AS ONE WHO SUBSCRIBES TO THE BELIEF IN THAT UNOFFICIAL NATIONAL HYMN of Disneyland and Walt Disney World that "it's a small world, after all," Your Correspondent feels it his duty to use this weblog to call attention to the interesting side of the world-at-large.

Even if, sometimes, it means the "WaiWai" column of the Mainichi Daily News, the English-language edition of the Mainichi Shimbun, one of Japan's top-selling daily gazettas (top-seller, it turns out, is also the world leader in this respect, the Yomiuri Shimbun) as features some rather bizarrely interesting articles from some of Japan's trashier and more disreputable magazines.

(Correct me if I'm wrong in noting where the Japanese magazine Sunday Mainichi, articles from which oft turn up in "WaiWai," has no business or other connexion to Mainichi Shimbun.)

Anyway, Your Correspondent was reminded of the trend among American megachurches (many of them with connexions to the Martext model of evangel) to include outright shopping malls in spotting the following "WaiWai" item as makes note of the concept not being an exclusive American monopoly:

Growing numbers of Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines have recently begun pursuing eccentric side businesses like beauty salons and restaurants to make it through tough times, according to Nikkan Gendai (1/11).

While it has been common in the past for the religions to run businesses with socially redeeming characteristics--kindergartens and schools are common choices--now the clergy is hitting on more profitable enterprises aimed to tap into the elderly and women markets, the lowbrow weekly says.

Bald bonzes are now plugging Buddhist-style beauty in Kyoto, while a Shinto shrine in Saitama Prefecture is making a killing operating a hot spring resort where everybody strips off and bathes together.

Buddhist and Shinto priests are no longer simply sitting around in the lotus position and pondering their navels. Instead, more and more of the clergy are getting out into world of business and hustling up some valuable cash they hope will secure their futures.

"It's become harder to find sponsors, for such reasons as people drifting away from religion or simply getting older, which in turn has cut into revenues from pilgrimages. Apart from the famous temples in tourist areas where money flows in easily, most temples and shrines across Japan can barely keep afloat," Keio University Prof. Takanobu Nakajima, also the author of "O-tera no Keizaigaku (Economics for Buddhist Temples)," tells Nikkan Gendai.

"Many of the people heading temples or shrines nowadays have inherited them from their parents and have developed a real sense of crisis about the future of the family business. These people are at the forefront of the move to make religion more profitable and have come up with some unique business plans that may help keep them afloat. They're into things like providing spiritual care for the elderly worried about the afterlife or sutra readings and Zen mediation workshops for women who've never done these kinds of things before, all of which are proving fairly popular."

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YOUR CORRESPONDENT PROBABLY HAS SOME SORT OF IDEA ABOUT WHAT WHITE SUPREMACISTS HAVE IN MIND about the "cultural heritage" they so overzealously claim to be defending in their propaganda:

For starters, a male-chauvinistic cultural model which excuses misogyny, wife-beating, rape and the occasional rounds with ladies of the night being "healthy."

Not to mention looking for ways to justify incest as one with "safe sexual introduction."

As well as the usual exercises in male bonding and machismo expected to reinforce traditional ideals of masculinity and "male honour" as will tend to involve smoke-filled beer parlours or backyards with coolers full of beer cans--and, regardless of the milieu, will include plenty of obscenity-laden jokes and stories involving sex, bodily organs and functions (mostly scatological) and National Minorities of the sort not seen since Capt. Billy's Whiz-Bang, when racist and ethnic jokes were seen as a normal and natural part of its monthly "Explosion of Pedigreed Bunk."

(Not to mention a few in the travelling-salesman-and-farmer's-daughter vein, as well as some playing on the presumed looser morals traditional to rural areas, almost all of them sexually-oriented.)

Plus the inevitable boasting about weird sexual exploits as would make Glenn Quagmire (per Family Guy) look like an amateur and drink-fuelled designs on mayhem and violence against National Minorities which, considering the secretive nature of these ur-smokers in the name of "masculinity made manifest," are unlikely to reach the attention of the police. Something about male honour, I believe.

And yet white supremacists call the preceding "cultural heritage" that they seek to "defend and uphold"! Have they no shame?

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NO WONDER THE PSEUDORELIGIOPOLITICAL RIGHT'S ARTICLES OF FAITH HOLD HOMOPHOBIA all the more dear and important, what with their still holding the discredited notion that homosexuals are Freaks and Travesties of the Natural Order and Threats to Morals, Decency and Common Sense.

Witness where the so-called "Traditional Values" wing--so long as they're not doing the Lindbergh Terminal Tap Dance--is calling upon "right-thinking White Christian families" across California to pull their children from public schools and, instead, homeschool them (preferably based on the apartheid South African syllabus of Nasionale Christen Opverdoing, what with its placing an all-too-unhealthy emphasis upon Morals, Values and True Patriot Love in All Thy Sons Command over core skills necessary for success in later life) or otherwise place them in "Christian Academies" where homosexuality is still seen as a Perversion and Travesty of the Natural Order.

Jews are seen as a Clear and Present Danger to Christendom by their "overzealous and unscrupulous control" of banks, business and finance, the media, etc., etc., to "weaken and undermine Christendom," reinforced by the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion as Required Reading, notwithstanding its having been repeatedly shown to be forgery.

Asians are seen as the Yellow Peril.

And the likes of blacks, Hispanics, Arabs and Native Americans are to be regarded as "inferior peoples***lacking any respect for morals and decency" expected to prevail among the "Aryan Master Race."

In short, a warped and outdated Weltanschauung regarding the ilk of Hitler, Mussolini, Hendrik Verword and Ian Smith as "great heroes" because of their "respect for the purity and sanctity of the Master Race" as a Holy of Holies.

And the likes of such Supreme Court cases as Mendez v. Westminster School District (1947), Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), Engel v. Vitale (1963), Loving v. Virginia (1967) and Roe v. Wade (1973) as "conspiring to undermine our traditional and Divinely-Ordained Precedence among the Nations," not to mention "our antient and pecuilar soverignty and soverign identity."

Which, it turns out, may conceal a rather sinister "dark side" involving mandatory "paramilitary training" with live rounds ... Fight Club-stylee "discipline" and threats thereof (with wagers among teachers and administrators on the outcome thereof) ... even swimming instruction in puris naturalibis which is actually a front for aquaphile kinderporn, the whole expected to be kept hush-hush "for reasons you will understand." Not to mention taking considerable pains to avoid attracting "unwelcome attention as could lead to scandal."

All this to perpetuate in the minds of children the discredited belief that homosexuality is a Perversion and Travesty of Nature ... and as but the small part of a larger whole as turns out excusing racism and White Supremacy as being pro Deo, patria et familia!

En 'n Ander Ding:

How many children as have been taught about homosexuality in a positive and factual manner actually wound up "suffering serious moral lapses" as opposed to those taught that homosexuality is a Perversion and Travesty of Nature?