Another Thing We Should Abolish

I'm as big of a news and politics junkie as they come and even I can't bring myself to watch Trumpolini's SotU.

Seriously, what's the point?  As the internet likes to say, don't feed the [ultimate] troll.

"John Kennedy's pulmanesque explained"

The Fall, "The Man Whose Head Expanded"

Mark E. Smith is dead at 60.  The world is a little less bright and weird today.

And you have to love the fact that he played himself in 24 Hour Party People.

Only The Beginning

America, 2018: a doctor rapes over 150 girls for nearly 20 years and finally gets justice far, far too late:

"Seven minutes into her testimony last Tuesday, delivered alongside her mother, Kyle looked up at Judge Rosemarie Aquilina and politely asked if she could address Nassar directly.

She reminded him of how her parents invited him round to their home after she had accused him. Sitting in her living room, he had denied abusing her and had said that if she was ever really abused, she should remember to report it.

'Well Larry, I'm here,' she told him in court. 'Not to tell someone, but to tell everyone.

'Perhaps you have figured it out by now, but little girls don't stay little forever. They grow into strong women who return to destroy your world."

The president of Michigan State has resigned.

While no amount of money can ever really cure the damage done, here's hoping MSU gets sued into oblivion.

As I snarked on twitter previously, we can start worrying about "witch hunts" against men once we've created a society where teenage girls can go to a doctor without the fear of being fingered and abused, then literally told to shut up about it.

Spare The Hike, Spoil The Worker

South Korea famously requires all men to serve almost two years of mandatory military service.  And once that's finished, all Korean entry-level employees may face the possibility of "corporate" military service / training:

"Other examples include Daegu Bank taking 64 recruits on a 100-kilometer hike last October, or Shinhan Bank forcing new employees in 2014 to hold a saddle stance while reciting passages written by the famous Korean independence activist Ahn Chang-ho. 

Unsurprisingly, such methods are not very popular with employees themselves. According to a survey of 296 people by Job Korea, a job searching website, 74 percent of respondents said training new recruits is 'necessary,' with 66.7 percent adding that the purpose of such training ought to be to learn basic information about the job.

Yet many companies continue to feel that these practices are the most effective. 'This happens because companies have a militarized view and ignore the value of creativity and independence,' said Lee Byoung-hoon, professor of sociology at Chung-Ang University. 'But in the fourth industrial revolution, this militarized view is outmoded.'”

Discussing this article with my adult students, I was happy to just sit back and let the older ones share their (insane) stories of Korean work culture in the 70's and 80's.  You may think a group hike would be a relaxing team-building exercise, but in South Korea it's a competition between various company departments.

It's Korea.  It's always about competition.

Also worth noting / puking about:

"Recently, KB Bank faced public criticism when it was revealed it had made hirees walk 100 kilometers (62 miles) and had provided birth control pills to female employees. 'We provided birth control pills based on desire,' said one KB Bank official. But one employee who participated in the training said, 'The hiring team gave us the birth control, telling us to control our periods during the training period.'”

Ugh.

"dystopia for some is utopia for others"

From a Boston Review interview with China Mieville:

"It is hard to avoid the sense that these are particularly terrible days, that dystopia is bleeding vividly into the quotidian, and hence, presumably, into 'realism,' if that was ever a category in which one was interested. At this point, however, comes an obligatory warning about the historical ubiquity of the questionable belief that Things Have Got Worse, and of the sheer arrogance of despair, the aggrandisement of thinking that one lives in the Worst Times.

But hot on the heels of that, we need a countercorrective to a no-less arrogant assumption that things will likely be alright, out of fear that thinking otherwise would indeed be arrogant. Against surrender to the complacency and historical myopia of steady-state politics—of precluding, as a real possibility, epochal degeneration.

There has not in living memory been a better time to be a fascist. I think these are dreadful, sadistic times, getting worse—though with abrupt and salutary countertendencies—and there is no reason that their end point might not be utter catastrophe. For me, facing that is urgent, as is the deployment (or anti-moralist rehabilitation) of categories such as 'decadence' and 'Barbarism' (as in 'Socialism or . . .').

It is not as if the world has not long, long been one in which vast numbers live in dystopian depredation. The horizon is more visible now to many who had thought themselves insulated, if they thought about it at all. And dystopia for some is utopia for others. To repeat something I have said elsewhere, we live in a utopia: it just isn’t ours."

Philosophical Debate

Is a five-foot long tapeworm worth it for eating lots of delicious sushi?

— "Stable Genius" James (@wetcasements) January 22, 2018

Here We Go

I bought my tickets for the Pyeongchang Olympics a few days ago.  By Korean standards, the website was very easy to use.  By international standards, it was only a bit of train-wreck but I could use it in Chrome which was pretty mind-blowing.

I'll be going for two days and seeing a) a US men's hockey match, b) two rounds, male and female, of aerial skiing, and c) the finals of the women's Super-G skiing event.

I wanted to try and see an event where South Korea had a good shot at medaling (basically, short-track skating) but those events were incredibly expensive (over 200 bucks).  The tickets I got weren't exactly cheap either, but I'm excited.

Kind of a Big Deal

North and South Korea, while competing separately, will march under the joint "Unification Flag" at the upcoming Pyeongchang Olympics next month.

The history of the flag is fascinating:

"The flag was first used in 1991 when the two countries competed as a single team in the 41st World Table Tennis Championships in Chiba, Japan and the 8th World Youth Football Championship in Lisbon, Portugal. The two countries' teams marched together under the flag in the opening ceremonies of the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia; the 2002 Asian Games in Busan, South Korea; the 2003 Summer Universiade in Daegu, South Korea; the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, Greece; the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy; and the 2006 Asian Games in Doha, Qatar; however, the two countries competed separately in sporting events. The flag was not used in the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, China. Not only was a unified team shelved, even Beijing Olympics Organization Committee (BOCOG)'s plan to make the two Korean teams turn up back to back during the opening ceremony was rejected due to opposition by the North Korean delegation at the last moment."

By my "stable genius" math skills, this will be the eighth time it's been used officially.

Flag-wise, I love the colors but am kind of put off by how damn literal the thing is.  It's downright Rorschachian.

Apples, Meet Oranges

"ZOMG #metoo is a witch hunt against men!"

Meanwhile, a prominent US doctor raped over 200 girl athletes and nobody. did. anything. about. it.

Discuss.

— "Stable Genius" James (@wetcasements) January 16, 2018

Foresight

From Kirby: King of Comics by Mark Evanier:

"Early on, it had been the subject of one of those Kirby precictions that few took seriously when he made it.  He said the con [San Diego Comic-Con, first held in 1970] would grow until it took over all of San Diego.  He said that the definition of 'comics' would expand beyond those things printed on cheap paper.  It would be about comic books as movies, comic books as television, comic books in forms yet to be invented.  He said -- and this is a quote -- 'It will be where all of Hollywood will come every year to find the movies they'll make next year and to sell the movies they found here the year before."

Kirby was a visionary, to say the least.  By 1970 he was slowing down as an artist but realized TV, and later film, would be where the money was.  He transitioned from comics to show producer and managed (with great effort) to get back some of his original artwork from Marvel and apparently lived pretty comfortably after a lifetime of economic anxiety, even though his creations had generated so much wealth for multiple comic companies (including, less famously, DC).

Stan Lee does not come off well here.  He was, at best, pretty much indifferent to the economic plight of the man who basically created the Marvel Universe.  At worse, he stole all of Kirby's best ideas.

Casting Stones

If Haiti and Africa are "shitholes," I wonder what that makes of rural Kentucky, West Virginia, and Ohio?  (And that's just for starters.)

Indeed, the United States has a life expectancy that's literally declining.  Opioids are ravaging, for lack of a better term, "white America" at rates that would make the worst inner city neighborhoods blush.  (With the added bonus of HIV making a serious comeback in these areas.)

But hey, just remember that Trump's rise and victory had nothing to do with race and the poison of white racial resentment.

Ugh

any white person writing about any city in Asia: "It's a city of contrasts, old and new, traditional and modern, at times hectic but also serene...."

— "Stable Genius" James (@wetcasements) January 11, 2018

I'm stoked for the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics next month (I'll be going for two or three days) but not so much for how Western media always covers Asia -- it's so fucking cliche by now.

As if New York or London aren't also massively contrasting and /or contradictory. That's how big cities work, always.

Age Is Just A (Complicated) Number

I've lived in South Korea for almost a decade now and I'll admit, I still don't understand how Korean age-accounting works (i.e., "East Asia Age Reckoning.")  Basically, Koreans count their Lunar New Year as a birthday and depending on your actual birthday, you can be either one or two years older than you would be in, say, America.  It's weird.  And it might be changing:

"While China, where the tradition originated, Japan and even North Korea officially did away with the traditional system in an effort to embrace the modern age system, South Korea stuck with it and essentially became the only Asian country where the old age calculating system is still practiced and culturally prevails even to date.

People from different cultures who first encounter the so-called Korean age often express interest in its novelty, prompting several YouTubers and K-pop-focused websites to give extensive coverage to the unique age system, under which one can experience an age gap of up to two years in some cases.

However, South Koreans, particularly younger generations, are experiencing difficulties switching back and forth between the western age system and Korean Age, and they have taken the issue to the internet where discussions are being had over the pros and cons of the traditional age system."

It's a rare occasion when North Korea is more "Western" regarding a cultural issue than South Korea is.

Also, I'm sure I'm not the only foreigner here who always uses his "Western" age.  Because, vanity.

#Oprah

Why not Oprah for president?  She's not my first choice but if she managed to win the Democratic nomination I'd vote, volunteer, and donate as much as possible in 2020.  She strikes me as smart enough to understand that she could surround herself with policy types and leave the hefty lifting of undoing the Trump Years up to them.

But to hear fellow Dems moan and wail about how we need "real" politicians instead of celebrities is laughable in a post-Trump world.

For better or worse (ed. note: much, much worse), politics in America now is post-policy and entirely based on personality.  And that genie isn't going back into the bottle ever again.  There is no second-place trophy for maintaining your pure political principles in the face of a GOP that is more than fine with supporting the Orange Pussy-grabber.

I wish -- dear god I wish -- some sort of book-readin', Harvard edumacated Obama 2.0 were in charge these days.  And I hope Elizabeth Warren (no slouch in the book-readin', edmucated department herself) runs.

But let's not fool ourselves -- in American politics for the foreseeable future personality trumps (ahem) all now, given our sick "both sides do it" media culture and a Republican Party that's been arguing that any Democratic president since Clinton has been somehow illegitimate, be it due to consensual blow-jobs or supposedly being born in Africa.

Adjust or die.  It's really that simple.

Great And Small

"The Garden," God's Gardeners Hymnal

I finished Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood over the weekend and started the third book in the trilogy, MaddAddam.  I stumbled upon these choral arrangements of the poems -- actually hymns -- from the book.

Not to spoil too much, but the most sympathetic group in the novels are God's Gardeners, a kooky but committed group of eco-purists fighting to survive in a dystopic hell where bio-engineering companies have basically taken over the world and ruined the environment.

In an interesting bit of intertextuality, the Gardener's charismatic leader, Adam One, who gives a sermon to begin every group of chapters, has had his words arranged to music.  Great poetry it ain't -- it borders on doggerel, but that's kind of the point.

In the context of the novel however, as the Gardeners fight to survive, it comes across as rather poignant.  Anyhow, it makes for interesting listening on a cold and rainy Daegu Monday.

Punk Pizza

Pizza Pals with Frankie Cosmos

A little ways back I read Slice Harvester, a memoir by Colin Atrophy Hagendorf and his mission to eat a single cheese slice at every pizza joint on the island of Manhattan.  It was good!  Now he has a video series of interviews with musicians where they sit down and -- wait for it -- eat pizza together.  It is also very good!

Life Update

between Trump and Republicans and Logan Paul I'm pretty much ready for a huge meteor impact / hostile alien invasion of earth

— James, Nazi-Puncher (@wetcasements) January 6, 2018

"Have You Ever Been?"

Nai Palm, "Electric Ladyland"

In addition to being great performance, I love the fact that she's playing a rock classic as a jazz standard on a metal-ass Jackson shred-master guitar.

My favorite type has always been against-type.

Hack Back

South Korea has had enough with North Korean cyber-attacks, so they've opened up a "Best of the Best" academy for so-called "White-Hat Hackers":

"With the North’s economy increasingly strangled by international sanctions, the country has almost no tax base and an expensive nuclear weapons program, meaning it has to seek alternative, often illegal, ways of generating income. North Korean hackers were linked to the theft of $81m from Bangladesh’s central bank in March 2016, and in December the US Trump administration identified North Korea as the culprit behind the WannaCry cyber-attack, which in May caused millions in losses. North Korea has denied involvement.

North Korean hackers have been linked to leaks of credit card information and illegal ATM withdrawals in South Korea. 'There are thousands of cyber-attacks in South Korea every day and most of them never get reported on the news,' Kim said. 'Information security is the basis of economic development.'”

For such a technologically advanced country, it does seem overdue for South Korea to finally take cyber-security more seriously.  They probably never expected a "backwards" North Korea to pull off the type of shenanigans that they've gotten up to lately.

Here's a free hint for starters: maybe don't make all your universities and banks and government agencies so heavily reliant on Internet Explorer?

These Trousers Are Rolled As Fuck

I did nothing for New Year's and it was glorious.

I mean, I did small things like laundry and a work-out and reading and watching a movie.

Getting older means being post-fun.  Post-fun is the best kind of fun.