Pro Commerce

Israel guilty

In a recent discussion about the malodorous history of the UN, I raised the point that the UN had been a main source of Middle East problems by keeping and supporting Palestinian refugees in camps for sixty years. I was about to point out that the UN had never done anything about other major refugee problems ranging from Tibetans and South Vietnamese to Somalis.

Then it dawned on me. The problem is that Israelis are civilized people. The Chinese would kill any returning Tibetans as did the North Vietnamese and the Somali warlords. If a program were worked out to resettle Palestinians, the Palestinians and everyone else on the planet knows that the Israelis are civilized and would accommodate the new returnees as they did the million Arabs who returned in 1947, many of whom are now Israeli citizens.

Israel is uniquely guilty of being civilized otherwise there would be no Palestinian refugee camps sixty years after the Israeli war of Independence.

On the same point, most Canadians were refugees from the American war of Independence. Canadians didn't sit in refugee camps until 1845 waiting to return to the 13 States (that were no longer just 13). Because the United States, like Israel was a civilized society, the Canandians who wanted to return did so. The rest did not wait in refugee camps. They became Canadians.

If some group of radical Israelis announced they would kill all returning Arabs from the refugee camps...the problem of refugees might go away.

Classic marketing genius

I just had lunch on a rainy day at a classic Tokyo restaurant, Umaya. As we left, in the small folder with our receipt, was a "rain check" for each of the people in our party. A real "rain check" good for a future 10% discount on lunch...a thank you for coming out to a meal in the rain.

I have been consulting restaurants for nearly forty years and have three of the great American restaurant success stories under my belt. I've rarely seen a marketing act as brilliant as this "rain check."

The problem with marketing...

Cultural anthropology

I am mindful in my reporting from Tokyo that a cultural visitor will always have a perspective that is different from other reporters on the Japanese culture and certainly a different perspective than native Japanese. My perspective is unambiguously commerce.

Clifford Geertz, the leading American thinker on the issue of cross cultural reporting was among the first to affirm that the problems of cross-cultural reporting are so great that the best one can do, to be responsible, is too write with a strong and constant reiteration of the reporter's own perspective. Geertz calls this 'thick description.'

It is my view that...

TV news

I often wonder why TV news is so boring. The answer can be found here.

TV news doesn’t tell a story and has no intrinsic story line. There could be a story line if TV tried to have intelligent on-going analysis…but it doesn’t and it won’t.

As a consequence, the best TV news is only 4.5 minutes long. Take a look and see if you agree with me. This is the future of TV news.

Smoking etiquette

In the tyrannical world of Lefties, more and more outdoor areas are being put off-limits to smokers. Banned and exiled, clearly labeling smokers as sub-human. Fat people may be next.

So far as I know, Berkeley, San Francisco and Santa Monica have laws banning a variety of outdoor locales from smoking.

The Japanese are more aggressive, banning outdoor smoking in many large parts of the city streets and sidewalks. But being civil human beings they are providing smoking areas for smokers who are clearly not considered sub-human.

I’ve seen the same consideration at airports in Europe.

Pay attention OSHA

I think OSHA has a thing or two to learn from Japan.

The photo on the right was taken in Kita-Kamakura on a narrow road to a shrine, pretty much in a jungle, like most shrines in Japan.

The workman on the left is operating a weed wacker, the man on the right is holding a protective guard to keep weeds from flying onto the clothes of passing pedestrians.

Get on it OSHA!

Interesting site

I saw this sight in Shibuya, Tokyo, near the statue of Hatchiko. On the right is a woman participating in the demonstration. She has a great body, rather suggestive clothes (in any other context) and an announcement that “There is no God” on her shirt.

Seems appropriate for the outrageous display that she was attending in the middle of a crowd. The photo on the left has two women, topless with painted clothes on their breasts.

All of this is for clitoraid.org a project of the Raelians a French based group that has close ties to aliens. The project aims to raise money to surgically reattach clitori to women who have had clitorectomies.

Doesn’t seem to bother the Japanese in Tokyo. Click on photos to enlarge.

Kosher

I had a wonderful meal and couldn’t help thinking about the kosher implications. The prohibition against eating meat and milk together, in kosher, is so explicit in the phrase don’t "boil a kid in its mother's milk" that it is mentioned in three places in the torah: Exodus. 23:19; Ex. 34:26 and Deut. 14:21

What I had was a sukiyaki, boiling sauce on the table, with chicken and vegetables. This particular dish comes from Akita prefecture. When just getting down to the final cupful, I was directed to put a raw egg in the pot. Along with some tiny noodles in the bottom and a few chunks of chicken, the combination was great.

Eating the chicken covered with egg seems very similar to eating a kid cooked in its mother’s milk. But of course there is a difference.