America as a kindergarten infant...

On July 23, “Idiot America” author Charles P. Pierce lectures David Shuster about Liz Cheney and idiots in America, including the “birther movement.” (Mark Schreiber)

But how new is this? Sinclair Lewis said all this years ago in “Elmer Gantry”, “Main Street” and “Babbitt”, and of course he's not the only one (just one of those who said it best).

It seems that Americans have revelled in ignorance and stupidity in their leaders and also in their everyday beliefs for a long time - since the 19th century, anyway. Having numbskulls (and criminals) like Gordon Liddy on TV and taking them seriously (not to mention the continued financial gains made by crackpots like Limbaugh, Coulter, O'Reilly, Hannity, Beck, and their poisonous ilk) are further proof that many Americans do not wish to think rationally.

The anti-intellectual attitude of many Americans has made them laughing-stocks to the “civilized” Europeans (the quotes are there for a reason), and GWB for many non-Americans was the perfect representative of his country: ignorant *and* stupid, parochial, bound to an outmoded primitive belief system, and too ready to use violence to settle differences of opinion.

Until America as a nation proceeds beyond a kindergarten level of emotions and rationality, it should drop its self-applied label as “the world's cop” and stay well out of other nations' affairs, remove its stormtroopers from other nations (how would the USA fancy a Japanese battle fleet stationed at Annapolis?) and grow up.

On September 12, 2001, my mother (a conservative by British standards) said to me over the phone after watching Bush's “patriotic” response to the appalling terrorist acts of September 12, “The Americans are still children - they haven't grown up yet”. How right she was.

Technorati Tags: politics

We moved...

Yes, I could have written from my phone, etc. but I wanted to spend time getting things ready for the big move. If you haven't moved house for 10 years, and you and your spouse are both messy hoarders, this makes life a little tricky.

I threw out masses of stuff, but there still seems to be far too much in the way of books, CDs, DVDs, etc., not to mention computer and msic instruments and equipment. I am really annoyed that I haven't been able to rationalize things as much as I would like, but it's not completely awful, anyway. The worst thing seems to be that my wife has not thrown out anything (we have some really weird stuff that has made it over on the move) and we got rid of a few bookcases, etc. Doh!

The house itself is old - by Japanese standards. Parts of it date back to pre-war, and the “new part” is at least 40 years old. We are 5 minutes' walk closer to the station, and there is even a little garden. The room I'm working on has large floor-level windows I can open (but I think it's going to be cold in winter).

Anyway, photos (hopefully) and more in a little while. I have to help empty some more boxes now. But it's nice to have the computer system working again after a few days away.

Technorati Tags: writing

Book sales

I feel a little hacked off because my book's not selling. Well, that's what I thought. In fact, it appears that about 10 people so far have bought and paid for the thing, some from Lulu, some from Amazon US and some from Amazon UK - and I don't know who all of them are, which is nice!

But then I read of someone who's spent the past two years or so self-publishing about six books, and had made 2 sales over the period! So there's hope yet. I'm certainly getting the word out - the Web site gets a few hits every day - not a lot, but then I can’t expect it to - it's hardly going to be a site that people keep coming back to. I just wish that some of that interest would translate into sales - not so much for the money as the interest of the thing.

Technorati Tags: sales, writing

Fuji-san kills man

A lump of rock fell from Mt. Fuji into a car park for climbers yesterday, and sadly one man was killed as a result. What made me and my wife laugh, though, was the TV-announced reaction of the local authorities who announced that as a preventative measure, they were going to “step up patrols”.

I can just see them now, wandering across the slopes of Fuji, clacking pieces of wood together, and calling out to rocks “Don't move! We have you covered!. Baaad rock! Stay!”.

Seriously, more useless jobs for the boys. “I walk around Fuji, seeing which rocks are about to fall down, and pushing them gently to see if-- Oops. There's another gone.”
Falling rock hits camper on Mt Fuji, killing man › Japan Today: Japan News and Discussion

Why does a dog lick its balls?

For the same reason that I am sending this blog entry from my phone. It's a cool idea to be able to do it, but I am not sure how well a picture will turn out here.

The air conditioner is on, by the way…

Another WTF moment

While looking at a political site, I'm accosted by two marriage bureau ads (same bureau) inviting me to find my soulmate in Kamakura. Usually, these are porn sites that tell me that there are thousands of blonde-haired, blue-eyed, big-breasted single women in Kamakura, dying for the chance to have wild casual sex with me.

But this time, it's a list of Indian ladies - all attractive professional women, who want to marry me. Who the hell put this thing up, and who is stupid enough to believe that all these Indian women are in “my community in Kamakura”? Enough with this “personalized marketing” shit that deceives no-one when it's done as clumsily as this. Presumably it's some relative of Sarah Palin who has confused a continent (Asia) with a country (India). And shame on the site, otherwise quite good, for allowing this sort of rubbish.

{}

Gun laws in Tennessee

Now Tennesseeans are going to be allowed to carry guns into bars...

I'm all in favor of this. The more knuckle-dragging Palin-voting jumped-up trailer trash who kill each other, the better. Of course some innocent folks will die, but hey, that's the American way, isn't it (we had to destroy the village in order to save it, unarmed drone attacks on Afghan wedding parties, no electricity or water in Baghdad for three years, etc.). The world welcomes Americans' rights to kill each other (and wonders when it's going to grow up and extend the right to health care and life to its citizens).Technorati Tags: politics

Justice for all?

Interesting how Karl Rove, a pathetic excuse for a political strategist, who has never won an election fair and square, but relies on the knife in the back and the smear (not to mention vote-rigging) to win “his” elections is no longer subject to the rule of law.

Having dodged a subpoena, and consistently refused to tell the truth, folk like you and I would be in jail. But not our Karl - although he's grilled by a House committee for a number of hours, he's not been placed under oath.

For what he has done, Rove should have been jailed the moment his dimwitted master left office, and brought out to testify as necessary. But wealth and political influence in the US, as in most other places, shield people from the raw effects of justice. There are exceptions - Madoff gets an exemplary jail sentence, Lord Archer gets stripped of his title and jailed, etc.

But for Americans to pretend that the USA is a fair and just society is as ridiculous as Stalin's subjects believing that they lived in a free democracy.
The Associated Press: Former Bush aide testifies on prosecutor firings

Technorati Tags: GOP, justice, politics

A test blog from ecto

More of a test than anything else, but I'm using ecto 2.4.2 to post this from my desktop. I do like this software - pretty simple to use - allows you to set up any number of accounts and works with lots of different blog sites.

I had a few problems getting it to work with this version of blogger, but right now, it seems pretty good and retrieves the posts, settings, etc..

The magic trick was to set the Access Point as http://www.blogger.com/feeds/default/blogs (thank you, Duncan).

Anyway, this will also go onto my laptop (not that I use that on the road so much now that I have an iPhone) and my words of wisdom will spill out to the world from anywhere I go that is linked to this Interweb thingy.

Technorati Tags: software, technology

Re-activating blogger

I was speaking last night at a meeting of FEW (Foreign Executive Women) in Tokyo about the topic of self-publishing together with my former literary agent and a fellow-contributor to various English-language publications in Japan. It was strange to be at a meeting where the chair starts with "Ladies..." and then stops – no "gentlemen".

We found ourselves discussing blogs at one point, and though I find many blogs to be self-indulgent, "let it all hang out", writing that has little appeal to me, I found myself defending the idea of blogs as a way of practising the craft of writing. I write a lot of words every day in any case, but these are often words written to order, which have little room for maneuver or for originality. I have to hew to a house style or to keep within the boundaries of the subject matter.

So… despite my earlier skepticism about blogs, I've decided to re-open my blogger account and get some of my thoughts out to the world. Some of you may even find them interesting. I've set up a link to my iPhone so that I can write as inspiration strikes and upload it via MMS. Is this a good thing? I ask myself. The answer is that it probably isn't - I like a little time to reflect, but at the same time it gives me more freedom to write when and where I want.

Time will tell.