there must be something in the water over there


3 U.N. police die in Kosovo jail shootout


- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Nebojsa Markovic



April 17, 2004 | KOSOVSKA MITROVICA, Serbia-Montenegro (AP) -- A Jordanian policeman opened fire on a group of international U.N. police in Kosovo on Saturday, killing two Americans before he was killed when officers returned fire. Ten American officers and an Austrian were wounded.

The shootout erupted when a group correctional officers -- 21 Americans, two Turks and an Austrian -- were leaving the detention center after a day of training. They came under fire from at least one of a group of Jordanians on guard at the prison, said Neeraj Singh, a U.N. spokesman.

The officers shot back in a gunbattle that lasted about 10 minutes. It was not immediately clear what prompted the Jordanian to shoot.

"As far as we know, there was no communication between the officer who fired and the group of victims," Singh said, adding that investigators looking into the incident were questioning four Jordanian officers.

The Jordanian government expressed regret for the incident in a statement and said it also was investigating the shooting, Jordan's official Petra agency reported. The statement identified the Jordanian officer as Ahmed Mustafa Ibrahim Ali.

U.N. and local police officers sealed off the yard of the detention center, took pictures and marked the bullet cartridges with numbers. The body of a police officer, covered with what looked like a dark blue jacket, lay for hours in the yard of the prison compound.

One witness, a 50-year-old woman who spoke on condition of anonymity, said she heard the shooting, ran to her balcony overlooking the prison yard and saw one officer shooting and another hiding.

Another witness who also gave only his age, 31, said he was at a nearby park when he heard the shooting and later heard American officers yelling, "Drop the gun! Drop the gun!"

"It is absolutely too early to draw any conclusions with regard to what happened there," the head of the U.N. police, Stefan Feller, told Associated Press Television News after visiting the site. He called the shootout a "terrible incident."

Milan Ivanovic, a doctor at the hospital in Kosovska Mitrovica, told AP that five American officers and one Austrian officer were being treated. It was not immediately clear where the other wounded were being treated, or what their nationalities were.

"Their wounds are predominantly in the chest and abdomen," Ivanovic said. "They were caused by firearms and possibly explosive devices."

Kosovska Mitrovica has long been the scene of violence between Serbs and ethnic Albanians, including riots that broke out a month ago, killing 19 and injuring 900.

Ethnic Albanians live on the southern side of the Ibar River in the divided city, and Serbs live in the north. Kosovska Mitrovica is located 25 miles from the provincial capital, Pristina.

Kosovo became a U.N. protectorate in 1999, after NATO launched a 78-day air war to stop Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic from cracking down on ethnic Albanians seeking independence.

There are some 3,500 U.N. police officers serving in Kosovo alongside a 6,000-strong local force.

The top U.N. official in Kosovo, Harri Holkeri, seemed stunned at the shooting incident, which came as the mission is still grappling with last month's violence.

"I am deeply shocked and dismayed at the unfortunate death of dedicated professionals who have come such a great distance to help Kosovo on its road to future," he said.

An unsanitized report from the front lines of Fallujah

can be found here

"Cause something is happening and you don't know what it is....."
Is this a new way for Bob to meet chicks? Was the endless tour not attracting enough nubile groupies? Not that he isn't looking great, but what the sweet and fancy Jesus is Bob doing in an underwear ad? It can't be the money, he hardly needs the exposure-to paraphrase Spike Lee, "Its gotta be the panties"
Picture it: You are Bob Dylan. You've been there, done that, there aren't many peaks left to scale. You're 60 years old and the phone rings and someone says, "Say Bob, if you aren't busy next week, how would you like to hang out in Venice with a bunch of underwear models? We'll spring for the Dom Perignon and cocaine, just bring your cowboy hat and trim your mustache before you come. Oh, and we'll pay you a minimum of six figures and sell some records for you." Who would say no?



Tangled Up in Boobs
What's Bob Dylan doing in a Victoria's Secret ad?
By Seth Stevenson/Slate
Posted Monday, April 12, 2004, at 9:39 AM PT

The spot: A well-formed young woman cavorts through a palazzo, wearing nothing but heels, lingerie, and a pair of outsized, feathery wings. At intervals, we cut to a shot of some sort of death's-head demon, who looks poised to bite into the pretty youth's skull, perhaps to suck on the marrow of her soul and prolong his undead half-life. Wait … stand by … I'm now being told that this creature is in fact Bob Dylan. (Click here to see the ad.)When Bob Dylan shows up in a Victoria's Secret commercial, it immediately triggers three questions. The first is: Am I hallucinating? Seriously, I think I'm hallucinating—can you see Bob Dylan, and did you eat the same shrimp I ate? The second is: Why on earth would Bob Dylan do this? And the third, and perhaps most puzzling, is: Why on earth would Victoria's Secret do this?

Moving past the first line of inquiry, which likely won't get us very far, let's ask ourselves why Bob Dylan, respected countercultural artist, would choose to sell panties. I think there are a few possible motives. The first is, of course, money. This seemed to be the sole motive when, several years ago, Dylan sold the Bank of Montreal the right to use "The Times They Are a-Changin'" in an ad. But the Vicky's Secret sellout feels different, in part because Dylan actually appears in the commercial.

Which brings me to the second possible motive: pure whimsy. He may just think it's funny to be in an underwear ad and that flying to Venice to leer at models could make for a diverting weekend. (I also wouldn't totally discount the idea that he's playing a sly, decades-in-the-making practical joke. Newspaper reports have noted that in 1965, when asked what might tempt him to sell out, Dylan said, "Ladies undergarments.")

But I think the most likely motive for Dylan is exposure. It's a real struggle for older rockers to remind the world that they still exist. Their music's not played on the radio, and their videos (if they even make them) aren't in heavy rotation on VH1. Thus you see the Jaguar ads with Sting, or the MCI ads with James Taylor and Michael McDonald—all of them prominently featuring the artist's song. It's essentially a way to put a video on the major networks, where an older audience might see it. Yes, in exchange for publicizing their art they sacrifice some integrity, but this is basically an understandable tradeoff. And Dylan even gets, in the terms of his deal, a mix CD of his songs sold at Victoria's Secret stores.

So, it makes some sense for Bob. But what about Vicky? Why would a brand that's about sexiness, youth, and glamour want any connection at all with a decrepit, sixtysomething folksinger? The answer, my friend, is totally unclear. The answer is totally unclear.

Even if Victoria's Secret hopes to bring in more boomer women, do those women want their underwear to exude the spirit and essence of Bob Dylan? Or, conversely, is Bob Dylan the sort of man they're hoping to attract? Even if you're of the belief that men frequently shop at VS for their ladies, I still don't see the appeal of this ad. I, for instance, am a man, and I can assure you that Bob Dylan is not what I'm looking for in a woman's undergarment. (And if I found him there—man, would that be disturbing.)

Victoria's Secret wouldn't return my calls, but media reports say the idea of putting Dylan's face in the ad (they'd been using his song—"Love Sick"—in ads for the past year or so) came straight from corporate chief Les Wexner. To the company's surprise, Dylan accepted their offer. It's at this point that someone at Victoria's Secret should have stopped the madness. Just because you can hire Bob Dylan as the figurehead for your lingerie line, doesn't mean you should. Perhaps no one was willing to say no to the big boss, or perhaps they fully expected Dylan to say no. Joke's on them.

'Bad Business' a good read

Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer


Bad Business
By Robert B. Parker
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 320 pp, 24.95 dollars


Readers still don't know his first name, but after 29 books we know just about everything else we need to know about Robert B. Parker's private eye hero Spenser.

The latest installment in the Spenser saga, Bad Business, sees the Boston sleuth take on wife-swapping corporate scammers. He is aided, as usual, by his psychologist soul mate Susan Silverman; Hawk, the world's most honorable thug; and the usual cast of trustworthy cops, charming criminal defense lawyers and friendly hit men.

Approached by the annoying Marlene Rowley to get the goods on her cheating executive husband Trent, Spenser keeps tripping over other private eyes tailing everyone connected to the Rowleys and Trent's energy trading firm, Kinergy. When Trent is murdered at his desk, Spenser suspects more than infidelity is involved.

While Parker is very good at painting detailed portraits of even the most minor characters, they tend to be strictly friends or enemies. Those who are Spenser's friends are willing to do almost anything for him and rarely have anything but the most minor of character flaws or weaknesses. The criminal careers of Hawk and hit man Vinnie Morris seem like minor eccentricities, while the vulgar yuppies central to the case seem like the worst people in the world every time they open their mouths.

The humor of Spenser's smart-aleck streak and his banter with Hawk have always helped put the series a cut above the average hard-boiled detective hero, and Parker manages enough levity to keep the story entertaining.

Sadly, after a long run of Spenser books, Parker seems to be doing a lot of this by rote. We have the stock scenes of Spenser with Susan, Spenser being romantic yet manly and Susan drinking her glass of wine a milliliter at a time while delivering a detailed psychological analysis of all the players in the case, including Spenser. After using such set pieces in almost every Spenser novel, they begin to have the ring of formula.

Despite this, Parker continues to demonstrate his gift for creating crackling dialog and believable characters. He captures the archetype of the corporate good-ol'-boy in Kinergy CEO Bob Cooper and the radio talk show host and "corporate pimp" Darrin O'Mara is superbly smarmy and fluent in psychobabble.

While action takes a back seat to investigation this time around, Bad Business is still among the better installments in the series

Hey Jesus, you got some 'splaining to do!
So the whole world is at war with Al-Quaida because they are violent religious fanatics, isn't there something in the bible about letting "he who is without sin cast the first stone?"

Murder suspect plucks out own eye in jail

April 6, 2004 | SHERMAN, Texas (AP) -- A jailed man accused of killing and cutting out the hearts of his son, estranged wife and her daughter plucked out his own eye and then quoted from the Bible, officials said Tuesday.
Andre L. Thomas was in a county jail cell Friday night when he tore his eye out of its socket with his hands, said Grayson County Sheriff Keith Gary.
Thomas, 21, then quoted the verse Mark 9:47: "And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell."
Thomas was taken to a hospital and the eyeball was put on ice, but it could not be reattached. He is now being held in restraints at the jail, the sheriff said.
Thomas is accused in the March 26 stabbing deaths of his 4-year-old son, his 20-year-old estranged wife and her 1-year-old daughter. All the victims' hearts were cut out; two were found at Andre Thomas' house. He turned himself in and was charged with one count of capital murder.
A judge ruled Monday that Thomas will be evaluated by a mental health professional.



Mother who stoned sons to death acquitted
Jury determines she didn't know right from wrong

Updated: 10:45 p.m. ET April 03, 2004TYLER, Texas - A woman who claimed God ordered her to bash in the heads of her sons was acquitted of all charges by reason of insanity Saturday after a jury determined she did not know right from wrong during the killings.

A jury found that Deanna Laney was legally insane May 9 when she killed her two older sons, ages 6 and 8, in the front yard and left the youngest, now 2, maimed in his crib.

Laney, 39, would have received an automatic life sentence had she been convicted of capital murder.

Laney broke into tears as the verdict was read. Her husband, Keith Laney, sat solemnly with his head down. A few jurors cried and struggled to maintain their composure.

State law allows Laney to be committed to a maximum security state hospital. Medical evaluations will dictate when she will be released. She will remain at the Smith County Jail until a hearing regarding her transfer.

Defense attorney Tonda Curry said the verdict doesn’t mean Laney escaped punishment.

“Now and for the rest of her life, the punishment and torment that’s going on in her own head is more significant and more damaging to her than anything the criminal justice system could have done, other than death,” Curry said.

All five mental health experts consulted in the case, including two for the prosecution and one for the judge, concluded that a severe mental illness caused Laney to have psychotic delusions that rendered her incapable of knowing right from wrong during the killings — the standard in Texas for insanity.

Smith County District Attorney Matt Bingham said had no regrets about taking the case to trial.

“This is a case that the citizens of this county needed to make the decision on,” he said.

Jurors deliberated about seven hours before reaching their verdict in the deaths of 8-year-old Joshua and 6-year-old Luke, and the beating of Aaron.

Defense attorneys argued that insanity was the only reason why a deeply religious mother who homeschooled her children would kill two of them and maim another without so much as a tear.

“There was no crying,” Curry said. “She was insane. There is no other answer.”

Psychiatrists testified that Laney believed she was divinely chosen by God — just as Mary was chosen to bear Christ — to kill her children as a test of faith and then serve as a witness after the world ended. In a videotape played at her trial, Laney said she saw her youngest son play with a spear, hold a rock and squeeze a frog, and took them all as signs from God that she should kill her children.

In closing arguments earlier Saturday, prosecutors portrayed the killings last Mother’s Day weekend as deceptively planned and coldly executed.

“It was graphic, it was horrific and it was brutal,” Bingham told the jury.

Bingham pounded his fist in his hand as he recounted Joshua’s killing: “He got strike after strike after strike on his head to the point that his brains were coming out of his head like liquid.”

Prosecutors said that even if Laney believed she was doing right by God, she had to have known she was doing wrong by state law. Her first call, they pointed out, was to 911 to summon authorities.

The 911 tape was among the evidence jurors reviewed during deliberations. They also went over psychiatric testimony to resolve a disagreement over why Deanna Laney stopped beating Aaron, then 14 months old.

Psychiatrists testified that Laney couldn’t finish killing the baby, and that she told God, “You’re just going to have to do the rest.” Prosecutors said that action indicated Laney knew right from wrong and that if she chose to disobey God’s orders by not killing Aaron, she could have disobeyed his orders to kill the other two.

Bingham said Aaron, who lives with his father, suffered permanent injuries in the attack.

As if we needed further proof that the universe has a sense of humour


Brawl breaks out at anger management assembly
WOODLAWN, Maryland (AP) -- A brawl broke out during an anger management assembly at a suburban high school.

Two people were arrested and 11 students were suspended after a shoving match escalated into a melee during Thursday's assembly.

Authorities said a confrontation between a student's mother and a group of girls who had been bothering her daughter turned into a shouting match, and led to pushing and hitting, before the crowd of 750 students erupted into "chaos," said C. Anthony Thompson, principal of Woodlawn High School.

The melee began as students on stage acted out peaceful ways to resolve conflict during the assembly was organized by Sheppard Pratt Health System.

Muscleman governor about to have ass put in sling

A story from the Guardian about the man Doonesbury calls the "Gropenfurher"

"In Ms Richardson's original interview with The Sun about the alleged groping incident, she said: "He kept saying how fantastic I looked and staring at my boobs. When I went to shake his hand he pulled me on to his knee, saying, 'I really want to know if your breasts are real'. I told him they are an F-cup. Before I knew what was happening he circled my nipple with his finger and gave it a squeeze. He then said, 'Yeah, they are real.' I stood up and said, 'You're making me nervous'. He told me not to be nervous and pulled me back on his knee. I said, 'Can I go, please?' He said, 'Yeah', and patted my bum as I went off."

Ah yes, a class act that Arnie.

:: Thursday, April 01, 2004 ::

30th Robert Johnson recording found

SAN ANTONIO, Texas, NOTA Press Agency (April 1)?In what blues scholars and record collectors are hailing as the fmd of the century, a female San Antonian construction worker has announced that she has found a hitherto unknown Robert Johnson master labelled "Fool For You."

Johnson, regarded as the most influetial Delta bluesman in history, died in 1938, aged 27, leaving behind a slim legacy of 29 recordings. Leastwise, that is what has always been believed until ThursdaY's shock announcement.

Abril Inocente, 33, said she came across a metal cannister in a building being demolished next to the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, in which Johnson had his first recording session, during which he recorded 16 of what would become some of the most influential recordings in history.

Johnson was born in Hazelhurst, Miss., on May 8,1911. In performance, Johnson played his own songs as well as those of other bluesmen and generally popular music by performers such as Bing Crosby. When he made up his mind to record, in 1936, he approached H. C. Speirs, a white record store owner in Jackson, Miss.

Speirs sent Johnson to Ernie Oertle, an American Record Company scout. Oertle and Johnson went to San Antonio on Nov. 23, 1936.

On Monday, Nov. 23, Johnson recorded eight songs: "Kindhearted Woman Blues," "I Believe I'll dust My Broom," "Sweet Home Chicago," "Ramblin'on My Mind," "When You Got a Good Friend," "Come on in My Kitchen," "Terraplane Blues," and "Phonograph Blues." Also recording in the makeshift studio that day were Hermanas Barraza and a western vocal group called The Chuck Wagon Gang.

Later that night, Johnson apparently ran into trouble somewhere in downtown San Antonio. No one knows what happened, but as the story goes, Law had to bail him out of jail during his stay in San Antonio, and it may have been that Wednesday.

On the following day, Thanksgiving, Johnson returned to the studio, but for some unknown reason recorded only one song: "32:20 Blues." His voice sounds tired on the recording, perhaps because of little sleep he had gotten behind the bars of the Bexar County cooler.

He returned on Friday morning, apparently refreshed, and recorded "They're Red Hot," "Dead Shrimp Blues," "Cross Road Blues," "Walkin' Blues," "Last Fair Deal Gone Down," "Preachin' Blues (Up Jumped the Devil)," and "If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day."

Johnson returned to recording in Jume of 1937, this time in Dallas. He did two takes each of "Hellhound On My Trail," "Little Queen of Spades," "Malted Milk," "Drunken Hearted Man," "Me and the Devil Blues," "Stop Breakin' Down Blues," 'Y raveling Riverside Blues," and "Honeymoon Blues," and three takes of "Milkcow's Calf Blues," and four takes of "Love in Vain."

For years, these have been believed to be Johnson's total volume of recodings, altough rumours of a missing Johnson master have circulated for years, but music historians have dismissed them as wishful thinking.

"This certainkly changes our view of that," musicologist Tother Lomax said.

"I didn't know what it was at first," Inocente said. "But after I brushed the dust of the metal cannister, I saw a handwritten label saying: R. Johnson 'Fool for You'."

"Opening it up, I saw what looked like a large wheel of black cheese with mold on it," Inocente added.

Recordings of the era were recorded on large wax masters, that fit the description given, according to Parlaphone Record sound engineer Mizzen Shellac.

Johnson died after being poisoned by a jealous husband at a juke joint on Aug. 13, 1938, in Three Forks, just outside Greemwood, Miss., at which the bluesman had been playing.

Would you both shut up and think?

Book review from The Daily Yomiuri, 

Kevin Wood Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

Dude, Where's My Country?
By Michael Moore
Warner Books, 249 pp, 24.95 dollars

===

Shut Up & Sing: How Elites from Hollywood, Politics, and the UN Are Subverting America
By Laura Ingraham
Regnery Publishing, 342 pp, 27.95 dollars


Liberal satirist and documentarian Michael Moore's Dude, Where's My Country? and conservative talk radio attack blonde Laura Ingraham's Shut Up & Sing are the literary equivalent of the sort of smug, self-satisfied invective and creative misinterpretation of the facts one would be disappointed to hear in a "did not!--did too!" argument between 7-year-olds. Taken together they are a one-two punch that make the reader long for the gentlemanly rhetoric and Wildean wit of pro wrestlers' pre-bout trash talk.

Ingraham graduated from the Ivy League bastion of Dartmouth, worked as a speechwriter in the final years of the administration of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan and as law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, became a defense attorney for white-collar criminals and finally a political commentator for NBC. She currently hosts a popular syndicated radio talk show in the United States.

Michael Moore, a college dropout, magazine editor, writer and activist, made his first film,"Roger and Me" (1989) about his unsuccessful efforts to confront General Motors Chairman Roger Smith. In terms of objective journalism, it was one-sided, shallow, manipulative and unfair. As a satirical documentary, it was brilliantly funny, razor sharp and original. It won numerous awards and its rags-to-riches success story (Moore maxed out numerous credit cards and even organized bingo games to raise the money needed to make the film) made the director a progressive populist hero to many and launched his career as a professional gadfly.

"Roger and Me" and the recent Oscar-winner "Bowling for Columbine" are Moore at his funniest--shining his klieg lights on absurdity and hypocrisy in U.S. society by playing the bewildered everyman and bushwhacking corporate sleazeballs, gun nuts and assorted conservative ne'er-do-wells.

Dude is Moore preaching to the choir. He lists all the faults, real and imagined, of the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush in an outraged rush. Unsurprisingly, Moore does not like or trust Bush, and considers him a lying weasel and corporate shill. Moore goes on to illustrate why he thinks this by quoting Bush and his inner circle and pointing to his well-known connections to the oil industry. Its all meticulously footnoted, but there is nothing new or especially interesting here, just Moore working himself into a frenzy of righteous indignation.

Humor, normally Moore's strong suit, gets short shrift, though his chapter on "How to Talk to Your Conservative Brother-in-Law" has a few good laughs and some sensible arguments and suggestions for helping convert orthodox Republicans back to the middle of the road. More strained however are his rhetorical questions for "George of Arabia" and his hinting at some sort of dark conspiracy between the Bush and bin Laden families.

Moore would be better advised to stick to comedy and leave the journalistic heavy lifting to guys like Greg Palast (The Best Democracy Money Can Buy), who are better equipped to handle it.

He makes a number of factual errors regarding the departure of bin Laden family members from the United States following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, U.S. aid to the Taliban, and the long since debunked myth about Wesley Clark being asked by the White House to use his position as a commentator on CNN to connect former Iraqi President Saddam Hussien to the 9/11 attacks.

While Moore is no poet and might make a better comedian than a journalist, Laura Ingraham makes him look like Edward R. Murrow, H. L. Mencken and Shakespeare rolled into one. Shut Up & Sing: How Elites from Hollywood, Politics and the UN Are Subverting America is not a book, but 339 pages of incoherent paranoid ranting between hard covers.

Like most of her U.S. talk radio siblings, Ingraham is outraged about just about everything. In this instance she is writing to warn us all of a terrifying threat to the United States: celebrities. Ingraham says that the elites that make up the entertainment industry, the "ivory tower" of academe, the business world, the media, politics and international organization are poised to destroy the United States. Aiding them are miscellaneous elites including, but not limited to: "trial lawyers, multiculturalists, God-haters, and the race-relations mafia," college-educated professionals, feminists, city dwellers--essentially everyone but the banjo-playing inbred hillbilly kid in Deliverance. It's surprising she leaves the Freemasons, the Trilateral Commission and the Elders of Zion off the list.

"Elites are defined not so much by class or wealth or position as they are by a general outlook. Their core belief--embraced with a fervor that does not allow for rational debate--is that they are superior to We the People. They know better."

So does Ingraham. She tells us exactly how all elites think: "They hate America" and "They think we're stupid."

Ingraham takes Bush's "You're either with us or with the terrorists" rhetorical excess a step further--you are either with her or you probably have fangs, three eyes and eat babies

As opposed to Moore's relatively careful footnoting, Ingraham rarely backs up her claims with any sort of evidence or logic, instead engaging in obvious sophistry: For example, she claims H.G. Wells believed patriotism and religious belief caused war and was a "burning" anti-Semite and cites a passage from George Bernard Shaw that appears to favor scientific extermination of "the sort of people who do not fit in," and then goes on to try to tar all liberal intellectuals with the same brush.

Particular venom is reserved for entertainers who dare to comment on politics, especially Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon and Barbara Striesand--who should "shut up and sing." Most of a chapter is taken up attacking Michael Moore for making money and being fat. Moore may occasionally try to make two and two add up to five, but Ingraham seems more inclined to insist two is a million and that anyone who adds two and two and gets four is an "elite" who thinks they are smarter than everyone else.

A similar mixture of false logic, specious argument and misinformation that would make Joseph Goebbels turn green with envy is used to attack anyone opposing the mixing of church and state as being on a crusade against religion, and to prove that "Antiwar rallies are really hate rallies. Hate-America rallies, that is." Ingraham attacks the United Nations for trying to "control America" and opposing capital punishment; nongovernmental organizations for being "undemocratic"; Europe and especially France for disliking Bush.

It seems like Ingraham made a bet with fellow conservative pin-up and talk show rottweiller Ann Coulter (Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism) to see who could make the most outrageous claims and still get into print. So far it's a close race.

Dude may not be Moore's best effort, but its main sin is not being funny enough. Ingraham's poisonous diatribe makes it look like Pulitzer material. Shut Up & Sing is the kind of book critics read so that you won't have to.





Copyright 2004 The Yomiuri Shimbun

And you thought your high school was run by Nazis...

"Sideways ballcap lands youth in jail"

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0313marlon13.html

A nice article on whisky tasting can be found at Slate today

Too much chatter means too little thought, Oe says

Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

While Japanese cultural exports in the form of pop music, manga and anime may be gaining ground abroad, novelist and Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe says Japan's cultural power is waning as true critical thought drowns in a sea of polite conversation.

Oe argued in a March 5 speech in English at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan in Yurakucho, Tokyo, that the relentless growth in the publication of interviews, panel discussions and collections of speeches threatens to supplant written intellectual discourse and is leading to the cultural impoverishment of Japan.

A prolific novelist and noted activist, Oe won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994 and is widely considered to be one of the leading intellectual figures in the nation.

In his speech, Oe referred to the work of U.S. scholars Edward Said and Masao Miyoshi in the early 1990s, when the two theorized that while bubble-era Japan was a dominant economic power, the nation's contemporary verbal culture was "austere, even impoverished, dominated by talk shows, comic books and relentless conferences and panel discussions."

Oe commented that while Japan's economic fortunes had since ebbed, Said and Miyoshi's comments on the state of the nation's culture were an accurate reflection on the present situation. He added that the current recession is casting a further shadow as companies cut back spending on cultural activities.

Japan, more than other nations, faces a crisis of written culture due to the relentless publication of ideas presented in a conversational mode. This conversational style of communication, which seeks compromise, conformity and consensus, is replacing real intellectual critical discourse, Oe said. He pointed out that there are no longer any national magazines catering to an intellectual audience, and that the remaining outlet for criticism--the newspaper book review--has become shorter and seems to include less and less analysis of theme, methodology and style.

"Japanese writing style has been undergoing a radical change lately, and whether the change is a cause or an effect, conversationalism is the dominant mode," Oe said. Where once writers felt the need to back up their assertions with facts and logical argument, he said, conversational writing assumes certain level of persuasive consensus. When confronted with disagreement in a conversation, one can apologize or ignore it, said Oe.

The superficiality and celebrity culture engendered by this conversationalism in publishing is beginning to infect other areas of culture and even politics, Oe contended, citing the "frantic support" enjoyed by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi when he first took office on the basis of structural reform slogans that offered little substance.

The result of the "washing away" of Japan's intellectuals by this flood of conversation is that Japanese no longer give serious thought to how the world should be or to the creation of ideas. The kind of serious discourse that dominated Japanese intellectual life in the immediate postwar period has disappeared, Oe said, and it may never return.

Japan today is dependent on the West for cultural input, soaking up Western culture, but exerting little influence in return, he said. Japanese pop culture may be a leading export commodity, but Pokemon and Hikaru Utada are unlikely to change the way people around the world think, in the way Oe said critics such as Said and Noam Chomsky have.

Oe said the nation must nurture an intellectual leadership and an audience that will not circumvent the logicality of written discourse, if the current situation is to be rectified.





Copyright 2004 The Yomiuri Shimbun

In your ear - Norah Jones, Brad Mehldau Trio

IN YOUR EAR


Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer


Norah Jones
Feels Like Home
Toshiba EMI, 2,427 yen


How do you follow up a debut album that wins eight Grammy awards and sells 5.1 million copies? Do you try to catch lightning in a bottle a second time or move in a different direction to avoid comparisons with the previous platinum standard?

With her sophomore effort, Feels Like Home, Norah Jones has done a bit of both.

All the things that made Come Away With Me a massive hit are here: The same simple, sparse, mid-tempo arrangements, warm jazz-inflected vocals, and relaxed, romantic atmosphere inform every track. While her debut album leaned heavily toward light jazz while giving a nod to folk and country with songs like "Lonestar" and Hank Williams' "Cold Cold Heart," Feels Like Home plants a foot firmly in the country while still demonstrating jazzy roots.

It's debatable whether an album that includes guest appearances by Dolly Parton and The Band's Levon Helm and Garth Hudson can really be called jazz, but what else can you call a cover of Duke Ellington's "Melancholia" (with lyrics added by Jones to become the 2 a.m. heartache torch song "Don't Miss You At All")?

If we reject such artificial pigeonholing in favor of Louis Armstrong's maxim that there are only two kinds of music: good and bad, Feels Like Home must unequivocally be considered good.

Top-notch guitar work by Adam Levy and Kevin Breit give a rootsy feel to tunes like "Toes" and "In the Morning," with Jones' piano spotlighted on "Carnival Town." Jones and her bandmates have clearly grown more confident as songwriters--of the 14 tracks on the album she had a hand in five and six were written by members of her band. Their compositions hold their own against the aforementioned Ellington adaptation, a catchy cover of Tom Waits' "The Long Way Home," and a country-blues version of Townes Van Zandt's "Be Here To Love Me."

This is truly adult contemporary music--not the tuneless schlock usually associated with the term. It has none of the tawdry, tacky, MTV-driven, image-making fluff and in-your-face attitude normally associated with the latest in pop music. It is tasteful, timeless, modern and mature music by and for grown-ups.

Brad Mehldau Trio
Anything Goes
Warner Music Japan, 2,520 yen


Anything Goes, a collection of straight-ahead instrumental jazz covers by the Brad Mehldau Trio--pianist Brad Mehldau, bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jorge Rossy--offers few surprises and breaks little new ground, but delivers 10 tracks of virtuoso playing by a trio so tightly coordinated they must be reading each others minds.

Mehldau is an outstanding technical player with a fast, fluid Charlie Parker-like ability to play twice as many notes as anyone else while never sounding busy.

The songs are mostly standards like the Cole Porter title track with a few curveballs --Radiohead's "Everything in Its Right Place" and a wonderfully nostalgic version of Paul Simon's "Still Crazy After All These Years"--thrown in for variety.

Slower ballads such as Hoagy Carmichael's "The Nearness of You" counterbalance the barely contained exuberance of Thelonius Monk's "Skippy." The angular, outside, bop arrangement of Harold Arlen's "Get Happy" still manages to swing and the Charlie Chaplin chestnut "Smile" is rescued from sentimentality with Grenadier taking the melody line on bass while Mehldau holds down the bottom end with his left hand

Musical ideology
Here's an interesting and thoughtful article from jazz pianist Brad Mehldau on jazz politics and ways of looking at music. See this space in a few days (or the Daily Yomiuri on Thursday) for my review of his latest album.


from Jazz Times Magazine December 2003

Ideology, Burgers and Beer

When I was first living in New York in 1989, a bunch of us musicians used to head over to the Corner Bistro in the West Village after the gig around 2:00 AM for their character-building half-pound burger and draft beer, accompanied to music from one of the best jazz jukeboxes in Manhattan. I think it was the drummer Joe Farnsworth who thought up a ridiculous but irresistible kind of word game that we often played there. The idea was to think of pairs of jazz musicians throughout history with the same first name or last name, pit them against each other, and then pick the greater.

Around the table we would go, taking turns as one person would formulate a pair, and then the rest of us would choose our favorite. Examples would be: Elvin Jones or Joe Jones? Wynton Kelly or Wynton Marsalis? Paul Chambers or Paul Gonsalves? (There was one night when this doubled as a drinking game. The rest of the table had to go bottoms up if someone could think up an adjacent last-name/first name two-gender pair —Shirley Scott or Scott Henderson?) As the night wore on and the dollar-drafts kept flowing, the game usually degenerated into random pairings that spread out into all realms of culture — Greg Brady or Greg Osby? Lonnie Plexico or Lonnie Anderson? Keith Jarrett or Keith Moon? Then it became a typical Gen-X affair, and we got a kick out of yoking the jazz musicians and pop-culture figures together as an end in itself.

The game had a certain purity precisely because of its inanity. How could you choose one person over another in an arbitrary pair like that? It was impossible! Joe was always there to remind us, though, of the simple conditions of the game: “You have to choose one.” Another rule that was almost always enforced: After you make your choice, own it with no apologies or explanations. Likewise, no one else was allowed to comment on your pick any more than a monosyllabic groan or grunt. It was onto the next person immediately. The effect was sublimely ridiculous – a rapid-fire barrage of written-in-stone value judgments against the absurd backdrop of matching first and last names.

The subtext of the game was that making comparative value judgments always smacks a little of the absurd. “Player X is more important in jazz history than Player Y,” is a ‘substantive’ statement, following legal and political commentator Stanley Fish’s gloss on that word. This kind of statement implies that further debate is redundant and worthless, although, alas, not everyone will grasp that implication. A real-world analogous statement is, “Every unborn child should have the right to life.” Fish’s point is that you don’t waste your time trying to argue against this kind of belief or reach a consensus with the person voicing it. If you disagree, your best tactic is to put your own view forward just as unapologetically, and lobby even stronger for its application.

How analogous are political and aesthetic substantive claims? In our game, we were poking fun at the overblown seriousness that surrounds aesthetic judgments. We were being contemptuous of the political tone of these ‘who’s the greatest in the history of jazz’ discussions. Why all the gravity? You’d get someone proclaiming that Wes was the end-all on guitar, everything after him was shite, and these new players today were desecrating the legacy of jazz guitar. It wasn’t so much the statement itself; it was the tone —all the tragic resignation of a Trotskyite who saw his original dream go up in smoke. I mean, we’re not talking serious world affairs that will affect humanity here. It’s just music! Right?

On one particular night, though, we fell into one of those dead-end ‘who’s better’ discussions. Lapsing into grave, weighty tones, we became the butt of our own joke. The pair in question was Sonny Rollins/Sonny Stitt. It was a perfect specimen of the game - apples and oranges, completely useless and ridiculous to pick one over the other. Regardless, the majority of the group went with Rollins, but a few chose Stitt. This was one of the few instances where we broke our no-explanations rule. A long, protracted discussion followed over just what the criterion for everyone’s choice was. My camp maintained that Rollins beat out Stitt. Undoubtedly, he’s one of the greatest improvisers that jazz has ever had. His winning greatness for us, though, was his double attribute: Not only are his improvisations so inspired, but Rollins’ solos often have a compositional logic that compels you to listen in a different manner. He pioneered that approach on the classic ‘Blue Seven’ from ‘Saxophone Colosssus’. There’s an organic way in which the motifs generate themselves out of each other. His opening melody drifts seamlessly into the solo; it’s all one large idea. Rollins wasn’t just blowing an inspired improvisation. He was building an edifice, erecting something that would stay standing through time because of the internal logic holding it together. To cement our argument in favor of Rollins, we dropped the big ‘P’ word: Profound.

The other guys maintained that Stitt was the greater because he was just a player — pure, unadorned great bop. As the discussion went on, it turned out that the whole ‘compositional’ approach, represented by a host of icons including Monk himself, lacked greatness for these guys. My camp was outraged, seething. What the heck did they mean? We had a strange feeling of disorientation, like on a Twilight Zone episode — were they the same musicians we had just been gigging with? Who were they, if they couldn’t get with Monk? Or maybe they were just trying to be provocative.

We quit the name game at that point and got all serious. The binary here was ‘more compositional player’ vs. ‘just a blower’. Example: Monk vs. Bud? Their answer unflinchingly: “Bud.” Note that the word ‘just’ was not pejorative for them. On the contrary, to be just a blower, albeit on an inspired level, was what jazz was all about.

Bird personified that. Those solos on live records like ‘Bird With The Herd’, when he sat in with the Woody Herman Band, or a record like ‘One Night in Washington’, are dangerously, menacingly good. ‘Just blowing’ was what made jazz more punk than any punk rock band could ever be. To be able to blow a solo like Bird — profound, gripping, full of urgency and beautiful mortality — but to do so, like him, with the casual ease of someone standing at a bus stop — well, now that was something that might be called ‘great’.

That ease couldn’t be hindered by compositional elements, because ‘composition’, was, in their line of argument, anathema to jazz. It was everything that Bird was escaping from; it was what made his music so free and joyous. A Bird head like ‘Anthropology’ was something that came more out of his improvisations. It was pasted together almost as an afterthought from the most inspired bits of his solos.

Building too much compositional logic into your solo was a flaw for the Stitt camp — an affectation that got in the way of the flow. It implied pretentiousness and an overly apparent intellectualism that wore thin and didn’t stand the test of repeated listening. Bop was Mecca for the Stitt camp, and Bird was the prophet. Their favorites followed in his footsteps through the hard-bop era: noble, unaffected players who were usually more obscure, like Tina Brooks, Ernie Henry or Bill Hardman.

Monk’s improvisations were informed by his compositions; Bird’s compositions were informed by his improvisations. In that assessment, they couldn’t be more opposite, and lumping Monk in willy-nilly with a ‘be-bop revolution’ is misleading to a point. He has a very different kind of genius than Bird – more a composer’s genius. One might put him in a lineage that includes Duke Ellington.

That would also be limiting, though. Monk, like Sonny Rollins, was also an incredible improviser who soloed with that same ‘waiting at the bus stop’ nonchalant greatness as Bird. His solo on ‘I Mean You’ may refer to the melody of the song, take it apart, and reconstruct it. But that was within the context of an improvisation, one that had the same killer casual profundity of Bird. Monk was certainly not getting caught in the net of his own compositional logic; he was just being a genius.

These guys were stubborn, though, and wouldn’t back down; neither would we. We finally sulkily ‘agreed to disagree’. A distinctly ideological strain had infected the discussion, killing our buzz.

In politics, ideology is dangerous – from 20th Century examples down to the present ‘Washington Consensus’. Ideology pastes what appears to be a thought-out argument onto a substantive claim that is more animalistic than logical in nature: “Because of facts A, B, and C, we should all band together in a tribe and demonize those other people.” Ideology uses logic selectively, in a sneaky, backhanded manner. Its aim is that we actually suspend our sense of logic and, with it, our moral radar. Then we’ll be in mute complicity with what’s to come.

Musical ideology is similar in that it asks us to suspend our aesthetic judgments and acquiesce to its claims. It collects facts and interprets them broadly in the same manner: “You cannot dig this music as much as that music because…” Why do we often identify practitioners of jazz ideology as conservative? It’s because of the parental, Old Testament ring to their utterances. Those utterances are analogous to the quasi-religious words of the Bush administration, spoken to us as if we are children who still believe in Santa Claus. Because of the specious, ideological tone, though, we cannot trust this parent and do not look up to it. We don’t like being told what to enjoy musically anymore than we like being told what constitutes being patriotic.

There’s another kind of musical ideology, though, that’s more self-imposed and private. I can identify it in myself, although it’s hidden under a veneer of it’s-all-goodism. I think many of us carry around some kind of ideology about jazz to varying degrees, because its marginalized status in American music stokes our partisan fury that much more. (See: Ken Burns documentary.) This kind of ideology bothers me because it’s intractable. It hasn’t been imposed on me by some outside authority; it’s my own personal dogma. Is it perhaps steering my whole aesthetic sense covertly, calling the shots from behind a curtain in the shadows of my Id?

For instance: Is my lack of enjoyment of most of what’s called pop music these days simply because it sucks, or is it because I’m unwittingly locked in the grips of a musical elitist ideology? Maybe I’m missing something vital; maybe I’ve become the proverbial old fart! Where does the ideological baggage stop and the real pleasure begin? Is there a hard line between the two, or are they all mixed up in each other? Perhaps they’re not entirely severable.

I have music that I love, and ideology is a weapon that I might use to defend and argue my love, which is tempting but absurd. After all, how do you defend a gut level emotion? What’s more, why would you? Kierkegaard writes wisely, “To defend something is to disparage it.” It’s the mantra of the high road. If you love something, you should be all quiet and spiritual about it, not needing to justify it, right? Wrong! How could we survive without the bitchy, bickering fun of polemics?

Maybe we get defensive over our various musical loves because they define who we are. Love is exclusionary. You can’t love everything, all the time. That goes for a critic or layman, and also for musicians. When you build your identity as a player, you do so in part by excluding a bunch of other identities, at least temporarily. That process of exclusion is determined by the gut, not the intellect. It’s tied up in the murky morass of subjectivity – early musical and non-musical experiences, innate personality traits, etc…

We laid that process of exclusion bare as we played the name-game. The arbitrary humor of the game was a salve, a way of keeping our own self-irony lest we lapse into ideology like we did that one night. At the end of the day, we all dug Sonny Stitt and Sonny Rollins both. It was a name pair that just shouldn’t have been uttered in the first place.

Whatever the case, I’ve discovered something great about listening to music and playing it. You may necessarily exclude great chunks of music in the process of building up your aesthetic. You can always surprise yourself later on, though, when music that you weren’t initially ready for reveals itself to you in all its beauty.

If only our government would surprise itself and us in the same way. At its present course, it is opting for the exclusionary course, guarding its belief with a desperate, violent love, full of folly. It is truly disparaging the thing it defends.

© Brad Mehldau, September, 2003

Hey Mr. Daley has his own very slick looking site -?@see his blog at http://www.mikedaley.net/blog.htm
I'm still working on adding a proper permanent link and putting him back up on the roster

In Your Ear -Ani DiFranco, Asylum Street Spankers

In Your Ear






Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer


ANI DIFRANCO


Educated Guess


Victor, 2,400 yen

The Little Punk Folkie That Did is back. After a decade of making albums with a backing band and producer, Ani DiFranco holed up alone in a New Orleans shotgun shack with an eight-track recorder and emerged with Educated Guess, a 14-track one-woman effort for which she did everything but personally stuff liner notes into CD cases.

Educated Guess marks a return to DiFranco's roots as a solo performer armed only with her acoustic guitar, her taut, airy, potent voice and lots of attitude, but also shows far a greater degree of musical and social sophistication and maturity than early albums.

The anger, militant feminism and strident liberalism of the early years is still there, but the bull in the china shop has become a matador, cloaking the sharpest lyrical steel in a velvet cape. She's still in your face, but you can never be sure whether it's to plant a kiss or an uppercut until the lyrical jolt has been delivered. Songs such as "Origami" and "Animal" demonstrate that DiFranco has not mellowed with age, she's just gotten craftier.

The layered, ringing guitar on Educated Guess shows off some impressive technique and compositional chops. DiFranco may not be the fastest or fanciest on the fretboard, but she is certainly one of the most original.

On first listening, the high-pitched chirps, wails and echoes of the backing vocals DiFranco has laid down seem superfluous, distracting and at times even grating, but repeated listenings show them to be the key to the deeper inner funkiness of "Bliss Like This" and an appropriate accent to the minor key mournfulness of "Bodily" and "You Each Time."

Three tracks are poetry recitations with accompanying soundscapes, ranging from the short personal "Platforms" to the longer sly broadside of "Grand Canyon."

DiFranco's all-too-brief tour of Japan--one show each in Tokyo and Osaka early next month--is not to be missed.


The Asylum Street Spankers


Mercurial


Buffalo Records, 2,099 yen

Hot on the heels of the release of their concert DVD Sideshow Fez late last year, the acoustic daredevils of The Asylum Street Spankers are back with Mercurial, a studio album of covers that have been a staple of their unbelievable live performances.

The band that has audiences on three continents asking "What the hell was that?" serves up smooth old jazz (Ivory Joe Hunter's "Since I Met You Baby") and smoking traditional blues ("Got My Mojo Working") straight up, with a chaser of hard-to-believe covers of The Beastie Boys, The B-52s, Black Flag and Jazz Butcher. Gangsta rap meets the Grand Ole Opry on "Hick Hop" and kitsch meets cool on "Shine on Harvest Moon."

The Spankers are far more than a simple though deeply weird comedy or novelty act. Veteran jazzman Stanley Smith's cool clarinet accents and Nevada Newman's slide guitar solos alone more than establish the Spankers' music credibility. Singer Christina Marrs could make the pope kick a hole in a stained-glass window with her frankly erotic version of Bessie Smith's "Sugar in My Bowl," while the antic efforts of violinist and dobro player Korey Simone and singer, harmonica player and general ringmaster Wammo are best described as acid burlesque.

In the unlikely event that this album alone isn't enough to make you smile, during March, Buffalo Records is giving away copies of a 17-track CD label sampler (including tracks by the Spankers, Hot Club of Cowtown, Ryan Adams and String Cheese Incident among others) with the purchase of any of the roots label's CDs--while supplies last.

Vietnam War hero's platform lacks detail

Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer


A Call to Service: My Vision for a Better America


By John Kerry


Viking, 202 pp, 24.95 dollars


Written as a campaign book by the four-term senator from Massachusetts, A Call to Service is unlikely to win any awards for the quality of its prose. Simply put, this book is a short but dull read that seems to be compiled from fleshed-out campaign speeches. Imagine a 200-page campaign leaflet without any gaudy photos or distracting colors.

While it might be naive to assume that John Kerry's incessant mentions of his Vietnam service have nothing to do with comparing his impressive record (four years of combat duty, one of them commanding a 50-foot river patrol boat, a Silver Star, a Bronze Star with combat V and three Purple Hearts) to the somewhat dubious wartime record of his Republican rival, it is clear from reading A Call to Service that Kerry's war service and subsequent time as a leader in the antiwar movement were the defining experiences of his life.

Those hoping to read the nitty-gritty details of Kerry's Vietnam exploits will be disappointed as the author only alludes, albeit often, to his adventures there. Policy wonks seeking a chance to examine the senator's proposals on education, health care, environmental protection, energy, defense and the economy also will come away virtually empty-handed. The second most frequently used phrase in the book--after "When I was in the Navy in Vietnam"--seems to be "While the proposal is too detailed to explain, let me give you the basics."

This is paraphrasing of course, but Kerry seems to start every explanation of his presidential platform by telling the reader that the proposal is very detailed and has been carefully worked out, but that we don't really need to know the details, just what the result will be.

On the surface, the proposals contained in A Call to Service seem reasonably progressive: increased funding for education while ensuring schools remain accountable, a return to legislation and budgeting to provide for the general welfare of the nation as opposed to aiding special interests, tying international trade treaties to human rights and environmental protection, and making the U.S. federal government's employee health insurance system accessible to uninsured citizens. The lack of nuts and bolts details provided is a little frustrating and makes it harder for Kerry to prove such policies are viable.

As mentioned earlier, Kerry constantly alludes to his service in Vietnam, but rarely dwells on it and never attempts to make it the basis for his credibility. It is simply that his service seems to be the crystal through which he views his life since then. Kerry says "when I was in Vietnam" much the way a newly arrived expatriate is apt to start sentences with a phrase like "back home" or a recent graduate might say "when I was in college."

An interesting aspect of the book is the number of times he stresses his personal friendship and good working relationship with former Republican presidential candidate and fellow Vietnam veteran, Arizona Sen. John McCain. The introduction to the book is such a ringing endorsement of McCain that it seems to belong at the front of McCain's Faith of Our Fathers instead of Kerry's campaign manifesto.

Such a lack of real substance is sadly typical of most campaign books, which seek to present an attractive picture of the candidate without providing too much detailed policy for opponents to attack. In this regard the book, like the candidate, is standard Washington issue.





Copyright 2004 The Yomiuri Shimbun

I've seen the best minds of my generation

(...and most of them are stone drunken hophead freeks!)
Ginsberg is still something to "Howl" about 50 years later

Stories you'll never see in the Daily Yomiuri, --- Part 73

Tokyo Lets Loose Lapdogs of War
Dominated by the U.S., officially pacifist Japan charges into the Iraq quagmire
Stolen from the LA Times
COMMENTARY

By Chalmers Johnson
Japan may have regained its sovereignty in 1952, but the decision to dispatch Japanese troops to Iraq earlier this month has reminded many of its citizens just how little independence the country really has — and just how much control the United States retains.

If British Prime Minister Tony Blair is President Bush's poodle, then Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi is his cocker spaniel.

"We are still occupied by the American military," said an acquaintance of mine who is a former official of Japan's Ministry of Education and now a university president. "We are a satellite. Our foreign policy revolves entirely around the wishes of Washington."

Like many other Japanese, he believes that Koizumi ordered Japan's first military sortie into an active combat zone since World War II because he was too weak to stand up to President Bush.

According to a recent Japan Broadcasting Corp. poll, 51% of the country opposes getting involved in Washington's war against Iraq, while only 42% supports Koizumi's decision. What's more, 82% of those polled said they did not trust the prime minister's explanations for marching into the Iraqi quagmire. Most believe that Koizumi had to go along with Bush or risk damaging the alliance with the U.S.

There's no question that the U.S. takes Japan for granted. The Bush administration likes to boast about how successful the U.S. Army was in democratizing Japan after World War II, and it likes to suggest that it will accomplish the same feat in Iraq. But it fails to note that the U.S. military kept the Japanese prefecture of Okinawa as a Pentagon colony for more than 25 years — until 1972 — and that the U.S. still has 38 military bases on that small island.

Okinawa is home to 1.3 million Japanese citizens who since 1945 have repeatedly had to bear the burdens of violent crimes by American soldiers, continuous environmental and noise pollution, hit-and-run accidents, bar brawls and behavior that would never be tolerated in the U.S. or the mainland of Japan.

The Washington official charged with keeping Japan in the U.S. orbit is Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. His name probably appears in the Japanese press more frequently than any other U.S. government figure. Armitage has been hammering Koizumi for more than a year "not to miss the boat" this time, referring to Japan's failure to support the United States militarily in the 1991 war against Iraq. (He has apparently forgotten that Tokyo bankrolled operations to the tune of $13 billion.)

After his reelection as prime minister in September, Koizumi railroaded a vote through the Japanese Parliament endorsing the dispatch of Self-Defense Forces troops to Iraq, even though he acknowledged that this was probably a violation of Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution.

Article 9, a key part of Japan's post-World War II constitution, prohibits Japan from using force in the conduct of its foreign relations. Koizumi tried to get around this by endorsing future efforts to amend the constitution and by claiming that the Japanese army would undertake "only humanitarian and reconstruction work" in Iraq.

But this is hardly a risk-free operation — militarily or politically. Domestic critics charge that sending the troops before amending the constitution suggests that Japan does not believe in the rule of law. Two former secretaries-general of Koizumi's Liberal Democratic Party, Koichi Kato and Makoto Koga, and the party's former policy chief, Shizuka Kamei, declined to vote for the troop deployment.

The first of about 1,000 Japanese troops arrived Feb. 8 in Samawah, 168 miles south of Baghdad. Four days later, they came under mortar attack. They've also been threatened by Al Qaeda for joining the U.S.-led coalition — and given that Al Qaeda delivered painful blows to the Turks in Istanbul after issuing similar warnings, Japan should be braced for military and civilian casualties.

Perhaps even more serious for the Japanese, Samawah was hit by U.S. depleted-uranium ammunition in both 1991 and 2003. A Japanese journalist, Mamoru Toyoda, equipped with a Geiger counter found radiation levels in the town 300 times greater than normal. The Dutch troops also based there have refused to remove or go near any of the radioactive debris in the area. Death and disability because of radiation sickness is a particular horror for all Japanese after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The British and Australian governments ignored their populations to join Bush's might-makes-right adventure, when they could have stood aside like France and Germany. It is too bad that Japan has now done the same thing, permanently destroying the idealism behind its antiwar constitution.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chalmers Johnson is president of the Japan Policy Research Institute and author of "The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic" (Metropolitan Books, 2004).

Keep an eye out while you read this - 'the man' is watching


A nice pair of articles from Salon.com - if you aren't a member you should be. Great articles and comics and some good political columnists. And everytime you give them money, Rush Limbaugh dies a little inside.
These article deal with the White House's assault on civil liberties under the guise of the war on terror - which is rapidly becoming the war on anyone who disagrees with Karl Rove.

Part one http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/02/11/cointelpro/index.html
and part two
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/02/12/dissent_two/index.html


Obviously, the U.S. is trying to invade Canada via terrorist infiltration, that or this woman is too dumb to be allowed out of the trailer park. Tell me that the wife of a Canadian soldier who made the same kind of mistake going into the U.S. wouldn't have gotten a one way ticket to Guantanamo Bay.
Grenade found in car closes border

This one from the Associated Press really tell you that something is going serious Orwell when you can get arrested and convicted for planning to protest. Thoughtcrime anyone?

Five convicted of violating city ordinance

02/17/2004

Associated Press


Five peace activists arrested last year en route to a demonstration outside President Bush's ranch were convicted Monday of violating the city's protest ordinance.

A jury deliberated about 90 minutes before returning the guilty verdicts for the five on the Class C misdemeanor of violating Crawford's parade and procession ordinance.

"It's an overall picture of the complacency of our nation and how the president has this sort of no-protest zone around him at all times," Amanda Jack, 23, of Austin, one of the defendants, said in a story in Tuesday's Waco Tribune-Herald. "It's completely absurd that you can't even get near the peoples' president. You can't even petition your own government representative."

The Crawford ordinance required 15 days' notice and $25 before the chief of police could issue a permit to protest within the city. The rule has since changed to allow for a seven-day notice.

The five, who were given fines ranging from $200 to $500, plan to appeal.

Tricia Major, who was the first of the five arrested, wasn't surprised by the verdict.

"I think that we had a jury of people who live in a small town, so they're going to have to face their neighbors and their public officials and their law enforcement personnel every day," said Major, 43, of Dallas. "We're not the most popular people in this town, and it would take an enormous amount of courage to bring back an innocent verdict."

The attorney for the five said they were not demonstrating at the time of their arrests. They were stopped by a police blockade in May and some had gotten out of their cars to try to negotiate with the officers, according to testimony. Trip organizer Lisa Fithian had testified that some took out their protest signs to show them to the officers.

Tidmore testified that a person wearing political buttons without a permit could violate a city ordinance that requires prior notice before a protest or parade.