Japanese Court Rules That Mochi Caused Brain Damage

In an earlier attempt at writing a blog, I posted the following about mochi.

Every year, mochi kills. This New Year's treat always manages to take out a few old folks. Actually near death by mochi occurs in the film Tampopo where a vacume cleaner is used to remove mochi from the throat of an elderly gent. No doubt more Japanese died yet again from sticky rice cakes. Makes you wonder whether it is worth all the risk. Also consider that while blowfish (fugu) is well known as a culinary killer, the only people who actually die from it are those that lack professional training in properly slicing it up. That is to say, you have to be a complete idiot to die from blowfish poisoning. Mochi by comparison kills far more people and does so when served properly. Just think about that. Its New Years day, you are sitting down to a nice bowl of ozoni (standard Japanese New Year's soup) with a big piece of mochi in it. You eat it. Nothing happens. This goes on for seventy or eighty years until one day when you choke to death on your favorite New Year's treat. I'l stick to blowfish prepared by certified professionals and leave the mochi to those with a death wish.


At the time I had no idea that mochi could cause brain damage, but that is what one Japanese Court Ruled:
"Man who received brain injury from choking on mochi wins lawsuit

A man who received brain injury after choking on a “mochi”, a sticky Japanese sweet, won a lawsuit Friday filed against a Tokyo compensation fund, filed after the man was denied compensation by the fund, Yomiuri reports.

Presiding Judge Yuki Furata dismissed the foundation’s appeal to the Tokyo Supreme Court, and supported the two previous sentences and ordered the compensation fund to pay the man 21m yen ($170,000).

The compensation fund does not pay compensation for accidents caused by chronic diseases, and argued that the man, who was 82 years old at the time, lacked the strength to swallow the mochi because of such diseases.

However, Judge Furata dismissed the foundations arguments, saying: “The burden of evidence that the accident did not happen because of a chronic disease does not lie on the person seeking compensation.”

Clearly mochi is even more dangerous than I thought. Look for a big wave of mochi brain damage cases to follow. If this were in America there would be a class action suit.

For those of you who enjoy mochi ice cream, I don't think you have to worry about choking to death or brain damage because the layer of mochi is rather thin. Anyway, best of luck.

Judge Kennedy's Women

Jeffrey Rosen's recent New Republic piece on the "Kennedy Court" makes me think about the continuous potential for arbitrary thinking in judicial opinions and how it is very likely that the Court will use such thinking to further curtail liberty. Consider the following very recent but far from sui generis example of Kennedy's method of argument as cited by Rosen:

Consider Gonzales v. Carhart, his five-four opinion in April upholding the federal ban on partial-birth abortions. There was nothing inherently objectionable about Kennedy's tie-breaking vote to uphold the ban--an uncharacteristic example of deference to Congress from the justice who has voted to strike down more acts of Congress than any of his colleagues except for Justices Scalia and Thomas. But Kennedy couldn't resist adorning his opinion with an unnecessary soliloquy about how the ban would serve the noble goal of protecting women from emotional distress. "Respect for human life finds an ultimate expression in the bond of love the mother has for her child," he wrote portentously. "While we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon, it seems unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained."

Rosen goes on to write:

Kennedy simply didn't care that he could find no "reliable data to measure the phenomenon." For him, "It is self-evident that a mother who comes to regret her choice to abort must struggle with grief more anguished and sorrow more profound when she learns, only after the event, what she once did not know: that she allowed a doctor to pierce the skull and vacuum the fast-developing brain of her unborn child ...."

Why is Kennedy so confident that this is "self-evident"? As Ginsburg suggested, a woman who is determined to have an abortion might suffer more profound anguish at enduring a procedure that her doctor considers less safe, or she might suffer just as much anguish if she ends her pregnancy with another, more common abortion procedure--one that Kennedy insists is her constitutional right. The truth is that Kennedy isn't interested in examining the actual experiences of real women affected by the partial-birth abortion ban; he feels he has an intuitive understanding of what women are feeling and is convinced that he has a unique and solemn responsibility to define the essential nature of women's dignity.

After reading Rosen's piece, I read through Gonzales v. Carhart and reached a similar conclusion about the essentially arbitrary nature of Kennedy's "soliloquy," which as Ginsburg points out in the minority's dissent rests upon "an antiabortion shibboleth for which it concededly has no reliable evidence: Women who have abortions come to regret their choices. "

When Judges begin to make arguments about regrets rather than choices, I know we are either entering legal justifications for the nanny state or legal justifications for eliminating choices (Ginsberg makes this latter point in her dissent). In either case, the liberty of American women will likely be curtailed by future rulings from the "Kennedy Court."

MY TWISTED IDEA OF FUN PART 2

Is there anything you really regret?

I think to myself: YES!

I regret that I did not study Latin. So over the next couple of years, I have decided to try and make up for that. Why Latin? Without it, I will never really be able to master Roman Law (big shock) and hence I consider it an important academic skill for me to develop. Also I want to be able to read Roman authors, especially Catullus, in the original Latin. I also consider this a significant hold in my education as a Western intellectual. I would like to learn Ancient Greek too, but I think it will have to wait for a decade or more. Latin is a dead language in as much as you can't speak it with very many people, but it lives within the languages of the West and hence studying it will provide me with further cognates for dealing with the living Romance Languages. Finally, you never know when you will have to meet the Pope.


http://adam-markus.blogspot.com/

MY TWISTED IDEA OF FUN

For a couple of years I had been looking for the right part-time graduate program. I finished my Masters in Political Science at University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1993 and with the exception of taking a CELTA and studying for Japanese, my education for the last fourteen years has been solely based on my reading choices. This is not to be despised or even apologized for because I have always regularly read hard academic books and have continuously developed my intellect. I have spent much of my life living in my head and a certainly large portion of that time is dedicated to thinking about philosophy, political theory, politics, law, religion, history, and literature. Given that list of subjects, it is clear enough that I have had no clear overall focus. For, perhaps, the first ten years after grad school I was simply not even interested in focusing on an academic discipline. Given the fact that I started by Masters at age 23 and finished by age 25 and also graduated from undergrad a year early at age 21, it is no surprise that I was tired with school.

However after a couple of years working as an admissions counselor, I was ready to go back, but not full-time. Frankly, I am committed to my profession as a counselor and was not looking for an academic program that would make that career impossible. I am good at what I do professionally, take great pride in it, and doubt seriously the advantage of leaving that career behind. Hence I started looking for part-time graduate program in my core field of political theory. No such part-time or distance program at what I would consider to be a good school exists. I came close to applying to one part-time PhD program in Japan, but decided that the topic I was planning to focus on was simply not something I could be passionate about. Another year went by and then suddenly I found it.

A disclaimer: I am not lawyer. Given my experience working as a paralegal in both bankruptcy and patent law as well as having a brother and two very close friends (my lifelong best friend and my best friend from my graduate school days) who are lawyers, I know that this is a well informed choice. On the other hand, legal theory and history have interested me since college. This area of scholarship was constantly overlapping with my core interests in the study of politics. Additionally, in the last couple of years, my interest in legal theory and history continued to grow especially when I started to lectures from the University of Chicago faculty and the Federalist Society ( I will write about my favorite podcasts in another post). At the same time I became interested in understanding legal history and theory more systematically.

Earlier this year, I began the latest chapter in my twisted idea of fun.
I started studying part-time for Postgraduate Diploma in Laws and assuming I get through it, I will also take an LLM at the University of London's External Programme. I am not planning to learn anything practical. I am planning on studying the history of law and legal theory. My first course is Western European Legal History. Sometime in 2008, I will move to legal and judicial theory. Assuming I stay on something like a regular study schedule I should be able to get an LLM by 2010.

My fun really began in earnest in May. I am reading mostly about the impact of Roman Law on the West. Based on what I can gather, I may be the only student in the External Programme studying this subject because no one has ever taken an exam in it before (they report the results and give the questions for all past exams) and when I tried to find anyone among the registered students who was taking this course, I could find no one. It is lonely in a way, but to be honest I did not really expect to be part of a learning community. Instead I simply want to obtain mastery of the subject in order to reinvigorate my intellectual foundations. Maybe after I finish the LLM, I will about doing a PhD in intellectual history or political theory, but at the moment, all I want to do is have fun with this.