushin in Japanese--has attracted attention as the focal point of the law's revision.

The Liberal Democratic Party and New Komeito reached an agreement that would define patriotism as "a mind that respects tradition and culture, loves the nation and homeland that have fostered them," according to the sources.

Although the minority party member of the ruling bloc requested that "the nation" not be specifically referred to as the government that administrates to it, the final draft didn't seem to make that distinction.

Does anyone else feel the slightest twinge of anxiety when a bill is presented requiring teachers to instruct children so that they will "love the homeland that fostered them?"

Frame of Reference

I'm sure that the Japanese Imperial Family is a subject that occupies a lot of your time. I mean, I can't go a day without devoting at least a couple of hours thought to their Y-chromosome problems. Specifically, that the Japanese family hasn't produced a boy since 1960-something.

Now, the country I was born in didn't have anything in the way of official royalty. Elvis and Michael Jackson excepted, of course. But I don't have any real sense of why a royal family is worth all the effort and expense. What with the Magna Carta and all, non-royal types are admitted to have the same basic human value as blue-noses. Or blue-bloods. Whatever.

My point is, most royal folks these days just hold symbolic posts, with a few exceptions like that guy who seized power in Nepal or the Saudi royal family. But the Japanese royal family is prohibited from exercising any actual power outside of officially endorsing parliament's choice of Prime Minister. Yet there is a nearly venomous debate over the future of the royal family and whether or not the Imperial House Laws (the part of Japan's legal codes that control what the royal family can and can't get away with) need to be changed.

As things stand now, there are a couple of people in line to succeed the current emperor. But they are all men over the age of 40. There's no sign of a male heir to the throne, and the current law specifically limits succession to males. While this seems like an easily solved problem, it has, in fact, exposed all sorts of rather disturbing opinions floating loose in modern Japanese society. Like the minister who theorized that if a woman was allowed to become empress, she might marry a strong-willed man of poor morals who would manipulate the throne for his own nefarious ends. Like, uh, presiding over the wrong sorts of charity galas and receiving honorary degrees from universities with departments of evil studies. Or the far sighted Cassandra who pointed out that an empress-to-be might follow and imperial tradition and study abroad, but come back with a "blue-eyed foreigner" and want to have his ungodly half-breed babies, which would then ascend to throne, bringing about the end of, er, whatever.

Now, let's forgo that fact that they seem to think that no woman, not even one raised as the heir to the chrysanthemum throne, could possibly refuse the wishes of her husband. The end-all fear is that she might come down with a case of Wonder Bread fever and bring home some honky? All this time I was under the impression that there was more depth, more resilience, and just more will to survive in the Japan's cultural heritage. Consider, for a second, that the English royal family has been regularly infused with German blood for the last couple centuries. Is there any reason to think that the Japanese family couldn't find some Asian nobility hanging around somewhere? Even if that isn't an option, are we to believe that the thread of nobility is so thin that it can't cling to blood without a y-chromosome?

Sorry. I'm going on too far here. The idea of a royal family strikes me as being fairly pointless in the first place. But all this sexist bullshit trying to pass itself off as tradition and heritage makes me sick. If you want to hang on to believing in an outdated ideal, fine. But don't expect it to apply to people who actually live in the present without being mocked.

Howling

Last month the US Army completed the court-martial and sentencing of Army Reserve Spc. Charles Graner Jr. For his role in the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal he'll face 10 years in the stockade, at the rank of private, with no pay, and a dishonorable discharge when he gets out.

I didn't know what a "Reserve Spc." was, so I looked it up. They used to call it "Technician" back in WWII. And assuming it's in something like electronics, it seems to be roughly equivalent to an associates degree from ITT Tech. Now, as I understand it, the army has to invest a fair amount of time and money in it's "human assets." Even if they're in the reserves, these people don't get trained, outfitted and shipped all over creation for free. Since the military has to make do on a measly $420.7 billion in 2005, one would be curious about how its property, even damaged property is dispensed with.

The point I'm trying to reach is what level of investment the military has in its soldiers and how it can so easily write off one or two or ten of them. Of all the military mottoes I could find on-line, none of them said anything about "leaving the laggards," "ready to downsize our own," or "tribuo in turbatus vicis." And for all the claims about esprit de corps or unit loyalty, there wasn't much about scapegoats, abandoning the losers or leaving that one guy hanging.

This is not to say that I think that Army Reserve Spc. Charles Graner Jr. should not be punished. If you abuse someone who has been remanded to your care, you will earn very little respect or consideration from me. But that's not my point here. I'm curious why problems with groups are resolved with the excision of individuals. If there was so much wrong with what happened there, why is cutting out two or five or twenty bad apples enough? Why isn't the entire system for military imprisonment dragged out into the daylight and examined? If a few dozen priests were molesting children, why isn't the church vivisecting all of the procedures that surround the problem? If there is a problem within a system, why are only a few individuals separated from that system and strung up as if that would be the end of it?

Again, I don't think that systemic problems are excuses for individuals to act like animals. But it doesn't make any sense to me to take a person acclimated to a system, punish him for something he did within that system, then not look any closer at why and how he did what he did. The military has problems. Big, deep, metastasized problems. So does the Los Angeles police department, the Catholic Church, the UN peacekeeping organization and almost every government on earth.

All these monstrous aggregates of policies, red tape and devoted company men get to keep on ensuring their own continued existence. And I want to know why it's okay to value these rancid, tumor-riddled dinosaurs that keep enabling abuse, crime, cruelty and the on-going degradation of the individual.

So, did you rock the vote?

When I was first contracted to work in Japan, one of the warnings the company gave me was that I would "represent the company at all times, even outside of normal work hours, and [would be] expected to behave in an appropriate manner." It seemed to me like a convenient thing to toss into a contract to facilitate firings in case teachers did some really heinous things that might reflect badly on the company that brought them there. And I don't mean like mistaking an after-work party for an excuse to drunkenly proposition students before groping a co-worker and throwing up on the street in front of the school. I mean like a drunken brawl with the police, an arrest and conviction for heroin trafficking or propositioning a 14-year old girl.

Those things have happened, but they're more often done by Japanese citizens than foreign teachers. It's just a case of numbers. In a nation of over 127 million people, registered foreigners, around 1.5% of that total, make up something like 1.8 million people. And the vast majority of them are ethnic Korean or Chinese. Oddly enough, the number three group is Brazilians, but a number of them are second- or third-generation children of Japanese people who immigrated to Brazil.

Just for comparison, the US population recognizes about 28.4 million registered foreign-born immigrants. That's 10% of America's population, and it doesn't include any of the undocumented entrants who are either: feared, reviled or seen as a necessary and unavoidable part of the labor force who must be used in the post-slavery-pre-worker-robot-and-vat-grown-clone-laborers-period to do the stuff we don't want to dirty our hands with. Like gardening, slaughterhouse work and child care.

The point of all this is that there aren't very many people walking around Japan who don't look Asian. In some of the smaller cities (like Yokohama, 3.5 million) there's only 1.8 foreigners for each 100 people. And that's in a port town where a history of international trade is considered an integral part of the city's identity. Yokohama is about the same size as LA, Sydney, St. Petersburg, metropolitan Paris or Montreal. Can you imagine being in any of those cities and only seeing one kind of person? It just doesn't happen like that in most parts of the western world. If you are a foreign person living here, by default you're going to be taken as representative of your species, primarily for lack of comparison.

(By the way, if you're curious about Japan's immigration situation, you might want to read this article about Japan's (somewhat glacial) move towards an immigration and integration policy for foreigners.)

In Tokyo, a fairly hip place, people will sometimes understand that there may be a difference between foreigners of different nations, and ask questions accordingly. After last summer's heat waves, the French got questions about their country's infrastructure and health care system. After the Olympics, Australians and Brits got questions about their athletes. After the election, Americans (and some unlucky Canadians) were being asked "what the hell happened?"

I don't know if anyone tries to find Floridians, Texans, or anyone from any of the other Republican states and asks "what the hell were you thinking?" But since there's no way to make that distinction here, for me it comes down to trying to explain why my country, why my fellow Americans chose a leader who the rest of the world (with the exception of a handful of like-minded politicians) think is a dishonest, oil-mad, warmongering halfwit with Jesus-flavored psychotic delusions.

And I don't know what to tell them. I mean, I can understand on a rational level how someone would make the choice to support a politician who promises to cut your taxes, or to protect you from foreigners, or even one who claims to have the same beliefs and prejudices as you. But what I can't understand is how someone would support that politician in light of everything questionable that he's done and reasonable that he's failed, neglected or simply chosen not to do.

So that's the rub. I have to admit that I really, honestly don't understand, agree or empathize with at least 59 million people in my country. I realize that the voting majority that put Bush in represents slightly over 1/6 of the total population, But that's still a lot. My leaders, the majority of my leaders, hold positions that I don't support, agree with or condone. And all signs say that this is only the beginning of a long, hard era.




A lot of being an expat has to do with not really belonging to the place where you live. Now I have the feeling I no longer understand the place I came from.

What do you believe in?

How deeply do you believe it?

This fellow wanted to know about his personal relationship with and responsibility to the government. He wanted an answer. And this is how far he's gone to get an answer.

Will he see it through? Will he get an answer? Your guess is as good as mine. But this guy seems to have made his stand and kept to it. So I ask again: What do you believe in? How deeply do you believe it?