U.S.A. · 2004 US Presidential Election · Japan · China & Other Asia · Europe · PRJ's Philosophy · Anti-American Index · White Flag of Old Europe · Baghdad Bob's Bunker · In Memoriam
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“Was non in his tyme him liche”
Contact PacRim Jim: info-at-japanorama-dotcom
America, America, that toddlin' town.
America is now Chicago. Not Al Bundy Chicago. Al Capone Chicago.
—PacRim Jim
Term: gadzooks
Meaning: an expression of surprise
Example: Gazooks, Yolanda! I seem to have an arrow in my neck.
—PacRim Jim
Each year, between late-morning and early-afternoon naps, PacRim Jim determines the highest-rated agency for Japanese patent translation, based on content fidelity, on-time delivery, and affordable rate.
This year the Japanorama Prize is awarded to...wait for it...the industrious folks at Japatent.
Between mouthfuls of popcorn, the Pacster proclaims, "Huzzah and omedeto!"
—PacRim Jim
During this year, the 60th anniversary of the publication of George Orwell's (Eric Blair's) 1984, the Pacster has but one abiding thought thereupon:
If the effect of 1984 has been so salubrious, why do free people continue to vote away their freedom?
Implicit in man's complicity in his own servitude is the inescapable conclusion that there is something ineradicably perverse about us humans; that what we deserve, we get.
—PacRim Jim
Mad spenders of trillions infesting D.C.
Ensure that tommorow Zimbabwe we'll be.
To our children, their children, in poverty,
The American Dream will a memory be.
—PacRim Jim
What happens to others won't happen to me.
It won't. It can't. Can it?
—PacRim Jim
Aspiring writers, lift your bleary orbs from your writer's block and attend. Pacrim Jim has identified trends that will steer your career, for good or ill:
Trend 1:
Young people are too preoccupied tickling mobile geegaws to read a whole book for pleasure or edification.
Trend 2:
Publishing companies are hurting and will downsize, due both to Trend 1 and PDF piracy of their now-portable publications.
Trend 3:
Most importantly, however, though your potential domestic audience might be shrinking like a Wall Street salary, you will be able to sell your Meisterwerks to a worldwide readership, via such Web-based e-book publishers as Scribd.com, which already publishes tens of thousands of e-books, or Google.com, which has announced plans to publish millions of e-books, most of which will no doubt be worth the paper they are printed on.
Dyskarmaphobic writers appreciative of the Pacster's career advice will now uncramp their blocked hands and click on the oh-so-subtle tipjar at the top right of this page. Or not.
—PacRim Jim
No life? Have less and less to say to more and more people?
The following social networks will happily relieve you of actually living your life:
AdultFriendFinder, Advogato, AmieStreet, ANobii, aSmallWorld, Athlinks, AvatarsUnited, Badoo, Bahu, Bebo, Biip, BlackPlanet, Broadcaster.com, Buzznet, CafeMom, CakeFinancial, Care2, Classmates.com, Cloob, CollegeTonight, CouchSurfing, CozyCot, DeviantART, Disaboom, dol2day, DontStayIn, Elftown, Epernicus, Eons.com, Espinthebottle, ExperienceProject, Facebook, Faceparty, Faces.com, Fetlife, Filmaffinity, Flixster, Flickr, Fotolog, FriendsReunited, Friendster, Frühstückstreff, Fubar, GaiaOnline, GamerDNA, Gather.com, Geni.com, Goodreads, Gossipreport.com, Grono.net, Habbo, hi5, HospitalityClub, Hyves, imeem, IndabaMusic, IRC-Galleria, Italki, InterNations, itsmy, iWiW, Jaiku, JammerDirect, kaioo, Kaixin001, Last.fm, LibraryThing, lifeknot, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Livemocha, LunarStorm, MEETin, Meetup.com, Meettheboss, Mixi, mobikade, MocoSpace, MOG, Multiply, Muxlim, MyAnimeList, MyChurch, MyHeritage, MyLOL, MySpace, myYearbook, Nasza-klasa.pl, Netlog, Nettby, Nexopia, Ning, Odnoklassniki, OkCupid, OneClimate, OneWorldTV, OpenDiary, Orkut, OUTeverywhere, Passportstamp, Pingsta, Plaxo, Playahead, PlayboyU, Plurk, quarterlife, Ravelry, Reunion.com, ResearchGATE, Reverbnation, Ryze, scispace.net, Shelfari, Skyrock, SocialVibe, Sonico.com, Soundpedia, Stickam, StudiVZ, Tagged.com, Talkbiznow, Taltopia, TravBuddy.com, Travellerspoint, tribe.net, Trombi.com, Tuenti.com, Tumblr, Twitter, VKontakte, Vampirefreaks, Viadeo, Vine, Vox, Wasabi, WAYN, WebBiographies, WindowsLiveSpaces, Wis.dm, WiserEarth, Xanga, XING, Xiaonei, Xt3, Yammer, Yelp,Inc., Youmeo, Zoo.gr
(Courtesy of Wikipedia)
—PacRim Jim
America has been hijacked by Marxware and is barely functional.
—PacRim Jim
The Pacster misses Bobo and Brain Guy and Torgo. Life just hasn't been the same without them.
—PacRim Jim
To their everlasting shame, Americans have forgotten that, merely three back-to-back lifetimes ago, the United States was founded with a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people." (This unprecedented relationship is implicit in the very word democracy, which derives from the Greek words demos (people) and kratia (power).)
For a variety of selfish though shortsighted reasons attributable to the ignorance conferred by a degraded educational system, Americans have chosen to cede their hard-won freedoms for the illusory security of government omnipotence.
It remains to be seen whether the government will be equally ready to restore power to its rightful owners: the American people.
—PacRim Jim
Quantum physics bugs Pacrim Jim. It abounds with nonsensical incantations unverifiable if not patently untrue.
Take, for example, the following two contentions:
* Each choice a person makes splits the universe into two parallel universes.
Suffice it to say that making a choice is not a discrete phenomenon confined to a particular instant, whatever that might be. Exactly when is this split supposed to occur? When the chooser considers making a choice? When this is reflected in bound consciousness? There is no precise instant a choice is made, so the contention is irrational. Q.E.D.
* According to the Copenhagen Interpretation, Schroedinger's cat collapses into a definite state only at the exact moment it is observed (i.e., subjected to quantum measurement).
What, precisely, is observation? Is it the moment light from the formerly smeared cat strikes the observer's retinas? The moment it reaches the observer's visual cortex? The moment it is bound into consciousness? The word moment itself is ambiguously nonlocal.
How, I ask you, can the Pacster take seriously a discipline so sloppy with its terminology?
—PacRim Jim
Millions of us Americans are unemployed, frantically worrying about how to pay for food and shelter for our children.
Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., our elected representatives argue about the morality of interrogating alien terrorists, in between lavish dinners and first-class world tours.
With the best of intentions, we Americans have become a people of the government, by the government, and for the government.
—PacRim Jim
Q. Of what value is life?
A. It spares one the humiliation of infinite nonexistence.
—PacRim Jim
It has been observed that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged. If so, expect the deepening recession to yield millions of conservatives.
—PacRim Jim
Something for nothing for me = Nothing for something for you
—PacRim Jim
Agriculture + Semiconductors + Software + Movies + Television + Aerospace + Biotech + Nanotech + Universities + Tourism
+ Democrats = Bankruptcy
—PacRim Jim
Beyond new eyes wide and stumbles unto earth,
Beyond slow lessons and labors slower,
Beyond burdens as onerous as forgotten,
Beyond doctorly solicitude,
Beyond these and more,
I return my first breath, but borrowed for the nonce.
—PacRim Jim
In their academic certitude--not to say arrogance--that they alone are wise enough to decide how individuals should lead their own lives, the Left has long sought to transform democracies to statist institutions, in the guise of Socialism, National Socialism (Nazism), and Communism. Once imposed, these bloody control mechanisms provoked in these countries a deep revulsion, an immune response so powerful that the Left despaired of reimposing total control.
Nevertheless, the Left persisted, finally hitting upon the expedient of multiculturalism, and what better culture to import than Muslim cultures? All Muslim states were failed states, so they provided a unlimited supply of fecund emigrants seeking economic opportunity in the West (and, incidentally, to impose the Muslim religion wherever they went). If stubborn citizens would not acquiesce to absolute rule by the Left, then the Left would import Muslims, peoples long accustomed to submission to the absolutest rule: Islam. (It is not for nothing that "Islam" means "submission.") Muslims would support the Left, while reproducing at a rate that would displace the native citizens.
Brilliant! Muslims will allow the Left to retain absolute power indefinitely. Even after Muslim majorities eventuate in mid century, Muslims will support the Left, unless the Muslims decide to....
—PacRim Jim
Govett's Law of Epistemology: Words mean precisely what is obscured by their utterance.
Corollary: Understand them otherwise and be thought an imbecile.
—PacRim Jim
I miss your mastery, Maggie T,
Though England misses more.
Thirty years ago, on your frail shoulders,
You England's burdens bore.
—PacRim Jim
It occurs to the Pacster that he has repeately mischaracterized Democrats as "tax-and-spend Democrats."
Mea culpa.
As their behavior has once again demonstrated, they are "spend-and-tax Democrats."
—PacRim Jim
Q. What results when a deep recession entails massive debt, sharply higher taxes, runaway inflation, and incompetent leadership?
A. Yes.
—PacRim Jim
There exist two types of people in this world: Those who excogitate dichotomies...and those who don't.
—PacRim Jim
Funny things, sports.
They involve passing a spherical object through a circle (basketball, golf, Aztect ball (Tachtli)) or through a rectangle (baseball, soccer, tennis, lacrosse, cricket, shuffleboard); or an aspherical object through a rectangle (football, rugby, hockey).
For some unaccountable reason, however, there seems to be no sport that requires passing an aspherical object through a circle, unless hanging is so considered.
—PacRim Jim
Compared with Sarah Vaughan, Susan Boyle is an unexceptional singer. Compared with what was initially expected of her, however, she shone.
The discrepancy between her humble appearance and behavior and her professionally controlled performance accounts for the startled reactions.
As Pacrim Jim sees it, the lesson here is to set expectations low, so that one will be able to handily exceed them, to the surprise and chagrin of cynical others.
—PacRim Jim
PRJ:
Boye, thank you for sparing a few moments to answer a couple of questions that have puzzled me for 40 years.
First, how do you pronouce your name, Boye Lafayette De Mente?
Boye:
The accepted [family-preferred] pronunciation of my last name, De Mente, is Deh-Men-tay. The original French spelling was apparently De Mentier, which Anglo-Saxon-Americans couldn’t say, so a number of spelling versions came into use, with De Ment or De Mint being the most common.
PRJ:
As America’s Basil Hall Chamberlain, you have explicated practically every facet of the opaque gem that is Japan. How came you to team up with the Tuttle publishing company in Japan?
Boye:
I first became acquainted with Tuttle in 1953 when Tex Weatherby was the chief editor. I went in and applied for a job, but fortunately wasn’t hired!
In November 1959, Tuttle became the distributor of my very first book, Japanese Manners & Ethics in Business, published by East Asia Publishing Co. (In a subsequent printing, the title was changed to Japanese Etiquette & Ethics in Business (which is still in print at McGraw-Hill).)
In 1962 I set up a small press in Tokyo with two imprints: Orient Holiday Publishing Company, and Simpson-Doyle Publishing Co. Under these imprints were brought out around a dozen of my own books, all distributed by Tuttle. One of which was Bachelor’s Japan, which became an instant bestseller, with more foreign female residents than men buying the book during its first months on the market.
I sold these imprints when I moved out of Tokyo in the mid 1960s, and thereafter Tuttle published a number of my titles, including slightly updated version of Bachelor’s Japan.
Tex Weatherby resigned from Tuttle in the early 1960s and co-founded Weatherhill Publishing in Tokyo, which later morphed into Walker Weatherhill in New York, which published my The Japanese as Consumers: Asia’s First Mass Market, in the mid 1960s.
In 1966, when I was staying at the New Otani Hotel, the Japanese-language edition of Bachelor’s Japan was the topic of discussion on a television show with a panel consisting of a famous actress, a famous baseball player, a comedian, and Japan’s best known sociologist.
When the four were asked to sum up their opinions of my book, the sociologist said, “Everything De Mente-san wrote is true, but I wish he hadn’t written it!”
Somehow, the news media learned that I was a guest at the New Otani and my phone rang until about 3 a.m., with people asking for live radio interviews. I finally consented to doing one.
After my book The Kata Factor: Japan’s Secret Weapon came out in Japanese in the early 1990s, I was invited to lecture to some 300 Japanese professionals from all fields. During the question-and-answer session that followed, all of the Japanese who spoke up, except one, expressed amazement at my use of the kata to explain the Japanese mindset and behavior—something they had not thought of.
The one who disagreed with the book, Japan’s premiere Shinto authority, said, “Everything Mr. De Mente said is wrong! Shinto, not kata, is responsible for how we Japanese think and behave! He does not mention Shinto at all!”
When he added that, I knew he had not read the book all the way through, because I had attributed much of the early core of Japanese culture to Shinto precepts.
When The Japanization of America came out in Japan as Nihonka Suru Amerika, it had a pretty good run, but at that time the Japanese were so sure that they were going to Japanize the whole world that it was not such a big deal.
After Nick Ingleton took over as the editor-in-chief at Tuttle (in the 80s), he asked me to do a whole series of small books—which I did—and was only partly pleased with the results because the distribution and marketing arms of the company had degenerated.
After my old friend Charlie Tuttle died, his wife’s nephew, Eric Oey, bought the company and merged it with his own imprints: Periplus and Berkeley Books. Eric turned out to be a very good publisher and has evolved the company into a major house; he has brought out some 12 of my titles in the past several years, several of which now have foreign language editions.
PRJ:
Any recent publication news?
Boye:
Although I have been published by over half a dozen Japanese companies, none of the books caused more than a small ripple. A couple co-authored with Michihiro Matsumoto and published by Kodansha made the Amazon.com bestseller list for a few days!!!!
Profile of Boye Lafayette De Mente and list of his publications, formally submitted to the Government of Japan
—PacRim Jim
Four pirates threaten on the sea.
A Seal's bullet; now there are three.
Three pirates yet; a motley crew.
Hot lead leaves Seal; now there are two.
Perhaps the end is evident.
Pirates to hell will be Seal-sent.
—PacRim Jim
Pity us humans. Confronted with the persistent and awful unknown, we humans coped by inventing religion, a kind of extended childhood that confers meta-parental protection. Who is the worse for that? We humans know not whence or whither we have come or shall go, not to mention why we are here, or even why here is here. Given our predicament, given the horrible, infantilizing reality, is superstition maladaptive? Given that denial comforts us vis-a-vis our ultimate exigency, of what value is truth? Ask yourself: Why do the dying call upon their long-dead mother and their possibly nonexistent God? Why, indeed.
—PacRim Jim
Bad music plays longer than good music.
—PacRim Jim
Nature has been unfair in distributing humans around the globe. Some are diluted by continents, while others are closer to their neighbors than to their mates.
Because this warrants fair reallocation of land, Pacrim Jim proposes the following redistribution plan:
The approximately 149,000,000 square kilometers of rock lapped by the oceans are inhabited by about 6,760,000,000 sapiens of the Homo persuasion, which means that about 45.4 humans tend each square km beneath the summer moon.
So, if all humans were spread out evenly over the entire globe, how would the populations of the world's countries change? The following table gives an idea:
—PacRim Jim
Shopped at Wal-Mart recently? Well, thanks to you and other bargain-hunting Americans, the Chinese Government now holds about $1 trillion ($1,000,000,000,000) of United States Treasuries, an amount large enough to be incomprehensible, since it exceeds the cumulative number of stars in the Milky Way, the Andromeda Galaxy, and several other galaxies.
Let PacRim Jim explicate the amount in terms understandable to any American worker.
If the $1 trillion is averaged over the lifetime earnings of the average American worker (at present, $1.44 million), who works for, say, the American average of $18 per hour for 40 years at 2000 hours per year, it means that the Chinese now hold enough American capital to purchase the entire careers of about 695,000 American workers.
To put it another way, the Chinese now could exchange their U.S. Treasuries for the entire careers of more American workers than live in the state of Hawaii.
Which state will be next, the Pacster wonders?
—PacRim Jim
"We've all got to be young once,".... "It's like the measles, it breaks out all over you, and you're a nuisance to yourself and everybody else, but it don't last, and it usually don't leave no ill effects."
— Katherine Anne Porter, Noon Wine
—PacRim Jim
Americans have a choice: The D.C. bull or the Wall Street bull.
—PacRim Jim
Those trillions of dollars taxed from us by hard-left, spend-and-tax liberals might have been invested in the biotechnology and nanotechnology industries. Instead, they will be taxed from potential risk-taking investors and used to purchase the votes of the non-investing improvident.
Worry not, however, even though we and our children won't be able to enjoy the longer, healthier life promised by the two technologies, our grandchildren might, if they will be able to afford the pricey biotech and nanotech products of Chinese capitalists who invested for the long term.
—PacRim Jim
During this deeping recession, suffering will be general, intense, and prolonged. However, it will be a salubrious preview of the myriad permanent paradigm shifts we shall endure during the fast-approaching Singularity.
For readers unfamiliar with the concept, see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
—PacRim Jim
While attempting to free Iraqis and Afghanis, we Americans are losing (discarding?) our own freedom.
—PacRim Jim
The fewer the gatekeepers, the more informed the decision.
—PacRim Jim
Birds swim the sky,
Fish fly the sea,
But I'm to I roam between my ears,
Through space, through time, through me.
—PacRim Jim
Beyond the sunlit world of the workaday,
Beyond the blaze of sure science,
Lie twilight worlds of imagination, of art,
Past which stir our formless tomorrows.
—PacRim Jim
Evolution has evolved the evolver.
Humans are bypassing the natural limits on variation, selection, and speciation. Within a few fiscal years, all imaginable forms of life—organic and otherwise—will pop industrially into existence and “go extinct” unnoticed and unmourned, at the whim of computer-enhanced man (and later the artificial intelligence-driven robot).
To what end, the Pacster can say not. But to an end it will be.
—PacRim Jim
...and I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more—the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort—to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires—and expires, too soon, too soon—before life itself.
...our faces marked by toil, by deceptions, by success, by love; our weary eyes looking still, looking always, looking anxiously for something out of life, that while it is expected is already gone—has passed unseen, in a sigh, in a flash—together with the youth, with the strength, with the romance of illusions.
—Joseph Conrad, Youth: A Narrative, 1898
Faustus is gone: regard his hellish fall,
Whose fiendful fortune may exhort the wise,
Only to wonder at unlawful things,
Whose deepness doth entice such forward wits
To practise more than heavenly power permits.
—Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus, 1588
Wants age. Needs age not.
—PacRim Jim
New Orleans
A city that compensates for its precarious location between a large lake and a larger river by being below both.
—PacRim Jim
My face you see each light-dark day,
But it’s not me.
My voice you hear whate’er I say,
But it’s not me.
Adrift, entrained in flowing thoughts,
My universe apart I roam.
A stranger unknown to myself,
Lost child without a home.
I have a name, you know it, too,
But it’s not me.
—PacRim Jim
Amazing country, this.
Every person, educated or no, better knows how to run America than its president.
We are, truth be told, a nation of presidents who command a populace of one, the elected commander-in-chief.
Thus our inverted pyramid of state wobbles parlously, hither and thither, upon its apex.
—PacRim Jim
Lawyers
Authors and interpreters of musty monographs of arcane laws intended to ensure that everyone unwittingly breaks some law or other and—mirabile dictu—that they will be there to protect us, the omnium-gatherum of hapless defendants, from the overzealous legal system.
—PacRim Jim
Every disease curable and ultimately preventable. Healthy lives spanning millennia. These are the wondrous promises of biotechnology abetted by nanotechnology.
Bring it on, you say.
As ever, the Pacster is dubious, particularly because of a consequence hitherto unexplored.
Imagine that such Faustian power had become available, say, seventy years ago. Those in power then would have been the first to make the jump to relative immortality. Hence they probably would remain in power even today. The same politicians, academics, writers, entertainers, athletes, et al., who monopolized mindshare then would, in all liklihood, continue to do so even now, to the detriment of innovation and cultural vitality.
Hitler, anyone?
—PacRim Jim
Italy. Portugal. Germany. France.
In this particular quadrennial World Cup, all four quarterfinalists are from Europe, a peninsula at the far west of the continent of Asia. All belong to the European Union. Three of the four speak dialects of Latin. In turn, three of the four have conquered the others.
A cup it is, to be sure. But surely not a World Cup. Or even a world cup.
—PacRim Jim
Lost in the vicinity of 1980s California, the youth of one individual.
Last seen in the San Francisco Bay area.
Reward: Gratitude up the yin-yang and out the wazoo.
Contact the undersigned.
—PacRim Jim
Over the dozens of years, the Pacster has noticed that he experiences music and other entertainment differently depending on the time of day.
Hard rock rattles his 206 bones during the day but merely annoys in the earlier hours, when his biorhytms resonate to the soothing harmonies of Gregorian chant. Too, the Pacmeister finds that horror movies are more skin-crawly in the early a.m., after his consciousness has dissolved into spookable irrationality.
This implies that we owe ourselves a systemic analysis of temporal tastes.
Know yourself and conform your entertainment thereto.
Are you listening, media marketing mavens?
—PacRim Jim
Not that many millennia ago, human survival, like that of other animals, was threatened by external enemies: predators, infectious diseases, parasites, etc.
After millennia of brain evolution and long centuries of trial and error failed to improve our lot significantly, we humans finally developed the scientific method, which has allowed us to overcome most of these life-shorteners.
Now, however, our survival is threatened by our own poor designs and bad habits, novel enemies the more irresistable for their wellsprings within each of us.
Some few of us have been able to overcome such bad habits as poor diet, smoking, inadequate sleep, consumption of alcohol and other drugs, sedentary lifestyles, etc. However, our design (i.e., our DNA) has been incorrigible, at least heretofore.
At long last, thanks to the diligence of thousands of bioscientists, we shall be able to revise the source code that is our parental legacy (which might, incidentally, even correct our bad habits).
We humans have overcome much and just might be on the verge of relative immortality (assuming we will be able to nudge aside a few as yet undetected comets).
—PacRim Jim
The Mexican oligarchy is attempting to solve its overpopulation and consequent poverty problems by exporting millions of its peasants to the U.S., whence they will send crucial tens of billions of dollars back to impoverished relatives in Mexico.
What they do not anticipate, however, is that the children and grandchildren of these de facto deportees will effect a reconquest, not of America, but of Mexico.
The success of these descendants in America will demonstrate unambiguously to all Mexicans that it is the Mexican system alone that destroys the dreams of the average Mexican. This realization will prompt profound structural change that will sweep aside the entrenched oligarchy (and, not incidentally, the complicit Catholic patriarchs).
Mexican immigrants will change America, certainly, but it will be Mexico that is reconquered, from the bottom up...American style.
—PacRim Jim
Objects and events, space and time are the products of brains unable to comprehend infinity on its own terms.
To us, standing on the bank of infinity, time and events flow slowly by. To one capable of simultaneously viewing the entire river, however, there would be no river, so it would not flow.
—PacRim Jim
On the playground of childhood, it usually is the proto-Republican who administers a licking to the proto-Democrat.
Decades later, in his beta hours, the aggrieved Democrat will bemoan the brutishness of the Republican.
What the former fails to understand yet the latter knows all too well is that the world is a playground writ large, aswarm with Darwinian bullies aplenty.
That said, would you rather have a Republican or Democrat as your playground buddy?
—PacRim Jim
The 2008 presidential election will be a close-run donnybrook, not to put too fine a point on it. The Republicans and Democrats both will get worse than they give, as always, but the trump card will be held abroad, by Muslim terrorists.
Any sufficiently ghastly terrorist attack in 2008 will stampede millions of undecided voters to vote R, whatever the name prefixed. Were such a bloodbath to occur, the mainstream media would attempt to ignore and minimize it, to protect their D candidate, but to no avail.
Whatever eventuates, at least there will be no hippies.
—PacRim Jim
Because English letters are unaccented, some consider it a bumpkinish language, less nuanced, less urbane than such languages as German with its umlaut and French with its accent grave.
High atop his high horse, the Pacster proposes a revised English alphabet at once arrivé and ausgezeichnet: Èñglîsh, which is as inspired as it is elegant.
|
English |
Èñglîsh |
|
English |
Èñglîsh |
|
a |
ò |
|
n |
o> |
|
b |
ó |
|
o |
o= |
|
c |
ô |
|
p |
o: |
|
d |
õ |
|
q |
o; |
|
e |
ö |
|
r |
o^ |
|
f |
o" |
|
s |
o\ |
|
g |
o# |
|
t |
o` |
|
h |
o' |
|
u |
o| |
|
i |
o* |
|
v |
o~ |
|
j |
o+ |
|
w |
o† |
|
k |
o- |
|
x |
o{ |
|
l |
o/ |
|
y |
o} |
|
m |
o< |
|
z |
o› |
Learn Èñglîsh and teach it to your children (but not that nitwit down the street), and feel a twinge of pity for the hypoaccented languages spoken abroad.
Self-satisfied as ever, PacRim Jim will now merge with his sofa and await international acclaim, or at least less-truculent criticism.
— PacRim Jim
Over the millennia, the land of California has been controlled successively by Indians, Spaniards, Mexicans, and Americans. (As usual, other wild animals have no claim.) Recently, Mexicans have insisted that they stole California fair and square and want it back. Do these erstwhile colonists have a legitimate claim or is it merely another instance of uvas amargas (sour grapes)? Examine the facts and then judge for yourself.
First, as is usually the case, there were the natives—in this case, the so-called Indians who fought for centuries to acquire and then hold onto their ancestral lands (which often had been stolen from other, weaker tribes). The Indian population of California peaked about four centuries years ago, with 300,000 members of 250 cultures, who spoke over 300 dialects of 100 languages. However, they proved to be no match for Spanish priests, pistolas, and smallpox, so over the centuries, 80% of California's Indians were wiped out by successive “owners.” (Although most California tribal cultures are history, their populations have recovered so vigorously as to be larger than ever.) For more than 150 centuries, though, what is now the state of California was inhabited solely by various Indian tribes. This putatively idyllic arrangement was soon to change, however.
In the 16th century, passing maritime explorers from England and Spain grandiosely claimed parts of California for their acquisitive governments over distant horizons. For a few more generations, however, California Indians remained blissfully ignorant of their fates.
Then, in 1769, Spain began to settle what it called Alta California (Upper California), to distinguish it from Baja California (Lower California). Spain’s control, which succeeded in forestalling the advance of the Russians moving down from the north, lasted until 1821, when Mexico declared independence from Spain.
Mexican stewardship was brief, however, since both Alta California and Baja California seceded from the Mexican Empire in 1827, and in 1848, under the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico ceded the California territory to its present owner, the United States, which admitted the State of California to the union in 1850.
So, who has the best claim to California's land?
The Indians who owned it for more than 15,000 years?
The Spanish who owned it for 52 years?
The Mexicans who at least claimed it for 26 years?
The current owners, the Americans, who have owned it for over 150 years?
Obvious though your answer may seem, it’s academic and your rationale matters not a whit, because facts never settle international land squabbles. Wars do.
Perhaps the best solution, all things considered, would be for the 30+ million Californians to tramp across the border into Mexico—without papers, of course—and leave the land to its most harmonious residents, the plants and animals.
— PacRim Jim
After a long night of water shooters, it occurred to the hyperhydrous Pacster that humans might have the wrong conception of God.
Throughout history we have assumed that God exists contemporaneously with us, though infinitely longer. PacRim Jim now believes that God exists transtemporally, but orthogonally to our arrow of time. This implies that God exists simultaneously throughout time and outside of time.
If so, all life that has lived, lives, and will live could be considered cells in the super-being we call God.
Well, it could be true. You have a better explanation at this hour?
Barkeep, another round of dihydrogen monoxide.
—PacRim Jim
Browser users in general and Google users in particular, beware.
If your name is Bob Johnson, you’ve nothing to worry about. However, if your name is relatively unique, know that browser companies store indefinitely all traces of you on the Web: sites you visit, letters to the editor you write, nasty things others say about you, spring break photos taken by your roommate, etc.
This allows any would-be biographer to compile at least a rough sketch of your life, truthful or not.
When you’re old and gray (under the blonde dye), your legacy will largely be beyond your control. Information about you that formerly decayed with time or lay forgotten in disparate drawers will live on indefinitely, regardless of its veracity.
Your biography could be written by any number of malicious gossips, human or otherwise.
—PacRim Jim
Acolytes of the High Church of Ecology have pronounced that man is diminishing biome diversity at an astonishing and accelerating rate.
Like all confirmed linear extrapolators, they fail to anticipate the effects of nascent disruptive technologies.
Biotechnology and genetic engineering are advancing so rapidly that, within a decade or two, teenagers and other deranged individuals will be able to purchase commercial home DNA synthesizers. Giggling in their basements, these gods manqué will design novel plants, animals, viruses, etc., which they then will loose upon unsuspecting Gaia, consequences be damned. In their spare time, they will swap “recipes” online and cross-breed their creatures with natural and other synthetic life.
Predictably, the econannies then will whimper about excessive diversity and hyper-accelerated evolution.
This will set the stage for the nanotech terraformers.
You’ve been doubly warned.
—PacRim Jim
In the 1840s, as the impecunious Karl Marx sat scribbling The Communist Manifesto in the dim British Museum, little could his monomaniacal mind have imagined the ultimate upshot of his economic philosophy, which is turning out to be no less than the destruction of Europe qua Europe.
He would have sympathized with the necessity of killing tens of millions of people to synthesize his procrustean utopia, first in Russia, later wherever common sense was wanting, and thus especially in academia. One consequence, however, he could not have foreseen.
Following World War II, the communist empire ruled from Moscow broke the historic European ties of Eastern Europe, thereby preventing their workers from participating in the postwar economic boom.
Because their success was more economic than reproductive—not to mention the fact that millions of European Jews no longer existed—Western European countries were unable to fill millions of domestic jobs preferably filled by Eastern Europeans. Thus they were forced to import non-Europeans, principally unassimilible Muslims from Turkey and North Africa.
Decades later, the correlation of demographics now is such that, by the end of the 21st century, Muslims will control much of Western Europe, relegating to history books European ascendance in things scientific, artistic, economic, military, and otherwise.
Thus the colonizer becomes the colonized.
One cannot but wonder, however, what Karl Marx would think about his ultimate legacy: the replacement of liberal Christians with theocratic Muslims.
More than 150 years ago, a small butterfly flapped his wings in London, with consequences as disproportionate as they have been unanticipatable.
Which butterflies now flapping unnoticed will be of consequence? And how destructive?
—PacRim Jim
Americans, you may be puzzled as to why so much anti-Americanism is being bruited about in the mainstream media, domestic and foreign.
The Pacster is here to elucidate the obvious.
Think back to high school. Girls, remember that confident, lithe beauty whom the guys fought over? Guys, remember that self-assured athlete who elicited sunny smiles from all the girls? How did you feel about them, in your bepimpled, gangling confusion?
A better analogy, perhaps, is to imagine yourself in a long footrace. Try as you might, you cannot catch the leader, who seems to glide effortlessly around the track. Lap after tiresome lap, all you see is the leader’s ass. How would you feel?
Quite probably you would think the leader an ass and wonder, burning with frustration and envy, how you possibly could be behind that behind.
Plainly stated for those incapable of subtlety, American Democrats and Europeans have stared at the Republican American ass most every decade since 1945, so they are furious at their inability and even their desire to catch what, after all, they consider best left behind.
—PacRim Jim
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