And speaking of clueless neofacists...
Debito has the kind of roundup I'm too lazy to put together on the charming Japanese Foreign Minister, who thinks Japanese will be better at solving the Middle East diplomatic Gordian knot because of the colour of their eyes and skin. I'm sure you won't be surprised that he is the forefront of the "War? What War? You Mean Japan's Glorious Anticolonial Crusade to Free China (In Which We Never Committed Any Atrocities)?" movement. He also ran his family's coal company before he got into politics, a company that took full advantage of forced labor during the war. Not that you'd have read about his comments in much of the Japanese Press.

By any other name...
If Stephen Harper were Mr. Potatohead, he'd be a dick-tater. Scott Feschuk nails it down with his advice to Stephane Dion about how to handle Harper's verbal thuggery, though personally I'd rather see him take the Trudeau approach and offer him a nice steaming-hot cup of fuddle duddle.

Even kids this young know the best way to handle a bully is to smack him on the nose the very first chance you get, and keep on smacking him until he stops acting like a dick.

Dis and dat
The most dangerous professor to ever play wing, maximum leader and president for life of the We Are All Giant Nuclear Fireball Now Party, the blogtastic Michael Berube, has returned to the interweb tubes! When he shut down his popular blog back at the start of the year, was an occasion for much weeping, wailing, gnashing of teeth and rending of garments. The last thing he wrote there is one of the most eloquent and informed explanations of agnosticism you are likely to read. Now he is making his triumphant return at Crooked Timber, hopefully with Theory Tuesdays and Arbitrary but Fun Fridays and hockey blogging in tow. Welcome back Michael, but remember, the Rangers still suck.

Kevin is home. Hopefully, his parents will get to stay.

Hold the presses, Peter MacKay did something right, though it did take him a few weeks to get around to it.

A South Korean protester invaded the Japanese embassy grounds in Seoul yesterday, but for some reason the Japanese media stuck its fingers in its ears, chanted Kimigayo and pretended it didn't happen.

Finally, a question about the Canadian budget: Wasn't the rise of the Western populist movement of the 80's and 90's that gave birth to the Reform Party and its current incarnation as the Alberta-centric Conservative Party of Canada largely sparked by Western outrage over equalization payments and federal spending giving Quebec a disproportionately larger slice of the pie than the west. Wasn't this the greatest sin the Liberals could be accused of, that they were siphoning off money from the West and using it to buy votes in Quebec to stay in power?
Glad to see the Gnu Gummint of Kanada has put a stop to that.

IN YOUR EAR

Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

RY COODER

My Name is Buddy

Warner, 2,680 yen

Call it a folk opera, a roots song cycle or even a musical socio-political analysis of modern U.S. history--whatever label you stick on it, Ry Cooder's new concept album My Name is Buddy is an entertaining road trip into America's past.

Best known for his 1997 project (and the subsequent Wim Wenders film) Buena Vista Social Club, an attempt to preserve the music of prerevolutionary Cuba, Cooder is a keen musicologist who dabbled in African music on his Grammy-winning 1994 collaboration with Malian guitarist Ali Farka Toure, Talking Timbuktu. He's also scored several films.

Artistically, My Name is Buddy picks up where Cooder's previous album Chavez Ravine left off. While that album used jazz, Latin-infused rock and pop and mariachi band music to tell the musical story of the Los Angeles barrio that was bulldozed to make way for Dodger Stadium, Buddy uses blues, rags, union anthems, bluegrass, dust bowl folk, country and roots rock to trace the history of the American progressive movement from the early days of the labor movement ("Strike"), through the Jim Crow era ("Sundown Town") and Red Scare ("Red Cat Till I Die") to the current frustration of those turned away at the polls in the most recent U.S. presidential election ("One Cat, One Vote, One Beer").

To keep things from getting too serious--the usual fatal flaw in political music--Cooder tells the whole story through a group of talking animals. The titular Buddy is a wandering cat who teams up with Lefty the mouse and the Rev. Tom Toad. One Internet wag at CD Universe aptly described it as "Woody Guthrie meets Beatrix Potter."

While there is anger in many of the songs, Cooder vents his frustration over injustice through not-too-subtle humor. Sings Cooder: "God help us J. Edgar, nothing's safe from you" in a song about a voracious hog named for a brand of vacuum cleaner.

Cooder wears his political heart on his sleeve--Karl Marx's Das Kapital is pictured on the inside cover of the accompanying booklet that provides the narrative context for each of the 17 songs.

Pete Seeger, the last of the great progressive activist-folksingers, plays banjo on the album and is feted alongside the legendary labor organizer and singer Joe Hill on the terrific "Three Chords and the Truth." Cooder and Seeger are joined by a number of guests including the Chieftains' Paddy Moloney, famed session drummer Jim Keltner, Van Dyke Parks and Flaco Jimenez.

If there is a weak spot in this hootenanny opus, it is that aside from some elegant country slide guitar on "Hank Williams" Cooder never really stretches out and delivers any of the scorching solos longtime fans might expect. While this will pass unnoticed by the casual listener and in no way detracts from the finished product, it is a little disappointing not to see the guitarslinger ranked No. 8 on the Rolling Stone list of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time showing off his chops at greater length.

BAKER BROTHERS

Hot Cakes: Live in Japan

P-Vine, 2,100 yen

When one thinks of funk, the first places that spring to mind are not Bournemouth, England or Tokyo, but P-Vine Records capture and release of Britain's fraternal funkateers' energetic Nov. 2006 performance in Japan's capital may put both cities on the list. Often reminiscent of the Meters, the Baker Brothers' jazzy old-school R&B sound is bound to put the cut in your strut, the glide in your stride and separate the funk from the junk. This disc is an instant party.

(Mar. 17, 2007)

"comfort women" - the story that will not die

Japanese politicians keep harping on the same nonsensical point about how there "no historical proof" that the comfort women were coerced and how it depends on your definition of "coerced" -- I wonder how those same politicians would react if the North Koreans said there was no evidence Megumi Yokota or any of the other abductees had been forcibly taken to North Korea? For a considerably less factually challenged approach to the issue, have a look at this excellent scholarly article from Japan Focus.
Surely, we can expect a free exchange of ideas in the media on a subject like this - after all Japan has a free press doesn't it?

Major (General) Dick
"I do not believe the United States is well served by a policy that says it is okay to be immoral in any way." -- Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Peter Pace

Indeed, I could not agree more. Immorality like this, this, this, this and this has no place in government policy or action. What kind of immorality were you talking about, General?

"I believe homosexual acts between two individuals are immoral and that we should not condone immoral acts. I do not believe the United States is well served by a policy that says it is okay to be immoral in any way." -- Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Peter Pace.

Just so I have this straight, let me check: imprisoning children indefinitely, abduction and torture (or as they call it rendition and robust interrogation), reading citizens' email and tapping their phones without judicial oversight, bombing civilians, lying to Congress, watching a major American city drown, letting poor kids die from something as simple as a tooth infection, drilling for oil in national parks, punishing the poor while giving more money to the rich -- these things are all okay. But two consenting adults of the same gender doing what consenting adults do is wrong.

Well, at least they aren't litterbugs

Welcome home
Nine-year-old Canadian Kevin Yourdkhani will soon be coming home to Toronto from the Hutto detention facility where he and Iranian parents have been held by U.S. Immigration authorities after they were found to be carrying false passports when their flight from South America to Canada made an unscheduled stop in the United States due to a medical emergency. The nine-year-old and his parents have been incarcerated for a month, but will soon be free - no thanks to Peter McKay or Stephen Harper who declined to intervene. Way to "Stand Up For Canada" guys.
Immigration Minister Diane Finlay has promised to grant the family a reprieve, which will be sufficient for them to get out of jail in the U.S. and come to Canada to try to get residency status. The parents were deported in 2005 after a ten year struggle to be accepted as refugees. They say they were arrested and tortured immediately after their return to Iran. Their son was born in Canada and is a Canadian citizen.

See, they aren't all wankers

A great big Woodshed thanks to Ralph Isenberg for being a real mensch.

Ralph Isenberg, a Dallas real estate developer whose Chinese-born wife has had her own struggles with immigration authorities, was so touched by Kevin's story he contacted Brouwer to offer help, including covering the family's airfare to Toronto.

"This is my apology to the Canadian people, to say sorry for the insensitivity of our government in taking a 9-year-old boy into custody in a maximum-security prison. Can you imagine what permanent damage it can cause to the child?" Isenberg said.

"Last I heard, Canada is one of our best allies, and this is how we treat our best friend from Canada? God only help you if you're the enemy of the U.S."

Blonde hair, brown shirts
Not content with using schoolyard bullying tactics and eliminationist rhetoric against those on the left, Ann "the man" Coulter, is now using goons against other conservatives. Of course while the cable talking heads and major news outlets are dicussing Ann's latest calculated outrage, crap like this is being ignored by most.

"How can you have the mess we have in New Orleans, and not have had deep
investigations of the federal government, the state government, the city
government, and the failure of citizenship in the Ninth Ward, where 22,000
people were so uneducated and so unprepared, they literally couldn't get out of
the way of a hurricane"
Newt Gingrich at CPAC

Coulter knows what she's doing. She grabs the headlines with some hateful bile, her comments get discussed in the mainstream media, conservatives tut-tut about her "outrageous" languague while endorsing her point of view in more carefully couched terminology and presto! the formerly fringe opinion gets lots of mainstream airtime and ink and comes to be considered reasonable.

She also acts as a smokescreen for people like Gingrich. Not matter how offensive his carefully phrased nonsense is, all he has to do is point out that at least he didn't call John Edwards a faggot.

tip of the hat to Lindsey at Majikthise and as always, go read the Galloping Beaver and Orcinus

Presented without comment
I have kids to feed and house payments to make so I'm not going to talk about the Japanese media vis a vis Prime Minister Abe's comments on the WWII Comfort Women/Sex Slaves, but I think it is important that people see this editorial from the largest Japanese newspaper. It is about what I expected. The Galloping Beaver has a nice post on this issue.

Don't mention the war
"I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it"
Continued employment precludes my commenting at length in the manner I would like to, but suffice to say those of you reading the Times, the Post and the Globe and Mail will read much more about these controversies than anyone in Tokyo will.

Gov. Shintaro Ishihara pens script on Kamakazi pilots -- just google his name to see whether this is likely to be a good idea.

Abe says "comfort women" weren't coerced -- Yeah, those 14 year olds were just asking for it, the trollops.

Education minister claims too many human rights are like too much butter and could soil Japanese purity, proposes stressing patriotic education in school system.

War crimes still coming to light

The hills are alive with the sound of merciless imperialistic hegemony

Accidentally, my eye! I always suspected those Swiss were up to something. For centuries they've tried to lull the world into a false sense of security with their fondue, chocolate, cuckoo clocks and watches -- and that damn Julie Andrews movie. And all the while they've been arming terrorists, militants and malcontents around the world with military weapons, acting as banker to the world's dictators and criminals, and worst of all, yodeling.

For centuries,they have provided an army of mercenaries as personal guards to shore up the regime of the world's most notorious religious fanatic, who claims to god's infallible voice on earth and who rules over a theocratic dictatorship. And yet, they never fought the Kaiser or Hitler - they didn't even join the UN until 2002, claiming it might compromise their precious so-called neutrality. Ha! tell that to the freedom loving people of Liechtenstien, you bloodthirsty rosti-eating, tyrolean-hat wearing bastards!

Through stealth and trickery, they've already tried to make Geneva the center of their one-world government. They've successfully infiltrated Canada using a restaurant chain as a front; "Taste it once, love it forever" -- nice way of describing the addictive mind-control drugs they put in that sauce. But now it's all out in the open:

Swiss "accidentally" invade Liechtenstien

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: March 2, 2007

Filed at 11:13 p.m. ET

ZURICH, Switzerland (AP) -- What began as a routine training exercise almost ended in an embarrassing diplomatic incident after a company of Swiss soldiers got lost at night and marched into neighboring Liechtenstein.

According to Swiss daily Blick, the 170 infantry soldiers wandered just over a mile across an unmarked border into the tiny principality early Thursday before realizing their mistake and turning back.

A spokesman for the Swiss army confirmed the story but said that there were unlikely to be any serious repercussions for the mistaken invasion.

Obviously nukes are the only way to deal with this threat, otherwise the next thing you know we'll all be forced to toot alpenhorns, eat musili and speak French, German and Italian. The horror.

Swiftboater on the rocks
Remember back in 2004, when "swiftboating" became shorthand for flinging enough total horseshit that some was bound to stick to a candidate? George W. Bush and his merry crew of slimeballs seem to have forgotten that while the American public has a short memory, John Kerry doesn't. The GOP saw fit to name Sam Fox as Ambassador to Belgium, a man who donated $50,000 to the lying character assassins at Swiftboat Veterans For Truth. What they also forgot is that ambassadors have to be confirmed by the Senate, of which Kerry is still a member.

Oooops.

The testimony is hilarious, with Fox trying to wheedle, flatter and squirm his way through with "the-dog-ate-my-homework" level excuses about giving them the money even though he thinks Kerry is hero because they asked for it and can't actually remember who asked him to do it. Think Jon Lovitz's Tommy Flannigan being cross-examined by Perry Mason.

Best. Lede. Ever.
The only thing missing is a politician and a domestic animal of some sort.
"A jazz musician was injured Friday after jumping from a burning motor home driven by a one-time roller skating stripper from Lodi."

Fresh meat
Welcome to the blogroll Kung Fu Monkey, to whom we have linked before and who has the definitive smackdown of FOX's "comedy" program, "The Half Hour News Hour" -- he links to the opening. I'm not saying I have high standards, but linking to that kinda stuff is where I draw the line.

Jake Gittes: I wouldn't extort a nickel from my worst enemy. That's where I draw the line.
Loach Jr.: Well, I'll tell you, Jake. I knew a whore once. For the right amount of money, she'd piss in a guy's face. But she wouldn't shit on his chest. You see, that's where she drew the line.
Jake Gittes: Well, Junior, all I can say is: I hope she wasn't too much of a disappointment to you.

The Age of Dumb
As ususal, we had CNN on in the newsroom today and I was, as usual, reminded just how crappy the "News Network of Record" usually is. Larry King was on, taking a break from his breathless "coverage" of Anna Nicole Smith and promotion of American Idol to lob softballs to Laura "the Joker" Bush, followed by a short interview with James Cameron about whether researchers (and I use that term in the loosest possible sense) had actually found the actual tomb of the actual Jesus.

This lead into a segment on "Mysteries of the Bible" with former MuchMusic VJ and senior CNN hair model John "JD" Roberts exploring the usual parade of long since debunked religious based scams - the shroud of Turin, the search for Noah's Ark etc etc - while a constant computer graphic scrolled the words "faith" "religion" and "Jesus" in a quasi-subliminal way in the sceen margin.

The sound was off so I can't say for sure that Roberts wasn't ridiculing the notion that Noah Ark was for real, but given the tenor of the discussion on Larry King, in which the only person he really seemed to challenge was the scientist who was rightfully contemptuous of the notion of "proving" it was Jesus and Mary Magdelene in the tomb through DNA testing, and the current fear in the media of offending any nutbar's oh-so-sacred religious sensibilities, I'll go out on a limb and guess that his was not the skeptical point of view. The King show transcript for the Jesus tomb James Cameron segment isn't available yet, but you can find his hard-hitting interview with the first lady here.

However, lest you think it is just something in the water in the USA, CNN brings us this gem from South Korea on how children are learning that Jews control the United States.

I guess my biggest complaint about CNN and the 24-hour cable news horrorshows in general is that they constantly pander to the lowest common denominator (yeah, yeah I know, it's TV -- what the hell did I expect) with mindless celebrity worship, fearmongering sensationalist crime stories, unspeakably shallow analysis of complex issues, the not so subtle reinforcement of the notion that having money makes you smart and important and the non-stop dumbing down of western culture. If the 24-hour cable news station were the irrelevant sideshow they seem to aspire to be, such a lack of serious news content would be one thing, but the problem is that they now set the public agenda in United States and to a lesser extent the Western world as a whole.

As Jon Stewart so famously said to Tucker Carlson and Paul Begalla "Stop, stop, stop, stop hurting America"

Standing up for Canada
Peter McKay is supposed to be hobnobbing with Condi Rice this weekend - do you think this family's case is likely to come up? Or will he be too busy trying to get to first base?

Canadian boy caught in Texas detention

Aircraft's chance landing in U.S. calamitous event for 9-year-old, his Iranian parents

Feb 16, 2007 04:30 AM

Michelle Shephard
Rick Westhead
Toronto Star Staff Reporters

A 9-year-old Canadian boy is in a Texas detention centre after his flight to Toronto made an unscheduled stop and U.S. officials detained his family.

Now the boy's Iranian parents are pleading with Canadian officials to help secure the family's release from the immigration holding facility, which has come under fire for allegedly detaining children in sub-standard conditions.

"All the time he is asking me, `Why am I wearing the uniform? Why I am here?'" the boy's mother said, as she sobbed during a telephone interview from the detention facility yesterday.

"We didn't do nothing. My child is innocent."

The parents, who have no status in Canada, asked that their names not be published out of fear of eventually being returned to Iran, where they say they were previously imprisoned and suffered physical and sexual abuse.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes
Some updating going on in the blogroll and elsewhere. We bid a sorrowful adieu to three fantastic blogs: Michael Berube, Billmon's Whisky Bar and I am Eating My Husband's Soul. All three seem to have retired from the blogosphere and we are all the poorer for it. Prof. Berube, as a prominent academic and semiprofessional pundit, can still be read here and there, and we can only pray that Billmon will come back someday (or that the New York Times will come to its senses and use him to replace the odious David Brooks) ---I don't know what happened to the author of I am Eating My Husband's Soul, but I suspect legal trouble with the Denny's chain could conceivably been involved.
In their place, we bring you Indexed, where you can find math and chart comedy along the lines of the this:



A list of good Japan blogs is in the making and I'm also looking into adding a list of podcasts, so if you have suggestions, by all means leave them in the comments.

Additionally, we have joined Blogshares -- a sort of stock market game where blogs are substituted for companies. Dave Monroe of the must-read Dave's Snarky Northern Canadian Blog (see blogroll) has generously given me his holdings in The Woodshed, which I will be splitting with him as long as he doesn't mind me trying to acquire a few more shares in his joint. So click on the link and come and drive up the share price --- we'll all get rich I tell ya! Fabulously wealthy!

And you just know they voted Republican
Some people really never get past the mental age of three and still think the universe revolves around them. Follow the link and scroll way down to read about people who think the notion that the Earth revolves around the sun, or that it moves at all is based on Jewish Kabbalistic propaganda and responsible for the French Revolution and Communism. No, really.

And for my next trick: loaves and fishes!
by way of Canadian Cynic, just because it gave me a much needed laugh before work