Far East Cynic

As a loyal Steeler fan, I should be hating the New England Patriots-regardless of what time of the season it is. But this year-they are my new heroes. Simply for pounding the Denver Tebows back into submission and sending Tim Tebow home to where he should be in the playoffs: watching them on TV.

The Tebow hype has been, to put it politely, overdone to the point of ridiculousness. He's a religious man? He's not the first and won't be the last NFL player to be that way. He does great things for charity? Again not entirely a unique thing in the NFL-although the league as a whole could improve on that score. He's a good quarterback? Yes he is-but he's not really that much better than the rest-$%^&ing 80 yard TD pass in overtime to beat my beloved Steelers not withstanding. 
 

Having Tebow thrusting his Christian beliefs upon the populace-definitely makes you hate him more than if he were just a mere Denver Bronco.

So for all of these reasons-and the even better one of the fact the Steelers should have played New England not Denver, I will savor the drubbing the boy and his teammates got today!

I took these pictures back when we moved in. It was better weather then-now the skies here are mostly gray-in the brief 7.5 hours we have daylight between about 7:50 AM and 4:30pm or so. But it is a nice view to wake up to or see when you can:

And the view from the top floor:

One thing that looks cool whenever the hell spring comes-will be riding on the bike trails.

Well it only took 7 weeks-but we finally have reliable internet at a reasonably fast speed. PLUS-I was finally able to get our Sky Satellite working, with the assistance of a very able man who worked a lot harder than he should have to help me troubleshoot why a perfectly good satellite box could not see a signal-that its less expensive digital German counterpart could. (Turns out Sky receivers are incredibly finniky-especially when you are trying to "trick f*ck" them into thinking the receiver is in the UK. I guess I should not be shocked a Murdoch product can be a pain in the ass). But hey? I've got movies and porn on demand-life is good.

Which means I now have the bandwidth to post and see videos like this:

Still the greatest Blue Angels Video ever made! "We don't need no stinking Hornets!!"

I have been watching with interest, the mil-blog reaction to the “new” strategy announced by the President and the Secretary of Defense-namely that the US has to know its limitations; and that so long as we choose to not raise enough revenue, then cuts must come to the federal budget. And as much as it pains some people, those cuts have to include the defense budget.

Now that rightly concerns me-since for better or for worse, I have thrown my lot in with DOD-so as to fund and extend the expatriate life style I aspire to. In a proper world-DOD funding would be at Cold War levels with respect to US GDP and the invention of the VTC would be undone-thus necessitating the kinds of frequent travel I desire and crave. But deep in my heart of hearts-as painful for me as it is to admit-making cuts to the defense budget is something the nation will have to do. No matter what the personal costs are to yours truly.

It is not that the United States can no longer afford to be a world power-it has the resources to be one for many years to come. However, as long as the country makes the cutting of taxes a pre-eminent priority, then the die has been cast and the great retrenchment must surely come.

Now Lex would have you believe that this folding of our military tent is not a requirement. It seems that he would rather place the blame-and the burden-on the weakest members our own society. This so we can ensure we remain involved in helping worthless Arabs accomplish nothing-primarily because its in their nature to do so. They are Arabs after all-residing at the bottom of the human evolutionary ladder. They don’t have to stay there of course-but until they discard their apostate religion of Islam-then at the bottom they shall remain. As recent events in Libya and Egypt are proving-Arabs can screw up anything in just a little time. They have made their choice.

And regrettably-so too have we.  As long as the United States chooses not to raise the revenue it needs to raise to take car of its own citizenry, then cuts and retrenchment must surely come. In that regard, I have to sullenly admire Ron Paul, for he-alone among the clown circus that is the current GOP Presidential field-has been forthright in acknowledging the facts: a good deal of our growth in government has come as a result of the wars-and the costs of maintaining the “empire”. ( An empire with none of the perks that come with empire-land to raise our flag over, vestal virgins to be ravished. )

Lex believes its all to rest on the collectors of the results of the social contract:

As has been pointed out in these pages many times, the ongoing financial crisis is not defense driven – we are currently expending a historically low percentage of our Gross Domestic Product on DoD accounts. What has changed is that entitlement programs have mushroomed to hitherto unthinkable levels, and they show no signs of abating. Spending on social services has taken all the oxygen out of the federal budget, even as deficit spending has risen to giddying heights. Slashing defense spending is not the cure, but rather a palliative: The patient is bleeding out, and in response the doctors are surgically removing a leg. True, that will reduce the gross need for blood, at least for a little while. But it does nothing to stanch the bleeding.

They’re called “entitlements” because, once the public has been introduced to them, they feel entitled to equal or greater levels of dependency. Rolling them back requires massive expenditures in political capital, and virtually guarantees popular revolt. See also; Greece, Italy.

In a word-bullshit.

As I have shown in these pages repeatedly-its not a spending problem that we have, it’s a revenue and fairness problem. Just eliminating the Bush tax cuts-while at the same time withdrawing from the foolish wars we have started, would more than halve the current –and projected -deficit. Ezra Klein has adeptly pointed out that most of our financial woes are self-inflicted. We would rather enable the selfish and elite-than do what’s best for the majority of our citizenry. Social Security can be fixed-and maintained or transitioned. And Medicare can be helped by a comprehensive overhaul of all of our health care system. Something we sort of achieved in 20009-but not fully.  Lex conveniently ignores the fact that every other civilized nation on the planet provides universal health care access for its citizens. The United States, however, turns its back on obvious solutions. Or was it just a figment of my imagination that my first doctor’s appointment here in Germany cost me half what my last appointment did here in the United States. Which works out fine for me-because my employer, unlike so many that Lex praises-provides health insurance. And what they didn’t pay-was paid for by one of those pesky entitlements. An entitlement I am entitled to-because I earned it.

So I should be on the same side as Lex-and rooting for holding the line on defense cuts. From a purely selfish standpoint-I can see the point of view. But as I said earlier, in my heart of hearts, I know it’s a fools errand. To quote Lex, “as long as the country has its attitude towards taxation’-then cuts must come. Kind of sad really since-when viewed in the macro perspective-we have the money for both guns and butter. But we would rather make the richest one percent of the US even richer-while a great percentage of the workforce eeks by on 30,000 per year or less. Is this a viewpoint you really want to defend?

A couple of other points. Lex hangs his hat on the fact that percentage wise-defense is a small part of GDP. My response to that is: “So what? That proves nothing. What percentage is it of the Federal budget?” Its 25%.  The U.S. Department of Defense budget accounted in fiscal year 2010 for about 19% of the United States federal budgeted expenditures and 28% of estimated tax revenues. Including non-DOD expenditures, defense spending was approximately 28–38% of budgeted expenditures and 42–57% of estimated tax revenues.  According to the Congressional Budget Office, defense spending grew 9% annually on average from fiscal year 2000–2009. Because of constitutional limitations, military funding is appropriated in a discretionary spending account.   The numbers would go down-if we didn’t have the burden of the wars-wars Bush started and refused to pay for. Percentage quotations of GDP are just a red herring. Its where (some of) the money is.

“But what about all the world’s bad actors?”

What about them? If you want to have a role to play in countering them-then you have to have the resources to do so. We do not. Being a super power costs money-we are choosing not to get the money to pay the bills. The money is there-especially in a country that has rich people making the kinds of obscene sums they do. And-as gruesome as it maybe-some of the killing by the actors is not our affair. The Arabs can kill themselves all they want to-it does not require the presence of Americans to happen. And given a choice-I’d rather an Iraqi to die in Iraq than an American. If nine years of a presence in Iraq have proven one thing-it’s that our being there is not going to stop that.

The Lex’s among us would rather point fingers at Europe and decry their priorities. Europe has its problems as I am learning now first hand-but it’s also made a lot of progress in valuing things that are important and discarding the things that no longer serve the citizenry well. ( It certainly has better food, booze, train service and a better attitude about time off than my homeland).   Perhaps through bitter experience they have learned the value of Herman Wouk’s admonishment: “Either war is finished-or we are.”

Now that’s a hard thing for a guy who grew up and thrived on  adventures due to the cold war to admit. I like being a part of the empire. I want to live my life overseas and in its benefits. However the nation of my birth has chosen to no longer pay for that empire-and so like our British forefathers our empire will probably enter into decline.

And much as it pains me to admit it, maybe it needs to.

F*^king TEBOW!

Dialect: A language without an Army to back it up. 

It’s that time of year again. Every year around this time the Japan Association of Kanji Aptitude Test  announces the kanji of the year. The announcement is made in Kyoto at the famous Kiyomizu-dera temple through a priest who writes the chosen kanji on a big white board.

The kanji of the year 2012 was announced on December 13:

                             KIZUNA

Kizuna means bonds, bonding. This kanji was chosen through an annual survey of about 490 thousand Japanese. 12.4% of respondents have proposed the kanji Kizuna which made it the most popular one for the year 2011. The word Kizuna often was used to express solidarity and support for the victims of the 3/11 disaster.

The kanji ranking second and third were for disaster and  for shaking/trembling. All the other kanji therefore also related to the tsunami of March 11.

Which got me to thinking about a recent posting over at The Economist regarding the Chinese Language-another language that relies on the pictorial characters-and whether the continued use of those characters is an impediment to the advancement and assimilation of the Chinese into the greater world society.  Most Chinese ( and from henceforth-when I use the word “Chinese”-you can substitute “Japanese” and the meaning will still be the same).

Mr. Johnson makes a couple of very valid points:

In brief, Chinese traditionalists believe:

1) Chinese is one language with dialects.
2) Chinese is best written in the character-based hanzi system.
3) All Chinese read and share the same writing system, despite speaking in different ways.

Western linguists tend to respond:

1) Chinese is not a language but a family; the "dialects" are not dialects but languages.
2) Hanzi-based writing is unnecessarily difficult; the characters do not represent "ideas" but "morphemes" (small and combinable units of meaning, like the morphemes of any language). Pinyin (the standard Roman system) could just as easily be used for Chinese. Puns, wordplay and etymology might be sacrificed, but ease of use would be enhanced.
3) Modern hanzi writing is basically Mandarin with the old characters in a form modified by the People's Republic. Everyone else (Cantonese speakers, say) must either write Mandarin or significantly alter the system to write their own "Chinese".

The simple truth is the Western Linguists have it right. English will become the lingua franca of our world, so the sooner the rest of the world gets on board,  the better off we will be. The whining in the comments on Johnson's post about how the British Empire trampled other languages is just whining. Nial Ferguson is more than right when he says that ,  "The question is not whether British imperialism was without blemish. It was not. The question is whether there could have been a less bloody path to modernity . The challenge for the U.S., he argues, is for it to use its undisputed power as a force for positive change in the world and not to fall into some of the same traps as the British before them. "

Short version is-the world is based on English. Period-end of argument.

Now of course the Chinese and the Japanese don't want to Romanize their languages, for one simple reason: They like to make it difficult for the foreigner ( and for that matter their own citizenry) to learn. Same is true for Arabic and Hebrew, Hindi and Thai, and for that matter Russian too.

Kanji ( or in its Mandarin form Hanzi) is a good means to present a lot of information visually-rather quickly. But the learning of it is nothing but sheer rote memorization. At least with Arabic and Hebrew there is a system of sorts-while I was in Israel, I picked up reading the signs (while not understanding them) in about 8 days or so. 22 letters can be learned a lot easier than 2000 or 3000.

Now the defenders of Kanji are out there-and they are determined to hold their ground:

To any educated Chinese, Pinyin is significantly more difficult to read. Virtually every Chinese word share the same pronunciation with many other words that it is impossible to tell apart in Pinyin. To read sentences in pinyin, you have to guess which Chinese word each pinyin corresponds to until the whole sentence makes sense.

Westerners may find reading/writing hanzi difficult to learn. It is, after all, a completely different system from Latin-based languages. But once you learn to read it, it is much easier than trying to translate pinyin to the actual Chinese word.

Substitute the word Romanji and you have the Japanese point of view.

And they do have a point. I have found in the learning of Japanese that it is actually a step backwards to start from Romanji to learn the language-its easier and facilitates learning the Kanji,  if you start straight from Hiragana and Katakana and move forward from that foundation. But its based on a flawed goal-that I have to assume the additonal burden of having to learn to read the language as well as speak it. I never labored under such a handicap while learning ( and now re-learning) German. Neither do learners of any of the other romanized languages. Ataturk probably heard the same argument from many of his fellow Turks when he ordered Turkish romanized in 1928.  Several generations later-it hasn't stopped Turks from learning Turkish.

It's not easier to translate-its just easier to read. What Mr , " I love Chinese Characters" is not telling you  is that by deriving the language from the visual characters, it has created an unacceptable situation where there are lots of words with similar pronuciations. Only by seeing the characters are proper distinctions made.

That's not to say English does not have similar situations-but it is much easier to distinguish by context. Can you think of any other reason Chinese and Japanese subtitle TV shows in their own language?

Spoken Japanese is not that difficult to learn, save for the incredibly difficult process of knowing which polite froms to use when ( Keigo). I suspect its probably the same with Chinese. Reading the language well on the other hand-and being able to discern nuance and intimation-is a much harder proposition. I would submit that many Westerners would agree with me-and even those who can speak the language well are probably not as adept at reading as they would like to be.

As one commenter pointed out-people generally learn foreign languages as a survival mechanism. If you want to function in Japan-you have to learn some level of Japanese. Those who say they never needed to are kidding themselves-or they are fine with limiting themselves in where they go and what they do. Same is true in China I think-but its also true in reverse. If the Chinese want to be a dominant force as they claim to be-they will have to take on more and more English. ( Dear Korean friends-please make a note of this.)

Its only a one way street. And the lanes are not going to be reversed.

Rule Britannia!

In Japan? Tell the customer very explicitly about your product

The world could be coming to an end-when we live in a world where Rick Santorum is considered a "serious" candidate for President:

Mitt Romney may have – just – emerged as the victor in Tuesday's Republican caucus in Iowa but, for many, the night belonged to his rival Rick Santorum, the most socially conservative of all the Republican candidates and a man who once declared: "I just don't take the pledge. I take the bullets."

Not one to shy away from making his voice heard, the 53-year-old from Winchester, Virginia, has peppered his political career with divisive pronouncements ranging from the hawkish and reactionary to the plain offensive.

Rick Santorum is an evangelical idiot-and a perfect example of why the US has, and needs, seperation of Church and State. One of the best votes I ever cast was to send that moron home in 2006. ( When in Japan I voted absentee in PA).

He lost the bubble a long time ago as the Guardian explores well. But in another example of why he sucks-Foreign Policy pointed out how religion makes a lousy basis for foreign policy:

Santorum is debating with a young voter, laying out his case why Israel should not dismantle its settlements in the West Bank.  "All the people that live in the West Bank are Israelis, they're not Palestinians," he says. "There is no ‘Palestinian.'"

This echoes Newt Gingrich's contention in December that Palestinians are an "invented" people — but, for my money, Santorum's comments are worse. Historical revisionism in the service of political gain has been a staple of international affairs since time immemorial. But what Santorum is suggesting is actually profoundly damaging to U.S. and Israeli interests: If the 3 million people of the West Bank are Israeli citizens, they have the right to vote, and will fundamentally reorder the Israeli government. That's a prospect the Israelis themselves have been trying to avoid, and the reason why they have never annexed the West Bank. Too bad nobody ever told Rick Santorum.

The clown car ride continues.