Even in death, Japanese abductee Megumi Yokota is getting no peace. The DPRK handed over a collection of bones said to be hers a while back. About a month ago, Japanese forensic experts determined that–surprise!–the North Koreans were lying. If I recall correctly, it was suggested that the bones received might not all be from the same person.

It’s taken the DPRK a month or so to respond, and its response, relayed through its state news organ, is, “The Japanese forensic report is a complete fabrication; a thorough fact-finding investigation into the fraud must be undertaken and the responsible parties severely punished.” Japanese Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machida replies, justifiably, that if the DPRK has accusations to make, it should make them through direct diplomatic communication.

Yokota’s first name, BTW, is officially written in kana: めぐみ. The meaning, tragically unfulfilled in her case, is “blessing.”

This is from Ghost of a Flea:

I have not listened to this one in ages. How is it Stock Aitken Waterman got away with releasing the oddly similar backing beat to “Venus” by Bananarama?

He is referring to Kylie’s much-spat-upon version of “The Locomotion,” and I believe the answer is this (yeah, I’m sure it’s on the Internet in a 1000 places): Kylie was one of the celeb guests at some charity performance-thing, and on the spur of the moment, they asked her…or everyone…to sing something. Anyway, I think she and some friends decided to improv their way merrily through “The Locomotion,” and it went over so well that someone decided it’d be great to, you know, milk it for maximum profit by releasing it as a single. When S/A/W produced, they naturally weren’t going to give it the full Rick Astley–it was just a one-off lark by a television actress whose amateurishness was part of the charm. So the fact that it sucked isn’t all that much a stain on anyone’s record. (The fact that Kylie’s later covers of “Tears on My Pillow” and “Celebration” were made to suck with malice aforethought is another thing entirely.)



Actually, another funny story I’ve heard a bunch of times is that after the sessions for “The Locomotion,” S/A/W said the usual “This was fun, stop by the studio and maybe we can get something bigger together” stuff, and when Kylie showed up as planned, they’d forgotten all about it. They had to write “I Should Be So Lucky” on the spot. Don’t know whether it’s true.

I like John Corvino’s latest article posted to IGF, but, then, I like his writing in general. I could have done without the Rosa Parks analogy, which he crashes through the guardrail and follows in flames as it rolls down the ravine (just to be gallant and cover his bad conceit-making with my own). His priorities are in the right place, though, and I join him in wondering how other people can possibly fail to see this stuff:

Is that name difference silly? Yes, it’s silly � maybe even insulting. But when health benefits are denied to committed same-sex couples, when a person can’t get bereavement leave upon the death of her same-sex partner; when loving couples are split apart because one partner is a foreigner and can’t get citizenship, that’s far worse than silly or insulting � it’s downright cruel. I contend that we have a fighting chance at ending such cruelty, and that once we do so we’ll have an even better chance at ending the silly name-difference (again, see Scandinavia).

I still don’t agree that attaining marriage under that name must, must, must be the goal. Even if we accept that legal and social circumstances are unequal now, it’s possible that opening marriage to gays is not the solution in the best interest of the larger society (including us gays). If the child-rearing function really is central to marriage, perhaps it needs to be reemphasized through stiffened divorce laws and greater penalties for parents who make spurious accusations at each other in custody battles, for example.



The interference in individuals’ ability to make contracts that dictate the disposal of their possessions and persons if they’re incapacitated isn’t even a given everywhere; as Corvino says, we need to start there. Forget even the part about “recognition of our relationships” in the general sense, or at least, hold it in abeyance. Accusations like the one in the hate mail with which Corvino opens his article can only come from people who don’t see the current social and political climate for what it really is, a phenomenon that may be partially explained by their tendency to reach for invective when they should be assessing and countering arguments.



Along those lines, I’m sorry to see that Maggie Gallagher is the latest columnist who took pay by the Bush administration to plug programs and is only now disclosing it. Gallagher is not my favorite person, as you might imagine. She has always struck me as principled, though, and I’ve cringed whenever I’ve seen someone from my team decide that the way to provide a witty and substantive refutation of one of her pieces is to call her a bitch. What she’s done isn’t an ethical infraction of epic proportions, but it doesn’t speak well of her–how does one forget about a contract for two grand, exactly? And even if her support for the program was there for the asking, anyway, is it impossible to believe that she might have been inclined not to publicize such flaws as it might have had once she and the government had an understanding?



What this does do is give people who could learn from Gallagher’s arguments a new, easy reason to dismiss her as a bankrupt thinker. That’s not exactly what we need on either side at the moment. (The Gallagher story was foreshadowed by Instapundit and Drudge.)

I don’t mind all the searches asking whether country singer Kenny Chesney is gay, but I also don’t have an answer. With the physique, the tan, the easily-removable outdoorsy clothing, the cat-like, angular features, and the lonesome tenor, he has plenty of our boys panting after him. That doesn’t say anything about the man himself, though.



I also don’t know anything about Atika Schubert, though no one seems to be interested in whether she’s a lesbian. I know she’s the CNN Tokyo Bureau Chief, and that her reporting style, while not conspicuously illuminating, isn’t as twinkly and annoying as some other people’s (at least to me). I assume lots of people are interested lately because she did a great deal of tsunami reporting? Or maybe there’s a campaign going to pitch her as CNN’s new star anchor, now that the word is Anderson Cooper is supposed to be it.

This fictional letter on Diplomad reminds me of that classic Bloom County sequence in which Steve Dallas is defending an elderly axe-murderess and, at the arraignment, so overzealously argues that she’s harmless (“She’s a lamb, your honor”) that the bemused judge releases her into his personal custody. Priceless.



(Via biased Susanna.)



Added on 25 January: One reader (I forgot to ask whether I could quote him) thinks I’m suggesting here that people who have issues with our treatment of prisoners are a monolithic bunch of idiot leftists. To me, Diplomad’s letter was pretty clearly targeting only the most volubly inane cultural-relativist types, who would complain about our treatment of prisoners if we set each of them up in beachfront property in Antibes. Those who question whether our personnel are acting in arbitrary ways that violate our own ideal of the rule of law, or worry that serious rusty-pliers-and-electrodes stuff may be worked on people because of possible failures in the chain of command–they were not, unless I read Diplomad incorrectly, the satirical target.



People with legitimate arguments to make do not, after all, rely entirely on vague blather about “cultural differences.” And as for torture, the fictional addressee is someone who has complained specifically about treatment at Guantanamo Bay, where I don’t believe anyone has been accused of torture.



Added on 27 January: My reader was tenacious (in a good way) and pointed me toward this article from The Baltimore Sun, in which torture allegations are, in fact, made about Guantanamo Bay. Sorry for speaking in ignorance. I still read the letter Diplomad cites as satirizing coarse leftism and not pooh-poohing actual prisoner abuse, but if an extra link will avoid possibly misleading people, here it is.

The spirit of international cooperation hovers, dove-like, over the end of the World Conference on Disaster Reduction (WCDR). Or not:

An international disaster conference ended over the weekend with participants agreeing on the need to help strengthen developing countries’ ability to deal with disasters, but some critics were already questioning the action plan adopted.



Not only does the broadly worded document lack achievable numerical targets, but it also largely ignores the input of developing nations, they say.



“The conference has tended to be about what ideas developed countries had and could do for the affected (tsunami) region,” said a delegate from India. The delegate said that it was important for the affected nations to take a central role, and that “existing systems in those countries be utilized.”

I wasn’t there, obviously, so I can’t verify the accounts of the delegate from India quoted above, or those from Senegal (drought-stricken) and the Marshall Islands (worried about global warming). However, not much imagination is required to conjure up a picture of first-world delegates–high on their own compassion and the possibilities of fancy, whiz-bang techno-fixes–talking right over people with actual knowledge of the different local circumstances disaster-relief programs are up against in the large and varied “developing world.”



The recent Sumatra earthquake and tsunami overshadowed everything, naturally. In the weeks since the initial emergency passed, the tsunami has evolved into a heightened version of the usual sexy, telegenic media story: a visually-impressive force of nature, the emotional trauma of sudden loss of friends and family, the occasional unexpected joyous reunion, the noble struggle to return things to normal. It’s the sort of thing that would be rejected as implausible if it were submitted as the script for a fictional made-for-TV movie.



Am I being cynical here? Well, only partially. I don’t doubt for a second that reporters feel the same compassion as the rest of us, and when they point out that they’re telling the stories of people who have no other public voice, they’re not just rationalizing. But it’s hard to keep covering something like this without falling back on stock disaster-drama clichés and thereby trivializing it.



The complaints about the WCDR indicate that, sadly but not surprisingly, the same sort of thing is happening among aid agencies. The tsunami provides the perfect opportunity to say, “You see what can happen when you don’t flood us with cash and make sure we have safeguards against everything?” To the best of our knowledge, though, the Indian Ocean disaster was (thankfully) a fluke. It is not representative of the issues facing the third world.



The problems that most poor countries are dealing with are mundane and un-dramatic. Much of what needs to be done is education, teaching everyday people how to evaluate their own circumstances and adjust their behavior accordingly. Technology is certainly useful in making it easier for developing countries to anticipate, weather, and respond to disasters, but in ways well-heeled do-gooders do not seem to have internalized:

During the meeting, big players from the developed world-including Japan, the United States, Germany and France-pushed their ideas for a tsunami warning system.



This did not sit well with some groups from the countries hard-hit by the tsunami. They felt their voices were not being heard when they suggested upgrading systems they already had for warning systems.

So the countries with non-tsunami problems did not see those problems addressed, and the countries actually hit by the tsunami felt that their knowledge of their own homelands was not taken into account by eager-beaver first-world technocrats. A toast all around, then, for a job well done.

Wow. Blizzard in the Northeast, huh? (It’s probably kind of stupid for me to be linking a Japanese article to tell you about a snowstorm you already know about in our native tongue–I’m only doing so because that’s where I first learned of it.) They actually had to close Philadelphia International Airport–and this time, not just de facto because of US Air’s fable-worthy incompetence. Stay safe, everyone.

Speaking of problems in Japan that need addressing: Japan Post (you know, that agency that sells commemorative stamps, delivers mail and packages, and just happens to control a REALLY HUGE AMOUNT of the household savings of the second-largest economy in the world?) is still in the crosshairs of Prime Minister Koizumi’s privatization gun:

The prime minister explicitly said he would stick to the basic privatization policy adopted by the Cabinet in September. One of the key planks of the policy is the creation of four entities–mail and parcel delivery, insurance service, savings service and an over-the-counter services network–under a holding company.

“The Fiscal Investment and Loan Program must be reformed because it’s the connection between the entrance of funds, postal savings and kampo postal insurance, and the exit of funds to public corporations. The flow of funds should be shifted from public to private,” Koizumi said. [You know the patronage and revolving-door systems that your econ professors said drive Japan? You’re looking at the monetary engine right in this paragraph. All that’s missing is explicit mention of the federal ministries involved.–SRK]

“The privatization is an indispensable administrative and fiscal reform to realize a smaller government,” Koizumi added.

Regarding opposition to privatization within the Liberal Democratic Party, the prime minister said: “They say the number of public servants should be decreased, but they oppose the privatization. That’s like instructing someone to swim but tying his arms and legs.

For all the bravado of that soundbite, there are critics who say the privatization plan in fact doesn’t go far enough. In my favorite (in a bad way) analogy, it could create the sort of California-electricity fiasco in which bureaucrats still get to make all the rules while the new private owners get all the accountability. In committee, the proposal predictably got bogged down in the usual attempts to shut up everyone with a complaint. But that was December; this Yomiuri piece says, “The prime minister explicitly said he would stick to the basic privatization policy adopted by the Cabinet in September,” which means not the further ground-down version from the very end of last year.

For those who are interested, the Yomiuri article leads with Japan Post privatization but gives a rundown of the issues the Diet hit in its first 2005 session.

When I talk about the cavalier way many Japanese doctors treat (in both senses of the word) their patients, friends of mine back home often chuckle, “Well, Sean, you don’t have to go to Japan to find a high-handed doctor who thinks you’re too stupid to be worth explaining things to!” The thing is that, here, it’s been largely institutionalized. The behemoth Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare is 4 Comments | misc | Permalink