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Doraemon: It is big in Japan

I am taking a break this morning from massacres, deportations, Islam, Trump, mass firings, and US politics in favour of the world’s most important entertainer at the moment, Doraemon (below, left).

The Japanese capacity for cutesiness is unparalleled, and it leads to some quite bizarre forms of entertainment and pop culture. Doraemon is a robot cat from the future who has travelled back in time to help his Norman Normal human friend, Nobita Nobi. Starting as a manga cartoon in 1969, Doraemon has become huge in Japan, as well as in many Asian countries, not merely as children’s entertainment, but as a well recognized character.The Japanese treat Doraemon as real, like Bugs Bunny, but as one who shows up at shopping centres and appears on TV to raise funds for disaster relief and children’s cancers.

Wikipedia relates:

Doraemon has become a prevalent part of popular culture in Japan. Newspapers also regularly make references to Doraemon and his pocket as something with the ability to satisfy all wishes. The series is frequently referenced in other series such as Gin Tama and Great Teacher Onizuka.^[48]^[49]

Doraemon appears in appeals for charity. TV Asahi launched the Doraemon Fund charity fund to raise money for natural disasters.^[50]

It is as if the adventures of both Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck still occupied the entertainment pages. Homer Simpson would be the closest equivalent in terms of pop culture importance, but he is not cute, he is truly deplorable. Big Bird on Sesame Street comes close to Doraemon in recognizability and benign nature.

My step daughter was on an Antarctic cruise recently, and the ship was being used for filming part of the next Doraemon movie. The Doraemon puppet is about four feet wide and is animated by a tiny Japanese lady who steps inside the costume. However, when she does so, she is surrounded by a team of people holding up sheets to prevent anyone from filming the event, in the belief that if Doraemon were ever exposed as not being real, the magic of Doraemon would be lost. Holding sheets around the animator in high winds aboard the ship was a cause for some laughter.

The photos also illustrate what you can do with drones these days. The mountains in the background are at the southern tip of South America.

The film will be called “Kachi kochi”, which is the Japanese signifier for “brrrrrrrr”. The plot will be preposterous. It will be the biggest cartoon movie in the world, and we will probably never hear of it, but you, dear readers of Barrelstrength, heard about it here, in the obscure depths of the conservative blogosphere.

I spoke of Pokaemon to my stuffed bear, who insists he shall shortly be leaving for Japan in order to make his fortune in the children’s entertainment business. Be careful with information about Doraemon if you have artificial and imaginary friends. They might get ideas that they could be stars if only they could get out of your house and fly to Japan. I think my bear is right. He too could be Big in Japan. Any culture able to suspend disbelief like the Japanese would provide fertile ground for playfulness of this order.

Male genius is not a “stereotype”

This from the Groniad:

Girls as young as six years old believe that brilliance is a male trait, according research into gender stereotypes.

The US-based study also found that, unlike boys, girls do not believe that achieving good grades in school is related to innate abilities.

Andrei Cimpian, a co-author of the research from New York University, said that the work highlights how even young children can absorb and be influenced by gender stereotypes – such as the idea that brilliance or giftedness is more common in men.

“Because these ideas are present at such an early age, they have so much time to affect the educational trajectories of boys and girls,” he said.

The trouble with this view – perceptions of males being more likely to be geniuses – is that it is not a “stereotype”, a form of false idea.

Quite the contrary, it is true. There are more very smart males than very smart females. It is also true that men are more likely to be savage criminal morons. No accounting of sex differences in intelligence fails to show that the distribution of male intelligence is wider than that of the female, at both ends.

I turn to Charles Murray’s Human Accomplishment, which no person may call himself educated who has not read it. In Chapter twelve “Of dead white males”, Murray writes:

One aspect of this male tendency towards extremes seems to apply to cognitive ability. Although the mean IQ of men and women is apparently the same, the variability of male IQ is higher – meaning that more men than women are to be found at both the high and low extremes of IQ. Conjoined with this is evidence that men’s and women’s cognitive repertoires are somewhat different….

The existing circumstantial evidence is already strong enough to have persuaded me that disparities in accomplishment between the sexes are significantly grounded in biological differences, but nothing in this brief rehearsal of the arguments need sway readers who are confident that science will prove me wrong. I close the discussion of sex differences with the point I made at the outset: All we need is a few decades’ patience and we won’t have to argue any more. (pp.289-291)

Finally I would like to quote Charles Murray, writing in the Afterword to The Bell Curve in 1995.

A few weeks after the Bell Curve appeared, a reporter said to me that the real message of the book is , “Get serious”. I resisted his comment at first, but now I think he was right. We never quite say it in so many words, but the book’s subtext is that America’s discussion of social policy since the 19670s has been carried on in a never-never land where human beings are easily changed and society can eventually become a Lake Wobegon where all the children are above average. The Bell Curve does indeed imply that it is time to get serious about how best to accommodate the huge and often intractable individual differences that shape human society. (pp. 574-575)

Today’s rubbish on stereotypes indicates that the getting serious has yet to occur.

The Guardian’s article concluded:

Dame Athene Donald, professor of experimental physics at the University of Cambridge, agreed. “If we are to facilitate a gender-balanced workforce of engineers, mathematicians and physicists in the future it is clear interventions at secondary school just aren’t going to be sufficient,” she said. “Parents, teachers and the media need to work much harder eradicating gender stereotypes in the way they talk about adults to children of all ages.”

To which I say, “Get real, snowflake”. The miracle is always that girls as young as seven see through the bullshit, and have some inkling that very smart boys are really smarter tan they are. Only by the time they have reached university have their minds been sufficiently warped to be fully ideologically ‘correct’.

Women make up about 2.2% of the most important figures in science and the arts. Read Human Accomplishment. Get the facts. It costs less than a good bottle of wine and its value is perpetual.

Never interrupt an enemy when he is making a mistake

So said Napoleon. And while I do not feel that Justin Trudeau is my enemy, I was not consulted by him about his Castro announcement, so I could not save him from embarrassment. Nor apparently could his oh-so-smart advisors.

“While a controversial figure, both Mr. Castro’s supporters and detractors recognized his tremendous dedication and love for the Cuban people who had a deep and lasting affection for ‘el Comandante,’ ” Trudeau’s statement said.

“I know my father was very proud to call him a friend and I had the opportunity to meet Fidel when my father passed away. It was also a real honour to meet his three sons and his brother President Raúl Castro during my recent visit to Cuba.”

The prime minister ended his statement by calling Castro a “remarkable leader.”

Let us substitute a few changes here.

“While a controversial figure, both Mr. Hitler’s supporters and detractors recognized his tremendous dedication and love for the German people who had a deep and lasting affection for ‘Der Führer,’ ” Trudeau’s statement said.

“I know my father was very proud to call him a friend and I had the opportunity to meet Der Führer when my father passed away. It was also a real honour to meet his three deputies and his wife during my recent visit to Berlin”

The prime minister ended his statement by calling Hitler a “remarkable leader.”

Additional parodies can be found at Breitbart.

I have it on good authority from people who have done business in Cuba that the price for doing so were large cheques to Fidel Castro, made out personally, and not in trust or to the equivalent of the Receiver general of the Cuban government. This was a tyrant, a crook, a murderer, and a typical Latin caudillo. Nothing progressive here.

Poor Governor General David Johnson – he has to attend the funeral in Trudeau’s place.

Justin Trudeau remains a very pleasant young man who will be Prime Minister for a long time, until something much more important than this airhead moment reveals him more clearly to the Canadian public.

Nevertheless, the man who executed, for political crimes, between 4,000 and 33,000 Cubans out of a population of 7 million, or roughly 15,000 people (equivalent to 680,000 out of 318,000,000 Americans, or the same number as fell in the US Civil War) will be put into the ground in the presence of the Queen’s Canadian representative.

The latest twaddle

I was at a speech given by a senior federal bureaucrat last week, a man not normally given over to political correctness, or complete folly for that matter, and to my astonishment I heard him begin his speech by announcing piously that he was acknowledging standing on some tribe or other’s treaty territory. This seems to be the latest fad in virtue signaling.

As I write I am sitting in a chair on land that goes back to the time it emerged from retreating ice 9,000 years ago. It used to be the hunting grounds of indigenous Ottawas, who emigrated to the Ottawa River from around Manitoulin Island in the upper Lake Huron, and thence to the Ohio River valley in the 17th century, where they were rivals, as were most Algonkian speakers, of the Iroquois Confederacy. My land has at various times been claimed by the King of France until the Treaty of Paris assigned it to the King of England in 1763 at the end of the Seven Years’ War.

The Ottawa [Or Odawa, Canadian] originally lived along the Ottawa River in eastern Ontario and western Quebec at the time of European arrival in the early 1600s. Their historic homelands also included Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron, and what is now Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The Ottawa moved into northern Ohio around 1740. They spoke an Algonquian language; and are thus related to the Delaware (Lenape), the Miami, and the Shawnee. Historically, the Ottawa were enemies with the Iroquois nation, and with the Wyandot because of the former’s ties to the Iroquois.

The Ottawa’s political alliances were complicated and changed with the times. Some Ottawa were allies of the French until British traders moved into the Ohio Country in the early 1700s. Many Ottawa moved into northern Ohio so that they could participate in the fur trade with the British.

And so forth. Normal people: fighting, trading, and moving with the tides of history to greater safety or greater opportunity.

In short, why is the claim of the Ottawas memorialized by the federal bureaucrat in a speech downtown last week – in what ought to have embarrassed him – over those of the King of France? Is anyone yet making a claim that I owe rent or acknowledgment to the remnants of the Ottawas or Hurons who still live around here? Or by contrast do I owe the same to the Bourbon pretender to the throne of France? Should I acknowledge the claims of the Count of Paris to the former New France? Perhaps I can send my loyalty by bank transfers to the Stuart Pretenders to the throne of England? For some hundreds of years the Stuart claim has been held by the Ducal House of Wittelsbach of Bavaria, and according to a certain friend of mine they are the rightful sovereigns of Canada.

Is it any more absurd to start one’s speech acknowledging the traditional rights of the Bourbons or the Wittelsbachs to the ground I stand on than to a bunch of Canadian Indians?

And what about the claims of the Iroquois Confederacy to the lands of the Hurons, whom they exterminated in the 1650s? Do I owe recognizance to the heirs of Joseph Brant, Mason, Loyalist, and Mohawk, in preference to those of the Ottawas? Or is the Roman Catholic style of the House of Wittelsbach more to your liking? Your call. The next time you make a public speech, throw in some other claimants to the ground you walk on.

Joseph Brant

Franz, Herzog (Duke) von Bayern at his investiture as a Knight of the Holy Grail of Jerusalem

Wristband

There may be a few Republicans who summer on Martha’s Vineyard, but if they do, I am sure they keep their mouths shut. Herewith is an insight into how the American ruling class works, from the pages of the Manchester Guardian. As with all carefully observed insider appreciations, this portrait is beyond caricature. The article is based on the leak of Hillary’s campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails.

This genre of Podesta email, in which people try to arrange jobs for themselves or their kids, points us toward the most fundamental thing we know about the people at the top of this class: their loyalty to one another and the way it overrides everything else. Of course Hillary Clinton staffed her state department with investment bankers and then did speaking engagements for investment banks as soon as she was done at the state department. Of course she appears to think that any kind of bank reform should “come from the industry itself”. And of course no elite bankers were ever prosecuted by the Obama administration. Read these emails and you understand, with a start, that the people at the top tier of American life all know each other. They are all engaged in promoting one another’s careers, constantly.

Everything blurs into everything else in this world. The state department, the banks, Silicon Valley, the nonprofits, the “Global CEO Advisory Firm” that appears to have solicited donations for the Clinton Foundation. Executives here go from foundation to government to thinktank to startup. There are honors. Venture capital. Foundation grants. Endowed chairs. Advanced degrees. For them the door revolves. The friends all succeed. They break every boundary.

But the One Big Boundary remains. Yes, it’s all supposed to be a meritocracy. But if you aren’t part of this happy, prosperous in-group – if you don’t have John Podesta’s email address – you’re out.

The mood is captured by a brilliant song on Paul Simon’s latest CD, “Stranger to Stranger” which features a catchy little tune called “Wristband”. Simon goes out the backstage door for a break and is locked out. He has to go around the front to get into to the theatre where his band is playing, and is stopped by a bouncer six feet eight inches tall in a snappy suit, who says “you have to have a wristband.” It quickly morphs into a much larger message, and prefigures why Trump is close to winning.

I stepped outside the backstage door
To breathe some nicotine
And maybe check my mailbox
See if I can read the screen
Then I heard a click
The stage door lock
I knew just what that meant
I’m gonna have to walk around the block
If I want to get in a…

Wristband, my man
You got to have a wristband
If you don’t have a wristband, my man
You don’t get through the door

Wristband, my man
You got to have a wristband
And if you don’t have a wristband
You don’t get through the door

I can’t explain it
I don’t know why my heart beats like a fist
When I meet some dude with an attitude
Saying, Hey, you can’t do that…or this
And the man was large
A well-dressed 6-foot-8
And he’s acting like St. Peter
Standing guard at the Pearly

Wristband, my man
You’ve got to have a wristband
If you don’t have a wristband
You don’t get through the door

And I said, Wristband?
I don’t need a wristband
My axe is on the bandstand
My band is on the floor

The riots started slowly
With the homeless and the lowly
Then they spread into the heartland
Towns that never get a wristband
Kids that can’t afford the cool brand
Whose anger is a shorthand
For you’ll never get a wristband
And if you don’t have a wristband
Then you can’t get through the door
No, you can’t get through the door
No, you can’t get through the door

Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, on why there is no CO2 crisis

Greenpeace co-founder pens treatise on the positive effects of CO2 – says there is no crisis

This is a straight lift from Watts Up with That

Moore looks at the historical record of CO2 in our atmosphere and concludes that we came dangerously close to losing plant life on Earth about 18,000 years ago, when CO2 levels approached 150 ppm, below which plant life can’t sustain photosynthesis. He notes:

“A 140 million year decline in CO2 to levels that came close to threatening the survival of life on Earth can hardly be described as “the balance of nature”.

Now, with 400ppm in the atmosphere, the biosphere is once again booming (see figure 8 below). He also points out how environmental groups and politicians are using the “crisis” of CO2 increase to feather their own nests:

“A powerful convergence of interests among key elites supports and drives the climate catastrophe narrative. Environmentalists spread fear and raise donations; politicians appear to be saving the Earth from doom; the media has a field day with sensation and conflict; scientists and science institutions raise billions in public grants, create whole new institutions, and engage in a feeding frenzy of scary scenarios; businesses want to look green and receive huge public subsidies for projects that would otherwise be economic losers, such as large wind farms and solar arrays. Even the Pope of the Catholic Church has weighed in with a religious angle. Lost in all these machinations is the indisputable fact that the most important thing about CO2 is that it is essential for all life on Earth and that before humans began to burn fossil fuels, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 was heading in a very dangerous direction for a very long time. Surely, the most “dangerous” change in climate in the short term would be to one that would not support sufficient food production to feed our own population.”

The link to the full (24 pp) report is below.

https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/moore-positive-impact-of-human-co2-emissions.pdf

The picture of the Lauterbrunnen (loudstream) valley in Switzerland is pretty and relevant. Do you see the shape of that valley? It is in the shape of a steep “U”, characteristic of the erosion pattern formed by ice. Within near-historical time, some 9 to 12,000 years ago, that valley was filled with ice, all the way to the top of the steep walls. Solid, grinding, flowing ice, at a latitude of Canada’s capital, Ottawa, 46 degrees north. There has been global warming.

House of Cards: Hillary and Bill

I read an article in the Wall Street Journal this morning that seriously considered the prospects of Bill as Vice President for Hillary, or was it the other way around? The article is confusingly misdated 2007 but concerns this year’s (2016) Presidential election.

A commentator poured cold water on the idea with legal facts:

The Vice President must be eligible for the Presidency per the 12th Amendment. Bill Clinton is no longer eligible to be President so he cannot be VP either. Also, the President and VP cannot be from the same state.

Those who have been watching Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright in House of Cards will be aware that this season’s plot twist is the joint candidacy of their characters Frank and Claire Underwood for election as President and Vice-President of the United States.

Trial balloon?

It does not matter. Trump is going to beat Hillary like a baby seal.

Vegans threaten death to apostate restaurant owners

Entitlement and hypocrisy come together this week in the story Time reported:

The husband-and-wife owners of famous vegan restaurant group Cafe Gratitude are under fire after a group of animal rights activists discovered last week that the couple was raising, slaughtering, and eating animals at their Northern California farm, named Be Love.

Possibly this is all a part of the fine American art of using adversity to promote one’s products.

Certainly it illustrates something C.S.Lewis adverted to a long time ago: the tendency of some to be cruel to those close to them in order to demonstrate their concern for those in the outer circles of the human range of compassion. C.S.Lewis said, as Christian has ever maintained, that the job of man is to love one’s neighbour. From the habits of loving one’s neighbour we may eventually come to broaden the circle of our compassion to others further away from us. There is a particular kind of human who thinks it is right to do harm to those close by in the name of anything or anyone that shows their higher moral concern: starving Africans, the future, the proletariat, the master race, non-human life, Gaia, the Holy Catholic Church. There is no lack of categories of concern different from the slob who shares your house, the actual neighbour, the people of (for instance) Fort McMurray, who have just been burned out of town.

Threatening to kill the owners of your favourite vegan restaurant because they have gone apostate by eating meat: how many sins and vanities does that expose?

The owners of the restaurant speak for themselves:

“We started to observe nature and what we saw is that nature doesn’t exist without animals,” Matthew Engelhart told the Hollywood Reporter last week after animal rights activists dug up and circulated blog entries from spring 2015 from the farm’s website, including photos of a freezer full of pastured beef, jars of gravy and Matthew enjoying a hamburger, with posts on their “transition” into meat products after nearly 40 years of vegetarianism.

Another study that came out this past week was a survey of people according to dietary habits.

A new University of Graz study concludes that vegetarians are more often ill and have a lower quality of living than meat-eaters. According to the German press release, vegetarians “have cancer and heart attacks more often”. The release also says that they show more psychological disorders than meat eaters. Consequently, the report writes, they are a greater burden on the health care system.

The scientists examined a total of 1320 persons who were divided up into 4 groups of 330 persons each. All groups were comparable with respect to gender, age, and socio-economic status. The study also accounted for smoking and physical activity. Also the BMI was within the normal range for all four groups (22.9 – 24.9). The only thing that really was different among the four groups was the diet. The four groups were: 1) vegetarians, 2) meat-eaters with lots of fruit and veggies, 3) little meat-eaters and 4) big meat-eaters. More than three quarters of the participants were women (76.4%).

Vegetarians plagued by significantly more chronic illnesses

The press release states that the results contradict the common cliché that meat-free diets are healthier. Vegetarians have twice as many allergies as big meat-eaters do (30.6% to 16.7%) and they showed 166% higher cancer rates (4.8% to 1.8%). Moreover the scientists found that vegans had a 150% higher rate of heart attacks (1.5% to 0.6%). In total the scientists looked at 18 different chronic illnesses. Compared to the big meat-eaters, vegetarians were hit harder in 14 of the 18 illnesses (78%) which included asthma, diabetes, migraines and osteoporosis [1, p.4, Table 3].

The Medical University of Graz confirms the findings of the University of Hildesheim: More frequent psychological disorders among vegetarians, the press release states.

The roots of anxiety and depression?

In the analysis, the University of Graz found that vegetarians were also twice as likely to suffer for anxiety or depressions than big meat eaters (9.4% to 4.5%). That result was confirmed by the University of Hildesheim, which found that vegetarians suffered significantly more from depressions, anxiety, psychosomatic complaints and eating disorders [2]. The U of Graz scientists also found that vegetarians are impacted more by ilnessses and visit the doctor more frequently [1, p. 3, Table 2].

Big meat-eaters were also found to have a “significantly better quality of life in all categories”, the study found. The four categories examined were: physical and psychological health, social relationships and environment-related life quality [1, p. 5, Table 4].

The study did not delve into the question whether vegetarians were more inclined to depression, neurosis and political leftism than meat eaters. It has been my observation that they tend to be. Vegetarians are part of that crowd of western Eloi whose over-developed super egos punish them for the pleasures of existence.

As to the apostate former vegan restaurant owners, their own moral posturing may have brought down the wrath of the disappointed vegans upon them. Try to read this without gagging:

The Engelharts spawned an entire industry with a carefully marketed message of peace, love and sharing, which includes a sister vegan Mexican restaurant, Gracias Madre, in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

The couple have written several books, including Sacred Commerce: Business as a Path of Awakening and Kindred Spirit: Fulfilling Love’s Promise. Their personal website is named Eternal Presence and references the board game they created in 2004, called The Abounding River Board Game, which was on every table in their San Francisco flagship; and which they said would train players to embrace “an unfamiliar view of Being Abundant” and develop a “spiritual foundation” for looking at money.

It is hard to tell who in this story is more to blame.

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Category: folly