Sunday, December 19, 2010
Thursday, December 16, 2010
This stuff is pretty rad. It looks like both the world that I want to live in and am absolutely terrified of.
Sunday, December 12, 2010
If you are familiar with the news in Japan, you will be aware that it is a country with a lot of free time on its hands. The biggest story of the late summer/early fall period was the monkey on the loose in Shizuoka, biting grannies and running from police. Now the winter has its own saga, with the fall colors now gone, Kabuki golden boy Ichikawa Ebizo has now risen to a higher stage.
What has he done to be on the news, morning noon and night for over two weeks? Nobel Prize? No, try again. Cure for cancer? Too easy. Iditarod, not even. Got drunk and then was beaten at a bar. Bingo! This nonsense has not just been news, but has been the only news for the last three weeks. Why? I can develop theories but not give answers.
I don't really care about Ebizo. I only know that he is a guy that comes on TV and speaks with fake gravity and people are supposed to be impressed by him. He may in fact be the once in a generation kabuki preformer that his supporters claim, but how would we know when his is the only family allowed to have once in a generation kabuki performers and he is the son? Wouldn't it stand to reason that that is what he would be held to be?
My concern is that now that his partner in this violence- I hesitate to say attacker because, who knows- has been found, I am worried for where the coverage will, and has already turned.
The 26 year-old yakuza lacky turns out to have an American father. Shame, shame. I have no heard him described twice in the news as looking like Bob Sapp.
Here is a photo of Bobb Sapp:
What has he done to be on the news, morning noon and night for over two weeks? Nobel Prize? No, try again. Cure for cancer? Too easy. Iditarod, not even. Got drunk and then was beaten at a bar. Bingo! This nonsense has not just been news, but has been the only news for the last three weeks. Why? I can develop theories but not give answers.
I don't really care about Ebizo. I only know that he is a guy that comes on TV and speaks with fake gravity and people are supposed to be impressed by him. He may in fact be the once in a generation kabuki preformer that his supporters claim, but how would we know when his is the only family allowed to have once in a generation kabuki performers and he is the son? Wouldn't it stand to reason that that is what he would be held to be?
My concern is that now that his partner in this violence- I hesitate to say attacker because, who knows- has been found, I am worried for where the coverage will, and has already turned.
The 26 year-old yakuza lacky turns out to have an American father. Shame, shame. I have no heard him described twice in the news as looking like Bob Sapp.
Here is a photo of Bobb Sapp:
Okay. Now here is a photo of Ebizo's alleged attacker, Ito Lion:
Alright. You got the resemblance there right? Check it again, just to make sure. Now here is a picture of the alleged victim, Kabuki god Ebizo:
Now, if forced to, just looking at these pictures, if you had to give police a description of alleged attacker Ito Lion, which man would you say he most resembled? Remember, Tiger Woods is not an option. Now, I will be honest, in his arrest pictures, Ito looks a bit more like a mope. He has put on some weight and has the hang dog look of a wannabe gangster. I know that look because I teach Japanese kids. It is very different from the look of a wannabe gangster in America. His whole body language says, "young Japanese kid gone wrong" to me. But that is not the context I have seen in the news.
Again, I might be reading this wrong. There is a lot of coverage that I have not watched. However, yesterday morning the panel discussion news involved a former model whose credentials were that one of her parents was Japanese while the other was American. They also had that ubiquitous Italian guy on. I might be constructing the racist dialogue in my own mind. I just wonder if the stroyline will ever run, "What is wrong with our country when a poor little kid with American and Japanese heritage gets sucked into our nasty Japanese underworld that eats wayward highschoolers and spits out their bones while being largely ignored by our justice system and public." I don't think we are going to hear that one.
May I ask a question, that I am sure has already been asked in you rown brain, if not in numerous media sources that I haven't seen? If the media and government are so put out over Julian Assange and want him to hang for his transgressions, then they must be just as furious over the Bush Administrations outing of Valerie Plame. Oh. What, they aren't?
Oh, wait, Democratic Underground is on it.
Oh, wait, Democratic Underground is on it.
While I am on the subject of bias, here is an article on the tax cuts. And here is a logical fallcy that I think it illustrates.
It is two years down the road and there is a lot of dusty ground in between, but is everyone really going to turn out to fight for Obama again? The kind of fight that will get him Florida again? Or North Carolina or Virginia? How are we going to pull off a Democrat for President when the President won't be a Democrat. If, after 2 years in the Senate, the decide to run Marco Rubio for the Republican nomination, what are we going to do? I am putting the long money on him. Mark it down now. Not that I want him to win.
It is two years down the road and there is a lot of dusty ground in between, but is everyone really going to turn out to fight for Obama again? The kind of fight that will get him Florida again? Or North Carolina or Virginia? How are we going to pull off a Democrat for President when the President won't be a Democrat. If, after 2 years in the Senate, the decide to run Marco Rubio for the Republican nomination, what are we going to do? I am putting the long money on him. Mark it down now. Not that I want him to win.
The question has been posed about post World War II America; that our resounding success in winning that war adversely affected our post war foreign policy. That we took the lesson to be that since we won a huge war, huge wars could help solve world problems, like in Korea or Vietnam. Japan, on the other hand, go the opposite idea; Man war is a bunch of garbage. Don't misunderstand, I am thrilled America won and Japan lost, but, even though I lead off with this paragraph, I don't mean to talk about post-war foreign policy.
It seems that our current national dialogue is at a bit of a distance from where our dialogue as people is. It is starting to seep through somewhat, but not with the urgency and fury that it needs to. As to why, the answer seems quite simple to my mind, the governing class in our country, both the press and the politicians are burdened with a gigantic survivorship bias. I Imagine most of you are familiar with the term, but let me give a brief summation. Let us suppose that a commander orders 20 men to invade an enemy bunker. This invasion leads to a complete destruction of the bunker and only one dead soldier from the 20 person team. An amazingly successful endeavor. Unless you are the one soldier who was shot through the head running up the hill. From his standpoint, rapidly ascending to the spirit world, it seems like a gigantic waste and a terrible order, but we will never hear his side of things. We will only hear from the guys who survived, how it was tough going until they made it over the rise. How it was sad to lose one guy, but they knew that they would make it. They just had a feeling. Of course, that one guy had that feeling to, until he felt nothing.
In business survivorship bias is often discussed in relation to figures that omit failures. Let's say there is a new shopping mall and it has 5 stores that are making 20% more profits than the mom and pop stores that were on Main street. Well, this shopping mall must be miraculous. What if we knew that there used to be 15 stores in the shopping mall and that 10 of them went bankrupt? That shopping mall wouldn't seem so magical then.
How am I applying this to our national discussion? Think about how rife every national conversation we have is with survivorship bias. Even the passionate speech given by the television host or the brave actions of a lone congressperson are only a hazy refraction of what is really happening. They can, at best, empathize. By the very nature of the job, no one who delivers our nightly news is being adversely effected by the economy. In fact, they are probably at the apex of an upward course. Of course they feel that success is a by-product of their own hard work, and it is to a large degree. It is also luck and favor and timing. Our representatives as well, are, again by the nature of their jobs, successful. Without question, it was a high risk proposition and some candidates wipe out completely and disappear, but there are no poor representatives. Senators have a high paying job for 6 years and representatives in the house for 2. To many of us that is a dream. I would gladly settle for 2 years at a hundred thousand dollars. It is beyond my wildest imagination.
How can we expect decisions to be made on our behalf, and a dialogue to happen to our benefit when there is no real way for the people in charge of those decisions and that dialogue to understand the situation? On television poor people seem like an aberration and should, without question, be apologetic about their situation. The homeless might be a sad situation, but what mistakes did they make to get there? Not any mistakes that a TV host or a politician would make.
I am a school teacher, and I don't want to just speak for me, but I know that no one in the government or on TV works ten times harder than I do. I am sure they work hard, but the nature of my jobs ensure that no one outside coal miners and infantrymen work harder than I do. That applies to a lot of people out there. However, everyone on TV and in the government makes ten times what I do or more. How can we expect a fair conversation to happen under those circumstances?
We can't.
It seems that our current national dialogue is at a bit of a distance from where our dialogue as people is. It is starting to seep through somewhat, but not with the urgency and fury that it needs to. As to why, the answer seems quite simple to my mind, the governing class in our country, both the press and the politicians are burdened with a gigantic survivorship bias. I Imagine most of you are familiar with the term, but let me give a brief summation. Let us suppose that a commander orders 20 men to invade an enemy bunker. This invasion leads to a complete destruction of the bunker and only one dead soldier from the 20 person team. An amazingly successful endeavor. Unless you are the one soldier who was shot through the head running up the hill. From his standpoint, rapidly ascending to the spirit world, it seems like a gigantic waste and a terrible order, but we will never hear his side of things. We will only hear from the guys who survived, how it was tough going until they made it over the rise. How it was sad to lose one guy, but they knew that they would make it. They just had a feeling. Of course, that one guy had that feeling to, until he felt nothing.
In business survivorship bias is often discussed in relation to figures that omit failures. Let's say there is a new shopping mall and it has 5 stores that are making 20% more profits than the mom and pop stores that were on Main street. Well, this shopping mall must be miraculous. What if we knew that there used to be 15 stores in the shopping mall and that 10 of them went bankrupt? That shopping mall wouldn't seem so magical then.
How am I applying this to our national discussion? Think about how rife every national conversation we have is with survivorship bias. Even the passionate speech given by the television host or the brave actions of a lone congressperson are only a hazy refraction of what is really happening. They can, at best, empathize. By the very nature of the job, no one who delivers our nightly news is being adversely effected by the economy. In fact, they are probably at the apex of an upward course. Of course they feel that success is a by-product of their own hard work, and it is to a large degree. It is also luck and favor and timing. Our representatives as well, are, again by the nature of their jobs, successful. Without question, it was a high risk proposition and some candidates wipe out completely and disappear, but there are no poor representatives. Senators have a high paying job for 6 years and representatives in the house for 2. To many of us that is a dream. I would gladly settle for 2 years at a hundred thousand dollars. It is beyond my wildest imagination.
How can we expect decisions to be made on our behalf, and a dialogue to happen to our benefit when there is no real way for the people in charge of those decisions and that dialogue to understand the situation? On television poor people seem like an aberration and should, without question, be apologetic about their situation. The homeless might be a sad situation, but what mistakes did they make to get there? Not any mistakes that a TV host or a politician would make.
I am a school teacher, and I don't want to just speak for me, but I know that no one in the government or on TV works ten times harder than I do. I am sure they work hard, but the nature of my jobs ensure that no one outside coal miners and infantrymen work harder than I do. That applies to a lot of people out there. However, everyone on TV and in the government makes ten times what I do or more. How can we expect a fair conversation to happen under those circumstances?
We can't.
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