Wednesday, November 13, 2013
CONTACT ME AT: manessmorrison2@yahoo.com


News Clips For The Day



World's oldest 'big cat' fossils unearthed in Tibet
Tia Ghose LiveScience


The earliest known big cat lived in what is now China between 5.9 million and 4.1 million years ago, newfound fossils of the ancient prowler suggest.
The fossils, which were discovered on the Tibetan plateau, belong to a sister species of the snow leopard that prowls the Himalayan region today, said study co-author Zhijie Jack Tseng, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

The new study also reveals that all cats diverged about 16 million years ago, about 5 million years earlier than was previously thought. [See Images of the Oldest Big Cat Fossils]

How cats evolved
The group of felines known as "big cats" includes tigers, leopards, lions and jaguars, as well as snow leopards and clouded leopards. But exactly where and when they evolved hasn't been clear.

Tseng and his colleagues were excavating a rocky region of badlands in the Tibetan plateau in 2010 when they uncovered a fossil skull and one other bone that seemed to belong to a big cat. On return trips, they excavated five more specimens of the cat.
The team didn't know how old the fossils were, so the researchers looked at the orientation of magnetic minerals in the rock layers around the fossils. Because Earth's magnetic poles have flipped at known points in geologic time, counting the number of times magnetic particles switch orientation in nearby rocks can reveal the approximate age of a fossil.

The team concluded the big cat was at least 4 million years old — a few million years older than some other ancient tiger fossils.

16 million-year-old cat tale
A detailed look at the anatomy in comparison with other living and extinct cats revealed that the primeval cat didn't look too different from a modern snow leopard.
But this cat is by no means the first feline from which all other cats evolved. After combining an analysis of the fossil cat's physical features with genetic data — including some from a fossil cave lion — the team puts the origin of all cats (including house cats) somewhere around 16 million years ago.

"These fossils are the oldest, but they're by no means the most primitive," Tseng told LiveScience. "There is some big cat out there that has yet to be described."
The findings are exciting because they corroborate genetic estimates of when cats first emerged, and because the fossils were found near Central Asia, the area where most scientists believe cats first evolved, said Julie Meachen, a paleontologist at Des Moines University in Iowa, who was not involved in the study.

Where mega-creatures hung out
In addition, the cat skull came from a region where other fossils of mega-creatures have been found, suggesting perhaps this is the region where Pleistocene megafauna, including "big furry guys" such as woolly mammoths and rhinos, evolved, Meachen said. (Megafauna are large or giant animals.)

It's also fascinating to see how little cats have changed over the past several million years, she said. "The reason they don't change is that they are so good at what they do that they don't need to change," Meachen told LiveScience. "They're just really effective killers of prey right from the get-go."
The cat fossil was described Nov. 12 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.


“The reason they don't change...they don't need to change.” Though I love cats, and they make great clean, friendly pets, they will start to pounce on anything that moves from the time they can walk and run, and as an adult, male cats will fight fiercely for a female, sometimes causing considerable injury. Their wild characteristics are always with them. That's why when they are separated from their human owners, they have a good chance of surviving and finding food. I shocked my niece when I said that I let my cat hunt, because I wanted my cat to retain her hunting instincts. She thought of all the poor little birdies such a cat kills. I want any pet cat that I love to have a good chance of surviving on her own.






How your company is watching your waistline – NBC
Kathleen Kingsbury Reuters

Employers tried the carrot, then a small stick. Now they are turning to bigger cudgels.
For years they encouraged workers to improve their health and productivity with free screenings, discounted gym memberships and gift cards to lose weight. More recently, a small number charged smokers slightly higher premiums to get them to quit.

Results for these plans were lackluster, and health care costs continued to soar. So companies are taking advantage of new rules under President Barack Obama's health care overhaul in 2014 to punish smokers and overweight workers.

Some will even force employees to meet weight goals, quit smoking and provide very personal information or pay up to thousands more annually for health care. That could disproportionately affect the poor, who are more likely to smoke and can't afford the higher fees.

Nearly 40 percent of large U.S. companies will use surcharges in 2014, such as higher insurance premiums or deductibles for individuals who do not complete company-set health goals, according to a survey of 892 employers released in September by human resources consultancy Towers Watson and National Business Group on Health, which represents large employers.

That is almost twice as many as the last time they did the survey in 2011, when only 19 percent of companies had such penalties. The number is expected to climb to two-thirds of employers by 2015.

Employers are getting much more aggressive about punishing workers who are overweight or have high cholesterol. A study released on Wednesday by the Obesity Action Coalition, an advocacy group, covered workers at more than 5,000 companies who must participate in their employer wellness programs to receive full health benefits. Sixty-seven percent also had to meet a weight-related health goal such as a certain body mass index.

Almost 60 percent of these workers received no coverage that paid for fitness training, dietitian counseling, obesity drugs or bariatric surgery to help achieve a body mass index under 25, which is considered healthy.
"Weight requirements are an effective way to make it harder for people with obesity to qualify for full health coverage," said Ted Kyle, the study's lead author and founder of Conscienhealth, a Pittsburgh-based company that advises other companies on obesity programs. "Some programs can verge on discrimination," he said.

PENALTIES HIT SMOKERS HARDEST
Next year many more companies plan to penalize workers who use nicotine because of their much higher health care costs. Proctor & Gamble Co, the Cincinnati-based household-product giant, will begin charging such employees an additional $25 per month in 2014 until they have completed a company-paid cessation program.
Under similar provisions, state employees in Wisconsin and Washington state will pay as much as $600 more per year, while nonunion smokers at United Parcel Service Inc will pay as much as $1,800.

"We found that while less than 10 percent of workers at large employers smoke, their impact to health care costs is disproportionately huge," said LuAnn Heinen, vice president for the National Business Group on Health. "Helping them quit — however you do that — has the most obvious near-term payoff in terms of savings and productivity gains."

A recent Ohio State University study found that businesses pay nearly $6,000 more annually per employee who smokes compared with a nonsmoker. Other research suggests that less than 16 percent of employees participate in voluntary smoking cessation programs, Heinen added.

A.H. Belo, owner of the Dallas Morning News, Providence Journal and other publications, told staff in September that for 2014 it would require employees and their spouses to complete a biometric health screening or face a $100 annual surcharge. In 2015, employees will be asked not only to undergo the screening but to meet three out of five as yet unspecified health goals to avoid the additional fee.

COSTLY PUNISHMENTS
Under Obama's Affordable Care Act, which takes effect in January, companies can offer a reward of up to 30 percent of health care costs paid by the employee to those who complete voluntary programs like smoking cessation, a risk assessment or biometric tests like waist measurement.

The financial incentives could add up to about $1,620 annually per worker. But if wellness programs don't end up saving costs, companies can raise premiums across the board or slap them on workers who don't get with the programs. In some states, tobacco users who sign up for insurance through the new state health exchanges could be charged 50 percent higher premiums than nonsmokers.

Research suggests savings may be harder to achieve when programs are voluntary than has often been thought. A report released in May by the RAND Corp found workers who participated in a wellness program had health care costs averaging $2.38 less per month than nonparticipants in the first year of the program and $3.46 less in the fifth year.

Some health and labor experts are concerned that penalties may be unduly harsh, especially for low-wage workers and those who have health conditions beyond their control. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 29 percent of adults with incomes below the federal poverty level smoke, compared with 18 percent of those above the poverty level.

Mark Rothstein, a lawyer and bioethics professor at the University of Louisville School of Medicine, chooses to pay a higher annual premium rather than complete a health questionnaire for his employer, calling it a "privacy tax." Lower-paid colleagues, he said, "don't have the same luxury to opt out."

Fierce resistance forced Pennsylvania State University in September to abandon a plan to charge employees $100 per month if they did not participate in various health screenings and fill out a detailed health questionnaire administered by WebMD, which asked among other things whether a worker had recently driven after drinking too much, whether female employees planned to become pregnant in the next year and how frequently male workers performed testicular self-exams. This led to an outcry over privacy concerns and the potential for hacking of computer databases.

"These were just things no employer has the right to ask," says Brian Curran, a professor of art history at Penn State who started an online petition to protest the questionnaire.

University officials had argued the penalty was needed to tamp down health care costs and avoid tuition hikes. In January it still plans to implement a $100-a-month surcharge for spouses and a $75-a-month penalty on tobacco users.

Courts so far have shown little resistance to such programs. The 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) prohibits workers who are in a group health insurance plan from being discriminated against on the basis of health, and Obamacare extends that right to individuals. But neither bans penalties outright.
The law does specify that wellness programs must be voluntary, but Lewis Maltby, president of the National Workrights Institute, a legal advocacy organization, says that can be a slippery slope. Most employees don't feel like they have a choice, Maltby says. "In today's job market, any reasonable request by one's employer is essentially read as a demand."


I care about health, but not as much as I care about citizens rights. I think intrusiveness on the part of employers is always wrong, and can lead to unfair discrimination. The business doesn't need to know if a woman plans to become pregnant within the next year. Are they going to fire a woman if she admits that she is trying to get pregnant? Instead, they should have paid leave for the first three months after a baby is born.

Workers have enough problems, what with anti-union activity that can lead to the firing of an employee who tries to bring in a union, and the difficulty of getting a significant raise in pay. I think most big businesses are making enough money that they can afford to pay for a fair healthcare plan and some other good benefits.

My favorite job from the 1990's at the Calvert Group in Bethesda, MD paid for smoking cessation, college course credits and gym memberships, and had a good health insurance and pension plan. These were benefits and we weren't charged for them. Though I can't remember seeing a very obese person there, there were a fair number of smokers, including myself. I quit smoking while working there by using the step-down patches. I give the Calvert Group an A+ rating as an employer.





Big business to Tea Party: Get out of our way – NBC
Lawrence Delevingne CNBC

The recent elections underlined a growing tension in political money circles: Business people are increasingly fed up with the activist wing of the Republican Party. It's a trend that will have broad implications for next year's midterm elections and the presidential race in 2016, political experts say.

In Alabama on Nov. 5, Republican Bradley Byrne beat tea party favorite Dean Young for a U.S. House seat in part because the business community rallied around him. In Virginia, Democrat Terry McAuliffe bested tea party-backed Republican Ken Cuccinelli partially because some conservative business donors wouldn't give to the GOP campaign—or even switched sides. And in New Jersey, moderate Republican Chris Christie crushed tea party candidate Seth Grossman in the primary and then Democrat Barbara Buono in the general election because of strong business support.

And there's more to come. Business interests appear to be rallying behind moderate Republicans Brian Ellis, David Trott and Mike Simpson against Tea Party-approved challengers Justin Amash, Kerry Bentivolio and Bryan Smith for House seats in 2014 (Ellis and Trott are running in Michigan and Simpson is in Idaho).

"We're seeing a fraying of the longtime alliance between the business community and activist, fiscally conservative Republicans," said Christopher C. Hull, an adjunct professor of politics at Georgetown University and head of political advocacy technology firm BlastRoots.

"Both used to be aligned on lower taxes and smaller government. Now the business community isn't so sure anymore. More and more of the business community depends on government contracts, regulations or tax policy to keep them in business," Hull added. They "need allies who win, not ideologically pure candidates who lose."
The Virginia gubernatorial race is a prime example of that battle.

"If the Tea Party wants to be part of winning in 2016, they're going to need to be inclusive, they're going to need to stop challenging Republican incumbents in primaries," said Bobbie Kilberg, a longtime Republican operative and donor who is also president and chief executive officer of the Northern Virginia Technology Council.

"They can spend all the time they want in making their points based on principal, but if you cannot win an election and you cannot govern, what is the point?" Kilberg has supported many Republicans in the past but refused to back Cuccinelli, who was outspent $32 million to $19 million by McAluliffe, according to the Virginia Public Access Project. Kilberg said she was turned off by Cuccinelli's focus on social issues like gay marriage and abortion and the Tea Party-fueled government shutdown (in contrast, the technology group Kilberg leads endorsed Cuccinelli).

Dwight Schar, the executive chairman of home-building company NVR and former national finance chair of the Republican National Committee, went so far as to switch sides.
"As a Republican and especially as a Virginia businessman, I am supporting Terry McAuliffe for governor," Schar wrote in an endorsement. "Terry is going to work with both parties to enact mainstream solutions that reduce traffic, improve our schools, and develop our workforce for the global marketplace. Ken Cuccinelli's ideological agenda has divided Virginians and blocked progress on education and transportation for long enough."

Observers noted the Virginia trend.
"Some heavy-hitting past GOP contributors switched to support the Democratic nominee, in part out of concern that a Tea Party-backed Gov. Cuccinelli would result in boycotts of the state and refusals by certain businesses to locate here," said Mark Rozell, a professor of public policy at George Mason University.

"Additionally, some in the business community believed that he simply was not attentive sufficiently to their issues, but was more driven by the culture wars."

Business associations chime in
Big business associations are also becoming more involved in primaries in hopes of, in their view, producing more electable general election candidates who are better for business.

"The 16-day-long government shutdown served as a wake-up call for the business community at large, especially in the retail industry, that we all need to be more actively engaged in both the policy and political arenas," said National Retail Federation lobbyist David French.

"We believe that the business community will play a much larger and more visible role in political campaigns moving forward, be it for primary or general elections, and ally with state and local partners and others to assist with candidate identification, member education, grass-roots engagement and get-out-the-vote operations."

NRF wouldn't specifically address the Tea Party, but has supported more mainstream candidates in recent elections. They include Republican Rep. John Boehner and Democratic Rep. John Conyers, according to public records summarized by the Center for Responsive Politics.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce wasn't involved in the New Jersey or Virginia gubernatorial races—it customarily stays out of state politics—but did back Byrne in the Alabama House race.

"The U.S. Chamber is proud to have supported Bradley Byrne and congratulate him on his victory. Byrne is clearly the best candidate to help grow our economy, create jobs and put our nation back on a sustainable fiscal path," said the group's national political director, Rob Engstrom.

Byrne also received support from the political action committees of the National Association of Home Builders, the Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of America, the National Beer Wholesalers Association, BASF and Pfizer, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

One of Byrne's prominent business supporters said the big money that rallied behind him was more about opposing Young.

"While some have said that the Alabama special election was a debate between the establishment and the tea party, we never believed that," said Brian Baker, president of Ending Spending, a conservative political advocacy group created by TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts.

"The Alabama race was all about the question of who would be the most effective conservative leader in Congress, and the answer to that question was clear: Bradley Byrne. Mr. Byrne has a great record of being a reform-minded fiscal conservative."
Christie's re-election as governor of New Jersey is already being talked about as a national model for Republicans to gain broader support; a common refrain is that he could run for president in 2016.

"He may not be the right wing's favorite purist but he is in a position to shape the way his state is run. He was able to win and pursue policy objectives with bi-partisan support like a balanced budget and smaller government from a position of authority," Fred Malek, a prominent Republican donor and former president of Marriott Hotels and Northwest Airlines, wrote in a recent Daily Caller op-ed.

"Unlike the Ted Cruzes of the world, his GOP ideas won't be shouted from the back bench but from the highest office in his land. That distinction should be a lesson to us all."

Of course, Tea Party and other dissident Republican politicians continue to receive support from groups with business ties, such as political action committees from Koch Industries and Citizens United.

But the increased support of more mainstream GOP candidates appears likely to continue.

Besides Michigan and Idaho, Republican Sens. Mitch McConnell, Lamar Alexander and Lindsey Graham are all facing tea party 2014 primary challenges in their respective states (Kentucky, Tennessee and South Carolina).

That bothers some moderate GOP donors. "What they're trying to do to McConnell, Alexander and Graham is disgraceful," Kilberg said.
It's likely business groups will jump into those races.

"I fully expect a major funded effort by mainstream conservative groups to try to push the GOP back toward its traditional roots by the time of the 2014 elections," said Rozell of George Mason. "There is a major battle brewing for the heart and soul of the party."



This article mentions Koch Industries as activists supporting the Tea Party. They are the company that owns the Illinois piles of blowing carbon dust called “petcoke,” and are presently being sued over it by the Illinois Attorney General. Such people are the enemies of human progress, as far as I'm concerned, and have little or no noticeable social conscience. I'm glad to see that the Republican mainstream is going after the Tea Partiers. The government shutdown apparently made many Republicans as angry as it did the Democrats. Maybe we can go back to a more cooperative interaction between the Republican and Democratic parties. This cheers me up considerably. We all need to bend some in order to govern at all.




Feinstein backs bill to allow Americans to keep health plans – NBC
By Kasie Hunt, NBC News

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., announced Tuesday that she will support legislation aimed at repairing the now-broken promise that the president -- and many senators -- made to Americans when the Affordable Care Act was passed: That if they liked their health insurance, they could keep it.

Feinstein will co-sponsor legislation that Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., announced last week. The bill would extend the so-called "grandfather" clause and require insurance companies to keep offering insurance plans they sold before the health care exchanges opened on Oct. 1.

Support from Feinstein, who represents a solidly blue state, illustrates that a growing number of Democrats are worried about what effect the health care law's turbulent rollout could have on the party. Earlier Tuesday, former President Bill Clinton said President Barack Obama should consider changes to the law to allow Americans who are losing their insurance plans to keep them if they desire to people were assured that they could keep their policy and it's like, ugh. Very, very upset people, in large numbers. We've had 30,000 calls, about 87 percent negative."

There's no guarantee the bill will ever see a vote on the Senate floor, but Landrieu said the administration hasn't definitively rejected or accepted her bill yet. She also said that Senate leaders were "listening" to her proposal. (At this point, the bill is unlikely to see a vote on the floor of Majority Leader Harry Reid's Senate.)
The administration has been working on a fix that doesn't require Congress to make a change to the law. But pressure is building, and the House is set to vote Friday on a bill aimed at letting Americans keep their policies.

Landrieu said that her bill also has other supporters, many of whom are up for reelection; she named Sens. Kay Hagan, D-N.C., Mark Begich, D-Alaska, and Joe Manchin, D-W.Va.

"My leaders are listening very intently to voices like Bill Clinton and mine and Sen. Feinstein -- there's a lot of listening going on because that was a promise clearly made and it should be kept. "I've had some 30,000-plus letters and emails of some very sad stories unable to keep their policy. Depending on it, because of what the president said. And I think the right thing to do is to extend it, enable them to keep their policy," Feinstein told reporters at the Capitol Tuesday evening.



I hope this goes forward. Insurance companies apparently have to be forced to offer these people their old policies back, and they shouldn't charge them a higher fee, either. From what was said on the TV news, many of these policies were given at a lower premium and deductible, largely because they had less coverage – for instance, a divorced man living alone doesn't need pregnancy coverage.

Obama's plan mandates full and even extended coverage such as adding in mental health coverage. Maybe it also needs to require insurance companies to offer the new coverage at a minimal premium. Some have raised their premiums and deductibles to the point that many people find them unaffordable.

The Affordable Care Act is supposed to offer help to insureds to pay for this. I haven't heard much about that yet. There are many people who simply didn't have health insurance because of the cost of it, and now they are required to pay for it or pay a fine. It's a problem that many will have difficulty adjusting their budgets to cover. I hope the government stipend is enough.

Of course, Medicare is not free, and many such as myself make just a little too much money to get help with paying the premiums. I am lucky in that my income, though small, is enough to stretch to meet my needs. It's good to have the Medicare. I was uninsured before, and if I got sick I just had to pay the doctor out of my pocket. Nothing is perfect.



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Why Can We Taste Bitter Flavors? Turns Out, It's Still A Mystery – NPR
by Michaeleen Doucleff
­ For most of us, bitter foods aren't love at first bite. (Not convinced? Just watch the little girl in the video above taste an olive for the first time.)
But after a few espressos or IPAs, most of us warm up to bitter flavors and eventually throw our arms in the air, like the little girl in the video, declaring, "Yes, I love bitter foods!"

Of course, people didn't evolve an ability to taste bitterness just so we could appreciate hoppy beer or macchiatos. So then, what are our bitter receptors good for?
More than a million years ago, our ancestor Homo erectus probably gained the ability to detect bitter flavors. So would he have enjoyed an espresso macchiato?
About a million years ago, one tiny change in DNA gave our ancestors the ability to perceive a bitter compound common in olives, nuts and seeds, scientists reported recently in the journal Molecular Biology Evolution.

That means the bitter-tasting mutation was present long before modern humans existed. And it stuck around as we evolved in Africa about 200,000 years ago.
But here's the twist: The mutation probably didn't arise — and persist — for the reason that most of think.

"People in the past have thought that bitter taste perception may have evolved for avoiding toxic substances," says biologist Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Pennsylvania, who led the study. "If you're a hunter-gatherer, you don't want to eat a poisonous plant. A bitter taste tells [you to] immediately to avoid it."

But that's not what she and her postdoc Michael Campbell found when they analyzed taste genes across indigenous populations in Africa. Campbell and her team tracked down 74 ethnic groups that still practice ancient methods of subsistence, such as hunter-gatherers and nomadic herders.

The team measured how easily people in each group could taste two bitter compounds, including the chemical in aspirin. They also sequenced two genes involved in detecting bitter flavors on the tongue.

­ "We had to haul huge numbers of bottles and chemicals to remote areas all across Africa," Tishkoff tells The Salt. "This was a ton of work."
She thought that hunter-gatherers would be more likely to carry the mutation that boosts their sensitivity to the aspirin compound because they and their ancestors foraged for food.

"We thought we'd see a difference in the bitter genes between the hunter-gatherers and pastoralists because of their diet," Tishkoff says. "But there was no correlation all."

In fact, while the ability to perceive bitter flavors is ubiquitous in people outside of Africa, that was not the case inside the continent, she says. In Africa, she found that people's ability to detect bitter tastes varied by geography — but it had nothing to do with what they ate or how they got their food.
So if bitter sensing didn't help our ancestors avoid poisonous plants, why have the genes stuck around for so long?

No one is really sure yet, Tishkoff says. "These genes could be detecting a compound we don't know anything about," she says. Or they could be performing a task that's completely unrelated to taste all together.

In the past few years, scientists have started to realize that bitter taste receptors are all over the body, Tishkoff says. These receptors have turned up in cells in the gut, lungs and even the testes.

"So the receptors are not only altering how we perceive food," she says, "but probably also our physiology, in ways we have no idea about."


From this article, most of the peoples who traveled north out of Africa have the genetic ability to taste bitterness, and it may be an indicator of other kinds of changes in physiology, though the type of change is not known. It must have an important function, because it has persisted over thousands of years.

This article asks more questions than it answers, unfortunately. It seems to me, though, that the ability to taste and enjoy bitter flavors would open up the range of plants our forefathers would tend to eat, maybe giving them better nutrition. That would have a survival value. People who only like sweet or bland tastes like starch and fat would tend to be very “picky” eaters, not to mention probably being overweight. Besides, if you are gathering your food you need to eat a wide variety of things, so you can take advantage of whatever is available. It makes sense to me.




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The Emperor's Code: Breach Of Protocol Spurs Debate In Japan – NPR
by Lucy Craft
­ A staid and unremarkable royal garden party suddenly became the stuff of front-page scandal, when rookie lawmaker and passionate anti-nuclear activist Taro Yamamoto slipped a handwritten letter to Emperor Akihito. The mystified monarch hurriedly passed the epistle to an aide, unread – but the damage was done.

There is no audible reaction on video of the Oct. 31 incident, but the collective public gasp over an unusual breach of conduct was heard nationwide. The lawmaker's sin, officially, is violating Japan's ban on using the emperor for political gain. But the incident shows lingering sensitivity over the emperor nearly 70 years after the end of World War II. That's when Emperor Akihito's father, Hirohito, renounced his divine status.

Japan's emperor has been a titular head since then, as the U.S. imposed a constitution that proscribed royal participation in the business of ruling. His life is confined to a whirlwind of goodwill trips, photo-ops with foreign dignitaries, and attendance at arts events.

Since the aging and frail monarch is constitutionally powerless, the letter incident was widely seen as a pointless and shameless spotlight grab. Yamamoto argued he was only trying to draw imperial attention to the plight of Fukushima, particularly radiation exposure on children, and workers involved in cleaning up the aftermath of the March 2011 nuclear plant accident.

The 38-year-old independent politician explained on his website that "very little progress has been made on the life-threatening situation (in Fukushima.) As time passed, I felt that only the emperor could understand the anguish and anxiety in my heart. My overwhelming love and respect for the emperor prompted me to write him."
An actor whose wide-ranging oeuvre runs from gore to G-rated, Yamamoto has managed to stay in the limelight in his latest role, representing the city of Tokyo in Japan's Upper House. In an interview with the Asahi Shimbun just after his election last summer, he said the nuclear accident had so permeated his subconscious that he shouted "Meltdown!" in his sleep.

Instant polls on the Japanese Yahoo site and elsewhere showed scant sympathy for the pol gone rogue. Spurning calls for his removal from office, the Upper House instead decided to banish him from any future events where the emperor, who presides over the world's longest continuous royal line, would be present.

­Residual Lese-Majeste
The prohibition against pulling royals into politics didn't stop conservative Prime Minister Shinzo Abe from deploying a princess to bolster Japan's bid for the Olympics, nor from placing the emperor and empress at Japan's first "return of sovereignty" ceremony this year, seen as an exercise in nationalism. The center-left Democrats have also had their turn at dragging the royal family into politics.
There seems to be a residue of prewar lese-majeste animating the most apoplectic of the Yamamoto-bashers.

"In the old days, Yamamoto would have had to commit ritual disembowelment," one person fumed. "No, he wouldn't have been given the honor!" fulminated another. "He would simply have been crucified!"
"Simply crucified" is perhaps the best way to describe the spleen still being vented at Yamamoto. Perhaps just as much a source of umbrage as anything else was his flouting of etiquette. More than one commentator has fulminated that the offending letter was, for goodness sakes, not even placed in a proper envelope!

Even Fukushima's benighted residents, while naturally more sympathetic toward someone who speaks so passionately on their behalf, have called him out for bad behavior. In a conservative country steeped in traditions, customs and rules governing the most minute aspects of public behavior, stepping out of line, even in the purported service of a noble cause, can only have consequences


An article I saw on the Internet within the last couple of months was talking about the extremely rigid rules of polite behavior among the Japanese. I wouldn't last ten minutes as a Japanese citizen. I'm not restrained enough as a personality, and I also simply don't like rigid thinking. I think it has to hold a society back. Of course, we can get too “wild” in the US in our words or behavior, and also too often verge into criminal or immoral tendencies, but our greater freedom allows new ideas, art and even the growth of wealth to flourish. There is a balance to be struck, it seems to me. I wouldn't want to live anywhere else.