You know this from fifty other people already: Senator Arlen Specter has Hodgkin’s Disease. Best to him and his family. He’s been one of our senators pretty much since we Pennsylvanians in our early thirties can remember; I can’t pretend to be crazy about all his triangulations, but he’s gotten my vote since I’ve been of age.



Uh, incidentally, this might be a nice time for the HRC (not Hillary–she’ll do the politically advantageous thing intuitively; the Human Rights Campaign will not) to say that, despite their differences in the last election cycle, it’s grateful for his record of gay-friendliness and robustly wishes him well. Of course, in order not to come off as (and be) cynically opportunistic, the HRC would have to have done some reflection. What chance is there of that?

Speaking of Jonathan Rauch, he’s started a website, linked to by IGF. Cool (even if the design does give me distracting cravings for the Neapolitan ice cream of my childhood). The links to his articles appear to pull together what you’d get from looking him up on IGF and Reason , which is a good thing. His book on gay marriage is disappointing, but not much of his other writing is. I’ve been a fan since Kindly Inquisitors .



And he doesn’t know what a trackback is, which gives me comfort. I thought I was just a moron, but maybe it’s a fag thing. (Homos who always knew what trackbacks were because they helped invent them, or whatever, will kindly refrain from disillusioning me.)

Right Side of the Rainbow says everything I’ve ever wanted to say about defenses of traditional marriage against gays here. If I read his tone correctly, he’s dead serious but also being arch. I particularly like this point:

Strip marriage of the rules that make it unappealing to gay men but keep all the nice perks that come with it — what, you think we don’t want our partners to have health insurance? — and you get the inevitable. You get a political campaign driven by middle class gay men, possessed as all middle class Americans are of a suffocating sense of entitlement, that will not relent until it succeeds.

People talk about gay activists as if their sense of entitlement were some kind of evidence of special gay selfishness. But entitlements are the way modern civic life works–remember Jonathan Rauch’s chapters on lobbyists in Demosclerosis? I’m happy to deplore this, and to join in any principled objection to the excesses of leftist gay advocacy. It’s a target-rich environment, to be sure; however, I get very uneasy when it’s treated as some sort of freakish aberration in American politics, rather than the wack-job end of a continuum that runs all the way through it.



Added on 17 February: Eric at Classical Values has mentioned common-law marriage in connection to gays, and I was sure that, somewhere, he’d pointed out that some gay-marriage advocates might not be so hot on the prospect of being considered a de facto married couple after cohabiting for seven years. Can’t seem to find the post I’m thinking of, but the point was a good one.



Oh, and one more thing: childrearing is the single most important thing most people do in life, and the amount of sacrifice it requires is considerable. The view one hears nowadays that childrearing = selflessness and altruism, however, is coarse and misleading. Everywhere outside the developed world, people recognize very matter-of-factly that they’re having children not just to let happy new life loose in the world but to provide work for the household, including elder care when the parents themselves are old and incapacitated.



The same mechanism operates here in the First World, of course; it’s just that our money economy means that people are less likely to need their children’s financial support and that the literal care they need can come from other people’s children in the form of strong, young nurses and deliverymen. The investment of energy in child-rearing feels obvious and real. The payback from the pool of workers who keep the economy going feels diffuse and is easy to gloss over (in that one often hears people talk about parenting as an investment in the future, as if the effort went in a single altruistic direction only).



One must also consider that, in a world in which many of us don’t do physical labor, and those who do are rarely involved in the farming of life’s essentials, sex and the production of children is one of the few experiences left that serve primal, animal urges–which civilization teaches us to subsume but doesn’t actually banish.



I am not arguing here that parenthood is on balance a selfish project. What I do think is that it paints a false picture to posit child-bearing straightness in an unqualified way as saintly and self-abnegating, which I think is the effect (however unintended) of quite a bit of the current discourse on marriage and parenting.

The Asahi seems to me to be a bit slow on the uptake on this one, since it’s been said for the last several years that the Kyoto Accord is basically impracticable for developed countries, but the results of its new survey at least provide dry humor on a topic that’s often treated with poker-faced do-gooder high seriousness:

With the landmark Kyoto Protocol on global warming finally taking effect today, Japan probably should own up to a major embarrassment: that it may well be unable to meet its obligations under the treaty.

This possibility, suggested by an Asahi Shimbun survey, contrasts sharply with the fanfare that greeted Japan’s decision to hold an international conference on climate change in 1997 in Kyoto to set reduction goals.

Under the Kyoto Protocol, Japan has agreed to cut greenhouse gas emissions between fiscal 2008 and 2012 by an average 6 percent from the fiscal 1990 level.

The Asahi Shimbun established that only a few prefectural and municipal governments have done anything about it. In fact, a nationwide survey found that only three of the 47 prefectural governments and seven of the 13 major cities can actually boast decreases in their greenhouse gas emissions.

Also, latest statistics offered by about half the prefectural and municipal governments surveyed showed double-digit increases over the fiscal 1990 level in greenhouse gas emissions.

Unlike the central government, prefectural and major municipal governments are not obligated to establish emission reduction goals, and so are still not feeling the heat.

Well, that’ll work. We’ll just make sure the Diet Building only uses its incinerator on alternate Tuesdays. The archipelago will be pollution-free in no time.

Now, I cropped that segment of the article just at the laugh line, so it’s only honest to point out that the next paragraph says, “On the other hand, many drew up plans to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and do away with chlorofluorocarbon replacements.” You have to wonder, though, whether this is motivated by environmental consciousness? Market forces? Production costs? Consider:

Even local governments that reported emissions cuts acknowledged that the changes were not due to any particular policy measures being implemented.

For example, an official with the Osaka prefectural government said, “With our faltering economic base, a number of factories decided to move elsewhere.”

A Kawasaki municipal government official said, “Basically, it was only by a stroke of luck that some companies were able to reduce their output of products that emit greenhouse gases.”

What Osaka means by “elsewhere,” of course, includes poorer areas in Japan but mostly refers to developing countries, especially China–and those places don’t have the luxury of sufficient prosperity to devote resources to casting about for cleaner energy sources.

BTW, I wasn’t aware that today was Kim Jong-il’s birthday and the day the Kyoto Protocols were supposed to go into effect. Sheesh. It’s enough to make you want to stay in bed until Thursday.

Added after the caffeine took effect: Some may remember that, a few months ago, some of those developing countries joined with the US to say no to the Protocols. I haven’t seen any statements from Japan, but the EU is, naturally, talking:

“We will continue to pressure hard for all of our international competitors to hamstring their economies for our benefit partners to come on board,” European environment chief Stavros Dimas said last Wednesday as the European Commission proposed such post-2012 steps as extending emissions reductions to aviation and shipping.

One must note, however, that the EU has instituted a point-trading system for emissions that is designed to adhere to the agreement it ratified.

Yesterday, Koizumi’s cabinet finalized its proposal (Japanese, English) to give the Self-Defense Force more leeway in defense. Specifically, if there’s a missile headed toward Japan, the proposal would allow the SDF to shoot the damned thing down without getting approval to mobilize from the Prime Minister.



Perhaps since I’m a military strategist the way Madonna is an actress, this sort of news makes me say, “This is a new proposal? What the hell was the idea before?” From the looks of things, the idea before was that a missile attack would come with plenty of warning. The cabinet is now considering that it may not.



There have been cases (as when our forces shot down an Iranian airliner) in which soldiers have misidentified aircraft, but the Prime Minister isn’t exactly in a position to help with that. Preventing those mistakes involves the segment of the command chain a lot closer to those who first sounded the alert. Of course, I assume the expense of anti-missile missiles, which the government can hardly afford to sling around like arrows, was also taken into account. Even in these times of tension in the region…well, it’s always tense, but a certain birthday boy has made things extra-special tense of late…one feels safe in presuming that the SDF is not going to get too trigger happy.



Added at 22:40: I’m not a military strategist or historian, apparently. The Iranian Airbus thing was bothering me–I associated it with high school, which for me ended the year before the Gulf War, so I did what I should have done initially and looked it up. I’ve fixed it above, but, you know, for any persnickety people who noticed….

There was an earthquake this morning. I think I felt it, but I may be dreaming…or something. Anyway, its epicenter wasn’t far from Tokyo, in the southern part of Ibaraki Prefecture. Magnitude 5.4, not much below that of some of the severe quakes Niigata Prefecture had last autumn. It looks as if about 37 people were seriously injured, which is a higher figure than I can remember for any earthquake besides the Chuetsu Earthquake (that’s what the seismologists call the Niigata quakes, after the village under which the biggest quakes were centered) in recent memory. Luckily, the Tokyo area hasn’t come off a summer’s worth of poundings by typhoons, which was the case in Niigata; there was lots of liquefaction that led to mudslides and cliffslides. It also is called the Kanto Plain for a reason: it’s not as mountainous as most of Japan, so the number of rocks higher than your head is a lot lower. On the other hand, Tokyo has plenty of reclaimed land, which proved to be a real menace in the Great Hanshin Earthquake ten years ago.

I know everyone will join me in wishing Kim Jong-il a happy birthday tomorrow. I’m sure all in North Korea will be celebrating!



And they’d better.

Joanne Jacobs gives us this wonderful little bon-bon:

Center for American Progress, a Washington think tank, is funding liberal newspapers on already liberal college campuses. “Isn’t that a bit like pumping sand into the Mojave Desert?” the Washington Post asks.

“We’re not winning the battle of ideas on campus,” says David Halperin, who is running the project for the Center for American Progress. Conservatives “have this insurgency mentality, even though they run the world.”

“We’re being outhustled,” says Halperin’s colleague Ben Hubbard. “We want to cultivate the media stars, much like the right has done with Ann Coulter and Dinesh D’Souza.”

Toward that end, the center will give $750,000 to nine liberal campus publications at such places as Princeton, Dartmouth and the University of Wisconsin, and help launch four at the universities of Michigan, Chicago, Kentucky and Ohio State. This is dwarfed by the more than $30 million a year that they estimate conservative campus organizations receive from such groups as the Young America’s Foundation and Leadership Institute.

The web site, CampusProgress.org, has a cartoon showing a blonde female cheerleader, dressed in blue, kicking off the head of a red devil-monster, revealing the cowering male within.

I don’t know about his colleague, but Halperin himself had a brush with media stardom of his own. In fact, I doubt that I’m the only person for whom he’s been positively immortalized. Halperin, you see, was one of the subjects of Camille Paglia’s climactic essay “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders,” which fourteen years ago helped push her through to fame from buzz. Most people didn’t see its original Arion printing but rather its climactic inclusion in her second book, Sex, Art, and American Culture . Here’s a paragraph from near the beginning of the (very long) essay:

One Hundred Years of Homosexuality is a short collection of essays that seems to have only one coherent aim: the nomination and promotion of David Halperin as a major theorist of sex. But Halperin, like most of the American academics who have wandered into sex studies, lacks the most elementary understanding of the basic disciplines of history, anthropology, and psychology necessary for such work. The exposition of these essays is tortured, bloated, meandering, pretentious, confused. Halperin’s first book, Before Pastoral: Theocritus and the Ancient History of Bucolic Poetry (1983), is quite different. Whether its precision and clarity of argument–not to mention skill in simple paragraphing–are due to the editors of Yale University Press or to a helpful dissertation director, it is evident that in One Hundred Years we are getting Halperin lui-même.

That’s one of the more mild passages. It gets much sharper and funnier and basically doesn’t let up until the end. At least the author of the other book under review was spared by death from seeing his idiocies ruthlessly enumerated and refuted. The whole essay is recommended most highly to anyone of generally kind-hearted disposition who nevertheless has an eensy mean streak that does not suffer fools gladly. It was a source of tremendous comfort to me when I was coming out, indicating as it did that the spoiled, upwardly-mobile LGBA types at college and the lugubriously noble AIDS sufferers of pop culture were not the only possible model for homosexual life.



This recent quotation from Halperin (in the article Joanne cites) is interesting because he appears not to understand its implications in the most meaningful sense. I mean, the “insurgency mentality” part. Conservatism includes a lot of people, and obviously there’s a lot I find to disagree with when examining the ideas of some of them; but I do think that as a generalization, it’s fair to say that conservatives have “hustle” because they see their ideas working and are thus energized and want to find new ways to implement them.



The left insists on retaining the why-aren’t-they-flocking-to-us-when-we-know-what’s-good-for-them? attitude that people REALLY DISLIKE in a free society. Tossing coins at a bunch of liberal campus newspapers seems to me unlikely to do much about that because it doesn’t involve reexamining their own motivations and hold on reality.

Ghost of a Flea has yet another Kylie picture up, but what caught my attention even more was a link to this site, which gives animated instructions for Westerners about to go to Japan to work. You have a sequence about navigating the office, one about visiting people at home, and one about going out drinking with colleagues. If you can stand to watch the Beavis and Butthead-ish characters (I mean, they don’t act like them, obviously, they’re just drawn like them), the information is pretty good. Telling points:

• Like a lot of explanations of tricky Japanese ceremonial maneuvers for Westerners, the one for exchanging business cards on this site doesn’t tell you about the little parts that can get you in trouble–in this case, how you’re supposed to hold two at one time. I mean, obviously, there’s nothing difficult about it physically, but if you’ve just received your visitor’s card, is there a certain set of fingers you’re supposed to hold it between while proffering yours? If you get it wrong, you could make it hard for your visitor to take your card from you. Or someone could get a nasty paper cut. Theoretically speaking, you understand.
  
• The house depicted in the home entertainment section is of the traditional Japanese kind with shutter-type front door, tatami rooms, side garden with stone lantern, and tokonoma (display alcove). What do the animators put right next to the front door to let you know you’re looking at the exterior of a realistic Japanese house? A beer vending machine.
  
• The proprietress of the bar in the sequence about drinking looks like Barbara Hale.
  
• The writer of the text keeps saying that Japan doesn’t differentiate between right and wrong. I think that’s a bad way to put an excellent point. What she’s talking about is the idea that Japan believes in extremes of behavior rather than moderation. In the West (sweeping generalization alert!), we like to get a sense of people’s real, essential personalities even in formal circumstances. If you know someone who acts one way at work and 180 degrees the opposite way outside it, you regard him as untrustworthy. In Japan, the opposite is true. You defer utterly to the group and the demands of ceremony at work, and then you let off all the resulting stress by being sloppily demonstrative while getting drunk later. Being too honest about your actual opinions in formal circumstances makes you look, paradoxically, untrustworthy–because what you need to be trusted to do is cooperate, and you may not attend to other people’s needs if you’re busy articulating your own.
  
• On the same token, those of us who were ruthlessly schooled in most of these little rules are often told, after we arrive in Japan, “You sound like an old man–no one acts like that anymore!” Years ago, a friend of mine presented a gift of sweets to her middle-aged host mother and that lady’s friends with the respectful words, “お口に合うかどうか分かりませんが” (o-kuchi ni au ka dou ka wakarimasen ga: “I’m not sure this will [be good enough to] suit your exalted palate, but [please take it]”). The assembled ladies were silent for a few beats and then burst out laughing. “You’re talking as if you were about to be interviewed! We’d be more likely to say, ‘Hey, I think you’ll like this!'” True, meeting a group of elder friends for lunch isn’t the same as doing a presentation at a prospective client’s place, but friends who are around my age and older are always complaining when we get together that they’ve had to drop a lot of the etiquette with which they were brought up. The last half-decade’s worth of hires at work don’t understand them.
  
• I think my favorite sequence is when the guy’s in the bathroom and there’s an excursus on windchimes in the middle of the directions for using the Asian-style toilet. What might have been more useful was a warning that there may not be soap or a guest towel at the hand-sink, so you need to be satisfied with splashing your hands very thoroughly and having a handkerchief in your pocket to dry them on. I can’t imagine how they missed that, since it’s one of the first things people express shock over on arriving here. If you want to give yourself a fighting chance of avoiding nasty germs, you can get alcohol-soaked wet handwipes at any convenience store. Not soap and hot water with a clean, soft towel to follow, but better than nothing.
  

Oh, and while we’re on this topic, I would just like to point out that in the months that Simon World has generously linked my little pieces on Japan Post privatization, Social Insurance reform, and Japanese views of the WOT, the link that has gotten me the most traffic from his site is my post about a musical toilet. I’m pretty sure there’s a life lesson there, but I’d prefer not to know what it is.



Added on 12 February: And, as Atushi just reminded me, I forgot to congratulate Japan on its Founding Day. But, congratulations on Founding Day, Japan!

Having seen it first from Japanese sources, I was kind of surprised at the wording of the English wire reports on the DPRK’s huffy departure from 6-way talks on its nuclear programs:

The United States has assumed since the mid-1990s that North Korean is able to make nuclear weapons, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Thursday, playing down a dramatic announcement from Pyongyang.

“Playing down”? “Dramatic”? I mean, sure, it’s newsworthy when high officials in a dictatorship have a fit of pique and storm out of a meeting, but these six-way talks have been rocky for months, and–maybe because its test missiles are fired directly over our heads–here in Japan, we’ve pretty much taken it as a given that North Korea has been developing nuclear weapons capability as quickly as it can. It’s hard to imagine who could have been caught off-guard by today’s announcement.