Ghost of a Flea brings up one of the more annoying Anglospheric gaps in communication about the races:

Let us clear this up. In English-speaking North America the word “asian” is generally used to refer to people of East Asian descent while in the UK the word “asian” is generally used to refer to people of South Asian descent. Both terms are gross generalizations that obscure fantastic regional, ethnic, linguistic and cultural diversity within the groups for whom they act as shorthand and either shorthand ignores well over a billion people who are just as asian. If I was, say, Armenian both abbreviations would be a source of ongoing annoyance.

A close English buddy of mine and I were just having this discussion a few weeks ago. He was bewildered at the way a lot of Americans look at you as though you’d committed a hanging crime if you use the word Oriental, which, Edward Said’s hex not having gained traction in the UK as it did in the States, is still the polite way to talk about the Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese there. Of course, even in the States, people of East Asian descent who haven’t gone through PC colleges still blithely refer to themselves as Oriental all the time, but you’d never hear a newscaster use the word.

Now that I think about it, the topic may have come up the night of the first London bombings. I do know that on 7 July we were sitting at our hangout when the video for Kylie’s “Giving You Up” came on: a twelve-foot-tall woman in curve-hugging black strides through London as if she owned the place, good-naturedly vamping at guys of various races (there’s an Asian, in the English usage, about 3/4 of the way through) along the way. It was very bolstering–the kind of sassy I can get behind.

FLAMIN’ NORAH! Now, that was an earthquake. Nothing fell (here at my office where high bookshelves are ranged behind our desks), but man, did we feel it. I hope it wasn’t a hell of a lot stronger anywhere else.

Added at 16:41: Looks like it was a weak 5 at the epicenter in northwestern Chiba Prefecture and in parts of Saitama and Kanagawa Prefectures. It was a 4 here. No tidal wave warnings.

Added at 17:58: The Nikkei says it was actually a strong 5 in Adachi Ward (northern part of the 23 wards of Tokyo proper). That’s the JMA scale that measures surface vibrations, of course, not the measure of energy released provided by the Richter scale. (The estimated magnitude is 5.7.) It was strong enough to cause rides at Tokyo Disneyland to shut down automatically (elevators, too–those in this building are still closed until they can be inspected). Service on runways at Narita and one of the Shinkansen lines was interrupted, but everything appears to be back to normal. There don’t seem to be any reports of actual damage.

Added at 19:42: I spoke too soon. Shibuya Station was a madhouse: the inner ring of the Yamanote Line (runs counter-clockwise) is still being inspected. Yikes.

Added at 21:36: Anyone who was in a coma this afternoon and missed the quake may be relieved to hear that the JMA is telling us to expect aftershocks of up to 4 in surface intensity. The magnitude of today’s quake has also been revised upward to M6. I’m assuming train service is up and running everywhere again?

More from Irshad Manji, the Muslim lesbian from Toronto, in last week’s Sunday Times:

Britain, she says, has been slow to introduce tests for imams on their mastery of the Koran. She recalls asking Mohamed al-Hindi, political leader of Islamic Jihad, where the Koran glorifies martyrdom; he insisted it was there, but even after looking up books and phoning colleagues, he couldn’t find one reference.

“His translator suggested I better go if I wanted to leave alive,” she recalls. “I asked why he had even given an interview, and the translator said, ‘Oh, he assumed you would be just another dumb westerner’.”

Muslims, adds Manji, must find positive role models rather than jihadists: “Martyrs are the rock stars of the Muslim world, shown on the internet against a background of funky music. They feed on the self-esteem crisis of young Muslims.” That could be addressed by history lessons paying greater tribute to the Muslim contribution to the Renaissance.

She denounces terrorism and the response to terrorism, which is not sufficiently robust. It is no good, she argues, for respectable Muslims to say “violence is not the Islamic ideal” if violence has become Islamic practice. And she attacks the proposed religious hatred laws, saying: “Society needs people who offend, otherwise there will be no progress.”

Manji thinks Islam needs a reformation.

Walter Olson reports at Overlawyered that a new frontier in save-people-from-themselves-ism is being explored. This from one of the Guardian articles he links to:

According to Dr Judith Reisman, pornography affects the physical structure of your brain turning you into a porno-zombie. Porn, she says, is an “erototoxin”, producing an addictive “drug cocktail” of testosterone, oxytocin, dopamine and serotonin with a measurable organic effect on the brain.

Some of us might consider this a good thing. Not Reisman: erototoxins aren’t about pleasure, they’re a “fear-sex-shame-and-anger stimulant”. Reisman’s paper on the subject The Psychopharmacology of Pictorial Pornography Restructuring Brain, Mind & Memory & Subverting Freedom of Speech has helped make her the darling of the anti-pornography crusade, and in November last year she presented her erototoxin theory to the US senate.

…

[Reisman and her fellow researcher] foresee two possible outcomes: if they can demonstrate that porn physically “damages” the brain, that might open the floodgates for “big tobacco”-style lawsuits against porn publishers and distributors; second, and more insidiously, if porn can be shown to “subvert cognition” and affect the parts of the brain involved in reasoning and speech, then “these toxic media should be legally outlawed, as is all other toxic waste, and eliminated from our societal structure”.

Not being addicted to porn, I still have enough imagination to be stoked at the mere mention of a cocktail of testosterone, oxytocin, dopamine and serotonin. Where’s that glass of iced water? [gulp…sigh] Okay.

Toxic waste is outlawed? Oh, excuse me–“legally outlawed”? I thought you just couldn’t leave it lying around, not that it was illegal. Olson also links to this post at Nobody’s Business:

Indefatigable at 70, Reisman continues her crusade against “the sexindustrial complex” mostly by trying to prove the existence of those elusive “erototoxins.” Right now, only she knows what those are — she coined the word herself, and it seems it has yet to make it into anyone else’s medical vocabulary. In fact, though she consistently identifies herself as “Dr. Reisman,” that title refers to a degree in communication, not to any expert medical knowledge. (This echoes her fondness for reminding people that her maiden name, Gelernter, is German for “learned one.” Indeed.)

Cheese and crackers, what a 24-karat quack. Of course, in a world after world-renowned agricultural chemist Meryl Streep’s 1989 lecture to Congress about Alar, I supposed it’s not a big shock that Reisman has given testimony before the US Senate about the neurological effects of pornography.

What’s so annoying here is that there are real issues to be addressed. We expect teenagers to grow through adolescence to strike out on their own and choose their own life partners, often without much assistance from family and community elders. What does it mean to have recordings of live, impersonal sex acts cheaply and readily available when they reach adulthood (if not before)? I don’t hold with the hard anti-porn line that pornography “causes” sexual dysfunction, and I’m against its criminalization. It’s also patently untrue that you can’t consume porn without spiralling helplessly into addiction. But you can’t evade questions about social effects just by pointing out that there’s no inherent shame in nakedness or sex; what you’re exposed to does affect your attitude.

On the other hand–give me a break! The sex impulse doesn’t obliterate free will. With all her blather about subverting freedom of speech, Reisman sounds exactly like the MacKinnon-Dworkin axis of feminism, with its line about how the power of the patriarchy means no woman in our society can ever give authentic “uncompromised” sexual consent. Another case of extremes meeting in the anti-pornography crusade.

If we don’t show solidarity with London by buying lots of stuff at Fortnum & Mason, the terrorists win. Take that, Islamofascists!

And that!

Mmmm…and maybe some of that.

In all seriousness, I’m just very grateful that this week’s crew of bombers only succeeded in displaying their incompetence to a media-saturated world. The police are apparently marshalling all their brain powers to figure who–who on Earth–might be behind the failed bombings:

Security analysts said the obvious carbon-copy attacks could have been masterminded either by the same group or by less sophisticated sympathisers — maybe young, disaffected Muslims.

“There is a resonance here,” police chief Blair said, but he cautioned it would take time to tell who was to blame.

Fine, let’s keep an open mind. But at this point, I’m thinking the probability that the bombers were not young, disaffected Muslims is pretty darned low.

A propos of nothing: it was at the Shepherds Bush Empire that I saw Alison Moyet perform ten years ago. One of the best concerts I’ve ever been to. I happened to stand next to a dyke couple who kept looking at me with expressions that clearly said, “Shouldn’t you be at a Madonna concert instead, Mary?” But it was great; it was the tour for Essex , and the songs were flatteringly toughened up a bit for live performance. It’s a shame Alison’s career never really, really ignited internationally (especially since Vince Clarke went on to find major success after hooking up with that grating, self-pitying, quivery, histrionic, braying gay donkey Andy Bell and forming Erasure), though it’s nice that she does well at home still.

This is good news:

Japanese researchers discovered a colorful, centuries-old Buddhist mural in a stone cave in Afghanistan that somehow escaped the destructive rampage of the Taliban regime in 2001, officials in Tokyo said.

The cave, about 3 meters wide, 3 meters deep and 2 meters high, is located at the west end of Bamiyan Valley, according to officials at the National Research Institute for Cultural Properties.

Parts of the mural are still covered with dust, but the painting is believed to cover all sides of the cave as well as the ceiling, the officials said.

The west wall depicts Buddha and other sitting Buddhist deities drawn with bold strokes.

We love bold strokes! The paintings could apparently help researchers determine how certain motifs in Buddhist art were transmitted through central Asia.

Congratulations, Canada:

Supreme Court Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin signed the legislation making it law, hours after it was approved by the Senate late Tuesday night despite strong opposition from Conservatives and religious leaders.

…

Churches have expressed concern that their clergy would be compelled to perform same sex ceremonies. The legislation, however, states that the bill only covers civil unions, not religious ones, and no clergy would be forced to perform same-sex ceremonies unless they choose to do so.

Charles McVety, a spokesman for Defend Marriage Canada and president of Canada Christian College, said he was “very sad that the state has invaded the church, breached separation of church and state and redefined a religious word.”

Well, buddy, this is what you get when the religious word in question is closely tied to a government goodie bag. I still think there’s reason for caution about a blanket extension of the legally designated category of marriage to cover gay relationships, but not all the opportunism in argument has been on the pro-gay side. And the sense of entitlement that has animated many gays in this debate is something that’s been picked up from the general culture, not invented by our team and foisted on it.

More evacuations on the London Underground. Let’s hope no one’s been hurt.

I’m not sure whether it’s the most depressing song ever, but Dolly Parton’s “Down from Dover” is one of those country songs that play on the emotions very cunningly. From the very first verse, you know exactly what’s going to happen:

I know this dress I’m wearing doesn’t hide the secret I have tried concealing
When he left he promised me that he’d be back by the time it was revealing
The sun behind a cloud just casts a crawling shadow o’er the fields of clover
And time is running out for me–I wish that he would hurry down from Dover

It’s not just that the story is as old as time–it’s that Parton sets it in the autumn, when things begin to chill and die. Of course, real babies are born in fall all the time, but within the universe of symbols in the song, Parton’s choice of season is significant.

He’s been gone so long–when he left the snow was deep upon the ground
And I have seen a spring and summer pass, and now the leaves are turning brown
And any time a tiny face will show itself ’cause waiting’s almost over
But I won’t have a name to give it if he doesn’t hurry down from Dover

My folks weren’t understanding–when they found out they sent me from the home place
My daddy said if folks found out he’d be ashamed to ever show his face
My mamma said I was a fool, and she did not believe it when I told her
That everything would be all right ’cause soon he would be coming down from Dover

I found a place to stay out on a farm taking care of an old lady
She never asked me nothing, so I never talked to her about my baby
I sent a message to my mom with a name and address of Miss Elvah Grover
And to make sure he got that information when he came down from Dover

I loved him more than anything, and I could not refuse him when he needed me
He was the only one I’d loved, and I just can’t believe that he was using me
He couldn’t leave me here like this–I know it can’t be so, it can’t be over
He wouldn’t make me go through this alone, oh, he’ll be coming down from Dover

My body aches, the time is here, it’s lonely in this place where I’m lying
Our baby has been born, but something’s wrong–it’s much too still–I hear no crying
I guess in some strange way she knew she’d never have a father’s arms to hold her
And dying was her way of telling me he wasn’t coming down from Dover

Look me dead in the pixels and tell me you’re not depressed. The fourth verse was omitted from the original version on The Fairest of Them All , but Parton reinserted it on her wonderful remake a few years ago on Little Sparrow . She changed the phrasing in places, too. In either version, the story is beautifully paced–each step at which the protagonist is further isolated from people and still doesn’t get what’s going on positively hurts to listen to. Dramatic irony at its most devastating. And unlike many of the old ballads from which Parton (among a lot of other country songwriters, of course) drew inspiration, the poor girl doesn’t end up dead and at least out of her misery.

This is one of the many reasons I love Susanna:

I just don’t think they’re [leftists, of course] being very realistic about the threat, which is not the same as questioning their honesty, morality or intelligence. I know a lot of people who I consider exemplary on all three counts who disagree with me on the WOT, both liberals and conservatives. So it’s not that either. But there are a lot of liberals and leftists who do give cover – just consider any of your garden-variety pseudo-intellectual Hollywood types like, oh, Sean Penn, George Clooney, Susan Sarandon, etc. And consider the leadership of the Democratic party as well as the nattering leftists in the US and Europe, whose primary solidarity is built on anti-Americanism arising from their own sick envy. I consider them the rankest hypocrites, demanding the freedoms and excesses of the West while succoring the fascists of radical Islam whose first activity on taking over any country would be to end the freedoms and excesses Western civilization provides. And finally, I’m not parroting a party line – I’m a lot harsher than the party line tends to be.

Yeah, we only wish the party line were that uncompromising. Susanna quotes Peter Tatchell’s statement on Unite Against Terror. In my opinion, Tatchell is one of the few lefty gay voices consistently worth listening to. He may stage wacko demonstrations and support “international socialism” [shiver], but he knows how to make arguments applicable to Earth and not Planet Clare.