Category: People

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rePost:: The final failure of the Meiji right-wing ideology … Japan fades into the future with a walking stick…::Bronte Capital

This is very nice for the Philippines. Filipinos will undoubtedly grab this opportunity if it was presented to them. It is really sad that we may lose more of the cultural diversity in the world. Globalization has almost made sure that there is a world culture developing.  When I think about this more I realize that the Philippines if it doesn’t get it’s act together will surely see a lot of its culture forgotten. In this respect when ( it is not an if, an if means Japanese culture has not died) Japan takes the immigration plunge their great effort in recording and preserving their culture will not go into waste. I hope we are not too poor to not be able to save most of the cultural capital our beautiful country has.

Japan will have a median age of about 55. This means that the vast bulk of the Japanese population (or more precisely Japanese women) will be well beyond child-bearing age and given low fertility rates anyway (below 2.0 per woman) the population will crash. That is more-or-less baked in. Simple equation – most the women past child-bearing age and very low fertility amongst those who bear children anyway.
There is a solution – immigration. There are an endless supply of well educated and skilled young people (mostly) from the subcontinent who would happily move to a developed country. There are more than a few from China too. Australia will import them. Ampontan rhetorically asked where I expected them all to fit into Japan? Well that is easy – with a demographic like that I expect them to fit into the slots left by the dying warriors of Japanese industrialization.
If Japan does not do it then aging and death is inevitable. The working population will be stuck looking after and funding the huge numbers of retired. Japan’s industrial growth – now anemic – will collapse entirely with its population. The great Japanese industrialization experiment will walk slowly into the setting sun aided by a walking stick.
There is of course an alternative which is modest levels of immigration. New immigrants will – like it or not – be Asian – mostly from the subcontinent. Over time they will also include many Muslims. The Japanese will have to accept – as Australians have accepted – that their children will breed with these people. As a white Australian I have fully accepted that it is likely as not that my grandchildren will arrive as little brown babies. I do not have a problem with that.
But Japan is a country where they won’t let their hookers sleep with foreigners because – well they are foreigners. (It was that story in this post that got Ampontan all upset with me.) But it does not have to be that way. There can eventually be an Asian co-prosperity zone in Japan – it will be with Japanese children and other Asian children and eventually their joint grandchildren. The Meiji racist ideology does not have to end with a walking stick – it can end in a truly multicultural society that will lead Japan onto greater things than the original modern revolutionaries of the Meiji era could ever have imagined.
via Bronte Capital: The final failure of the Meiji right-wing ideology … Japan fades into the future with a walking stick….

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rePost:Are you looking for a job that allows you to spend time with family and friends? Maybe this is for you!!!!:SuperFreakonomics Book Club: Allie the Escort Answers Your Questions – Freakonomics Blog – NYTimes.com

What if I suggested this to a stranger (obviously beautiful) who wanted more time with family and friends? Think I’d get slapped in the face?

Q.
What do you like best about your job and what do you like least about it? – lost_fan
A.
I loved the free time that the job allowed me. I was able to travel and spend time with friends and family. I disliked the dishonesty and secrecy.
via SuperFreakonomics Book Club: Allie the Escort Answers Your Questions – Freakonomics Blog – NYTimes.com.

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rePost::SuperFreakonomics Book Club: Allie the Escort Answers Your Questions – Freakonomics Blog – NYTimes.com

Nice read.

Q.
Do your parents know about what you do for a living? What was your occupation before you became a call girl? What made you go into this line of work? Was it just the money or was it the flexible hours and the chance to be your own boss? – Dmitri
A.
My parents don’t know about my work, or anything else about my sex life. I was a programmer when I decided to quit my job and become an escort. I was single and meeting people through a popular dating website. Finding someone “special” proved to be difficult, but I did meet many nice men. I had grown up in a repressive small town and I was, at that time, looking to understand my own sexuality. I have never attached my self-worth to some idea of virginity or monogamy, but I still had not really explored many of my desires. I was meeting people living alternative lifestyles, and, as I got to know them, the stereotypes that I had built up started to come apart. During this time I was in my mid-twenties, and I had an active sex life.
One day I decided to enter the occupation of “escort” on an online instant messaging profile. Within seconds I had many responses, and after about a week of talking to a few people, I decided to meet a dentist at a hotel. The experience wasn’t glamorous or nearly as sexy as I thought it might be. However, I came away from the experience thinking, “It wasn’t bad.” I began to think that if I just had one appointment a month, I could pay my car loan with it, and have a little extra money. Eventually, I chose to work as an escort exclusively. At that time, the reason I gave up my programming job was the free time. I was caring for a family member with a serious illness — the free time and money was a huge benefit.
via SuperFreakonomics Book Club: Allie the Escort Answers Your Questions – Freakonomics Blog – NYTimes.com.

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rePost:Better Politicians :: Better Press Corp :: Better Celebrities :: Better Philippines :Brian Williams: Why Jon Stewart Is Good For News : NPR

We need something like this in the Philippines. I think this should start with trying to organize all recorded interviews we have of candidates. These interviews we tag with their positions and the context. We could do this for everything a politician/journalist/business people/celebrity  etc. says. Then whenever a new video is entered into our database we can automatically query flip-flopping, bad policy advice etc! This can be done by us the citizens of the Philippines. I hope someone does this.
PS: The cynic in me keeps remembering Miriam Defensor-Santiago’s “I lied!!!”
PS1: Listen to the npr audio in the linked post.
Ps2: One of the things I’d miss from my current job is the US IP address. No more full episodes of The Daily Show. Colbert Report and

For decades, young reporters would ask themselves, “What would Walter think?” Nowadays, it’s not the memory of Walter Cronkite or even Edward R. Murrow that motivates some reporters — it’s more often the fear that the stories they put out today might get picked apart by Jon Stewart tomorrow.
Prominent among the wary: NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams, who recently explained in a magazine essay that The Daily Show host “has gone from optional to indispensable” in just a few short years.
And Williams tells NPR’s Guy Raz that on occasion, when he feels his broadcast tap-dancing toward the precipice — tossing around a story idea for “what I call Margaret Mead journalism — where we ‘discover Twitter,’ ” for instance, or entertaining some other unfortunate editorial possibility — “I will, and have, said that, ‘You know, maybe we can just give a heads-up to Jon to set aside some time for that tonight.’
“I should quickly add, we have another set of standards we put our stories through,” Williams cautions. “But Jon’s always in the back of my mind. … When you make The Daily Show, it’s usually not for a laurel, it’s for a dart.”
None of this, the NBC anchor says, is to claim that Stewart and his crew have had some wholesale transformative effect on the news media.
But “a lot of the work that Jon and his staff do is serious,” Williams says. “They hold people to account, for errors and sloppiness. … It’s usually delivered with a smile — sometimes not. It’s not who we do it for, it’s not our only check and balance, but it’s healthy — and it helps us that he’s out there.”
via Brian Williams: Why Jon Stewart Is Good For News : NPR.

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rePost:Radical? Hardly!:Howard Zinn…not in our high schools either | Angry Bear

I always wondered why Howard Zinn was considered a radical. (He called himself a radical.) He was an unbelievably decent man who felt obliged to challenge injustice and unfairness wherever he found it. What was so radical about believing that workers should get a fair shake on the job, that corporations have too much power over our lives and much too much influence with the government, that wars are so murderously destructive that alternatives to warfare should be found, that blacks and other racial and ethnic minorities should have the same rights as whites, that the interests of powerful political leaders and corporate elites are not the same as those of ordinary people who are struggling from week to week to make ends meet?
…..
Mr. Zinn was in Santa Monica this week, resting up after a grueling year of work and travel, when he suffered a heart attack and died on Wednesday. He was a treasure and an inspiration. That he was considered radical says way more about this society than it does about him.
via Howard Zinn…not in our high schools either | Angry Bear.

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rePost::Howard Zinn…not in our high schools either | Angry Bear

Howard Zinn wrote this to Henry Giroux a few days before his death, hope you can read the whole write up of henry about Howard Zinn. I’ve always been a fairly level headed chap, I caution against over reaction, and trying to appear too radical. I’m slowly coming to the conclusion that I’ve been wrong in this stance. Once again read the linked article.

“Henry, we are in a situation where mild rebuke, even critiques we consider ‘radical’ are not sufficient. (Frederick Douglass’ speech on the Fourth of July in 1852, thunderously angry, comes close to what is needed). Raising the temperature of our language, our indignation, is what you are doing and what is needed. I recall that Sartre, close to death, was asked: ‘What do you regret?’ He answered: ‘I wasn’t radical enough.'”
via Howard Zinn…not in our high schools either | Angry Bear.

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rePost::J. D. Salinger, Enigmatic Author of ‘The Catcher in the Rye,’ Dies at 91 – Obituary (Obit) – NYTimes.com

But writing in The New York Review of Books in 2001, Janet Malcolm argued that the critics had all along been wrong about Mr. Salinger, just as short-sighted contemporaries were wrong about Manet and about Tolstoy. The very things people complain about, Ms. Malcolm contended, were the qualities that made Mr. Salinger great. That the Glasses (and, by implication, their creator) were not at home in the world was the whole point, Ms. Malcolm wrote, and it said as much about the world as about the kind of people who failed to get along there.
via J. D. Salinger, Enigmatic Author of ‘The Catcher in the Rye,’ Dies at 91 – Obituary (Obit) – NYTimes.com.

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Praise::Christian Bautista offered to do TV series in Indonesia | ABS-CBN News Online Beta

Good for him.  We really need to export our artists/various media/various entertainment resources. This is one of the few ways we could possibly re-awaken the sleeping movie industry, take the music industry to the next level, and be the cultural capital of south east asia.  To do this even with the weakest economy compared to the countries that matter would be a great achievement.

Christian Bautista offered to do TV series in Indonesia
abs-cbnNEWS.com | 01/28/2010 6:53 PM
MANILA, Philippine – Don’t be surprised if you see less of crooner Christian Bautista.
The singer recently announced that he got an offer to do a television series in Indonesia.
He also has to stay outside the country for a while to fulfill his numerous music commitments not only in Indonesia but in Malaysia as well, he added.
Thus, learning how to speak Bahasa fluently is a must, he said.
“Ngayon hahanapin ko ang mga kaibigan kong Malaysian dito sa Philippines para mag-aral talaga ako ng Bahasa kasi that's the only way. I'm very interested pero ipa-plano muna yon,” Bautista told ABS-CBN News.
Dubbed as “Asia's Pop Idol” and “Asia's Romantic Balladeer,” Bautista quickly clarified that his singing career is still his top priority.
via Christian Bautista offered to do TV series in Indonesia | ABS-CBN News Online Beta.

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RIP::Reclusive author J.D. Salinger dies at 91 | ABS-CBN News Online Beta

When I woke up earlier this morning I had a fever and a headache. I didn’t go to work and slept through the day.  I know it’s crazy but The Catcher in the Rye was a book I loved. The freakish part of me that feel that everything is connected somewhat believes that my being sick this whole friday may be in fact connected. RIP JD Salinger.

Reclusive author J.D. Salinger dies at 91
Reuters | 01/29/2010 10:28 PM
BOSTON – Reclusive U.S. author J.D. Salinger, who wrote the American post-war literary classic “The Catcher in the Rye,” has died of natural causes aged 91.
His literary agent, Phyllis Westberg, said he died on Wednesday at his home in New Hampshire.
“The Catcher in the Rye” was published in 1951. Its story of alienation and rebellion, featuring the teenage hero Holden Caulfield, immediately resonated with adolescent and young adult readers.
via Reclusive author J.D. Salinger dies at 91 | ABS-CBN News Online Beta.

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rePost::Merienda with a Nobel Laureate | Filipino Voices

Prof Wiesel advices Pinoy academics that these S&T incubators will only deliver its promise if the academics themselves adopt a more daring interdisciplinary view of things. This would imply a major shake up of how university bureaucracies are run which at present promotes departmental isolation. He suggests that academic departments and even the various UP campuses be daring enough to set up shop at the technohub (which should facilitate departments to collaboratively how to hatch projects). He gives the example of UP Manila’s health sciences research units. Medicine should not limit itself to clinical research but look into the potential of basic science research which can be incubated as new medical technologies. The best place to do that is in UP Diliman’s technohub since UP Diliman is strong in the basic natural sciences like physics, chem, biology and environment.
via Merienda with a Nobel Laureate | Filipino Voices.