Oops. Someone (or everyone?) is nuts

I missed it, but then again, I miss everything anymore, in part because I am trying to type Japanese on a computer. Great fun. I somehow end up with weird kanji all over the place (forgot to hit return every after nearly every word), or forgetting a double consonant or a long vowel and since the computer is not nearly as smart as my stupid Canon Wordtank G90 electronic dictionary, it is not smart enough to guess or give me reasonable choices. No, it will give me every rarely used kanji in the dictionary, while the simple very commonly used kanji that I am looking for is at the bottom of a gadzillion character list. (#$%& It cannot even list the effing kanji for tsuishin---P.S. How effing rare is that?*) On second thought, it is just like my Wordtank.**

Anyway, the Washington Post in a Monday Idiotorial discovered that Yukihisa Fujita is a September 11 conspiracy theorist and decided this somehow meant that the DPJ was anti-'merican or sumtin' like that there.

Well, (to use an overused and long out-of-date expression, "Duh!") Good god man, (Lee Hockstader) even I knew that Fujita was a bit whacked on the September 11 conspiracy a year ago. What kind of "reporter/editorialist" does that make Lee? And how does that make the whole gubberment anti-US? Damned Reds.

Better discussed at the usual suspects here, here, and also here. (I very strongly recommend avoiding the first comment on the latter if you have eaten recently. My opinion on that is irrefutable, so STFU.)

*No wait, it found it on the fourth or fifth try of entering the same word. No wonder Fujita believes in nutty conspiracy theories---anyone forced to type much in Japanese will soon be nuttier than a fruitcake. And I have being doing it a lot recently...)

**Great piece of 1990s-level technology. I understand, from the Internut, that it does not have all the kanji (huh?), but only the ones that Japanese aren't likely to know. To test that theory I once entered 一. To my amazement it was in the dictionary! Apparently, most Japanese do not know that most basic character. What has the education system come to?

Problem solved

Society can rest easier now that this 70-year old lady is securely behind bars:

Presiding Judge Satoshi Miyamoto said the woman had a previous record of shoplifting and other offenses, and the nature of her crime "reflected her experience."

...[Miyamoto] said the woman could not avoid prison. Asahi Shimbun* (English)

The welfare recipient had just been released from the pokey in January, but apparently had not learned the error of her ways. Obviously means other than prison could not have been attempted as they would likely fail. Those soft on crime may say that this 2-year sentence is excessive, but it was not their ¥98 eraser which was stolen.

1114 pm update: I have not been able to find out what the "other offenses" were except for other thefts. According to the original Japanese article*, she stole the eraser to use in writing a letter to her son. Note that this is not the usual suspended sentence that is often given to high-ranking corporate types whose decisions kill people, or e-stalking judges like Yasushi Watanabe, but I'm sure the only difference is that they are not repeat offenders.

*It seems that Asahi links go dead in about 3-5 days, so the links to that news organization above should vanish forever by the 22nd or 23rd of July. My mistake for using them.

(Nothing to do with the above, but the Apollo 11 moon mission is being replayed in "real time" here---assuming it really happened and was not some sort of fakery on a Texas sound stage. Wonder if the DPJ's Yukihisa Fujita and the other conspiracy theory nutjobs believe that too? This could be evidence as it is mostly computer simulation.)

Intellektual Philosofyin'

There is a fellow in the DPJ---the goofy party which we are hoping will replace the beloved goofs of the LDP---who is trying to crack open the US government/CIA/US media/BBC/E.T. conspiracy concerning Sept 11, 2001. Now I admit, when I read about this, I had just a wee bit of doubt about Yukihisa Fujita. To be blunt, I thought he was a doofus. Then a few weeks later, I read some of the readers' responses to that article and was surprised at the number of doofuses folks who agreed with him. I have no doubt that a number of them have suffered UFO abductions too.

A few days ago, I was sitting in the office with a deep-thinking buddy from Down Under. As usual the subject turned to the US and how it is just pure evil and stupidity. To avoid such things as hurt feelings and broken jaws, we don't directly trash the US. Instead, we trashed George Bush. It's gettin' a little dated now, but doing so allows people from outside the US to indirectly call Americans fat, stupid, and greedy (completely the opposite of the rest of the planet), and allows Americans to avoid any responsibility for anything by blaming it all on Bush.

I brought up the tired old subject of Republicans having no ideas for anything except to cut taxes, and my buddy agreed, "Yea, I don't mind paying taxes, how else are we gonna pay for everything!" I was a bit surprised to hear that Uncle Sam was so aggressive as to collect taxes from Australians who live in Japan, but knowing the IRS, I figured it could be true.

Then, after we went through the "think of all the wars that religion has caused" cliche, he brought up an online documentary concerning the 9/11 cover-up that he had spent 4 hours watching last weekend. Being a real documentary fan---Michael Moore, Oliver Stone, X-files---he knows and believes his documentaries.

It seems, you see, that the planes which crashed into the Pentagon and into the ground in Pennsylvania did not exist. That's why there were no traces of either found.

Having had online experience with conspiracy theorists in the past, I was reluctant to reply for to do so is like trying to wrestle an oiled fishing worm---no matter how you try to pin it, it squirts away in another direction. But after gathering up my courage, I mentioned that I recalled seeing parts of the wreckage on TV at that time. "No, they never found anything," he quickly replied.

Being even less clever than him, I tried yet again and explained that when a jet hits something head on at 600mph, the results are going to be different than when one crashes at a low angle and relatively low speed while landing and gave as an example a fighter jet crash at a steep angle. "No, they rig those with explosives to blow up so that the enemy can't get secrets." Huh? 8 years in the USAF and I had never heard such a thing nor had I seen any evidence of that at crash sites I had been to. I admired the quickness of his mind and his ability to come up with such horse dung without batting an eye.

"You gotta watch it," he excitedly told me, "it'll make you think!" It made him think, but, he admitted, not enough to actually research anything to see if an Internet documentary by a utopian* might possibly be a little suspect.

I haven't been able to get the time to watch the film yet----it's on my things-to-do list just after "finish the last 2 chapters of Fujiwara Masahiko's tome" at #567 trillion. I did, however, google a little about the conspiracy theory.

It seems that there are conflicting conspiracy theories. One side claims that there were no planes involved in the Sept 11 attacks. It was done by the gubbermint, using such things as computers in the WTC rigged to blow the buildings down and a missile, not a plane, to hit the Pentagon.

The other side, the anti-no-plane-conspiracy-theory theorists, believe that aircraft were involved and claim that the no plane theory is a distraction possibly created by the government to hide the fact that the government knew about the attacks and took no action. Bush et al wanted them to happen in order to have an excuse to go to war in the Middle East. Sorta like Roosevelt tricking Japan into attacking Pearl Harbor, knowing that it was coming, then doing nothing in order to get the US into WW2. America does that a lot. Looks like we and the rest of the world would catch on sooner or later. Perhaps my friend already has.

*According to my friend, the documentary provided a utopian solution to the world's problems.

**I first learned about the rigged WTC computers in reader responses to the article about Fujita. I stopped reading at that point. I mentioned that to my colleague as an example, I thought, of how absurd some of this stuff was. Didn't work. Apparently, he already knew the computer bomb fact.

Disclaimer: Since I was once in the military and thus a part of the military industrial complex, I may be involved in the conspiracy. Beware.