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LP does not think yesterday’s post was boring:

that post about Asian-eastern hot chics or if they are not hot chics…fun post. everytime I check your blog it is always ineresting! well, the latest Gwen stefani cd talks about harra ju ku girls and Japan street fashion…Japanese street fashion IS NOT IMPRESSIVE at all…

Actually, I think it is quite impressive in a blink-your-eyes-and-shake-your-head way. Being an occasional victim of fashion in the past, I tend to find the vagaries of human adornment to be more interesting than, say, the debate over which team of engineers can cause its human-occupied vehicle to travel marginally faster across the earth’s surface.

Please note that I didn’t say I find them to be very interesting, only less completely boring than numerous other human bizarrities. Every culture is freaky in its own way; the Japanese, having benefitted from centuries of near isolation, are freakier and thus more interesting than most. Would William Gibson’s novels be half as spellbinding if they were set in a futuristic Scotland or Lithuania? I don’t think so.

As for Mrs. Rossdale, she looked fantastic in that video with the little Japanese cheerleaders. Not a bad pop song, either.

The New York Times wonders where its friends went:

But unlike those books, or this year’s “The Friend Who Got Away,” an anthology of essays by well-known women writers, Ms. Lippman’s entry is not segregated in the “relationships” section of the bookstore. It is first and foremost a gripping mystery novel, one that Ms. Lippman notes is more likely to reach plenty of readers – men as well as women – who until now have given little thought to the emotional attachments among girls and women.The giddy beginnings and heartbreaking endings of all her failed friendships haunt Ms. Lippman, 46, whether she was the one who walked away unceremoniously or the one abandoned and bewildered. “I’ve been in both situations,” Ms. Lippman said. “I imagine most women have.”

So why is it, Ms. Lippman wonders, that female friendships, so deeply felt, often end so shamefully?

The logical assumption would be that both parties are women. It mystifies me that this sort of thing is even considered a matter for debate. No one questions the fact that men are more murderous and physically dangerous than women, so why is it at all controversial to assert that women are nastier and more psychologically dangerous than men?

I suppose the absence of a psychological body count would suffice to account for this, but still, one need only look at the ways in which male and female friendships differ to understand why one sort is more likely to last than the other. Female friendships burn hotter and are more intimate than the closest male friendships, but as everyone who’s had a romantic relationship go bad knows, even serious intimacy is perfectly capable of leading to bitter hatred and mutual loathing.

One difference that I have noted is that while men tend to treat their friends better than everyone else, women often seem to treat their friends worse than they treat complete strangers. I don’t know if the idea is that closeness is an justification to reveal the unpleasant aspects of one’s character or if female friends are expected to cut each other slack that they would not give anyone else. Either way, it’s a recipe for disaster in the long term.

One thing of which I’m sure is that friendship is not about doing nice things and building up a store of gratitude in the other party. I know several women who not only visibly keep score of this sort of thing, but actually make a hobby of telling uninterested third parties about the saintly deeds they are doing and how much the recipients appreciate them. Weird. Friendship has nothing to do with being nice per se, it’s more about continually building up trust between two individuals.

I have been fortunate to have had the same friends for decades. I am not blind to their flaws nor are they blind to mine, but we shrug our shoulders, accept them as given and go on. Without this indifference and mutual acceptance, a friendship is ultimately doomed.

Unfortunately, this phenomenon Ms Lippman laments is not of complete irrelevance to men, however much we might wish it to be, as I suspect that some aspects of the difficulties encountered within male-female relationships may stem in part from the problematic history of earlier female friendships. I suspect that a man who can teach his daughter how to be a good friend may be laying a foundation for her to have a successful marriage one day.

A list of kenminsei:

Unlike Akita, Ibaraki is famous for its unattractive women. Mito city, in particular, is said to have the worst looking girls in Japan, just edging out Sendai and Nagoya in the ugliness rankings.

Given what I endured in Tokyo, the flowers of Ibaraki must be frightening indeed. In six months of reasonably dedicated bar and nightclub-hopping combined with daily classes on campus, I encountered a grand total of three genuinely beautiful Japanese girls, while you could easily count five times that number of gaijin girls in a single night at the Lexington Queen.

(That’s not exactly a fair comparison, since the Queen was a Roundeye model hangout, but still….)

Anyhow, I found these amusing. My Japanese was borderline functional by the time I left, but I’ve forgotten all of it now, barring one or two memorable little phrases. Asita no asa wa, kohee o nomimasen-ka?

I couldn’t resist telling my boss that this was a very polite and respectful way to greet a high-ranking Japanese executive when he flew over for some meetings I’d set up for him. Fortunately, the Hitachi vice-president he was addressing turned out to have a great sense of humor. The guy took us to a ridiculously expensive restaurant which served the most disgusting food I have ever eaten – it was all super deep sea stuff that glowed in the dark and whatnot – and I still remember him grinning slyly as he paid by slipping his business card to the kimono-clad proprietress.

“Japanese-ah credit card, heh heh heh.”

As I was cruising around the newsgroups – never you mind why – I happened to notice a certain novel had been made available in .pdb format by someone using the unlikely nomenclature ripXrip. To be sure, it was merely one of several hundred ebooks that had been uploaded to the site, in between The Romance Reader Top 100 List [html].rar and Theodore Sturgeon – Shottle Bop [v.1.0][html].rar, but I felt rather pleased at my discovery all the same.

After all, people generally don’t go to the trouble to scan and pass around a book unless they think someone is going to want to read it. I am well aware that in the SFWA, I am in the extreme minority with this point of view, but then, let’s face it, in that organization, I’m in the extreme minority with regards to almost every aspect of my life.

Rip away. Read away. If you like it, tell someone about it. If you really like it, go pick up the dead tree version.

Gregg writes:

If a nuke goes off in a America I think the mass psychology will run the Muslims into concentration camps. It will be a horrible thing for Muslims, but it would happen. I believe Malkin and Coulter would write in favor of it. Would you?

No, I would not. I would continue to write in favor of returning all non-citizens from Islamic countries to their countries of origin – for the terminally obtuse that is defined as countries where more than 50 percent of the population is Muslim or where Sharia is incorporated into the legal system – and I would fervently defend the rights and liberties of all American citizens who happen to be Muslim. In no case should the Constitution be violated nor should innocent individuals be deprived of their property and liberty en masse on the basis of their race or religion.

In the event of a nuclear attack, I think it is likely that concentration camps would be established, but they would not necessarily be filled with Muslims. First, it’s pretty clear that martial law would be declared, and the immediate priority for the federal government, (or, depending on where the nuke went off, its FEMA-established replacement), would be to round up those acting in opposition to martial law, regardless of their creed.

Suffice it to say that I am opposed to the historical violation of American rights and liberties that occurred during WWII, (including the draft), and I am opposed to any future violation of American rights and liberties, regardless of the excuse or the identity of the particular group being targeted by the federal government and/or public opinion.

As for the girlish doyennes of the right-wing commentariat, I have to confess that I’m not sure what Miss Coulter would say. Considering her interest in constitutional law, I don’t think she’d be inclined to embrace the Constitution-shredding actions required, but she’s inconsistent enough that it is possible, if unlikely. Mrs. Malkin, despite her unconvincing protestations, has indicated a level of support for interning Muslims already; if one were to make the mistake of taking her most recent book seriously, it makes a much stronger case for a current internment on the basis of national security than it did for what would be its historical predecessor.

The important thing to remember is that while 50 simultaneous nuclear explosions could not destroy America, the government’s reaction to a single nuclear dud could. I believe it may have been the historian Toynbee who first pointed out that civilizations are not murdered, they commit suicide. And martial law is almost inevitably a major step in that process.

Nate delineates a few facts about Southron history, including the following: “Do I think the South was Right to buy and sell people like cattle… hrm… You actually just mean buy don’t you? Since it was the Yankees that did all the collecting and selling? We bought the slaves the yankees sold us.”

Which, naturally, sparked the following response from what would appear to be a dyslexic anonymous visitor: “LIES, LIES, LIES, LIES. History revisionist bulls_hit. Pure and simple. Rewrite history anyway you like. Tell yourself a lie long enough and you will believe. The Yankees sold us slaves. The South didn’t buy any slaves. Uh-huh, suuuuuuuuuuure. Moron.”

This is a clear case of projection combined with a complete reading comprehension failure. I’m not sure how Anonymous managed to confuse “We bought the slaves” with “The South didn’t buy any slaves”, but he did.

Of course, he also reveals a certain absence of logic as well as ignorance of the basic facts of the Civil War. Consider the following:

1. Black slaves were imported from Africa by ship.
2. Throughout the war, the North imposed a naval blockade on the South.

Given the above, now see if you can answer the following questions:

1. Which side possessed an abundance of naval power, the North or the South?
2. Which side therefore was likely to have imported the vast majority of slaves, the North or the South?

Confirming our logic, the historians record that Newport, Rhode Island was the slave trade’s primary North American port. “The principal port in North America for ships engaged in the Atlantic slave trade, Newport sent over 900 voyages to the African coast. Between 1725 and 1808 Newport ships took about 100,000 people to slavery in the West Indies and North America.”

From another source: “Boston and Newport were the chief slave ports, but nearly all the New England towns — Salem, Providence, Middletown, New London – had a hand in it. In 1740, slaving interests in Newport owned or managed 150 vessels engaged in all manner of trading. In Rhode Island colony, as much as two-thirds of the merchant fleet and a similar fraction of sailors were engaged in slave traffic.”

UPDATE: jccclimber fails to grok the fullness:

Once importing slaves was outlawed in 1808, the Northern ports were pretty much closed to new slaves. So where did the (now illegal) slaves come into the US? In the North?”

“Even after slave trading was banned in 1808, Northern slave traders continued to smuggle 40,000 slaves a year to America; saying little for the U.S. Government’s laws and policing of the problem. A New York City slave ship, in 1858, was discovered to have landed some 420 African slaves on the coast of Georgia; avoiding northern scrutiny. As late as 1861, five vessels were seized and destroyed that were being outfitted specifically for slave trading transports.”

It seems that the northern slavers simply continued their operations but on a less open basis. The South didn’t have the ships for the trans-oceanic trade, even when it was banned in Northern ports after 1808. To use a modern analogy, the Northerners were the drug dealers, the Southerners were the drug users.

From another source: “Attempts to outlaw the slave trade in the north only increased the profits of smuggling. In 1858, only two years prior to the birth of the Confederacy, Stephen Douglas noted that over 15,000 slaves had been smuggled into New York alone, with over 85 vessels sailing from New York in 1859 to smuggle even more slaves”

John Derbyshire writes to Rich Lowry on NRO:

I apologize for not having made myself sufficiently clear.

—Yes, I want to pull out of Iraq.

—Yes, I want to kill jihadis everywhere we can find them, certainly including Iraq.

I think our point of disagreement is that you believe (apparently) that in order to kill jihadis in country X, or country Y, or country Z, we need to maintain a huge armed presence in X, Y, and Z. Heaven forbid this be true!

I don’t mean to trivialize your point of view. Far from it–I know you hang out with a lot of senior Washington and DoD types way above my pay grade, hear a lot of stuff you can’t publish, & have been thinking hard about Iraq for 3 years. Could that, perhaps, have made you a little too Iraqocentric? You seem to be saying: “Hey, Derb, you say you want to kill all the jihadis in Iraq, yet you want to pull us out of Iraq. Does not compute!” Or perhaps: “Hey, look, we have this army in Iraq, for whatever reason, and it’s a great place to kill jihadis. So why would anyone want us to withdraw?”

My opinion is that, from the point of view of killing jihadis — a thing I strongly favor — Iraq is not that important. It is not even the most jihadi-ridden nation — Pakistan and Saudi Arabia easily outrank it on that scale. The “flypaper” theory — that all the jihadis in the world are going to flock to Iraq so we can kill ’em — is just silly. Ask a Londoner.

There are more ways to kill a cat than by choking it with cream, and there are more ways to fight the War on Terror than with massive conventional-force assaults and Wilsonian nation-bulding efforts. We really ought to be devising and practicing those ways, instead of wasting our substance on Iraq.

There are many other ways to kill jihadis in country X. If X = Britain, for example, we can depend on the British themselves doing it for us (give or take the odd Brazilian electrician). The same applies to Australia, and all over the Anglosphere. In other civilized nations, matters are not so clear. Could we depend on, say, Greece taking care of any jihadis on their territory, to our satisfaction?

Outside the pale of civilization — a phrase that, I believe, fairly describes the Muslim Middle East — things are much more difficult. Sending in 130,000 troops to occupy country X is not a bad idea, I suppose; but then, what do you do about country Y and country Z? See the difficulty?

I believe, and hope, that there are ways to kill satisfactory numbers of jihadis without either (a) having a dependable local government to do it for us, or (b) placing 130,000 Americans in the offending nation.

Your idea — the administration’s idea — is that we convert Iraq (and then, I suppose, country Y and country Z) into Anglosphere-type nations, whom we can depend on to take care of matters themselves, using their own police and army. I believe — and I am sorry to be blunt about it — that this is a preposterous fantasy. I should be sufficiently astounded if we could turn Iraq into a Greece, or a Mexico. We might, with luck, turn it into a Saudi Arabia, but… Surely you see the problem?

I hope that makes things clear. Now perhaps you could clarify something for me.

You are speaking here, and in your last couple of posts, as if the main point of being in Iraq is to kill local jihadis more easily.

So, were you arguing back in 2002 and 2003 that the main reason we ought to invade Iraq was to kill local jihadis more easily? Was that your rationale, or some large compnent of your rationale, for supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom at that time? If it was not — if, at some point between spring of 2003 and now, you changed your rationale for our presence in Iraq — how would you go about persuading an impartial observer that your change of rationale was not motivated by blind loyalty to this administration?

Blind loyalty to the Bush administration? NRO? Derb might want to watch his tongue, or he’ll find himself writing for WND soon… not that it’s seemed to hurt Ann Coulter in the least.

And yes, I’m very much in agreement with his “preposterous fantasy” statement. That’s been my view of the notion of nation-building in Iraq since the beginning, and was the primary reason for my many reservations about supporting the initial invasion.

London and Madrid and Egypt make it quite clear that the concept of an occupied Iraq as an irresistible magnet to which terrorists will be drawn like bugs to a zapper has worked out about as well as skeptics like Derb and I thought it would. In fact, one could argue that leaving our borders open and sending our troops over there is a recipe for disaster.

John sounds vaguely offended:

Vox, you’re painting in brushstrokes that are way too broad. Over the last three days, you’ve impugned the professionalism and integrity of every law enforcement agency in two countries.

Answer me this: The guy that responds to a domestic violence call or liquor store robbery is a part of some government plot to take your liberties and is merely looking to shoot you for the hell of it?

Absolutely I have and I do. Like many other people, I have some very serious doubts as to whose side the police and the federal criminal agencies are on these days. It is interesting to note that 15 years ago, “Fuck the Police” was the battle cry of a few black gangbangers in Los Angeles. Now, I hear those same sentiments from wealthy 50-something white suburbanites who wouldn’t listen to rap if you physically threatened them.

But professionalism is not the answer, indeed, it is part of the problem. The Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe were filled with precisely the sort of professional warriors that currently make up much of our armed forces and police. They were good men, family men, men who believed that they were doing the right thing by obeying the law and their government. Their problem was not that they were bad people, the problem was that they were good people acting in obedience to evil men.

The people of the United States are not serfs, they have no masters and they do not need protection, which, by the way, they are clearly not receiving anyhow. In any event, I will always favor taking the risks that exist on the side of freedom, mostly because the historical bodycount on that side is significantly smaller.

Lest you think I am avoiding your question, the policeman became a part of a government plot to eliminate American liberties the moment he accepted the notion that he had the right to act as judge, jury and executioner on the basis of his own feelings. Most policemen, being decent individuals, will not abuse that illegitimate power. The hundreds of annual killings by police indicate that too many, however, will, either intentionally or unintentionally.

The International Chiefs of Police, a police organization, tried in the 1980’s to collect such information, but “the figures were very embarrassing to a lot of police departments,” said James Fyfe, a professor of criminal justice at Temple University who is a former New York City police lieutenant. The results, he said, varied wildly. New Orleans had 10 times as many shootings per 100 officers as Newark. Long Beach had twice as many as neighboring Los Angeles, which in turn had three times more than New York….

On its cover, for example, the report refers to all the victims of police shootings as “felons justifiably killed by police,” a categorization that Samuel Walker, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, termed “deeply offensive and legally incorrect.” In fact, a Justice Department official said the bureau was so embarrassed by the term, and the lack of distinction between justifiable police shootings and murders, that it did not send out its usual promotional material announcing the report.

A compilation of movie lameness:

2. When paying for a taxi, don’t look at your wallet as you take out a note. Just grab one out at random and hand it over. It will always be the exact fare….

21. Cars will explode instantly when struck by a single bullet.

Remember, these are the same people that argue they have to be able to show humans being blown away in every other scene because they are “keeping it real”. When you combine the constant insults to their potential audience’s intelligence and the inability to find new and interesting stories to transform into the visual medium – there’s still no Dark is Rising film, but both The Bad News Bears and The Dukes of Hazzard have been remade already – it’s no wonder that box offices are declining.

The last movie I saw in the theatre was Return of the King. I don’t feel as if I’ve missed a thing.

This is a basic 25-question test that isn’t, in my opinion, a true intelligence test as it required familiarity with certain literature that I would consider to be more than a little obscure these days. It doesn’t take long, though, and it only had one of the IF THIS IS THIS AND THAT IS THAT THEN WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THIS AND THAT questions that I loathe.

How’d I do? Not quite as well as I’d expected, although still in the 141-159 range. Really low in that range, unfortunately, or 142, to be precise. Perhaps I should have had that second cappucino I was contemplating….

Don’t cheat!