Rumors have been coming out the past several days that a new Apple iPhone, a 3G machine with GPS and possibly an OLED screen, will be coming out soon, possibly as early as June. Apple has supposedly ordered 10 million units for production. If true, then I am guessing that they still won’t come out in Japan until they have appeared everywhere else on Earth first.
Obama Girl (Amber Lee Ettinger) is back with a new video, “Hillary! Stop the Attacks! Love, Obama Girl.”
But much more funny is this uncovered footage of Hillary arriving in Bosnia under heavy fire and mortar attack:
“Top generals agree that there is no place more dangerous and snipery than Bosnia right now.”
Looks like I was wrong about Hillary again!
I thought it was weird when Hillary Clinton snuggled up to conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch, even to the extent of having him run a fundraiser for her and accepting donations from Murdoch and other Fox News execs.
But now there’s a photo of Hillary sitting down to have an interview with Richard Mellon Scaife, one of the most rabid right-wing attack dogs during the Clinton years.
WTF?
I can’t bring myself to believe in some bizarre conspiracy between Hillary and hard-core right-wing sleaze merchants, but I do have to ask, what the hell is Hillary thinking and doing?
When you live in Japan, one of the obstacles to everyday entertainment is trying to find a video at the rental store. Aside from the usual bizarre choices for which categories they place titles under, the main impediment in finding a title is…the title. Sometimes it’s the same as it is in the U.S., but all too often it’s not.
Even when it is the same title, you still have to work through the Katakana-ization of the original English; for example, when asking for Back to the Future, you would have to say “Bakku to za Fyuucha.” Of course, the rental store clerk might understand you when you just say it naturally in English, but if the title has tough sounds for Japanese, and/or the movie is not well-known in Japan, then you could still get into trouble–for example, “Batorufiirudo Aasu” is not quite as recognizably Battlefield Earth–and sometimes naming the stars is not so easy either (“Jon Toravorutora”?).
But it gets even harder when they change the title. There are two variations of this, the first being when the new title is in Japanese. These titles can be hard if you don’t read or speak the language well, but even when the title is directly translated, it can make you strain at your Japanese. 許されざる者, for example, translates directly to “The Unforgiven (Man),” more or less the title of the Clint Eastwood film Unforgiven. 猿の惑星 is an accurate translation of Planet of the Apes. But some titles are changed and in Japanese, some more understandably than others. For example, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants became 旅するジーンズと16歳の夏, or (as far as I can imperfectly translate) “The Traveling Pants and the 16-year-old’s Summer.” Dead Poet’s Society becomes いまを生きる, or “Live for the Moment” (or, Japanese for Carpe Diem). The great comedy Blast from the Past became the rather convoluted タイムトラベラー きのうから来た恋人, or “Time Traveler: The Lover from the Past.” One that will really throw you for a loop is 四つ数えろ, or “Count to Four.” Give up? It’s Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, Steve Martin’s parody of old detective flicks. Why the title? Because 三つ数えろ, or “Count to Three” was the Japanese title for The Big Sleep. I remember an older title, 愛は静けさの中に, literally “Love is Within Silence.” Any guesses as to what that one was? How about 愛しのローズマリー, or “My Dear Rosemary” (possibly “Poor Rosemary,” depending on the translation)? See the answer below the fold.
Even more confusing is when the title is changed but remains in English, but different English. For example, if you want to get The Siege, you need to ask for “Marshall Law.” X-Men 3 is not The Last Stand, but “Final Decision” instead. Miss Congeniality becomes “Dangerous Beauty.” Bicentennial Man is “Andrew NDR114.” The movie “Total Fears” might be too easy to guess as The Sum of All Fears; however, would you care to guess which movies got the titles “The Agent” and “Color of Heart”? Those below the fold as well.
If you’re searching for a title in Japanese, a Google search for the title plus the words (in quotes), “Japanese Title” will often get you the correct answer. But if you want a cheat sheet, try this guy’s web site–he lists a good many movies with their Japanese titles–though a few are a bit misspelled in English, most notably Load of the Rings. At least, I hope that’s misspelled.
Read more…
Via Andrew Sullivan:
“The Reverend Jeremiah Wright is an outstanding church leader whom I have heard speak a number of times. He has served for decades as a profound voice for justice and inclusion in our society. He has been a vocal critic of the racism, sexism and homophobia which still tarnish the American dream. To evaluate his dynamic ministry on the basis of two or three sound bites does a grave injustice to Dr. Wright, the members of his congregation, and the African-American church which has been the spiritual refuge of a people that has suffered from discrimination, disadvantage, and violence. Dr. Wright, a member of an integrated denomination, has been an agent of racial reconciliation while proclaiming perceptions and truths uncomfortable for some white people to hear. Those of us who are white Americans would do well to listen carefully to Dr. Wright rather than to use a few of his quotes to polarize. This is a critical time in America’s history as we seek to repent of our racism. No matter which candidates prevail, let us use this time to listen again to one another and not to distort one another’s truth.”
Who said this?
Dean J. Snyder, Foundry United Methodist Church, March 19, 2008.
Why is that significant?
Snyder is Hillary Clinton’s pastor. See comments.
Oops. If Hillary’s pastor approves of Wright, and Hillary feels that Wright is unacceptable, then her pastor must be just as unacceptable to Hillary, by the same association she foists upon Obama. Which means that in order not to be a hypocrite, Hillary must denounce her own pastor and leave his church.
Think she will?
As promised, here is the birdwatching conclusion to the Shinjuku Gyouen Park post. Actually, at the park, I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to get any bird photos–after taking about a hundred photos of blossoms and other things, my camera stopped working. When I looked, it was flashing, “CF Card Full.” What the? I had cleared the card before leaving home, and the thing holds close to five hundred photos, even Large, SuperFine 10-megapixel images. But then I remembered–I had last set the thing to take JPEG plus RAW images… and the RAW images are huge. Worse, I couldn’t find a way to delete just the RAW images without deleting the JPEGs as well. Fortunately, I had taken quite a few excess images, and was able to erase enough unwanted ones to clear up enough space for a few hundred more high-quality JPEGs.
Good thing, too, because there were quite a few birds there–twenty-one species (though I may be forgetting a few) in all:
Brown-eared Bulbul
White-cheeked Starling
Great Tit
Varied Tit
Bull-headed Shrike
Great Cormorant
Large-billed Crow
Mallard
Mandarin Duck
Spot-billed Duck
Little Grebe
Black-faced Bunting
Rose-ringed Parakeet
Dusky Thrush
Oriental Turtle Dove
Common Kingfisher
White Wagtail
Grey Wagtail
Japanese White-eye
Tree Sparrow
Great Egret
Always beautiful is the Common Kingfisher:
The Black-faced Buntings are not too rare, but you don’t often see them out in the open like this:
The Varied Tits were all crowded in one large bush, coming out to sit on a cable and dip into a plastic sleeve… for some reason. (The first two images have larger versions on click.)
A surprising catch was a Rose-ringed Parakeet, which I have heard about but never spotted before–I did not expect to catch a new species in Shinjuku! The Rose-ringed Parakeet is an escaped species, originally in Japan as a pet, but they have been doing quite well in Tokyo for some time–even roosting 600-700 strong near this biological research lab in Meguro. You can also see a map showing sightings of the birds throughout Tokyo. I only caught this one in flight–and this attests well to my new camera’s worth. I only saw the bird after I heard a strange screeching in the sky, and I spotted and photographed the bird only as it flew overhead in a matter of a few seconds. Nevertheless, these pictures resulted:
Just one more image for today–a flock of Mandarin Ducks were at the park–but only under dark shade and at extreme range in the park’s westernmost lake. Could barely see them, but you could see that they were there in number.
There were lots more, but those were the more interesting of the day.
I had a little problem with my WiFi base station after a firmware upgrade the other day, and I figured that the thing reset or something–I could not pick it up under its old name, and figured that it reset to some generic name. The problem was, I couldn’t figure out which one, as my computer kept on picking up other signals–lots of other signals. Not all at the same time, either–only five or six at a time, and they kept changing. I had to read all the different signal names and then unplug my base station to see which one disappeared… and, as it turned out, the base station was none of them, it simply wasn’t being picked up. In the meantime, I went through the list… and counted a total of twenty-one different network signals.
The puzzling thing is, most WiFi networks have a limit of 30 meters or so, less than that in actual practice. Most won’t even reach between floors of a building, especially one with heavy construction like this one. Seeing as how I’m on the 21st floor of a high-rise and there are no other buildings that close, I have no idea what I’m picking up. There are at most eight apartments around me, but even if every one of them uses WiFi, that still doesn’t account for the other dozen. I can only figure that my computer is picking up signals that are weak as hell but nonetheless register somehow, at least enough to get the network name across. I must be picking up stray signals from at least a few different buildings.
In fact, a few have to be from other buildings–I’m picking up at least a few signals that purport to be free-access networks (though they are always password-protected), and I’m pretty sure that nobody in this building does that–in fact, I can’t see how any location even near this building is offering that. Maybe there are some stronger WiFi networks in the area than I am guessing–not just your standard home-network stuff, but something a lot stronger. Interesting.
Recent news: as civilian violence in Iraq escalates again, the Mahdi Army cease-fire seems on the brink of collapse. But even while the media reports on this and correctly identifies this as a possible end to the relative calm in Iraq this past 6 months, it still stubbornly insists that it would threaten the “success” of the Surge™. Come again? Either the surge was more responsible for the relative calm, or the Mahdi cease-fire did. You can’t have it both ways–but they’re trying to:
Is ‘success’ of U.S. surge in Iraq about to unravel?BAGHDAD — A cease-fire critical to the improved security situation in Iraq appeared to unravel Monday when a militia loyal to radical Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al Sadr began shutting down neighborhoods in west Baghdad and issuing demands of the central government.
Simultaneously, in the strategic southern port city of Basra, where Sadr’s Mahdi militia is in control, the Iraqi government launched a crackdown in the face of warnings by Sadr’s followers that they’ll fight government forces if any Sadrists are detained. By 1 a.m. Arab satellite news channels reported clashes between the Mahdi Army and police in Basra.
The freeze on offensive activity by Sadr’s Mahdi Army has been a major factor behind the recent drop in violence in Iraq, and there were fears that the confrontation that’s erupted in Baghdad and Basra could end the lull in attacks, assassinations, kidnappings and bombings.
Now, read that carefully, or go to the web page and read the whole thing. The headline claims that the surge is responsible for the relative calm, but the story clearly lays out that it’s the cease-fire that has done this.
Likely what happened was that the reporter on the ground who knows what’s what in Iraq wrote the story, and then an editor buying into the whole “Surge Success” bamboozle here at home pasted the headline on it, either because he believes it, or because he realizes that since everybody thinks the surge is a success, they’ll be confused if something else is credited.
Either way, Bush gets credit for something that had nothing to do with him. More Liberal Media™ fun!
As for the news itself, it is nothing close to fun, even in the sarcastic sense. This could signal a descent back into pre-cease-fire violence, lessened only by the balkanization of Iraqi sects and the relative lack of people left to violently butcher.
If that happens, what will be said about the surge? That it still worked, but the insurgents spoiled it? I’d say you can always bank on the U.S. media’s schizoid break with the reality of the situation, and that they’ll claim exactly that–despite how meaningless and self-contradictory it is.
The talking heads on the air waves are agonizing over whether we should make a big deal over the 4000th US soldier dead in Iraq.
My opinion: we should be agonizing over every single soldier who dies in Iraq, and for that matter, every Iraqi civilian who dies as well.
But if we can only get media attention, as compromising as it is, when the US death toll hits yet another thousand mark, then so be it.
There was a small but noticeable quake just a few minutes ago. Strangely, about five minutes before that, I swore I felt a quake, but the ceiling lamp didn’t sway visibly (as it did with the larger quake just a few minutes ago), so I discounted it. Also strangely, the larger quake so far has not been noted by the usual quake sites I visit.
Hmm.
Update: OK, it was a 5.6 quake off the coast of Fukushima. Mystery solved.
Have you heard of the recent “Winter Soldier” event? Probably not, and there’s a reason for it. Winter Soldier is named after a similar event following the Vietnam War–you probably heard of that one, seeing as how conservatives used it to call John Kerry a traitor. The event this time around, like the last, is one where soldiers returning from war tell of the horrors they saw and experienced, and speak both eloquently and powerfully against the need for the wars being waged. These soldiers are protesting the Iraq War, and while soldiers supporting the war tend to be given coverage, the media is all but silent about this much more provocative and important event.
In fact, though regional and local papers have dedicated a few columns to it, the mainstream media, the big, national news outlets, have been completely silent on this rather significant news story. The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, CNN, CBS, ABC, Fox–none of them have written a single word on the event. MSNBC had an article, but they inexplicably took it down less than a week after the story was published.
Why the silence? Why not honor the service of these soldiers, and hear the message they have to tell us?
Go ahead, read. (Hat tip to Charles for this story.)
Even if he gets dinged on the experience stuff, “Oh, he says he’s Mr. Experience. Doesn’t he know the difference between this stuff?” He’s got enough of that in the bank, at least with the media, that he can get away with it. I mean, the irony to this is had either Senator Clinton or Senator Obama misspoke like that, it’d have been on a running loop, and it would become a, a big problem for a couple of days for them.
It’s an everyday thing to see the media acting this way. It’s far more rare for them to come out and admit it.
So, does the media cover them equally? Hell, no. Does the media cover them just a bit disproportionately? Nope, not that, either. In fact, while the media just won’t let go of the Wright story, injecting it in stories about Obama that have nothing to do with Wright, the same Liberal Media™ virtually ignores the Hagee story, writing almost nothing about it at all.
Meanwhile, Obama tends to get grilled not only for what his pastor said, but for what other people say or do, apparently just because they’re black, too. (As I write this, CNN is running the Wright video clips for the millionth time.)
The rundown: Hillary can’t win this. She should withdraw. But it’s pretty obvious that she won’t, probably not even if Pennsylvania goes badly for her. She’s going to hang on no matter what, and she’s going to hurt the Democratic cause in a major fashion by doing so. The general consensus is, she should read the handwriting on the wall and drop out, giving the Democrats a far greater chance of winning.
But some see even baser motives in Clinton’s Quixotic challenge: that if Obama wins, he’ll be the new boss of the Democratic Party, while if Clinton or McCain win, the Clintons will maintain their control. Yikes! That’s a pretty harsh charge–that Hillary would be willing to sink the Democratic chances at the presidency just to maintain political control over the Democrats. I would not quite go so far as to accuse her of that… but I would not put it past her at this point, either.
IT workers are evenly split between Barack Obama and John McCain as their choice for the next president of the United States, according to a new survey by the Computing Technology Industry Association and Rasmussen Reports.The survey of IT workers, taken in early March, shows Obama and McCain in a dead heat, with each receiving 39 percent of the vote, and Hillary Clinton trailing at 13 percent.
The survey also shows that while 35 percent of IT workers identify themselves as Republicans and another 26 percent call themselves Democrats, 40 percent chose no party affiliation. An overwhelming majority—75 percent—put themselves in the conservative-moderate political spectrum.
Interesting that Obama does so well in a right-of-center environment; equally interesting to note that if Clinton were not in the picture, her support would almost certainly shift to Obama, giving him the clear advantage here.
Not a November prognosticator or anything, but interesting nonetheless.
But Obama has invited us to talk about race.Okay. I’m accepting the invitation. He can regret it at his leisure.
I don’t hate black people. I can’t pretend to be color-blind because absolutely nothing in my culture will allow me to be. I admire Thomas Sowell, Duke Ellington, Roberto Clemente, Muhammed Ali, Alexandre Dumas, Sidney Poitier, Denzel Washington, Count Basie, Tiger Woods, and Bill Cosby. There are many others but that’s a sampling of the famous folks whose courage, genius, character, and achievements I would be proud if I could get anywhere in the vicinity of. The bald truth of the matter is that they’re better than I am, and it doesn’t arouse a flicker of racial feeling in me to acknowledge it. They have enriched and elevated my own experience of life.
On the other hand, I am sick to death of black people as a group. The truth. That is part of the conversation Obama is asking for, isn’t it? I live in an eastern state almost exactly on the fabled Mason-Dixon line. Every day I see young black males wearing tee shirts down to their knees — and jeans belted just above their knees. I’m an old guy. I want to smack them. All of them. They are egregious stereotypes. It’s impossible not to think the unthinkable N-Word when they roll up beside you at a stoplight in their trashed old Hondas with 19-inch spinner wheels and rap recordings that shake the foundations of the buildings. It’s like a broadcast dare: Go ahead! Call me a nigger! And then I’ll cap your ass.
Here’s the dirty secret all of us know and no one will admit to. There ARE niggers. Black people know it. White people know it. And only black people are allowed to notice and pronounce the truth of it. Which would be fine. Except that black people are not a community but a political party. They can squabble with each other in caucus but they absolutely refuse to speak the truth in public. And this is the single biggest obstacle to healing the racial divide in this country. The dammed-up flood of good will in this nation for black people who want to work for their own American Dream is absolutely enormous. The biggest impediment is the doubt created in each and every non-black American by the clannish, tribalist, irrational defense of every low act committed by any black person. If you’re offended when Republicans defend Richard Nixon or when Democrats defend Chuck Schumer, imagine what it’s like when black people swarm the streets to defend Jeremiah Wright.
I’m not proposing the generalized use of the term, just trying to be clear for once, in the wake of Obama’s call for us to have a dialogue about race. However much they may scream and protest, black people will know what I mean when I demand they concede that the following people are niggers:
– Jeremiah Wright
– O.J. Simpson
– Marion Barry
– Alan Iverson
– William Jefferson
– Louis Farrakhan
– Mike TysonYou know what I mean. They hold you back. They’re dirty, violent, and stupid. They make you look bad, and you foul yourselves by defending them, by reelecting them to office, by admiring them in spite of all their awful behavior.
I think this post is important in that it highlights a way that right-wingers legitimize racist views. They know that they don’t hate all blacks, and can list blacks they admire (all too evocative of the old “some of my best friends” line), and so use this as proof that they are not racist–whereupon they then release some pretty baldly racist invective. In this case, you have the person involved spilling forth a list of people he feels that deserve the base epithet, and the only common factor among them is that they are black and have said or done questionable or illegal things (are all whites who have similar pasts “crackers,” or whatever the epithet is today?). The claim is that they are defended and admired only because they are black (which somehow makes them qualified for the epithet), a charge you’d have a hard time defending for most of the people on that list. I don’t see Mike Tyson defended because he’s black, any more than so many other celebrities, most of them white, who get off with less than most people simply because of their celebrity (in fact, one could name more white celebrities who get treated more lightly than most black celebrities who break the law–and they certainly get far less attention, and no mention of race). William Jefferson? Don’t make me laugh. That’s entirely political, with the equivalent going for many white Republicans who committed similar crimes.
In fact, looking at the list, one quickly sees a pattern with most of those names: they are not all defended just because of their race, but almost all of them are singled out because of it. Seriously, there are white preachers who have said a lot worse than Farrakhan or Wright, but few who have been demonized as much as they have been because of it, and none that I have heard of who have been highlighted for “whites” or “Christians” being apologists for them; somehow, this is only notable with black preachers and those who follow them.
Even this relatively pedestrian display of racism is offered only upon the invitation to speak publicly about such things, and still you will not hear many people speaking so openly about such opinions. The scary thing is, if you look at the rhetoric that has long poured out of the conservative community, you can see this mindset lurking just beneath the surface, every once in a while peeking out. But it stays beneath the surface because it gets rightly slapped down when it comes out into the light of day. People who hold these views have learned to keep them hidden, to not speak it out loud. You can still make out their shape under the thin veneer of right-wing diatribe.
The positive view of all this is that it is best to pull out this fear and hatred into the light of day so that the people who feel and think this way can be presented with evidence that what they believe is not supported by fact or reality. And while that may work with a good many Americans, there is a large base of right-wing extremists who will refuse to change, no matter what the discussion. Unfortunately, these tend to be the same people who believe that George W. Bush is a great president, the Iraq War is a good thing and the administration never lied about it, and a mass of other pipe dreams which can be just as easily disproved. But the people who believe these things are not swayed by facts; they believe their guts, and short of a complete breakdown of their social support mechanism, which is unlikely to happen, most of them will not be moved by an open discussion on race. We’ve tried to move them on so much else, to no avail. Perhaps the only thing to do is to so stigmatize these racist ideas that they wither away and die slowly over time. I wish I could be more optimistic, but it is difficult to be optimistic in the face of the utter intransigence of far-right fear and loathing.
Despite what Dubya tells us, this is anything but a color-blind society. A lot of this is revealed in how race is treated when the race-baiting is anonymous. Subscribe to Scopes.com, and you’ll see what I am talking about. There are countless emails which constantly vilify blacks, some of them so baldly racist as to make you cringe. Most of these don’t make any of the news, but they are passed around by who knows how many hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of people. Want a recent and very wince-inducing example? Check out this one–which takes an old group portrait of Obama and relatives (perhaps including friends, some people in the shot are unidentified), and gives them fake names and histories–calling some of Obama’s relatives “crack addicts,” criminals, and “gay porn stars,” then inviting the reader to imagine what will happen when “this bunch starts running around the White House.”
Looking at how Obama is treated in the MSM calls forth impressions that a similar thing is being done at a far more “civilized” level, and is just as overlooked–Tim Russert holding Obama responsible for what Harry Belafonte says and does, the whole media jumping on the Wright affair and linking it to Farrakhan and worse, while not making a peep about McCain and Hagee and other controversial preachers McCain has sought endorsements from.
Yes, a dialog on race is overdue, if for no other reason than to demonstrate that race is still a huge issue in the United States, and that the right wing needs to wash out a lot of its dirty laundry on the issue.
Seeing as how the weather was nice, and we’d heard that the cherry blossoms had already started to bloom, we made off to Shinjuku to visit Shinjuku Gyouen Park, a large botanical garden very close to Shinjuku Station’s south exit. There was quite a bit to see today, and everyone seemed to come for the same reason we did. Tons of people were there, lots of families with kids, and surprisingly many foreign visitors as well.
Before we entered the park (¥200 admission fee, by the way), we stopped by a convenience store and picked up some food. We broke down and got a few “Calbi Franks,” which were nothing less than frankfurter sausages wrapped in bacon. Incredibly unhealthy, I am sure, but god they were good. We also got a few cans of beer, and so had to hide it when we noticed at the park entrance the sign which said, “no alcohol.” But one really strange thing to me at the store was the sandwiches. Among the ham & cheese and other usual sandwich types were these:
Those are strawberry, cream, and custard sandwiches. Not sold with the snacks, but with the regular sandwiches. Hmmm.
Anyhoo, we got into the park, and it was quite nice:
This little kid below, for some reason, decided to stop right in front of us as we sat on the lawn, and give us a little boogie dance.
Sachi took some photos of me by a cherry blossom tree, and caught this kid with his rather interesting English shirt, staring up at me in shock and awe:
And I can only suppose that these people were doing a catalog shoot for a bridal gown company or something. That little light/lens flare near her chin was there in the photo when I took it.
Naturally, the main reason to be there was to view the blossoms, and though (this being just the bare beginning of the blossoming season) most of the trees were not in bloom yet, there were a startling variety of trees which, while few in number, were nonetheless gracing the landscape with all varieties of white, pink, and red. The park has all different kinds of cherry blossom trees, some which blossom earlier than others (one was already shedding blossoms!), and many which sported different colors, even mixes. One tree had half white and half red blossoms, with several blossoms showing a mix. I’m sure that by next weekend, the park will be spectacular.
Sachi posed very nicely before one of the branches–many (I am sure by design) hang down low so people can see them very close.
The park is also very good for birdwatching… but this is enough for one post. More soon!
Good lord. Already the English language teaching market in Japan has become bad enough so that most jobs out there for teachers rate only the rock-bottom $30,000/year salary, work you hard, and most require you teach classes to little kids. For those of you who thought it could not get much worse, then prepare to have your hopes dashed.
What’s next? Clown suits and pie throwing? (Although this could easily be seen as the equivalent….) I am all for making the classroom environment stimulating and interesting for the students, but there are limits; this borders on the fetishistic.
As I mentioned in the last post, Sachi and I used the Vernal Equinox to make a day trip back to her hometown in Nagano. Despite being in the way-out inaka, the Shinkansen (bullet train) stops relatively nearby, just a half-hour drive from her brother’s house. So we took the express train to Omiya just north of Tokyo, and switched to the Shinkansen there; Sachi’s stop is just one after Karuizawa, a popular Nagano resort town. Despite it being the first day of Spring, it was snowing in Karuizawa, which kind of surprised us even though it was cold and rainy elsewhere. It was snowing only a little less in the highlands of her parent’s home where the grave site is.
After the ohaka-mairi visit, we went back to Sachi’s brother’s place for some food and drink and company before heading back. Hard to ignore was the family dog, Ryu. A cute dog, except that he’s so damned ugly. He’s a seven-year-old dog but looks fifteen. The poor little guy has allergies all the way to Hades and back; he’s a mass of red rashes which cover the exposed skin of his belly, around his eyes, and often right through his fur. He is constantly scratching himself, and spent half the time we were there barfing on a cushion. I just had to take some photos of him. He had no problem with that, but did not seem to like the results–when I showed the picture of him to the canine directly, he peered at the camera through red, squinty eyes, and then started growling deep and low. He showed the same reaction only when the camera’s display, with his image on it, was turned toward him.
Not just mine, of course. This is Sachi’s family grave site (the name is distorted out at Sachi’s request), and Sachi wants us to both be buried there. I’m cool with that–while incredibly out of the way from anywhere most people would ever know about (it’s way up a narrow, steep, and windy little road, far out in the Nagano countryside), it’s a beautiful locale. Being hard to reach doesn’t concern me, and could be seen as an advantage–little chance it will be one day paved over or anything.
There are graves from Sachi’s ancestors reaching back maybe at least a few hundred years, well into the Tokugawa era. The site has permanence, esthetics, and a history. I never really thought or cared much about my eventual burial site before, and this certainly will do just fine.
We visited it because of Shunbun no Hi, or Vernal Equinox, when many Japanese do Ohaka-mairi, or visiting the family gravesite. Sachi’s father set up flowers, left a food offering, and burned incense; he as well as Sachi and I prayed shortly. It was quiet in the snow upon the hillside, almost poetic.
Now the headlines have shifted: not just Obama’s, but all three candidates’ passport files were breached. This makes it sound less like political dirty tricks, so they say:
Because the unauthorized intrusions involved all three major presidential candidates, and involved employees at more than one contracting company, State Department investigators at this stage believe the incidents are the product of “curiosity” on the part of contractors’ employees, rather than some kind of political dirty trick.
That sounds reasonable, and is probably why they released the information about Clinton’s and McCain’s passport file breaches. If people were looking at all three files, well, then it’s not partisan, right?
The thing is, when you read further into the details, you realize that, at the very least, this impression is weak, and at the most, the information released may have been engineered to create a very false impression indeed. The Clinton “breach,” in fact, should not even have been included here, as it was not even close to being the same magnitude:
Mrs. Clinton’s passport file was breached last summer during a training session for State Department employees. A trainee was encouraged to enter a family member’s name into the passport database for training purposes, Mr. McCormack said. Instead, the trainee entered Mrs. Clinton’s name. Mr. McCormack said the trainee was promptly admonished.
In other words, there was a trainee under immediate and close supervision, in a situation where they almost certainly had no opportunity to print out or transcribe any amount of useful information–it was just some smart-ass trainee who typed in a name as a gag and was immediately discovered by a supervisor. That “breach” doesn’t belong in this report.
That leaves McCain’s records access:
McCormack said one of the individuals who accessed Obama’s files also reviewed McCain’s file earlier this year. This contract employee has been reprimanded, but not fired. The individual no longer has access to passport records, he said.
This report raises more questions than it answers; the employee accessed McCain’s file on one date, then Obama’s on another later date, and was only reprimanded? This person’s employer was apparently not disclosed, and the reasoning behind the lower level of punishment despite two breaches is not explained–but the impression is that this person’s access was somehow less improper, less liable to raise eyebrows, and perhaps less needful of investigation.
So take the third person out of the picture, at least until we know more about it. Fine. After also removing the Clinton access, what does that leave us?
Two different people, coincidentally working for the same firm, accessing Obama’s records only, on two separate occasions. That they both worked for the same firm, that neither were investigated or reported even after the second improper access of a presidential candidate, and that both were fired and so are now outside of the authority of the inspector to question, only intensifies suspicions, it does not belie them. Nothing about the Clinton or McCain incidents has any relation to these breaches; the suspicion of dirty tricks still remains in full force, and should be stronger, if anything.
And yet now we have even liberal blogs saying that there is less reason to be suspicious now. In other words, this was a well-played gambit–release just enough additional information to obfuscate and confuse the issue, even though at the core, the issue is more suspicious than before.
We still have no idea of the details behind the three Obama and one McCain accesses; we still don’t know what differentiates the person who looked at the two candidate’s files; we don’t know how long or under what circumstances any of those breaches were. Why not? Why were such details released about the Clinton access, but not the later accesses? While there is the very real possibility that this was, in fact, just several different people taking curious peeks for fun, there is too much unexplained for me to accept such an explanation–more now with this current ploy for obfuscation than there was before.
This, from Crooked Brains, is a license plate joke only those familiar with hexadecimal RGB can appreciate. I love it.
As I mentioned recently, and have mentioned many times in the past, how headlines are shaped has a great deal of influence on how people think of an issue. The headline creates a picture of a theme in our minds as we read the article, influencing our view of the entire issue. In addition, many don’t even read the articles, but gain their impressions completely by glancing through the headlines. This is not something that has slipped the attention of the media; you can be certain that they know this and pay close attention to how headlines are worded.
So when headlines begin to change, one should pay attention to the how and why. The Obama passport file scandal has just lifted off and has been in the public eye for only hours, but I have noticed that the headlines have notably changed in that short time. While the scandal is obviously centered on the breach of privacy, how it impacts the Obama campaign, and were there any dirty tricks involved, the headlines have suddenly begun focusing on a different and almost irrelevant aspect of the issue:
WaPo: Looking at Obama’s File Gets Two Fired
NYT: 3 Disciplined in Passport Case
ChiTrib: State Dept. workers fired for looking at Obama passport file
AP: Feds Fire 2 for Looking at Obama File
LAT: State Dept. fires 2 for peeking into Obama’s passport file
MSNBC: 2 fired over Obama passport file breach
AFP: State Department sacks two for Obama passport breach
Why focus on the fact that three people were disciplined for this, when there is a long list of far more important aspects? It does not seem to make any sense…until, that is, you try to think of it from a different angle: if you wanted to downplay the offense to the Obama campaign and make it sound like the government acted appropriately, then these headlines would be perfect for conveying that sense.
Update: now that the story is no longer just about Obama, the media has suddenly dropped the “three employees disciplined” or “two workers fired” headlines, and–now that the focus superficially allows for dismissing the dirty-tricks angle, the headlines have changed to center on the falsely exculpatory part of the story. Here are the headlines from the exact same sources I quoted before:
WaPo: 3 Candidates’ Passport Files Breached
NYT: Passport Files of 3 Candidates Were Pried Into
ChiTrib: Obama, Clinton, McCain passport files breached
AP: Candidates’ Passport Files Breached
LAT: Passport files of McCain, Clinton, Obama all breached
MSNBC: Passport case leads to Va. contractor
AFP: US candidates’ passport files breached
How about that? Now that Obama is not the only one identified as having his files breached, now the MSM’s headlines drop their focus on how people got fired for it and focus instead on the angle that all three candidates’ records were “pried into” or “breached” (they no longer say “peeked into” or “looked at,” more trivializing verbs). Sometimes the tendency to change wording in a biased way is rather surprisingly overt–if you care to take notice of such things.
They say that this was not political in nature, but when three government contractors rifle through Barack Obama’s passport files at the State Department on three different instances over five weeks, it stinks to high heaven. Here’s where the Bush/Republican campaign to politicize the government bureaucracy has its damaging effects: considering how ardently partisan all aspects of the government under the Bush administration have become, it is impossible to see such a thing as this and not assume that there were partisan political motives involved–especially with a candidate who has lived overseas before, and whose enemies have been trying to cast him as some sort of Muslim terrorist. The fact that it took two months for this to be reported makes it even more suspicious.
On the crass, cynical political strategy level, this could be good for Obama–on the upswing after two strong speeches, this could generate sympathy and make people less liable to take criticism against him as seriously, as it is now apparent that people are illicitly rifling his personal records for damaging info.
Josh Marshall points out:
A few more details about the Obama passport breach. According to a new piece out in the Post from Glenn Kessler, the breaches occurred Jan. 9th, Feb. 21st and March 14th.That would be the day after the New Hampshire primary, the day of the Democratic debate in Texas and the day the Wright story really hit.
On the one hand, that makes it even more suspicious. On the other hand, it would be hard to pick three dates out of those two months and not come out close to some significant landmark, there being so many.
In case it sounds to you like this wasn’t something done to damage Obama politically, one should remember that a similar thing happened to Bill Clinton in 1992. SOP for RNC election strategy?
If Obama confused Sunni al Qaeda operatives with Iraqi Shiite extremists, not once but several times before he had to be corrected in public, then you can bet that this would be fairly big news–Obama the inexperienced foreign-policy lightweight doesn’t even know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites!
Of course, it wasn’t Obama–it was McCain, the guy who is supposed to be an expert on the subject, someone who is supposed to have the facts down cold on this. McCain making this mistake repeatedly should be a much bigger story… and yet, the media is hardly covering it. Surprise!
And in a Liberal Media™ double-whammy, not only are they not reporting much on this, but when they do report on it, they use this kind of headline:
Democrats jump on McCain’s Iran-Qaeda gaffe
As I have pointed out several times before, when Republicans attack Democrats for having made a mistake, the headlines focus on the mistake; but when Republicans make a mistake, the headlines emphasize how the Democrats are attacking them, as if the mistake is not worthy of mention by itself, giving the impression that the attack is political opportunism.
In just the past few weeks, we’ve learned that McCain is in violation of campaign finance laws according to the Republican head of the FCC; that despite the press touting his campaign finance reform history McCain surrounds himself with lobbyists and is proven to have interceded on their behalf on several occasions; and that despite the press touting his foreign policy experience, he repeatedly confuses even the most basic elements of the Iraqi situation. None of this is news to them. But if Obama’s pastor once said “God damn America,” then it gets played endlessly for days.
Sometimes you just wish that this damned Liberal Media™ would let up and give McCain a break!