Japan ← Progressive Bloggers // Blogues progressistes

Things Are Good: Visualizing Bold Climate Action

Jan

18

2017

There’s so much talk about taking action around climate change that it can be hard to remember what real action looks like. Climate action can take on many different forms and around the world how places react to climate change is different; meaning that we can see so many ways that cities are changing the ...

Dead Wild Roses: Empathy Classes in School. The World Needs More of This

Oct

29

2016

We start our lives as the whole of the universe. Reality is completely comprised of our perceptions and any “outside” object that is blocked from our senses puffs out of existence. Eventually, we learn object permanence, and we recognized that things outside us actually do exist on their own, but we are still the centre ...

Left Over: No Non-Polluting Victories on Victoria Day…

May

23

2016

Stephen Hume: Province’s secrecy puts people’s health at risk STEPHEN HUME More from Stephen Hume Published on: May 20, 2016 | Last Updated: May 20, 2016 3:25 PM Finally, the Mayor of Vancouver, BC, Gregor Robertson is earning the trust that voters have given him for a few years now…and possibly starting the ...

Alberta Politics: Jason Kenney sails close to the wind on Anti-Terrorism Act at picnic visit

Aug

19

2015

PHOTOS: Liberal candidate Adam Vaughan’s photo of the Kurdish Peace and Cultural Festival in Toronto Saturday, with an image of PKK founder Abdullah Ocalan visible in the background. (Grabbed from Twitter.) Below: Defence Minister Jason Kenney, who bragged about being at the event, and Mr. Vaughan. Jason Kenney, who notwithstanding the dissolution of the House ...

The Tory Pirate - Politics & Policy: Education Reform In New Brunswick: What Japan Can Teach Us (Part 1)

Aug

11

2015

As a graduate of New Brunswick’s education system I sometimes reflect onthe quality of the schooling I received. I also have a longstanding interest inJapanese culture. It is natural then that I would eventually get to looking at howJapan does education. What I found was a school system that better instills thevalues of leadership, sense of community, and respect than anything ...

Things Are Good: In Japan, Abandoned Gold Courses Become Solar Farms

Jul

14

2015

Golf courses have a well deserved reputation of being absolutely horrible for the environment. Golf courses are responsible for deforestation and damaging local ecological systems all while consuming an absurd amount of water. In Japan, where many golf courses have gone out of business, they are converting the massive chunks of land into something useful: ...

The Disaffected Lib: A Hooker is Just a Hooker – Provided, Of Course, She’s Korean

Mar

17

2015

This time they’re using Japanese academics to dispute the reality of “comfort women” – women, mainly Korean, coerced into prostitution by the Japanese army during WWII. A less genteel term would be “sex slaves.” A group of Japanese historians is urging McGraw-Hill, the American publisher, to “correct” a college textbook that they say contains “many ...

Bill Longstaff: Oh my God! The Japanese make better whisky than the Scots!

Nov

5

2014

A year of firsts for whiskey. For instance, it’s the first time in the 12-year history of the World Whisky Bible’s rankings that a Scottish malt has failed to make the top five. Depressing news for the Scots. And it gets worse. Much, much worse—it is also the first time the top whisky was distilled ...

Eclectic Lip: A mini blog re: Mega Fauna

Aug

25

2014

Productivity gurus occasionally say that to make time for the most important things (e.g. promoting your next book) you need to cut back the time you spend on less-critical stuff (such as, writing it yourself) by making priority calls (translation: hire a ghostwriter). Sadly, I haven’t met any ghostwriters comfortable starting blog posts with 50-word-long ...

Dead Wild Roses: Capitalism – “Breaking” Cultural Norms (Ochobo) by Reinforcing Them.

Aug

13

2014

From Sociological Images Micheal Lozano – […] Japanese fast-food has found a way to bypass the cultural stigmas that impede their profits. One food chain noticed many women would not buy their biggest-sized burgers. The culprit was ochobo, a Japanese custom that prevents women from opening their mouth widely in public. Small mouths are ...

Things Are Good: LED Farms Could be the Growing Fields of the Future

Jul

15

2014

As humans flock to cities and the surround them with suburban sprawl we have covered some of the most arable lands in concrete. This has caused problems of food security, access, and sustainability. Urban farming is nothing new and will continue to spread, but what about industrial-scale farming in cities? A farmer in Japan has ...

Things Are Good: High Speed Rail Coming to……Texas?

May

7

2014

Texas is an American state best known for its gun-loving, big truck driving, cowboy, remember the Alamo culture. It is the last place I’d expect high speed rail infrastructure to actually get support in the USA. The good news here is that not only are Texans in favour of high speed rail – the private ...

Things Are Good: Japan Ordered to Stop Whaling and Complies

Apr

1

2014

Japan has long been criticized for its “scientific” whaling and now the UN has asked them to stop. Japan defended itself by saying that their ships who were slaughtering whales were doing so in the name of science – a defence nobody believed. In a lengthy ruling, the presiding judge in the Hague, Peter Tomka, ...

The Disaffected Lib: No, This Can’t Be Possible. Could Japan Actually Rescind Its Apology to Wartime ‘Comfort Women’?

Mar

5

2014

One of several dark stains on the honour of Japan was its practice, during WWII, of impressing foreign women, mainly Korean, into sex slavery to serve Japanese soldiers. They were called ‘Comfort Women’ or, in Japanese, Kanji. Somewhere between 20,000 to 400,000 Korean, Chinese and Philippino women were subjected to sexual slavery. For the past ...

LeDaro: Harsh weather strikes accross the Globe

Feb

17

2014

Severe weather is making news from record snowfall in Japan to devastating floods in the U.K. Following video says it all:

Eclectic Lip: Back from Happy Hawaii

Feb

9

2014

Synchronized phoning, coming soon to a summer Olympics near you… Trivia note: Swedish supergroup Abba’s “Why did it have to be me” was originally titled (and lyricized) as “Happy Hawaii”. But those of you who also secretly bought the 4-CD ABBA box set without admitting it to your friends, already knew that! 🙂 We recently ...

Bill Longstaff: U.S. feeds Japanese militarism

Dec

2

2013

China, with its paltry aid to the Philippines and its announcement of a new air-defense zone over the East China sea, has not been making friends in its region these days. But the country to worry about in the Far East is not China. It is Japan. Countries such as China and South Korea that ...

Writings of J. Todd Ring: Fukushima still spreading deadly radiation across northern hemisphere: one food can help protect you

Oct

8

2013

Seaweed is a true super-food, high in essential nutrients, low carb, low calorie, and also, naturally high in iodine – and it helps protects the body from radiation. It is a staple in Japan and many other maritime regions. Considering the rising levels of radiation across North America due to the Fukushima disaster, we had all best ...

Writings of J. Todd Ring: Say sayonara to seafood – the oceans are no longer safe to eat from in the wake of Fukushima

Aug

28

2013

It looks like sushi time is over – seafood is no longer safe to eat after the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Fukushima continues to dump 300-400 tons of radioactive contaminated water into the Pacific every hour. Japanese experts estimate Fukushima’s fallout at 20-30 times as high as the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombings in 1945. Polar ...

Eclectic Lip: Passing Gas – EV’s now outnumber gas stations, in America

Aug

27

2013

My latest piece is up on GreenCarReports, here. It’s where I sourced the photo from. 🙂 And yes, putting “Passing Gas” in the title was deliberate. Hey, it’s catchy! From what I can tell, electric vehicles also outnumber gas stations in Japan as well. Alas, Canadians are somewhat behind our American and Japanese (and no ...

Saskboy's Abandoned Stuff: Fukushima Keeps Staying The Worst

Aug

26

2013

It’s always been /worse/. And it just keeps staying tragically the same. It’s remained a global crisis with hemispheric deadly consequences. Japan could still wind up largely uninhabitable (if it isn’t already). Canada could suffer directly a great deal. Steam and non-water vapour has been off-gassed since the beginning. The supporters of nuclear power have ...

The Disaffected Lib: Learning to Live Within Your Own Skin – Japan’s Grand Experiment

Apr

20

2013

The Japanese have become perhaps the greyest of the greying nations of the developed world. This is discussed in The World Today, the public journal of Chatham House, perhaps the world’s most venerable and certainly most prestigious think tank. Everybody knows that Japan is ground zero for global ageing. The youngest of the developed countries ...

350 or bust: Saturday At The Movies

Mar

30

2013

I sure hope they used recycled paper!

The Disaffected Lib: It’s Still Fossil Fuel

Mar

12

2013

The Japanese have successfully tapped seabed methane clathrates, also known as “flammable ice.” Deposits of compressed and frozen methane are fairly common in northern waters. British Columbia has looked at exploiting them. The gas field is about 50km away from Japan’s main island, in the Nankai Trough. Researchers say it could provide an alternative energy ...

The Disaffected Lib: Sea Shepherd Piratical? Hardly.

Feb

28

2013

Japanese whale “researchers” have persuaded a U.S. judge to declare the Sea Shepherd organization piratical. The ruling was issued on Wednesday by chief judge Alex Kozinski of the 9th US circuit court of appeals. In his 18-page opinion, he wrote: “You don’t need a peg leg or an eye patch. When you ram ships; hurl ...