Category Archives: Technology

UPDATE II: Japan Won’t Be Needing Sean Penn

Asia, Crime, Foreign Aid, Foreign Policy, Multiculturalism, Technology, Uncategorized

The rude Wolf Blitzer’s interview with Ichiro Fujisaki, the Japanese ambassador to the united states, reminded me of the time the regal (Akio) Toyoda went up against the proverbial Torquemada, his tormentors on the US House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. (Here) No words of condolence did Blitzer offer to the Japanese gentleman for the calamity his country and people have endured. Instead, Wolf hammered Fujisaki about the possibility of “another Chernobyl,” a meltdown, at one of the Fukushima’s Daiichi nuclear power reactors.

The March 11, magnitude 8.9 earthquake had damaged the Fukushima 1 power station. BBC reports more reliably and with greater detail that a big explosion on Saturday had caused “the cooling system to fail at the No 3 reactor and the fuel rods inside had been exposed.” (HERE) Wolf finally explained that the “tsunami had put that whole power plant basically under water, and killed its coolant capabilities.” (Transcripts) Fujisaki reiterated that, “We do not see evidence of a meltdown at this time,” and that his government had already evacuated the people, First from a three kilometer radius, then 10, and finally 20 kilometers radius. “We are taking as most cautious measures and we’re trying to evacuate people so that accident will not really affect people,” Fujisaki explained.

CNN further reported, via the Kyoto News Agency (the official Japanese news agency), that “9,500 people are unaccounted for. We cannot confirm that they are all deaths but know for a fact that 9,500 are missing.” A far smaller, magnitude 7.0. seismic event in Haiti, which CNN keeps invoking, killed hundreds of thousands of people, and the place is still in ruins, despite the rescue efforts of Hollywood actor Sean Penn. (And it’s not just the building codes, as our media’s analysis would have it.) Blitzer wanted to know if Japan could cope with its reactors without the US! The Chutzpah! How many working reactors does the US have?

Fujisaki assured him with the utmost politeness that “we are now coping with this issue ourselves. But, of course, there could be some consultation with other countries. But for the moment, because it’s just happening now, we are doing — working on ourselves.”

Wolf seemed shocked that a tremor and attendant tsunami that generated 30- to 50 foot tall walls of water that crashed onto Japan’s north-east coast had left some 6 million households without electricity. The ambassador assured Wolf that the number was down to 2.5 million. If that is correct, it is remarkable. Wolf and CNN hardly breathed a word about the biggest windstorm to have hit Washington and Oregon in decades. In 2006, “at least a million residents in the Pacific Northwest were stranded without power for days, in primitive conditions, befitting a Third World country.” Is Wolf unaware that, with Katrina, the US had established the gold standard for government ineptitude in a disaster? We in the Pacific North West are due for what Japan has just endured. We call it “The Big One.” The Japanese have responded calmly. I’d feel far safer in a disaster if at the helm were people who were driven by national and personal pride to put their best foot forward, and to stay stoical and soldier on.

Japan will be okay. It’s a highly civilized, advanced society.

When Wolf repeated, incredulously, “No looting? No looting; are you sure?”, one of CNN’s foreign correspondents, a Japanese woman (you guessed, her story is nowhere to be found on CNN’s website), proudly recounted how crime-free Japan is; how people pull together, yet are propelled forward by individual agency and initiative; how honest the average individual is; how, if you lose your wallet, you’ll likely find it at the nearest police station.

My husband, who traveled there recently, found the Japanese he collaborated with remarkably polite, refined, and respectful of experience and skill (whereas here in the US we idolize the average hubristic Millennial).

Japan is not a very “diverse” society, you know. Actually, it’s a homogeneous country. And as Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam discovered, but tried his best not to divulge, “In diverse communities, people ‘hunker down’: they withdraw, have fewer ‘friends and confidants,’ distrust their neighbors regardless of the color of their skin, expect the worst from local leaders, volunteer and carpool less, give less to charity, and ‘agitate for social reform more,’ with little hope of success. They also huddle in front of the television. Activism alternates with escapism, unhappiness with ennui.” …

UPDATE I: I have just posted this comment on Facebook, where the blog post seems to have struck a chord: “You all seem to have picked up on the incredible chauvinism with which our elites treat The Other—unless this Other is an illegal immigrant criminal, or some knuckles-dragging atavist. Do you think this has to do with the comfort those who have little awareness of their own motivation derive from patronizing lesser individuals? Underachievers make us feel good about ourselves. The latter are easier to ‘help.'”

UPDATE II: With respect to “individual agency” and the attempt to do your best—values Japanese society upholds— Sean related the following: exiting the train station that takes you from Tokyo airport to the down down area, he flagged a taxicab. The driver could not speak a word of English, which makes him not that different from the cabdrivers you hail on American soil. With two exceptions: the first being that the driver was in his own, Japanese-speaking country. The second was the way he proceeded. This gentleman overcame the language barrier thus: Unable to decipher the note my husband had handed him in English as to his destination, Sean’s Japanese cabby existed his vehicle, leaving Sean in it ALONE, and stopped a near by policeman. The latter explained to the cabby where the client (Sean) was headed. A confident cabby got into the cab he had abandoned to look for a cop, and drove my husband to his destination. This kind of experience was repeated throughout his trip: agency, efficiency, occupational pride, politeness.

In a word: a traditional society, the kind this American historian believes thwarts progress.

UPDATE III: State of the Union: a ‘Disgusting Spectacle’ (Derb: Defeatist or Realist?)

Barack Obama, Constitution, Democrats, English, History, Intellectualism, Intelligence, Literature, Politics, Propaganda, Reason, Republicans, Technology, The State, The Zeitgeist

Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution required that the president “shall from time to time give to Congress information of the state of Union.” Like everything in the Constitution, a modest thing has morphed into a monstrosity.

A “Stalinesque extravaganza” that ought to offend “anyone of a republican (small ‘r’ …) sensibility,” is how National Review’s John Derbyshire describes the State of the Union speech. “American politics frequently throws up disgusting spectacles. It throws up one most years in January: the State of the Union speech,” writes Derb in “We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism,” a book I discussed in “Derb Is Right: ‘We Are Doomed'” (http://www.ilanamercer.com/phprunner/public_article_list_view.php?editid1=580).

John goes on to furnish the quotidian details of how “the great man” is announced, how he makes an entrance; the way “the legislators jostle to catch his eye” and receive his favor. “On the podium at last, the president offers up preposterously grandiose assurances of protection, provision, and moral guidance from his government, these declarations of benevolent omnipotence punctuated by standing ovations and cheers from legislators” (p. 45).

Then there is the display of “Lenny Skutniks” in the audience, “model citizens chosen in order to represent some quality the president will call on us to admire and emulate” (this year it’ll be the family of the little girl who was murdered by the Tucson shooter).

Derb analyzes this monarchical, contrived tradition against the backdrop of the steady inflation of the presidential office, and a trend “away from ‘prose’ to ‘poetry’; away from substantive argument to “hot air.”

The president of the USA is now “pontiff, in touch with Divinity, to be addressed like the Almighty.”

Prepare to puke. The antidote is “WE ARE DOOMED.”

UPDATE I (Jan 25.): Robert, have you even read “WE ARE DOOMED”? Derb is a paleo-libertarian and a bloody good writer at that.

UPDATE II (Jan. 26): Derb: Defeatist or Realist? Van Wijk: I did not know you were among the happy faced, cheery conservatives who eschew reality and insist that the band of fools plays on, as the Titanic goes down.

Almost all of Derb’s misery making factual survey of America, in We Are Doomed, is correct (bar his biological determinism, which is supposed to sunder free will, but is not convincing). In fact, it mirrors a lot of what I’ve said and written (why, I’m cited in the book vis-a-vis Robert Putnum). There is no getting out from under:

1) Crippling government debt

2) The layers of crap culture and cultural products (literally: did you know that the MOMA, or its British equivalent, stores bodily waste in hundreds of vials produced as art?)

3) Perverted intellectual and moral standards

4) Crops of affirmatively appointed leaders, in all fields of endeavor, which will be with us for decades, if not longer, because of (1) and (2), among other reasons.

What’s your problem with that (Derb’s) rational, reality based conclusion—an analysis effected over the years in these (my own) pixelated pages?

Isn’t it clear that freedom and mass society—unfettered democracy, mass immigration mainly of voracious tax consumers with a visceral hatred for the history and historical majority of this country, on and on—cannot coexist?

It does not mean that one doesn’t continue to fight (I do), but it’s a losing proposition. Talented, industrious, taxpayers—doing highly skilled work—will become less numerous and more burdened with the years. This shrinking tax-base will be working to keep the voracious racial Idiocracy, represented faithfully by the political and intellectual class, in the style to which they have become accustomed.

(As aside: My source in one of America’s most lauded corporations, brilliant in his performance and intellectual leadership, is forever being told to develop his sorry “emotional intelligence”—even given books about this crap—as he solves the most complex of technical and logical problems. Why? because the manly, forceful, algorithmic iteration of facts, without dissolving into tears and embracing the intellectually halt and lame and dysfunctional around you: that is BAD. Men like that are not dismissed, because few can replace them. But they are cornered and cowed. Wanna tell me that a society that disempowers and subdues talent will survive?)

Isn’t it idiotic to attack the messenger, Derb? In any case, I’m glad you don’t attack me for advancing a similar message for years.

UPDATE III: To the letter about his alleged taste in poetry, Derb has provided some references in the Comments sections below. What about Louis MacNeice? I’m a poetry primitive, but I quite liked MacNeice.

UPDATED: Net Neutrality Odyssey

Business, Constitution, Fascism, Free Markets, Internet, Private Property, Technology

If they are not, the FCC’s new Net Neutrality rules sound awfully like price fixing, or a kind of Internet Civil Rights Act, where everyone must be allowed access to everything without discrimination based on, well, what and how much you purchase.

Ruled by regulators we certainly are.

Article I, Section 1, of the United States Constitution, provides that:

All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

So what is the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) doing regulating the Internet? Nothing out of the ordinary is the answer. The FCC is just doing what all America’s extra-Constitutional government agencies do: manage all aspects of American life. Hence the term “The Managerial State.”

ROBERT M. MCDOWELL, a Republican commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, calls the FCC’s unconstitutional power grab a “jaw-dropping interventionist chutzpah”; a bypasses of “branches of our government in the dogged pursuit of needless and harmful regulation.”

Let us not forget that the Net Neutrality odyssey began with that bastard Bush. As Wired reports, “In 2005, then-FCC chairman Michael Powell issued a set of principles, the so-called Four Freedoms, which said that internet users had the right to use the lawful software and services they want to on the internet, access their choice of content, use whatever devices they like, and get meaningful information about how their online service plan works.”

Note the Bush boy’s UN-like language: “Four Freedoms.”

This is important: “Both wireless and fixed broadband service providers will have to explain how they manage congestion on their networks. Cable and DSL companies will have to let you use the applications, online services and devices that you want to. Meanwhile, wireless companies will be prohibited from blocking websites and internet telephony services like Skype. Cable and DSL providers would be barred from ‘unreasonably’ discriminating against various online services.”

An Internet Civil Rights Act of sorts.

The one thing that bothers me is this: Is Comcast, for example, not a franchise (“a privilege or right officially granted a person or a group by a government”)? The kind of areal monopoly they enjoy and less-than-optimal service they provide in the market seems to suggest that possibility.

Franchise status might also explain why, as Wired observed, “There was one group … which seemed content with the new rules: the nation’s cable and telecommunications companies, including AT&T, Comcast and Verizon. They’ve been making the rounds in recent weeks signaling their support for Chairman Julius Genachowski’s compromise deal.”

UPDATE (Dec. 22): GREAT MINDS. Michelle Malkin also finds Civil Rights language to be the appropriate source of metaphor to describe the impetus of laws that’ll mandate equal Internet access to all irrespective of the cost of a product or service.

Under the FCC’s new regime, the market will be fattened and socialized and the price system sundered. This means worse service for all paying customers as the incentive to innovate are removed. When will Out “Overlords Who Art in DC” UNDERSTAND that the price and profit system is the key to prosperity? The correct answer is “never.”

VIA MICHELLE:

Undaunted promoters of Obama FCC chairman Julius Genachowski’s “open Internet” plan to expand regulatory authority over the Internet have couched their online power grab in the rhetoric of civil rights. On Monday, FCC Commissioner Michael Copps proclaimed: “Universal access to broadband needs to be seen as a civil right…[though] not many people have talked about it that way.” Opposing the government Internet takeover blueprint, in other words, is tantamount to supporting segregation. Cunning propaganda, that.

“Broadband is becoming a basic necessity,” civil rights activist Benjamin Hooks added. And earlier this month, fellow FCC panelist Mignon Clyburn, daughter of Congressional Black Caucus leader and Number Three House Democrat James Clyburn of South Carolina, declared that free (read: taxpayer-subsidized) access to the Internet is not only a civil right for every “nappy-headed child” in America, but essential to their self-esteem. Every minority child, she said, “deserves to be not only connected, but to be proud of who he or she is.”

Cultural Foot-And-Mouth Can Kill

Art, Music, Pop-Culture, Technology, The Zeitgeist

An abundance of flying objects and a minimalist script, as far as music and language go: This encapsulates the artistic tastes pervading the culture. “Sixty Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl, however, was enraptured by the sounds of a bad band called “The Edge,” collaborating with Bono, another three-chord wonder, to produce the “new musical ‘Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.'”

In order to better describe the audial effects he wanted to achieve, Bono told “The Edge”: “ta, ta, ta, tum; give me that John Lennon-kinda sound.” He can’t even read music. Neither could they, presumably. That was “the creative process in real time” to which Stahl treated her viewers.

About the pretentious director, Julie Taymor—without whom Bono said he would not have been willing to warble worthlessly—the media seem to be saying less since her set has started buckling under poor Super Man and his supporting crew. She must be a card-carrying liberal.

The show’s financial scaffolding is rickety too. It so happens that Taymor’s talents for entertaining are not commercially viable: she has been at this production longer than the Iraq war has been entertaining the political deadheads. Before its financial sponsors can break even, “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” will have to run for decades. That is if it holds up.