Item 1: Japanese Justice. Two stories in the news this week show the madness of the Japanese government. Again.
+
The first concerns Charles R. Jenkins, a U.S. Army defector to North Korea in 1965 who happily promoted the government of the lunatic North Korean Communist regime, a regime which has killed, at minimum, a million of its own people thru famine it refused to cure, and maybe as many as three million! While in that hellhole, he met and married a Japanese woman, Hitomi Soga, who in 1978 had been KIDNAPPED from her home in Japan(!) by the lunatics of North Korea and forced to teach Japanese to North Korean spies! In 2002, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi visited North Korea and brought out Soga, her daughters, and four other abducted Japanese, but she left Jenkins in his beloved North Korea.
+
Jenkins, you see, feared that if he joined his wife and daughters in Japan, he would be arrested and extradited to the U.S. to stand trial for desertion and various other charges that could result in his being condemned to life imprisonment — not that that is likely to be very long, since he is 62 years old and apparently quite ill. Because of his illness, however, Jenkins did reunite with his wife and daughters, first in Indonesia, then in Japan, which has an extradition treaty with the U.S. Jenkins has not, however, been extradited to face charges. Why not?
+
The Bush Administration, which you would think would be very concerned about leniency toward deserters given our two present-day wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, has not (yet) demanded his extradition, perhaps in part because the Japanese Government has, astonishingly, leapt to defend Mr. Jenkins so he can stay with his Japanese family. Think about that: the Japanese Government wants to defend a man who was an active ally of the very government that KIDNAPPED the woman he ended up marrying — and other Japanese as well — from Japanese territory!
+
There may even be an election-year element to Dubya's reticence, in that Jenkins' birth family resides in the key battleground state of North Carolina. Does Bush really risk antagonizing North Carolina voters in prosecuting a traitor who just happens to have been born in the Tar Heel State? Treason isn't popular in North Carolina.
+
Quite the contrary of treating this defector as a criminal, the Japanese government, according to a report in Britain's Daily Telegraph, actually rented an entire floor of a ritzy Indonesian hotel for his reunion with his wife and daughters, "including the presidential suite, which costs more than £1,000 [$1,847] a night."
+
Contrast that behavior of the Japanese government with this second story. Bobby Fischer, the American chess prodigy of past decades, was arrested this past week, in Japan, for having an invalid passport. You see, Fischer committed the unpardonable crime of playing chess in Yugoslavia in 1992 during the U.S. boycott of that government because of its behavior in Croatia and Bosnia. For that, his passport was revoked, and he is under indictment for violating the boycott, which could carry a penalty of ten years in prison. That's right: 10 years in prison for playing chess. He didn't aid the Yugoslav assault on Croatia and Bosnia. He didn't bring money to the Milosevich regime. Quite the contrary: he won the match and took away $3 million!
+
Yet, the very same Japanese government that resists turning over a defector who actively aided a government that kidnapped Japanese citizens and held them for decades against their will, using them to train SPIES against Japan, wants to extradite Fischer to the U.S. in exchange for an agreement by the U.S. not to seek extradition of the traitor Jenkins!
+
I've said it before and will say it again: Japan is insane, a profoundly bonkers society that needs to be shaken out of its madness.
+
Complicating the issue is the fact that Bobby Fischer, whose mother was Jewish (and so, by Jewish law, Bobby is himself Jewish even tho his own choice is Christianity), has turned rabidly anti-Jewish and has made remarks praising the attacks upon the World Trade Center and Pentagon on 9/11. According to a report in the Philadelphia Daily News of July 17, 2004, Fischer declared on Philippine radio shortly after the 9/11 attacks:

"This is all wonderful news," he said, "I applaud the act. The U.S. and Israel have been slaughtering the Palestinians, just slaughtering them for years. Robbing and slaughtering them. Nobody gave a s---. Now it's coming back to the U.S."

Some media observers see Fischer as a pawn in an international chess game the ends of which are, are, what? Justice? A private citizen plays chess and is to be sent to prison for 10 years, but a military deserter who actively assisted the criminal regime of North Korea, which killed over 37,000 Americans in the Korean War (5,639 of them helpless prisoners of war!), is to be allowed to live out his life in freedom because the government of Japan, a country that has absolutely no discernible morality, has decided to sacrifice Fischer to save Jenkins. That is insane and unacceptable. The Bush Administration MUST demand the extradition of Jenkins, and should discontinue its malicious prosecution of Bobby Fischer for the non-crime of playing chess.
+
Item 2: Lance Armstrong — a Worthless Life (and a Cheat?). American bicyclist Lance Armstrong seems likely to win, this Sunday, his sixth consecutive Tour de France, an unprecedented accomplishment (as was his fifth consecutive win, last year). Accusations have surfaced that despite many denials, Armstrong has used the "banned blood booster erythropoietin (EPO)." I'm more concerned about his testosterone.
+
It's not easy to clarify via the Internet Armstrong's medical condition, that is, whether his famous bout with testicular cancer resulted in the removal of both testes or only one. He is reported to have had a child from sperm that was frozen, which suggests that both testicles had been removed, since there would be no need to freeze sperm if he still had one functioning gonad. But the Lance Armstrong Foundation website says that "Lance underwent two surgeries, one to remove his cancerous testicle [singular] and another to remove two cancerous lesions on his brain."
+
So why was his sperm frozen? If one testicle is removed, the other takes over. Were the surgeons concerned that once they opened him up they would find that both had to be removed, so sperm was frozen just in case? If so, why was that frozen sperm used to produce a child, rather than simply discarded when it became plain that he would be able to resume normal sexual functioning?
+
The base question as to his athletic performance thus becomes, "If Lance Armstrong has no testicles, is he taking testosterone as hormone replacement therapy? And if so, how much is he taking?"
+
If he is taking as "replacement" more testosterone than he would normally produce, or more than his sexually intact competitors naturally produce, would that excess (1) enhance his athletic performance and (2) be detectable as cheating?
+
I don't know the answer to any of these questions, but I do have to wonder. How likely, really, is it that one person could, without performance-enhancing drugs, dominate a grueling event that draws the top competitors from the entire world, for six years in a row? I don't follow sports closely, but I can't think of a single competition of the same sort — many competitors in a rough-and-tumble free-for-all — that consistently produces a single winner six years in a row. Some boxing champs retain their title for years at a time, but they aren't boxing everyone willing to fight them. They fight a tiny number of bouts that are carefully controlled by industry gatekeepers. The Tour de France, by contrast, has hundreds of entrants all competing at the same time. Rarely, nowadays, does the same sports team win the World Series or NBA Championship more than twice in a row, and no team has won any such championship six times in a row! It makes me wonder.
+
As for Lance Armstrong's life, he is making MILLIONS of dollars for living a life of utter uselessness. Since age 13 he has done nothing but ride a bicycle! RIDE A BICYCLE! That's kid stuff, and he gets away with it. While you and I are working for a living, he is gallivanting around Europe RIDING A BICYCLE and making MILLIONS from that and from product endorsements and commercials. What the hell kind of message does that send to people?
+
Had he not developed cancer, he would probably never have done a damned thing worthwhile in his entire life. Only the advent of that disaster caused him to do anything socially useful, helping to create the Lance Armstrong Foundation. I don't know how much good that foundation does, but it does something. His earlier "contribution" was a cycling foundation to promote bicycle-riding by children! Wow. That's socially useful, isn't it? Oh, it might get a few flabby kids to be more active, but basically it feeds the useless bicycle-competition industry, promoting careers of uselessness. I despise Lance Armstrong and all other grown people who spend their lives playing children's games for millions of dollars, while people who do the heavy lifting in society make almost nothing by contrast.
+
We may not be able to change a popular culture that values bike-riding and playing football, baseball, and basketball more than teaching, policing, nursing, and the huge host of hard and important jobs that ordinary people do. What we can do, however, is take the preposterously excessive money those infantile pursuits pay, away from those useless creatures and use them to lower the taxes on working people. Let us thus develop a progressive taxation system that takes from the overpaid and benefits the underpaid. Then I won't mind, so much, that Lance Armstrong and hosts of other perpetual children make a fortune from lives of irresponsibility, because we will MAKE them responsible by taking their excess income and using it to fund socially valuable programs and to lower taxes on decent people.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 10:12 PM