Dieting

People like Sydney Spiesel at Slate seem to be completely missing the point of a recent study that shows that people who have dieted tend to gain weight in the long-term. The title of the article is

Beware of Diet

What if counting calories makes you fatter in the long run?

I've heard this chalked up to 'dieting changing your metabolism' and all sorts of nonsense, but naturally people are making the same mistake they always make, confusing correlation with causation.
As a former fatty fatty fat fat who lost 180 pounds through lifestyle change, I'll tell you why people who go on diets, even successful ones, gain weight in the long run. It's because they were never taught will power and have terrible eating habits that they don't know how to break. Perhaps they have the 'soft will power' necessary to stick to a strict diet plan, but they don't have what it takes to live a life in which they exercise control over their own actions on an everyday basis. People talk about going on diets and all the will power that it takes, but in the end that effort cannot extend into the long term. The most important thing of all is developing new eating habits, which people on the whole don't know how to do. The most effective way for an out-of-control fat person to change their eating habits is to take the choice out of their own hands in one way or another, because just like you can't expect a wild dog to be a good babysitter, you can't expect what amounts to a feral person to plan out a balanced diet and administer it to themself.
In Korea, there was a fad a couple of years ago called welbing, from the English 'well-being'. Basically welbing consisted of sprinkling green tea powder on everything and frying stuff in olive oil. That's how ridiculous dieting sounds when viewed with a detached eye (gross image, I know).

A bad argument against a guest worker program

The argument that says that it is cruel to expose foreign workers to America with a stated limit is infuriatingly chauvinistic and wrongheaded. It implies either a) there are no people who would like to make money in America and then return with that money to their homeland or b) nobody exposed to the greatness of America ever wants to return home. Both implications are insulting to the majority of the many people worldwide who would love the opportunity to make more money and send it home to their families or save it for their future back home. Imagine if Korea, the country where I live, took the same tack, assuming that all foreign workers were clamoring for permanent residence. Since Korea is still only concerned with being a country for ethnic Koreans, the entire massive English teaching industry that brought me and countless others over would be restricted to hiring only ethnic Koreans from other countries and thus completely crippled. There are plenty of legitimate arguments against a guest worker program, the most salient to me being the likelihood of abuse of the rights of such workers, but there is nothing un-American about it. To take an applicable example from venerable old Wikipedia

The years 1910 to 1920 were the high point of Italian immigration to the United States. Over 2 million Italians immigrated in those years, with a total of 5.3 million immigrating between 1820 and 1980. About a third of them returned to Italy, after working an average of 5 years in the US.

Sounds like a reasonable term to me.

Oh, kooky mix-ups

You know what two Korean words I used to always mix up back when I first learned them?

Ishimjeonshim (이심전심) - telepathy, mind-to-mind communication
and
Imshinjungjeol (임신 중절) - abortion, interruption of pregnancy

To hilarious effect.

The most American woman in the world

Living in the Land of Extremes has done a great post on this paranoid Korean adoptee, who claims that her Korean culture was "literally raped from her" and that white Americans take one look at her and expect her to yield to them when they get on and off elevators

The thing that gets me about her is that it is impossible to look at such a person as anything but an American. The quest for identity, the identification with something that she knows nothing about in opposition to the place where she comes from, which she characterizes as an uneducated family. It's textbook, but for some reason people as a species suffer from a chronic inability to look at themselves in such terms unless exceptionally trained or otherwise forced to. Looking at her is like watching a flailing mixed-up machine malfunction, except, you know, we're the same kind of machines.

Incidentally, like most Americans, she has an incredibly poorly informed concept of what international adoption is and how nations interact. For a person getting a masters and leaving America for ever to live in Korea with her people, she has an almost comically misinformed perspective on the country, seemingly derived from a single session of factoid spouting and anger venting by some angry Korean she knows. Korea is a small victim country and America raped it for its resource, adorable babies, so that Americans could selfishly make themselves feel good by raising said babies.
The fact that a person like this is getting a masters indicates to me that America has a serious glut of universities.

Just a random etymology thought.

Merriam Webster has window's etymology as

Middle English windowe, from Old Norse vindauga, from vindr wind (akin to Old English wind) + auga eye; akin to Old English ēage eye

A 'wind eye'. The Korean word for window is changgu (창구, 窓口), made up of the Chinese characters chang (窓), meaning surface or exterior, and gu (口) meaning mouth and, by extension, a opening. An 'opening in the exterior' of a building.

Make of that what you will.

You both crossed the Rubicon yesterday.

Watch this video. Share it with those you know who love America.

I accuse you, Mr. Bush, of lying this country into war.

I accuse you of fabricating in the minds of your own people, a false implied link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11.

I accuse you of firing the generals who told you that the plans for Iraq were disastrously insufficient.

I accuse you of causing in Iraq the needless deaths of 3,586 of our brothers and sons, and sisters and daughters, and friends and neighbors.

I accuse you of subverting the Constitution, not in some misguided but sincerely-motivated struggle to combat terrorists, but to stifle dissent.

I accuse you of fomenting fear among your own people, of creating the very terror you claim to have fought.

I accuse you of exploiting that unreasoning fear, the natural fear of your own people who just want to live their lives in peace, as a political tool to slander your critics and libel your opponents.

I accuse you of handing part of this Republic over to a Vice President who is without conscience, and letting him run roughshod over it.

And I accuse you now, Mr. Bush, of giving, through that Vice President, carte blanche to Mr. Libby, to help defame Ambassador Joseph Wilson by any means necessary, to lie to Grand Juries and Special Counsel and before a court, in order to protect the mechanisms and particulars of that defamation, with your guarantee that Libby would never see prison, and, in so doing, as Ambassador Wilson himself phrased it here last night, of becoming an accessory to the obstruction of justice.

When President Nixon ordered the firing of the Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox during the infamous “Saturday Night Massacre” on October 20th, 1973, Cox initially responded tersely, and ominously.

“Whether ours shall be a government of laws and not of men, is now for Congress, and ultimately, the American people.”

President Nixon did not understand how he had crystallized the issue of Watergate for the American people.

It had been about the obscure meaning behind an attempt to break in to a rival party’s headquarters; and the labyrinthine effort to cover-up that break-in and the related crimes.

And in one night, Nixon transformed it.

Watergate—instantaneously—became a simpler issue: a President overruling the inexorable march of the law of insisting—in a way that resonated viscerally with millions who had not previously understood - that he was the law.

Not the Constitution. Not the Congress. Not the Courts. Just him.

Just - Mr. Bush - as you did, yesterday.

The twists and turns of Plame-Gate, of your precise and intricate lies that sent us into this bottomless pit of Iraq; your lies upon the lies to discredit Joe Wilson; your lies upon the lies upon the lies to throw the sand at the “referee” of Prosecutor Fitzgerald’s analogy. These are complex and often painful to follow, and too much, perhaps, for the average citizen.

But when other citizens render a verdict against your man, Mr. Bush—and then you spit in the faces of those jurors and that judge and the judges who were yet to hear the appeal—the average citizen understands that, Sir.

It’s the fixed ballgame and the rigged casino and the pre-arranged lottery all rolled into one—and it stinks. And they know it.

Nixon’s mistake, the last and most fatal of them, the firing of Archibald Cox, was enough to cost him the presidency. And in the end, even Richard Nixon could say he could not put this nation through an impeachment.

It was far too late for it to matter then, but as the decades unfold, that single final gesture of non-partisanship, of acknowledged responsibility not to self, not to party, not to “base,” but to country, echoes loudly into history. Even Richard Nixon knew it was time to resign

Would that you could say that, Mr. Bush. And that you could say it for Mr. Cheney. You both crossed the Rubicon yesterday. Which one of you chose the route, no longer matters. Which is the ventriloquist, and which the dummy, is irrelevant.

But that you have twisted the machinery of government into nothing more than a tawdry machine of politics, is the only fact that remains relevant.

It is nearly July 4th, Mr. Bush, the commemoration of the moment we Americans decided that rather than live under a King who made up the laws, or erased them, or ignored them—or commuted the sentences of those rightly convicted under them—we would force our independence, and regain our sacred freedoms.

We of this time—and our leaders in Congress, of both parties—must now live up to those standards which echo through our history: Pressure, negotiate, impeach—get you, Mr. Bush, and Mr. Cheney, two men who are now perilous to our Democracy, away from its helm.

For you, Mr. Bush, and for Mr. Cheney, there is a lesser task. You need merely achieve a very low threshold indeed. Display just that iota of patriotism which Richard Nixon showed, on August 9th, 1974.

Resign.

And give us someone—anyone—about whom all of us might yet be able to quote John Wayne, and say, “I didn’t vote for him, but he’s my president, and I hope he does a good job.”

We owe it to ourselves to stand up and say 'Enough!'.

Fujiya & Miyagi

You will get tired of this, but I promise thatyou'll love it for a while before you do.

Incidentally, I lived in Miyagi prefecture. Nice place.