Far East Cynic

As I drove to work this morning, something seemed out of place.

Glasses? -Got ‘em. Whew!

School crossing lady? Missing in action as I came round the bend expecting to have to slam on the brakes. HMMMM. That’s odd. Oh well-lets see what the BMW can do………….(Six cylinders of German engineering spring into action.)

No line of traffic at the turn to the Arsenal? What’s up with that? At least it means I won’t be late. I can even stop at the Quickie Mart and get the foo-foo coffee I like.

Get to work. Boarding the elevator to cubeville, I ask, ” Hey are schools closed this morning?”

“Yep-they had a case of swine flu diagnosed. Don’t you watch the news?”

Not in the morning, I don’t. I’m lucky if I make it to the car on time.

So now we have got that going for us.

Because it makes so much sense:

The iron-girder he-men of the conservative blogosphere have greeted former Republican Senator from Pennsylvania Arlen Specter’s defection to the Democrats with whiskery hoots of “good riddance/get lost/don’t let the door hit your withered buttocks on the way out” and similar pleasantries. Many of them appear defiantly resigned to the Republican Party becoming a regional bastion of true believers, the Branch Davidian compound of the Confederate Jesus. To those, however, who still share the same sky as those in the real world and think that the best escape route out of minority status and possible extinction is to win elections (crazy, I know), the Specter defection is a disaster.

For the true believers though-its merely one down, a dozen more to go. We can end common sense in your life time!:

Now that Specter’s gone, we can turn to the real enemy – Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe! Then the only thing between us and victory will be Graham, Lugar, McCain, Murkowski, Grassley, Hatch, and some of the RINOs in the House. And the Governors, like Crist and Douglas and Lingle and anyone not named Palin or Jindal. And the Supreme Court Justices like the radical Kennedy. But time is on our side. If we get small enough, voters will finally see true conservatism, and then we’ll have to win.

A couple of weeks ago, SMAP band member  Tsuyoshi Kusanagi was arrested for being drunk and naked in a Tokyo park. As a result he as dropped as the spokesman for Digital TV in Japan and replaced by a deer:

This is Chidejika. Over at Japan Probe they have been chronicling the fun the Japanese blogging world has been having with this one particular mascot.

There has been a cute anime version created, which for some reason I really like.

And a whole host of folks have had fun ribbing Kusanagi about his arrest:

Photoshopped into the picture is the same phrase that Kusanagi asked the police at the time of his arrest: “What’s wrong with being naked?”

There is a whole bunch of Chidejika art can be found here.

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The party I was a proud member of and still claim as my political home.

When Lieberman abandons the principles of his party-because of his beliefs-somehow that is OK. When a moderate Republican says I can’t stand what the party I served has morphed into-that is an act of treason.

John Cole probably has an excellent summary of the absurdity that is today’s “real Republicans”:

I have to admit to being surprised that the right seems to not only have instinctively rushed to defend torture (when, of course, they are not busy insisting that it isn’t torture), but now they are attempting to shift the debate into one in which we discuss the relative merits of torture (look at all the good intel I got while drowning this guy!) while bringing in the lawyers (I guess Andy McCarthy has moved on from Obama’s birth certificate) to make sure that their legal behinds are covered.

Considering what they have done with virtually every other aspect of the Bush years, I honestly expected them to do what they did with the trillions of dollars of spending and debt that happened with a Republican congress and a Republican President Bush- first, pretend it didn’t happen, then after being forced to acknowledge it did happen, claim that everyone was doing it and blame the Democrats and scream about Murtha and Barney Frank, and when that didn’t work, just pretend that it was “other” Republicans who aren’t “real conservatives” (Move along, these aren’t the wasteful spenders you are looking for) while ranting about earmarks. That is what they did with spending, I figured they would do it again with torture.

But they didn’t and they aren’t. Instead, they are mobilizing and going balls to the wall in defense of sadism. It is really quite amazing, and a testament to just how sick and detestable and rotten to the core the Republican party has become.

Now that is not to say I support the rationale that any good can come from a witchhunt or show trials. Ford pardoned Nixon for a reason-because he needed to move on to a new day.

At some point-Obama is going to have to face down the strident voices of the left-just as the Republicans should face down their own wackos-and move on. So far neither side seems willing to do so.

But they still have the gall to think they are somehow different from one another.

In style.

Another contemporary of mine has retired. Only he did it in the style that only he can do.

….he passes through the “side-boys” down the “after-brow” and “ashore”
where he “doffs” his uniform blouse, dons a Hawaiian shirt, his wife cuts
off his uniform trousers into shorts, then he puts on some flip-flops and
grabs a mug of beer

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I’ve been following with considerable interest, the ongoing war debate between Thomas Ricks and the service academies.

It all started with this article in the Washington Post:

After covering the U.S. military for nearly two decades, I’ve concluded that graduates of the service academies don’t stand out compared to other officers. Yet producing them is more than twice as expensive as taking in graduates of civilian schools ($300,000 per West Point product vs. $130,000 for ROTC student). On top of the economic advantage, I’ve been told by some commanders that they prefer officers who come out of ROTC programs, because they tend to be better educated and less cynical about the military.

With that rather controversial start it has escalated to an all out blog war-with lots of posts on both sides of the aisle. Ricks’ side can be found here, here, here, here, here and here.

There have been a lot of posts in reply at Lex’s place, The Naval Institute Blog, Information Dissemination and from the boys at VMI.

Truth in advertising-its no secret to regular readers of this blog, that in my perfect world-the student body of any Academy would number 4,400 MEN. Thought I would get that out of the way up front-before someone brings it up.

However that said, it seems to me, that Ricks is beating the wrong horse. The problem with whether the Academies have value is not with their academics. They compete just fine on that score. There are plenty of surveys that point out that the Academies are equivalent to any major university in America in terms of academic excellence.

Does that not mean there is not room for improvement ? No. If I were king of the world The Academies need to find a “core” curriculum and then build their major programs around that. As a suggestion I could think of nothing better than at least two years of college English -because all officers need to know how to write- mandatory four years of language education, a course in the history of Western Civilization and a course in Military History.

They also should expand and make more use of programs such as the permanent military professor program-right now the problem with it is that officers have to choose too early to apply for it, before all the prizes have been handed out. The 30 year statutory retirement should be waived for those who are accepted. Don’t underestimate the value of being taught by someone who has been to the institution itself.

But to the question of value-its not about academics that academies are falling down on value. Its about the drip by drip dissolution of the military system at the academies-that should form the basis for the  argument Ricks makes. Given the amount the academies have diluted their military systems-especially their plebe systems-are they really worth the expense any more? Can we even still call them academies any more? Or are they just universities where every one dresses the same?

The compromises that the service academies have had to make in their military systems over the last 33 years are well documented. Martin Van Creveld has well documented these compromises that have occurred over time. I’ve also documented it in detail here. I’ll not repeat them now.

But let me ask you this: even if changing social mores required the admission of women to the Academies ( and to  my beloved alma mater), why couldn’t the women lived by what they professed to want-to be treated just like the men were treated? Congress just said the academies had to admit women. It did not say they had to sell the whole farm to accommodate that change.

Ricks loves to talk about General Petreaus as his example of what a civilain education can produce. He neglects that fact that Petreaus was a graduate of West Point-and of a military system that was very much unchanged for over a 100 years and had a proven track record of producing outstanding young men.

Even with the admission of women-the old military system could have survived-with required level of emotional violence needed to tear down a plebe and then start the process of building him ( or her) back up. Shave every-one’s heads,call them by the names that work and run them through an equal wringer. After all that’s what the feminists said they wanted-just to be treated like one of the guys.

Except of course they didn’t and the men did not have a powerful lobby working in their favor.

So over time-the military system began its inevitable decline.

And that is why Thomas Ricks should be questioning the value of the service academies. Not because of the number of PHD’s.

Like I said, he’s beating the wrong horse.

On the feet of the girls of Ewha University in Korea.

The rest of the bodies attached to feet in said shoes are not too bad either.

MEXICO CITY (AP) – Mexico’s government is ordering closed schools nationwide as the suspected death toll from swine flu climbed to 149.
Health Secretary Jose Angel Cordova says only 20 of the deaths have been confirmed to be from swine flu and the government was awaiting tests results on the rest.

He says 1,995 have been hospitalized with serious cases of pneumonia since the first case of swine flu was reported on April 13. The government does not yet know how many were swine flu.

Of those hospitalized, 1,070 have already been released.

Cordova says school at all levels nationwide are suspended until May 6. Schools had already been suspended in Mexico City and five of Mexico’s 32 states.

Japan was lucky in that it dodged the SARS bullet in 2003-but the disease still played hell with getting around Asia that year.

Leave it to Hemlock to find the silver lining:

On a brighter note – and if this isn’t proof that every cloud has a silver lining, what is? – a lethal contagion sweeping the world right now will help take everyone’s minds off our planet’s ongoing economic catastrophe and climatic collapse.

Nor will it stop, as John Cole points out, the rapid assessment of blame:

“What are the odds that one could convince greater wingnuttia that pork barrel spending was the cause of the swine flu outbreak? I’m guessing there’s at least a 20% chance of success.”

Express train to 2012-no local stops.

Here is a map of the Swine Flu epidemic to date.

When I agree with Glenn Reynolds:

RADLEY BALKO: Putting MADD in Charge of America’s Highways. “With Hurley in charge, MADD’s goals will become NHTSA’s goals. That’s troubling because at heart, MADD is an activist organization. The groups once-admirable goal of raising public awareness about drunk driving has over the last several years morphed into a zealous, evangelical teatotaling campaign. When a coalition of college presidents recently asked for nothing more than a new debate over the federal drinking age last year, for example, MADD called on parents to boycott the presidents’ schools.”

MADD has been off the deep end for years. They have been enablers of America’s treatment treadmill, and have made it impossible to to just go out and have a few good times with a few good friends. The .08 limit has been a money maker for states- its increased the number of DUI arrests and not made a real dent in anything.

There once was an insurance study that noted the Blood Alcohol level in DUI arrests resembled a bathtub curve: between .08 and .11 it went up-starting at .12 it dropped off a lot and did not start back up again till .18.  That’s not surprising. There are two types of people out there-those that just have one too many and those who are not going to stop no matter how stringent the law is. The first is being punished in vain efforts to ensure we get the second.

Speaking of drunks-in sports, the Pens sent the thuggish Flyers and their drunken reprobate fans home. Give me a beer!

I will never understand women. Not that understanding them has ever really been a goal-merely securing their daily cooperation will suffice for me.

However, trying to understand how their twisted little minds work, is beyond any normal comprehension.

Backing up. On Easter Sunday, the S.O. went to Mass with me. On the way out, she picked up a bulletin and the only thing that she noticed in it was the fact that the church was going to be having a “yard sale” in the school gym today.  ( Now some of that is  not surprising-having been raised in a Shinto-Buddhist culture, the order of the Mass is confusing enough for her. I’ve explained it -but I don’t think it registered). So yesterday she informs me that she wants to get up at 6 AM so we can be there when they opened at 7am.

“You get up at 6am-unless you are going to make it worth my while, I’m sleeping in. You know where the church is-and the car keys are on the dresser.”

Suffice it so say she was not pleased with that answer. After some negotiation I agreed to drive her there-but only if we went out to breakfast afterwards.

And no-she did not make it worth my while.

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One man’s junk may be another man’s treasure-but sometimes one man’s junk is just another man’s junk. So it seemed in the church gym today.  They had lots of stuff-especially piles and piles of clothes. But to get through those clothes required a great deal of patience-and the occasional hip check. One thing about being at a Catholic Church yard sale, you will find yourself face to face with groups of Filipinas. Who don’t want to yield ground at the table without a fight.

Accordingly, I spent a lot of time at the book table. Eventually the S.O. found me and said she agreed, the stuff here was not that great. We could leave whenever I was ready.

Tell me again why I was up at 6am?

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One of the oddest things of the crowd at the church though was the sight of several, and I do mean a fair amount, of Muslim women in and among the shoppers. I am assuming they were Muslims-why else would one wear a scarf in 87 degree weather? One woman present was obviously Indonesian, dressed in Busana Muslima, the term used for female
Muslim dress in Indonesian, and she was with a non- descript, middle aged African American guy. There has to be a story there-and the journey from Indonesia to Shopping Mall had to be a long one.

Now, I’m sure Muslims like getting bargains as much as the next person-however the idea of hordes of Muslims shopping in a Catholic Church-well, it just seems a little out of place. Somehow I don’t think you will find hordes of Christians shopping at the local mosque gym.  ( In Shopping Mall, I somehow think a mosque would have to keep a low profile anyway-lest it find itself being put to the torch).

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I thought we were going to be able to make a straight shot to breakfast. All I had to do was head up the main road the church was on, make a right at University, and I-Hop should have been just a couple of miles down the road. I did not reckon with the fact that garage sale signs were on this road like flies on dog poop. When she say the “neighborhood yard sale” sign in one particular group of McMansions-breakfast ended up being postponed. After about four stops, and it now being 8:45am or so, when she got back in the car I told her we where going to breakfast-now. “We can always come back here-but the crowd at the I-Hop will be forming. And I’m hungry!”

As it turned out, I was right-30 more minutes we would have been waiting in line.

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The S.O. wanted to go to her favorite thrift shop after breakfast. I desperately needed a haircut. 30 years of military cuts make having my hair touch my ears bothersome for some reason.  I could go to the exchange on post-but there are always a lot of Soldiers waiting in line and their time is more valuable than mine. So I decided to stick my head into the next door ladies hair salon.

” Do you cut men’s hair? The sign says walk-ins welcome.”

“Sure we do honey, come on in.”

The S.O. has used this shop,  so she suggested it to me. The lady used to work at a military barbershop it seems. After explaining that I wanted a hair cut-but not a really short haircut like the Soldiers get, she set away to work.

She was one of those conversant barbers. And somehow she got it in her head that she should ask me about politics:

“Did you hear Hannity wants to get himself waterboarded? What do you think about that?”

Uh-oh. She’s probably not going to want to hear the response that was on the tip of my tongue,   ” Oh really? I  hope  he fucking drowns”.

Discretion being the better part of valor, I changed the subject. “So how long have you lived in Shopping Mall”

Trailer parks and an ex-husband who slept with her sister then ensued. Whoo-boy!

However-she knew her trade though. It’s a good haircut and I have to admit-I’ll probably be back.

To a  women’s beauty shop.

How low have I fallen?

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The S.O. has a doctors appointment this week. It is out in the nether regions of Shopping Mall-to get her thyroid checked. Now getting there is really not that hard-for someone who can read a map. The S.O. seems never to have learned that particular skill. ( Even the Tokyo subways sometimes threw her for a loop-something I never really understood). So I suggested I take her for a “test run” to find the place and give her some landmarks to find. I’m glad I did. Its out in the North County-and knowing her-she would have turned back long before she got anywhere near it. I will probably draw her a map with land marks anyway.

Sigh…-and she thinks she is so smart.

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This weekend is Shopping Mall’s Arts festival-known as Panoply. It is held in the center city park and so after we had figured out where the doctors office was, made the obligatory Costco stop, and got gas- I suggested we go down there. It was Ok. Nothing like some of the festivals I have been to in Asia-but the weather was nice. After walking around to all the exhibits we stumbled onto a lady named Yuri Ozaki.  The S.O. , upon seeing the name, ventured forth with a tentative, ” Nihonjin desu ka?”

“Hai-so desu”.

And off the conversation went. It did my ego good to realize that I still understood the language, the rolls of ripples of Nihongo tripped off my ears like a welcome tonic.  The S.O. talked with her for about 20 minutes and she seemed more than a little surprised when I joined the conversation in Japanese. Seems her American husband does not speak the language. She asked which language we use at home. Now truth be told-since coming here, we use more English. Although we still have a mish- mosh of her asking a question in Japanese and me responding in English and vice versa.

Her art of Shopping Mall is quite good-but it was interesting to here her say that she could never sell it in Japan. ” Its not good enough for there”.

Hmmm. $700 for a watercolor of Washington Square seems a little steep if you ask me. maybe its not the quality of the art-but the prices.

We then meandered to the tent where the fiddle competition was going on-mostly so we could sit down for a while. The Youth Division was competing.  These kids were good! The S.O. asked me what a fiddle was-and what was difference between it and a violin.

“Nothing-except how you play it.  The country grew up on this kind of music in its early years”, I pointed out to her.

The boy I was rooting for got beat by a girl. She was pretty good too, but she was not from around her. A Kentucky import.

We did not stay around for the masters.

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By now it was 3:30 and we were both feeling the effects of that 6AM wake up. Home we went. I took in a run-and then fell asleep. I’m just now waking up.

Just another weekend in dullsville Shopping Mall, USA.

And I still don’t understand how the S.O.’s mind works.

Back in the day-shuttling from work to Tokyo for Japanese class-one of my favorite things to see upon rolling into the Black Lion pub in Meguro, was to pick up the latest edition of Japanzine. ( The Black Lion was right around the corner from my Japanese class-thus it was popular with me. Good beer and lots of people to meet.)

Early in the decade it used to run the comic strip, Charisma Man:

It was pretty funny because it played on stereo-types-the lusty western man who can’t score at home,  but gets laid like a big dog in Japan. And Western women living in the country seemed to really take exception to a bit of harmless fun:

I didn’t know it at the time, but I’d just had my first experience with a classic “charisma man” type of foreign male. This is the type of guy who lacks sufficient social skills and emotional maturity in his home culture that he would have a lot of difficulty cultivating a romantic relationship with a woman in his home country, but cross-cultural differences allow him to form relationships in Japan. His “foreignness” explains his awkwardness and lack of grace in a manner which allows Japanese women to forgive him. They can’t tell the difference between someone who doesn’t conform to their cultural expectations because he doesn’t know how to and someone who is an oafish dork. Also, Japanese people value tolerance and “enduring” hardship silently as a part of their culture so the women feel that part of being in a relationship is accepting the rough patches in their mates to a far greater extent than foreign women do. Previously, I talked about how Japanese women also generally have different expectations of a mate and that’s part of the situation as well.

Most western guys dismissed the criticism-after all, they were the ones getting laid. However like all stereo-types there was the occasional grain of truth. On both sides:

But it seems to be that disparity that bugs our foreign sisters so much. All is fair in love and war, unless your ugly, in which case it is cheating. That seems to be at the root of the sentiment. I also hear a lot of “guys come over here and get arrogant.” I can hear the vitriol in women’s words when they say it. I also recently read a woman blogger’s send up of “charisma men,” in which she seemed to think that these guys completely lack in all social graces and dis other foreigners in favor of hanging out with J girls. A type of guy I have yet to encounter here.

I keep hearing about these terribly awkward and rude guys, but I never meet them (it admittedly could be a factor of where I live: inaka(Skippy-san note-this means rural)). All the guys that I know that are dating J girls seem pretty nice and normal to me. So I am wondering where all the sour grapes come from. I hate to say it, but I think it’s a racist and jealous thing. And that is going to hurt some feelings, but some people really need to take the time and reflect on why they would be bothered by an interracial relationship. I hear words like “yellow fever” and I cringe, because while I think fetishists exist in small numbers in all demographics, I don’t think but a tiny portion of guys target specific races to date, and this term only exists out of hatred.

There are guys that use the J girls’ tendency to jump into relationships to their advantage. But it happens back home too; they’re called players and some are so proficient in America that they tutor other guys for money. So being a sleazy guy has nothing to do with Japan. Sleazy guys may end up here, but I think they are rare enough that the usual anti white/Japanese sentiments are still oddly numerous and shrill . It’s a bias that some girls carry, like a chip on their shoulder.

While it is true that more guys end up working in Asia, more women end up working in Europe for the exact same reason; they find the opposite sex particularly attractive in that reason. They perceive their prospects of romance to be on a higher scale. But, since it is most likely an Occidental-Occidental relationship that women will end up with in Europe, there is no discussion on the possibility of their “failed lives” back home.

And besides-the comic was pretty funny.

And why Jonah Goldberg has not been burned at the stake. (His book sucks by the way….).

Because not every news magazine can be as good as The Economist.

P.S. The Financial Times has Goldberg pegged pretty well too………

It was either answer you or play golf this afternoon.

Golf won.

Phil: I was in the Virgin Islands once. I met a girl. We ate lobster and drank pina coladas. At sunset we made love like sea otters. *That* was a pretty good day. Why couldn’t I get that day over and over and over…-From the movie Groundhog Day.

Today I indulged myself in my occasional sinful pleasure at lunch. I drove up to Krystal-wolfed down four Krystal’s and a shake-then I went to Barnes and Noble. I spent about 35 minutes or so walking through the bookstore-reading various titles. Came out poorer than when I went in.

And that-aside from the decreasing sexual morsels the S.O. deems fit to throw my way ( she is getting Americanized it seems)-is  the highlight of my days, these days.

Twas once not always so. Seeing this post from Spike, took me back in my memory to a better time, some nine years ago this month, when I first set foot upon the land surrounding the Fragrant Harbor-with the awe and sense of wonder that a child feels on Christmas morning.

I had been in Asia about a month-and had experienced more adventure and joy than I ever thought was possible. When I left for Japan I knew I wanted to go to Hong Kong-the city had fascinated me since I was little boy reading about it in National Geographic. Being a rampant Anglophile-and retrograde supporter of the British Empire- I was on fire to see what was one of the last vestiges of what once was and probably still should be.

So, as soon as I could carve out the money, one Friday night I hopped on the train to Narita and some six hours later I was walking, wide eyed, through Hong  Kong International Airport. Hopped the train to Kowloon and found my way by taxi to my hotel. Since I was trying to save money, it was a cheapo hotel up in Yau Ma Tei. Since I had not become as enraptured with Wanchai as I later did, I spent a lot of time up in Kowloon.  Not being savvy in the ways of Hong Kong night life-in hindsight, it was clear I had missed some opportunities. Still I could not complain-much.

On my last day in town though, I was up at a reasonable hour and decided that I should see the South Side of  Hong Kong Island. I had read that there was a park over there and so onto the MTR I hopped. Not really knowing how to get there, when I arrived at Central, I meandered up towards Sheung Wan till I found a bus stop that had the name Aberdeen on it. As Spike’s picture shows, it was a little bit of journey from one side to the other.

For those who have never been to Hong Kong-you just don’t go straight south, over Victoria Peak, as the bus routes ( and the roads) go around the edge of the island. So I went from center to left on the picture and around to the “W” you see in the lower left corner of Hong Kong Island. There I departed the bus-more than a little apprehensive.

Rather than find myself in a park-I found myself in the middle of apartment buildings-and it appeared not so many Gweilos such as me were present:

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