Japan has been appalled by the comments of a senior ruling party politician that gang rapists were ‘virile’ and ‘close to normal’.

Seiichi Ota, a former cabinet minister and member of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, made the comments at a forum on Japan’s declining birthrate, held by the national kindergarten association.

(…)

The Japanese news agency Kyodo reported that Mr Ota, 57, said the fall in the birthrate was because of the lack of courage among Japanese men to marry.

The moderator of the debate then made a perplexing reference to a notorious case of alleged gang rape earlier this month, where five students from prestigious universities were arrested for gang raping a female student.

In an equally bizarre comment, the moderator reportedly asked if men should gang rape ‘if they don’t have the courage to make a marriage proposal’.

‘Gang rape shows the people who do it are still virile, and that is okay,’ Mr Ota said. ‘I think that might make them close to normal. I know that I would be criticised for saying these sorts of things.’

Sydney Morning Herald

“The United States would train and lead an international police force, bypassing traditional peacekeeping bodies such as the United Nations and NATO, under a proposal by the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.

The plan, involving thousands of Americans permanently assigned to peacekeeping, would also be a major reversal by the Bush Administration, which has strongly opposed tying up its troops in such operations.” Sydney Morning Herald Of course, why bypass the traditional peacekeeping vehicles unless you have some ulterior desire to continue not to play by the rules of the civilized world?

“AlertNet provides global news, communications and logistics services to the international disaster relief community and the public. Reuters 150 years’ experience reporting from disaster zones around the world allows AlertNet to give disaster relief organisations reliable information, fast.

Anyone can access the public pages, which have a live news feed from Reuters together with articles describing how relief agencies are responding to the latest humanitarian crises.”

“Environmental group Greenpeace launched a campaign on Saturday to give Iraqis clean water barrels in exchange for contaminated containers they have been using which were looted from a nuclear complex.” Reuters AlertNet Readers of FmH know how concerned I have been about the underreported story of the looting of the contaminated barrels in Tuwaitha and the dumping of the nuclear material into the local ecosystem. This was a function of weeks of negligence by occupying American forces who had been alerted to the potential for disaster at the unguarded nuclear facility. US officials downplayed the danger until it was publicized that Iraqis were using the containers to store food and water. They have offered to buy the barrels back for $3 each but, according to Greenpeace, the US offer is useless as a replacement barrel would cost a family the equivalent of around $15.

Are you an e-bore? “Do your friends nod off or walk away when you start talking about ASP, HTML or CPM? Is the local Starbucks still the only place you can properly brainstorm with your colleagues? Are you onto your 4th PDA?

If so, you might be suffering from e-bore Syndrome. But the only way to find out is to consult the e-consultancy e-bore-ometer…” It tells me:

You’re pretty balanced all in all, but you could find yourself getting excited about bandwidth before long and it’s only downhill from thereon in.

“The counselling routinely offered to people in the immediate aftermath of a disaster seldom protects them from developing post-traumatic stress – and it could even delay their recovery.

This is the conclusion of a comprehensive review of the ‘single-session debriefings’ offered to victims straight after an incident. In single-session debriefings, a counsellor talks to a victim to help them learn about and prepare for any psychological problems they might encounter later.” New Scientist

“Books are weapons of mass instruction, according to a bookshop window in London. The point was well illustrated at the capital’s Science Museum on Wednesday evening, when Chris McManus won the Aventis Science Book Prize for Left Hand, Right Hand: The Origins of Asymmetry in Brains, Bodies, Atoms and Cultures.” New Scientist

“A large-scale study has backed the health benefits of the Mediterranean diet, but indicates that it is the combination of foods, not any single ingredient, that is beneficial. The research, conducted in Greece, showed that the diet significantly prolongs life and reduces the risk of coronary heart disease and cancer.” New Scientist

“Lance Cpl. Thomas Keys, 20, couldn’t wait to come home from Iraq, where he believed he was wasting his time trying to train Iraqis to police themselves, because of infighting among the local people.” AP via Salon

“Last month’s bombings suggest the enduring significance of Casablanca — and Casablanca.” The American Prospect

“…(U)niversities are becoming factories of jargon and illiteracy“, says a classicist, concluding “We need more Northumberland rat-catchers.” Imprecision of language leads to imprecision of thought. I know, since I’m often someone who often gives in to the temptation to say something simple in a more lavish (and tortured) way. The Spectator

Is there any reason to think they’ll be right this time?

The bearers of bad news are back. The headlines may tell of American military victories overseas, but everywhere warnings are proliferating of troubles ahead. Most of the forecasts concern the allegedly dire consequences of the victories themselves: chaos or worse in Iraq, permanent disaffection in Europe, mounting enmity elsewhere. But a spate of new hooks point to deeper structural dangers–dangers that are said to be lurking beneath the surface of our global pre-eminence and that are mostly of our own making. Taken together, these works constitute the largest chorus of foreboding since the appearance 15 years ago of the prophets of American decline.” — Joshua Muravchik, Barrons

Mr. Muravchik, of the conservative thinktank the American Enterprise Institute, concludes, “Had we heeded the declinists of the 1980s, we might not have won the Cold War. If today we heed the advice of those offering tendentious and pejorative interpretations of our effect on the world, the results could be no less calamitous.” No big picture for him and others in what I cal the ostrich mode of political analysis, from the fabled tendency of the ungainly and vulnerable birds to stick their heads in the sand so that the threats they do not see do not exist…

A Talk with Jonathan Miller:

“INTERVIEWER:

Being as passionate about the subject of philosophy as you are, how does it enter into your work as director?

MILLER:

It comes into it all the time, in that I’m watching people behaving intentionally. I keep asking myself, What do they intend by what they are doing? Are they fully aware of their own intentions? What is it that motivates Hamlet? How much does he know what he is doing?

I am less interested in the Freudian unconscious than in another form of unconscious about which I have written recently, which is what I call the Enabling Unconscious. We can, for example, go to sleep with a problem in our mind and wake up with a clear solution. There are deep levels of capability which don’t reach consciousness and yet deliver their results into consciousness. This is again where science is so much better than metaphysics. There were people in the nineteenth century who began to see this; in fact, most philosophers have had vague intuitions, but they were not smart enough to think clearly about it. The reason they now think about it is because we have a device which enables us to do so—the computer. The computer gives us a metaphor to consider what it is to have mental activities we are not aware of. We once thought that chess was a high-level spiritual capability which only human beings possessed. We now get machines which are better at it than we are. Once we examine how machines do it, we get a pretty good idea how our brains might do it. These are profitable questions because there are procedures you can follow to produce an answer. The questions which you say won’t go away—metaphysical ones—are like flies which won’t go away. But it doesn’t mean that they are interesting.” Paris Review

Pill blending 6 drugs said to prevent heart attacks. Misgivings, sometimes vehement, are emerging within the medical community to this novel concept about which I posted below. Sentiments expressed include:

• It “might be dangerous for healthy people and not strong enough for those with heart trouble”
• “It also could also lull some people into persisting with life-threatening habits”. (This one doesn’t hold water. With an aging population, much of modern medicine is devoted to protecting people against chronic problems which have a lifestyle aspect. Should we treat no one until they stop smoking, drinking, lose weight, begin exercising, reform their dietary approach, treat their domestic partners better?)
• “the people you save by preventing heart disease and stroke (by giving aspirin to the general population) is offset by the number of people you kill by causing bleeding”. Although I haven’t researched the matter recently (and medical thinking goes through fads and fancies just as any other discipline), it is my impression that this opinion is not borne out by public health research suggesting the routine use of aspirin is valuable.
• “the “one-size-fits-all” idea runs counter to the way medicine is headed in the future, which is toward personalized medication based on an individual’s genetic profile”

Fresno Bee

‘There is no longer anyway to tap dance around the responsibility of the administration for what more and more looks like a monumental bog up,’ Thomas Houlahan, told UPI. Houlahan is the Washington-based director of a military assessment program for James Madison University at Harrisburg, Va. He is also a former paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division and staff officer with the 18th Airborne Corps.

The planning for Operation Iraqi Freedom, Houlahan says, ‘was very slipshod and not up to the standards of the U.S. Army.’

Timothy Carney, a former U.S. ambassador who has just returned from two months in Iraq, has said much the same thing.

Carney, with long experience in post-conflict zones, told the British Broadcasting Corp. that the White House failed to think through post-war plans and that there was a lack of resources and of priority for reconstruction efforts. UPI

These analyses, however, miss the boat because they accept the fundamental premise of US adventurism. We didn’t just miscalculate the extent of Baathist resistance or the costs of civil reconstruction or policing efforts. We are facing not isolated sniping from foreign elements or scattered residual Baathists but a broadbased spontaneous resistance against an imperious occupying force.

It looks as if the Showtime team responsible for Dead Like Me took a seminar in just what elements are required to build a cutting-edge series, from theme and tone to which brand names to drop. ‘Six Feet Under‘ was essential viewing, as were clever group shows from ‘Seinfeld‘ to ‘Friends.’ Which still left time for literature, chiefly Alice Sebold’s best seller, ‘The Lovely Bones.’ NY Times

There’s been alot of buzz about this series. Curious, my wife and I took in the debut last night. It is a clever blend of comedy and fantasy although, yes, derivative. [Other names dropped in the review include Buffy, Sex and the City, and the Sopranos, more of a reach.] It is hard to see how its premise can fuel an entire season, though. And let’s hope it doesn’t take its Seinfeld and Friends influences as seriously as its Sebold or Six Feet Under ones…

“I am sorry now that I did not write an opera with her every year,’ Virgil Thomson once wrote about Gertrude Stein. ‘It had not occurred to me that both of us would not always be living.’

More and more, I am reminded of that sentiment, most recently last month, when I heard about David Lewin’s death at age 69.

His name does not spur widespread recognition. Obituary notices after he died of heart disease on May 5, tended to be of the paid variety. And the area in which he displayed incomparable mastery is the most esoteric branch of a rarefied subset of a specialized discipline.

David Lewin was a musical analyst— a specialist in the theory of how musical compositions are constructed. The compositions to which he devoted attention tended to be 20th-century works with an already limited following; he wrote essays on such exotica as Dallapiccola’s “Simbolo” and Stockhausen’s Klavierstück III. And his own work was an attempt to construct a mathematical theory of musical composition, drawing on fields in higher mathematics, including group theory, algebraic topology and projective geometry.” NY Times

Bill Keller writes on the New York Times op-ed page:

‘A cynic,’ protested The Wall Street Journal, ‘might conclude that yesterday’s decisions mean universities can still racially discriminate, as long as they’re not too obvious about it.’ Yes, just so. The editorial might have added that this is pretty much what the first President Bush did when he appointed a black jurist of questionable distinction to the Supreme Court, insisting all the while that it had nothing to do with race.

I believe in affirmative action as meeting worthy societal goals, but its point is not that it promotes the less worthy, rather that it remedies longstanding and deepseated social barriers to those whose worthiness is less likely to be discovered and recognized. That is not Clarence Thomas. Thomas is not a failure of affirmative action principles; he is a failure of a Republican caricature of affirmative action.

Questions for Jesse Friedman:

“You were thrust into the spotlight recently when Capturing the Friedmans, the documentary movie about your family and the conviction of you and your father on charges of sexually abusing students who came to your house, had its premiere in New York. How is all this sudden attention sitting with you?” NY Times Magazine

CtF was one of the most devastating films I’ve seen in a long time. It is not really about a pedophile as much as a graphic examination of how failures of community morés, family cohesiveness and judicial protections can erupt spontaneously in a sad, sick society.

Here’s a beauty: to vote or not to vote, to favor or not to favor the Medicare Prescription Drug Bill?

Theoretically, everybody’s in favor of a plan to help senior citizens with prescription drug costs, which are truly appalling. Many seniors literally have to choose between their meds or food. Everyone agrees it’s awful — the question is whether the bills currently in the House and Senate are actually an improvement.

Those of you who make up your minds based on the if-he’s-for-it, I’m-against-it method (quite a few people seem to be doing that these days) are in deep doo-doo on this one. True, Ted Kennedy is for it, and The Wall Street Journal is against it. On the other hand, the White House is for it, and pretty much everyone on the left except Kennedy is against it. The press is helpfully wringing its hands and announcing, ‘This is soooo complicated.’ ” — Molly Ivins, syndicated

South Carolinian Christopher George writes.

“Well it finally happened. My home state of South Carolina’s most famous (or is that infamous) political figure died at the age of 100.

(…)

As might be imagined, he is being remembered as a hero in his home state. The local media would have you believe that the earth itself spun only because he willed it to. We have a tendency, as a people, to not speak badly of those who have passed away, but it’s important to remember people for who they actually were, not some rose-colored vision of who they were, or pretended to be.

It’s with that in mind that I want to paint a picture of what Strom Thurmond really stood for. He was a racist. No amount of sugarcoating or excuse-making can change that. In fact, he was one of the most important figures in the history of the Segregated South.

I’ve had my fill of people telling me that he was a product of his times and the views he held were almost universally held in the South back then.” AlterNet

Many weblogs this week have posts discussing transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), the ‘TMS thinking cap’, and related topics, in the wake of the ‘Savant for a Day’ piece in last weekend’s New York Times Magazine. Here’s a Metafilter thread taking off from the article. I posted some comments on the topic in March, from my psychiatric vantage point.

I’ve been a subscriber to Whole Earth Magazine/Whole Earth Review/CoEvolution Quarterly since shortly after its inception. Many of the contemporary social-cultural-political thinkers who have resonated with and shaped my thinking have graced their pages through the years. Although it less often shines with the luminosity it once did these days, resources or — more important — revelations still tumble densely from each issue. From b0ing b0ing (because Cory Doctorow has an article in it) I learn that the publication of the forthcoming issue, a special one on the Singularity, is delayed because of lack of funds. The Whole Earth website has a sampling of articles from the delayed issue to entice you, and they are soliciting immediate financial support to remain afloat (as they have had to do several times in the past).

“This page regularly offers ideas for books or stories or works in other media, from those who can’t act upon them. In all cases they are offered in the hopes that these worthy projects will find their way to someone with the time and wherewithal to pursue them. Send yours to ideas@believermag.com.” The Believer

“New research suggests that petulant behavior could actually be due to normal brain ‘remodeling’ that occurs during adolescence.” Psychology Today

says Canadian aid worker:

“Tens of thousands of children in war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo are being slaughtered, raped or enslaved to fight in rebel armies in what aid agencies are calling one of the largest humanitarian emergencies in the world.

‘The situation is nothing short of genocide, with over three million people killed since 1998 – many of these women and children,’ says David Agnew, president of UNICEF Canada, who just returned to Toronto from a week in the central African country.

Agnew said the deaths do not represent only those killed directly in battle, but also millions who died in massacres or from disease and hunger.” canadaeast.com [via walker]

Isn’t there enough natural wealth or geopolitical advantage to justify a Bush cabal ‘humanitarian’ intervention in the DRC?